This week in KDE: something for everyone

This week we have a little bit of everything! Hopefully everyone should be able to find something to like:

15-Minute Bugs Resolved

Current number of bugs: 68, down from 70. 0 added and 2 resolved:

When Discover’s window is narrow/mobile mode and you search for something, the search field now disappears as expected when you resize the window to be wider (Matej Starc, Plasma 5.24.6)

System Settings’ sidebar view now remains visually in sync when the page shown by the main panel is changed by something else, such as opening a different page from KRunner (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.24.6)

Current list of bugs

New Features

Elisa is now able to display lyrics embedded in files that are using the LRC format, and automatically scroll the lyrics view as the song plays! (Han Young, Elisa 22.08)

There is now a user-facing option to control Tablet Mode! It retains its current default value of “switch automatically when relevant” which is only available on Wayland, but you can now additionally force it to be always on always off, and those options work on X11 too! (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.25):

System Monitor now has an option to make a page start loading data as soon as the app is opened–rather than as soon as the page is accessed–and the default History page now uses it by default (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.25)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Yakuake no longer inappropriately opens on the active screen when configured to always open on a specific screen (Jonathan F., Yakuake 22.04.1)

When using Gwenview’s Crop tool with a fixed aspect ratio, changing the values in the size spinboxes now works properly (Alban Boissard, Gwenview 22.08)

Fixed a semi-common way that Plasma could crash when you remove a panel that has a System Tray widget on it (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.24.6)

In the Plasma Wayland session, KWin no longer crashes when you hit Alt+Tab while the context menu for a window titlebar is visible (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.24.6)

The Overview effect no longer shows your panels, confusing you into thinking they’re interactive when they’re really not (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.24.6)

In the Plasma Wayland session, when something is recording your screen, the icon that appear in your system tray to notify you of this now appears in the visible part of the tray where you’ll actually see it, instead of only in the popup where it would be missed and fail to achieve its purpose in life (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.24.6)

System Monitor Widgets now load handmade presets correctly. Note that you will need to remake your presets for this to work (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.24.6)

When you’ve set Discover to restart automatically after installing updates, now it only does so if all of the updates were applied successfully (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.24.6)

In the Plasma Wayland session, when a KDE app is activated from another KDE app, the activated app now raises itself, just like it does on X11. This also makes the launch feedback animation work for apps launched from Kickoff, KRunner, and other pieces of KDE software! (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.25) Note that when an app is activated and does not raise as you would expect, if either (or both) of the apps is a 3d-party app, it’s because that app needs to implement the xdg_activation_v1 Wayland protocol

In the Plasma Wayland session, a severe visual glitch experienced by users of NVIDIA GPUs has been fixed (Erik Kurzinger, Plasma 5.25)

In the Plasma Wayland session, hitting Meta+V to show a menu of the clipboard contents now shows an actual menu at the actual cursor position, rather than a standalone window in the center of the screen (David Redondo, Plasma 5.25)

In the Plasma Wayland session, you can now activate global shortcuts while dragging a window (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.25)

The Digital Clock applet’s “Copy to Clipboard” menu item now respects whether you’re using 24-hour time or 12-hour time (Felipe Kinoshita, Plasma 5.25)

Icon previews are once again shown for files on NFS or NTFS drives, the Trash, Plasma Vaults, KDE Connect mounts, and other non-local locations (David Faure, Frameworks 5.94). Note that this means preview generation can once again cause slowdowns and freezes in Dolphin when accessing those locations if they are slow, and we are working on a better way to avoid this without throwing the baby out with the bathwater by disabling previews entirely!

When you drag-and-drop an image onto your desktop and choose “Set as Wallpaper”, it will now automatically switch to the correct wallpaper plugin that supports single image wallpapers if you were currently using something different (Fushan Wen, Frameworks 5.95)

User Interface Improvements

When you provide incorrect authentication credentials on the lock or login screens, the whole UI now shakes a bit (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.25):

Tabs in GTK apps using the Breeze GTK theme now match the tab styling in Qt and KDE apps (Artem Grinev, Plasma 5.25)

Menubars and areas that use the menubar color in GTK apps using the Breeze GTK theme now use the header color as expected, if you’re using a color scheme with header colors (Artem Grinev, Plasma 5.25):

Toolbar buttons with icons and toolbar buttons without icons now share the same text baseline, so their text will always align vertically (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.25):

In the Plasma Wayland session, multi-finger touchscreen gestures (Did you know that KWin has touchscreen gestures?) now follow your fingers just like touchpad and edge swipe gestures do! (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.25)

In the Plasma Wayland session, actions that trigger when you touch a screen edge are now disabled by default while there are any full screen windows, which improves the UX for games where you touch screen edges a lot (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.25)

The Dictionary widget now shows you an appropriate error message when it can’t fetch the definition (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.25):

The weather widget no longer shows decimals for its temperature display when used on a Panel (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.25):

On System Settings’ Login Screen (SDDM) page, the “Halt command” and “Reboot command” text fields are now editable, so you can type in a command by hand, or add a command-line argument to it if you’d like, instead of only being able to choose a command using the Open dialog (Someone going by the pseudonym “oioi 555, Plasma 5.25)

…And everything else

This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! Tons of KDE apps whose development I don’t have time to follow aren’t represented here, and I also don’t mention backend refactoring, improved test coverage, and other changes that are generally not user-facing. If you’re hungry for more, check out https://planet.kde.org, where you can find more news from other KDE contributors.

