People are always saying that they want us to slow down on the features and focus on stability for a while. Well, we’ve heard you and we’re doing just that for Plasma 5.26 in general, and specifically are focusing almost entirely on bug work during the one-month beta period. The results so far have been tremendous! I suspect everyone reading this post should find something in the “Significant Bugfixes” section to be happy about! Possibly multiple things. This is the time to file your beta bugs! They’ll get fixed quickly. Let’s all help to make Plasma 5.26 the most stable release ever!

New Features

Kdenlive has now adopted KHamburgerMenu, so if you turn off its normal menu bar (which remains visible by default), you can still access its full menu structure (Julius Künzel, Kdenlive 22.12. Link)

If your keyboard has a “Calculator” button, pressing it will now open KCalc (Paul Worrall, KCalc 22.12. Link)

User Interface Improvements

The global Edit Mode toolbar now has a nicer and smoother enter/exit animation (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.24.7. Link)

The Plasma Media Player and Notifications plasmoids are now grouped with system services rather than app status indicators, so your apps’ System Tray icons will always be together in a group, without these plasmoids appearing in random-seeming positions among them (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.26. Link)

You can once again switch tabs in Kickoff the Ctrl+Tab shortcut, and now also the standard ones too (Ctrl+PageUp / Ctrl+PageDown and Ctrl+[ / Ctrl+]) (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.26. Link)

The marks you make on the screen using the Mouse Mark effect now appear in screenshots and screen recordings (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.26. Link)

On the lock screen, you can now zoom in and out, and clear the password field with the semi-common-ish Ctrl+Alt+U keyboard shortcut (Ezike Ebuka and Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.26 and Frameworks 5.99, Link 1 and link 2)

Tooltips throughout Plasma and QtQuick-based apps now smoothly fade in and out when they appear and disappear (Bharadwaj Raju, Frameworks 5.99. Link 1 and link 2)

Significant Bugfixes

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

In the Plasma Wayland session, Plasma no longer sometimes crashes when dragging items from Kickoff that aren’t on the Favorites page to somewhere else (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.24.7. Link)

On System Settings’ Fonts page, the sub-pixel anti-aliasing and hinting settings now reflect the true state of reality on first boot as configured by your distro, rather than inaccurately always saying that the system is using RGB sub-pixel anti-aliasing and slight hinting (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.24.7. Link)

Also fixed the most common Plasma crash, which could happen sometimes when searching using KRunner (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.26. Link)

Fixed the second-most-common Plasma crash, which could happen sometimes when dragging widgets out of the widget explorer (Fushan Wen, the latest release of the KDE Qt patch collection. Link)

Desktop widgets and icons no longer randomly move around and reset their positions sometimes when you log in! (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.26. Link 1 and link 2)

When using an NVIDIA GPU in the Plasma Wayland session, clicking on Kickoff’s panel button now always opens it as expected (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.26. Link)

On the subject of NVIDIA, we also fixed a major issue with NVIDIA GPUs that could cause various elements of Plasma to be visually corrupted after the system wakes from sleep (David Edmundson and Andrey Butirsky, Plasma 5.26. Link 1, link 2, and link 3)

Right after the system wakes up, the desktop is no longer displayed for a moment right before the lock screen appears (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.26. Link)

In the Plasma Wayland session, dragging files to Firefox now works properly again (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.26. Link)

Un-maximizing a maximized window while using a floating panel no longer leaves a weird shadow floating in space (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.26. Link)

The desktop context menu’s “Add Panel” sub-menu no longer shows non-functional items for “Empty Grouping Plasmoid” and “Empty System Tray” (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.26. Link)

In the Plasma Wayland session, those of you using the latest Frameworks plus Plasma 5.25.5 should now see your widgets and notifications positioned in the right place (Xaver Hugl, Frameworks 5.99 or else distro-patched 5.98. Link)

Floating panels and the corners of Plasma dialogs/popups no longer exhibit the customary dots and other visual glitches you’ve become accustomed to 🙂 (Niccolò Venerandi, Frameworks 5.99. Link)

Fixed yet another way that some Kirigami-based scrollviews using a recent version of the KDE Qt patch collection could display an unnecessary horizontal scrollbar (Marco Martin, Kirigami 5.99. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

• 11 Very high priority Plasma bugs (down from 17 last week). Current list of bugs
• 44 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 45 last week). Current list of bugs
• 190 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed this week. That’s a lot! Full list of bugs

Something worth noting is that this week we made our Bugzilla bot start automatically promoting bugs to be 15-minute bugs or very high priority bugs to reduce the manual work for bug triagers. As a result, the total numbers kept going up this week as the bug bot did its work to re-classify old bugs. So the fact that we still managed to keep ahead of that and reduce the totals on net–and during a Plasma beta period too, when people are filing more bug reports than average–is very impressive to me!

