Author: Nate

This week in KDE: 5.17 and beyond

We’re mid-cycle in Plasma 5.17 and still working hard to fix bugs and regressions, while planning for Plasma 5.18, our next LTS release! There’s also been continued work on our apps. Check it out:

New Features

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

User Interface Improvements

How You Can Help

Qt 6 is around the corner! …And everything will need to be ported to use it. But don’t worry, the 5 -> 6 transition promises to be a relatively smooth one thanks to the Qt folks working hard on compatibility and us having already started the work of porting our software away from deprecated APIs. on that subject, it’s a great way to help out if you’re into backend work and appreciate a clean codebase. Check out the Phabricator workboard for the KF6 transition to learn more!

More generally, have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved and find out more 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, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

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

This week in KDE: bug squashing and more

This week we continued fixing bugs in Plasma 5.17! We know that it was a bit buggier than the 5.16 release was, and we strive to do better. If you’d like to help out with this, please test our Plasma beta releases by switching to the unstable/beta testing repos in your rolling release distro of choice. For example, Arch and openSUSE Tumbleweed. Beta releases of KDE apps will show up in these repos as well. It’s super fun! Try it, you’ll like it! 🙂

New Features

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

User Interface Improvements

How You Can Help

I mentioned testing Beta releases earlier, but here’s something else! Do you like the idea of running a KDE-endowed free software operating system on your phone? I know I do. But did you know that KDE already has a mobile platform called Plasma Mobile? It’s real and it works and it needs your help to become mainstream! If this sounds like your cup of tea, check out https://www.plasma-mobile.org/findyourway/. You can read the Plasma Mobile project’s weekly updates in a format similar to this one here: https://www.plasma-mobile.org/blog/

More generally, have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved and find out more 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, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

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

This week in KDE: Goodbye Noble Cashew

Plasma has a brand-new way to edit and customize widgets and panels: a global “edit mode” that can be entered using the context menu for the desktop and panel, or pressing-and-holding on the desktop with a touchscreen. While in this mode, widgets and panels are editable and movable. This solves a number of problems and yields the following improvements:

  • The Desktop toolbox (that little hamburger menu in the corner of the screen that nobody liked) is now gone forever!
  • The modes are now much clearer, with “Locked” mode being a mostly hidden thing for system administrators.
  • The panel toolbox button (the “two sliders” icon at the end of your panel) is now hidden unless you’re in the global edit mode, which means that the bottom-right-most pixel of the screen can be used to trigger the Present Windows widget, or any other widget you put at the very end of a panel.
  • Editing widget size and position is much faster while in this new edit mode.
  • The panel context menu has been made more useful, and now displays more panel-related actions.

Here’s a video of it in action:

This work was mostly done by Marco Martin, with assistance from Björn Feber, and ideas from many others in the KDE VDG. The remaining rough edges will be polished before the release of Plasma 5.18 (which is an LTS release, let us not forget). Overall I find it to be a huge improvement!

But wait, there’s more! Much, much more…

(Other) New Features

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

User Interface Improvements

How You Can Help

Check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved and find out ways to help be a part of something that really matters. You don’t have to already be a programmer. 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 in KDE: fixing all the things

Plasma 5.17 was released this week to glowing reviews! As with most new releases, our loyal users wasted no time in finding all the bugs we missed! So you know what that means, right? We all burned the midnight oil fixing the problems you found, and Plasma 5.17.1 will be released in just a few days with everything we’ve knocked out so far (detailed below) so never fear!

New Features

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

User Interface Improvements

How You Can Help

Check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved and find out ways to help be a part of something that really matters. You don’t have to already be a programmer. 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 in KDE: Plasma 5.17 approaches

Lots of great backend work happened this week which is very important, but not terribly flashy. And most of the in-progress work I alluded to last week hasn’t landed yet. So I’m afraid the user-visible changes will have to be a bit light this week. But fear not! For Plasma 5.17 is undergoing its last rounds of final polish and bugfixing before the release next week, and work churns along on lots of great stuff slated for Plasma 5.18 and the next apps versions!

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

User Interface Improvements

How You Can Help

Check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved and find out ways to help be a part of something that really matters. You don’t have to already be a programmer. 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 in KDE: apps, apps apps!

It’s been a big week for Dolphin with some new features, plus various improvements for other apps. Among them, KDE developer Christoph Cullmann went on a High DPI rampage and and fixed visual glitches in Kate and Okular on Windows when using a High DPI scale factor, and made great progress towards fixing the infamous line glitches in Konsole when using fractional scaling. Though still not quite perfect, it’s much better now.