How You Can Help

If you’re a developer, check out our 15-Minute Bug Initiative. Working on these issues makes a big difference quickly!

Otherwise, have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover ways to be part of a project that really matters. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE; you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to already be a programmer, either. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

Finally, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

This week in KDE: New features and many bugfixes for Plasma 5.25

This week Plasma 5.25 reached its “soft feature freeze” date, at which point we don’t add any large new features or major code refactorings. This reduces risk and gives us a longer period of time to polish those changes before the final release. So as you can imagine, everyone rushed to merge their big stuff right before the deadline! 🙂 As a result, this week I can present are tons of new features and important refactorings that fix multiple bugs. Check it out:

15-Minute Bugs Resolved

Current number of bugs: 70, same as last week. 2 added and 2 resolved:

The volume and brightness OSDs once again show their visual indicator bars on the lock and login screens (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.24.5)

When an application gives the system both an icon name and an image for its System Tray icon, the System Tray now prefers the icon name, so if there is such an icon in your icon theme, you’ll see that and it will respect your color scheme. This affected Telegram, for example (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.24.6)

Current list of bugs

New Features

You can now optionally give your panel a “floating” appearance! In this mode, it still functionally behaves identically to a traditional panel, and clicks in the empty area will be forwarded to the panel. In addition, the panel “un-floats” when there are any maximized windows (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 5.25):

Discover now shows you apps’ level of access to resources on your system! When an app is sandboxed, you get a fine-grained list of exactly the things that the app automatically has permission to do (Suhaas Joshi and Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.25):

The presentation here is still a bit rough, and will probably be cleaned up by the time 5.25 ships

When you uninstall a sandboxed app in Discover, it now offers you the ability to easily delete the settings and user data if you want to (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.25):

The Overview effect now offers the option to exclude minimized windows, just like Present Windows does (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.25)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

When you use Dolphin’s “Open Terminal” feature, it once again opens the terminal at the folder which is selected (if any) rather than always opening it at the current folder (Someone going by the pseudonym “oioi 555”, Dolphin 22.08)

Elisa now shows album art for songs and albums that have the covers embedded in the files, not just sitting next to them (Tranter Madi, Elisa 22.08)

System Monitor once again shows information for AMD GPUs (David Redondo, Plasma 5.24.6)

The Flickr and Simon Stålenhag Picture of the Day wallpapers no longer change more than once a day (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.24.6)

Text for menu items in the Global Menu once again follows the color scheme of the Plasma Theme (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.24.6)

System Settings’ Display Configuration page now shows the correct refresh rates in more circumstances (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.24.6)

Fixed one of the ways that the kded daemon could crash in the Plasma Wayland session (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.25)

Under the hood, the Present Windows and Desktop Grid effects have been rewritten to use the same backend as the Overview effect, which fixes a grand total of 44 Bugzilla tickets (!!!), gives them consistent visual styling, and modernizes their code to keep them maintainable going forward (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.25)

System Monitor charts using the “Horizontal Bars” style are now able to meaningfully show values equal to or very close to 0 (Trent McPheron, Plasma 5.25)

Fixed a memory leak when changing your wallpaper plugin (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.25)

When you change any of the paths in System Settings’ Locations page, any Places Panel bookmarks that pointed to the old locations are automatically updated to point to the new locations (Méven Car, Plasma 5.25)

System Monitor now shows the correct app icons for apps that were launched automatically at login (David Redondo, Plasma 5.25)

Breeze cursors are no longer ever so slightly smaller than they were intended to be (Chris Chris, Plasma 5.25)

Plasma no longer crashes if it can’t find the active theme (David Faure, Frameworks 5.94)

Dolphin no longer crashes when closed from the “Close Tab” list item from the command palette (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.94)

Fixed a bug that could cause file transfers to SMB shares to fail the second and/or subsequent times you make a transfer (Harald Sitter, Frameworks 5.94)

Fixed a memory leak affecting many Kirigami-based applications (Fushan Wen, Frameworks 5.94)

User Interface Improvements

Kate now shows its toolbar by default (Christoph Cullmann, Kate 22.08)

Kate’s Menu bar has been re-arranged a bit to make each one less huge and intimidating. In particular, there is now a new “Selection” menu that holds actions which will be applied only to whatever is selected (Eric Armbruster, Kate 22.08):

Various KWin scripts that are implemented in JavaScript (such as the Show Desktop effect) now that follow your fingers when activated with a gesture. Activate Show Desktop with a Touch Screen swipe to see some magic! (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.25)

