This week in KDE: Plasma 5.22 arrives but I bet you’ll want 5.23 once I show you this

This week Plasma 5.22 was released! Overall our focus on stability has paid off, and so far there are no major regressions reported; only a few medium-severity ones which have all already been fixed in Plasma 5.22.1 :). You can read the release announcement, or check out KDE developer Niccolò Venerandi’s lovely video about it:

But something much bigger happened as well: the next phase of the Breeze Evolution initiative was merged, providing a new style for buttons, menu items, checkboxes, radio buttons, sliders, and more! It’s beautiful:

This new style also fixes several bugs plaguing the old styling for these controls, such as sliders becoming invisible when located on a selected list item, and the “default button” of a dialog not being very visually obvious.

The work was implemented by Jan Blackquill in accordance with mockups made by Manuel Jesus de la Fuente and other members of the KDE VDG. It will make its debut in Plasma 5.23. There is a lot of time left to tweak the final appearance as needed, but overall I think it’s really nice and I hope you’re as excited about it as I am!

New Features

Thumbnails for files inside encrypted locations such as Plasma vaults are now generated and displayed as expected, but not saved, to eliminate a data leak (Marcin Gurtowski, Dolphin 21.08)

Kate’s LSP support now extends to the Dart programming language (Waqar Ahmed, Kate 21.08)

Konsole now supports the DECSET 1003 standard, which means that the features in terminal software such as vim which rely on mouse tracking now work (Luis Javier Merino Morán, Konsole 21.08)

This is not strictly speaking a KDE project, but it certainly affects us: the SDDM login manager can now be run as Wayland-native software without needing X11 at all! (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, SDDM 0.20)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Konsole now correctly processes double right-click events (Luis Javier Merino Morán, Konsole 21.08)

emacs xterm-mouse-mode now works in Konsole (Luis Javier Merino Morán, Konsole 21.08)

In the Plasma Wayland Session, additional screens are now detected when using a multi-GPU setup (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.22.1)

The Network Speed widget once again works (David Redondo, Plasma 5.22.1)

The weather widget’s BBC weather data source now works again (they changed the API and we had to react to it) (Joe Dight, Plasma 5.22.1)

In the Plasma Wayland session, the transparent background beind Task Switchers is now always blurred as expected (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.22.1)

In the Plasma System Monitor app, the “Get New Pages” view now opens in a nice overlay rather than a narrow squeezy column (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, Plasma 5.22.1)

Custom shortcuts for “Walk through applications” (bound to Alt+` by default) now work (Andrew Butirsky, Plasma 5.22.1)

The System Settings File Search page no longer sometimes shows a weird duplicated header (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.22.1)

The re-done Autostart page in System Settings now always shows the correct icon for applications set to run at login (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.22.1)

When using a lot of window rules, the System Settings Window Rules page is now much faster to load and display them (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.23)

Disabled pages in System Monitor no longer temporarily become un-disabled if its sidebar is collapsed into icons-only mode (Arjen Hiemstra, Frameworks 5.84)

Other User Interface Improvements

When entering Party Mode in Elisa, the playlist now automatically scrolls to the currently-playing song if it would otherwise be out of view, and also automatically scrolls the view as needed to make sure that any newly-playing songs remain in view (Tranter Madi, Elisa 21.08)

The “Get New [thing]” dialogs now handle situations like the server being down or slow more gracefully (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, Frameworks 5.84):

QtQuick apps using the Kirigami OverlaySheet component no longer let the sheet touch the edges of the window or screen (Devin Lin, 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.

This week in KDE: Plasma 5.22 is nigh

In just four days, Plasma 5.22 will be released, with all the features, bugfixes, and improved Wayland compatibility that we’ve been working on over the past few months! So it’s time to start working on 5.23 features. We also got a lot of work done for our apps too!

New Features

It’s now possible to globally disable IPv6 in the Plasma networks GUI settings (Jan Grulich, Plasma 5.23)

Gwenview now inherits the sorting order from Dolphin if Dolphin is used to open an image, so that you’ll never have that experience of opening an image in Gwenview and navigating to the next one, only to discover that it goes to an image other than the one you expect (Marco Martin, Dolphin and Gwenview 21.08)

You can now add a button to the toolbar in Okular to quickly toggle color-changing modes for the active document (David Hurka, Okular 21.08):

And it remembers the last-used color mode, too

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Adding a new radio station in Elisa now works again (Jerome Guidon, Elisa 21.04.2)

Spectacle’s image annotator module is now correctly translated when using a non-English language (Alexander Volkov, Spectacle 21.08)

Konsole now lets you set your default shell the one with fewer than 3 letters, such as sh (Adriaan de Groot, Konsole 21.08)

In the Plasma X11 session, the keyboard layout change OSD once again appears when the keyboard layout is changed using an “alternative shortcut” trigger (Andrey Butirsky, Plasma 5.22)

Newly-downloaded Plasma System Monitor pages now become available instantly, rather than requiring the app to be restarted (David Redondo, Plasma 5.22)

Fixed various pixel misalignment issues in a few dialogs of the new Plasma System Monitor app (David Redondo, Plasma 5.22)

Applying a Global Theme that includes a new color scheme now results in that color scheme always being correctly applied (Benjamin Port, Plasma 5.22)

Clicking the “Use” button for newly-downloaded items in “Get new [thing]” dialogs once again works (Alexander Lohnau, Frameworks 5.83)

Global shortcuts using the actual ampersand chartacter (&) are now displayed correctly (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.83)

User Interface Improvements

Gwenview now lets you wrap around while browsing using the arrow keys, only shows the “you have reached the end” menu in slideshow mode by default, and lets you disable it entirely if you want (Marco Martin, Gwenview 21.08):

The list item sizes of “Small” and “Medium” for Dolphin’s Places panel are no longer almost visually identical (“Small” is now smaller), and the “Medium” size is now the default, to match the size of list items used in many other places now (Eugene Popov, Dolphin 21.08)

Elisa now uses the F11 hotkey to toggle entering and exiting Party Mode (Tranter Madi, Elisa 21.08)

When using Plasma in a live session (e.g. before installing it), when you connect to a Wi-Fi network, the password is now always stored locally rather than annoyingly asking the user gobbledygook questions about setting up a KWallet wallet to store it (Jan Grulich, Plasma 5.22)

