Author: Nate

This week in KDE: SDDM

This week SDDM–the venerable login manager used by KDE and some other DEs–finally got a new release after two and a half years! This work was pushed through by a variety of KDE contributors, notably Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Fabian Vogt, David Edmundson, and Harald Sitter. At this point they contribute the overwhelming majority of changes and have effectively taken over the SDDM project. Because of this, we’re going to bring SDDM closer and incubate it in KDE for Plasma 6! Once completed, this project will see SDDM release at the same time as Plasma and use Plasma technologies to add many new features, such as management of network and Bluetooth devices on the login screen, and tighter integration with user settings.

Plasma 6

In other Plasma 6 news, everything has been fully ported to use KSvg, the new SVG-handling library that can be used outside of Plasma as well. The technical work was almost entirely done by Marco Martin, with me helping out and performing QA.

Additionally, Xaver Hugl significantly improved graphics performance with multi-GPU systems that are using an NVIDIA GPU in the secondary position. Work is also in progress on a massive performance improvement for some Intel GPU users; more on that next week.

Finally, Qt scaling will be used on X11 in Plasma 6, improving the high DPI scaling experience for people not using mixed-DPI multi-monitor setups. That use case is already not supported on X11, so our story remains the same: if you have a mixed-DPI multi-monitor setup, use Wayland! Marco did this too.

There were many other random bugfixes as usual, with David Edmundson and Xaver Hugl fixing all of the significant bugs I was experiencing in my Plasma 6 Wayland session. As a result, I’m now using it as my daily driver, rather than that janky old X11 thing. 🙂 It’s amazing!

New Features

Welcome Center now has a “Live environment” mode that can be used by distros to show a special page in their live environments, including a nice friendly button to launch the installer (if the distro configures it appropriately; see the documentation here) (Oliver Beard, Plasma 6.0. Link):

Welcome Center showing "Welcome to Fedora Linux!" live installer mode, including a button in the center of the screen with the caption "Install to hard Drive" overlaid on top of the Fedora Linux logo

The Web Browser widget now shows its site’s favicon as its Panel icon by default, and you can also override this to set a custom icon if you prefer (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.0. Link):

You can now open Partition Manager from the context menu of removable Devices in Dolphin and other apps using the standard Places Panel, so from there you can reformat it if you want (Harald Sitter, Frameworks 6.0. Link):

User Interface Improvements

Dolphin now hides apps’ temp files and backup files (i.e. the kind of useless files that end in ~ or #) unless actively showing hidden files (Méven Car, Dolphin 23.08. Link). This is a 23 year old feature request!

In System Monitor, text for list items without icons now visually aligns with the text for list items that do have icons (Oliver Beard, Plasma 6.0. Link):

Other Significant Bugfixes

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

Distros using rpm-ostree for packaging (such as Fedora Kinoite) once again receive updates using Discover (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.27.6. Link)

System Settings’ Thunderbolt page no longer suffers from a layout glitch that hid text with large window sizes (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.27.6. Link)

KWin no longer sometimes crashes when you accidentally click on the tooltip for a window titlebar button, instead of the button itself that you were aiming for (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.27.6. Link)

When using a fractional scale factor, checkboxes on Discover’s Settings page no longer become glitchy and blurry when the page is scrolled with a touchpad (Akseli Lahtinen, Plasma 5.27.6. Link)

Fixed a few ways that KWin could crash immediately after logging in under certain circumstances (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.27.7. Link 1 and link 2)

Notifications from Snap apps now show up more reliably, notably including Slack (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.27.7. 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

If you’re a developer, please please please start living on Plasma 6 and fixing the bugs that you encounter. It’s very much usable for daily driving (I’m doing so) but still in need of work to get it into a releaseable state by the end of the year. Your help… really does 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!