A bunch more KWin effects are now activatable using touch screen edge swipes (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.25)

When you set up fingerprint authentication, the lock screen now lets you immediately unlock by putting your finger on the fingerprint reader; no need to click the “unlock” button with en empty password field anymore! (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.25)

You can now add locations and places to the “Favorites” list/grid in Kickoff, Kicker, and the Application Dashboard (Méven Car, Plasma 5.25):

Klipper’s configuration window has been re-organized a bit to have a new “Action Menu” page, which holds settings relevant to the actions menu when you are using any Klipper actions; if you’re not, you can safely ignore it entirely (Jonathan Marten, Plasma 5.25)

File open/save dialogs and inline icon views in various apps such as Kdenlive now let you scale icons up to 512 px size (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.94)

…And everything else

How You Can Help

If you’re a developer, check out our 15-Minute Bug Initiative. Working on these issues makes a big difference quickly!

Finally, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

This week in KDE: Porting everything to QtQuick

Well OK not literally everything. But… a lot of things! The KWin scripts KCM, Filelight, and DrKonqi. What does this mean? From a user perspective, mostly not much except for better visuals that align them better with modern KDE UI design. But it also means better-separated internals, more modern code, and easier hackability for the UI. The software’s lifespan increases and we get closer to everything using the same tech stack. It’s important stuff.

In addition, you should find lots of nice bugfixes and even a few new features!

15-Minute Bugs Resolved

Current number of bugs: 70, down from 73. 2 added, 2 found to be duplicates of other 15-minute bugs, and 3 resolved:

Certain monitors no longer constantly power-cycle in a loop when connected (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.24.5)

Everyone can once again change their Favorites in Kickoff and Kicker and have those changes persist after restarting Plasma or the computer (Méven Car, Plasma 5.24.5)

After installing a Flatpak app using Discover, there’s no longer still a misleading “Install” button there anyway (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.24.5)

Current list of bugs

New Features

Skanpage now supports exporting searchable PDFs using optical character recognition! (Alexander Stippich, Skanpage 22.08):

Dolphin now lets you sort by file extension if you prefer that (Eugene Popov, Dolphin 22.08)

In the Plasma Wayland session, you can now change the resolution of your screen to resolutions beyond the officially supported ones, just like you can in the X11 session (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.25)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Dolphin’s Terminal Panel no longer gets de-synced from the view itself (Felix Ernst, Dolphin 22.04.1)

Elisa’s “Load Playlist…” and “Save Playlist…” actions now work from the global menu (Firlaev-Hans Fiete, Elisa 22.04.1)

Text in Filelight’s tooltips is no longer clipped away at the ends (Harald Sitter, Filelight 22.08)

Plasma no longer sometimes randomly crashes when you have more than one app with multiple windows open and you interact with one of their Task Manager tooltips (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.24.5)

In the Plasma Wayland session, KWin no longer crashes when connected USB-C monitors wake up from their power-save states (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.24.5)

The Global Menu widget no longer shows menus that the app has marked as hidden, such as the “Tools” Menu in Kolourpaint (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.24.5)

In the Plasma Wayland session, KWin no longer crashes when you close a laptop and re-open it when its internal screen is set to turn off when closed (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.25)

In the Plasma Wayland session, fixed another way that KWin could crash when you disconnect an external screen (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.25)

In an app using xdg-desktop-portals (e.g. sandboxed Flatpak and Snap apps), when you use a file dialog to access a file in a remote location that automatically gets mounted using kio-fuse under the hood, the next time you open the file dialog again, it will open showing the original location, not its weird-looking kio-fuse mountpoint (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.25)

Closing a window that spawned a child “Get New [thing]” window now closes the child window too, rather than letting it keep living, and then the parent app either crashes or has an invisible window that can’t be shown again until you kill the app using System Monitor or a terminal window (Alexander Lohnau, Frameworks 5.94)

Apps like Konsole that allow you to set a custom color scheme for the whole window that overrides the system’s default color scheme are now substantially faster to launch (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 5.94)

User Interface Improvements

The KWin Scripts KCM has been ported to QtQuick, modernizing its appearance and making future maintenance simpler (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.25):

Filelight has been ported to QtQuick, modernizing its appearance and making future maintenance simpler (Harald Sitter, Filelight 22.08):

DrKonqi’s crash reporting wizard has been ported to QtQuick too! But honestly you should barely notice the difference (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.25)

For apps using xdg-desktop-portals, the app chooser dialog now looks and behaves better (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.25):

For those of you who disliked the change to always skip minimized tasks when scrolling over the Task Manager to switch tasks, it’s now configurable (Abhijeet Viswa, Plasma 5.25)

…And everything else

How You Can Help

If you’re a developer, check out our 15-Minute Bug Initiative. Working on these issues makes a big difference quickly!

