This week in KDE: a mad bugfixing spree

Plasma 5.25’s first bugfix release came out a few days ago, and the next one is due early next week. Hopefully most of the bugs you folks found will have been fixed! And among those are few 15-minute bugs too.

Occasionally people ask, “Jeez, it feels like you guys are fixing bugs all the time… shouldn’t they all be fixed by now? Why is your software so buggy?” Thing is, that’s the nature of software. There are always more bugs to fix, no matter how long you work at it. And the more people who use it, the more bugs they’ll find. This is universal, for every piece of software. The best metric is not really “number of bugs fixed,” but rather “egregiousness of bugs fixed.” You want to see that the bugs we fix get weirder and more esoteric over time, which indicates that the basics are becoming more reliable. We’re not all the way there yet, but I believe we are making progress!

15-Minute Bugs Resolved

Current number of bugs: 59, down from 65. 0 added, 2 found to be upstream issues, and 4 resolved:

Session-restored windows no longer restore themselves to the wrong virtual desktops when using the now on-by-default Systemd boot feature (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.25.2)

In the Plasma X11 session, buttons in the Present Windows and Overview effects no longer only work every other time you click them (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.25.2)

Switching between Plasma widgets using the “Alternatives” panel now saves their settings, so if you switch back to an old widget you were using before, its settings are remembered (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.26)

In the Plasma X11 session, the search icon displayed inside search fields throughout Plasma widgets and KWin effects is no longer comically large (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.96)

Current list of bugs

New Features

In the Plasma Wayland session, it’s now possible to disable middle-click paste (Méven Car, Plasma 5.26):

User Interface Improvements

Tooltip visibility for pages in System Settings now respect the global setting to disable tooltips (Anthony Hung, Plasma 5.24.9)

The Edit Mode toolbar now splits itself into multiple rows when the screen isn’t wide enough to accommodate it (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.25.2)

Discover now determines the priority of your Flatpak repos (when you have more than one configured) from the command-line flatpak tool, and changes the priority there too if you change it in Discover, so the two always remain in sync (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.25.2)

The Pager, Minimize All and Show Desktop widgets now handle Panel keyboard focus properly (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.26)

Entering or exiting the letter grid in Kickoff now plays a nice little animation (Tanbir Jishan, Plasma 5.26):

When the wallpaper changes from one to another, it no longer becomes slightly darker during the animated transition (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.26)

The clipboard widget now uses a more appropriate and less visually busy character to represent tabs (Felipe Kinoshita, Plasma 5.26)

Kirigami-based apps with sidebars in desktop mode no longer secretly show an invisible close button in the sidebar’s bottom-right corner that you can accidentally click on to confusingly close the sidebar with no way to get it back (Frameworks 5.96)

When app icons change on disk, Plasma now notices this and displays the new icon within 1 seconds, down from 10 seconds (David Redondo, Frameworks 5.96)

The “Battery and Brightness” widget now shows you the battery level for connected wireless touchpads (Vlad Zahorodnii, Frameworks 5.96)

The “Open With…” dialog that you’ll see in non-sandboxed apps now has a “Get more Apps in Discover…” button, just like the different-looking dialog seen in sandboxed apps (Jakob Rech, Frameworks 5.96):

And yes, before you ask, it’s silly that we have two different “Open With…”dialogs with different appearances and codebases. Unifying them is an active area of work!

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Elisa’s playback slider once again works properly when the current track is longer than about 3 minutes long (Bart De Vries, Elisa 22.04.3)

The remote desktop dialog for sandboxed apps now appears when expected (Jonas Eymann, Plasma 5.24.6)

When run from a Flatpak, the Pitivi app no longer crashes on launch when using the Breeze cursor theme (Mazhar Hussain, Plasma 5.24.6)

In the Present Windows effect, it’s once again possible to activate windows that are on a different screen from the one used to type text into the filter (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.25.2)

External USB-C displays once again work properly (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.25.1)

Fixed a very wide variety of keyboard searching, focus, and navigation issues with the new Present Windows effect, bringing it back up to its keyboard usability in Plasma 5.24 (Niklas Stephanblom, Plasma 5.25.2)

It’s once again possible to select desktops with the keyboard in the Desktop Grid effect (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.25.1)