Beyond that, a bunch of great things are in development which I can’t announce yet, but I guarantee that you’ll like them once they land in the coming weeks!

New Features

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

User Interface Improvements

How You Can Help

Check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved and find out ways to help be a part of something that really matters. You don’t have to already be a programmer. 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 in KDE: Towards Plasma 5.18

With Plasma 5.17 due to be released in less than two weeks, developers are working hard to polish it up. It’s also time to look forward towards Plasma 5.18. Features are already starting to land and it promises to be another very cool release!

There’s lots of great stuff in the apps world too, including that Filelight is now in the Microsoft Store! KDE truly is all about the apps. 🙂

New Features

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

User Interface Improvements

How You Can Help

Check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved and find out ways to help be a part of something that really matters. You don’t have to already be a programmer. 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 in KDE: a metric avalanche of amazing things

Get ready for a massive load of improvement! And it’s all pretty darn shiny too because in addition to a ton of work on apps, we polished up Plasma to be as smooth as a marble for the 5.17 beta version (numbered 5.16.90), which is now available. The final product is due to be released in about a month, and as you’ll see, KDE contributors have been hard at work making it as awesome as humanly possible! A few things have slipped until the Plasma 5.18 LTS release, but that’s okay because it means 3 more months to polish them up.

Oh, one more thing before we begin: like Kate, Okular is now also available on the Microsoft store! This work is so important because Windows users who become accustomed to using free open source software on Windows are more easily able to switch to a fully FOSS platform, like a Linux distro running KDE Plasma. 🙂

New Features

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

User Interface Improvements

How You Can Help

Do you like the idea of enticing Windows users by making KDE apps more available to them? If so, check out this post by Kate developer Christoph Cullmann. Relevant skills include build systems, packaging, and promotion It’s very important work, and a key part of the new “all about the apps” initiative.

You can also check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved, and find out other ways to help be a part of something that really matters. You don’t have to already be a programmer. 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 in KDE

See, I told you I’d continue to blog about the cool things that have happened in KDE-land. 🙂

On that subject… Kate is now available for free on the Microsoft Store! So far the ratings are quite good. 🙂 KDE has always aspired to make our apps available to as many users as possible, and getting them on today’s distribution platforms continues that.

For those of you who switched from Windows or macOS, think back to how helpful it was that a bunch of your favorite apps (Firefox, Chrome, VLC, LibreOffice, Inkscape, Blender, Krita, etc) were already available on Linux and you already knew how to use them. Getting more of our apps on other platforms is a key part of easing the transition for future generations of switchers. 🙂

Beyond that, it’s been a somewhat light week because everybody was off at Akademy planning the future. A lot of really great things got discussed and decided, the results of which should start to trickle into subsequent weeks’ blog posts. 🙂 So stay tuned!

New Features

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

User Interface Improvements

How You Can Help

This is a new section I’m adding to these weekly blog posts, highlighting a new way to get involved every week!

Do you have any web design experience? KDE community members are currently working on redoing the ancient and inconsistent assortment of websites hosted on kde.org, and help is needed! If this sounds like your cup of tea, join the kde-www mailing list and check out the tasks on the Phabricator Workboard.

You can also check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved, and find out other ways to help be a part of something that really matters. You don’t have to already be a programmer. 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 Usability & Productivity: Week 87

This is the last week in KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative (next week the blog posts will continue, but under a new name). The voting results are in for KDE’s new goals and the community-selected winners are full Wayland support, consistency throughout the KDE ecosystem and software, and a renewed focus on KDE apps. Read all about it here!

But meanwhile, there’s a ton of stuff to announce right now, so let’s jump right in.

Serendipitously enough, something big landed this week that’s relevant to the first new goal: fractional scaling on Wayland!!!

Check out the complicated dependency tree of patches that were required to make this happen:

Veteran KWin developers Roman Gilg and David Edmundson have been working on this for ages, and all of their hard work–which will land in Plasma 5.17–is much appreciated. But wait, there’s more!

New Features

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

User Interface Improvements

Next week, your name could be in this list! Not sure how? Just ask! I’ve helped mentor a number of new contributors recently and I’d love to help you, too! You can also check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved, and find out how you can help be a part of something that really matters. You don’t have to already be a programmer. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

If you find KDE software useful, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.