Finally, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

This week in KDE: Major accent color and Global Theme improvements

If last week’s post was heavy on the bugfixes, this week we’re overflowing with juicy features! But don’t worry, we didn’t forget about the 5-minute bugs and managed to squash three. Feast your eyes:

15-Minute Bugs Resolved

Current number of bugs: 72, down from 73. 2 added and 3 resolved:

The Battery widget now always appears in the System Tray on login, instead of sometimes being missing until you manually restart Plasma (Jolene K, Plasma 5.24.5)

The date displayed in the Digital Clock widget now always matches the real date (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.24)

In the Plasma X11 session, volume OSDs no longer sometimes appear in the top-left corner of the screen (Jim Jones, Frameworks 5.94)

Current list of bugs

New Features

When you click on a Global Theme in System Settings, it will now tell you what changes it’s going to make, and it gives you the opportunity to only apply certain parts of it! (Dominic Hayes, Plasma 5.25):

You can now set your accent color to be automatically generated based on the colors in the current wallpaper! It even changes the accent color automatically when the wallpaper changes! (Tanbir Jishan, Plasma 5.25):

You can now edit your color scheme to make the accent color subtly tint all of its colors! And color schemes can now be configured this way by default, so folks uploading color schemes to store.kde.org can also set a tint for them out-of-the-box (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.25):

The amount of tint is configurable too, you you can make the tint subtle or ridiculously garish, according to your aesthetic preferences. And yes, this works with wallpaper-aware accent colors too!

For apps using xdg-desktop-portals (e.g. Flatpak and Snap apps), Plasma now supports the new “Dynamic launcher” portal that allows apps to create and edit .desktop files for better system integration (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.25)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Spectacle no longer disables all the buttons when you cancel taking a screenshot if there was already one in the main window at the time (Antonio Prcela, Spectacle 22.04.1)

Elisa no longer needs to be restarted after you embed a category in the sidebar, or change the thing that’s embedded in the sidebar (me: Nate Graham, Elisa 22.04.1)

In the Plasma Wayland session, SDL apps no longer crash when an external screen is unplugged (Weng Xuetian, Plasma 5.24.5)

The Comics widget once again works (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.24.5)

On System Settings’ Quick Settings page, the “Change Wallpaper…” button now works when you have more than one Activity (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.24.5)

Searching in KRunner, Application Launcher, Overview (or any other KRunner-powered search) now returns matches that are text files, or use a file format that inherits from the plaintext format (Julian Rolfes and Natalie Clarius, Plasma 5.24.5)

Closing the Widget Explorer sidebar now deletes it, saving some memory and fixing a bug whereby the previous search query would be inappropriately remembered the next time you open it (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.24.5)

KRunner no longer hangs forever when you ask it to define a “word” with spaces in it (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.25)

For apps using xdg-desktop-portals (e.g. Flatpak and Snap apps), quitting or killing the app while one such portal dialog is open now closes the dialog too (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.25)

KWin rules are now re-evaluated when the set of active screens changes, so they will be correctly applied at more times (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.25)

Plasma no longer sometimes crashes when you change the wallpaper from the context menu item for image files in Dolphin or on the desktop (Jakub Nowak, Frameworks 5.94)

User Interface Improvements

Filelight’s old homepage that displayed subtly inaccurate and incorrect information has been replaced with a standard-style welcome page that doesn’t mislead you (Harald Sitter, Filelight 22.08):

Ark now displays real on-disk sizes for folders inside archives, rather than the number of items they contain (Andrey Butirsky, Ark 22.08)

Dolphin can now optionally display “Author” metadata below filenames in icon mode (Kai Uwe Broulik, Dolphin 22.08)

Discover now shows all application categories in the first level of its sidebar, rather than nested one level deep (Taavi Juursalu, Plasma 5.25):

The Networks widget’s details view now shows the frequency and BSSID of the currently connected WiFi network (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.25)

There is now a standard “loading” placeholder component in Kirigami that Kirigami apps are being ported to use, so you will always see a consistent loading indicator (Felipe Kinoshita, Frameworks 5.94):

Right-clicking on path items in URL navigators throughout KDE apps now gives you an option to open that location in a new window if you’d like, not just a new tab (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.94)

…And everything else

How You Can Help

If you’re a developer, check out our 15-Minute Bug Initiative. Working on these issues makes a big difference quickly!