In the Plasma X11 session, tiling windows to the left or right no longer sometimes cause an odd flicker (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.25.1)

The screen locker no longer crashes if you’ve manually installed support for the Howdy facial recognition system (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.25.2)

Square highlights once again appear on hover in the Application Dashboard (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.25.2)

Using the new “Tint all colors with accent color” now tints the titlebar too, without you having to also check the checkbox that explicitly applies accent colors to the titlebar (Eugene Popov, Plasma 5.25.2)

Setting advanced firewall rules once again works (Daniel Vrátil, Plasma 5.25.2)

When using a traditional Task Manager, open tasks no longer spontaneously re-arrange themselves when a pinned app is moved with the “Keep launchers separate” option unchecked (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.26

Inline buttons in NeoChat’s Accounts list are once again visible (Jan Blackquill, Frameworks 5.96)

Overlay sheets no longer sometimes have excessive bottom margins in desktop mode (Ismael Asensio, Frameworks 5.96)

…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 in KDE: non-blurry XWayland apps!

Plasma 5.26 will resolve a major pain point for users of the Wayland session with high DPI screens: you’ll now be able to choose how you want your XWayland-using apps to be scaled:

By the compositor–ensuring uniform scaling, but blurriness (this is the status quo)
By the apps themselves–allowing them to use their pre-existing X11 high DPI capabilities, if they have them, but leaving apps without such capabilities at the wrong scale

So if all the XWayland apps you use support high DPI scaling properly on X11, you can use this new setting to make them look nice and crisp at your chosen scale factor:

This setting is currently off by default in Plasma 5.26, but we’re considering turning it on by default after more testing. Big thanks to David Edmundson and Aleix Pol Gonzales for this work!

Beyond that, the focus was on fixing bugs discovered in Plasma 5.25, and you’ll see quite a few mentioned here.

15-Minute Bugs Resolved

Current number of bugs: 65, up from 64. 1 added and 0 resolved.

Current list of bugs

New Features

You can now optionally configure minimized tasks in your Task Switcher to be sorted last, after all unminimized tasks, which is the way things work in the MATE desktop environment (Rachel Mant, Plasma 5.26)

Animated images can now be used as wallpapers, either standalone, or even as a part of a slideshow (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.26)

User Interface Improvements

When you drag-and-drop something onto an empty part of a Dolphin window that is showing Details view, the drop is once again interpreted as a drop into the visible view rather than the sub-folder on the row under the cursor (Felix Ernst, Dolphin 22.08)

When you open a PDF document externally in a sandboxed app, Okular now appears in the list of preferred apps that can open PDF files as expected (Harald Sitter, Okular 22.08)

It’s no longer possible to try (and fail) to remove distro-installed SDDM login screen themes on System Settings’ “Login Screen (SDDM)” page; now you can only remove SDDM themes there that you’ve downloaded yourself, same as on other similar pages (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.25.1)

The “Cover Flip” and “Flip Switch” Task Switcher effects now use the same background appearance as the Overview and new Present Windows effects, which looks better and makes them all more consistent in visual styling (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.26):

In the Plasma X11 session, on System Settings’ “Display and Monitor” page, the message telling you that you need to restart the machine to make scaling changes take effect now includes a “Restart” button you can click to do it immediately (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.26)

Okular’s Breeze theme icon now better matches its original icon (Carl Schwan, Frameworks 5.96):

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Fixed one way that Dolphin could crash when you use it to search for files (Ahmad Samir, Dolphin 22.04.3)

External screens once again work properly with multi-GPU setups (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.25.1)

Screen brightness is no longer stuck at 30% for people with laptop screens that declare a maximum brightness value high enough to cause an integer overflow when multiplied using 32-bit integers (Ivan Ratijas, Plasma 5.25.1)

Fixed a common way that KWin could crash when the screen setup changes (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.25.1)

System Settings no longer crashes when you try to install a cursor theme from a local theme file, rather than the downloader window (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.25.1)

Switching desktops no longer sometimes leaves windows visible as ghosts in rare circumstances (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.25.1)

You can once again drag individual windows from one desktop to another in the Desktop Grid effect (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.25.1)

Fixed a memory leak in Klipper, the Plasma clipboard service (Jonathan Marten, Plasma 5.25.1)