…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, fix Plasma 5.26 beta bugs! Let’s make this bug list empty before the final release!

Beyond that, check out our 15-Minute Bug Initiative. Working on these issues makes a big difference quickly! Otherwise, 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 we have, like, a quadruple whammy. We released the Plasma 5.26 beta, annihilated a huge number of high profile bugs, added new features, and improved the UI throughout Plasma!

New Features

Ark has now been ported to use KHamburgerMenu for a cleaner default user interface (Andrey Butirsky, Ark 22.12. Link):

Not quite a new feature, more like a brought-back-from-the-dead feature, but anyway… You can once again use a flag+label style for the Keyboard Layout plasmoid (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.26. Link):

You can now add an “Open Terminal” menu item to the desktop context menu if you want (Neal Gompa, Daniel Vrátil, Jan Grulich, Marc Deop, and Rex Dieter, Plasma 5.26. Link):

Info Center now has a page where you can see support info and technical details about the KWin window manager, which can be useful when filing bugs (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.26. Link):

User Interface Improvements

The opening/closing animation speed for the Overview, Desktop Grid, and Present Windows effects has been changed back to what it used to be: 300ms (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.26. Link)

When previewing the color temperature adjustment on System Settings’ Night Color page, the message that tells you what’s going on is now in an OSD, not inline on the page (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 5.26. Link)

When the virtual keyboard is visible, there’s now always a button in the System Tray to close it, even when you’re not in Touch Mode (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.26. Link)

You can now close notification pop-ups by middle-clicking on them (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.26. Link)

The Plasma Widget Explorer, Alternatives pop-up, and all Plasma plasmoids that use expanding list items can now be navigated entirely using the arrow keys (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.26. Link 1, link 2, and link 3)

You can now use the Ctrl+Alt+[arrow keys] keyboard shortcuts to re-arrange items in Kickoff, the Quick Launch plasmoid, and the Task Manager (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.26. Link 1, link 2, and link 3)

Inactive Breeze-themed tab bar tabs are no longer quite so distractedly dark when using a dark color scheme (Waqar Ahmed, Plasma 5.26. Link)

Switching to the next month, year, or decade in the Digital Clock plasmoid now shows a nice animation (Tanbir Jishan, Plasma 5.26. Link)

The Networks and Bluetooth plasmoids now display relevant actions in their context menus for faster access (Oliver Beard, Plasma 5.27. Link 1 and link 2):

When using the “Accent color from wallpaper” feature, the accent color generated by the system should now look significantly nicer, better reflecting the most eye-catching color in the image (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.26 with Frameworks 5.99. Link)

The “Download new Wallpapers” dialog’s footer now looks better and isn’t visually broken (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.99. Link 1 and link 2):

Standalone links in Kirigami-based apps now always have an underline, so you can more easily tell they’re links (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.99. Link)

Significant Bugfixes

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

When using an NVIDIA GPU in the Plasma Wayland session, the Application Launcher menu once again always appears when you click on its Panel icon (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.26. Link)

Dragging windows in the Desktop Grid effect once no longer uses a visually broken animation (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.26. Link)

When the Overview, Present Windows, and Desktop Grid effects are activated with a screen corner, continuing to push the pointer into the corner when the effects are already open no longer closes them immediately (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.26. Link)

Scrolling on the desktop to switch virtual desktops now always works (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.26. Link)

Even though we haven’t fully finally for-realsies fixed the issue of Plasma desktops and panels being scrambled or lost, panels should now at least be less likely to get lost (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.26. Link)

It’s once again possible to tell identically-named screens apart in the System Settings Display & Monitor page’s screen view and “Identify” feature (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.26. Link 1 and link 2)