On the road to Plasma 6

At this point you’ve heard a lot about Plasma 6, and each of my weekly “This week in KDE” brings news of a few new features, UI changes, or bugfixes that are only in Plasma 6. But how do we get there, and how long will it take? So today I’d like to talk about the process and schedule a bit. Let’s start with an outline of the required steps to get there, in sequential order:

  1. Make it compile
  2. Make it livable
  3. Clean up the code
  4. Implement planned features and changes
  5. QA it and fix the bugs

Are we there yet?

My sense right now is that we’re in the middle of steps 3 and 4. Basically everything in Plasma compiles with Qt 6, and at this point Plasma 6 is fairly livable. To give you a sense of how livable, it’s good enough that over the past 2 months, I’ve gone on three KDE-related trips from the USA to Europe, with my only computer running Plasma 6 in “current git master” state, with work-in-progress merge requests applied! Its stability has been good enough that this has caused me no apprehension, and indeed, it’s been totally fine on each trip.

So seriously, if you’re a KDE developer or an adventurous user, start living on Plasma 6! Jump right in, the water’s fine. 🙂

If we’re not there yet, where are we?

Right now the most active work is in step 3 code maintenance. Tasks already completed include an overhaul of the API for Plasma widgets, which affects basically everything. This project makes it easier to write Plasma 6 widgets that function properly using standard components, and allow us to add future capabilities to the basic widget structure in a way that all widgets will get for free.

Less code duplication

Next up, we’re porting most of the PlasmaCore and PlasmaExtras units, color theme components, and user interface elements to their Kirigami counterparts. This is important since it lets us remove a ton of code that’s currently duplicated across Plasma and Kirigami with only minimal differences. We’ll be able to use the Kirigami things everywhere and work towards the goal of having only one set of QtQuick-based UI components. This is a big deal! More code re-use means more eyes on less code, resulting in better quality and faster development.

Right now the only Kirigami UI component that’s a drop-in replacement is Kirigami.Heading, which can replace PlasmaExtras.Heading on a one-for-one-basis. Then we can delete PlasmaExtras.Heading entirely!

After that, we’ll start on the second part, which consists of making it possible for Plasma to use more complex Kirigami components that internally draw desktop-themed UI elements like buttons and text fields. We’ll basically make them smart enough to substitute the relevant Plasma-themed versions under the hood when they detect they’re running in Plasma. This will let us port PlaceholderMessage, ActionTextField, SearchField, and PasswordField to their Kirigami equivalents, and delete the PlasmaExtras versions.

KSvg

Simultaneously, we’re also porting away from PlasmaCore’s SVG-handling capabilities and instead using a new SVG-handling library that’s named–get this–“KSvg.” It’s basically the PlasmaCore stuff, but extracted into its own library. This was done to make Plasma 5’s powerful SVG handling capabilities available to software outside of Plasma, such as KDE and 3rd-party apps.

Actions in headers

UX changes are landing as well. One effort I haven’t blogged about yet is a change to how we expose page-specific actions on System Settings pages–known internally KCMs, or “KDE Control Modules”. Previously, it was up to each KCM to write its own custom UI for everything. If it wanted some buttons, the convention was to create some and put them at the bottom of the page. But KCMs are embedded within System Settings, which draws its own button bar below the page. The result was a double stack of button rows in many KCMs, with a very heavyweight appearance.

In Plasma 6, we’ve written the capability for KCMs to declare their actions in a more, well, declarative way. Instead of drawing the buttons themselves, they broadcast their actions and those actions turn into UI elements automatically in the right place. Kirigami apps have had this feature for years, and now through more internal use of Kirigami, the capability is coming to KCMs as well! We’re currently using the feature to move footer actions to into headers, which saves space and results in a more lightweight look. Here’s a preview:

Because we’re KDE, all of this work is happening in a fairly anarchic, nonlinear fashion. We don’t have change control meetings or prevent people from working on later-stage tasks. This takes skill in communication and git rebase to avoid stepping on people’s toes. 🙂 But it is happening, in its own messy and beautiful way.

Why does it take so long to do all this code maintenance stuff?

