This week has seen more fixes and improvements to the Get New Stuff system, as well as speeding up Discover. But they may be overshadowed by Major Enormous Exciting Amazing new Wayland features such as screencasting and Klipper/shared clipboard support!
Wow, this menu is getting pretty huge; I guess we should do something about that next
How You Can Help
If you are an experienced developer who would like to make a gigantic impact very quickly, fix some recent Plasma regressions or longstanding bugs. Everyone will love you forever! No really. Sometimes people will mail you beer and everything. It’s happened before!
Beyond that, have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover ways to help 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, youโll like it! We donโt bite!
I’ve had the privilege of testing and using the brand-new 15.6″ Ryzen-powered KDE Slimbook laptop for the past month. During that time, I worked with the Slimbook developers to perform QA and polish Plasma for this laptop. They’re awesome people who hosted our Plasma+Usability & Productivity Sprint last year at their offices. I’d like to share my impressions of their latest laptop.
Full disclosure: this laptop was sent to me for free for testing and development, so I have no financial skin in the game. They haven’t asked for it back yet, but I plan to either send it back, or purchase it, if I want to keep it. My configuration retails for 930โฌ (roughly $1,075), which is a steal for what you get. Regardless, what follows is what I believe to be an honest, unbiased review.
Performance and battery life
Here’s what I know you’re all waiting to hear about, so I’ll just start with it: performance with the 8-core/16-thread Ryzen 4800H CPU is unbelievable!
I can compile KWin in five minutes, compared to over 11 with my top-of-the-line Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga with a 10th generation Intel i7 processor. Everything feels smooth and fast. The power of this machine is awesome, and the Ryzen CPU makes it heaven for people who need to perform processor-heavy tasks on a regular basis.
Despite this, case temperatures remain cool and the fan remains off when the machine is not under heavy load. The thermal management is excellent–far better than on my ThinkPad.
Additionally, battery life is amazing. The machine idles at around 3 watts and goes up to only about 7 or 8 with average tasks that don’t involve compiling KWin. ๐ Because of this and the positively enormous 92 watt-hour battery in the 15.6″ model, I get about 12 hours or more of real-world, actual usage battery life.
OMG WTF
This level of battery life is just incredible. I’m honestly jealous, as my ThinkPad gets barely 4 hours with average use and never appreciably cools down. In practice, it means that I can work with the Slimbook from any room in my house without having to worry about where the cord is, while with my ThinkPad, I’m always tethered to the nearest plug and it’s always toasting my lap. The Slimbook is a clear winner for travel, obviously. There’s no compromise between power, battery life, and cool temperatures. It’s pretty impressive, really.
Case and ports
The KDE Slimbook’s understated magnesium case is lovely. Medium silver is my favorite case material/color as it strikes an excellent balance between not showing fingerprints and not showing dirt.
The whole machine is incredibly thin and light for a 15.6″ screen laptop: 17mm (0.67 inches) thick and weighing exactly 1.5kg (3.3 pounds). Despite this, it is nice and rigid, without much flex. It definitely feels durable enough to throw in a backpack and travel the world with.
I generally prefer small and light laptops and for this reason I usually go with 13.3″ and 14″ laptops–but the 15.6″ KDE Slimbook is actually barely larger: it fits into the same compartment in my travel backback that I slot my 14″ ThinkPad into.
The lid opens with one hand–no need to hold down the bottom. This is a nice touch.
The case has a good assortment of ports, including two goodies that are becoming increasingly rare on thin-and-light laptops: full-sized ethernet and HDMI ports! In addition you get 3 USB-A ports, one USB-C port, a MicroSD card reader, and obviously a headphone/microphone combo jack. The laptop supports WiFi6. It includes a fairly hefty 90-watt power adapter with a right-angle barrel jack plug which weights 0.49 kg, but the USB-C port supports charging just as you would expect.
Here’s what it looks like under the hood:
Access is super easy. You just remove nine philips head screws and then the bottom cover pops right off.
The RAM, wifi card, and SSD are all upgradable. My unit came with a single 8GB RAM stick in single-channel mode. I asked the SlimBook folks about this and they said that the 8GB configuration ships in single-channel mode like this, but all other configuration options (16GB, 32GB, and 64GB) will include two sticks and support dual-channel mode.
