I have exciting news: this week the long-awaited new QML-based Overview effect has been merged! Currently it shows you all your open windows, just like the existing Present Windows effect–which it will eventually replace. And it does not dim the inactive/un-hovered windows. :)The visuals are not final, but here’s what it looks like so far:

Vlad Zahorodnii has been doing this work and it is still in the latter stages of development, but will eventually replace the existing Present Windows effect and probably the Desktop Grid effect as well, unifying them both into a full-screen overview of windows, Virtual Desktops and perhaps Activities too! The idea is to show you all your relevant window-related functionality in one place, similar to the popular 3rd-party Parachute KWin script, or macOS’s Mission Control overlay. It will ship in Plasma 5.23 and will need plenty of testing! So I would encourage everyone to try it out! To test it, install git master packages from your distro’s unstable repo or build everything from source or use KDE Neon Unstable or openSUSE Krypton. Then enable the Overview effect in the System Settings Desktop Effects page and invoke it with Meta+Ctrl+D.

New Features

You can now choose the status of your Bluetooth adapter on login: powered on, powered off, or remember the state it was in the last time the system was rebooted (the latter option is the new default) (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.23):

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Spectacle once again takes screenshots with the correct resolution in a Plasma Wayland session using a fractional scale factor such as 125% (Méven Car, Spectacle 21.08.1)

Fixed a regression in how Breeze theme window decoration buttons were rendered in GTK CSD headerbar windows (Emilio Cobos Álvarez, Plasma 5.22.5)

System Monitor no longer fails to display IPv4 address information when IPv6 has been disabled (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.22.5)

Fixed one of the ways that the lock screen could get broken on Wayland (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.23)

In the Plasma Wayland session, middle-click-paste now works between native Wayland and XWayland apps! (David Redondo, Plasma 5.23)

In the Plasma Wayland session, copying text from notifications using any means now works (David Redondo, Plasma 5.23)

In the Plasma Wayland session, DPI-based scaling once again works (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.23)

In the Plasma Wayland session, the cursor now shows animated icon feedback when launching apps (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.23)

Combobox popups in QtQuick apps now look correct in RTL languages (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.86)

User Interface Improvements

You can now copy text from Plasma notifications with the Ctrl+C keyboard shortcut (David Redondo, Plasma 5.23)

Dragging windows around now only snaps them to the edges of other windows that are on the same virtual desktop (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.23)

You can now change the manual speed setting for wired Ethernet connections to more values (David Hummel, Plasma 5.23)

The Global Menu applet now has a more menu-like appearance (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.23)

The Media Player widget now always displays the album art and its blurred background at the same time, even when the album art is read from a slow location (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.23)

The loading spinner has been unified across Plasma, KDE apps, and the splash screen, and it now looks like a spinning gear! (Björn Feber, Plasma 5.23 and Frameworks 5.86)

Shadows for Plasma popups, dialogs, OSDs, and notifications have been made a little bit more soft, visually pleasing, and more consistent with the shadows for app windows (Niccolò Venerandi, Frameworks 5.86):

…And everything else

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

How You Can Help

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

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

Continuing with our recent theme, this week KDE contributors squashed an astonishing number of bugs! In addition, we rolled out some nice UI changes that I think folks will enjoy and which make Plasma and KDE software more usable on those touchscreen devices that are becoming more ubiquitous all the time.

New Features

Elisa now lets you rate songs inline from in the playlist and the Now Playing page, rather than needing to go to the info window to do it (me: Nate Graham, and Javier Goday, Elisa 21.12):

The Plasma wallpaper slideshow configuration page now has an option to display all of the wallpapers in each folder before moving onto the wallpapers in the next folder (Mihai Sorin Dobrescu, Plasma 5.23)

The Networks applet now supports additional authentication settings/protocols/requirements for OpenVPN connections (Jan Grulich, Plasma 5.23)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

In the Plasma Wayland session, Spectacle no longer shows you an error message when you cancel the process of taking a screenshot in the middle (Bharadwaj Raju, Spectacle 21.08.1)