Porting is easy and fast if you don’t do any QA. But if you do, you’ll discover a million tiny papercuts caused by subtle differences in the new thing you’re porting to. Testing changes, iterating on code, and adapting to other changes made to the repos all take time. We’re doing it slowly because we want to do it right. QA is critical to shipping a good product, especially when there are many far-reaching changes.

C’mon, where’s the schedule?

I’m afraid there is still no formal schedule with dates on it. But you can use the above step-by-step process as a rough barometer of completeness.

I expect most of the large-scale code maintenance work to be done by the beginning of August, at which point the focus will shift to new features and UX changes. It’s impossible to give an accurate estimate for how long that part will take, but as an extremely rough guess, I’d say 2 months at a minimum.

The QA and bugfixing work will be happening simultaneously, since that latter work is what gates the release; ultimately having a polished release with few new features is more important than the reverse (though both is even more desirable, of course). I want at least 2 months of QA and bugfixing time for Plasma 6, with multiple beta releases.

This would take us into the middle of November. This is most likely the earliest timeframe for a Plasma release, and it would require everything to go right, including a huge burst of contributor activity around QA and bugfixing. The likelier scenario is a release sometime between this December and March of next year.

Please note that this is a wild guesstimate! It is not an official schedule. Do not interpret or represent it as such. Do not say “hey everyone Nate told us Plasma 6 will be out around the end of the year.” These are my personal rough guesses!

How to help

If you’d like to help make these guesses become more concrete, the time to help is now. We need it! Test Plasma 6 and submit bug reports for things that worked in Plasma 5 but broke in 6. Test open Plasma 6 merge requests and find any regressions in them before they merge. Help port older Plasma stuff to Kirigami and KSvg. Work on approved Plasma 6 changes. Fix open bugs. Help make it happen! And if you find yourself with more money than you have time and skill, consider donating to KDE e.V. so we can expand our sponsorship of impactful development work. It really helps!

This week in KDE: nicer digital signing in Okular

There’s some of interesting Plasma 6 news, but I’m saving it for another post in a day or two, so it doesn’t distract from all the great work that KDE contributors landed on other things this week! So let’s dig into that:

New Features

Okular’s digital signature workflow has been improved, and now offers you the opportunity to add various pieces of metadata such as “reason” and “location” to the signature, and also to optionally add a background image behind it (Sune Vuorela, Okular 23.08. Link):

User Interface Improvements

You can now double-click on a tab in Dolphin to create a duplicate of it (Méven Car, Dolphin 23.08. Link)

When Elisa switches album art between one image and another one, it’s now smoother and nicer-looking, with no visual flash or flicker (Fushan Wen, Elisa 23.08. Link)

Okular now shows the “Digitally Sign” action at the top level of its hamburger menu, for faster access (me: Nate Graham, Okular 23.08. Link):

All the dialogs in System Monitor have been ported to use a newer Kirigami dialog component, which looks better and fixes a few layout issues (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.0. Link 1 and link 2):

Improved the responsiveness when hovering over items in Kickoff’s category list (Derek Christ, Plasma 6.0. Link)

Folder entries in System Settings’ File Search page now show their actual icons (Oliver Beard, Plasma 6.0. Link)

After being notified of a filename conflict in the save dialog, keyboard focus now immediately returns to the filename field so you can change the name to something else (Oliver Beard, Frameworks 5.107. Link)

Other Significant Bugfixes

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

In the Plasma Wayland session, fixed a source of Powerdevil crashes when screens are sleeping (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.27.6. Link)

Fixed a source of excessively high CPU usage in Plasma caused by moving windows around (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27.6. Link)

In the Plasma wayland session, fixed some cursor handling bugs that could cause cursors to look wrong in XWayland apps (Severin von Wnuck, Plasma 5.27.6. Link 1 and link 2)

System Settings’ “Login Screen (SDDM)” page now shows errors in the UI again (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.27.6. Link)

Checking for updates in the PyCharm app no longer causes KWin to crash (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.0. 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

If you’re a developer, please please please start living on Plasma 6 and fixing the bugs that you encounter. It’s long past the point where we should still be on Plasma 5! 6 is quite usable for daily driving (I’m doing so) and has lots of papercuts that need sorting out. A list of known issues that need fixing can be found at https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Plasma_6.

