This week Plasma 6 underwent some major refactoring to the fundamental Plasma widget APIs to modernize them and make it harder to introduce errors when developing new widgets. Since almost everything in Plasma is a widget, this necessitated a lot of changes and QA. After a month of work, it’s now done! The user-facing side is nil (ideally nobody will notice anything), but there are some changes that developers will need to be aware of to port their widgets. Most widgets already needed to be ported anyway due to Qt changes, but hopefully this won’t add much else. A porting guide has already been written and can be found here. This work was done by Marco Martin, with me providing QA support.
On that subject, we got a lot more organized about Plasma 6 this week. We now centrally track status on a new wiki page that shows the outstanding issues and notable changes. I’m starting to feel like I see a light at the end of the tunnel! While I’ve had to use the X11 Plasma 6 session because the Wayland one is still a bit too unstable for me to feel productive, the X11 session now feels barely buggier than the Plasma 5 X11 session. It’s really quite nice at this point.
This came up in the comment threads of last week’s post, but the more people test and contribute to Plasma 6, the better the final release will be. Neon Unstable now offers Plasma 6 by default, making it a good testing platform for the adventurous. Especially if you have a heavily customized setup or use exotic hardware, please try it out and submit bug reports! Make sure to apply the “qt6” keyword to them.
User Interface Improvements
Many significant UI improvements to Skanpage, including drag-and-drop page re-ordering, better keyboard shortcuts, and better error reporting (Someone going by the pseudonym “John Doe”, Skanpage 23.08. Link)
Okular no longer bugs you when you save a document that was deleted on disk; it simply re-saves it as instructed (me: Nate Graham, Okular 23.08. Link)
The context menu actions of the Dictionary Widget are now more relevant and have icons (Laurent Montel, Plasma 6.0. Link):
Significant Bugfixes
(This is a curated list of e.g. HI and VHI priority bugs, Wayland showstoppers, major regressions, etc.)
KRunner no longer sometime crashes when trying to calculate certain math expressions, or simply when typing numbers in general (Max Ramanouski, Plasma 5.27.6. Link)
The final change just went in for making sure that Discover always gets the version numbers right for updatable Flatpak apps (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.27.6. Link)
When using a fractional scale factor in the Plasma Wayland session, you should no longer see line glitches all over the place (Matthias Dahl, Plasma 5.27.6. Link)
Fixed the “Add New Page” dialog in System Monitor to not be visually broken when using a language with longer translated strings than English (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.27.6. Link)
In the Plasma Wayland session, when adding a second keyboard layout, the Keyboard layout System Tray icon now appears immediately (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.0. Link)
KDE’s growing assortment of “KDE for” pages has gotten a snazzy new landing page, and now it’s a top-level link over at kde.org (Carl Schwan):
On top of that, there’s a new page: “KDE for Activists“, showcasing how KDE’s privacy-conscious communication can help you organize for what you believe in (Carl Schwan):
Note that this is a value-neutral statement; you can use KDE software to organize for whatever cause you believe in, no matter where on the political spectrum you consider yourself. Our software is neutral; it’s people who choose to use it for their purposes, and how. KDE software is used in homes, schools, businesses, news organizations, local governments, and, believe it or not, on both sides of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. People can take sides, but our software does not, so let’s try to keep the political battles out of the comments section of this post. Thanks everyone.
…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
If you’re a developer, please please please start living on a Plasma 6 session (not just building Plasma 6 stuff on top of Plasma 5) and fixing the bugs that you encounter. Plasma 6 is usable for daily driving, and I’m doing so, but it’s still very much in an alpha state and in need of work to make it releaseable.
If you’re an adventurous user, you can also use Plasma 6 with Neon Unstable. If you do so, make sure to submit bug reports for any problems you encounter, and apply the “qt6” keyword to them.
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!
And finally, KDE can’t work without financial support, so consider making a donation today! This stuff ain’t cheap and KDE e.V. has ambitious hiring goals. We can’t meet them without your generous donations!
Plasma 6 porting continues, with stability improving daily and new features and user interface improvements trickling in.