Despite the enormous battery, there is clearly room for an even bigger one if some of the internal components were rejiggered a bit. There’s a big empty space to the left of the right-most fan that’s just empty right now. Obviously you wouldn’t want to put a battery right next to the heat pipes, but potentially the speakers could be moved closer to the top of the case and made upwards-firing, which would leave enough room at the bottom of the case for the battery to be even wider.
Display
Overall the laptop’s screen is perfectly nice.
It’s a 1080p 15.6″ (197mm) matte non-touch panel with 100% sRGB coverage, the combination of which results in everything looking roughly the right size on screen. However I find myself wishing it were a 4K panel. The pixels are a bit big for my tastes and double the pixel density on a screen of this size would make everything so much more sharp and crisp looking, especially text. This would of course reduce the battery life a bit, but the machine’s cavernous 92 watt-hour battery would surely be able to handle it. I personally would be willing to go down to only 7-10 hours of battery life in exchange for a higher resolution screen, and I wish it were at least an option.
There is no visible ghosting, and the refresh rate is just fine.
The maximum brightness level is fine for indoor use, but a bit dim for outdoor use. It’s usable, but not as nice as if it got about 100 nits brighter, as my ThinkPad’s screen does.
Colors look good, but they do feel a little bit washed out and de-saturated to me, and the black level is not as dark as I would prefer. This is a function of the display surface being matte rather than glossy, and it’s why I personally prefer glossy screens. Yes, you get more reflections and glare with a glossy screen, but in exchange you get richer colors and darker blacks, and glare can be offset with a brighter backlight. Now, if you’re a fan of matte screens, obviously, this is all a feature, not a bug. ๐ However those of you who are willing to accept the trade-off of glossy screens are out of luck, as the laptop only comes with a matte screen.
There is no option for touch or 2-in-1 functionality, which should not be a problem as a 15.6″ touch laptop is kind of a silly idea in the first place.
Keyboard
Text and symbols on the final keyboard will be using the Noto Sans font, breeze icons for the function keys, and the Plasma logo for the Meta key! My unit did not have this yet, but the final shipping units will.
The keyboard is a bit of a mixed bag from my perspective.
The keys themselves have a satisfying feel and bottom out firmly. However the activation force could be a bit higher for my tastes, and the larger-than-average keys initially caused me to accidentally press adjacent keys more often that usual. I got used to it eventually though. Overall, the typing experience is pretty good, but not amazing–at least when compared to a ThinkPad keyboard! Keep in mind that I’m a keyboard snob who spends most of the day typing, so the KDE Slimbook’s keyboard would probably it would be considered excellent by most people. It’s certainly leagues better than those horrible low-travel “maglev” or “magic” keyboards plaguing certain high end laptops.
However the keyboard does have a real drawback: the fact that the keys themselves are silver with dark gray text. This makes the text a bit difficult to read under dim-but-not-dark lighting conditions. Black keys with white text would be far superior, and in fact the older KDE Slimbook laptop already had this setup! This version should do the same, so I find it a bit odd that it does not. Unfortunately the keyboard backlighting is dim and uneven, and often makes things worse:
I generally keep the keyboard backlight off except in very dark conditions where it actually helps. In comparison, the text on my ThinkPad’s keys are more visible, and the backlighting is more useful in more lighting conditions.
In the end it’s not a huge deal as my old HP Spectre was afflicted with the same problem and I lived with it for four years. Still, higher contrast would be better.
On the plus side, the keyboard layout is very good. You don’t have any bizarre departures from normalcy like putting the PrintScreen key between Alt and Ctrl and the Fn key in the bottom-left corner as on ThinkPads, or replacing the right Ctrl key with a fingerprint reader in in newer HP laptops. There’s none of that nonsense here! You get a conventional layout with a few real improvements, like the inverted T arrangement of the arrow keys, rather than having smooshed up and down arrow keys. And I really like the a column on the right side of the keyboard with Home, End, PageUp, and PageDown keys:
Having the Home and End keys close to the arrow keys makes efficient text processing a snap, and it’s easy to hit Ctrl+PageUp/PageDown with one hand for fast tab navigation. This is present on the 15.6″ model that I have, but not the 14″ model. It would be nice to have it on that one, too.
