Author: Nate

This week in KDE: the Plasma 6 feature freeze approaches

At this point nearly all the planned features for Plasma 6 are done, and everyone’s focus has begun to shift to bug-fixing and polishing. People are reporting plenty of bugs (most of them fairly minor) and we’re fixing them as fast as we can! In addition to that, some larger and more notable changes went in too:

KDE 6 Mega-Release

(Includes all software to be released on the February 28th mega-release: Plasma 6, Frameworks 6, and apps from Gear 24.02)

General info – Open issues: 162

Shutting down or restarting the machine while in the Plasma Wayland session now causes apps with unsaved changes to prompt the user to save them, rather than just quitting immediately and losing the changes. No new Wayland protocol ended up being necessary after all! This was one of the last three Wayland Showstoppers (David Redondo, link)

“Bounce Keys” now fully work in the Plasma Wayland session. This was the second of the last three Wayland Showstoppers! Now we’re just down to one, and it too is being worked on! (Nicolas Fella, link)

Partition Manager no longer lets you write entries to your fstab file that could prevent mounting a partition in the future by closing the partition editing dialog without changing the mountpoint, when the mountpoint was previously undefined (Arjen Hiemstra, link 1 and link 2)

Files and folders created in ~/Desktop but outside of Plasma itself should now always appear there immediately (Harald Sitter, link)

Changing your user picture in System Settings now results in the picture in Kickoff changing immediately, rather than only after Plasma was restarted (Akseli Lahtinen, link)

Fixed a visual glitch in Kate and other KTextEditor-based apps involving the completion popup (Waqar Ahmed, link)

Since the API for Plasma Widgets has changed in Plasma 6, widgets that you migrate from a Plasma 5 installation but aren’t compatible with Plasma 6 are now shown in a relatively user-friendly way, so at least you know what to do and don’t think that Plasma 6 is just totally broken (Marco Martin, link 1, link 2)

When you’ve downloaded an offline update, there’s now an option to reboot without applying it on the next boot-up. We’re considering adding this as an option when shutting down, too (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

The “Battery and Brightness” widget has been split into two new widgets: “Brightness and Color” and “Power and Battery.” The former one integrates controls for Night Color, so in the end the total number of widgets in your System Tray isn’t increasing; they’re just better organized and relevant now! (Natalie Clarius, link):

KMail now gains support for the beautiful new frameless styling in the Plasma 6 Breeze theme (Carl Schwan, link):

The “Kill unresponsive window?” dialog now exists in the Plasma Wayland session and has received a visual overhaul to brings its UI into the 21st century (Kai Uwe Broulik, link):

Spectacle now opens on Meta+Shift+S, for the benefit of those whose keyboards don’t have a PrintScreen key (Noah Davis, link)

Welcome Center gains a dedicated page shown to people who use the beta version of Plasma (Oliver Beard, link):

The Samba sharing configuration wizard has been fully ported to Qt6 (Harald Sitter, link)

Other Bug-Related Information of Interest:

This section is short because all notable bugfixes are included in the mega-release! Expect this to be more and more true as we get closer to the final release, which, as a reminder, is planned for February 28, 2024.

…And Everything Else

This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! 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

We’re hosting our Plasma 6 fundraiser right now and need your help! Thanks to you we’re past the 75% mark, but we’re not there yet! So if you like the work we’re doing, spreading the wealth is a great way to share the love. 🙂

If you’re a developer, work on Qt6/KF6/Plasma 6 issues! Which issues? These issues. Plasma 6 is usable for daily driving now, but still in need of bug-fixing and polishing to get it into a releasable state by February.

Otherwise, visit https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover other 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!

This week in KDE: Panel Intellihide and Wayland Presentation Time

It’s great to see lots of people running the Plasma 6 Alpha release, which has resulted in a spike of bug reports, as we had hoped and expected. So keep at it! Focus is already shifting to bug fixing now that most planned features are merged, with only a few to go. So far I’ve been following a policy of only noting fixes for bugs that affect shipping software, but I might have to change that given the loooong bugfixing window for Plasma 6. Still chewing on it.