In the Plasma Wayland session, your keyboard delay and repeat rate settings are now respected (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.26. Link)

A variety of fixes were made to make autostart apps more likely to autostart successfully when using the Systemd startup feature: Systemd itself is now more tolerant of minor issues in autostarted desktop files, and both KMenuEdit and the properties dialog make it harder for you to create or edit a desktop file in a way that’s invalid (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.26 with Frameworks 5.99 and systemd 252. Link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, and link 5)

In the Plasma X11 session, KDE apps now correctly remember their window sizes and positions on multi-screen arrangements (Richard Bízik, Frameworks 5.99. Link)

Using a touchpad to scroll through scrollable lists in Kirigami-provided overlay sheets should just kinda be a lot less janky in general (Marco Martin, Frameworks 5.99. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

• 15 Very high priority Plasma bugs (down from 20 last week). Current list of bugs
• 46 15-minute Plasma bugs (same as last week, but this is because a few new ones were added to replace ones that were fixed). Current list of bugs
• 143 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed this week. 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.

How You Can Help

If you’re a developer, check out our 15-Minute Bug Initiative. Working on these issues makes a big difference quickly! Otherwise, 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 we’re getting ready for the Plasma 5.26 beta and focused on bugfixing and UI polish. Expect more of this over the next few weeks!

New Features

While in Touch mode in the Plasma Wayland session, you can now force the Maliit Virtual Keyboard to appear even if it didn’t appear automatically (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.26. Link)

In System Monitor and the Plasma widgets of the same name, you can now query sensors for your CPUs’ minimum, maximum, and average temperature and frequency (Alessio Bonfiglio, Plasma 5.26. Link)

User Interface Improvements

Gwenview can now open GIMP’s .xcf files (Nicolas Fella, Gwenview 22.08.1. Link)

Elisa now shows you a user-friendly message explaining what didn’t work when you drag-and-drop non-audio files onto it (Bharadwaj Raju, Elisa 22.12. Link)

In Kickoff, Flatpak apps now show the “Uninstall or Manage Add-ons” menu item in their context menus (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.24.7. Link)

Info Center pages now have a visually obvious “Copy to Clipboard” button you can use to copy their entire text to the clipboard (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.26. Link)

Night Color now has a simpler interface for turning it on and off: now the “off” status is a part of the combobox to choose the activation time, rather than being a second checkbox (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.26. Link):

The User Switcher widget no longer has a confusing “Leave” button that shuts down the computer; this has been replaced with a “Log out” button that, well, logs you out! (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.26. Link)

Significant Bugfixes

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

Connecting to Windows Samba shares now works when using samba-libs 4.16 or higher, because they changed a behavior out from under everyone and we had to work around it! (Harald Sitter, kio-extras 22.08.2. Link)

Fixed another common source of KWin crashes in the Plasma Wayland session when plugging or unplugging screens (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.25.5. Link)

KWin no longer crashes when waking up from sleep with the “KDE Snap Assist” script active (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.26. Link)

KRunner’s code is no longer overridable by 3rd-party Plasma themes, making them no longer capable of breaking it such that it can’t be opened, which, yes, was totally a thing that sometimes happened (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.26. Link)

The KWin crossfade effect is back, meaning that you will once again see a nice cross-fade when maximizing and de-maximizing windows, and when moving between panel tooltips (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.26. Link)

Apps and windows on the Task Manager are now much more resistant to being accidentally dragged when you mean to just click on them (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.26. Link)

In the Plasma Wayland session, panel tooltips once again morph using the KWin Morphing Popups effect (Marco Martin, Frameworks 5.99. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

• 45 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 49 last week). Current list of bugs
• 20 Very high priority Plasma bugs (down from 21 last week). Current list of bugs
• 121 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed this week. 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.

How You Can Help

If you’re a developer, check out our 15-Minute Bug Initiative. Working on these issues makes a big difference quickly! Otherwise, 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.

We’re getting close to the Plasma 5.26 beta and plenty of features have landed before the soft feature freeze–the point at which new features need discussion before being merge-able. Many are mentioned below! But now, the idea is to focus on bugfixing and UI polish for the next six weeks before the final release of Plasma 5.26, and assistance is greatly appreciated. If you’re a developer who’s excited about Plasma, the time to fix bugs is now! Which bugs? These bugs! Pick a bug and fix it!