Elisa no longer shows a “Show in Folder” button on the Now Playing page for radio streams (me: Nate Graham, Elisa 21.08.1)

Konsole no longer sometimes flashes when its last tab/session is closed with the Ctrl+D keyboard shortcut (Tomaz Canabrava, Konsole 21.12)

Closing a Konsole tab when something is written on the prompt is now faster (Christoph Cullmann, Konsole 21.12)

Plasma’s panel edit mode now lets you move, configure, and remove applets with a touchscreen (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22.5)

When you rotate Widget on the desktop by 90°, the tooltip for the Rotate button no longer covers up the Configure button and prevents its use (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22.5)

When showing scrollbar arrows, the arrows themselves now show the correct hover color in QtQuick-based apps (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.22.5)

When the feature to show popup previews of desktop folders has been disabled, those popups no longer appear when dragging something into a folder either (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.23)

When you attempt to move or copy a file or folder onto a different filesystem that has any characters in its name that are incompatible for that filesystem, you are now warned of this fact and offered the opportunity to correct it, rather than the files or folders being silently transferred with invalid characters and being un-openable (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.86)

The calendar no longer shows the wrong number of dots on each day/month/year under certain circumstances when it is pinned open (Eugene Popov, Frameworks 5.86)

The “Allow Folder Expansion” option in open/save dialogs is now respected in all relevant contexts (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.86)

Headers in QtQuick-based System Settings pages no longer disappear when you scroll up the view using a touchscreen (Jan Blackquill, Frameworks 5.86)

Scroll handles in QtQuick-based apps no longer incorrectly interpret a click at the very top of the handle as a click in the track (Jan Blackquill, Frameworks 5.86)

It’s now possible to edit the icons for system-installed applications through Kickoff’s “Edit Application…” menu (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.86)

The “Units” definitions for QtQuick-based software have been re-implemented in C++, which should provide a small boost to performance and launch speed for all QtQuick-based KDE software (Jonah Brüchert and Arjen Hiemstra, Frameworks 5.86)

User Interface Improvements

Breeze style spinboxes now locate the up and down arrows on either side of the text area in a bigger and more button-like clickable area, providing for a much more usable click target and also making the control touch-friendly (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.23):

The Breeze style scrollbar handle has been updated to match the new style for other UI elements: now it is slightly thicker (though the width of the track it sits in is still the same thickness) and has a more visually refined appearance (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.23):

^{Oh and we’re looking to get rid of the controversial scrollbar divider line too, once we change our list highlights to be more Plasma-style!}

In the Plasma Wayland session, entering tablet mode with a convertible laptop now automatically causes the System Tray icons to become larger and therefore more tappable (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.23):

^{Please pardon the atrocious quality of this video; capturing something like this on camera is a bit hard! Look at the System Tray icons in the bottom left corner of the video.}

Pressing-and-holding with a finger in Kickoff now opens the context menu (Devin Lin, Plasma 5.23)

The PageUp and PageDown keys now work to scroll the table views in System Monitor (Felipe Kinoshita, Plasma 5.23)

In Kickoff, hitting the return or enter key while a UI control (such as one of the power buttons) has been tab-focused no longer unexpectedly launches the last-focused app in the grid or list above it (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.23)

The Networks applet’s details tab now shows more information about the currently-connected network, when available (Francesco Bonanno, Plasma 5.23)

The “Public” and “Templates” folders now show nice new icons (Björn Feber, Frameworks 5.86):

…And everything else

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

How You Can Help

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

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

This was a major bugfix week, with many important fixes to our core apps as well as the touchscreen experience. More of these are in the pipeline too! We are really trying to improve the stability of our software now that it’s starting to be used in more 3rd-party products like the Steam Deck. The idea is that this will become a virtuous circle of better more stable products leading to more use leading to even better more stable products! So check it out:

New Features

Kate now lets you open multiple tabs in its embedded terminal views (Waqar Ahmed, Kate 21.12)