Anyway, lots to talk about this week!

Plasma 6

(Includes all software to be released on the February 28th mega-release: Plasma 6, Frameworks 6, and apps from Gear 24.02)

General info – Open issues: 144

Plasma Panels have now gained a new visibility mode: “Dodge Windows” aka “intelligent auto-hide!” In essence, the Panel auto-hides when touched by a window, but is otherwise visible (Bharadwaj Raju and Niccolò Venerandi, link)

KWin now implements support for the Wayland “Presentation time” protocol! (Xaver Hugl, link)

Carl Schwan has been improving the look and feel of QtWidgets-based KDE apps left and right, and they just look gorgeous now! (Carl Schwan, link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5, link 6, link 7, link 8, and link 9):

List items throughout QML-based KDE software now use a nicer rounded highlight style (Arjen Hiemstra and Carl Schwan, link):

When you create a new blank panel, it now comes with an “Add Widgets…” button on it to save you some time, because let’s face it, the next thing you were about to do was add some widgets! (Niccolò Venerandi, link)

The Breeze icon theme has gained symbolic variants of the weather icons, which means that when you use a Weather Report widget on your panel, it’s no longer the only thing in or near the System tray with a colorful icon (Alois Spitzbart, link):

When you scroll down in one of the “Get new [thing]” dialogs to load new content, it now loads without throwing up a giant full-window loading indicator that blocks the view of what you were looking at (Rishi Kumar, link)

Ported all of Plasma’s widget configuration dialogs to use the same base components we use for system Settings pages, allowing for more unified code and also frameless, edge-to-edge scrollable views like in System Settings (Nicolas Fella, link)

the Task Manager widget’s rather confusing “Always arrange tasks in columns of as many rows” setting has been re-done in the UI to be comprehensible (Niccolò Venerandi, link):

Improved app launch time in the Plasma Wayland session (David Edmundson, link)

Elisa now always uses its internal music indexer rather than Baloo. This unifies the UX and indexing codepaths, as many users did not have Baloo available and were using the internal indexer anyway. The result is 10 open bug reports fixed! (Christoph Cullmann, link)

Konsole’s default “Breeze” terminal color scheme now uses the more attention-getting and attractive “Plasma Blue” color for intense text (Thiago Sueto, link):

In Dolphin, you can now toggle inline previews on and off with the F12 key, just like how you can in the open/save dialogs (Eric Armbruster, link)

Other Significant Bugfixes

(This is a curated list of e.g. HI and VHI priority bugs, Wayland showstoppers, major regressions, etc.)

Brightness control now works on FreeBSD systems (Gleb Popov, Plasma 5.27.10. Link)

Your preferred web browser is now looked up more reliably (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.27.10. Link)

Moving the pointer over a partially-visible list item in various Plasma widgets no longer auto-scrolls the view to make that list item totally visible, which could be rather disruptive in certain circumstances (e.g. for very large list items, or when moving the pointer up from the bottom of the list to try to reach an item at the top) and annoyed a lot of people (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 6.0. Link)

Dolphin’s ISO integration tools now work again after briefly breaking (Eric Armbruster, Dolphin 23.08.3. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

…And Everything Else

This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! 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

We’re hosting our Plasma 6 fundraiser right now and need your help! Thanks to you we’ve hit the 70% mark, which is amazing! To be honest, I had thought the goal of 500 new KDE e.V. supporting members was too ambitious, but you folks have proven me wrong so far. But nonetheless, while 70% is amazing, 70% is not 100%, so if you like the work we’re doing, spreading the wealth by becoming a member is a great way to share the love. 🙂

If you’re a developer, work on Qt6/KF6/Plasma 6 issues! Which issues? These issues. Plasma 6 is usable for daily driving now, but still in need of bug-fixing and polishing to get it into a releasable state by February.

Otherwise, visit https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover other 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!

This week in KDE: Wayland by default, de-framed Breeze, HDR games, rectangle screen recording

Yep you read that right, we’ve decided to throw the lever and go Wayland by default! The three remaining showstoppers are in the process of being fixed and we expect them to be done soon–certainly before the final release of Plasma 6. So we wanted to make the change early to gather as much feedback as possible.