Finally, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

This week in KDE: Stable desktop icons and even better gestures

It was a mostly bugfixy week, without so much feature and UI work. As a result, we have some very exciting 15-minute bugfixes this week that should really improve desktop icon stability! But we didn’t forget UI improvements entirely, and now the Wayland session touchpad gesture to switch between virtual desktops follows your fingers! Read about all that and more:

15-Minute Bugs Resolved

Current number of bugs: 73, down from 75. 1 added and 3 resolved:

Discover no longer constantly crashes either on launch or when you visit the Installed page if you have the Flatpak backend activated with certain types of Flatpak remotes (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.24.5)

Manually-arranged desktop icons no longer get reset to the alphabetical sorting mode when you restart the computer! (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.24.5)

Desktop icons now remember their positions on a per-resolution basis! (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.24.5)

Current list of bugs

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

You can now drag-and-drop things from Ark onto items in Dolphin’s Places panel, and it will extract those items there just like you would expect (Kai Uwe Broulik, Dolphin 22.04)

In the Plasma Wayland session, Yakuake now opens itself on the active screen, just like KRunner also now does (Martin Seher, Yakuake 22.08)

In the Plasma Wayland session, fixed a case where KWin could crash while the screen was locked (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.24.5)

In the Plasma Wayland session, unlocking the screen no longer causes various visual glitches all over the place (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.24.5)

Activating Task Manager tasks by using a Meta+[number] keyboard shortcut now always does what you expect irrespective of how many grouped tasks you have and whether they were last accessed using the mouse or keyboard (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.24.5)

In the Plasma Wayland session, the “Virtual Desktops” KWin window rule now works properly (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.24.5)

In the Plasma X11 session, fixed a case where KWin could crash when you close the lid of your laptop while an external screen is plugged in (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.25)

Grouped Task Manager tasks’ tooltips now resize and arrange themselves properly when using an RTL language (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.25)

On System Settings’ Cursors page, cursor previews once again display animations when you hover your cursor over them (David Redondo, Plasma 5.25)

In the Plasma Wayland session, the Task Manager no longer shows incorrect icons for XWayland-using web apps (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.25)

KDE apps that are capable of opening .psd files no longer crash when opening one such image that is malformed (Albert Astals Cid, Frameworks 5.94)

When you have various widgets in your panel that open popups when clicked, clicking on them no longer opens the popups with an absurdly, unusably small size (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Frameworks 5.94, though I have emailed distros and asked them to backport it to 5.93)

Highlight effects once again appear on hover in applets still using the old deprecated PlasmaComponents 2 version of the highlight, such as Legacy Kickoff (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Frameworks 5.94)

User Interface Improvements

In the Plasma Wayland session, the “slide” gesture to switch virtual desktops now follows your fingers and animates the desktops in the correct direction! (Eric Edlund, Plasma 5.25)

System Settings’ Night Color page now tints the screen how it will look in real life as you drag the slider to choose a color, so you can see the effect live (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.25)

Even though it isn’t 100% technically correct, 1360×768 and 1366×768 screens are now listed as having the “16:9” aspect ratio in System Settings’ Display Configuration page (Felipe Kinoshita, Plasma 5.25)

Changes not in KDE that affect KDE

Jan-Marek Glogowski and Michael Weghorn have done a lot of work recently to fix many LibreOffice bugs affecting KDE users, including the entire interface being too small on Wayland when using scaling, button popups not opening, Math menus being accessible in tabbed mode, and pasting text from Firefox turning it into Chinese. These are all fixed in various bugfix releases of LibreOffice 7.3.x!

…And everything else

How You Can Help

If you’re a developer, check out our 15-Minute Bug Initiative. Working on these issues makes a big difference quickly!

Finally, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

This week in KDE: a feast for the eyes

Those finger-following touchscreen gestures have started to land, and we have a lot more than that too! This week is overflowing with positive visual changes that I think you’re all really going to like:

15-Minute Bugs Resolved

Current number of bugs: 75, down from 76. 0 added and 1 resolved:

Accent colors are no longer darkened a bit when using a dark base color scheme (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.24.5)

Current list of bugs

New Features

When you change the color scheme, the screen now smoothly cross-fades between the old and new colors! (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.25):

Shamelessly copied from the GNOME effect, which was a really good idea. Soon this will be extended to also cross-fade when you change the Global Theme and Plasma Style too!

Info Center’s “About this System” page now shows you more relevant information about your hardware, such as the product name, manufacturer, and serial number (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.25):

Showing the serial number requires an extra click so that you don’t accidentally reveal it when you take a screenshot of the window, as many people like to do

The Plasma Wayland session gained support for the “screencast session restore” protocol, which means that apps using XDG portals (such as Flatpaks and Snaps) which implement the protocol (such as OBS since version 27.2.0) won’t have to ask for permission to restore the screen every time you launch them after you’ve granted it once (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.25)

There’s now a new “Crashed Processes Viewer” app that can be used to graphically see crashes collected by coredumpctl and access their developer details (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.25):

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

KIO no longer crashes while trying to open an unreadable file in an SFTP location (Harald Sitter, kio-extras 22.04)

Album list views in Elisa no longer display the tracks in the wrong order (me: Nate Graham, Elisa 22.08)

In the Plasma Wayland session, fixed a case where a misbehaving app could cause KWin to crash (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.24.5)

In the Plasma Wayland session, changing your screen configuration in certain ways (e.g. rotating and moving a screen while not also changing its refresh rate) no longer sometimes causes KWin to crash (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.24.5)

In the Plasma Wayland session, when a window requests activation using the official Wayland activation protocol so that it can raise its own window, but this gets denied by KWin for whatever reason, now the window’s Task Manager icon uses the orange “needs attention” background color, just like on X11 (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.24.5). If you encounter an app that does *not* get the orange background on its Task Manager icon when it fails to activate (e.g. when clicking on a notification sent by Thunderbird or Telegram), this means that the app in question does not implement the activation protocol at all, and it should! So go report this to its developers.