It’s now possible to configure whether hidden files are shown before or after other files in Dolphin, and the default is “before”, as it used to be (Chris Holland, Dolphin 21.12):

You can now delete selected items in the Clipboard applet’s popup by pressing the Delete key on the keyboard (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.23)

The “Get new [thing]” window now has a feature to let you begin the process of uploading your own contributions to store.kde.org! (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, Frameworks 5.85):

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Dolphin once again restores the window and sidebar to the correct sizes after being un-maximized (Felix Ernst, Dolphin 21.08)

Dolphin’s --select argument now does what you expect: it selects the file in the window rather than opening it and showing Dolphin with an empty window (Jordan Bucklin, Dolphin 21.08)

Okular’s page number counter now always has enough space to display the full page number no matter how many pages the document has (Kishore Gopalakrishnan, Okular 21.08)

Elisa’s desktop config window is now able to scroll vertically in situations where this would be required, for example due to long translated test or many configured search locations for the music library (me: Nate graham, Elisa 21.08)

Konsole no longer sometimes crashes when closing a tab (Ahmad Samir, Konsole 21.12)

Konsole’s “Show Statusbar” menu item now works (Ahmad Samir, Konsole 21.12)

Fixed various recent regressions affecting Yakuake: it once again slides out properly and no longer flashes blue while closing (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.22.5)

System Monitor’s “Export Page” function now works (David Redondo, Plasma 5.22.5)

Some of Discover’s user interface elements now show their shortcut keys in their tooltips, rather than showing random numbers (Aleix Pol Gonzalez and me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22.5)

The header in the Digital Clock’s calendar popup now looks correct in right-to-left text mode (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22.5)

When you have a lot of different timezones defined in the Digital Clock’s calendar popup, the list is now scrollable when needed (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22.5)

The window maximization and full screen effects now cross-fade again (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.22.5)

Plasma’s “Alternatives” popup no longer lets long labels visually overflow; now list items become as tall as is needed to contain them (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22.5):

Task Manager tooltips for pinned apps now disappear when you move the cursor over them, just like all other tooltips do (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22.5)

Fixed a case where KWin could crash when pressing Alt+Tab to activate the Task Switcher (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.23)

In the Plasma X11 session, touchscreen input now works properly when the Wacom System Settings module is installed (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.23)

In the Plasma Wayland session, clicking in a virtual machine window now results in the click targeting the correct region of the screen in the guest OS (Andrey Butirsky, Plasma 5.23)

Discover is now faster to launch, especially on low-resource devices like the PinePhone (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.23)

Discover’s “Install” buttons no longer sometimes overflow from their parent layout when the application in question comes from a non-default backend with a very long name; now the name is shown in a tooltip rather than in the button text when it is very long (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.23):

Discover’s app screenshots view no longer shows arrow buttons to navigate left and right when the view is non-scrollable (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.23)

You can now enter decimal values for manual chart data ranges in System Monitor (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.23)

Items on the desktop once again get thumbnails automatically generated for them (Marcin Gurtowski, Frameworks 5.85)

Kirigami apps and views that are non-scrollable no longer awkwardly teleport the view contents to the bottom of the view when the down arrow button is pressed (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.85)

Plasma text fields now always have the correct text color even when using themes which use strongly contrasting colors for the window background vs the view background, such as Oxygen (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.85)

Close buttons in Kirigami inline messages no longer overlap the action button beneath them when using certain font sizes (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.85)

The Breeze icon theme is no longer missing network and hibernation-related icons when used in XFCE (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.85)

User Interface Improvements

When Dolphin is launched with any tabs showing paths that are not accessible, it now returns to the previous behavior of telling you that the path is not available rather than discarding the path data and showing you your home folder instead (me: Nate Graham, Dolphin 21.08)

When selecting an online account to log into on the System Settings Accounts page, now nothing is pre-selected, and clicking on one of the accounts in the list no longer leaves it selected if you cancel the authentication prompt (Mufeed Ali, kaccounts-integration 21.12)

