This week in KDE: re-organized System Settings

Plasma 6

System Settings’ sidebar has gotten a much-needed re-organization! This is still under development and may change a bit before the final release, so don’t consider the following screenshots 100% final. Probably 90% final. But anyway, but here’s what we’ve got right now (me: Nate Graham, link):

Changed who handles screen arrangements in the Plasma Wayland session: until now, it was KScreen, whereas now for Plasma 6, KWin has absorbed that functionality. This will make it much easier to ensure a good UX here because state will be centralized in one location, rather than having it be synchronized across two components that need to be in communication with one another. This proved fragile throughout Plasma 5. The work has already fixed three bugs, with more to come. Ultimately this means that KScreen is now feature-frozen, and no further changes to multi-screen handling on X11 should be expected in Plasma 6 (Xaver Hugl, link)

While Discover is fetching updates, its progress bar now corresponds much closer to actual reality, instead of being more like a random number generator (Alessandro Astone, link 1 and link 2)

Discover now lets distros opt into turning on dependency auto-remove for apps that are removed with Discover (Alessandro Astone, link)

When the screen resolution or scale changes–which can happen when additional screens are plugged in–the wallpaper now instantly resizes to the new desktop geometry rather than doing an animated fade, which in this context just looked weird and glitchy and broken (Marco Martin, link 1 and link 2)

Improved the Breeze Night Color icon (Philip Murray, link):

Other New Features

Spectacle’s screen recording feature gained support for recording using the VP9 codec (CPU rendering only for now, but GPU acceleration is coming soon). In the process, the default location where screen recordings get saved to has been made customizable (Noah Davis, link 1, link 2, and link 3)

Other Significant Bugfixes

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

Fixed a bug in Discover that could cause it to crash for some people after searching, or even when just launching the app (Harald Sitter, link 1 and link 2)

In the Plasma X11 session, various QtQuick-based dialog windows will no longer be missing their close buttons (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.27.9. Link)

Apps and Plasma can no longer crash when told to use DBus to launch an app with a malformed .desktop file name that’s out of compliance with the spec (David Redondo, Frameworks 5.111. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

3 Very high priority Plasma bugs (down from 4 last week). Current list of bugs
56 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 58 last week). Current list of bugs
91 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed this week. Full list of bugs

Automation & Systematization

Added more GUI tests for the Battery & Brightness widget, the Clipboard widget’s barcode page, and the System Settings Users page’s avatar chooser sheet (Fushan Wen, link 1, link 2, and link 3)

…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

We’re hosting our Plasma 6 fundraiser right now and need your help! If you like the work we’re doing, spreading the wealth is a great way to share the love. 🙂

If you’re a developer, work on Qt6/KF6/Plasma 6 issues! Plasma 6 is usable for daily driving now, but still in need of bug-fixing and polishing to get it into a releasable state by February.

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!

This week in KDE: time for the new features

The floodgates opened this week, and a lot of consequential in-progress work was merged: juicy new Plasma 6 features, long-awaited bugfixes, spicy automated testing, and more!!!

Plasma 6

General info – Open issues: 94

The Overview and Desktop Grid effects have been merged together into one, with fluid and natural-feeling touchpad gestures to transition between all states. It’s really awesome work, and also fixed a ton of open bug reports! (Niccolò Venerandi, link):

In the Plasma Wayland session, there’s now a System Tray monitor that shows you when something is using the camera, just like we already have for screen recording and microphone usage (Fushan Wen, link 1 and link 2):

Floating panels now have nice shadows, and when they de-float, they no longer have ugly chunky margins! Additionally, when the panel is floating, any popups opened from it are floating too, with nice rounded corners on all sides. Oh, and with this blocking work done, we’ve made floating panels on by default! (Niccolò Venerandi, link 1, link 2, link 3, and link 4):

There’s now a new global shortcut (Meta+Alt+L by default) to switch between the current and last-used keyboard layout, which can be useful for people who have more than two layouts but commonly switch between two of them on a regular basis (Mihail Milev, link 1 and link 2)

Icons drawn by Kirigami.Icon–which in Plasma 6 is nearly all of them in KDE’s QML software–now look better and sharper when using a fractional scale factor (Marco Martin, link)