But that’s not all, of course. This was another big week! Read on to see the rest:

Plasma 6

(Includes all software to be released on the February 28th mega-release: Plasma 6, Frameworks 6, and apps from Gear 24.02)

General info – Open issues: 118

The Breeze app style has gotten the visual overhaul you’ve all dreamed of: no more frames within frames! Instead Breeze-themed apps adopt the clean design of modern Kirigami apps, with views separated from one another with single-pixel lines! (Carl Schwan, link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5, link 6, link 7, link 8, link 9, and link 10):

In the Plasma Wayland session, there’s now preliminary support for playing HDR-capable games when using an HDR-capable screen! (Xaver Hugl, link)

Spectacle has gained support for rectangular region screen recording! (Noah Davis, link)

System Settings’ Printers page has gotten a major overhaul and now includes the features internally that it used to direct you to external apps for. The result is much nicer and more integrated, without a cascading soup of dialog windows (Mike Noe, link):

The Plasma Panel settings have been redesigned again, and this time everything is in one dialog; no more nested sub-menus! This work fixed 14 open bug reports (Niccolò Venerandi and Marco Martin, link 1 and link 2):

Ark is now significantly faster to compress files using xz and zstd compression, as they are now multi-threaded (Zhangzhi Hu, link)

When you run Flatpak apps, they’ll no longer prompt you to approve or deny “background activity”; the whole concept of this has been removed as it was kinda sus and not useful at all (David Edmundson, link)

There’s now a simple setting to disable notification sounds systemwide, for those of you who don’t like them (Ismael Asensio, link 1, link 2, and link 3):

Improved Plasma’s start time rather significantly–up to a few whole seconds (Harald Sitter, link)

The double-click speed setting returns, and now lives on System Settings’ General Behavior page. Before you ask why it’s not on the mouse Page, it’s because it affects touchpads too and that has its own page, and duplicating the setting on both pages seemed messy and ugly (Nicolas Fella, link)

Syncing your Plasma settings to SDDM now also syncs your desired NumLock state on boot (Chandradeep Dey, link)

In QtWidgets-based apps, you can open the context menu for the selected thing with the Shift+F10 shortcut (Felix Ernst, link 1 and link 2)

You can now open System Monitor with the Meta+Escape shortcut (Arjen Hiemstra, link)

Significant Bugfixes

(This is a curated list of e.g. HI and VHI priority bugs, Wayland showstoppers, major regressions, etc.)

Fixed a wide variety of multi-screen issues related to screens sometimes not turning on at the right times or becoming visually frozen until going to another VT and back (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.0. Link)

Fixed a bug that could cause desktop icon positions to be mis-remembered, especially if the system has ever had multiple screens connected (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.27.10. Link)

Fixed a bug that could cause Night Color to start transitioning to night mode at inappropriate times when using a certain combination of settings (Sanjay Swain, Plasma 5.27.10. Link)

Just in case you have a window that fails to set a minimum size, KWin no longer lets you resize it to a width of zero pixels, whereupon it would become invisible and impossible to find (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.0. Link)

In the “Get new [thing]” dialogs, items’ full descriptions are now visible, instead of getting cut off at some point (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 6.0. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

Automation & Systematization

Added a GUI test to make sure that Panel Edit Mode can be entered (Fushan Wen, link)

Added some GUI tests for functionality of the wallpaper chooser dialog (Fushan Wen, link)

Added some GUI tests for KRunner’s plugins and their presence in the relevant System Settings page (Fushan Wen, link)

…And Everything Else

This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! 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

We’re hosting our Plasma 6 fundraiser right now and need your help! Thanks to you we’re past the 60% mark, but we’re not there yet! So if you like the work we’re doing, spreading the wealth is a great way to share the love. 🙂

If you’re a developer, work on Qt6/KF6/Plasma 6 issues! Which issues? These issues. Plasma 6 is usable for daily driving now, but still in need of bug-fixing and polishing to get it into a releasable state by February.