GPU statistics are now only shown in System Monitor widgets and the app of the same name if they are supported by your GPU (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.22)

The System Tray’s Disks & Devices applet no longer lets you futilely try and fail to eject a removable disk that contains the root volume (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22)

The shadows of a maximized window no longer subtly spill over onto adjacent screens of a multi-screen arrangement (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.22.1)

When a virtual keyboard is selected in the Plasma Wayland session, it no longer needs to be manually enabled using its system tray status notifier item before it will ever appear (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.23)

When you click on a panel applet or System Tray item, the highlight effect now touches the panel edge and spans the full width/height of the applet’s click area, and there is a subtle and pleasing line separating the panel from the popup that just opened (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 5.23):

KRunner’s list items have been made slightly taller to accommodate larger icons (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.23)

Plasma no longer sometimes crashes when displaying the events for a day that has exactly 5 events in it using one of the calendar widgets (Carl Schwan, Frameworks 5.83)

The graphs in System monitor widgets and the app of the same name no longer have weird lumps at the ends (Arjen Hiemstra, Frameworks 5.83)

Clicking on category names in the “Open With…” dialog now expands the categories; no need to click on the tiny arrows (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.83)

The error message displayed when you try to add an autostart script for a file that does not exist or is not executable is now clearer (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 5.83)

One more thing

Version 1.2 of KDE’s Matrix chat app NeoChat has been released! It’s a major upgrade that brings NeoChat closer to prime time. I’ve been using it daily, and you should too!

…And everything else

How You Can Help

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

This week in KDE: performance improvements galore

This week a number of performance improvements landed for for areas as diverse as taking screenshots with Spectacle in the Plasma Wayland session, using the Plasma Wayland session in general with an Nvidia GPU, and entering or exiting Elisa’s “Party mode” and resizing the main window.

But that’s not all; we also added a bunch of nice new features and UI improvements:

New Features

Spectacle can now be invoked globally to take a screenshot of the window currently under the cursor using Meta+Ctrl+Print (Antonio Prcela, Spectacle 21.08)

Gwenview can now read embedded color profile information for image formats other than JPEG and PNG (Daniel Novomeský, Gwenview 21.08)

If your keyboard lacks a “mute microphone” key, you can now mute the default microphone using the Meta+speaker mute keyboard shortcut (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.22)

In the Plasma Wayland session, the System Tray now notifies you when something is recording the screen, and gives you the opportunity to cancel it (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.23)

KCommandBar has been added to all KXMLGui-using KDE apps, so you can start using it by hitting Ctrl+Alt+I in Dolphin, Gwenview, Okular, Konsole, Krita, Kdenlive, and so on! (Waqar Ahmed, Frameworks 5.83)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Spectacle is now much faster and more reliable in the Plasma Wayland Session (Vlad Zahorodnii, Spectacle 21.04.2)

Konsole no longer sometimes crashes when using the “random color scheme” setting (Luis Javier Merino Morán, Konsole 21.04.2)

Elisa’s fancy blur effects have been ported to use a lighter weight implementation, hugely improving the app’s visual performance when entering or exiting party mode or resizing the window (Tranter Madi, Elisa 21.08)

Dolphin no longer sometimes crashes when emptying the trash (Ömer Fadıl Usta) Dolphin 21.04.2)

In the Plasma Wayland session, disconnecting an external screen no longer causes all open Qt apps to crash (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.22)

Majorly improved the reliability of the Plasma Wayland session for users of Nvidia hardware with the proprietary driver (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.22)

Fixed a case where the new Plasma System Monitor app could crash on launch (David Redondo, Plasma 5.22)

The new Plasma System Monitor app no longer sometimes crashes when its main window is de-focused (David Redondo, Plasma 5.22)

The new Plasma System Monitor app now displays fully accurate disk usage information (David Redondo, Plasma 5.22)

Launching an app using the Kickoff Application Launcher no longer shows an unnecessary left-slide animation inside the popup before it closes (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.22)

Fixed tons of issues in the System Settings Virtual Desktops page, including a case of broken text display, the “Apply” button not becoming activated when it should, the “Defaults” button not bringing back removed virtual desktops, and several problems with the animation duration chooser (Nicolas Fella and David Edmundson, Plasma 5.22)

On System Settings’ Global Themes page, the “Use desktop layout from theme” button now correctly activates the Apply and Reset buttons (Cyril Rossi, Plasma 5.22)

Fixed a recent regression that could cause Dolphin to crash when searching for files (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 5.83

User Interface Improvements

Gwenview has now adopted KHamburgerMenu, giving it a cleaner look and a more approachable set of actions when the menubar is hidden (Noah Davis, Gwenview 21.08):

As a reminder, if you hate this, you can simply show the menu bar and the hamburger menu will disappear

Discover’s “Installed” view is now case-insensitive for searching (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.22)

The System Tray’s arrow uses to show the pop-up with hidden applets in it no longer appears when using the “Show all entries” setting (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.22)

The new Plasma System Monitor app now lets you search for multiple search terms separated with commas, just like the old KSysGuard app did (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.23)

Users are now told what they will be losing when they disable file indexing (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.23)

The Virtual Keyboard System Tray applet (which appears in the Plasma Wayland session) now disables itself completely if you have disabled the virtual keyboard globally (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.23)

On System Settings’ Virtual Desktops page, you can now double-click on a desktop’s name to rename it, and while you’re in renaming mode, the “Rename” button turns into a “Confirm new name” button (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.23)

Auto-generated avatar images used in various places in Plasma and apps now use flat colors for the backgrounds, rather than gradients (Jan Blackquill, Frameworks 5.83)

…And everything else

How You Can Help

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

This week in KDE: KCommandBar delivers ludicrous-mode productivity

This week I have another exciting new UI element to present: KCommandBar! You might have gotten the impression by my fawning over KHamburgerMenu that we care more about casual or novice users today… not so! KCommandBar is an expert-focused UI element implementing a HUD-style popup that aggregates all of the actions in a KDE app’s full menu structure, so that you can quickly activate features at the speed of thought! It’s like a KRunner inside your apps. You can also use it as a search, if you think a feature may exist somewhere but you don’t know where.

Hmm, does kate have a Block Selection mode? How do I activate it?