The Global Menu widget now works properly when you turn on its optional “be a hamburger menu” mode that is typically used for vertical panels (David Redondo, Plasma 5.24.5)

In the Plasma Wayland session, KRunner now appears on the active screen when shown, just like it does on X11 (Martin Seher, Plasma 5.25)

Discover no longer sometimes hangs forever when you visit its “About” page (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Frameworks 5.94)

Kate, KWrite, and other KTextEditor-based apps no longer crash when you define a new file type for the app to open (Waqar Ahmed, Frameworks 5.94)

Checkboxes and radio buttons in Plasma are no longer sometimes blurry, cut off at the bottom, or slightly squashed when you use certain combinations of fonts and font sizes (Noah Davis, Frameworks 5.94)

The Places Panels in Dolphin, open/save dialogs, Gwenview, and all other QtWidgets-based apps are now touch-friendly (Steffen Hartlieb, Frameworks 5.94)

User Interface Improvements

https://kde.org and all of it subdomains now auto-detect your browser language and show you content in your native language, if it’s available (Phu Nguyen, right now!)

Elisa’s playlist now displays adjacent songs from different albums in a much more compact and prettier way (Tranter Madi, Elisa 22.08):

Elisa now displays Bit Rate and Sample Rate metadata using sensical units (Jack Hill, Elisa 22.04):

The color theme configuration page in Kate and KWrite has received a big UI overhaul (Waqar Ahmed, Kate & KWrite 22.08):

In Kate and KWrite, typing an opening bracket character now automatically inserts the closing one after the text insertion point by default (Christoph Cullmann, Kate & KWrite 22.08)

The four-finger swipe up gesture to open the Overview effect now follows your fingers! (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.25):

The Network widget now shows contextually-relevant items in the expanded view of each list item, rather than a context menu. This makes them more discoverable and fully touch-compatible (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.25):

The Window List applet has been rewritten to modernize and future-proof its codebase, which also makes it keyboard-navigable and shows the active window’s icon and name in its Panel version, just like the classic Mac OS window menu did (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.25):

The “RGB Range” and “Overscan” controls in System Settings’ Display Configuration page now have help buttons you can click or hover over to learn what they do, as these are rather technical features need some explanation (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.25):

System Settings’ Energy Saving page now displays percentage labels by both of the brightness sliders (Edo Friedman, Plasma 5.25)

KRunner’s help button now disappears when you’ve disabled the Help runner (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.25)

Placeholder messages throughout Kirigami-based KDE apps and Plasma are now more readable, nicer-looking, and have slight visual differences between actionable and informational messages (Felipe Kinoshita, Frameworks 5.94):

The Breeze icon theme’s “debug step” icons are now more visually clear and nice-looking (Jan Blackquill, Frameworks 5.94):

…And everything else

How You Can Help

If you’re a developer, check out our 15-Minute Bug Initiative. Working on these issues makes a big difference quickly!

Finally, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

This week in KDE: Get ready for a big one!

…But first, let me mention up front that those touchpad gesture improvements I teased last week aren’t quiiiite ready, but they’re very close now. Hopefully next week! In their stead, we have an enormous number of Plasma bugfixes and UI improvements, tons of goodies for KWrite users, and finally a truly colossal number of enhancements for touch-friendliness when in Tablet Mode.

“Hey, what is Tablet Mode?”, you might ask. It’s a feature of the Plasma Wayland session in which everything becomes more touch-friendly. If you have a convertible laptop, it’s activated by flipping back the screen to make it into–you guessed it–a tablet! But it will also trigger on phones and other touch devices without a pointing device, such as the Steam deck as long as no mouse is plugged in (only once it uses the Wayland session, of course).

At the moment it is a Wayland-only feature that requires physical hardware support, but that could change and I personally would be in favor of letting people manually toggle it.

Anyway, get ready for a big one!

15-Minute Bugs Resolved

Current number of bugs: 76, same as last week. 2 added and 2 resolved:

The folder popup you can open to show the contents of folders on the desktop is no longer annoyingly two pixels too narrow to display an additional grid cell (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.24.5)

When using a Plasma Vault with the GoCryptFS backend, unlocking the vault now causes it to appear in the Places panel, just like vaults using the CryFS and EncFS backends (Ivan Čukić, Frameworks 5.93)

Current list of bugs. Get cracking! 😎

New Features

KWrite now internally uses the exact same codebase as Kate but simply turns off a bunch of programmer-centric features. This makes it much more consistent with Kate, more maintainable, and it will have fewer bugs. And now it has tabs! You can read more about it here on the Kate blog (Christoph Cullmann, KWrite 22.08):

Picture of the Day wallpapers now lets you preview the image and see image metadata right there in the config window! (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.25):

You can even click the preview to go to the image’s source URL, or click the little inline save button to save it locally!