New Features
Okular now lets you choose the default scaling mode when printing PDFs (Martin Schnitkemper, Okular 23.08. Link)
Global Themes can now set the window decoration border size (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.0. Link)
User Interface Improvements
Gwenview’s color correction settings have been rephrased to be more comprehensible and correct (Adam Fontenot, Gwenview 23.08. Link)
Apps that have been marked as “Favorite” in Kickoff/Kicker/Application Dashboard/etc are now weighted more a bit more highly in KRunner-powered search results (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 6.0. Link)
KRunner’s own search history no longer includes searches made in other KRunner-powered search tools such as Kickoff (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 6.0. Link)
In the Clipboard widget, when you generate a QR code for some text, you can now drag it anywhere images can be dragged (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.0. Link)
When a Flatpak app requests permission to run in the background, the way this is presented is now clearer and more user-friendly (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.0. Link)
Metadata from Krita’s .kra files is now parsed, extracted, and displayed in “Details” views of the Properties Dialog, Dolphin’s Information Panel sidebar, etc (Joshua Goins, Frameworks 6.0. Link)
Other Significant Bugfixes
(This is a curated list of e.g. HI and VHI priority bugs, Wayland showstoppers, major regressions, etc.)
When using the optional ddcutil support in Powerdevil, changing the brightness via any of the current methods now prioritizes changing the brightness of a laptop’s built-in screen, rather than only adjusting the brightness of an external screen. Support for per-screen brightness control is being scoped out and may come in the future! (Quang Ngô, Plasma 5.27.6. Link)
Category names in Widget Explorer are once again translated (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.27.6. Link)
Switching Global Themes or color schemes in System Settings no longer results in the “Appearance” category list item becoming temporarily invisible (Someone awesome, Plasma 6.0. Link)
Windows marked “Show on top” now remain where they are when the “Peek at Desktop” effect is invoked (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.0. Link 1 and link 2)
In the Plasma Wayland session sidebars and docks provided by QDockWidget now work much better: it’s now re-dockable, and visually moved when dragged (David Redondo, Qt 6.6. 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
If you’re a developer, please please please start living on Plasma 6 and fixing the bugs that you encounter. It’s usable for daily driving (I’m doing so) but still very much pre-alpha and in need of work to get it into a releaseable state by the end of the year. We need your help!
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!
And finally, KDE can’t work without financial support, so consider making a donation today! This stuff ain’t cheap and KDE e.V. has ambitious hiring goals. We can’t meet them without your generous donations!
This week probably the biggest news is that in Plasma 6, the Night Color feature will work as expected on Wayland when you’re using an NVIDIA GPU! Because NVIDIA’s drivers don’t support the necessary Gamma LUT features to make it work in an optimal way as on Intel and AMD GPUs, we had to use a slightly different approach that isn’t quite as efficient. But hopefully that’s better than not having the feature work at all, and if you care about the increased resource usage, you’re welcome to not use the feature. This work was done by Xaver Hugl. Thanks, Xaver!
User Interface Improvements
KRunner search results for very short 2 and 3 character strings should be a bit better and more relevant now (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.27.6. Link)
System Settings’ sidebar now has better keyboard navigation, and lets you use the arrow keys instead of the tab keys if you’d prefer or if you’re using a device with a d-pad and no obvious tab key (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.27.6. Link)
In the Plasma Wayland session, when you activate a KWin effect with a touchpad gesture in a certain direction, the opposite gesture now deactivates it (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 6.0. Link)
System Settings’ File Search page has gotten a visual overhaul and now looks nicer (me: Nate Graham and Helden Hoierman, Plasma 6.0. Link):
The tooltips showing window previews in the Task Manager no longer time out on their own while the cursor remains hovering over a Task, just like the behavior of other tooltips elsewhere (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6. Link)
Other Significant Bugfixes
(This is a curated list of e.g. HI and VHI priority bugs, Wayland showstoppers, major regressions, etc.)