Fixed multiple focus issues in System Settings: it’s now possible to focus the sidebar again after focusing the main page, and also pressing the down arrow key in System Settings’ search field now moves focus to the list view, which is especially helpful after searching for something (Fushan Wen, link 1 and link 2)

Started improving the presentation of the permissions of Flatpak apps in Discover, including using better icons, more user-friendly text, and showing the “sound system access” permission, which we had previously been ignoring (me: Nate Graham, link 1, link 2, and link 3)

The setting to toggle “offline updates” no longer uses that confusing terminology anymore (me: Nate Graham, link):

The “About” pages in System Monitor and Filelight were both ported to the new Form Card style (Carl Schwan, link 1 and link 2)

For a cleaner and less confusing presentation, common shortcut-choosing views now hide the local-only columns when all shortcuts are global, just like we already hide the global-only columns when all shortcuts are local (me: Nate Graham, link)

Made some fixes to monitor handling that should decrease the likelihood of the monitor instantly waking up right after being put to sleep (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.0. Link)

When using the Plasma systemd integration (which is on by default when you have systemd), Plasma is now more comprehensive about killing processes when logging out, which should prevent crashes at logout and dangling zombie processes that can prevent logging in again. This might end up being backported, too! (David Edmundson, link)

When using a Panel on the bottom screen edge, Task Manager tooltips that include media controls are no longer sometimes positioned in the wrong place (David Edmundson, link)

Breeze-themed GTK2 apps no longer look wrong (well, not as wrong, at least) when using a dark theme (Someone going by the pseudonym “Mors Mortium”, link)

It’s now possible to remove a favorite from Kickoff and other launcher menus whose underlying app or file has since been deleted (Méven Car, link)

Page headers throughout Kirigami-based software will no longer sometimes elide titles when there’s plenty of room for them when using certain combinations of fonts and font sizes (Ivan Tkachenko, link)

Other Significant Bugfixes

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

It’s no longer possible for the lock screen to break and show the dreaded “the screen locker is broken” screen due to QML cache corruption as a result of running out of space on the system. To be clear, it can still break for other reasons too, but we are working on tracking those down as well! (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.27.9. Link)

Fixed the actual root cause in KDE software for the “ever-growing ScreenMapping config file key causes Plasma to crash or fail to launch new apps” issue. And that fix also allowed us revert the stopgap fix to cap the number of mappings and fix icons being always unsorted when there was a huge amount of stuff on the desktop (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.27.9. Link)

Fixed multiple issues with Discover’s reviews popup, including being too slow and sometimes failing to load or submit reviews (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.27.9. Link 1, link 2, and link 3)

KMenuEdit once again correctly creates .desktop files with exec= keys that point to executable files that have spaces or other special characters in their file paths (Méven Car, Plasma 5.27.9. Link)

In KRunner and KRunner-powered searches, searching for recent files is once again correctly completely case-insensitive as expected (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.27.9. Link)

Fixed a fairly complex issue that was causing Flatpak-based GNOME apps to display text without any anti-aliasing when run in Plasma (Timothée Ravier, Plasma 5.27.9. Link )

If a touchscreen calibration matrix has been configured, KWin now respects it (someone doing by the pseudonym “The Official GMan”, Plasma 5.27.9. Link)

It’s now possible to use the keyboard to focus buttons in the toolbars of KDE apps using the KXMLGui framework (Felix Ernst, Frameworks 5.111. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

4 Very high priority Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
58 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 59 last week). Current list of bugs
127 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed this week. Full list of bugs

Automation & Systematization

Added basic UI tests for the applets and System Settings pages that live in plasma-workspace! (Fushan Wen, link 1 and link 2)

Fixed various problematic autotests in the Kirigami and KSvg frameworks, and made it mandatory for them to pass before merge requests can be merged (Marco Martin, link 1 and link 2)

…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, work on Qt6/KF6/Plasma 6 issues! Plasma 6 is usable for daily driving now, but still in need of bugfixing and polishing to get it into a releaseable state by the end of the year.