Oh, like that!k

Notice how it shows you the action’s keyboard shortcut too, so you can learn how to activate it even faster next time!

This UI element has been merged into the code but not yet rolled out for all KDE apps. Once this merge request is merged, all QWidgets-based KDE apps that use our KXMLGui framework (which is to say, most of them) will automatically get this feature for free! Big thanks to Waqar Ahmed for creating it!

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Dolphin’s split view closing animation no longer briefly shows the wrong view content in the left view before being closed (Felix Ernst, Dolphin 21.08)

Plasma no longer sometimes crashes when using the Audio Volume widget with full PipeWire support (David Redondo, Plasma 5.22)

In the Plasma Wayland session, connecting or disconnecting an external screen no longer sometimes immediately causes Plasma to crash (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.22)

In the Plasma Wayland session, windows that automatically close themselves no longer get stuck on the screen as half-transparent phantoms if you happened to have been dragging them at the moment when they closed themselves (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.22)

We pushed a better fix to prevent the network applet from erroneously showing a huge traffic spike the first time you open it that should hopefully fix it for good this time (David Redondo, Plasma 5.22)

System Monitor widgets now display the correct information when located on a panel (David Redondo, Plasma 5.22)

The new Plasma System Monitor app no longer sometimes visibly flickers when table views of apps or processes are updated (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.22)

In the Plasma Wayland session, sub-menus of hamburger menus from interactive notifications (e.g. for newly-taken screenshots) no longer open in their own separate windows (David Redondo, Plasma 5.22)

In the Plasma Wayland session, showing the titlebar app menu no longer temporarily makes an item named “KDE Daemon” appear in your Task Manager (David Redondo, Plasma 5.22)

In the Plasma Wayland session, Aurorae window decorations are no longer visually corrupted when using high DPI scaling (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.22)

When using the Breeze application style, the cursor no longer gets stuck in the “double headed arrow” shape when first moving over a resizable divider and then into a terminal panel, as in Dolphin (Fabian Vogt, Plasma 5.22)

The Icons-Only Task Manager’s “currently playing audio” indicator no longer overlaps with its numbered badge when the badge is visible (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.22)

The adaptive panel transparency feature and the Minimize All applet now work properly when using KWin’s “keep thumbnails for minimized windows” setting (Bharadwaj Raju and Abhijeet Viswa, Plasma 5.22)

In the Plasma Wayland session, external screens are now detected properly on multi-GPU systems (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.23)

Selecting folders in the folder selector dialog for Flatpak apps and others using XDG portals now works (Bharadwaj Raju, Frameworks 5.83)

When using a recent version of Qt, automatic spellchecking in Kate and KDevelop and other KTextEditor-based apps once again works out of the box without need to be turned off and back on again (Antonio Rojas, Frameworks 5.83)

User Interface Improvements

The tabs at the bottom of Gwenview’s sidebar now become icons-only at very small widths where the text would have previously been elided, and become icons+text at very wide widths (Noah Davis, Gwenview 21.08):

Dolphin’s Trash entry in the Places panel now has a context menu item to open the trash settings window (Saravanan K, Dolphin 21.08):

In Elisa, the inline Play button for playlist items now resumes playback when paused, rather than going back to the beginning of the song (Tranter Madi, Elisa 21.08)

System Tray applets with hamburger menus no longer redundantly show the same configure action inside them that is already visible available as a button on the header itself (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22):

In the new Plasma System Monitor app, you can now terminate the selected process/app by hitting the Delete key, just like you could in KSysGuard (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.22)

Clicking on any of the media controls on the lock screen no longer takes the keyboard focus away from the password field (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.22)

Using the Task manager’s “cycle through tasks with mouse wheel” no longer un-minimizes minimized tasks (Abhijeet Viswa, Plasma 5.22)

Widgets on the desktop now have a blurred background, making them more legible and better-looking compared to the previous transparent-without-blur background (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.23):

Retro wallpaper shows the effect better!

The Audio Volume applet’s Applications tab now distinguishes between applications that are currently playing or recording audio, and those that are not (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.23):

The System Settings Boot Splash page has been moved to the “Appearance” category (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22)

…And everything else

How You Can Help

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

This week in KDE: the Plasma 5.22 beta is here!

This week we finished up the last of our feature work for Plasma 5.22, so go test out the beta! We also started on 5.23 feature work, fixed a bunch of Wayland issues, and polished up our apps a bit more. Check it out:

New Features

The Digital Clock applet now has an option to display timezones not as their code or city name, but rather the offset from UTC time (Momo Cao, Plasma 5.22):

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Okular now correctly renders embedded PNG images in .cbz comic book files (Albert Astals Cid, Okular 21.04.2)

Gwenview now uses a standard Qt-provided graphics component for its image view, which fixes a common display corruption bug when panning and zooming, reduces memory use, and improves responsiveness, particularly with pinch-zoom gestures (Arjen Hiemstra, Gwenview 21.08)

In the Plasma Wayland session, the Plasma Browser Integration app no longer crashes in a loop when Firefox asks whether or not it can be your default browser, which it does too often due to a bug in Firefox itself when the GTK_USE_PORTAL=1 environment variable is set, as it is by default in Neon and Fedora (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.22)

In the Plasma Wayland session, KWin no longer sometimes crashes when an external display goes to sleep or is disconnected (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.22)

The new Plasma System Monitor app no longer crashes on close after switching pages many times (David Redondo, Plasma 5.22)

When using the Systemd startup feature, you can now unlock your session using the command-line loginctl utility (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.22)

In the Plasma Wayland session, dragging-and-dropping Task Manager Tasks to the Pager applet to move them to different virtual desktops now works (David Redondo, Plasma 5.22)

In the Plasma Wayland session, the optional titlebar button that shows a window’s menu structure no longer strangely appears as a separate window, and navigating it with the keyboard also now works properly (David Redondo, Plasma 5.22)

The new Plasma System Monitor app no longer sometimes shows two “Name” columns in various table views (David Redondo, Plasma 5.22)

The new calendar no longer renders too many dots in Month and Year views (Carl Schwan, Frameworks 5.83)

Fixed the most common binding loop (which cause log spam as well as reduced performance) in QtQuick-based apps (Arjen Hiemstra, Frameworks 5.83)

Plasma tab buttons with both icons and text once again center the content–this time without letting the text overflow! (Noah Davis, Frameworks 5.83)

User Interface Improvements

Dolphin has now adopted KHamburgerMenu, which has allowed us to tweak the contents of the hamburger menu to be vastly more relevant, less redundant, less intimidating, and less likely to overflow on small screens. All the features are still there, just re-organized so that the common ones are easier to access and the uncommon ones are no longer so in-your-face (Felix Ernst, Dolphin 21.08):

What’s really cool is that it responds to your customizations. For example, because I’ve added the “Add New…” action to my toolbar, it isn’t in the hamburger menu. But I’ve removed the “Filter…” action, so it goes into the hamburger menu.