When you press-and-hold on a desktop widget with a finger on the touchscreen, the icons in the overlay are now sized in a manner appropriate for touch interaction (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22.5):

The DrKonqi crash reporter no longer lets users waste their own time by filing worthless bug reports against unmaintained apps and ancient unmaintained versions of developed apps, and instead recommends that they find a new app or upgrade, respectively (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.23)

The System Settings Login Screen page’s settings synchronization feature has now been renamed to “Apply Plasma Settings” to clarify what it does (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.23):

Dialogs for various file operations now word-wrap the text so they never become too wide and get cut off when displaying extremely long file paths (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.85)

…And everything else

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

How You Can Help

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

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

This week I have two particularly large things to present! Not Steam Deck levels of large, but still pretty cool, I think. 🙂

First of all, David Redondo and Kai Uwe Broulik implemented the power profiles feature! This allows you to specify how your computer should balance energy use against performance. You can switch modes at any time using the Battery and Brightness applet, and you can configure which profile gets used automatically when plugging or unplugging the power cord. The feature will be available in Plasma 5.23 with a newer computer that supports it when using Linux Kernel 5.12 or greater.

---

Next, the new Kickoff launcher menu that was introduced in Plasma 5.20 has received a gigantic code overhaul which fixes many bugs, improves performance and accessibility, tightens up the user interface, and adds a few commonly requested features. Among the fixes:

• Long text for the power/session items in the footer or items in the sidebar is no longer ever elided; instead the layout stretches horizontally to accommodate them
• Using the arrow keys to navigate the search results list no longer discards the first keystroke
• The context menu no longer takes ages to appear
• The popup now always opens instantly
• There is no longer an awkward animation when you open the popup if you happened to be on the Places tab the last time it was closed
• Alt+letter accelerators are now stable and consistent
• Two-line grid item labels are no longer closer to the icon above them than single-line grid item titles are
• The layout is no longer flipped vertically depending on the popup’s position on the screen
• The Configure button no longer retains keyboard focus if it is clicked and the popup is closed
• You can now choose whether to use a list or a grid for all app views, not just the Favorites category
• A Pin button has been added, so you can now pin it open if you like–just like you can do for the System Tray, Digital Clock, and KRunner

Here’s how it looks now:

Big thanks to Noah Davis for completing this exhaustive change! It will be released in Plasma 5.23.

More New Features

You can now configure whether the footer action buttons in Kickoff have text or not, and you can opt to show all the power and session actions at once if you prefer (Maxim Leshchenko, Plasma 5.23):

Sensor labels in System Monitor can now be changed and given custom text (David Redondo, Plasma 5.23)

The System Settings Login Screen page’s synchronization feature now syncs your screen arrangement as well, so that the login screen UIs are positioned properly on all your physical screens (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.23):

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Konsole’s window is no longer a tiny tiny rectangle the first time you launch the app (Konsole 21.08)

Okular now scrolls by the correct distance using the PageUp/PageDown keys when its scrollbars are disabled (David Hurka, Okular 21.08)

The “Start a Slideshow” menu item in Dolphin’s context menu is now translated (Yuri Chornoivan, Gwenview 21.08)

Opening the Digital Clock applet’s settings dialog no longer closes the applet’s popup if it has been deliberately pinned open (David Redondo, Plasma 5.22.3)

When using systemd-homed, entering your password incorrectly once on the login screen no longer causes all subsequent unlock attempts to fail (Gibeom Gwon, Plasma 5.22.4)

The Bluetooth widget now works properly when placed directly on the Panel, as opposed to when it lives in the System Tray (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.22.4)

System Monitor is now hugely faster to launch (David Redondo, Plasma 5.22.4)

The grid items in the System Tray’s expanded popup are now always perfectly pixel-aligned so they will not become blurry (Derek Christ, Plasma 5.22.4)

Using QTimer in KWin script now works again (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.22.4)

In the context menu for desktop items, pressing the shift key to switch between “Move to Trash” and “Delete” now works when a sub-menu is open (Derek Christ, Plasma 5.22.4)