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: an unfrozen panel for NVIDIA Wayland users

Though the number of total Plasma 6 known issues rose this week, we managed to fix some major and longstanding ones from Plasma 5! You might recognize a few in the text below. Ultimately, these were deemed more pressing than the comparatively minor new ones. We’ll be continuing to hammer those bugs, but we do need help–your help! Discovering bugs is important, but so is fixing them, and we need help to get it done.

Plasma 6

General info – Open issues: 90

Fixed the infamous issue of Panels visually freezing in the Plasma Wayland session when using a non-Intel GPU in conjunction with the Basic QtQuick render loop and Task Manager previews turned on (David Edmundson et al, link)

Searching for apps, System Settings pages, and other things classified internally as “services” in KRunner and other KRunner-powered search tools (such as Kickoff) now matches English text as well when using the system in a language that’s not English (Alexander Lohnau, link)

When using a single-row Icons-Only Task Manager, the last opened task on the row is no longer sometimes missing under certain circumstances (Marco Martin, Link)

Fixed a bug that could cause auto-started apps with System Tray icons to sometimes not show their System Tray icons as expected until manually quit and re-launched (David Edmundson, link)

Fixed various cursor glitches and brokenness when using rotated screens in the Plasma Wayland session on a GPU that supports hardware cursors (Xaver Hugl, link)

The “Manually block sleep and screen locking” switches of multiple Battery and Brightness widgets are now synchronized; when one is toggled, all of them will change as well (Natalie Clarius, link)

Repeated messages on the lock screen now do a little bounce, rather than piling up and repeating themselves (me: Nate Graham, link):

Reduced resource usage in QtQuick apps that have mnemonics–those little underlines below letters when you hold down the Alt key (Kai Uwe Broulik, link 1 and link 2)

The menu item that says “Enter Edit Mode” now changes to “Exit Edit Mode” when you’re already in Edit Mode (me: Nate Graham, link)

The Kirigami.BasicListItem component has been deprecated with a planned removal in KF6, because it was too slow, heavy, and inflexible, worsening performance in QtQuick apps that used a lot of them. In its place are a new set of lightweight components that are thin wrappers around the standard Qt ItemDelegate, CheckDelegate etc. components, plus some more basic building blocks for making custom list items. This provides most of the convenience of BasicListItem, without the performance overhead (Arjen Hiemstra, link)

Other Significant Bugfixes

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

Gwenview now displays images more correctly when using a fractional scale factor in the Plasma Wayland session (Kai Uwe Broulik, Gwenview 24.02. link)

Fixed multiple bugs in Elisa that could cause odd and incorrect behavior when you re-arrange the contents of the playlist around the currently-playing song (Jack Hill, Elisa 24.02. Link)

Filelight once again respects the settings regarding folders exclusions and filesystem boundaries (Yifan Zhu, Filelight 23.08.2. Link)

When closing a document in Kate and KWrite that has unsaved changes, you’ll no longer see two dialogs asking you if you want to save them (Kai Uwe Broulik, Kate and KWrite 23.08.2. Link)

Widgets using the standard Plasma Calendar integration will no longer sometimes display holidays from the default region, rather than the selected one (Eugene Popov, Plasma 5.27.9. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

4 Very high priority Plasma bugs (down from 5 last week). Current list of bugs
59 15-minute Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
121 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed this week. Full list of bugs

Automation & Systematization

Added some autotests for MPRIS media playback global shortcuts (Fushan Wen, link 1 and link 2)

…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, work on Qt6/KF6/Plasma 6 issues! Plasma 6 is usable for daily driving now, but still in need of bugfixing and polishing to get it into a releasable state by the end of the year.

This week in KDE: more Plasma 6 dev

This week it was pretty much all Plasma 6 all the time. With the release date four and a half months away, work is kicking into high gear to make sure that we hit our deadline!