Gwenview’s default toolbar layout has been tweaked for greater simplicity and user-friendliness (Felix Ernst, Gwenview 21.08):

Made various UX improvements to Okular’s quick annotation tools such as making them toggle-able, remembering the last-used one, and keeping the quick annotation tools distinct from the complex full toolbar view (Simone Giarin, Okular 21.08)

The System Tray Printers applet has been made simpler and more consistent by changing its Configure button to open the relevant System Settings page and moving its applet-specific options into the hamburger menu, just like the Disks & Devices applet does (me: Nate graham, print-manager 21.08):

You can now disable the “Open Terminal” item in Dolphin’s context menu (Alexander Lohnau, Dolphin 21.08)

When Dolphin is showing hidden files, they are now all placed after all the visible ones, rather than before them (Gastón Haro, Dolphin 21.08)

Using Kate’s feature to show the differences between the open version of a file and the version of it that was just updated on disk no longer populates lists of recent files with temporary “.diff” files (Méven Car, Kate 21.08)

The “Translucency” desktop effect is now disabled by default, so windows no longer become slightly translucent when moved or resized (me: Nate Graham and Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.23)

The System Tray Bluetooth applet’s “Add New Device” button now lives in the header, becoming consistent with other System Tray applets (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22):

It’s now possible to have the icons in your Icons-Only Task Manager automatically sorted by various criteria (alphabetically, by desktop, etc) exactly as you can do for the traditional Task Manager (Marko Gobin, Plasma 5.22)

…And everything else

How You Can Help

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

This week in KDE: UI improvements abound

Plasma 5.22 is just around the corner, and we put the finishing touches on some UI improvements to it, as well as our apps! Check it out:

New Features

You can now limit the update interval of System Monitor graphs (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.22)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Fixed an obscure way that Konsole could crash when opening its Settings window (Carlos Alves, Konsole 21.04.1)

Gwenview no longer gets confused and sad when asked to open a document whose mimetype does not match its filename extension (Arjen Hiemstra, Gwenview 21.08)

Fixed a way that Plasma could crash immediately upon login when using certain System Tray items, or when switching keyboard layouts (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.22)

Clicking the “Sleep” button when using Systemd startup mode with an older Systemd version no longer turns the computer off instead of putting it to sleep (Yaroslav Sidlovsky, Plasma 5.22)

Fixed an odd bug that could occasionally cause KRunner to not activate or deactivate when pressing its global shortcut (Fabian Vogt, Plasma 5.22)

When you tell the Clipboard applet to clear history and it asks you if you really want to proceed, clicking “No” after checking the “don’t ask again” checkbox no longer breaks the “clear History” functionality forever; it will now ask you again the next time! (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.22)

Used swap space is now visible in the new Plasma System Monitor app’s Memory graph (David Redondo, Plasma 5.22)

Opening a .flatpakref file in Discover for an already-installed app no longer presents an odd error (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.22)

Discover no longer shows an “Uninstall” button on update pages where it doesn’t make sense (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.22)

The button to configure your screen reader in System Settings’ Accessibility page now actually uh works (how embarrassing) (Carl Schwan, Plasma 5.22)

The kdeinit5 process no longer crashes either randomly or constantly when trying to generate thumbnails during semi-common operations like taking screenshots, copying files, etc (Fabian Vogt, Frameworks 5.82)

User Interface Improvements

Ark now shows a “welcome screen” of sorts if you open it without an archive, and also opens to a saner window size (Jiří Wolker and me: Nate Graham, Ark 21.08):

Spectacle’s options for what to copy after taking a screenshot (if anything) have been substantially clarified in the settings window, and the setting to copy the file path to the clipboard now works even if autosave is turned off (it saves the file to a temp path) (Srevin Saju, Spectacle 21.08):

Gwenview’s sidebar has received a visual refresh to be more in line with current KDE user interface guidelines (Noah Davis, Gwenview 21.08):

Dolphin’s tags menu in the search view now has a “Clear selection” button so those of you who make extensive use of tags can more easily start a new tag-based search (Ismael Asensio, Dolphin 21.08)

The Notifications applet’s “Clear all notifications” action has been moved out of the hamburger menu to make it more accessible, and the applet’s “Configure” button now opens the System Settings Notifications page rather than a mostly empty applet configuration window (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22):

The System Tray Notifications pop-up now closes when the last notification is cleared by using the manual close buttons in the view instead of the “Clear all Notifications” button (Eugene Popov, Plasma 5.22)

Discover’s Sources menu is now accessible and usable with the keyboard (Carl Schwan, Plasma 5.22)

System Settings’ Audio Volume page no longer shows unused and inapplicable settings when the system is using the new PipeWire-PulseAudio compatibility system (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.22)

The Task Manager’s “Highlight windows” feature now only triggers when you hover the cursor over a window thumbnail, which makes it useful and not annoying, so we turned it on by default (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.22)

The System Tray Vaults applet’s “Create new Vault” button now lives in the header, to match the design of other System Tray applets (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22):

The System Tray Battery & Brightness System applet’s header has received an overhaul: the “Configure” button now opens the relevant System Settings page rather than a mostly-empty applet config window, and that window’s only option has been made into a checkable item in the Hamburger menu (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22):

And yes, we know that the “Configure Energy Saving…” item in the hamburger menu is redundant. This is a known bug that will hopefully be fixed soon.

System Settings’ own settings window is no longer too small (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22)

The corner radius of KWin-drawn titlebars now respects the scale factor on X11 (Paul McAuley, Plasma 5.22)

There’s no longer a little empty space on the right edge of a non-maximized panel (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.22)

Dolphin’s breadcrumbs bar now displays more user-friendly text for search results (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 5.83)

The System Settings Browser Identification page has been removed because it was almost completely pointless in this day and age (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 5.83)

…And everything else

How You Can Help

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

This week in KDE: Support for GPU hot-plug and FreeSync, and so much more

This was another really really big week in KDE!