Global shortcuts for apps whose desktop files have uppercase characters in their filenames now work properly, and their entries in the System Settings Shortcuts page now always display the correct icons (David Redondo, Plasma 5.22.4)

Plasma Notifications with embedded links now use the link color from the Plasma theme rather than the application color scheme, fixing bugs in cases where these differed such as when the Breeze Twilight theme is applied (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.22.4)

Category lists in the Unsplash Picture of the Day wallpaper’s configuration page are now sorted alphabetically, rather than semi-randomly (Arnaud Vergnet, Plasma 5.22.4)

Website Favicons displayed in KRunner that come from a browser using Plasma Browser Integration are now nice and crisp when using a high DPI scale factor (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.22.4)

Opening the System Settings User Feedback page no longer briefly makes Discover appear in the Task Manager (Plasma 5.23)

In the Plasma Wayland session, global shortcuts once again work while popups that would otherwise steal focus (on X11) are open (Andrey Butirsky, Plasma 5.23)

Fixed a case where searching in Dolphin could cause the kdeinit5 process to crash (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.85)

User Interface Improvements

Dolphin’s Places panel now elides text when it’s not wide enough to show everything, rather than showing a horizontal scrollbar (Eugene Popov, Dolphin 21.08):

Every one of Dolphin’s zoom levels now has a different icon size associated with it; no longer will changing the zoom level sometimes cause the size of the grid to change but the icons stay the same size (Eugene Popov, Dolphin 21.12)

Panels using the Adaptive Transparency feature now enter transparent mode when the Show Desktop effect is in use (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.22.4)

When multiple devices are mounted, the Device Notifier applet now shows the “Unmount All” action inside the hamburger menu instead of as the lone button on a new toolbar that appears (Eugene Popov, Plasma 5.23):

When browsing app lists in Discover, the icon of the source that the app comes from is now displayed inside the button that also lists the name of the source (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.23):

The Kimpanel candidates popup now looks better (Mufeed Ali, Plasma 5.23):

The question mark button in the titlebar is now hidden by default for dialog windows (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.23)

Discover no longer misleadingly shows the wrong date of last update for apps that fail to provide this information themselves (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.23)

In System Monitor, the app-specific process list view now sorts by memory usage by default, just like it does elsewhere (Felipe Kinoshita, Plasma 5.23)

Event indicator dots on the Plasma Calendar widget and the Digital Clock popup are now more visible no matter what color scheme or Plasma theme you’re using (Carl Schwan, Frameworks 5.85)

Kirigami-based apps’ “About” pages now display a “Get Involved” link that takes you to https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved (Felipe Kinoshita, Frameworks 5.85):

…And everything else

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

How You Can Help

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

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

This week a whole bunch of longstanding issues got fixed! If you look through the list, I bet you’ll find one or two things that have annoyed you–and no longer! In addition, we did a lot of high-impact Wayland work. Take a look:

New Features

Dolphin is now able to display thumbnail sequences for thumbnailers that support it when you hover over files and folders (David Lerch, Dolphin 21.08):

KWin window rules can now target special OSD windows like Firefox’s picture-in-picture overlay (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.23)

In addition to the overscan property, KWin now supports setting the underscan too (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.23)

A wide variety of features in KDE apps which rely on the Solid library now work on OpenBSD thanks to new UDisks2 support (Rafael Sadowski, Frameworks 5.85)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Spectacle no longer crashes when using any of the image uploading plugins that come from the legacy Kipi plugins system (Adriaan de Groot, Spectacle 21.08)

Okular now shows the alt text (if set) for inaccessible images in Markdown documents (Yuri Chornoivan, Okular 21.08)

In the Plasma Wayland session with the Wobbly Windows effect enabled, GTK windows no longer fly off in bizarre random directions when dragged with a touchscreen (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.22.3)

When using an Nvidia GPU with the proprietary driver in the Plasma Wayland session, XWayland windows that are toggled between full screen and windowed modes no longer sometimes stop updating (Erik Kurzinger, Plasma 5.23)

