This week we released Plasma 5.21 and have been hard at work fixing the bugs you fine folks have found with it. 🙂 Frankly I’m pretty exhausted after a long week so let’s just get right into it:
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!
Neither Plasma nor the whole session will crash when dragging a file over a Task Manager entry in the Plasma Wayland session (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.21)
Niccolò Venerandi published part two in his video series about how to create a plasma theme:
Leszek Lesner published a video about kio-fuse, which makes it easier to interact with remote files:
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!
Plasma 5.21 is almost here, but we’ve already fixed almost all the issues found during the beta and are hard at work on the next big thing! This includes some very juicy morsels…
KDE Consistency goal leader Niccolò Venerandi has produced a beautiful video showing people the basics of making Plasma themes! Check it out:
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!
We spent the week largely working on polishing up Plasma 5.21 and fixing all the bugs you folks found in the beta! Or internal QA seems to be improving because there don’t seem to be as many this time around, and we’ve already got most of them fixed. Hallelujah! So hopefully 5.21 should be a fairly smooth release. Famous last words, eh?
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!
Well folks, you finally have a chance to test out Plasma 5.21, in beta form! Please do install it and find all the bugs we missed. Bug reports have already started pouring in, and we’ll fix them as fast as we can in the next month. 🙂
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!
This week a huge new feature landed in Konsole: it now reflows the text when you resize the window! This feature can be turned off if you don’t like it, but comes on by default. It works really well. Thanks very much to Carlos Alves and Tomaz Canabrava for this work! It will be released in Konsole 21.04.
Kirigami icons in apps now consume a bit less memory, which will appreciably reduce memory usage for apps that have a lot of icons (David Edmundson, Frameworks 5.79)
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!
This week KWin’s compositing code was almost totally rewritten! It should broadly reduce latency throughout all compositing operations, and also adds a user-facing control in the System Settings Compositing page so people can choose for themselves whether they prefer lower latency or smoother animations. In addition, it brings support for mixed-refresh-rate display setups on Wayland, e.g. one 144Hz screen and one 60Hz screen! This very exciting work was completed by Vlad Zahorodnii and will land in Plasma 5.21.
But that’s not all: Plasma also got a brand new Kickoff menu, which was rewritten from the ground up and fixes more than two thirds of the open issues in the bug tracker! It features a double-pane UI with better keyboard, mouse, touch, and accessibility, RTL support, an alphabetical “All Applications” view, a grid-style favorites view, power actions visible by default with labels, and much more. Here it is:
I’d like to offer a big thanks to Mikel Johnson for this excellent contribution, which will also land in Plasma 5.21. People who liked the old Kickoff can download it from store.kde.org using the “Get new widgets” button in the “Add Widgets” panel. Search for “Legacy Kickoff”.
Gone are the days of being embarrassed during a meeting because your microphone is muted or way too sensitive. This lovely improvement was contributed by David Edmundson and David Redondo, and also lands in Plasma 5.21.
When Discover and the Emoji picker are already open but unfocused, activating them via their System Tray icons or global shortcuts now raise the existing windows properly (David Edmundson and me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.21)
Fixed the Network Speed Widget for people who were seeing that it didn’t work properly for them some of the time (David Redondo, Plasma 5.21)
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!
Mnemonics (those little horizontal lines that appear below letters when you hold down the alt key) now work for Plasma buttons and tabs (David Edmundson, Frameworks 5.78)
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!
2020 was not an amazing year for most of us, but it sure was for KDE and people who use KDE software! Despite the inability to travel and meet for sprints, conferences, and Akademy in person, we kept busy.
I’d like to highlight some of my favorite improvements throughout KDE! Keep in mind this is not even a small fraction of everything that went on. To keep this post from ballooning a hundred pages long, I’ve had to leave out many smaller features, all of the performance and bugfixing work, and tons of KDE apps that I don’t closely follow, including big important ones like Krita, Kdenlive, Digikam, and GCompris. You can find more news at https://planet.kde.org/.
Also, those of you who like podcasts or are audio learners can listen to a condensed version of this post in the Linux Unplugged podcast #385, where I spoke a bit about some of these things:
Roadmap items
From last year’s proposed roadmap, we got FUSE mounts, improved Samba share discovery, automatic screen rotation, and Breeze Evolution visual overhaul work starting to land!
We did not get PolKit privilege escalation, new photo wallpapers, per-screen scale factors on X11, or inertial scrolling in Plasma and QML apps, or power/session actions on the lock screen. Some of these will be punted to next year. More on that tomorrow!
Hardware Partnerships
We created a new page on the kde.org website showcasing the ways that you can get Plasma pre-installed on hardware: https://kde.org/hardware/. It showcases two very exciting new devices:
The superfast Ryzen 4000-powered KDE Slimbook. I wrote a review of it! It’s really good, and it’s one of the few laptops you can buy with the monster Ryzen 4800H CPU.
We had our first virtual Akademy, and it went very well thanks to KDE’s talented sysadmins! You can watch the video recordings of all the talks, workshops, and other content at https://www.youtube.com/c/KdeOrg/videos.
Infrastructure
We began the process of migrating to GitLab at https://invent.kde.org! Thus far we are using GitLab for code review, and are working on migrating the continuous integration system next. After that will be Phabricator Tasks, and then hopefully bug reporting (a man can dream).
We kicked off the year with the Plasma 5.18 Long Term Support version, which was received very well, and is shipped in Kubuntu 20.04 and openSUSE Leap 15.2.
We also did a massive overhaul of the System tray from top to bottom: all of the applets were polished both visually and functionally, most bugs were fixed, various new features were added, and the whole thing was made more cohesive overall.
And remember, this is just a subset of a subset! KDE has over a hundred other apps which you can find out about at https://kde.org/applications. And I didn’t even mention some of the amazing stuff that’s still under development but not yet released, like a firewall control UI for Plasma and totally re-worked compositing in KWin which will result in support >60hz screen refresh rates and mixed refresh rates in multi-screen setups. Stay tuned for more information about that stuff and more. 🙂
Merry Christmas everyone! We have some nice holiday presents for you:
First of all, KDE’s FUSE-based remote location mounter kio-fuse got its first stable release, which means it can now be pre-installed by distros.
That’s not all: we have a new KDE Matrix-based chat app: NeoChat! This app is a fork of Spectral, which a few months ago appeared to have been abandoned by its developer. Carl Schwan and Tobias Fella decided to resurrect it as a KDE project, and they’ve done a smashing job bringing it into the fold. In addition to being a very nice desktop app, it also runs on Plasma mobile and there are early Android builds. I’ve been using it for the last month, and even in an early beta state, I already like it better than Element and every other Matrix client I’ve tried. Check out the official release announcement here: https://carlschwan.eu/2020/12/23/announcing-neochat-1.0-the-kde-matrix-client/
KRunner’s history is now activity-aware by default! This means for example that there will no longer be a data leak if you use an activity with history turned off (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.21)
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!