Plasma 6

General info – Open issues: 87

Made even more cursor responsiveness improvements for the Plasma Wayland session! The cursor is really very responsive now 🙂 (Xaver Hugl, link)

This work as also substantially improved latency in general, especially for games (Xaver Hugl, link)

Kickoff now has an option to move its sidebar over to the other side of the main view. This has better Fitts’ Law adherence and zero risk of accidental category switching if you use the mouse pointer to activate Kickoff and launch Favorites more often than you activate it with the Meta key or switch categories (Forest Ix, link)

The default keyboard shortcut used to open the Activity Switcher has been changed to Meta+A, so that its prior shortcut Meta+Tab can be used some something else, which is coming soon… (Niccolò Venerandi, link)

When you have Powerdevil configured to hibernate after a period of sleep, invoking sleep using KRunner now respects that preference and hibernates at the appropriate time (Natalie Clarius, link)

Sped up the launch time of Plasma and QtQuick-based KDE apps by loading the mobile text editing toolbar on demand, rather than always (Fushan Wen, link 1 and link 2)

fstab-mounted NFS drives no longer produce duplicate items in the Places panel of various KDE apps and the open/save dialog (Méven Car, link)

Discover now shows release data for SteamOS system updates in a prettier and more comprehensible way (Jeremy Whiting, link)

Discover’s “About” page now uses the newer and more attractive FormCard style (Carl Schwan, link):

A variety of QtWidgets-based dialog windows that have menubars or toolbars now use the common unified header style that KDE’s app windows use (Carl Schwan, link):

Created a new standard component: Kirigami.InlineViewHeader, and ported a bunch of list and grid views to use it (me: Nate Graham, link):

The “Upgrade your distro now” notification message is no longer radioactive (Oliver Beard, link)

Other Significant Bugfixes

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

Spectacle now takes Rectangular Region screenshots correctly when you’re using any screen scale factors less than 100% (Noah Davis, Spectacle 24.02.0. Link 1 and link 2)

Fixed a case where the touchpad daemon could randomly crash (Gabriel Souza Franco and Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27.8. Link)

Fixed a rare case where KWin would crash in the Plasma Wayland session when waking from sleep (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.27.9. Link)

The Alt+Tab window switcher is now fully accessible via the standard Orca screen reader in the Plasma Wayland session (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27.9. Link)

While updating a lot of Flatpak apps at the same time, discover can no longer exhaust the system’s set of available file handles and then fail (Discover 5.27.9. Link)

Automatically turning off the keyboard backlight when on battery power now works, if you’ve configured it to do this (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 6.0. Link)

Fixed a bug that could cause KIO-using apps to crash when trying to overwrite a file under certain circumstances (Kevin Ottens, Frameworks 5.111. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

5 Very high priority Plasma bugs (up from 4 last week). Current list of bugs
59 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 58 last week). Current list of bugs
119 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed this week. Full list of bugs

Automation & Systematization

Added autotests for KHamburgerMenu (Felix Ernst, link)

Added more autotests for window placement in KWin (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Fixed a flaky autotest for the Task Manager in Plasma, and also expanded it to cover more things (Fushan Wen, link)

Fixed a flaky autotest in KIO (Méven Car, 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

This week in KDE: power management galore

This was a big week for backend work, especially on the subject of power management and energy efficiency!

Plasma 6

General info – Open issues: 81

New Features

Welcome Center’s first page can now be customized by distros–or for that matter, by users (me: Nate Graham, link)

User Interface Improvements

The KDE desktop portal implementation now supports the new cross-desktop accent color standard (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27.8 Link)

The separator line between the titlebar/toolbar area in KDE apps and the content below it is now drawn at the correct stroke weight with a high DPI screen (Carl Schwan, Plasma 5.27.8. Link)

KRunner-powered searches now only show you sleep modes that are actually supported by the system, and you can also now find them by searching for the word “power” (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 6.0. Link 1 and link 2)

After the work done last week to improve cursor responsiveness and lower power usage in the Plasma wayland session… we did some more! (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.0. Link)

The notifications about low and critically low battery power are now worded in a shorter and clearer way (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.0. Link)

The Lock/Logout widget no longer changes in height when configured to only show one item (Yannick, Plasma 6.0. Link)

Improved the keyboard navigation and accessibility properties of Discover’s Reviews viewer and entry page (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 6.0. Link 1 and link 2)

Other Significant Bugfixes

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

Fixed a glitch in Dolphin that could cause the view to not display the correct files after clearing the text entered in the search field (Amol Godbole, Dolphin 24.02. Link)

When run in a VM, Plasma now disables auto-suspend as this can sometimes cause the VM to hang (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 5.27.8. Link)