Otherwise, visit https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover other 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!

November Plasma 6 update

Well, I skipped October, oops. So it’s been two months since my last Plasma 6 update, but you can find all kinds of other good stuff about Plasma 6 on https://planet.kde.org, including this post from Kai.

Probably the big news is that we released the Plasma 6 Alpha today! What does that mean? Well, go read this blog post by David Edmundson to find out! In a nutshell, you should try out the Plasma 6 Alpha out using one of these distros (or by building it yourself using kdesrc-build) if you’re an adventurous person who has a backup and wants to help make the final release better by reporting bugs or even fixing them. It really does help!

So what else happened over the past two months? Tons and tons:

The end of the big porting tasks

Yep, we finally finished* the porting and maintenance work.

This included the extremely large task of porting everything (Plasma, frameworks, and apps) away from Kirigami.AbstractListItem and Kirigami.BasicListItem. The former has been replaced with plain old upstream QtQuick.ItemDelegate, and the latter has been replaced with either one of the new Kirigami delegates or or a custom content item that uses one of them (or just totally custom content). It’s a bit of a loss in the consistency department since now we have more custom content items, but the loss isn’t that big since we did before as well, and the consistency promise of BasicListItem was never realized anyway. The work was done by Marco Martin, Arjen Hiemstra, me: Nate Graham, Carl Schwan, Ivan Tkachenko, Nicolas Fella, and others.

Speaking of Nicolas Fella, he also ported, like, everything in sight to better newer versions. Seriously, he did so much I can barely believe it. Plasma 6 and Frameworks 6 will have much nicer, more modern, more maintainable code.

*Okay, I lied. We still have one outstanding task to port widget config pages to use more standard components. But hopefully that won’t be too hard.

A huge number of user facing changes

There are almost too many to list, but here are a few:

  • Wayland session is now the default (Neal Gompa)
  • Color management on Wayland (Xaver Hugl)
  • Removed the nested frames from KDE’s QtWidgets apps and adopted the more modern Kirigami style (Carl Schwan)
  • Rectangular region screen recording in Spectacle (Noah Davis)
  • The return of the Desktop Cube effect (Vlad Zahorodnii)
  • Overhauled and modernized Plasma Panel configuration UI (Niccolò Venerandi)
  • Overview effect now incorporates the Desktop Grid and can smoothly switch to it and back, all with better and more natural touchpad gestures (Niccolò Venerandi)
  • Overhauled QML Printers page in System Settings with a better UI and lots of previously-hidden features migrated from the obscure QtWidgets apps (Mike Noe)
  • Overhauled QML Energy Saving page in System Settings with a better, more comprehensible UI (Jakob Petsovits)
  • A completely new QML Game Controllers page in System Settings to replace the old obsolete Joysticks page (Joshua Goins and Jeremy Whiting)
  • A huge amount of UI polish for Discover, including better search results and status reporting, more relevant reviews, a new screenshot carousel, and more (Marco Martin, Alessandro Astone, and Ivan Tkachenko)
  • Re-organized sidebar in System Settings (me: Nate Graham)
  • Colorblindness correction filters (Fushan Wen)
  • Simultaneous password-or-fingerprint/smartcard authentication on the lock screen (Janet Blackquill)
  • A camera usage monitor on Wayland (Fushan Wen)
  • Support for HDR in compatible games (Xaver Hugl)
  • Floating panel by default (Niccolò Venerandi)
  • The first page in Welcome Center can be customized by distros (me: Nate Graham)

It’s, like, kind of a lot of stuff! And those are only the headliner features; there are loads more UI improvements and bugfixes. Plasma 6 is gonna be big!

What’s next

We have two weeks before the “soft feature freeze” and three weeks before the hard one. Expect people to madly race to finish their work-in-progress features before them. There are still quite a few, and you can see some of them mentioned on the Plasma 6 wiki page. During this time, I expect the perceived level of bugginess and number of open bug reports to rise.

After that, we’ll have a solid 3 months of bug fixing, with regular beta and RC releases. This is a lot longer than we typically do for normal Plasma releases–3 times as long! So despite the large number of changes so far, expect the number of bug reports to fall very significantly during those 3 months, and I predict that Plasma 6.0 ends up being pretty darn stable, all things considered.