Task Manager tooltips can no longer make Plasma hang or lag when the tooltip attempts to display album art that is located on a slow or inaccessible location (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.22.3)

The Meta Key shortcut to open the default launcher no longer sometimes just randomly breaks (Andrey Butirsky, Plasma 5.23)

In the Plasma Wayland session, touch input no longer get scrambled up by quick tile operations (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.22.3

In the Plasma Wayland session when using a high DPI scale factor, GTK app windows no longer display a variety of their UI elements at too small a size (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.22.4)

System Settings’ Keyboard page is now fully translatable, so the missing translations should be added soon (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.22.4)

You are no longer warned via notification that your S.M.A.R.T. enabled disk is showing signs of instability. This generated too many false positives due to disks reporting their status incorrectly or inaccurately characterizing transient conditions as instability. You are still warned for normal error conditions though! (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.22.4)

In the Plasma Wayland session, right-clicking on a Task Manager task now does what it should instead of closing the context menu when the task’s tooltip disappears (David Redondo, Plasma 5.23)

In the Plasma Wayland session, certain non-resizable windows no longer erroneously display Maximize buttons (Plasma 5.23)

Task Manager tooltips now consume less memory (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.23)

In the Plasma Wayland session, native wayland apps making use of “subsurfaces” are now positioned correctly when they ask to be positioned below their parent window (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.23)

Improved the speed of access for reading global config files, which should slightly make many things a tiny bit faster, including app startup (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Frameworks 5.85)

Updating certain types of GHNS items in various apps such as KStars now works again (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, Frameworks 5.85)

User Interface Improvements

A variety of dialogs throughout KMail and the other PIM apps have been modernized and de-framed (Carl Schwan, KDE PIM 21.08):

When an app is playing media, the Task Manager thumbnails for each of its windows now only show album art from that media when the window title matches the media; this should fix the problem of all windows always showing album art instead of thumbnails in virtually all cases! (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.23):

The list of screen refresh rates in System Settings’ Display Configuration page is now sorted in descending order (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.23

When hovering over a source button in Discover, the tooltip now tells you specifically which repo within the source it comes from, in the case that the backend has multiple repos configured (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.23)

The icon chooser dialog has gotten a visual and UX overhaul and now shows SVG icons accurately for high DPI users (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 5.85):

“About” pages in each Kirigami-based app now mention the full name of the app itself and also display the role/type of work done for each contributor (if that data is set) (Felipe Kinoshita, Frameworks 5.85):

…And everything else

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

How You Can Help

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

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

New Features

Gwenview now uses a combobox to hold all of its zoom/size modes, which has freed up enough room on the bottom bar to add a background color chooser! This handy feature lets you quickly change the background color behind an image to be dark, light, somewhere in between, or follow the background color of your active color scheme. This can be useful if the active image looks better with a different background color and you want a quick way to change it. (Noah Davis, Gwenview 21.08):

Gwenview now supports color management for 16-bit color depth images (Daniel Novomeský, Gwenview 21.08)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

In the Plasma Wayland session, Skanlite now launches (Alexander Stippich, Skanlite 21.08)

In the Plasma Wayland session, Okular no longer crashes when you drag-scroll the document in such a manner that the cursor touches a window edge. It still doesn’t wrap around as it does on X11; we’re working on that (David Hurka, Okular 21.08)

Konsole’s default window size the first time you launch it is no longer ridiculously small (Tomaz Canabrava, Konsole 21.08)

When you run a sandboxed Flatpak app and switch to another one, the popup that asks you to approve background activity no longer causes the xdg-desktop-portal process to crash (Jan Grulich, Plasma 5.22.3)

In the Plasma X11 session, the process that runs the Plasma logout screen no longer sometimes crashes as it disappears (David Redondo, Plasma 5.22.3)

In Plasma System Monitor, killing a process in Tree View mode now kills the correct process (David Redondo, Plasma 5.22.3)

System Tray icons using the xembedsniproxy process that implement context menus are no longer invisible (David Redondo, Plasma 5.22.3)