Spectacle’s sidebar is no longer too narrow to accommodate long button text in some languages (Yoann Laissus, Spectacle 23.04.2. Link)
When using a horizontal bottom panel, Task Manager tooltip window thumbnails no longer sometimes appear in the wrong location (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.27.6. Link)
In the Plasma X11 session, dragging files to Task Manager Tasks in such a manner that you end up right-clicking while still dragging no longer sometimes causes drag-and-drop to just break (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27.6. Link)
In the Plasma Wayland session, some blurred and transparent Breeze-themes context menus no longer sometimes exhibit weird visual glitches (Mouse Zhang, Plasma 5.27.6. Link)
When KDE apps are run in dark mode on non-Plasma desktops where the plasma-integration package isn’t installed, Breeze icons will now correctly use light colors instead of staying dark and becoming unreadable (Jan Grulich, Frameworks 5.107. Link)
When your system is set up with an encrypted home directory, file and folder thumbnails will now be stored in their typical cache location in your homedir, preventing them from having to be re-generated every single time (Payton Quinn, Frameworks 5.107. Link)
Now that tons and tons of KDE projects use JSON files to describe their metadata, there’s now a JSON file validator CI job that will prevent silly errors (Alexander Lohnau, right now. 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
If you’re a user, upgrade to Plasma 5.27! If your distro doesn’t offer it and won’t anytime soon, consider switching to a different one that ships software closer to its developer’s schedules.
If you’re a developer, please please please start living on Plasma 6 and fixing the bugs that you encounter. It’s usable for daily driving (I’m doing so) but still very much pre-alpha and in need of work to get it into a releaseable state by the end of the year.
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!
And finally, KDE can’t work without financial support, so consider making a donation today! This stuff ain’t cheap and KDE e.V. has ambitious hiring goals. We can’t meet them without your generous donations!
Today I had the honor of delivering a virtual presentation with fellow KDE contributor Neofytos Kolokotronis at the University of Macedonia, the site of KDE’s 2023 Akademy conference. The subject was “Making a Difference: How to contribute and jump start your career in Free Software with the KDE Community”, making it especially relevant for those who have been looking to get started contributing to KDE and don’t yet know how. But even if you’re a seasoned KDE contributor, I bet you’ll learn a thing or two about KDE’s storied history or ambitious plans!
KWin developer Xaver Hugl put a lot of work into HDR support in KWin during the recent HDR hackfest and Plasma sprint, and as a result, the first parts have now been merged for the Plasma 6.0 Wayland session! This also lays the groundwork for color management on Wayland. It’s an interesting and complex subject, so if you’d like to know more, check out Xaver’s excellent blog post on the subject.
While you’re here, let me also do a bit of self-promotion. Fellow KDE contributor Neofytos Kolokotronis and I will be giving a virtual pre-Akademy talk at the University of Macedonia in a few days, on May 23rd. Learn more and register here!
New Features
Skanpage now exposes scanner-specific adjustment options like for brightness, contrast, gamma, and color balance (Someone still going by the pseudonym “John Doe”, Skanpage 23.08. Link)
Konsole now has a new “Monitor for prompt” feature that can be used to send a notification once a long-running task finishes (Matan Ziv-Av, Konsole 23.08. Link)
Kate’s LSP client support now supports the GLSL language (Marián Konček, Kate 23.08. Link)
Just like with volume adjustments (announced last week), you can now hold down the Shift key while adjusting the brightness to adjust it in 1% increments for finer control (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.0. Link 1 and link 2)
You can now apply file associations’ app ordering priorities to other file types in bulk (Marco Rebhan, Plasma 6.0. Link)
User Interface Improvements
Kate’s Debugger plugin has received various enhancements: interactive GDB navigation buttons in its toolview, a configuration window, and a clearer name (Akseli Lahtinen, Kate 23.08. Link 1, link 2, and link 3)
For those of you who were using the fact that Gwenview appears in its own “Open With” menu to open the current image in a new window, there’s now a new “Open in New Window” feature that does the same thing in a fully supported way (Eugene Popov, Gwenview 23.08. Link)
The Magic Lamp window minimizing effect now works and looks better with floating panels, hidden panels, and multi-screen arrangements (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.27.6. Link 1, link 2, and link 3)
When tiling windows, the gap value you choose now affects the gap between windows, not just between windows and screen edges (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.27.6. Link)
System Settings’ Activities page has been ported to QML and given a small visual overhaul in the process (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 6.0. Link):
We now use Switches instead of checkboxes for “instant apply” and “on/off” style actions in Plasma widgets, such as the Networks and Bluetooth widgets (Niccolò Venerandi and me, Nate Graham, Plasma 6.0. Link 1, link 2, and link 3):
Now that single-clicking on a desktop in the Overview Effect’s desktop bar only switches desktops with the effect, double-clicking it will now switch desktops and then exit the effect (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.0. Link)
Dolphin no longer shows a free space capacity bar for read-only volumes, because for those it isn’t very actionable (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 6.0 Link)
Significant Bugfixes
(This is a curated list of e.g. HI and VHI priority bugs, Wayland showstoppers, major regressions, etc.)