Unfortunately, the function keys are annoying. They behave as F keys (F1, F2, F3, etc.) when pressed; to access the secondary functionality, you have to hold down the Fn key in the corner, which makes it irritating to do things like quickly adjust the volume or the brightness. I wish these features were triggered by default without having to hold down the Fn key, which is how most laptops seem to have it set up these days, or at least they offer it with a function lock feature. Unfortunately there is no option for this with the KDE Slimbook.
Additionally, a minor annoyance concerns how to toggle keyboard backlight: there is one key to increase the keyboard backlight’s brightness, and another to decrease it (there are two brightness levels). This is unnecessary fiddly, and I wish there was a single brightness level and a single function key that toggled the keyboard backlight on and off, or cycled through the modes if there have to be multiple brightness levels.
As one final nitpick, I would prefer play/pause, back, and forward media keys, and a microphone mute key. However the lack of these is a pretty minor thing as it’s easy enough to assign them yourself them in the System Settings Global Shortcuts page.
Oh and one more really final thing, this time just for Americans: a US American layout is offered, complete with wide Enter and Shift keys. My unit has an ISO English keyboard layout, so that’s what the photos depict, but a US American layout is available. Not to worry. ๐
Touchpad
The touchpad is serviceable. Usable. But not amazing.
The physical feel is fine–not wonderful, but fine. It doesn’t have a glass surface, but the plastic surface is smooth, not rough, and will probably become smoother over time. So that’s good. However there is a small amount of play in the touchpad such that you can press it down a tiny bit and hear a low but audible click without it actually clicking. By contrast the touchpad on my Thinkpad is rock-solid, and does not move or emit any sound until you click it.
Tracking is fine, but the resolution could be a bit higher to make cursor movement feel smoother.
Overall there is room for improvement, but it’s not terrible. It’s notably not as good as my ThinkPad’s touchpad, but it’s usable. In practice I suspect that only very picky people or those who have used Apple hardware will be disappointed, while people who have only ever used typical crappy PC laptop touchpads and think all touchpads are terrible will just plug in a mouse like they always do. ๐
Speakers
The KDE Slimbook’s speakers are surprisingly good. I was honestly not expecting much from them as they are just two small downward-pointing stereo speakers, but they produce good sound with a high maximum volume and even a bit of bass. At the high end, the sound becomes a bit tinny, but they are just laptop speakers, after all. ๐ Listening to music on the SlimBook is pleasant and enjoyable overall. A very good showing in my opinion.
Camera
The KDE SlimBook’s camera is also surprisingly good! Its picture quality is adequate and the responsiveness is excellent. This is a welcome change from the camera in my ThinkPad, which is visibly laggy. Maybe this is a driver issue, but the SlimBook’s camera is just better to use.
Software integration
The KDE Slimbook ships with KDE Neon as the operating system, which runs like a top. Boot is very fast; pressing-power-button-to-login-screen is about 11 seconds. Everything works just like you would expect. The hardware’s features are all fully supported out of the box–except for the infrared facial recognition camera which we in KDE haven’t managed to add support for yet. So boo us! It’s an omission we’re hoping to address in the future. One final thing is that the volume up/down keys on my unit send double events, so pressing them increases or decreases the volume by 20%, not 10%. This is a firmware bug that the Slimbook folks are tracking down and hopefully it should be fixed soon. In the meantime, you can change the volume step value to 5% in the Audio Volume applet.
Otherwise the hardware-software integration Just Worksโข, exactly as it should.
In conclusion
There are very few compromises with the KDE Slimbook. You get a thin, light, rigid, and durable laptop with a nice screen, a powerful CPU, and crazy battery life. It’s nice to type on and its speakers sound good. The price is reasonable, starting at 930 โฌ (roughly $1,075) for the 8GB RAM 250GB SSD configuration.
I have no reservations recommending this laptop. You should buy it. Heck, I feel like I should have bought it!