This is where I once again urge people to test out Plasma 6 and report bugs. The more good quality bug reports we get, the better the final release will be! Seriously.

But does that sound kinda scary? Another good way to contribute is to donate to KDE e.V. by becoming a supporting member via our fundraiser. We set a very ambitious goal of 500 supporting members (starting from 52–yes, really) and believe it or not, we’re more than halfway there! So it looks like we might actually be able to attain this goal. And you can help! If you haven’t already sign up to become a member today!

This week in KDE: Plasma 6 Alpha approaches

Time has a way of creeping up, and the Plasma 6 alpha release is on November 8th. People are scrambling to get their features in before either the soft feature freeze (on Monday) or the hard one (a few weeks later). So this has been a week of big changes! Starting on Monday, we’ll officially start the process of convergence and shift focus to bug fixing and UI polishing, with the currently in-flight new features trickling in too.

KDE 6 MegaRelease

(Includes all software to be released on the February 28th mega-release: Plasma 6, Frameworks 6, and apps from Gear 24.02)

General info – Open issues: 113

Discover now has a better way to present app ratings: now it shows a big overview of the ratings with quotations from the best ones, and you can still read all of them in a popup like before. When you do, they’re now sorted by “relevance” which is a determined by combination of recency, helpfulness votes, and the version being reviewed matching the version available to you (Marco Martin, link 1 and link 2):

Discover’s search has been hugely improved, and now generally always returns the results you’re expecting when you search for something that exists and is available (Marco Martin, link):

Please excuse the lack of app icons; this is a local setup issue on my machine that I haven’t fixed yet, not a bug in Discover

System Settings’ Energy Saving page has been rewritten in QML, which fixed all of the open bug reports for the old one, and also has a nicer and easier-to-parse visual design (Jakob Petsovits, link):

When using a Plasma style without the grouped task indicator SVG (of which Breeze is now one), the Task Manager now switches to a fancy new style to show grouped tasks (me: Nate Graham. Link):

Still slightly work-in-progress and subject to change based on feedback

Vertically-space-limited line graphs in System Monitor and the Plasma widgets of the same name no longer let their legends get cut off (Arjen Hiemstra, link):

Pen input using a graphics tablet can now be manually re-mapped to the entire desktop area consisting of all screens, not just a single screen (Aki Sakurai, link)

Transient dialog windows (i.e. windows that close with the Escape key that you typically open from another window, like settings dialogs) are now handled in the Plasma Wayland session like they are on X11: they no longer appear in the Task Manager as separate windows, propagate “needs attention” status to their parents, and so on (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

Ark can now extract files from multi-volume ZIP files (Ilya Pominov, Ark 24.02. Link)

When using “Repeat this track” mode in Elisa, manually skipping forward or back to the next or previous tracks now works as expected (Quinten Kock, link)

KRunner’s web shortcuts runner now has two new entries: Codeberg (search for “cb [search term]”) and PyPi (search for “pypi [search term]”) (Salvo Tomaselli, link)

Other Significant Bugfixes

(This is a curated list of e.g. HI and VHI priority bugs, Wayland showstoppers, major regressions, etc.)

Fixed one of the most common random crashes in Plasma or when changing audio device settings in System Settings (David Redondo, Plasma 5.27.9. Link)

Fixed an extremely subtle threading bug that could cause Plasma or KWin to randomly crash when files being watched for changes got certain types of changes with certain timings, which in Qt 6 became easier to trigger by switching Kate or Konsole profiles while KRunner’s Kate Sessions or Konsole Profiles runners were active (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.0 and Plasma 5.27.10 with Frameworks 5.112. Link)

It’s no longer possible for the screen locker to break when you either had an extremely large number of session-restored apps, or any of your session-restored apps did something naughty and silently exhausted the system’s session restoration resources. Instead, when either of these things happens, Plasma will warn you about it and prevent the resource exhaustion (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.0. Link)