When Dolphin is configured to remember open tabs on launch, this now works again after it broke recently during the process of fixing a different bug (Méven Car, Dolphin 23.04.2. Link)
Gwenview’s “Open With” menu once again always opens the actual app you specified instead of a different one, after we broke this by removing Gwenview from its own menu, oops (Gwenview 23.04.2. Link)
The Properties dialog for files and folders on the desktop now shows its “Details” tab as expected (Méven Car, Dolphin 23.08. Link)
The “Software Sources” button on Discover’s Settings page now actually works (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.27.6. Link)
Discover finally shows the versions of updated Flatpak apps in the correct order, for real this time (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.27.6. Link)
Discover will no longer sometimes show a mysterious error message saying “No metadata URIs for vendor directory” (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.27.6. Link)
When using a Global Menu, GTK apps now display their menus correctly right after being launched, with no re-focus required (Severin von Wnuck, Plasma 5.27.6. Link)
The global “Window to Next/Previous Screen” actions now send windows to the correct screens again (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 5.27.6. Link)
When using icons themes with non-monochrome action icons, various icons in various Kirigami-based apps are no longer sometimes inappropriately rendered in all black (Alexander Volkov, Frameworks 5.107. Link)
136 Bugzilla tickets of all kinds resolved this week. Full list of bugs
…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
If you’re a user, upgrade to Plasma 5.27! If your distro doesn’t offer it and won’t anytime soon, consider switching to a different one that ships software closer to its developer’s schedules.
If you’re a developer, please please please start living on Plasma 6 and fixing bugs. It’s usable for daily driving (I’m doing so) but still very much pre-alpha and in need of work to get it into a releaseable state by the end of the year.
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!
And finally, KDE can’t work without financial support, so consider making a donation today! This stuff ain’t cheap and KDE e.V. has ambitious hiring goals. We can’t meet them without your generous donations!
The folks at Tuxedo Computers have published a video of short interviews with some of the participants of the Plasma sprint from earlier this month, so you can see that we were actually there. 🙂 Check it out!
In addition to the changes made and announced during the recent Plasma Sprint at Tuxedo Computers’ offices in Augsburg, lots of other things have been brewing as well!
New Features
Kate now supports Godot Engine’s Language Server Protocol (Michael Alexsander, Kate 23.08. Link)
In Okular, you can now copy an annotation’s text to the clipboard using the context menu for the annotation’s entry in the annotations sidebar list (Kai Uwe Broulik, Okular 23.04. Link)
There is now a new kinfo command you can run to dump versions numbers of various software components on the command line, which can be useful for debugging and bug reporting purposes. It displays the same information that’s in Info Center’s “About This System” page (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.27.5. Link):
To save energy, while the screen is locked, your monitors now turn off sooner than they do when unlocked. This is configurable and defaults to 60 seconds (Méven Car, Plasma 6.0. Link)
You can now middle-click on a color circle in the Plasma Color Picker widget to copy the color code text to the clipboard (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.0. Link)
You can now hold down the Shift key while adjusting the volume by using a global shortcut or scrolling over the Audio Volume widget to adjust it in 1% increments for finer control (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.0. Link)
User Interface Improvements
In Spectacle’s annotation UI, it’s now as easy as it was in the 22.12 release to draw a shape with an outline but no fill–for example to draw a perfect circle around something to call attention to it (Noah Davis, Spectacle 23.04.1. Link)
Significantly improved scrolling performance in Elisa when there are a lot of songs in the playlist (Nicolas Fella, Elisa 23.04.1. Link)
Dragging the volume slider in Elisa now shows a tooltip indicating its current level (Jack Hill, Elisa 23.08. Link):
Discover now tries even harder to point you in the first direction (i.e. towards your distro) when there’s an update issue (me: Nate Graham. Plasma 6.0. Link):
Oh look, Discord’s version numbers are reversed again. But this time it wasn’t Discover’s fault and Flathub was actually the culprit!