First we got support for hot-plugging GPUs and FreeSync/Adaptive Sync/variable screen refresh rates on Wayland in Plasma 5.22, thanks to Xaver Hugl!

Next, thanks to Aleix Pol, Gonzalez, we got a new Wayland protocol for tracking app activation and hand-off which will eventually allow KDE apps to display visual feedback when launching, and bring forward existing windows of already-open apps when asked to display new content!

And then there’s the rest of this cool stuff! See if you can count how many of your longstanding annoyances have been addressed below:

Other New Features

Konsole now lets you save your current layout to a file, and load saved layouts at will (Lucas Biaggi, Konsole 21.08)

Spectacle now lets you copy the image’s path to the clipboard right there from the main UI, and performs whatever action is necessary to make that possible (e.g. saving the image if you ask for the path) (Srevin Saju, Spectacle 21.08):

KHelpCenter now has a “Full Screen” mode (Yuri Chornoivan, KHelpCenter 5.7.6.21080)

In the Plasma Wayland session, you can now choose which virtual keyboard to use, or disable it entirely if that’s your thing (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.22)

The Digital Clock’s pop-up now displays an “Add…” button that opens Kontact so you can add events, and also shows days with any events using pretty dots rather than ugly triangles (Carl Schwan, Plasma 5.22 and Frameworks 5.82):

It’s now possible to configure normal-priority notifications to appear in your full-screen windows, so for example you can (optionally, of course) still see them while watching fullscreen video or reading documents in Okular’s fullscreen view (Oleksandr Popel, Plasma 5.22)

The new Plasma System Monitor app now remembers the last page you were viewing by default, but if you want, you can instead set it to open a specific page every time (David Redondo, Plasma 5.22)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Improved the visibility of selected text in Konsole (Jan Blackquill, Konsole 21.04.1)

Konsole no longer crashes when you enter an absurdly long string into it (like 6000 characters long) and then immediately maximize the window (Carlos Alves, Konsole 21.04.1)

After using the Trim to Selection tool in Okular, the Browse tool is once again automatically activated (Gerd Wachsmuth, Okular 21.04.1)

Video thumbnails now work again when using distro packages with ffmpeg 3 but not 4 (Xuetian Weng, KDE Gear 21.04.1)

Plasma’s Folder View widget (which handles desktop icons) now calculates icon positions correctly from the top-left corner of the top-left-most screen, which fixes various bugs such as icons on the last column moving over to the left-most column after a reboot or after creating new icons, or icons on non-left-most screens being mis-positioned out of the view and making the whole desktop scrollable (Oleg Solovyov, Plasma 5.21.5)

Renaming items on the desktop using the keyboard shortcut (F2 by default) now works in the case when the icon was selected using its little plus sign button that appear when you hover the mouse over it while using the default single-click mode (Tobias Fella, Plasma 5.21.5)

The Plasma Wayland session no longer hangs at login when booting in basic/fallback graphics mode (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.22)

In the Plasma Wayland session, KWin no longer crashes when you apply firmware updates (using Discover or just with the fwupdmgr command-line tool) with a touchscreen laptop or a graphics tablet connected (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.22)

Konsole no longer hangs when using the top/bottom split feature and the Oxygen application style (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.22)

Plasma can no longer freeze by viewing year 0 in the calendar (Alois Wohlschlager, Plasma 5.22)

Opening an audio or video file from Dolphin no longer causes the “now playing audio” indicator to appear on Dolphin as well as the app that’s actually playing it (Méven Car, Plasma 5.22)

Changing your system icon theme or using an AppImage no longer sometimes causes all System Tray icons to temporarily become invisible (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.22)

Removed recently-accidentally-added default global shortcuts for the “Reboot/Halt/Log Out Without Confirmation” actions, because actions like these are too dangerous to have default global shortcuts (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22)

KWin now has better support for the Panfrost Mali driver (Tomasz Gajc, Plasma 5.22)

System monitor widgets and the new app by the same name no longer indicate that you have no CPUs under certain circumstances (lol) (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.22)

It’s no longer possible to try to remove the entry for your home folder in the System Settings File Indexing page, because this isn’t a valid action and doing so doesn’t work (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22)

In the Plasma Wayland session, sub-menus of context menus for Plasma applets no longer bizarrely appear as separate windows with their own titlebars and everything (lol) (David Redondo, Frameworks 5.82)

The “Get new Plugins” window no longer displays spurious error messages when you cancel the installation of a plugin (Alexander Lohnau, Frameworks 5.82)

Fixed one of the ways that Kirigami-based apps could crash when displaying icons (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Frameworks 5.82)

User Interface Improvements

Elisa’s Now Playing page has undergone a UI overhaul which sees the introduction of a two-column layout in widescreen mode, collapsing to a multi-view one-column layout in narrow mode. You can also turn off the blurred album art background on that page if you don’t like it (Tranter Madi, Elisa 21.08):

Elisa’s Shuffle and Repeat buttons are now a bit more comprehensible by showing their checked states when active and making the tooltip clear that it is describing the current state, not the action that will be performed when you click on the button (Tranter Madi, Elisa 21.08)

Dolphin’s Information Panel now updates in real-time as the file for which it is displaying information gets updated by any other apps and when the size changes for a folder for which it is displaying information (Méven Car, Dolphin 21.08)

The Buttons in Gwenview’s status bar now have correct sizing and outside margins (Noah Davis, Gwenview 21.08):

The “Go up” button in Filelight is now disabled when you’re viewing the root level of your filesystem (Burak Hancerli, Filelight 21.08)

The Kickoff application launcher menu now implements a Triangle Menu Filter, which means that you can move the cursor diagonally over the categories list to reach the items in the view without accidentally switching categories! So we have also removed the irritating hover delay when moving the cursor vertically to switch categories! (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.22)

KRunner now shows multi-line text for long dictionary definitions! (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.22):

KRunner no longer returns duplicate or pseudo-duplicate search results, such as “Launch Firefox” and also “launch firefox” (the terminal command) (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.22)