In some ways, this is the machine I should have gotten instead of the ThinkPad X1 Yoga I wound up with–had it been available a few months ago! It’s better than my former HP Spectre x360 laptop in virtually every way, and a straightforward upgrade. Had I not gone with the ThinkPad, I never would have been spoiled by the pleasures of a 4K screen and the amazing ThinkPad keyboard. True, it doesn’t have a touchscreen, but I could have kept my old laptop for testing touch support.
Verdict
The good:
Outrageously amazing performance
Incredible battery life
Runs cool and quiet
Keyboard has a sensible layout
Speakers are surprisingly good
Built-in camera is surprisingly good
Case is very thin and light despite large screen size; super portable
Includes full-sized HDMI and ethernet ports and WiFi 6
Very attractive machine overall
Great integration with KDE Plasma
The okay:
Screen is fine, but I would prefer at least an option for a brighter glossy 4K screen
Keyboard is fine but I would prefer smaller keys and firmer activation force
Touchpad is fine but the physical feel and resolution could be improved
The bad:
Keyboard keys are silver with dark gray lettering, so text is hard to distinguish in many lighting conditions, and backlighting often makes things worse
Function keys’ secondary functionality is annoying to access
But as you can see, those negatives are pretty minor in the scheme of things–mostly just little annoyances, nothing dealbreaking. It is an amazing computer overall. So what are you waiting for?! Go buy one!
Do you like more features, fewer bugs, and a better UI? I do. So as I look over this week’s update, I smile. In particular, some much-needed fixes for the Get New [thing] system have landed, and more are on the way. We realize this is a pain point and we’re working on it.
In Plasma, we’ve been actually using Bugzilla’s priority feature to prioritize bugfixes, beginning with recent regressions. Every day I triage all new bugs and mark any recent regressions accordingly, then try to try to track down people who can fix things, or do it myself if I’m able to. Hopefully over time we’ll have fewer regressions, and the ones that do slip through will get fixed faster.
If you are an experienced developer who would like to make a gigantic impact very quickly, fix some recent Plasma regressions or longstanding bugs. Everyone will love you forever!
Beyond that, have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover ways to help 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, youโll like it! We donโt bite!
Eagle-eyed viewers will notice that despite the above fix, some of these separator lines are 1px tall and others are 2px. This is a so far unavoidable artifact caused by my using a fractional scale factor on X11. It’s already better on Wayland and I’m investigating whether there’s anything we can do there on X11 too, but this caption is already way too long for any more explanation than that!
Have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover ways to help 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, youโll like it! We donโt bite!
I’d like to share a brief update regarding the state of high DPI support. Since getting a laptop with a 4K screen, I’ve found all sorts of subtle papercuts and have been doing my best to fix them or at least file bug reports. Here’s what’s been fixed recently:
When mirroring the internal 4K display to an external FHD display, the image on the external display is cropped rather than scaled
A lot of the above issues are sort of stretch goals for me as each one requires a great deal of learning before I can even begin to try to put together a halfway-intelligent fix. So feel free to help out if you find this work useful and have relevant skills!
Several Breeze icons which had subtle pixel mis-alignments that could make them appear blurry no longer suffer from this issue (Maksym Hazevych, Frameworks 5.72)
Have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover ways to help 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, youโll like it! We donโt bite!
Fix Plasma 5.19 regression: The logout action in the Lock/Logout widget now works again (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.19.3)
Fix Plasma 5.19 regression: window rules using the WM_CLASS property now work again (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.19.3)
Fix Plasma 5.19 regression: window rules created from the rule dialog accessible by right-clicking on a window’s titleabar are now saved and applied properly (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.19.3)
That incredibly annoying bug whereby scrolling with a scroll wheel mouse in a GTK app stops working when a Plasma notification appears has just been fixed!!! (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.19.3)
Plasma’s Emoji picker window(which you can open with the Meta+period keyboard shortcut) now closes when you hit the escape key (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.20)
Have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover ways to help 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, youโll like it! We donโt bite!
FUSE mounts to better support accessing remote locations in non-KDE apps: DONE
kio-fuse was released in beta form early this year and is already packaged in many distros. It’s working great! The final release will happen later this year.
Privilege escalation in KIO and Dolphin: AT RISK
It turned out that there was more work remaining here than I had anticipated. Unfortunately nobody seems to have the critical combination of domain knowledge, interest in working on it, and time to do so. Assistance on https://phabricator.kde.org/D7563 would be appreciated to help make it happen this year.