Hybrid Sleep now actually works (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 5.27.8. Link)

System Settings’ Accessibility page no longer erroneously asks you to save your changes when you leave it without having actually made any changes (Jürgen Dev, Plasma 5.27.8. Link)

The Baloo file indexing service no longer re-indexes everything after every reboot when using the Btrfs filesystem (Tomáš Trnka, Frameworks 6.0. Link)

The file dialog is once again capable of saving to files with quotes in their names (Andreas Bontozoglou, Frameworks 6.0. Link)

In various QtWidgets-based apps, star ratings are no longer inaccurate when using icon themes that lack the rating-unrated icon (Felix Ernst, Frameworks 6.0. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

4 Very high priority Plasma bugs (up from 3 last week). Current list of bugs
58 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 57 last week). Current list of bugs
110 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed this week. Full list of bugs

Automation & Systematization

Improved some autotests in Plasma and KPipeWire (Fushan Wen and David Edmundson, link 1 and link 2)

…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

This week in KDE: Custom ordering for KRunner search results

This was a big week for KRunner! In addition, the number of open Plasma 6 issues continues to tick down. Thanks to everyone who’s been making this happen!

Plasma 6

General info – Open issues: 81

You can now manually configure certain types of search results in KRunner to be high priority and hence always appear first in the results list! (Alexander Lohnau, link):

KRunner has also received a lot of performance work (Alexander Lohnau, link)

Landed some nice performance work for KWin as well, including making it do less unnecessary work by avoiding repainting layers of the screen that haven’t changed at all (Xaver Hugl, link)

Did a Plasma performance push too, resulting in various parts of Plasma and System Settings launching in some cases hundreds of milliseconds faster (Fushan Wen, link 1, link 2, link 3, and link 4)

The Breeze icon theme’s “refresh” icon and all other icons that use a similar “circle with arrows” style of iconography have now been updated with a new arrow style that looks nicer (Philip Murray, link):

The Breeze icon theme now has more colorful weather icons to match additional weather conditions supported by various weather providers (Alois Spitzbart, link)

When supported, KRunner and KRunner-powered searches now let you manually initiate “Hybrid Sleep”, which is when the system goes to sleep immediately and then hibernates in a few hours (Natalie Clarius, link):

The Display Configuration widget is now less intrusive on your System Tray, and only appears in the visible part if you’ve enabled Presentation Mode (Fushan Wen, link)

Improved the “your distro shipped Discover without its app backends” message to be shorter and more comprehensible (me: Nate Graham, link)

Explanatory text of placeholder messages found throughout Kirigami-based apps is now mouse-selectable and copyable, and can contain clickable links (me: Nate Graham, link)

User Interface Improvements

Preview thumbnails for HDR images being viewed in non-HDR mode apps are now converted to the sRGB color space, ensuring that they’re actually viewable (Mirco Miranda, kio-extras 23.12. Link)

Konsole’s multi-process architecture gained support for putting each process in its own Systemd cgroup when using (Systemd, of course), which makes them show up correctly as children of Konsole in System Monitor (Theodore Wang, Konsole 23.12. Link)

We now support public holidays in Benin (Lukas Sommer, KDE Frameworks 5.110. Link)

Other Significant Bugfixes

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

Fixed yet another way that Plasma could crash when switching Global Themes (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.27.8. Link)

The Widget Explorer’s category filter once again works for people using the system in a language other than English after we broke this recently, sorry! (David Redondo, Plasma 5.27.8. Link)

Fixed one of the most common random generally unexplainable-to-the-user crashes in Plasma (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.0. Link)

In the Plasma Wayland session, the “Maximized” window placement mode no longer gets inappropriately applied to OSDs (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.0. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

3 Very high priority Plasma bugs (down from 4 last week). Current list of bugs
57 15-minute Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
103 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed this week. Full list of bugs

Automation & Systematization

Added a bunch of autotests for Kirigami.PlaceholderMessage (Ivan Tkachenko, link)

Added a bunch of autotests for the Media Controller widget (Fushan Wen, 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

This week in KDE: tap-to-click by default

This week we weren’t done improving input device defaults; for Plasma 6, touchpad tap-to-click is now enabled by default! If you’re curious about the reasons, click that link.