The thick vertical lines in the Notifications widget no longer look weird with using various non-default Plasma themes, including Oxygen (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.27.5. Link)
When an app is forcing Do Not Disturb mode to be enabled, its explanatory text will no longer sometimes show end times in the past (Nicola Smaniotto, Plasma 5.27.5. Link)
In KRunner and other KRunner-powered searches, when the search term matches the starting text of both apps and files, apps are now prioritized (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.27.5. Link)
When you switch Virtual Desktops in the Overview effect by clicking on one of them on the strip at the top, it will now switch to that desktop within the Overview effect itself, and not close immediately (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.0. Link)
When you view the QR code for a connected network, it now appears inline in the widget, rather than in a giant full-screen overlay (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 6.0. Link)
In the Breeze Icons theme, the small monochrome versions of the “MS DOS Executable” icons now respect your active color scheme as expected (Michael Alexander, Frameworks 5.106. Link)
The icons shown in the Display Configuration widget and OSD now have consistent stroke widths and levels of detail (me: Nate Graham and Noah Davis, Frameworks 5.106. Link)
Significant Bugfixes
(This is a curated list of e.g. HI and VHI priority bugs, Wayland showstoppers, major regressions, etc.)
In Okular, it’s now possible to “Save As…” when your document has been externally modified or deleted, so you can avoid losing any unsaved changes (me: Nate Graham, Okular 23.04.1. Link)
The authentication window will no longer sometimes appear behind the window that requested it, as would often happen when launching Partition Manager (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.27.5. Link)
In the Plasma Wayland session, fixed a bug that could cause Plasma to repeatedly crash on login with certain combinations of settings (David Redondo, Plasma 5.27.5. Link)
In the Plasma Wayland session, text copied in an app while Klipper is running with sane regular settings is now still paste-able after quitting that app (Tobias Fella, Plasma 5.27.5. Link)
On System Settings’ Night Color page, the text telling you what will happen is no longer truncated when the page is scrollable (me: Nate Graham and Natalie Clarius, Plasma 5.27.5. Link)
In the Plasma Wayland session, basic sticky keys functionality now works! (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 6.0. Link 1, link 2, and link 3)
In the Plasma Wayland session, kinetic scrolling in GTK now works (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.0. Link)
In the Plasma Wayland session, searching for the clipboard contents in KRunner with the Alt+Shift+F2 shortcut now works (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 6.0. Link)
199 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed over these two weeks. Full list of bugs
Automation & Systematization
Added an autotest for doing modesets in KWin (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.0. Link)
Changes not in KDE that affect KDE
When using the Systemd-enabled Plasma boot sequence (which has been the default setting for a year or two), apps set up to autostart will no longer fail to autostart if their .desktop file happens to contain the X-GNOME-Autostart-Phase key (David Edmundson, Systemd 254. Link)
PDFs digitally signed in Okular no longer become locked in Adobe Acrobat such that no one else can sign them (Nicolas Fella, sponsored by TU Dresden, Poppler 23.05.0. 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
If you’re a user, upgrade to Plasma 5.27! If your distro doesn’t offer it and won’t anytime soon, consider switching to a different one that ships software closer to its developer’s schedules.
If you’re a developer, consider working on known Plasma 5.27 regressions, or compile Plasma 6 and start working on outstanding issues and porting tasks. You might also want to check out our 15-Minute Bug Initiative. Working on any of these topics makes a big difference quickly!
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!
And finally, KDE can’t work without financial support, so consider making a donation today! This stuff ain’t cheap and KDE e.V. has ambitious hiring goals. We can’t meet them without your generous donations!
The 2023 Plasma sprint is now finished! KDE Patron Tuxedo Computers were kind enough to open their offices to us for a full week to do the sprint. We had some great conversations with Tuxedo employees, who were very friendly and excited to work with us, and made us thoroughly aware of just how much more complicated modern keyboard backlighting is than we had imagined! I’d like to thank KDE’s Software Platform Engineer Nicolas Fella for organizing this sprint, and Tuxedo Computers for providing the space and free pizza for lunch yesterday. 🙂
This actually isn’t all of us, because we foolishly forgot to take a picture earlier when everyone was present!
This won’t be a retrospective of the entire sprint, because I don’t want to steal anyone else’s thunder! People will be blogging and making videos about their own personal work and experience, so this one will be about mine.
