Author: Nate

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.

This week in KDE: colorblindness correction filters

This week there’s a lot of news on the accessibility front in particular! Beyond that, we have a fairly juicy assortment of other new features and user interface improvements, so have a look:

Plasma 6

General info – Open issues: 103

KWin now includes an effect that can change the colors on the whole screen to better support people with various forms of color-blindness! (Fushan Wen, link):

The F10 key is now used in most KDE apps (with more being ported soon) to open the main menu or hamburger menu. This means that the keyboard shortcut to create a new file had to be changed to Ctrl+Shift+N, which also makes it more consistent with what’s used in other environments (Felix Ernst, link)

Kate, KWrite, and other KTextEditor-based apps gained support for speaking text from the document! (Christoph Cullmann, link)

Throughout QtQuick-based KDE software, scrolling using a mouse wheel now smoothly animates the view! Smooth scrolling, baby! Note that this is different from inertial scrolling for touchpads, which is not implemented yet. For more information, see this wiki page. (HeCheng Yu and Fushan Wen, link)

When your Panel has a Task Manager widget on it, the feature to add panel launchers (as opposed to pinned Task Manager apps) has been hidden to avoid confusing people. You can still add them manually if you want, but the way to do it is no longer so in-your-face. As a part of this, the Traditional Task Manager has been changed so that its pinned launchers no longer disappear by default when used to launch an app; they now stay where they are and can be used to open new instances, so they feel more like panel launchers now. This is configurable if you liked the old approach better, of course! (Niccolò Venerandi, link 1 and link 2)

LibreOffice documents now appear in Plasma’s “Recent Documents” list (Méven Car, link)

Cursor theme previews are no longer drawn too small when using scaling on Wayland, and are no longer pixelated when using a fractional scale factor (Fushan Wen, link 1 and link 2)

Locally-downloaded and manually installed packages installed using Discover can now be upgraded and uninstalled (Alessandro Astone, link)

Offline Updates in Discover now report their progress more accurately (Alessandro Astone, link)

In the Plasma Wayland session, it’s now possible to mirror (as in, visually flip) a display if needed (Xaver Hugl, link)

Other User Interface Improvements

The default location where Spectacle saves screenshots and screen recordings has been changed; now they are saved to ~/Pictures/Screenshots and ~/Videos/Screencasts, respectively. And of course these default settings can be changed if you’d prefer them to be saved elsewhere! (Noah Davis, Spectacle 24.02. Link)

Elisa’s color scheme chooser menu now looks native, not kinda weird (Jack Hill, Elisa 24.02. Link)

Other Significant Bugfixes

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

Fast user switching from a passwordless user account now works (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.27.9. Link)

In Dolphin, the “Create New” menu now correctly enables and disables itself as needed when you switch tabs (Amol Godbole, Dolphin 24.02. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

Automation & Systematization

Added an autotest to make sure the Panel’s Edit Mode toolbox works (Fushan Wen, link)

Added some autotests to make sure the new Kirigami list delegates work properly; more on that soon! (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!

This week in KDE: re-organized System Settings

Plasma 6

General info – Open issues: 91

System Settings’ sidebar has gotten a much-needed re-organization! This is still under development and may change a bit before the final release, so don’t consider the following screenshots 100% final. Probably 90% final. But anyway, but here’s what we’ve got right now (me: Nate Graham, link):

Changed who handles screen arrangements in the Plasma Wayland session: until now, it was KScreen, whereas now for Plasma 6, KWin has absorbed that functionality. This will make it much easier to ensure a good UX here because state will be centralized in one location, rather than having it be synchronized across two components that need to be in communication with one another. This proved fragile throughout Plasma 5. The work has already fixed three bugs, with more to come. Ultimately this means that KScreen is now feature-frozen, and no further changes to multi-screen handling on X11 should be expected in Plasma 6 (Xaver Hugl, link)

While Discover is fetching updates, its progress bar now corresponds much closer to actual reality, instead of being more like a random number generator (Alessandro Astone, link 1 and link 2)

Discover now lets distros opt into turning on dependency auto-remove for apps that are removed with Discover (Alessandro Astone, link)

When the screen resolution or scale changes–which can happen when additional screens are plugged in–the wallpaper now instantly resizes to the new desktop geometry rather than doing an animated fade, which in this context just looked weird and glitchy and broken (Marco Martin, link 1 and link 2)

Improved the Breeze Night Color icon (Philip Murray, link):

Other New Features

Spectacle’s screen recording feature gained support for recording using the VP9 codec (CPU rendering only for now, but GPU acceleration is coming soon). In the process, the default location where screen recordings get saved to has been made customizable (Noah Davis, link 1, link 2, and link 3)

Other Significant Bugfixes

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

Fixed a bug in Discover that could cause it to crash for some people after searching, or even when just launching the app (Harald Sitter, link 1 and link 2)

In the Plasma X11 session, various QtQuick-based dialog windows will no longer be missing their close buttons (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.27.9. Link)

Apps and Plasma can no longer crash when told to use DBus to launch an app with a malformed .desktop file name that’s out of compliance with the spec (David Redondo, Frameworks 5.111. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

Automation & Systematization

Added more GUI tests for the Battery & Brightness widget, the Clipboard widget’s barcode page, and the System Settings Users page’s avatar chooser sheet (Fushan Wen, link 1, link 2, and link 3)

…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!