Now, when you enter Tablet Mode, all interactive UI elements (including titlebar buttons) that are styled with the Breeze theme become larger and more touchable! (Marco Martin and Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.25:

You can now manually adjust the spacing between Icons-Only Task Manager icons, and when you’re in Tablet Mode, the spacing is automatically set to its highest level for improved touchability, just like we do for System Tray icons (Tanbir Jishan and me: Nate Graham):

In the Plasma X11 session, you can now configure all the buttons of Wacom ExpressKey Remote devices (Someone going by the pseudonym “oioi 555”, wacomtablet 3.3.0):

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Monitors in multi-monitor setups once again power off when you disable them (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.24.4)

When Discover installs updates for packages that have multiple architectures available (e.g. both 32-bit and 64-bit versions, due to having Steam installed), it now installs the updates for all architectures rather than a pseudo-random set of them, which would blow up your system! 🤯 (Alessandro Astone, Plasma 5.25, but it may be backported to 5.24.5 soon)

kio-fuse now works within the open/save dialogs of sandboxed apps, meaning that you can now use such apps to open and save files to Samba shares and other network locations, for example (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.25)

Discover now shows the description and license information for local packages (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.25)

Discover now shows you the correct author name for packages without a specific author set that live in a project group. In practice, this means that a while bunch of KDE apps will now list “KDE” as the author (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.25)

The Bing Picture of the Day wallpaper plugin will now download the 4K versions of images if you have a screen with a resolution greater than 1080p (Fushan Wen and Yunhe Guo, Plasma 5.25)

Headings in Plasma widgets once again appear as expected when you’re using the “Breeze Light” or “Breeze Dark” Plasma themes that have hardcoded colors, rather than the “Breeze” Plasma theme that respects your app color scheme (Marco Martin, Frameworks 5.93)

Draggable list items in Kirigami-based apps now move much more smoothly with no jerks or glitches (Tranter Madi, Frameworks 5.93)

User Interface Improvements

When using per-folder view properties in Dolphin, a variety of locations now use more relevant view settings: for example the search view list includes a column shows you the actual location of all matches; the Trash view list view has columns that show the “original location” and “Deletion time”; the “Recent Files” and “Recent Locations” searches group items by day; and so on (Kai Uwe Broulik, Dolphin 22.04):

Tabs in Kate and KWrite no longer fully span the whole window width by default, and the whole tab bar now only appears after a second document is opened, just like in other tabbed KDE apps (Christoph Cullmann, Kate & KWrite 22.08)

Filelight now has a “go to overview” action that will take you back to the homepage (Harald Sitter, Filelight 22.08)

In the Overview effect, you can now swipe down on a window to close it, and window close buttons are now always visible rather than appearing only on hover (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.25)

Notifications for job progress now show a percentage value by the progress bar for those of you who prefer reading text to looking at something visual (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.25):

The Margins Separator widget is now much smaller, but becomes larger and more visually obvious in Edit Mode (Tanbir Jishan, Plasma 5.25)

The Audio Volume widget no longer shows virtual devices by default, though you can show them again if you do actually use them (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.25)

System Settings’ Users page no longer lists a placeholder email address in the “Email Address” field, because it’s 2022 and people generally know what an email address is and how it’s structures (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.25)

Album art in the Media Player widget now smoothly cross-fades when it changes, rather than abruptly blinking (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.25):

All the Plasma widgets that display placeholder messages when empty now show icons too, in addition to text (Fushan Wen and me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.25):

System Settings’ Display Configuration page can now tell you exactly what setting a screen to be “Primary” actually does! (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.25):

Discover’s “What’s the risk of proprietary software?” sheet is now opened by clicking on a more conventional button, rather than a link that might make you think it’s going to open a web browser (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.25):

When you create a new file from Dolphin, the desktop, or anything else that uses the standard “create new file” functionality, the pre-selected part of the filename no longer includes the extension (Fushan Wen, Frameworks 5.93):

…And everything else

How You Can Help

If you’re a developer, check out our 15-Minute Bug Initiative. Working on these issues makes a big difference quickly!

Finally, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

This week in KDE: Progress on gestures and 15-minute bugs!

This week some of the in-progress work on touch gestures was merged, and now the edge swipe gesture to trigger KWin’s Overview and Desktop Grid effects will follow your fingers, just like you’d expect!

Big thanks to Marco Martin for implementing this improvement, which will be in Plasma 5.25. More is in the pipeline too, including finger-following touchpad gestures for the Overview effect and virtual desktop Slide effect. Hopefully I’ll be able to announce them as finished next week. 🙂

15-Minute Bugs Resolved

Current number of bugs: 76, down from 79. Current list of bugs

When you have a vertical panel and a horizontal panel, the horizontal panel no longer overlaps and hides buttons on the edit mode toolbar for the vertical panel (Oleg Solovyov, Plasma 5.24.3; this actually went in two weeks ago but I didn’t notice it!)