What counts as a default setting in System settings now takes into account the settings of the active Global theme; for example when using the Breeze Dark Global Theme, the Breeze Dark color scheme is considered the default color scheme (Henri Chain, Plasma 5.22)

The Battery & Brightness applet’s user interface for communicating the ability to temporarily inhibit sleep and screen locking has hopefully been made much more comprehensible, and also takes up less space (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22):

When using a multi-screen setup, apps and windows are now opened by default on the screen containing the cursor (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.22)

You can now double-click on the grid items in System Settings to quickly apply the settings for the double-clicked-upon item without having to reach down and hit the Apply button (Wael Chlouftou and me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22)

Discover’s application page now has an improved layout including more standard-style cards for reviews (Carl Schwan, Plasma 5.22):

GTK apps using the libhandy library–particularly for its tab bars–now look more native when run on Plasma (Jacob Kauffmann, Plasma 5.22):

The now-visible-by-default Panel in the Present Windows effect is now darkened along with the background to communicate that it’s non-interactive (Felipe Kinoshita, Plasma 5.22)

The Audio Volume applet’s tooltip now shows the user-friendly name of the current audio output rather than its technical name (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.22)

GTK apps now use Breeze-style arrows in menus and various other places (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22):

Middle-clicking System Monitor applets now opens the new Plasma System Monitor app (David Redondo, Plasma 5.22)

Discover’s “Updates” jump list action has been clarified so that it no longer seems identical to other similar actions in search results (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22):

Various keyboard shortcuts can now be used to manipulate the volume of the currently focused stream in the Audio Volume applet: the numbers 0-9 to change the volume, M to mute, Enter/Return to make it the default one, and Menu Key to open the menu (Chris Holland, Plasma 5.22)

The Clipboard applet no longer features a “Quit” action, because you can’t actually quit it (Eugene Popov, Plasma 5.22)

Scrolling over the Battery & Brightness applet to change the brightness now works more consistently and predictably with both a high-resolution touchpad as well as a traditional mouse wheel (Bernhard Sulzer, Plasma 5.22)

Shadows behind the clock text in the lock and login screens has been slightly lightened when displayed above light backgrounds so that it doesn’t appear so sharp and harsh (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22)

A variety of QWidgets-based KDE apps will no longer have absurdly small 640×480 pixel default window sizes (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.82)

Web shortcuts now display their icons by default (Ismael Asensio, Frameworks 5.82)

…And everything else

Keep in mind that this blog only covers the tip of the iceberg (though this week it was perhaps a bigger tip than usual)! 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

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

This week in KDE: Overflowing with UI and accessibility improvements

This week we have the usual assortments of bugfixes and little new features here and there that you’ve come to expect, but the real focus was on user interface and accessibility improvements–and there is a truly massive amount of them! You would be forgiven for skipping straight to the “UI Improvements” section. 🙂

New Features

When renaming files in Dolphin, you can now quickly start renaming the next or previous file as well by hitting the Tab/Shift+Tab key, or even the up or down arrow keys while in Details view (Michal Sciubidlo and Méven Car, Dolphin 21.08)

The System Settings File Search page now lets you check on the status of indexing and temporarily pause or resume it, or monitor its current status. And if you disable indexing, it now offers you the opportunity to delete the index database on disk (me: Nate Graham and David Edmundson, Plasma 5.22):

The Plasma Browser Integration feature now notifies you when a download hasn’t started yet because the browser is waiting for you to click the “Yes I accept the risk of downloaded files blah blah blah” button (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.22):

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Changing the icon size of Dolphin’s Places panel sidebar and then reverting the change now results in the list items having the correct spacing again (Harald Sitter, Dolphin 21.04.1)

In the Plasma Wayland session, Plasma no longer crashes when dragging a file over the panel (Alois Wohlschlager, Plasma 5.21.5)

You know that annoying bug with the volume percentage being sometimes adjusted by too much or too little that we thought we had fixed? It was not in fact actually fixed, but now we re-did it to be actually fixed this time, honest! (Chris Holland–so you know it was done right, Plasma 5.21.5)

You know that other annoying and recurring bug where the applet configuration menu in panel edit mode with a top or left panel sometimes disappears right when you move the mouse over it? That’s finally fixed for real too! (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 5.21.5)

The Cover Switch and Flip Switch task switchers now work properly again (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.21.5)

The new Plasma System Monitor app no longer sometimes loses the names of processes after modifying columns (David Redondo, Plasma 5.21.5)

Comboboxes in GTK apps now use the correct dropdown arrow icon (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.21.5)

The System Tray’s blue indicator line now appears in the right place after performing an action that causes the current’s visible applet to become hidden (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.22)

Discover’s “get addons” feature for Flatpak apps no longer shows an empty dialog before taking you to the real content (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.22)

KRunner-powered calculations now perform exponentiation operations for numbers with real superscripted exponents; i.e. entering “8²” will produce the correct result of “64” (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.22)

Excluding certain folders from the file indexer now works properly when for some reason the $HOME environment variable ends with a slash (Oded Arbel, Frameworks 5.82)

Fixed one way that the file indexer could crash when trying to index a moved or renamed folder (Oded Arbel, Frameworks 5.82)

Clicking on the darkened area behind a pop-up sheet in Kirigami-using KDE software once again closes the sheet (David Edmundson, Frameworks 5.82)

Checkboxes in QtQuick-based desktop apps now elide long text and show underlines for alt-accelerators (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.82)

User Interface Improvements

In Elisa’s Now Playing page, the status bar on the bottom now correctly shows the “Show In Folder” action when there’s space, sticks it in an overflow menu when there’s not, and elides the file path from the left side when space gets really limited (Tranter Madi, Elisa 21.04.1):

Okular now lets you disable seeing those big notification messages about embedded files, forms, and signatures (Okular 21.08)

The System Settings Shortcuts page is now accessible and keyboard-navigable (Carl Schwan, Plasma 5.22)

The “Most Used” category icons in the System Settings Quick Settings page are now accessible and keyboard-navigable (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22)

The Plasma Calendar applet and the popup for the Digital Clock applet which includes it have been completely re-done to look vastly more modern and consistent (Carl Schwan, Plasma 5.22 and Frameworks 5.82):

Next we’re going to replace those little spiky triangles with dots

Task Manager window thumbnails now display a nice little drop shadow behind themselves (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22):