New Features

On System Settings’ Night Color page, you can now set a day color in addition to a night color for maximum flexibility (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 5.26. Link):

Discover now displays content ratings for apps that support them! (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.26. Link):

Discover now lets you change the name used for submitting a review (Bernardo Gomes Negri, Plasma 5.26. Link)

Discover now has a “Share” button on each app’s details page that lets you send a link to the app to someone else (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.26. Link)

Discover now checks to make sure there’s enough free space before updating, and warns you when there isn’t (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.26. Link)

You can now configure what happens when you activate a window that’s currently living on another Virtual Desktop: you get switched to that window’s Virtual Desktop (the default setting) or the window jumps to your current Virtual Desktop (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 5.26. Link):

User Interface Improvements

When using a multi-monitor setup, window position is now remembered on a per-screen basis, so when screens are plugged in and unplugged, windows that have not been manually moved will be automatically moved to the last screen they were known to be on (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.26. Link)

Bluetooth device pairing/permission/etc notifications will now appear even when you’re in Do Not Disturb mode, so you don’t miss them (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.26. Link)

The Color Picker widget’s popup now features a placeholder message when there are no colors in it, and it lets you remove saved colors (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.26. Link 1 and Link 2)

The compact representation of a standalone Media Controller widget (not the one that appears in the System Tray by default) now shows you the title, artist, and album art of the currently-playing track (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.26. Link):

You can now also zoom in using the Meta+Plus keyboard shortcut, which should be easier for people with ISO keyboards than the old default of just Meta+Equals (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.26. Link)

Significant Bugfixes

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

When your battery reaches the “critically low” threshold, the screen will no longer be inappropriately brightened if it was already under the brightness level that it would be automatically set to (Louis Moureaux, Plasma 5.24.7. Link)

Applying a cursor theme that inherits itself no longer renders you unable to log into your user account (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.25.5. Link)

In the Plasma Wayland session, KWin no longer sometimes crashes when dragging an attachment from Thunderbird (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.25.5. Link)

In Discover, clicking the button to delete the user data for for a no-longer-installed app that came from a local Flatpak bundle (not a more common .flatpakref file or an app from a remote repo) no longer deletes all user data for all Flatpak apps (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.26. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

• 49 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 46 last week). Current list of bugs
• 21 Very high priority Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
• 112 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed this week. 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.

How You Can Help

If you’re a developer, check out our 15-Minute Bug Initiative. Working on these issues makes a big difference quickly! Otherwise, 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 we merged support for re-binding the buttons of your multi-button mouse! You can assign buttons to keystrokes or keyboard shortcuts. Thanks to David Redondo, who implemented this for Plasma 5.26!

But that’s not all: we have much more, including a ton of work on Discover!

Other New Features

Elisa now defaults to saving playlist files with relative paths internally when the music files they reference live in the same folder–which is what most other music players do–but this can be changed if you prefer your playlist files to always contain absolute paths (Yerrey Dev, Elisa 22.12. Link)

Kate now has a keyboard macro feature! (Pablo Rauzy, Kate 22.12. Link)

Discover now lets you choose the frequency with which it notifies you about new updates! And within those frequencies, it’s now less aggressive about notifying you; no longer will you have the experience of updating, rebooting, and then immediately getting a notification about another update! Finally, this frequency UI also controls the frequency of automatic updates, if you’ve got those enabled. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.26. Link 1 Link 2 Link 3):

User Interface Improvements

Dolphin no longer pointlessly tells you “User canceled action” when you canceled an operation before confirming or completing it (Kai Uwe Broulik, Dolphin 22.08.1. Link)

When using Discover in mobile/narrow mode, clicking on a non-parent category in the drawer now automatically closes the drawer (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.25.5. Link)

System Settings’ Audio page now features a streamlined layout with smaller list items so that the whole view isn’t consumed by just a few audio devices (Oliver Beard, Plasma 5.26. Link):

The app selection dialog for sandboxed/portal-using apps now has significantly improved keyboard navigation (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.26. Link):

Discover’s Updates page now shows you the correct installed version for Firmware updates and no longer shows you both the version number and branch name for Flatpak apps and runtimes, which was confusing in the case when the app’s branch name looked like a version number so it seemed like the app had two version numbers (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.26. Link 1 Link 2):