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!

Call to Action: Easy porting opportunity in Plasma

This post is a Call To Action™ for those with the ability to set up a Plasma development environment and an interest in code hygiene. Plasma 6 development is in full swing, and we have an opportunity to make a difference by doing some relatively easy code porting. Read on if this intrigues you!

History

First, some background: For many years, Plasma has maintained forks of various Kirigami bits whose only purpose in life was to get colors from the active Plasma theme, rather than the systemwide color scheme. For example, Heading exists in both Kirigami, and also PlasmaExtras; they both do the same thing and are implemented the same way under the hood, but the PlasmaExtras version gets its colors from the active Plasma theme. If it didn’t, then when you used the Breeze Twilight theme, the text colors on your dark Plasma widgets would come from the systemwide light color scheme, be inappropriately dark, and you wouldn’t be able to see them.

Maintaining forks with minimal differences worked but wasn’t ideal, as they could–and sometimes did–drift subtly out of sync and cause maintenance headaches. It would be better if we could use the Kirigami versions in Plasma and have them substitute Plasma colors automatically. As of today, core Plasma developer Marco Martin has done just that for Plasma 6 with two patches!

Ultimately this will let us get rid of the forks, at least for components that don’t do any SVG styling (that’s planned too, but not ready yet).

How you can help

So with that out of the way, here’s how you can help: throughout Plasma (i.e., all repos in the Plasma group), submit merge requests with the following changes:

Replace this……with this:
PlasmaExtras.HeadingKirigami.Heading (Example merge request)
PlasmaCore.Theme.smallestFontKirigami.Theme.smallFont
PlasmaCore.Theme.NormalColorGroupKirigami.Theme.Window
PlasmaCore.Theme.mSize([default font]).heightKirigami.Units.gridUnit
PlasmaCore.Theme.[anything else]Kirigami.Theme.[the same thing]
PlasmaCore.ColorScope.colorGroupKirigami.Theme.colorSet
PlasmaCore.ColorScope.inheritKirigami.Theme.inherit
PlasmaCore.Units.largeSpacingKirigami.Units.gridUnit (due to a bug where PlasmaCore largeSpacing was too big; we need to change it to a Kirigami gridUnit to keep the expected sizing)
PlasmaCore.Units.devicePixelRatio1
PlasmaCore.Units.roundtoIconSize([height of the default font])Kirigami.Units.iconSizes.sizeForLabels
PlasmaCore.Units.roundtoIconSize([some integer value])Kirigami.Units.iconSizes.roundedIconSize([the same thing])
PlasmaCore.Units.[anything else]Kirigami.Units.[the same thing]

Quirks to be aware of

Make sure your master branch is up to date before you start looking at code, and also check to see if anyone else has already submitted a merge request. You don’t want to do work for nothing!

If any file with such changes made to it doesn’t already have a line near the top that says import org.kde.kirigami 2.20 as Kirigami, add it We can’t use Kirigami stuff without importing Kirigami!

If as a result of these changes to any particular file, nothing in it is still using PlasmaExtras or PlasmaCore anymore, you can also remove those import lines at the top.

Testing

Make sure to test your changes! Apply the changes to your Plasma 6 development build and restart. Then use the Breeze Light color scheme and the Breeze Dark Plasma theme and make sure all changed text is still readable, that anything using a small font size is still doing it correctly, that colors in general look correct, and that spacings and units look correct. You want to see no visual changes at all.