When using NetworkManager 1.44, restarting the NetworkManager system service–which sometimes happens automatically when the computer goes to sleep and then wakes up again– no longer causes the Networks widget in the System Tray to either disappear or stop displaying any networks (Ilya Katsnelson, Frameworks 5.112. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

…And Everything Else

This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! 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

We’re hosting our Plasma 6 fundraiser right now and need your help! We’re almost to the 50% mark of our goal of 500 members, so if you like the work we’re doing, joining up and spreading the wealth is a great way to share the love. 🙂

If you’re a developer, work on Qt6/KF6/Plasma 6 issues! Plasma 6 is usable for daily driving now, but still in need of bug-fixing and polishing to get it into a releasable state by February.

Otherwise, visit https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover other 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!

Plasma 6 fundraiser update

In case you weren’t aware, KDE e.V. is doing a membership drive right now, fundraising to strengthen the organization’s financial sustainability. The money goes towards employment for KDE contributors, organizing development sprints and the Akademy conference, server hardware, and more. If you want to know more details, check out the 2022 annual report which lists the budget.

For this fundraiser, we set a super ambitious goal of 500 members. We started with around 50, and as of today the total sits at 202! Even if it’s not 500, it’s still quadruple what we had before! This is great!

But we would really like to get to 500 before the release of Plasma 6 next February. 🙂 If you haven’t donated recently or aren’t a member of the KDE e.V., this is the perfect time to become a supporting member and help ensure the financial sustainability of one of the oldest and greatest FOSS communities on the planet! It’s less than the cost of Netflix or Amazon Prime, and it’s a whole lot more important. So please consider becoming a member or donating today! Already a member? Pitch it to a friend, family member, or colleague who uses KDE software! Every member helps. 🙂

These past 2 weeks in KDE: Wayland color management, the desktop cube returns, and optional shadows in Spectacle

Aaaaaand it’s a big one! I challenge anyone to read this week’s (well, these past two weeks’) report and not find something they’ve been wanting for a long time. 🙂

Plasma 6

(Includes all software to be released on the February 28th mega-release: Plasma, Gear-aligned apps, and Frameworks)

General info – Open issues: 109

Per-screen color management is now supported in the Plasma Wayland session for up to sRGB screens! You can assign ICC color profiles to each screen and apps will do the right thing. And colors picked using the Color Picker applet are now color-managed appropriately as well (Xaver Hugl, link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5, and link 6)

The Desktop Cube effect returns! It now lives in the kdeplasma-addons repo and you can trigger it with the Meta+C shortcut (Vlad Zahorodnii, link):

When Spectacle is run on Plasma 6, you can now take “Active Window” and “Window Under Cursor” screenshots that optionally omit window shadows! (Kristen McWilliam, link):

Discover has started to undergo many small UI improvements: a nicer background color for cards views; better visual alignment for cards on search and browse pages; smarter behavior in the sidebar while searching; more robust display of screenshots for apps and backends without thumbnails correctly specified; Flatpak apps with low-level PipeWire access are now correctly marked as having access to the audio system; and app sizes for Flatpak apps are now more concise and readable (Marco Martin, Arjen Hiemstra, Jonah Brüchert, and me: Nate Graham, link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5, and link 6)

On the subject of Discover, its Application Details page has gotten a new rewritten screenshot viewer, which is vastly better than the old one in every way and fixes multiple bugs (Ivan Tkachenko, link):

The Overview effect now has an option to only perform a KRunner-powered search when searching, rather than also filtering windows based on the search text (Dashon Wells, link)

When you have fingerprint or smartcard authentication set up, you can now use that method on the lock screen, OR your password, rather than only being able to use your password after failing at the other auth method several times. This is only for the lock screen right now and not also the Polkit authentication dialog, but that’s being explored as well (Janet Blackquill, link 1 and link 2)

The headers of settings dialogs in QtWidgets-based apps are now styled to look the same as System Settings and other Kirigami-based apps (Waqar Ahmed, link):

KFontView now works as expected on Wayland (Kai Use Broulik, link)