Discover’s screenshots now also support animated images (Ellie Dent, Plasma 5.26. Link)

Your cursor position is now remembered across screen arrangements (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.26. Link)

The path bars in various KDE apps like Dolphin and Gwenview now accept relative paths (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.98. Link)

Kate and other KTextEditor-based apps now support various mouse-based methods of adding more cursors using the multicursor feature (Waqar Ahmad, KDE Frameworks 5.98. Link)

Significant Bugfixes

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

Filelight once again uses correct text colors with a dark color scheme and looks fine when using a fractional scale factor (Harald Sitter, Filelight 22.08.1. Link 1 Link 2)

Discover now inhibits automatic sleep while it’s installing apps or updates (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.24.7. Link)

Discover no longer freezes on launch if you launch it without a network connection (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.25.5. Link)

System Settings’ Quick Settings page no longer sometimes shows duplicate items in the “Frequently Used” section (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.25.5. Link)

On Discover’s Updates page, Flatpak apps or runtimes no longer sometimes show the wrong version number (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.26. Link)

All KDE apps using KIO for file transfers now benefit from faster copy speeds, especially NFS which can be up to 3-4x faster! (Méven Car, Frameworks 5.98. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

• 46 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 51 last week). Current list of bugs
• 21 Very high priority Plasma bugs (down from 22 last week). Current list of bugs
• 118 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed this week. Full list of bugs

Changes not in KDE that affect KDE

In the Plasma Wayland session, the standard Qt color picker dialog can now pick screen colors (Harald Sitter, Qt 6.5. Link)

Lowering the brightness to its lowest level when using an OLED with an Intel GPU screen no longer turns off the screen until restarting the machine (Jouni Högander, the next release of the Intel GPU drivers. 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

If you’re a developer, check out our 15-Minute Bug Initiative. Working on these issues makes a big difference quickly! Otherwise, 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.

Today something very cool landed: Dolphin now has a dedicated “Selection Mode” you can optionally use to make the process of selecting items easier with a touchscreen or when using the default single-click setting! It even shows a toolbar of contextually-relevant actions you can perform on the selected items! When using a mouse and keyboard, you can quickly enter and exit it by pressing the spacebar, pressing-and-holding on an item in the view, or using an item in the menu. It’s completely optional, so if you like selecting files the old fashioned way, you don’t have to use it at all. Big thanks to Felix Ernst, who implemented this feature for Dolphin 22.12!

…But that’s not all! Read on for more goodies!

Other New Features

Elisa now has a Full Screen mode (me: Nate Graham, Elisa 22.12. Link):

You can now change the way the system formats addresses, names, and phone numbers (Akseli, en, Plasma 5.26. Link):

When using a horizontal panel, Kickoff can now be configured to display text and/or remove the icon (Denys Madureira, Plasma 5.26. Link)

Kate now lets you customize the font that the document will be printed in, right there in the Print dialog (Christoph Cullmann, Frameworks 5.98. Link)

File thumbnailers are now capable of generating preview images for .arw RAW image files (Mirco Miranda, Frameworks 5.98. Link)

User Interface Improvements

Elisa’s “Artist” view now displays a grid of the artist’s albums, rather than a sea of nondescript identical icons (Stefan Vukanović, Elisa 22.12. Link):

When you enter shuffle mode in Elisa, the currently-playing song is now always the first one in the shuffled set of songs (Dmitry Kolesnikov, Elisa 22.12. Link)

When setting properties for KWin rules, the sheet containing the list of properties now stays open until explicitly dismissed (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.26. Link)

You can now launch executable files from file searches in Kicker, Kickoff, Overview etc; you’ll now see the standard “Open or execute?” dialog as you would expect (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.26. Link)

The “Get New [thing]” windows now support animated GIFs used as images, so for example, you can now preview the effects of the fancy “Burn My Windows” KWin effects that were added recently (Alexander Lohnau, Frameworks 5.98. Link)

Significant Bugfixes

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

The circular timeout indicator for Plasma notifications is now fully visible no matter what your screen DPI and scale factor (Eugene Popov, Plasma 5.24.7. Link)

Launchers other than Kickoff are once again capable of searching for files (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.25.5)

Touch scrolling once again works in Kickoff (Noah Davis, Plasma 5.25.5. Link)

