New Features

KMenuEdit and the properties dialog now make it easy for you to set environment variables when opening your apps. This was always possible, but you had to know the secret special syntax (e.g. Exec=env FOO=1 kate); now the UI makes it easy and explicitly supported (Dashon Wells, Frameworks 5.101 and Plasma 5.27. Link 1 and link 2):

User Interface Improvements

The option to disable the Secret Service interface now clearly explains what this means and why you might want to do it (Guilherme Marçal Silva, KWalletManager 22.12. Link):

Discover no longer shows categories in light text on the app cards because it’s mostly visual noise, and it also once again has an “All Applications” category you can use to see all apps and limit a search to just apps (me: Nate Graham and Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.27. Link 1, link 2, and link 3):

When the Battery & Brightness widget is configured to show you the exact charge percentage on its icon, it no longer does so when the battery is fully charged, since this is obvious (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.27. Link)

In a variety of scrollable System Settings pages, the separator above the footer buttons now matches the separator above the “Highlight Changed Settings” button on the sidebar’s footer (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.101. Link):

Significant Bugfixes

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

Vertically-arranged monitors are no longer slightly overlapping by one pixel, which can trigger various weirdnesses (Alexander Volkov, Plasma 5.26.4. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

• 11 Very high priority Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
• 51 15-minute Plasma bugs (1 more than last week). Current list of bugs
• 174 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed this week. Full list of bugs

Changes not in KDE that affect KDE

Firefox now supports the xdg_activation_v1 Wayland protocol, which means its windows will be able to raise to the top when a URL is opened in them from another app that also supports the protocol (Emilio Cobos Álvarez, Firefox 108. 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.

This week KRunner got a lot smarter about its search results. For years people have complained about various things not being the top item when they expect it, so Natalie Clarius and Alexander Lohnau decided to make some major improvements:

• System Setting pages whose names exactly match the search term now have much higher weight so they should appear first (Link)
• Various other things with an exact names match also now have much higher weight so they should appear first, and also recent files have their relevance reduced according to age (Link)
• Entering something like “Time CET” or “Time Shanghai” now shows you not only the time, but also how much earlier or later it is than your current timezone (Link)
• The exec= lines of desktop files for Chrome web apps and Flatpak apps no longer inappropriately get matched (Link 1 and link 2)

Thanks a lot, you two!

New Features

Gwenview now lets you change images’ brightness, contrast, and gamma (Ilya Pominov, Gwenview 22.12. Link):

User Interface Improvements

All of the global volume settings have been moved into the System Settings Audio Volume page, and the Audio Volume widget no longer has a separate settings page of its own. So clicking its configure button now takes you to System Settings. In addition, this has provided the opportunity to make the global mute feature truly global, and also make the sliders on the System Settings page only go up to 150% when you’re using the “Raise maximum volume” setting (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.27. Link 1, link 2, and link 3):

When using offline updates, you can now use Discover to see the changelogs for individual packages, just like you can with online updates (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.27. Link)

Wallpapers in the wallpaper chooser grids you see in various places are now draggable-and-droppable, so you can drag them into image editors to edit them, into a file manager to copy them, and so on (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27. Link)

While on the lock screen, you can now hit the Escape key to turn off the screen and save some power (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.27. Link)

When your computer is plugged in and using Performance mode or an app has requested to use Power Save mode, now you can see this right in your System Tray (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.27. Link):

Significant Bugfixes

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

Krita now supports using a global menu (Antonio Rojas, Krita 5.1. Link)

Libreswan VPN detection now works if you’re using version 4.9 or greater, and detection for StrongSwan and OpenSwan should be more accurate now too (Douglas Kosovic, Plasma 5.24.8. Link)

In the Plasma Wayland session, when using the default setting of “Legacy apps scale themselves,” Steam and some other XWayland-using apps now get scaled to the correct and expected size (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.26.3. Link)

Switching between launcher widgets (e.g. Kickoff and Kicker) no longer re-arranges your favorites to be in alphabetical order; their manual ordering is now preserved (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.27. Link)

You can once again disable the “Present Windows” effect within the Desktop Grid effect, instead keeping windows where they are and using it as a Virtual Desktop switcher (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.27. Link)

All sorts of KDE apps no longer hang on launch when files in their “Recent documents” lists aren’t accessible for some reason (Christoph Cullmann, Frameworks 5.100. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

• 11 Very high priority Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
• 50 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 56 last week). Current list of bugs
• 133 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed this week. Full list of bugs

Automation & Systematization

When building a module using kdesrc-build fails, it now suggests a way for you to install missing build dependencies (Marius Pa. Link)

Added autotests to make sure file thumbnail generation doesn’t regress (Nicolas Fella, kio-extras 22.12. Link)

Added an autotest in KWin to make sure that auto-generated resolutions are generated properly (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.27. Link)

Added an autotest in Plasma to make sure windows are correctly mapped to their Task Manager entries (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27. Link)

Web Presence

KDE now has a fancy new “KDE for Creators” website! (Carl Schwan, Nicolas Fella, Áron Kovács, and other folks in the Promo team) This complements the existing “KDE for Kids” page, and we’ll be adding more soon!

kde.org/hardware now much more prominently lists Tuxedo Computers‘ devices, now that they’ve switched to shipping Plasma by default! (Paul Brown, Carl Schwan, and me: Nate Graham, 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.