The first thing was to get a Plasma 6 session working for daily driving. My colleagues have been working unbelievably hard on this, and I’m happy to report that I was able to live on Plasma 6 for the entire sprint without major showstoppers (from the perspective of a technical developer, of course). Almost everyone else there was as well, and I expect this to lead to extremely rapid stabilization despite the heavy code refactoring underway. I plan to continue living on Plasma 6 until its eventual release, and I encourage any adventurous developers to do so as well. If you try it out and submit any bug reports, make sure to add the “qt6” keyword to it.
I also did a bunch of technical work of my own, but I largely found myself in the role of facilitator, hosting discussions and meetings with different groups of people to bridge gaps.
New Default settings
As a result, we advanced a number of topics that had been stuck for a while. A major area of my focus in this respect became “Better default settings”. The 5 -> 6 transition is the perfect time to make significant changes to the default settings in a way that improve the UX out of the box. Among these are:
Wait, did I just bury the lede!? I did indeed. This is because the work hasn’t actually been done yet… but it has in fact been approved! That’s right, Plasma 6 will default to opening files and folders with a double-click, not a single-click. Even though almost everyone in the room for the discussion actually uses and prefers opening with single-click, we had to admit that it’s probably not the ideal default setting for people who are migrating from other platforms, which is most of them. They can still learn the benefits of single-click later. 🙂
We’re going to make a very strong push for Wayland to be the default session type for Plasma 6. The X11 session will still be there of course, and distros will be free to override this and continue defaulting to X11 if they feel like it suits them better. But we want Wayland to be our official recommendation.
To get there, we went over our “Wayland showstoppers” wiki page with a fine-toothed comb to refine what we really consider a showstopper. We decided that a lot of them are really more like annoyances rather than showstoppers, because X11 has plenty of annoyances of a similar severity too! The true showstoppers are down to five, plus a couple of NVIDIA issues that need further investigation. Many of these issues are in progress with a clear path towards resolution, so I do expect us to be able to achieve the goal!
This feature has been optional since its introduction a year ago. In that time it’s become quite popular, but its visual fanciness alone wasn’t enough to tip this proposal over the finish line. Rather, it’s the fact that Microsoft has blatantly copied us in Windows 11, and as a result, people are starting to see Plasma as a cheap clone of Windows again. We see this all the time in the VDG room when some rando comes by and starts telling us why our design isn’t as good as what Windows 11 has; they’ve implicitly made the comparison and found us wanting. It’s the wrong mindset!
Making the panel float by default provides an immediate visual differentiation from Windows 11 and we hope this will help jolt users’ brains out of “ew, it’s slightly different from Windows 11” mode and into “wow, this is new and cool and I wonder what’s in it” mode. There’s probably more that needs to be done for that, but I think this is a good start.
In the middle of the Plasma 5 lifecycle, we switched to the Breeze Light color scheme by default, and we changed its appearance to use a medium gray header area, sort of mimicking the visually pleasing CSD headerbar look without actually using CSD headerbars. This appearance change has generally been well-received by users, but it faced a persistent criticism: diminished ability to distinguish the active window at a glance.
It’s a legitimate problem, and we decided to fix it by lightly tinting the header area with your current accent color (or the current color scheme’s selection color, if you’re not using Accent colors). This will distinguish the active window with a small amount of color, making it pop more without being visually overwhelming. Something like this:
Note: this is a mockup and the appearance is not final! So don’t go posting this all over social media declaring that it’s going to be the way everything looks forever 🙂
For a while, we’ve had a goal of switching our current default “Breeze” Task Switcher to something that doesn’t vertically scroll with even a relatively small number of windows, which feedback had indicated was bad for usability. We also wanted to make our default task switcher better for people who navigate primarily by looking at app icons rather than thumbnails or text. With those design goals in mind, we decided to use the “Thumbnail Grid” Task Switcher by default and make some UI changes. Here’s what it looks like at this point in time:
As a part of this work, we also deleted a bunch of infrequently-used Task Switchers in the kdeplasma-addons Git repo that were simply worse versions of other ones. And finally, we made our Breeze Global Themes no longer have an opinion about what they want the Task Switcher to be, so if you use a non-default one, you can safely switch Global Themes without having it reset your Task Switcher all the time! That makes it less annoying to use the Dark and Light buttons on System Settings’ Quick Settings page to switch the system’s appearance between those two states.
This work is already merged and was done by me.