In addition, convergence is starting to happen. You might notice that the number of open Plasma 6 issues is lower this week than it was last week! A good sign for sure.

Plasma 6

General info – Open issues: 85

In the Plasma Wayland session, text copied from an XWayland-using app now remains on the clipboard after it quits (David Edmundson, link)

In the Plasma Wayland session, dialog windows with parent windows set to live on multiple virtual desktop now always appear on the current virtual desktop (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

System Settings’ minimum window size is now smaller, fitting better into low-resolution 1366×768 screens with thick panels (me: Nate Graham, link)

System Settings’ Printers page has been rewritten in QML for better future maintainability and a more modern and consistent style (Mike Noe, Print Manager 23.12 with Plasma 6. Link):

Icons in Dolphin’s item view now look better and smoother when using a fractional scale factor (Kai Uwe Broulik, Dolphin 23.12 with Plasma 6. Link)

Other User Interface Improvements

In Dolphin, you can now middle-click a file to open it in the first app in the expanded “Open with” list, rather than the default app for its file type (Méven Car, Dolphin 23.12. Link)

.3mf files now display thumbnails showing their 3D model contents (Bernhard Sulzer, Dolphin 23.12. Link)

Other Significant Bugfixes

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

Yet again fixed the ability to monitor NVIDIA GPUs using System Monitor, this time improving compatibility with multi-GPU setups (Oliver Beard, Plasma 5.27.8. Link)

The time that you configure your system to dim the screen after is now respected, instead of the screen dimming in half that time (Konstantin Kharlamov, Plasma 6.0. Link)

Starting a Plasma Wayland session in VirtualBox is now more reliable (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.0. Link)

Improved reliability with symlinked or hardlinked files on Samba shares opened with KIO-using KDE apps (Kevin Ottens, Frameworks 5.110. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

4 Very high priority Plasma bugs (down from 5 last week). Current list of bugs
57 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 59 last week). Current list of bugs
90 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed this week. Full list of bugs

Automation & Systematization

Koko now produces Flatpak bundles with every commit and Merge Request change via its CI system (Tobias Fella, 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

This week in KDE: Double-click by default

This was a week of huge changes and improvements, starting with our headliner! Yes it’s true, by default in Plasma 6, you’ll single-click to select files and folders, and double-click to open them. The patches have now landed, done by me. This remains user-configurable, of course.

But there’s a whole lot more to talk about as well! This is gonna be a big one…

More Plasma 6 awesomeness

General info – Open issues: 87

KWin’s blur effect has been totally rewritten for better reliability. Among other things, this fixes the infamous glitches that have been appearing for people using fractional scale factors as well as the blocky cursor trails for users of NVIDIA and some AMD GPUs (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

When a KDE app crashes and you click on the “Report bug” button in the notification, the DrKonqi crash reporting wizard you’ll see has now been hugely simplified and includes an option to report the crash automatically to our new Sentry-based crash tracker, no need for a Bugzilla account! (Harald Sitter, link):

System Settings’ Autostart page now lets you see the technical details about entries’ startup sequences which lets you debug why they might not be behaving as expected (Thenujan Sandramohan, link):

Cycling through keyboard brightness level keys (e.g. with Fn+Space on many laptops) now shows an OSD for the change (Natalie Clarius, link)

When toggling the keyboard backlight off and back on, it now remembers its previous brightness level (Natalie Clarius, link)

The minimum screen brightness is now always 1, and the minimum keyboard brightness is now always 0, ensuring that the screen backlight never turns off completely at minimum brightness, while the keyboard backlight always does (me: Nate Graham and Natalie Clarius, link 1 and link 2)

The “Alternative widgets” popup has been modernized and now has the typical hover highlight effect (Lukas Spies, link)

It’s now possible to change the wallpaper immediately after changing the desktop containment type (e.g. switching from Folder View to Desktop or back) (Fushan Wen, link)

In the System Tray configuration window, the icons shown to represent the widgets now match the actual icons shown in the System Tray itself (me: Nate Graham, link):

The project to fully remove the concept of icons in the Plasma style has been completed, so now all icons come from the systemwide icon theme. In addition, we have also completed the project to remove the ability to globally change the size of toolbar, dialog, and small icons in some KDE apps that respected these global settings (not all did), in order to reduce the number of ways to scale things on the system so that people will be more likely to use one of the supported methods. For more information about these planned and previously announced changes, see https://pointieststick.com/2023/07/26/what-we-plan-to-remove-in-plasma-6/.