Breeze-themed sliders no longer exhibit visual glitches when using a right-to-left language (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.25.1)

Activating the Overview, Present Windows, and Desktop Grid effects with a touchpad gesture should now be smoother, not jittery or stuttery (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.25.1)

Tinting your titlebars with the active accent color no longer applies the wrong color for inactive window titlebars (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.25.1)

System Tray icons no longer scale strangely when your panel height is set to certain odd (as in non-even) numbers (Anthony Hung, Plasma 5.25.1)

While a fullscreen window is focused, KWin’s “edge highlight” effect is no longer shown when you move your cursor near a screen edge with an auto-hidden panel that wouldn’t appear anyway because showing auto-hidden panels is disabled while a fullscreen window has focus (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.25.1)

In the Plasma Wayland session, videos viewed in the latest version of the MPV app will no longer appear with a small transparent border around them (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.25.1)

Using the properties dialog or KMenuEdit to edit an application’s .desktop file that happens to be a symlink now works as expected (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.96)

…And everything else

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!

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

This week in KDE: the Analog Clock changes color

Because that’s clearly the most important thing this week, right!?

Anyway, Plasma 5.25 is going to be released in a few days, and it’ll be huge! Accordingly, feature work for 5.26 is starting to land alongside bugfixing for 5.25.

15-Minute Bugs Resolved

Current number of bugs: 64, down from 65. 2 found to already be fixed (thanks to whoever fixed them!) and 1 added.

Current list of bugs

New Features

Plasma now supports wallpapers with different images displayed when using a light color scheme vs a dark color scheme! Expect future Plasma releases to ship both light and dark versions of our wallpapers (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.26):

User Interface Improvements

Ark now checks to make sure that there will be sufficient free space in the place when you’re trying to un-archive something before it starts (Tomaz Canabrava, Ark 22.08)

When you search in KRunner, Kickoff, Overview, or any other KRunner-powered search field, any System Settings pages that match are no longer displayed so far down in the list (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.25):

You can now drag windows between screens in the Overview and Present Windows effects (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.25)

Scrolling over the Media Controller widget’s icon now changes the volume of the app playing media in steps of 5%, not 3%, so now it matches the default step size when changing the whole system volume. Also like the system volume, the step size is configurable! (Oliver Beard, Plasma 5.26)

Breeze-styled buttons no longer have a gradient on them when not being hovered by the cursor, which effectively makes them look a little bit lighter and stand out more from the page background (Someone who wishes to remain anonymous, Plasma 5.26):

The common “Keyboard Shortcuts” dialog you’ll see in many apps and System Settings no longer shows you empty “Global Shortcuts” columns when the app doesn’t set any global shortcuts, or empty “Local shortcuts” columns when it only sets global shortcuts (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.95):

The tickmarks and digits on the Analog Clock now respect your accent color (Ismael Asensio, Frameworks 5.95):

…And in addition, the entire Analog Clock’s face also respects your color scheme too! (Ismael Asensio, Frameworks 5.96):

The animated transition when the wallpaper changes from one image to another now respects the global animation duration setting (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.26)

Throughout QtQuick-based software, views where one thing transition into another thing now respect the global animation duration setting (Fushan Wen, Frameworks 5.96)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Thumbnail previews for a folder’s contents are once again generated as expected, rather than only after you have navigated to the folder (Martin T. H. Sandsmark, Dolphin 22.08)

Automount is once again disabled by default as expected (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.25)

SDDM login screen themes downloaded using the “Get New [thing]” downloader window now appear in the System Settings Login Screen page immediately, rather than only after it is closed and re-opened (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.24.6)

Automatic Touch Mode detection now ignores fake input devices, so it can no longer become blocked when an app that creates any such fake input devices is running (Alexander Volkov, Plasma 5.24.6)

Repeatedly mounting and unmounting a disk no longer sometimes causes its list of actions in the “Disks & Devices” widget to become ever longer and accumulate blank entries (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.25)

It’s no longer possible to undo deleting text in Plasma’s Password input fields, which increases security a bit (Derek Christ, Frameworks 5.95 and Plasma 5.26)

When you use the “Go Up” action in Dolphin, the folder you just came from is once again highlighted (Jan Blackquill, Frameworks 5.95)

The shortcut dialog once again shows you accurate information about shortcut conflicts (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.96)

…And everything else

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!