No more scrolling on desktop to switch virtual desktops by default
We got feedback over the years that scrolling on the desktop to switch virtual desktops was disorienting, especially because you could switch to a desktop that you couldn’t switch out of in the same way because the desktop was covered up. So we decided to turn this feature off by default. If you really like it, you’re still welcome to turn it back on, of course!
This work is already merged and was done by me.
Clicking in scrollbar track jumps scrollbar to that location
This change makes it easy to scroll straight to a specific location without having to drag the scrollbar, which is worse from the perspective of avoiding repetitive motion injuries. The old style is still available as an option to can switch back to.
This work is already merged and was done by me.
Other discussions and decisions
Many other discussions were also had besides just default settings. Here are a few:
City of Treuchtlingen’s use of KDE software
We found out that the nearby German city of Treuchtlingen has been using KDE software for over 20 years for their government IT purposes. Two representatives came out to the Tuxedo HQ to give us a presentation and we all talked about how to continue this going forward not only for us, but potentially for a lot of other German governments. The possibilities here are quite exciting.
In the beginning of Plasma 5, the release schedule was very fast–four releases a year. As it stabilized, we went down to three, which we kept for the whole lifecycle of Plasma 5.
Over time we’ve gotten a lot of feedback from distros in particular who have told us that this represents a hardship. It’s also been my personal observation that we often don’t have enough time to polish a new Plasma version before it’s released.
Now, a fast release cycle makes sense for a product under heavy development that breaks a lot of things and needs to fix them quickly. However, at this point Plasma is mature and feature complete after 8 years of hard work. It can always be improved, of course, but it pretty much does everything a general user needs at this point in time. So a fast release schedule isn’t as useful as it once was.
For Plasma 6, we’re going to try a slower release schedule of two per year once we feel like it’s stabilized enough after its initial release. And we’re going to be reaching out to distros with twice-yearly release schedules themselves to see if we can find release dates that will allow all of them to ship the latest version of Plasma soon after it’s released rather than skipping it in favor of something older. Making use of these lengthened release periods, we’re also going to lengthen our Beta releases and update them on a weekly basis, so there’s more time to find and fix bugs. We’re hoping this should result in Plasma 6 having a high level of stability and reliability throughout its lifecycle.
We agreed that the status quo isn’t ideal because people expect to find wallpaper settings in System Settings. So we started sketching out a wallpaper KCM that will let people change their wallpapers in a central location, including the ability to apply them to the lock and login screens. You’ll still be able to access the wallpaper changing UI from the current method in addition to the new KCM.
Currently we have two default desktop plugin types: “Folder” (the default) and “Desktop”. “Desktop” is just “Folder” without support for desktop icons. This is a bit silly, and internally they’re 99% the same because its prior developer also thought it was a bit silly and implemented them with the same backend code. So for Plasma 6, we’re going to collapse the distinction in the UI and instead expose a “Show desktop icons” checkbox somewhere. This will make it even easier for people who don’t like desktop icons to hide them, avoid putting implementation details in front of the user, and de-clutter the wallpaper choosing view.
Keyboard backlighting is hard
Taking advantage of the fact that we were in Tuxedo’s offices, we took the opportunity to ask many Tuxedo employees about their and their customers’ biggest pain points with KDE software. Happily, there were actually few complaints. But something that came up a few times was how we handle keyboard backlighting. Currently our code assumes there will be one keyboard backlight that affects all keys, so it only affects the first one it finds. But many modern laptops have more than one backlight, with some even giving each key its own! Needless to say, the result of adjusting a single backlight on such a keyboard looks somewhat hilarious. So we plan to put some effort into improving this.
That’s not all
This blog post contains only a small sampling of what was done and talked about during the sprint. There are many, many other plans and in-progress projects for Plasma 6, but I’ll let others talk about their own projects elsewhere, so look for them on https://planet.kde.org! I’d say that Plasma 6 promises to be a very large and exciting release.
Help make it possible again
Thanks again to Tuxedo Computers for graciously opening their offices to us, and for Nicolas Fella for organizing the sprint!
In addition, funding for the sprint was covered by KDE e.V., the nonprofit backing KDE. As you can probably imagine, transporting and lodging 20 people for a week is expensive, and most e.V. funding comes from individual donations. So if you’d like to see more of this kind of thing, please consider making a donation today! Every little bit helps!