Global shortcuts are now capable of launching apps that define command-line arguments in their .desktop files’ Exec= keys (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 5.98. Link)

Kirigami-based apps and views that use the common FormLayout component will no longer sometimes randomly freeze with certain combinations of fonts, font sizes, window sizes, and content sizes (Connor Carney, Frameworks 5.98. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

• 51 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 50 last week). Current list of bugs
• 22 Very high priority Plasma bugs (down from 25 last week). Current list of bugs
• 99 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed this week. Full list of bugs

Changes not in KDE that affect KDE

That Qt bug that causes vertical scrollbars to disappear in QtQuick-based apps has been fixed upstream, and we’ll soon be backporting it to our KDE Qt Patch Collection (Mitch Curtis, a Qt version coming to you soon. 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

If you’re a developer, check out our 15-Minute Bug Initiative. Working on these issues makes a big difference quickly! Otherwise, 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.

Though KDE’s goal-setting process is still ongoing, contributors have started working on Plasma accessibility in a major way! As of Plasma 5.26, all Plasma widgets will be fully compatible and usable with a screen reader, thanks to Fushan Wen with assistance from Harald Sitter! And there’s more to come too, plus lots of other great work:

New Features

It’s now possible to manage Samba shares’ permissions remotely! (Harald Sitter, kdenetwork-filesharing 22.12. Link)

The Plasma Network manager’s OpenConnect VPN plugin now supports the “F5,” “Fortinet,” and “Array” protocols (Enrique Melendez, Plasma 5.26. Link)

Kickoff now has a new non-default “Compact” mode that lets you see more items at the time. When using Touch Mode, compact mode is automatically disabled to ensure that Kickoff remains touch-friendly (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.26. Link)

Global Themes can now change the order and arrangements of titlebar buttons and turn on or off the “Borderless Maximized Windows” setting which disables the titlebar for maximized windows. And you can also turn these on or off while applying a theme so configured on System Settings’ Global Themes page (Dominic Hayes, Plasma 5.26. Link)

By default, Picture of the Day wallpaper plugins don’t refresh while the system is using a metered network connection–but this can be turned back on if you want (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.26. Link):

It’s now possible to clear the Command Bar’s history (Eugene Popov, Frameworks 5.98. Link)

User Interface Improvements

Elisa can now open files from relative paths, not just absolute paths (Bharadwaj Raju, Elisa 22.08.1. Link)

When searching with KRunner, results from the “Software Center” category (which finds non-installed apps) are always lower than results from categories that show already-installed apps and settings pages (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.24.7. Link)

You can now use the Ctrl+S keyboard shortcut in the Clipboard applet’s Edit Mode page to save and return to the main page (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.24.7. Link)

System Settings’ Night Color page now lets you use a map to choose a manual location, and shows a loading placeholder when using automatic location mode and the geolocation service is still working on geolocating you (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.26. Link 1 and Link 2):

The opening and closing animations for the Overview, Present Windows, and Desktop Grid effects now last longer and have a nicer easing curve, making them feel much smoother (Blake Sperling, Plasma 5.26. Link)

Significant Bugfixes

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

Switching your Global Theme to one that has its own color scheme now immediately changes the color in all running GTK apps that are being themed with the Breeze GTK theme (David Redondo, Plasma 5.24.7. Link)

Fixed a major regression in multi-monitor support for the Plasma Wayland session that could cause screens to display no output (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.25.5. Link)

In the Plasma Wayland session, certain apps like GIMP no longer sometimes fail to appear in the Task Manager while running (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.25.5. Link)

Fixed a prominent Task Manager-related crash (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.25.5. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

• 50 15-minute Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
• 25 Very high priority Plasma bugs (down from 26 last week). Current list of bugs
• 125 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed this week. 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.

How You Can Help

If you’re a developer, check out our 15-Minute Bug Initiative. Working on these issues makes a big difference quickly! Otherwise, 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.

I’ve started to worry that mentioning really small weird bugfixes week after week gives the impression that KDE software is buggier than it really is. The truth is that all responsibly maintained projects are constantly landing these kinds of maintenance bugfixes, so it’s probably a bit misleading to be talking about them all the time.