In the future

Later, we’ll also be able to port forked components that internally use Plasma-specific SVG theming. For example, PlasmaExtras.PlaceholderMessage is identical to Kirigami.PlaceholderMessage but it internally contains Plasma-specific labels and buttons that use Plasma SVG theming, rather than theming from the app style. We’re planning some more code wizardry so that the Kirigami versions of these components can dynamically substitute the internal Plasma SVG themed variants when run in Plasma. This isn’t ready yet, but when it is, I’ll announce another porting opportunity for folks who enjoyed (or missed out on) this one!

Tips & tricks: handwritten signatures in Okular

Today I’d like to share a tip about Okular, KDE’s flagship document reader app that’s eco-certified in Germany and used professionally around the world to secure documents.

Okular has robust support for digitally signing documents using a cryptographic signature, and it’s going to become even better soon. But what about signing documents using handwritten signatures, for those who live in places where digital signing hasn’t caught on yet?

Now, this is typically the point at which everyone who lives in a place where cryptographic signatures are common will chime in about how handwritten signatures are pointless and insecure. And they may be right, but it doesn’t matter because handwritten signatures are still used and considered valid in most of the world. And thankfully for people who live in any such part of the world, Okular turns out to support them pretty well.

The process involves some setup that you do once, and then after that’s done, the process of signing documents is suuuuuuuper simple. The time invested is worth it, trust me! So here’s how:

One-time setup process

First, you’ll need a piece of paper. Write your handwritten signature on it:

But, you know, for real

Next, scan it with SkanPage or take a picture of it with your phone and then transfer it to your computer using KDE Connect. You’ll end up with an image on your computer like this:

Open it up in Gwenview. Click the “Show Editing Tools” button in the toolbar to show the “Image Operations” sidebar. On this sidebar, click the “Crop” button and crop the image so that only the signature part is visible.

Then Click the “Adjust Colors” button:

Boost the contrast and brightness and reduce the gamma to make the background become completely white, and make the text look darker. But don’t make the text look completely 100% black; you want to preserve the appearance of real pen-strokes. It may take a bit of tweaking but keep at it! The end result will be something like this:

Now save this image somewhere on your computer using the PNG format–maybe in your Pictures or Documents folder. Don’t delete or move this image in the future!

Time to open up Okular. Go to the “Settings” menu and click “Configure Okular”. Then go to the “Annotations” page and click on the “Add” button:

A dialog window will appear. In this dialog window, give it the name “Insert Signature”, change the type to “Stamp”. Click on the little folder button next to the “Stamp Symbol” text field and navigate to the signature image file you just created:

If your file doesn’t appear in the “Open” dialog, that’s because you didn’t save it as a PNG. Re-save it as a PNG in Gwenview.

Click OK and you’re done!

Use it to sign a document

Now, the next time you have a document that needs signing, Open the annotations menu by clicking on the downward-pointing arrow next to the “Yellow Highlighter” toolbar button. Don’t click on the “Yellow Highlighter” text itself; click on the arrow next to it:

Now draw a box where you want the signature to be! There’s usually a “Date” field, so you can use the “Insert Text” annotation accessed from the same menu, and draw a similar box where you want the date to be. Enter the date when prompted.

Voila:

Easy as pie! Now you can do this almost instantly every time you have to sign a document.

This week in KDE: major plumbing work in Plasma 6

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)

Other bug-related information of interest:

Automation & Systematization

Overhauled the documentation about Plasma styles to be more up-to-date and accurate (Thiago Sueto, link)

Web presence

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!

This week in KDE: for developers

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)

Other bug-related information of interest:

Web presence

Another “KDE for” page has been created, this time showcasing what KDE can do for software developers! (Carl Schwan, right now! Link)

Changes not in KDE that affect KDE

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 in KDE: Night color on Wayland with NVIDIA

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)

Other bug-related information of interest:

Automation & Systematization

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!

Presentation at University of Macedonia: Making a Difference

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!

Check it out:

This week in KDE: Preliminary HDR support

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)

"Apply to..." dialog to apply app orderings for one file type to other file types as well

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):

System Settings window showing Activities page with clean modern design

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):

Networks widget showing switches rather than checkboxes in header area

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)

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

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!