This week my fellow developers and I are in Germany for an in-person Plasma sprint–our first since 2019! For this reason, there will be no normal weekly blog post today, and instead next week there will be a combined “what happened over the last two weeks” and “what happened during the sprint” blog post, since otherwise there would be significant of overlap. There’s a lot to do, and here are some of the topics we’re covering:
Stabilizing Plasma 6 so we can all start living on it full-time
Discussing significant UX changes we want to make in Plasma 6
API changes for Frameworks 6 that are relevant for Plasma
Design vision for Kirigami and various Kirigami-related topics
Improving our test infrastructure
…And a lot more! I’ll be able to share additional details next week. Wish us luck!
Last week’s focus on bugs continues into this week, with the VHI-priority Plasma bugs slashed down to just three! In addition, Plasma 6 UI improvements are starting to land now that it’s stabilized a bit. In fact I’m typing this post from within a Plasma 6 session right now!
User Interface Improvements
In Elisa, double-clicking on a song or clicking its “Play now” button now puts its entire album in the playlist and begins playing from that song (Melissa Autumn and me: Nate Graham, Elisa 23.08. Link)
While annotating a screenshot in Spectacle, annotations now have a nice hover outline so it’s obvious how to select them (Noah Davis, Spectacle 23.08. Link)
In Plasma’s Disks & Devices widget, you’ll no longer see a useless “Mount” action for MTP-connected devices (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.27.5. Link)
The way you configure your panels is now much more visual, with explanations too! (Tanbir Jishan and Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 6.0. Link):
Discover now has smarter search behavior, putting more weight on direct title matches and words that appear in the title, rather than the description (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 6.0. Link)
Search results in Kickoff are now ordered the same way they are in KRunner and other KRunner-powered searches (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 6.0. Link)
It’s now possible to do math function s like sqrt() in KRunner without having to prefix the operation with an equals sign (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 6.0. Link)
When the current wallpaper’s image file is changed on disk, it will update the wallpaper in real-time (Oleg Solovyov, Plasma 6.0. Link)
You can now convert to and from kilometers per hour using the “kph” keyword (June Knauth, Frameworks 5.106. Link)
Significant Bugfixes
(This is a curated list of e.g. HI and VHI priority bugs, Wayland showstoppers, major regressions, etc.)
Dolphin’s selection mode is no longer inappropriately activated or deactivated by the Spacebar key when it’s pressed despite not being the assigned shortcut for that action, or when pressing it while an interactive UI control is focused (Eugene Popov, Dolphin 23.08. Link)
Fixed a recently-introduced source of KWin crashes in the Plasma Wayland session when hovering over Task Manager icons or closing windows (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.27.5. Link)
System Settings no longer crashes on launch when your Activities database has become corrupted (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.27.5. Link)
Fixed another cause of screens overlapping by one pixel in multi-screen setups which would cause various other weird bugs (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.27.5. Link)
When using a multi-screen arrangement, the lock screen’s unlock button now always works on the first click (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.27.5. Link)
In the Notifications history, long notification title text can no longer sometimes push that notification’s close button partially out of view (Eugene Popov, Plasma 5.27.5. Link)
When connecting a Bluetooth device, the separator line between connected and disconnected devices no longer briefly overlaps the connected device (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.27.5. Link)
Invisible Breeze-themed progress bars throughout Qt software no longer sometimes consume CPU resources by animating while out of sight (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.27.5. Link)
Entering paths with spaces in them now works properly in the Properties dialog, Shortcuts page, and Autostart page in System Settings (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.27.5 and Frameworks 5.106, Link 1, link 2, and link 3)
Fixed a variety of embarrassing layout glitches in KDE software when used with an RTL language (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.27.5 and Frameworks 5.106. Link 1, link 2, link 3, and link 4)
Fixed a major source of crashes when copying files in Dolphin and other apps (Fushan Wen, Frameworks 5.106. Link)
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
Check out KDE’s new forum at https://discuss.kde.org! This is a great place to ask for help if you’re experiencing an issue that might not necessarily be a bug, and to help others with their own issues.
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!
And finally, KDE can’t work without financial support, so consider making a donation today! This stuff ain’t cheap and KDE e.V. has ambitious hiring goals. We can’t meet them without your generous donations!
Adventures in Linux and KDE 