Instead, I’m going to try only mentioning the big, consequential bugfixes: the ones for bugs marked HI or VHI priority, that have with multiple duplicates, that are really significant in effect, etc. Hopefully this should improve the signal-to-noise ratio in the blog posts.

I’ll still mention new features and significant user interface improvements, of course.

Let me know what you think!

We continue chewing through bugs this week, and now I’m mentioning the “very high priority” Plasma bugs in addition to the “15 minute bugs” which are slightly lower priority. Plasma developers reading along are encouraged to prioritize the very high priority bugs. 🙂

Very high priority Plasma Bugs Resolved

Current number of bugs: 26, down from 29. 3 resolved:

System Monitor widgets no longer reset various settings to their default values after the system is restarted (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.25.5)

It’s once again possible to select windows on other screens using the Present Windows and Overview effects (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.26)

Application Launcher widgets that you activate by pressing the Meta key no longer require that the Alt+F1 shortcut to be set, which should dramatically reduce instances where you press the Meta key and nothing happens. Also, now when you have more than one launcher that wants to open with the Meta key, it will open on whatever screen is considered active by KWin (David Redondo, Plasma 5.26)

Current list of bugs

15-Minute Plasma Bugs Resolved

Current number of bugs: 50, down from 51. 1 added and 2 resolved:

Kickoff no longer strangely pre-selects search results list items that aren’t the first ones after previously having selected the item in that position using the cursor the last time you searched for something (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.25.5)

Hovering the cursor over an item in Kickoff no longer repeatedly re-selects it if you use the keyboard to select something else (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.25.5)

Current list of bugs

New Features

You can now configure a keyboard shortcut to activate Present Windows showing only the windows from the current app that are on the current desktop (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.26)

User Interface Improvements

It’s now much easier to initially set up a folder for sharing with Samba, because the wizard now gives you detailed and actionable error messages (me: Nate Graham, kdenetwork-filesharing 22.12):

Wallpapers in the slideshow wallpaper grid are no longer selectable, since this isn’t a state that makes sense for them (Jin Liu, Plasma 5.25.4)

The Timer Plasma widget has received a big overhaul that fixes most of the open bugs and improves the UI to add a clickable start/stop button (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.26):

Searching for widgets in the Widget Explorer now also matches their keywords, providing another way to find what you’re looking for (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.26)

Menu shortcuts are now displayed in a subdued gray color, visually de-emphasizing them compared to the menu items’ text (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.26):

The Breeze icon theme now includes icons for Windows DLLs (Alexander Wilms, Frameworks 5.97)

Other Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

In Okular, it’s no longer possible to drag pop-up notes off the screen (Nikola Nikolic, Okular 22.12)

The first time KRunner is opened, it no longer oddly slides up from nowhere; now it always slides down from whatever’s above it as expected (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.24.7)

In the Plasma Wayland session, monitors no longer sometimes lose their names and become unable to be set as the primary one (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.24.7)

The Breeze style once again respects the “Small Icons” size you can set in System Settings (Alexander Kernozhitsky, Plasma 5.25.5)

The KScreen screen handling service is now more lenient about detecting screens as unique, which should fix various weird screen-and-desktop-layout-related problems caused by hotplugging screens and docks where both the screen ID and connector ID change during the hotplug (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.26)

Setting the language in System Settings now updates the standard FreeDesktop org.freedesktop.Accounts.User.Language value which is used by Flatpak apps and lots of 3rd-party apps in general, so they should now use your preferred language as well (Han Young, Plasma 5.26)

…And everything else

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 more news from other KDE contributors.

How You Can Help

If you’re a developer, check out our 15-Minute Bug Initiative. Working on these issues makes a big difference quickly!

Otherwise, 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, Aleix Pol Gonzalez put a ton of work into Discover, which you’ll see throughout the post! Beyond that, it was a Plasma-heavy week, with developers adding several useful new features, polishing the UI, and fixing a large number of high-priority issues.

15-Minute Bugs Resolved

I’m going to start mentioning “very high priority” Plasma bugs here too, as I think it makes sense for them to inherently be considered 15-minute bugs as well. For now I’m going to put them in the “added and also fixed” bucket, but I could add them to the total count instead, if folks think it would be more accurate. This would bring the total up to 79. Or I could mention them separately. Let me know what you think.