System Settings’ Shortcuts page has been modernized a bit to avoid the “chunky footer” style used in Plasma 5 (Mike Noe, link):

More than doubled the speed of KRunner’s Recent Documents runner, among other various improvements (Alexander Lohnau, link)

The infinite scrollable calendar in the Digital Clock widget is now vastly more responsive (Fushan Wen, link)

Type-ahead find in Dolphin now causes the matching file to be centered in the window when using Details view (Amol Godbole, link)

In Elisa, playlist items now play on a single-click rather than a double-click, and when you try to play a song that has since been deleted or renamed, you’re warned of this appropriately (me: Nate Graham, link 1 and link 2)

The “Get New [thing]” dialog now has an appropriate minimum size (Oliver Beard, link)

Other Significant Bugfixes

(This is a curated list of e.g. HI and VHI priority bugs, Wayland showstoppers, major regressions, etc.)

Fixed a case in the Plasma Wayland session where logging in would cause KWin to immediately crash and throw you back to the login screen (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.27.9. Link)

Fixed the most common crash in Plasma that could manifest when closing notifications, by backporting a Qt patch that fixes it, since it’s already fixed in Plasma 6 (Marco Martin and David Edmundson, the latest release of the KDE Qt 5 Patch Collection, link)

Fixed a semi-common crash in Discover when installing Flatpak apps (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.27.9. Link)

Various KWin-provided global shortcuts that were always intended to be on by default–such as for switching virtual desktops–now are (Joshua Goins, Plasma 5.27.9. Link)

Fixed a race condition that caused the “Show in Activities” menu item in the window menu to only sometimes be visible (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.27.9. Link)

Fixed an irritating screen flicker that would show up when using touchpad gestures to switch virtual desktops with animations globally disabled (Quinten Kock, Plasma 5.27.9. Link)

Fixed the most common crash in System Monitor that could sometimes cause it to blow up when quitting or switching pages (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 6.0. Link)

Fixed a case where file associations could be inherited in the wrong order, causing certain document types to open in the wrong apps under certain circumstances (David Redondo, Plasma 6.0. Link)

Fixed an issue that could cause complex display arrangements involving daisy-chained DisplayPort screens to be arranged randomly after wakeup, reboot, or hotplug (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.0. Link)

In the Plasma Wayland session, using a stylus to interact with System Settings’ Tablet page no longer makes the rest of System Settings unresponsive to stylus input (Aki Sakurai, Plasma 6.0. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

For Developers

You can now easily build a whole Plasma desktop session plus associated apps like System Settings and Discover by running kdesrc-build workspace (Nicolas Fella, link)

When setting up kdesrc-build, it now defaults to building everything against Qt6 (Thiago Sueto and Mariua Pa, link 1 and link 2)

Automation & Systematization

Added some autotests for the Kirigami NavigationTabBar and NavigationTabButton components (Ivan Tkachenko, link)

…And Everything Else

This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! 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

We’re hosting our Plasma 6 fundraiser right now and need your help! If you like the work we’re doing, spreading the wealth is a great way to share the love. 🙂

If you’re a developer, work on Qt6/KF6/Plasma 6 issues! Plasma 6 is usable for daily driving now, but still in need of bug-fixing and polishing to get it into a releasable state by February.

Otherwise, visit https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover other 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!

It’s time to port your widgets to Plasma 6

Consider this a formal heads-up for Plasma 5 widget authors: You will need to port your widgets to newer APIs to make them compatible with Plasma 6!

Many aspects of the Plasma widget API have changed, and existing 3rd-party widgets need adaptation for Plasma 6 or else they will not run. You can read our porting guide here: https://develop.kde.org/docs/plasma/widget/porting_kf6

Plasma-6-compatible widgets can be uploaded to store.kde.org and live in the new “Plasma 6 Extensions” category, visible at https://store.kde.org/browse?cat=705&ord=latest. There’s nothing in there right now, so I’m assuming no one knows about it yet. Therefore, I’m telling people: the time for 3rd-party widget authors to start porting their widgets is now!

Let me know in the comments here if you have any questions or concerns, and I’ll try to answer them and adjust the documentation as needed.