As we near the end of Plasma 5, a lot of people are putting thought into what’s next for Plasma 6, beyond simply porting it to Qt 6. The general consensus is to avoid big architectural changes, with most of the major changes being UI improvements and new features. So KDE’s VDG team has been busy planning for that future, which has yielded a lot of improvements for the last and best version of Plasma 5!

New Features

If you really don’t like Dolphin’s recently-changed list view behavior of selecting or opening an item when clicking empty areas of its row, you can now go back to the old way (Felix Ernst, Dolphin 22.12. Link):

Discover now has a brand-new homepage design with dynamically-updating categories that shows popular apps, and a new set of featured apps that showcase the best of KDE (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Carl Schwan, me: Nate Graham, and Devin Lin, Plasma 5.27 . Link 1, link 2, link 3, and link 4):

You can now middle-click the Networks icon to toggle Airplane Mode on and off (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.27. Link):

“Running” (i.e. clicking on or pressing the return key for) dictionary definition entries in KRunner’s results list now copies the definition text to the clipboard, and even sends a system notification about this so you know that it happened (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.27. Link)

In the dropdown menus for Dolphin’s path navigator bar, now hidden folders will show up there if you currently have hidden files visible (Eugene Popov, Frameworks 5.100. Link):

User Interface Improvements

On Info Center pages that consist of monospaced text, the text is now selectable (and hence copyable) and no longer slightly overflows on the right side (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.26.2. Link)

In the Plasma X11 session, portalized dialogs shown by Flatpak apps no longer use the wrong theming and colors (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.26.2. Link)

Breeze-themed windows now have a subtle outline around them, which not only looks classy as hell, but it also helps keep dark-themed windows from blending into one another (Akseli Lahtinen. Plasma 5.27. Link):

Floating Panels now de-float whenever any window touches them, and the margins they gain when doing so are now smaller and less weird-looking. This also makes Panel Widget popups touch the edge of a floating Panel (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 5.27. Link 1 and link 2)

The new portalized Kirigami-based app chooser dialog now has more focused and relevant text in the header area (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.27. Link 1 and link 2)

You can now search in KRunner for “Save Session” to invoke the manual session saving functionality, and when you use KRunner to switch sessions, the message dialog it shows you is now worded more comprehensibly and doesn’t make what you’re about to do seem scary (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 5.27. Link 1 and link 2)

KRunner’s “Recent Files” plugin now matches substrings (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 5.27. Link)

You can now resize Kickoff’s popup to be smaller than it is by default, if you want that (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 5.27. Link)

Title text in QtWidgets-based System Settings pages now has the same padding and alignment as those in Kirigami-based pages, so there’s no longer a weird jarring difference between them as you switch pages (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.27. Link 1 and link 2)

Throughout KDE software, the appearance of list views and list section headers is massively improved (Devin Lin, Frameworks 5.100. Link 1 and link 2):

Panel Widgets’ popups are now displayed centered on their Panel when they could be displayed as such without becoming disconnected from their Panel icons (Niccolò Venerandi, Frameworks 5.100. Link)

In dialogs where you can permanently delete files, the buttons to do so now say “Delete Permanently” so you can be absolutely sure of what you’re getting yourself into (Guilherme Marçal Silva, Frameworks 5.100. Link)

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, the “Flat” acceleration profile now works properly (John Brooks, Plasma 5.26.2. Link)

In the Plasma Wayland session, tapping the address bar in Firefox with a touchscreen now always makes the virtual keyboard appear as expected, without you having to focus another app and go back to Firefox first (Xaver Hugl and Xuetian Weng, Plasma 5.26.2. Link)

Fixed one of the most common Plasma crashes when using Plasma Vaults (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.26.3. Link)

Fixed a recently-introduced glitch that could cause it to become difficult to click the top-right-most screen pixel to trigger the close button of a maximized window (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.26.3. Link)

Fixed a recent regression in the X11 session that would cause maximized windows to not redraw properly when using scaling (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.26.3. Link)

In the Plasma Wayland session, clicking and dragging something in Firefox no longer causes the cursor to get stuck in its “grabby hand” state until you drag a tab (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.26.3. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

• 11 Very high priority Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
• 56 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 55 last week). Current list of bugs
• 144 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed this week. Full list of bugs

Automation & Systematization

Added a test case for Chromium web app icon display in the Task Manager, so it won’t break or regress again (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.27. Link)

Added a test case for panel/containment/screen mappings in Plasma, so we can start to weed out the issues in it without regressing things so often (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.27. Link)

We have a new wiki page that outlines some of the ways people can make a living working on KDE projects (me: Nate Graham. 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.