Plasma Audio Volume applet now consumes fewer background CPU resources (David Redondo, Plasma 5.22.3

The Media Player applet now removes an audio sources from its list of audio sources immediately after it stops playing, rather than only after all audio sources have stopped playing (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.22.3)

Dialogs in GTK apps can now be moved properly using a touchscreen (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.22.3)

The KWin window manager no longer sometimes crashes while trying to render window thumbnails while compositing is disabled (David Edmundson, KWin 5.23)

Improved the speed of SVG item lookups, which should result in a slight boost to responsiveness and reduction in CPU consumption throughout all of Plasma (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Frameworks 5.84)

When you change the system font, it now updates immediately in QtQuick-based apps without you needing to re-launch them first (David Redondo, Frameworks 5.84)

User Interface Improvements

Discover now shows a saner name for the Kate Snippets category (Christoph Cullmann, Kate 21.08)

Dolphin now shows a “Loading…” placeholder text in the center of the window while folders are loading (Mufeed Ali, Dolphin 21.08)

In Yakuake, you can now switch terminals in a split view with Ctrl+Tab (Alexander Lohnau, Yakuake 21.08)

The System Settings Launch Feedback page has been moved to the Appearance category (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.23):

…And everything else

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

How You Can Help

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

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

KDE’s annual Akademy conference was held last week, and we’re all kind of still recovering. Nonetheless, we managed to do all kinds of useful work, including a major new Konsole feature and a number of Wayland bugfixes:

New Features

Konsole now has a new plugin system which ships with the inaugural plugin of an SSH bookmark/connection manager! (Tomaz Canabrava, Konsole 21.08):

Hitting Shift+Delete in the new Plasma System Monitor app now sends the selected process a SIGKILL signal, just like the old KSysGuard app did (Felipe Kinoshita, Plasma 5.23)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Konsole no longer sometimes crashes when text is zoomed or reflowed (Luis Javier Merino Morán, Konsole 21.08)

System Settings’ new Quick Settings no longer gets truncated on the bottom when the screen size is very small; it now becomes scrollable instead (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22.2)

When using Activities in the Plasma Wayland session, new windows are now created in the current Activity, rather than in all Activities (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.22.2)

Hitting the Meta+V shortcut to show the clipboard history in a pop-up menu no longer crashes Plasma when using certain multi-screen arrangements (Felipe Kinoshita, Plasma 5.22.3)

In the Plasma Wayland session, window rules related to Activities now work (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.22.3)

In the Plasma Wayland session, the Activity Switcher sidebar now always works (David Redondo, Plasma 5.23)

Fixed the most common crash in the Plasma calendar (David Edmundson, Frameworks 5.84)

Significantly improved the SVG lookup performance in Plasma, which should result in slight speedups and energy efficiency improvements everywhere (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Frameworks 5.84)

Clearing global shortcuts for Plasma applets now works properly (David Redondo, Frameworks 5.84)

Clicking on Places Panel entries for locations that have been bind-mounted now works correctly (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.84)

User Interface Improvements

In Dolphin, pressing the Shift key while the context menu is open to access the semi-hidden “Delete” action now works when a sub-menu of the context menu is also open (Derek Christ, Dolphin 21.04.3)

Okular’s annotations tool is now a mutually exclusive action, so activating it takes you out of Browse or Text Selection mode–or vice versa (Simone Gaiarin, Okular 21.08)

Those of you who hate Konsole’s smart text selection color choosing algorithm can now make use of a new option to always simply invert the color (which, depending on your terminal color scheme, may not always work–but in those cases, you can go back to using the smart color chooser algorithm, and vice versa) (Ahmad Samir, Konsole 21.08)

In the Plasma Wayland session, cursors are no longer pixelated when drawn over a GTK app window while using a high DPI scale factor (Emilio Cobos Álvarez, Plasma 5.23)

Unlabeled disks now have the name of the mountpoint (e.g. “sda1“) appended to their generic name, to help you identify them especially in the case where disks have the same size (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.84)

Web Presence

In case you missed Akademy, everything was recorded, so you can check out the raw video here! It will eventually be edited into bite-sized videos, one per session/talk/whatever.