Other User Interface Improvements

Dolphin’s settings window has gotten an overhaul to re-arrange things to be more logical (Dimosthenis Krallis, Dolphin 23.12. Link)

The initial location for Elisa’s “Files” view is now user-configurable but defaults to the system’s “Music folder” location (Me: Nate Graham, Joshua Goins, and Eduardo Bray, Elisa 23.12. Link 1 and Link 2)

KCalc now remembers its window size, and position too on X11 (Gabriel Barrantes, KCalc 23.12. Link)

Apps using the KHolidays framework now have support for holidays in Tanzania (Lukas Sommer, Frameworks 5.110. Link)

Settings dialogs for QtWidgets-based apps now have a search field in the header area that can be used to find settings on individual pages!!! (Waqar Ahmed, Frameworks 6.0. Link):

Improved the Breeze icon for .bak and other backup files (Alexander Wilms, 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.)

Fixed a way that Plasma could crash when launching an app using the Task Manager while its tooltip was open (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27.8. Link)

Implemented a workaround for a weird issue that could cause Plasma to eventually slow down and crash on systems that frequently change monitor arrangements. A better fix will be coming for Plasma 6 (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.27.8. Link)

Fixed a way that taking screenshots using Spectacle could fail in the Plasma X11 session (Noah Davis, Plasma 5.27.8. Link)

Sensors in System Monior and the widgets of the same name now work properly when your system is using the C locale (Maciej Stanczew, Plasma 5.27.8. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

5 Very high priority Plasma bugs (down from 6 last week). Current list of bugs
59 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 60 last week). Current list of bugs
91 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed this week. Full list of bugs

Automation & Systematization

A long-failing test in the plasma-workspace has been fixed, in the process requiring fixes to various things that were actually broken that the text had caught–imagine that! (Marco Martin, link)

Wrote extensive autotests for the Powerdevil profile generator code (Jakob Petsovits, link)

Tests are now required to pass before a merge request can be merged in the plasma-framework, plasma-workspace, plasma-desktop and print-manager repos (Harald Sitter and me: Nate Graham, link 1, link 2, link 3, and link 4)

Changes not in KDE that affect KDE

Firefox now supports the Wayland fractional scaling protocol, so it will be smoother and better looking when using a fractional scale factor (Emilio Cobos Álvarez and Robert Mader, Firefox 118. Link)

Fixed a common way that Qt-based apps could crash when disabling a screen (Axel Spörl, Qt 5.15.12, or the latest snapshot of the KDE Qt patch collection. Link)

Fixed a major graphical glitch affecting people using certain AMD GPUs (Melissa Wen, Linux kernel 6.5. Link)

Sped up the glCopyTexSubImage2D graphical operation on integrated Intel GPUs, which helps various KWin effects (Sviatoslav Peleshko, Mesa 23.3, 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

This week in KDE: porting, Dolphin, and KWin

I wrote about all the porting work done recently for Plasma in yesterday’s Plasma 6 update. That work consumed a lot of time due to a big push to get it all done, so this week there isn’t as much feature work and UI polishing to report. Nevertheless, some good fixes and improvements made it in, especially for KWin and Dolphin!

Plasma 6

General info – Open issues: 82

Copying and pasting files to the desktop that won’t fit there because there’s not enough space now shows a notification explaining the problem (Thenujan Sandramohan, link)

In the Plasma Wayland session, cursors now look better when using fractional scale factors (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

User Interface Improvements

Gwenview now transitions between images more smoothly, or, if it can’t do so because the system is under heavy load, it doesn’t animate the transition at all (Felix Ernst, Gwenview 23.08. Link)

Dolphin’s location bar can additionally now be focused using the Alt+D shortcut (Amol Godbole, Dolphin 23.12. Link)