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

This week in KDE: Fixing bugs, and let’s fix more

This week we did a lot of work to fix bugs and make UI improvements, but we still need help to knock out the remaining issues found during the Plasma 5.25 beta. If you are an experienced developer, please consider fixing one or two of these bugs within the week! Plasma 5.25 is a big release, but let’s not let it get a reputation for big bugs too. 🙂

15-Minute Bugs Resolved

Current number of bugs: 65, up from 64. 1 re-opened and 0 resolved.

This is the second week in a row that the number has risen. The reason is because Plasma’s core developers are all very busy with other projects. So if you want this number to go down, it’s going to take more contributions from volunteers. What are you waiting for!? 🙂

Current list of bugs

New Features

You can now remove individual items from the “Recent Files” and “Recent Locations” lists in Dolphin, the file dialogs, and other places (Méven Car, Dolphin 22.08):

It’s now easier to preview wallpapers: just click on them and the desktop will change to show you what the wallpaper would look like. The preview will only be applied if you click on either the “OK” or “Apply” button, of course (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.26)

File open/save dialogs now let you sort hidden files last, just like you can do in Dolphin. And when you do show hidden files, they’re lightened–again, just like in Dolphin (Eugene Popov, Frameworks 5.95)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Sorting by access time in Dolphin now works properly (Méven Car, Dolphin 22.04.2)

Spectacle’s global shortcut for “take screenshot of window under cursor” (Meta+Ctrl+Print screen) now works properly and doesn’t cause the app to launch incorrectly and get stuck in memory when you close it (Paul Worral, Spectacle 22.04.2)

Konsole is now more reliable about parsing URLs that include things like port numbers or are IPV6 addresses (Ahmad Samir, Konsole 22.08)

Elisa’s “Files” view is now rooted at / rather than your home folder, so you can now use it to access music that isn’t in your home folder (Roman Lebedev, Elisa 22.08)

The kded daemon no longer leaks XCB client connections when the screen configuration is changed, so it no longer eventually causes you to be unable to open new apps (Stefan Becker, Plasma 5.24.6)

3rd-party cursor themes can once again be applied and deleted (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.24.6)

KRunner no longer freezes when it tries to display a search result with text that would consume more than three lines (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.24.6)

KWin’s lowest latency setting now actually works (Malte Dronskowski, Plasma 5.24.6)

When you sync your Plasma settings to the SDDM login screen while using a color scheme other than Breeze Light, the user interface elements in SDDM now respect the new color scheme without you having to manually clear the Plasma cache first (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.24.6)

Changing the delimiter character from a space to a colon (or vice versa) in KRunner’s web shortcuts now works without you needing to restart KRunner first (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.24.6)

In the wallpaper chooser window, wallpapers now appear in the aspect ratio of the screen they will be applied to, not the aspect ratio of the screen that the window is currently located on (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.24.6)

Discover now finds apps from their AppStream URLs when the trailing .desktop suffix is omitted, which in particular makes it able to handle all the links at https://apps.kde.org (Antonio Rojas, Plasma 5.25)

Widget resize handles on the desktop now uses the correct cursor shapes when Plasma is running in reversed/RTL language mode (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.25)

Sliders are now drawn correctly with when Plasma is running in reversed/RTL language mode (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.25)

The “Astronomical Events” calendar plugin no longer shows an event for the intermediate moon phases (e.g. “waxing gibbous”) every single day (Volker Krause, Plasma 5.25)

It’s now possible to use wallpapers with ampersands in their filenames (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.26)

Previews for various types of RAW image files are once again generated as expected (Alexander Lohnau, Frameworks 5.95)

Fixed a significant memory leak in the Plasma Wayland session (Méven Car, Frameworks 5.95)

Dolphin’s “All Tags” view now shows the correct name for all tags (Méven Car, Frameworks 5.95)

Fixed an issue in the common Kirigami Scrollview that could cause Kirigami-based apps–especially Discover–to freeze (Marco Martin, Frameworks 5.95)

Progress bars and sliders in QtQuick-based apps now have smoother animations (Ivan Tkachenko, Frameworks 5.95):