Also, I gave an interview on https://www.dedoimedo.com recently! If you’re interested, you can check it out here.

…And everything else

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

How You Can Help

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

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

This week we have yet another interesting new user interface feature to talk about. The old “What’s This?” feature has been re-worked as a shiny and new user interface convention we’ve come up with: expandable tooltips! Many tooltips in KDE apps that use the KXMLGui and Kirigami frameworks now have a little label saying “Press Shift for more”, and if you do so, it will show you the longer text. This makes the feature much more useful since it’s invokable right at the point where you would need it. Big thanks to Felix Ernst for this work! It will land in Frameworks 5.84.

Other new Features

You can now hold down the alt key to drag underlined files from Konsole into other apps for various purposes! (Tomaz Canabrava, Konsole 21.08)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

When an overlay is active in System Monitor, clicking on a different page in the sidebar now closes the overlay before navigating to the clicked-on page (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.22.1)

Deleting a page in System Monitor now removes it immediately even if you were in that page’s Edit Mode when you deleted it (David Redondo, Plasma 5.22.1)

Fixed a recent regression about Task Manager tooltips not properly updating their header text when the window’s title changes (Henri Chain, Plasma 5.22.1)

Autostarted applications listed in System Monitor no longer display the wrong icons (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.22.1)

Fixed various rendering glitches when using the Vulkan graphics system (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.22.1)

The “Dialog Parent” effect that dims windows behind dialogs no longer flickers when the dialog is closed (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.22.2)

Discover no longer notifies you constantly about updates even when there are none (sorry about this regression) (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.22.2)

When Plasma is restarted–either manually or automatically because it crashed–various Plasma-related shortcuts such as the Meta+number keys to activate Task manager items no longer stop working (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.22.2)

In the Plasma Wayland session, the cursor is no longer briefly invisible after a screen wakes up (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.22.2)

One specific text label on the System Settings Virtual Desktops page (you know which one I’m talking about) no longer gets inappropriately elided when there’s still plenty of space (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22.2)

In System Settings’ Login Screen page, the sheets that appear for syncing settings and changing the wallpaper now disappear after you use them, providing confirmation that the action that you triggered succeeded (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.23)

Tooltip shadows throughout Plasma no longer have a broken appearance in their corners (Marco Martin, Frameworks 5.84). Popup/dialog/OSD corners still have problems, but we’re working on that too.

User Interface Improvements

For a cleaner appearance, Gwenview’s sidebar is now hidden by default, and its visibility is now a global setting rather than a per-mode setting; when you show it, it will now stay shown, and then when you hide it, it will now stay hidden (Felix Ernst, Gwenview. 21.08)

Gwenview’s display of tags in the sidebar (when it is visible) is now prettier (Noah Davis, Gwenview 21.08):

Gwenview no longer uses the space and backspace keys for navigation by default, to prevent the space key from conflicting with the play/pause action when you navigate to a video. To navigate between items, just use the arrow keys (me: Nate Graham, Gwenview 21.08)

Konsole’s split view feature will now snap split dividers to the location of other dividers when you drag them (Tomaz Canabrava, Konsole 21.08)

Clicking on any of the buttons for bold, italic, etc. in a Sticky Note widget no longer de-focuses the text area (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22.1)

Discover no longer shows you a notification telling you that an offline update succeeded, because if you’re able to see it, of course it did! (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22

The Breeze SDDM theme now shows a more appropriate UI for accounts with no password set but auto-login turned off (Tadej Pecar, Plasma 5.23):

The clipboard now remembers 20 items by default, up from 7 (Felipe Kinoshita, Plasma 5.23)

Grid items throughout System Settings and the wallpaper choosers no longer lighten the content area when you hover the cursor over them, so that it is always presented accurately (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.84)

…And everything else

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

How You Can Help

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

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