A ton of UI improvements landed this week. If you can’t find something to like in this post, I’ll eat my hat!

New Features

System Settings’ Firewall page now supports IP address strings with netmasks (Daniel Vrátil, Plasma 5.27. Link)

User Interface Improvements

On the Information tab of Gwenview’s sidebar, you can now reduce the area taken up by the metadata and description section using a draggable splitter between it and the Image Information section that’s above it. The splitter remembers its position, too! (Corbin Schwimmbeck, Gwenview 22.12. Link)

Spectacle now remembers the last-chosen rectangular region area by default, even across app launches. This is configurable, of course (Bharadwaj Raju, Spectacle 22.12. Link)

Kate and KWrite’s welcome screen (which remains optional, and able to be permanently disabled using a checkbox right on the screen itself) now includes links to documentation (Eugene Popov, Kate and KWrite 22.12. Link):

In the Plasma Wayland session, opening Dolphin from the Disks & Devices popup now raises its existing window, if it was already open (Nicolas Fella, Dolphin 22.12 with Plasma 5.26.1. Link)

Dragging-and-dropping windows onto the Pager Widget now works a lot better, with less fiddliness (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 5.26.1. Link)

When using Plasma, the “Open file with app…” dialog now uses the XDG portal version for improved visual consistency and user-friendliness. The old dialog is still used when you invoke “Open this file in a different app” functionality from a KDE app that’s not being used in Plasma (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.27. Link):

System Tray Widgets that can be middle-clicked to toggle something about them on or off now indicate as such in their tooltips (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.27. Link 1, link 2, and link 3):

In the Plasma Wayland session, Help Center is now able to raise its open window when activated by another app (Nicolas Fella, Help Center 5.27. Link)

The icon size popup in System Settings has gotten a UI overhaul to remove unused settings and make what it does do more comprehensible (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.27. Link):

When you resize the Plasma calendar popup, text in the calendar itself now scales up and down appropriately (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27. Link):

The Overview, Present Windows, and Desktop Grid effects now try harder to pack windows efficiently, so hopefully you won’t see windows arranged like staircases anymore (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.27. Link)

When viewing the page for a Flatpak app that has been marked as “end-of-life” by its developer, Discover now shows you the reason given by the developer (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.27. Link)

Shadows behind the clock and date text on the login and lock screens are now a bit softer and prettier (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.27. Link):

The Lock Keys Widget now shows a different icon from the Keyboard Layout Widget, so can distinguish between them at a glance (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.27. Link):

In the Plasma Wayland session, the “Something is recording your screen” System Tray icon now uses a more correct “recording”-style icon (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.27. Link):

Trying to trash an item that’s bigger than the current trash size now gives you the option to delete it immediately if you want (Ahmad Samir, Dolphin 22.12 with Frameworks 5.100. Link):

Avatar images throughout KDE software are now sharper and better-looking when using a high DPI screen and screen scaling (Fushan Wen, Frameworks 5.100. Link)

Recent Documents lists throughout KDE software will now display appropriate icons for the recent files (Eric Armbruster, Frameworks 5.100. Link)

Significant Bugfixes

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

Fixed another cause of desktop widgets slightly moving around on login, which apparently has multiple causes (Aaron Rainbolt, Plasma 5.24.8. Link)

Fixed an issue that could cause input to not be detected when using the new mouse button rebinding feature (David Redondo, Plasma 5.26.2 with Frameworks 5.100. Link)

Plasma no longer constantly consumes high CPU resources when using an animated AVIF image as your wallpaper (Fushan Wen, Frameworks 5.100. Link)

Plasma no longer constantly consumes high CPU resources when disabling middle-click paste and copying certain content (David Edmundson, Frameworks 5.100. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

• 11 Very high priority Plasma bugs (up from 10 last week). Current list of bugs
• 55 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 53 last week). Current list of bugs
• 144 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed this week. Full list of bugs

Automation & Systematization

This goal now has a Matrix room! Search for kde-institutional-memory:kde.org in your favorite Matrix client, or click here to access it in the web client.

The goal also has a team on https://invent.kde.org! You can join at https://invent.kde.org/groups/teams/automation/-/group_members. We’ll be using this for long-term task coordination via the task tracker at https://invent.kde.org/teams/automation/issues/-/issues.