Improved Samba share discovery in Dolphin: DONE
This was implemented for Dolphin 20.04. By all accounts, it’s working quite well!
Auto-rotation for tablets, convertibles, and other hardware with rotation sensors: DONE
This was implemented for Plasma 5.18 and works on Wayland (getting it working on X11 is a lost cause, apparently). If it isn’t working for you on Wayland, it’s likely that you don’t have the iio-sensor-proxy package installed, or your hardware isn’t supported by the kernel yet.
Implement more of the proposed visual design changes to the Breeze style and KDE apps: ON TRACK
Work is proceeding at a good pace. The new System Tray design was shipped with Plasma 5.19. We’re targeting 5.20 for the new application appearance and patches are landing. Things are on track.
Better wallpapers in the extra wallpapers repo: AT RISK
This is blocked on implementing a wallpaper cache. I took a stab at it for Plasma 5.18 but it turned out to be more complicated than I had anticipated and I kind of got demoralized and dropped it. Need to resume the work.
Per-screen scale factors on X11: UNLIKELY
Focus has shifted toward Wayland in a big way, and for the past few months, veteran KDE developers have been smashing Wayland problems left and right. They’ve gotten clipboard support working with Klipper and going between Wayland and XWayland windows; made Spectacle work properly; fixed a number of drag-and-drop issues, and are very close to finishing task manager thumbnails, screencasting, and more! Given the progress and momentum, there’s a strong desire to make Wayland finally usable rather than hack things into X11 that it was never designed to support and are unlikely to ever work properly.
Inertial scrolling throughout Plasma and QML apps: UNLIKELY
No work has happened here. A lot of the issue are in Qt itself and are very challenging to resolve, especially on X11. There may be more hope for getting it done on Wayland.
Power/session controls on the lock screen: AT RISK
Well there you have it! Of course this is just a tiny fraction of the stuff actually going on, it’s just what’s relevant to the proposed roadmap I outlined earlier.
As always, if you want to see these things happen faster, please feel free to help out! The code is public and the people are friendly. ๐ What do you have to lose!? Nothing, that’s what!
This week we plunged into fixing issues in Plasma 5.19 that slipped through QA as well as some older ones–a truly enormous number in all! We are taking to heart your pleas to focus on stability and polish. But of course we also worked on some new features too, because we can walk and chew bubblegum at the same time!
New Features
Spectacle’s timer feature and Shift+Printscreen (take full screen screenshot) and Meta+Shift+Printscreen (take rectangular region screenshot) shortcuts now work on Wayland (Mรฉven Car, Plasma 5.20 and Spectacle 20.08.0)
Apps removed from the favorites list shared across Kickoff, Kicker, and Application Dashboard now always stay removed after you reboot (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.18.7)
Notice the little Flatpak icons in the corner? I know this presentation isn’t ideal; I was planning to polish it up and add text but didn’t have time this week, sorry. Maybe next week!
Have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover ways to help 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, youโll like it! We donโt bite!
I found a way to get external microphones connected to the audio jack working for my laptop ! KDE contributor Debarpan Debnath pointed me to an Arch wiki page that helped me reach a solution:
Open/create the file /etc/modprobe.d/alsa.conf and add the following on a new line: options snd_hda_intel index=0 model=dell-headset-multi
go to System Settings > Audio > Advanced > and check the checkbox saying “Automatically switch all running streams when a new output becomes available” (this applies to inputs too)
Reboot
Mute the microphone using the keyboard’s microphone mute button
Now my headset’s microphone is working as expected–too late for last week’s virtual Plasma sprint though. Oh well, my colleagues got to hear my kids playing/rioting a lot. ๐
There is now one remaining issue with the use of an external microphone: the two audio input sources are represented in the plasma-pa applet as different devices rather than as different ports of the same device, which would make the switch-on-connect module unnecessary and clean up the display in the Plasma audio applet. Apparently this is a PulseAudio issue in that the device’s hardware doesn’t fit cleanly into PulseAudio’s abstraction model! There are some PulseAudio patches to clean things up which I have reviewed. So for now, this is the best we can do:
Adventures in Linux and KDE 