Re-did the legends for system monitor graphs, which particularly improves the presentation for CPU graphs when there are a lot of cores (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.22):

System Settings’ Virtual Desktops and Desktop Effects pages now support the “Highlight changed settings” feature (Benjamin Port, Plasma 5.22)

Klipper’s history pop-up (shown with Meta+V by default as of Plasma 5.22) now uses more user-friendly text (Felipe Kinoshita, Plasma 5.22)

Your Plasma Panels no longer totally disappear while the Present Windows effect is active, and app icons are now larger and appear in the center of the window (Felipe Kinoshita, Plasma 5.22):

The Show Desktop effect now just hides all your windows while it’s in use, rather than keeping little half-visible phantoms of them visible in the corners (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22):

When you trash a screenshot from the notification in the history view (not a pop-up on screen, but from its entry inside the System Tray applet) it now disappears afterwards (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.22)

The new Plasma System Monitor app now defaults to sorting “Applications” views by memory usage, rather than by name (Felipe Kinoshita, Plasma 5.22)

The new Plasma System Monitor app now has a “Report Bug…” item in its hamburger menu (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.22):

The Battery applet no longer shows a silly little empty overlay when using the “Show Percentage” option but with no batteries. This could happen I suppose if you have one of those rare laptops that still has hot-swappable batteries (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22)

The Battery applet now opens the Energy Saving page in System Settings, not in a funny little standalone window (Eugene Popov, Plasma 5.22)

Grid items in System Settings pages are now fully accessible and keyboard-navigable (Jan Blackquill, Frameworks 5.82)

Grid items in System Settings pages now display their inline actions for the currently-selected item as well as the hovered one, improving usability on touch and discoverability for everyone (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.82):

When the file dialog ever has to display a progress bar while it’s loading the view, the progress bar is now aligned properly (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.82)

The “Open or execute” dialog is now modal, so it’s no longer possible to accidentally show it multiple times and launch multiple instances of an application (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.82)

Icons on your Plasma panel now resize more gradually when changing the panel thickness (Niccolò Venerandi, Frameworks 5.82)

Web Presence

Did you ever want to know exactly how Plasma Panels work? Niccolò Venerandi would love to show you in exhaustive detail:

One more thing

Technically this is not in KDE, but it’s relevant to us nonetheless: the SDDM login manager can now run the greeter without needing root privileges! The work was done by Pier Luigi Fiorini and will land in SDDM 0.20.

…And everything else

How You Can Help

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

This week in KDE: Offline updates are now optional

I have good news for those of you who are upset by KDE Neon moving to offline updates by default: we’ve made a GUI setting to turn it off (there was already a CLI setting). I get that the nerdy tech crowd is not super thrilled by this new more Windows 10-style update mode. But though you might find it annoying, it really does improve your system’s stability. I can point to literally hundreds of bug reports about problems caused entirely by not rebooting the computer after installing updates. However, in KDE we want you to be in control, so starting in Plasma 5.22, you’ll be able to enable or disable offline updates to suit your preference. This work was done by Aleix Pol Gonzalez:

And yeah, all these update-related options live in System Settings, not in Discover itself

Other New Features

In the Plasma Wayland session, the Global Menu widget now includes a Search field that you can use to quickly locate menu items! (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.22)

Discover has gained the ability to update distros using rpm-ostree, such as Fedora Silverblue and Fedora Kinoite (Mariam Fahmy, Plasma 5.22)

In the Plasma Wayland session, screen-casting will now enter “Do Not Disturb” mode by default (though this can be overridden, if desired) (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.22)

You can now set screens’ overscan values in the Plasma Wayland session (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.22)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Hugely improved Gwenview’s speed, responsiveness, and memory usage when loading and navigating large grid views, particularly for files located on network locations (Arjen Hiemstra, Gwenview 21.08)

Entering your password in the Networks applet no longer causes the networks list to re-arrange itself while you’re typing and sometimes send your password to the wrong network! This has been a problem for quite a while, and we tried various targeted fixes that never fully worked; this time we went for the nuclear option that should finally solve it once and for all! (Jan Grulich, Plasma 5.21.5)

The new Plasma System Monitor app no longer crashes when you select a new display style for any of the sensors (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.21.5)

Sending files to Bluetooth devices from Dolphin now works again (Egor Ignatov, Plasma 5.21.5)

Discover once again displays firmware updates for eligible devices (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.21.5)

It is now possible to specify a usergroup for OpenConnect VPNs (Aaron Barany, Plasma 5.21.5)

Long names in System Settings’ Users page no longer overflow (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.21.5)

Fixed one of the ways that KWin can crash when using a multi-GPU system (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.22)

In the Plasma Wayland session, KWin no longer sometimes crashes when showing Task Manager thumbnails or ending a screen recording/streaming session (Alois Wohlschlager, Plasma 5.22)

Accented and dead keys now work in the Plasma Wayland session when the virtual keyboard is available (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.22 with Qt 5.15.3 plus KDE’s backported patches)

The Present Windows effect now works in the Plasma Wayland session when activated from grouped Task Manager entries (David Redondo, Plasma 5.22)

The new S.M.A.R.T. monitoring system no longer erroneously warns you that VirtualBox disks are broken when they’re not, or tracks the status for devices without S.M.A.R.T. support at all (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.22)

When using the new Systemd startup feature, processes that crash at logout or login can no longer either block re-login, or fail to get started at login in circumstances under which they would otherwise launch normally (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.22)

System Settings no longer sometimes crashes when navigating from one QtQuick-based page to another (Jan Blackquill, Frameworks 5.82)

List Items throughout QtQuick-based KDE software no longer exhibit excessive left padding for their icons (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.82)

User Interface Improvements

Digital signatures in Okular are no longer drawn with scary red text (Albert Astals Cid, Okular 21.04)

When dragging a document in Okular using the mouse, the cursor now wraps around horizontally when you reach the edge of the screen, just like it already does vertically (David Hurka, Okular 21.08)

On systems with slow PackageKit implementations (such as openSUSE-based distros), Discover now presents the initial view a bit more accurately while metadata is still being loaded (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.22)

In the new Plasma System Monitor app, any page with a search field now focuses that search field by default when the page is loaded, so you can always start typing right away to search (David Redondo, Plasma 5.22)