User Interface Improvements

In Elisa, you can now sort the Tracks view by “Date Modified”, which can be useful to find things you’ve recently added or changed (Shantanu Tushar, Elisa 22.08)

Tapping a song in Elisa’s playlist using a touchscreen now plays it immediately rather than simply selecting it. In addition, playlist items become taller and more finger-friendly when the app is interacted with using a touchscreen (me: Nate Graham, Elisa 22.08):

When you stretch Partition Manager’s window vertically, text in the information panel no longer awkwardly stretches as well (Ivan Tkachenko, Partition Manager 22.08)

Partition Manager now shows human-readable text for the amount of time that a disk has been powered on (Ivan Tkachenko, Partition Manager 22.08)

Global keyboard shortcuts in Plasma that currently don’t use the Meta key now do; here are the new keyboard shortcuts:

Note that this change will only take effect for new installations; no shortcuts will be changed for existing users (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.25)

You can now click on a letter header in Kickoff’s “All Applications” view to be taken to a view where you can choose a letter and be zoomed right to the apps that start with that letter (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.26):

Clicking the “Cancel” button in the desktop configuration dialog now shows a warning about unsaved changes, if you have unsaved changes (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.26)

…And everything else

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!

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

This week in KDE: Resizable Plasma panel pop-ups

We are busy working on the bug reports folks are filing about the Plasma 5.25 beta, and as of right now, we’re down to 15. Working on these is a great way to make a difference quickly!

In addition, features that didn’t make it into Plasma 5.25 are starting to land in 5.26. There’s some very cool stuff this week, so let’s jump in:

15-Minute Bugs Resolved

Current number of bugs: 64, up from 63. 3 added and 2 resolved:

In the Plasma X11 session, Plasma notifications, OSDs, and widget pop-ups are no longer inappropriately minimizable, maximizable, and tilable (Luca Carlon, Plasma 5.26)

Fixed another way that KWin could crash when plugging in or unplugging an HDMI monitor (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.24.6)

Current list of bugs

New Features

You can now change the color scheme used by Okular independently of the system color scheme (George Florea Bănuș, Okular 22.08):

Elisa now allows you to disable the automatic music scan on startup, and only do it manually (Jerome Guidon, Elisa 22.08):

The pop-ups of Plasma widgets in the panel are now resizable from their edges and corners just like normal windows, and they remember the sizes you set, too! (Luca Carlon, Plasma 5.26):

The Dictionary widget can now be configured to show results from more than one dictionary at once, but not necessarily all of them (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.26):

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Uninstalling service menu items from Dolphin now works for services menus that have any symlinks in their sets of installed files (Christian Hartmann, Dolphin 22.08)

In the Plasma Wayland session, Plasma no longer immediately crashes right after login when you have an external screen connected in “switch to external screen” mode (someone amazing but probably Vlad, Xaver, or Marco; Plasma 5.25)

The System Tray popup no longer sometimes fails to open after you click on the Notifications icon in the hidden view (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.25)

KWin’s “Zoom” effect now works while you’re in the Overview effect and no longer causes glitches when you zoom into a part of the screen that contains a Plasma widget with a blurred background (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.25)

Closing the password prompt without entering a password on System Settings’ “Login Screen (SDDM)” page no longer shows a blank error message (Someone going by the pseudonym “oioi 555”, Plasma 5.25)

Multi-line inline messages throughout QtQuick-based software no longer fail to display their text properly under certain circumstances (Ismael Asensio, Frameworks 5.95)

When viewing files in the trash, the process of generating previews for the ones that don’t already have previews no longer results in the files being copied to /tmp (Méven Car, Frameworks 5.95)

In Konsole, the “Get new Color Schemes” window once again works properly (David Edmundson and Alexander Lohnau, Frameworks 5.95, but distros should be backporting it sooner)

User Interface Improvements

In Dolphin’s Details view, when you right-click on an empty part of the view, the row under the cursor will visibly become unselected and pasting files will now paste into the currently visible view, rather than the folder for the row that was right-clicked (Felix Ernst, Dolphin 22.04.2)

The “Eject” button next to mounted disks in Dolphin’s Places panel no longer appears for internal disks and those manually added to your /etc/fstab file (Kai Uwe Broulik, Dolphin 22.08)