There’s now a wiki page explaining how distros can package Plasma for the best user experience, full of accumulated knowledge over time (me: Nate Graham. Link)

On distros using gdb 12, the DrKonqi crash reporting wizard is now capable of dynamically symbolicating crash traces without debug symbols, which makes them actionable and reduces bug triaging work (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.26.1. Link)

Added an autotest for the PNG metadata extractor (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 5.100. Link)

Added autotests for KWin’s DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) platform code (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.27. Link)

Changes not in KDE that affect KDE

RGB sub-pixel hinting for text is now enabled by default, which is good for users of KDE software since we respect the set of systemwide default settings rather than overriding it with our own value (Akira Tagoh, Fontconfig 2.14.1 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.

Over the past two weeks, the KDE community has largely been preparing for and attending Akademy, the big annual in-person conference. It’s a great time to bond socially and discuss important topics face-to-face, and more on that later! Meanwhile we’ve also been getting Plasma 5.26 ready, which has benefited from a major focus on stability. Expect that to ramp up now that Akademy is finished. More on that later as well!

New Features

Ark now supports ARJ archives (Ilya Pominov, Ark 22.12. Link)

Kate and KWrite now have a welcome window when launched without any files open. (Eric Armbruster and Christoph Cullmann, Kate & KWrite 22.12. Link):

User Interface Improvements

In Dolphin, dragging-and-dropping a folder onto an empty area of the tab bar now opens it in a new tab (Kai Uwe Broulik, Dolphin 22.12. Link)

The animation for the Slide Desktops effect has been made a bit faster, due to popular demand (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.26. Link)

In the “new screen plugged in” chooser OSD, choosing “Extend Left” now actually makes the new screen extend left, and it extends from the current primary screen (Allan Sandfield Jensen, Plasma 5.26. Link 1 and link 2)

On System Settings’ Colors page, clicking the “From current wallpaper” option now updates the preview view immediately to show the accent color that will be used (Tanbir Jishan, Plasma 5.26. Link)

When transferring files using Bluetooth, the progress notification now shows more detailed and useful information (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.26. Link)

Uninstalling an app now removes its icon from the Kickoff Application Launcher’s favorites list/grid immediately (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.27. Link)

Picture of the Day wallpapers how have a nice cross-fade transition animation when switching from one picture to another, or to a different type of Picture of the Day picture (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27. Link)

The Breeze Window Decoration theme setting to continue displaying window borders for maximized and tiled windows has now been re-worded for clarity (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 5.27. Link)

The Media Frame widget’s “Show/hide background” setting now uses the standard user interface for this, with a button on its Edit Mode toolbar (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27. Link)

When replying to a text message using the KDE Connect plasmoid, the text field is now inline rather than in a separate dialog window (Bharadwaj Raju, KDE Connect 22.12. Link)

When you unmount a removable device in Dolphin, its Eject button now transforms into a busy indicator so you know when it’s safe to physically unplug it (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 5.100. Link):

Significant Bugfixes

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

Switching between Global Themes that include their own desktop layouts no longer sometimes causes Plasma to crash and lose your panels (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.24.7. Link)

System Settings no longer sometimes crashes when navigating away from the Thunderbolt page (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.24.7. Link)

On System Settings’ Users page, It is once again possible to change your user password and nothing else when using a recent version of the AccountsService library (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.24.7. Link)

In the Plasma X11 session, when repeated graphical crashes cause KWin to disable compositing, it will now periodically check to see if it’s better, and if it is, it will re-renable compositing so you don’t have to do it manually or lose compositing forever if you don’t know that this has to be done (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.26. Link)

Application Dashboard grid items now have two lines of text, so you can actually read longer labels (Tomáš Hnyk, Plasma 5.26. Link)

In the Plasma X11 session, when KWin crashes and auto-restarts–or is manually restarted–it no longer loses its mapping of windows to Activities (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.26. Link)

Fixed an issue that could occasionally cause apps like VLC and Firefox to stop refreshing after being used for a while (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.26. Link)

In the Networks plasmoid, networks no longer jump around and re-arrange themselves while you’re trying to connect to one or enter your password (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.26. Link)

Discover and other apps that can display animated images can no longer freeze when displaying certain PCX images (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Frameworks 5.99. Link)

Various System Monitor graphs no longer blink, stutter, and freeze when using an NVIDIA GPU (Łukasz Wojniłowicz, Frameworks 5.100. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

• 8 Very high priority Plasma bugs (down from 11 two weeks ago). Current list of bugs
• 47 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 44 two weeks ago). Current list of bugs
• 209 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed over these two weeks. Full list of bugs

…And everything else

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

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.

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.