Current number of bugs: 51, down from 52. 5 added and 6 resolved:

Hotplugged mice no longer lose their settings when the system is woken up or un-docked (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.25.4)

Fixed a recent regression in Activities support that caused weird issues when switching between Activities (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.25.4)

Discover no longer erroneously labels various apps and add-ons as having proprietary licenses when they don’t (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.25.4)

The setting to disable file history no longer confusingly lives on System Settings’ Activities page, and instead has its own page in the Workspace Behavior group (Méven Car, Plasma 5.26):

Fixed one of the ways that Plasma could crash and potentially lose your panels and desktops when you plug in or unplug a screen or change the display scale (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.26)

When Plasma is restarted manually or automatically (e.g. after it crashes) while the Show Desktop effect was active, your windows are no longer invisible (yet still interactive) for 30 seconds (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.26)

Current list of bugs

New Features

Typing in the Overview effect now filters windows when there are any matching the search text, in addition to doing a KRunner search when no open windows match the search text (Niklas Stephanblome, Plasma 5.26):

The Digital Clock widget now lets you customize the font size as well as the typeface and styling. Happily, the changes required for this also fix a bug affecting the old font chooser UI and make the widget no longer change size when seconds are shown (Jin Liu, Plasma 5.26):

In the Plasma Wayland session, it’s now possible to adjust how a graphics tablet’s input area maps to your screen coordinates (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.26):

User Interface Improvements

Pressing the Escape key in Spectacle while in Annotation mode now exits only from Annotation mode, rather than quitting the whole app (Antonio Prcela, Spectacle 22.08)

The comic book thumbnailer now supports comic book files with more image formats used inside of them (Pedro Liberatti, Dolphin 22.08)

Dragging a window over other windows in Overview or Present Windows no longer triggers their highlight effects and no longer causes the dragged window to bizarrely appear under them (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.25.4)

You can now drag apps from Kickoff’s search results to an empty area of the Task Manager to pin them there (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.25.4)

The Digital Clock popup is now fully keyboard navigable (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.26)

In the System Settings Screen Locking page, the configuration settings for the clock and media controls are now much clearer (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.26):

Changing your user avatar no longer requires admin permission (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.26)

You can now find the System Settings Touchpad page by searching for the word “Trackpad” (Nicolai Weitkemper, Plasma 5.26)

Discover now warns you when you’re looking at an app from a beta channel, and also makes it even more warningy when the version available on the beta channel is older than the one on the stable channel (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.26):

When you’re looking at the page for an add-on in Discover, its “Distributed by” field now shows “KDE store” instead of an unclickable elided URL (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.26):

Discover now does a better job of indicating to you when a Flatpak repo is a user-specific repo, to disambiguate it from the same repo that applies for the whole system (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.26)

When you close Discover’s main window during an update, you can now open it again by re-launching Discover, and also if you close it a second time, it won’t create a second notification but rather will re-use the original one (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.26)

Undoing a bulk rename job in Dolphin no longer sends a notification that says “Moving” (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.97)

Other Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Discover no longer crashes when browsing certain add-ons that don’t have any reviews or when a firmware update fails with an error (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.24.7)

The priority you set for your Flatpak repos in Discover is now always honored properly (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.24.7)

Fixed a case where Discover could crash when quit after successfully performing updates (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.25.4)

In the Plasma Wayland session, switching virtual desktops with a touchpad swipe gesture can no longer sometimes cause WINE or Steam Proton apps and games to crash (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.25.4)

When you close Discover’s main window while it’s in the middle of installing updates, the notification that appears in its place now shows an accurate count of the items left to update (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.25.4)

In the Plasma Wayland session, you can now use touch taps to interact with certain pop-ups in GTK-based apps that were previously untouchable (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.26)

Discover is now faster to start up its Flatpak backend (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.26)

Fixed a couple of animation glitches in the Overview and Present Windows effects, and they also no longer stutter while opening when you have a multi-screen setup (Ivan Tkachenko and David Edmundson, Plasma 5.26)

KRunner no longer produces gibberish results when you give it text that begins with an equals sign that isn’t a math expression (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.26)

…And everything else

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 more news from other KDE contributors.

How You Can Help

If you’re a developer, check out our 15-Minute Bug Initiative. Working on these issues makes a big difference quickly!

Otherwise, 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.