When you use Spectacle to copy an image to the clipboard, the notification it sends no longer confusingly talks about saving things (Felipe Kinoshita, Spectacle 22.08)

When Okteta (a KDE hex editor app) is installed, previewing files with Ark no longer previews them using an embedded hex editing view from Okteta (Nicolas Fella, Ark 22.08)

Discover now displays a more actionable and relevant error message when you launch it without any app backends available, including a special message tailored specifically for Arch Linux (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.25):

Message for non-Arch users
Message for Arch users

The “None” entry in System Settings’ Splash Screen page is now always listed last (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.25)

You can now close Discover while software is being installed, removed, or updated, and it will turn into a system progress notification (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.26)

Description text in the “Get new [thing]” windows is now selectable and copyable (Fushan Wen, Frameworks 5.95)

You can now convert from teaspoons and tablespoons if you only need to know the equivalent of a single one, and also to and from “sq m”, “sq km” and other common abbreviations (Ahmad Samir, and me: Nate Graham Frameworks 5.95)

…And everything else

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! Also, check out the list of Plasma 5.25 beta bugs; those are also important.

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

This week in KDE: We don’t like bugs very much

With the Plasma 5.25 beta released, this was a very bug-squishy week. We managed to land a new feature and some UI improvements, but the focus was on fixing bugs, as you can see below!

Go install the beta release and file bug reports! Find all the issues we missed so we can fix more bugs!

15-Minute Bugs Resolved

Current number of bugs: 63, down from 68. 0 added and 5 resolved:

The screen locker no longer shows its interactive UI elements under certain circumstances (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.25)

The screen locker can now be unlocked if your user account doesn’t have a password set (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.25)

With an auto-hide Panel, right-clicking on a Widget and clicking “Show Alternatives…” now works (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 5.25)

All System Settings and Info Center modules are once again right-clickable in Kickoff (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.25)

The 3rd-party “WeatherWidget2” widget once again works when you also have any 1st-party System Monitor widgets in use (Arjen Hiemstra, Frameworks 5.95)

Current list of bugs

New Features

You can now set an alternate calendar that will be displayed inside the main calendar, so you can keep track of dates in both calendars at once! (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.26):

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Dolphin is now more reliably able to download and install new context menu services (Alexander Lohnau, Dolphin 22.04.2)

Elisa’s playlist sidebar is once again keyboard-navigable, and now it works even better than ever before and you can fully reach and trigger all controls for each item in it (Tranter Madi, Elisa 22.08)

System Settings’ Plasma Styles page once again shows your installed Plasma styles (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.24.6, and I have asked distros to backport it to Plasma 5.24.5 as well)

The “Shut Down” and “Restart” Buttons are once again visible in the fullscreen Application Dashboard launcher (Amy Rose, Plasma 5.24.6)

In the Plasma Wayland session, System Settings’ Drawing Tablet page now correctly remembers what you configured for its “Target Display” setting (David Redondo Plasma 5.42.6)

When shutting down the system, the kded background process now quits properly rather than being abruptly terminated, allowing it to correctly perform cleanup operations which should fix a variety of subtle bugs all over the place (Eugene Popov, Plasma 5.25)

In the Plasma Wayland session, the cursor no longer flickers when dragging something while using the default Breeze cursor theme (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.25)

In the Plasma Wayland session, when you have rotated any of your monitors, connecting a new one no longer un-rotates the rotated ones (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.25)

CSD-using dialog windows in GTK apps using the Breeze GTK theme now have close buttons that match the styling of other windows (Artem Grinev, Plasma 5.25)

Fixed various slightly incorrect colors in GTK apps using the Breeze GTK theme (Artem Grinev, Plasma 5.25)

When you open the Desktop configuration window, the “Wallpaper” item in the sidebar is now correctly highlighted when the rest of the window is showing the Wallpaper page (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.25)

In the Plasma Wayland session, a wide variety of single-window KDE apps now have their existing windows brought to the front when re-launched from Kickoff, KRunner, etc (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.25, KDE apps version 22.08, and various other KDE apps too, I’m sure)

In the Plasma Wayland session, drag-and-drop onto XWayland-using apps now works better (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.25)