Ctrl+Scrolling to zoom in Dolphin now goes in the expected direction on Wayland (Amol Godbole, Dolphin 23.12. Link)

In Dolphin, you can now press-and-hold with a touchscreen to enter selection mode for already-selected files or folders too (Steffen Hartlieb, Dolphin 23.12. Link)

Significant Bugfixes

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

When searching in the Kickoff Application Launcher, the initially selected item is now always the first one, not the one that happened to be under the mouse pointer (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27.7. Link)

Fixed another way that KWin could crash in the Plasma Wayland session when clicking on a window decoration tooltip (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.27.8. Link)

In the Plasma Wayland session, alt+tabbing through windows no longer goes in reverse when Caps Lock is on (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.27.8. Link)

Fixed a bug that could cause Night Color to not properly deactivate after waking the computer up from sleep at a time when it would otherwise have already turned off automatically (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.27.8. Link)

In the volume and brightness OSDs, the text “100%” no longer inappropriately wraps across two lines in some languages (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.27.8. Link)

Fixed a bug that could cause some items to be silently skipped when copying a very large number of files (Harald Sitter, Frameworks 5.109. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

6 Very high priority Plasma bugs (up from 5 last week). Current list of bugs
58 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 62 last week). Current list of bugs
113 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed this week. Full list of bugs

Automation & Systematization

Monochrome icons for the Breeze Dark icon theme are now automatically generated at build-time from the light ones, saving a huge amount of manual work! (Noah Davis, Frameworks 6.0. Link 1 and link 2)

…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

This week in KDE: Plasma 6 features

We’re hot on the heels of Akademy 2023, which proved to be a fertile space for collaboration. As a result, in addition to the background work being done to stabilize Plasma 6, a bunch of new features landed too!

Plasma & Frameworks 6

General info – Open issues: 59

Plasma now plays a sound from the active sound theme (more on that in a bit) when a USB device is plugged in or unplugged. And this is configurable, of course! (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 6.0. Link)

You can now change your system’s active power profile (if its firmware and kernel version are modern enough to support the feature) by pressing Meta+B to show a profile chooser OSD similar to the one used to display screen-related options (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 6.0. Link):

The Networks widget now shows an inline message prompting you to log into a network’s Captive Portal page, if it has one (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 6.0. Link):

Dolphin, Filelight, and the Disks & Devices widget now respect the user’s choice of how to display binary units (e.g. MB or MiB) (Jack Hill, Frameworks 6.0. Link 1, link 2, and link 3)
…Wait, you didn’t know we had such a setting? Neither did most people! That’s because it’s currently hidden with no UI. Right now you have to manually add BinaryUnitDialect=2 to the [Locale] group in your kdeglobals file (keep in mind that it doesn’t work well in Plasma 5; only in 6). We will be adding a GUI for it for Plasma 6.

Frameworks 6 has gained support for playing sounds from FreeDesktop-compatible sound themes (Ismael Asensio, Frameworks 6.0. Link)
This work supports the Plasma 6 task to use a brand new sound theme, made by Guilherme Silva and nearly finished now! Bonus points: this sound theme is complies with the FreeDesktop sound theme spec, and we’ve made the current Oxygen sound theme FDO-compatible as well! You’ll be hearing more about this in the coming weeks and months as the work is finalized.

Significant Bugfixes

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

When zooming with a pinch gesture in Okular, the document no longer also scrolls wildly (Nicolas Fella, sponsored by TU Dresden, Okular 23.08. Link)

The feature to focus a specific Plasma panel via custom keyboard shortcut now works (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27.7. Link)

Various settings are now always properly displayed on the System Settings touchpad page, no matter how you access the page (Méven Car, Plasma 6.0. Link)

Many more dual-GPU systems should now have both GPUs detected properly, which unlocks the ability to tell the system to use the more powerful discrete GPU for specific apps (Dave Vasilevsky, Frameworks 5.109. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

4 Very high priority Plasma bugs (up from 3 two weeks ago). Current list of bugs
60 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 61 two weeks ago) Current list of bugs
138 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed over the past two weeks. Full list of bugs

…And everything else

This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! If you’re hungry for more, check out https://planet.kde.org, where you can find more news from other KDE contributors.