Logging into Plasma no longer becomes slower the more images you’ve added to your wallpaper settings (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.25)

Dragging a panel from one screen edge to another no longer sometimes causes it to disturbingly get stuck in the middle of the screen (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.25)

New Features

When sharing a folder using Samba, there is now a folder permission helper window to help you get the permissions right (Slava Aseev, kdenetwork-filesharing 22.08)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

KRunner-powered searches are now case-insensitive when matching text for System Settings pages, so you can find them more easily (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.24.4)

When running the Plasma Wayland session in a VM, clicking on something now causes the click to actually go to the correct place, rather than being slightly offset (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.24.4)

Applying various boot splash screens in System Settings now works (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.24.4)

“Get New [thing]” dialogs once again work when you’re using your system in a language other than English (Alexander Lohnau, Frameworks 5.93)

Menus for text fields in QtQuick apps no longer show a separator as the first item or make space for invisible items (Gabriel Karlsson, Frameworks 5.93)

The arrows in shortcuts windows in QtWidgets-based apps are now high-dpi compatible (Someone going by the pseudonym “snooxx 💤” Frameworks 5.93)

User Interface Improvements

The menu items in Dolphin’s Back/Forward menu now show icons (Kai Uwe Broulik, Dolphin 22.08):

The bar that shows a disk’s usage level in Dolphin is now always visible, rather than only appearing on hover (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 5.93)

The Battery and Brightness applet’s power profiles slider now shows its two extreme states with icons, and indicates the current mode with text above the slider like other sliders do. This prevents text from ever getting cut off in languages that use very long words for “Power Save,” “Balanced,” and “Performance.” (Ivan Tkachenko and Manuel Jesús de la Fuente, Plasma 5.25):

Lists of recent documents now implement a FreeDesktop standard that governs this, which means they are now synced with GTK/GNOME apps. So for example you can open a file in Gwenview and it will appear as a recent document in the “Open File” dialog in GIMP! (Méven Car and Martin Tobias Holmedahl Sandsmark, Frameworks 5.93

…And everything else

How You Can Help

If you’re a developer, check out our 15-Minute Bug Initiative. Working on these issues makes a big difference quickly!

Finally, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

This Week in KDE: coming tomorrow!

The normal weekly post will be delayed a day. Consider it extra time to merge your changes. 🙂

This week in KDE: Back to those 15-minute bugs

This week we got two good 15-minute bugs fixed, with a few more in progress that have a target merge date of next week! And of course there’s a good smattering of other positive changes as well:

15-Minute Bugs Resolved

Current number of bugs: 79, down from 81. Current list of bugs

All the notifications that were suppressed while you were in Do Not Disturb mode no longer flood the screen when you leave Do Not Disturb mode; instead, they just appear in the history pop-up, ready for you to read them there (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.25)

Folders in Recent Documents lists throughout Plasma now display their real folder icons instead of a broken-looking “unknown” icon (Méven Car, Plasma 5.25)

New Features

KRunner now has its own config window rather than re-using the systemwide search plugins page in System Settings, and in that window it now lets you disable the behavior where typing text while the desktop is focused will open it (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.25):

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Ark’s “Extract here” context menu items no longer do so much unnecessary work, making Dolphin’s context menu faster to open and causing fewer hangs on network locations (Kai Uwe Broulik, Ark 22.04)

Opening a new Private window in Firefox using its Task Manager task context menu no longer sometimes opens the window with the path to your home directory in the URL field (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.24.4)

When using a Global Menu, closing the active app now clears the menubar rather than leaving its menu there as a zombie (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.24.4)

Window titlebar buttons now get reversed as expected when you’re using the system with a right-to-left language (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.24.4)

KWin’s blur effect no longer sometimes results in flickering for windows that use blurred backgrounds (Mathias Tillman, Plasma 5.24.4)

Clicking the “Launch” button in Discover to launch an app now always results in only one thing getting launched, instead of sometimes launching several things (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.25)

When used in right-to-left-text mode, a variety of QtQuick controls now look correct, including sliders (Jan Blackquill, Frameworks 5.93)

Showing the “Get New Widgets” window from the Widget Explorer sidebar no longer blocks/freezes the rest of Plasma until it’s closed (Alexander Lohnau, Frameworks 5.93)

User Interface Improvements

GTK applications using the Breeze-GTK theme now fully match the new appearance used in KDE apps (Jan Blackquill and Artem Grinev, Plasma 5.25)

The Plasma Wayland session’s touchpad gestures now let you reverse the direction of your fingers to cancel an in-progress gesture, when the effect in question supports it; right now only Desktop Grid does, but more are coming soon! (Eric Edlund, Plasma 5.25)

The “active job progress” notification icon in the System Tray now shows you the average completion percentage in its tooltip (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.25):