In the Plasma Wayland session, when you drag something, the cursor now generally always changes to the correct “you can drop it here” cursor when moving over an area that can accept the dragged thing (David Redondo, Plasma 5.25)

In the Plasma Wayland session, when you hit Meta+V to show the clipboard history menu, an entry for it no longer appears in the Task Manager or Task Switcher (David Redondo, Plasma 5.25)

The Task Manager no longer takes up slightly too much space when not showing anything (Victor Pavan, Plasma 5.25)

When using System Settings’ icon view, hovering over an icon on the homepage no longer shows two tooltips (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.25)

In the Plasma Wayland session, when you launch a single-instance app that’s already running using either a global shortcut or the Overview Effect’s KRunner-powered search field, its window is now raised as you would expect (Aleix Pol Gonzales, Plasma 5.25 with Frameworks 5.95)

Column views in Kirigami no longer leak memory when you navigate back and forth in them (David Edmundson, Frameworks 5.95)

User Interface Improvements

When you hover over the free space bar at the bottom of a Dolphin window, its tooltip now tells you the disk capacity too (Shubham, Dolphin 22.08):

When using your system in Chinese, Japanese, or Korean, the alphabetical ordering of apps in Kickoff now groups apps by the romanization of their names, not their first characters–which it may surprise you to learn is something considered generally desirable by speakers of those languages (Xuetian Weng, Plasma 5.25):

CSD-using GTK apps using the Breeze GTK theme now better match the styling of other apps: their corner radius is now equal, there’s a subtle light highlight on top, and menu shadows look like the shadows for Qt/KDE menu shadows (Artem Grinev, Plasma 5.25):

“Level bars” in apps using the Breeze GTK theme now have a nice Breezey appearance (Artem Grinev, Plasma 5.25)

System Settings’ Search page now has a simpler UI to include or exclude a folder from indexing: each action just has a button on the bottom of the page to let you do it (Áron Kovács, Plasma 5.25):

System Settings’ Touch Screen Edges page is now only visible in the Plasma Wayland session, since the feature only really works properly on Wayland (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.25)

On the login and lock screens, the little battery indicator icon in the corner now has a more aesthetically pleasing size and scale (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.25)

The User Switcher widget now displays a prettier round representation of your user picture (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.25):

Text for app descriptions in Discover and image metadata in the Picture of the Day wallpaper settings page is now selectable and copyable (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.26)

Scrolling over the calendar view in various Plasma widgets now does what you would expect (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 5.95)

Collapsed Kirigami sidebars’ “Open Sidebar” buttons now have a tooltip so you can tell what it is (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.95)

…And everything else

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!

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

This week in KDE: something for everyone

This week we have a little bit of everything! Hopefully everyone should be able to find something to like:

15-Minute Bugs Resolved

Current number of bugs: 68, down from 70. 0 added and 2 resolved:

When Discover’s window is narrow/mobile mode and you search for something, the search field now disappears as expected when you resize the window to be wider (Matej Starc, Plasma 5.24.6)

System Settings’ sidebar view now remains visually in sync when the page shown by the main panel is changed by something else, such as opening a different page from KRunner (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.24.6)

Current list of bugs

New Features

Elisa is now able to display lyrics embedded in files that are using the LRC format, and automatically scroll the lyrics view as the song plays! (Han Young, Elisa 22.08)

There is now a user-facing option to control Tablet Mode! It retains its current default value of “switch automatically when relevant” which is only available on Wayland, but you can now additionally force it to be always on always off, and those options work on X11 too! (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.25):

System Monitor now has an option to make a page start loading data as soon as the app is opened–rather than as soon as the page is accessed–and the default History page now uses it by default (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.25)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Yakuake no longer inappropriately opens on the active screen when configured to always open on a specific screen (Jonathan F., Yakuake 22.04.1)

When using Gwenview’s Crop tool with a fixed aspect ratio, changing the values in the size spinboxes now works properly (Alban Boissard, Gwenview 22.08)

Fixed a semi-common way that Plasma could crash when you remove a panel that has a System Tray widget on it (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.24.6)

In the Plasma Wayland session, KWin no longer crashes when you hit Alt+Tab while the context menu for a window titlebar is visible (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.24.6)

The Overview effect no longer shows your panels, confusing you into thinking they’re interactive when they’re really not (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.24.6)