The Bluetooth applet’s section separator now visually matches that of the Networks applet (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22):

Web Presence

Pablo Marcos re-did Okular’s website to be nice and modern, with the help of Carl Schwan:

…And everything else

How You Can Help

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

This week in KDE: Activities on Wayland

This week the Wayland train continued barreling on, full speed ahead! We picked up a bunch of nice fixes and a big feature:

New Features

The “Activities” feature now mostly works on Wayland! There are a few remaining things to implement to make it 100% comparable to the X11 version, but that should get done in time for the next Major Plasma release (Kevin Ottens, Plasma 5.22)

Sticky Note widgets now have an option to change the font size (Shantanu Tushar, Plasma 5.22):

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Zooming in and out in Okular now works correctly when using the “Trim Margins” feature (Gerd Wachsmuth, Okular 21.04)

Media9 PDF movie annotations can once again be played in Okular (Albert Astals Cid, Okular 21.04)

When using Okular’s “Invert Luma/Lightness” setting, the loading page now retains its correct color (David Hurka, Okular 21.04)

Ark can now un-archive zip files with Windows-style backslashes used as path separators (João Silva, Ark 21.08)

Fixed a bug in the Breeze application style that could manifest as a big ugly black square appearing in KMail (Fabian Vogt, Plasma 5.18.8)

Fixed one way that Plasma could crash right after login (John Zimmermann, Plasma 5.21.4)

The Plasma Wayland session will no longer crash if you plug in an external screen while in a non-GUI session (e.g. a virtual terminal) (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.21.4)

The Bluetooth applet’s tooltip no longer displays the wrong name of the currently connected device. I originally fixed this 9 months ago in Plasma 5.19.1 but somehow the fix was never merged into Plasma 5.20, so it got broken again. That has now been corrected (me: Nate Graham with help from James John, Plasma 5.21.4)

Ultra-wide screens with a 21:9 aspect ratio are now displayed as “21:9” in System Settings’ Display Configuration page, rather than “64:27” (lol) (Felipe Kinoshita, Plasma 5.21.4)

Fixed one way that KWin could crash with certain low-power embedded GPUs (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.21.5)

Maximized GTK app windows are no longer positioned too high in the Plasma Wayland session (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.21.5)

Discover’s ability to show you an app’s dependencies now works again (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.21.5)

Disconnecting a screen in the Plasma Wayland session no longer causes all Qt apps to crash (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.22)

Global shortcuts are now working even on non-US keyboard layouts (Andrey Butirsky, Plasma 5.22 in conjunction with a Qt version that has this pending patch integrated)

Plasma no longer lags or hangs when displaying a massive number of tooltips for grouped Task Manager tasks (Aleksei Nikiforov, Plasma 5.22)

The kglobalaccel5 daemon can no longer block re-login by crashing on the previous log-out and then getting stuck (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.22 or Frameworks 5.82; whichever one you get first)

When using a multi-screen setup, the lock screen no longer only displays typed text on the text field of the left-most screen, even if you clicked on the text field on a different screen (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.22)

The Task Manager’s “Highlight windows when hovering over tasks” feature now works in the Plasma Wayland session (David Redondo, Plasma 5.22)

Kate and other KTextEditor-based apps no longer crash if you delete an open file on disk and choose the “Close file, discarding contents” option in the warning message that appears in the app (Christoph Cullmann, Frameworks 5.82)

Fixed a rare case where Kate and other KTextEditor-based apps could crash when dragging text (Waqar Ahmed, Frameworks 5.82)

Context Menus for text fields inside Kirigami overlay sheets are no longer displayed below the sheet content (Noah Davis, Frameworks 5.82)

In Kate and other KTextEditor-based apps, the code completion pop-up no longer sometimes take up the whole screen width (Waqar Ahmed, Frameworks 5.82)

Text in Plasma tab buttons (such as in the new Kickoff menu) now gets elided when there’s not enough space, rather than overflowing (David Edmundson, Frameworks 5.82)

User Interface Improvements

Konsole’s “Edit Profile” window now displays errors inline, rather than using an ugly modal dialog window (Ahmad Samir, Konsole 21.04):

Okular’s “Continuous” mode is now considered to be a document-specific setting (like the zoom settings are), rather than a global setting (Mahmoud Khalil, Okular 21.08)

Items in the System Settings KWin Scripts now use the “pending deletion” pattern used in many other pages, whereby deleting an item only marks as it as in a “pending deletion” state and it only actually gets deleted when you click the “Apply” button (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.22)

System Tray applets now receive keyboard focus when opened, so they can be interacted with using the keyboard (Eugene Popov, Plasma 5.22)

Hover buttons in the Clipboard System Tray applet’s list items are now top-aligned for tall ones, so that the trash button doesn’t shift around according to height, which makes it easy to click on that button repeatedly to manually prune your history list (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22):

Discover no longer shows a huge weird rapidly-disappearing tooltip while loading the Updates page if the cursor is over any part of it (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22)

The tooltip for the window decoration button used to keep a window above all others now makes its purpose more clear (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22):

The previously somewhat confusing “Keyboard Indicator” applet has been renamed and given a UI overhaul to clarify what it is and what it does (Andrey Butirsky and me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22):

The Task Manager tooltip now visually indicates when it’s scrollable by displaying a visible scrollbar (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22)

When using the systemwide double-click mode, it’s now possible to disable “click a selected file’s label to rename it” feature for desktop icons, just as it is in Dolphin (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22)

Discover’s view of an app’s dependencies has received a visual overhaul and now also shows you the exact name of the package for the app in question and also groups the dependencies by installation status (Aleix Pol Gonzalez and me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22):

Looks like this will install all of GNOME; guess I don’t wanna do that

All the grid view pages in System Settings now sort items case-insensitively (me: Nate Graham and Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.22)

Plasma list items now have left and right margins that are consistent with their top and bottom margins (Noah Davis, Frameworks 5.82)

Various message dialogs throughout KDE software no longer display pointless tooltips saying, “Yes” and “No” when you hover your cursor over buttons whose own text may already be “Yes” and “No”! (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.82)

Web Presence

Check out Niccolò’s video about how to set up a development environment and submit a merge request. Very handy for audiovisual learners!

…Read that as “dev env” not “ded end” lol

…And everything else

How You Can Help

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