In the Plasma Wayland session, when something is recording your screen, the icon that appear in your system tray to notify you of this now appears in the visible part of the tray where you’ll actually see it, instead of only in the popup where it would be missed and fail to achieve its purpose in life (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.24.6)

System Monitor Widgets now load handmade presets correctly. Note that you will need to remake your presets for this to work (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.24.6)

When you’ve set Discover to restart automatically after installing updates, now it only does so if all of the updates were applied successfully (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.24.6)

In the Plasma Wayland session, when a KDE app is activated from another KDE app, the activated app now raises itself, just like it does on X11. This also makes the launch feedback animation work for apps launched from Kickoff, KRunner, and other pieces of KDE software! (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.25) Note that when an app is activated and does not raise as you would expect, if either (or both) of the apps is a 3d-party app, it’s because that app needs to implement the xdg_activation_v1 Wayland protocol

In the Plasma Wayland session, a severe visual glitch experienced by users of NVIDIA GPUs has been fixed (Erik Kurzinger, Plasma 5.25)

In the Plasma Wayland session, hitting Meta+V to show a menu of the clipboard contents now shows an actual menu at the actual cursor position, rather than a standalone window in the center of the screen (David Redondo, Plasma 5.25)

In the Plasma Wayland session, you can now activate global shortcuts while dragging a window (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.25)

The Digital Clock applet’s “Copy to Clipboard” menu item now respects whether you’re using 24-hour time or 12-hour time (Felipe Kinoshita, Plasma 5.25)

Icon previews are once again shown for files on NFS or NTFS drives, the Trash, Plasma Vaults, KDE Connect mounts, and other non-local locations (David Faure, Frameworks 5.94). Note that this means preview generation can once again cause slowdowns and freezes in Dolphin when accessing those locations if they are slow, and we are working on a better way to avoid this without throwing the baby out with the bathwater by disabling previews entirely!

When you drag-and-drop an image onto your desktop and choose “Set as Wallpaper”, it will now automatically switch to the correct wallpaper plugin that supports single image wallpapers if you were currently using something different (Fushan Wen, Frameworks 5.95)

User Interface Improvements

When you provide incorrect authentication credentials on the lock or login screens, the whole UI now shakes a bit (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.25):

Tabs in GTK apps using the Breeze GTK theme now match the tab styling in Qt and KDE apps (Artem Grinev, Plasma 5.25)

Menubars and areas that use the menubar color in GTK apps using the Breeze GTK theme now use the header color as expected, if you’re using a color scheme with header colors (Artem Grinev, Plasma 5.25):

Toolbar buttons with icons and toolbar buttons without icons now share the same text baseline, so their text will always align vertically (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.25):

In the Plasma Wayland session, multi-finger touchscreen gestures (Did you know that KWin has touchscreen gestures?) now follow your fingers just like touchpad and edge swipe gestures do! (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.25)

In the Plasma Wayland session, actions that trigger when you touch a screen edge are now disabled by default while there are any full screen windows, which improves the UX for games where you touch screen edges a lot (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.25)

The Dictionary widget now shows you an appropriate error message when it can’t fetch the definition (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.25):

The weather widget no longer shows decimals for its temperature display when used on a Panel (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.25):

On System Settings’ Login Screen (SDDM) page, the “Halt command” and “Reboot command” text fields are now editable, so you can type in a command by hand, or add a command-line argument to it if you’d like, instead of only being able to choose a command using the Open dialog (Someone going by the pseudonym “oioi 555, Plasma 5.25)

…And everything else

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!

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

This week in KDE: New features and many bugfixes for Plasma 5.25

This week Plasma 5.25 reached its “soft feature freeze” date, at which point we don’t add any large new features or major code refactorings. This reduces risk and gives us a longer period of time to polish those changes before the final release. So as you can imagine, everyone rushed to merge their big stuff right before the deadline! 🙂 As a result, this week I can present are tons of new features and important refactorings that fix multiple bugs. Check it out:

15-Minute Bugs Resolved

Current number of bugs: 70, same as last week. 2 added and 2 resolved:

The volume and brightness OSDs once again show their visual indicator bars on the lock and login screens (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.24.5)

When an application gives the system both an icon name and an image for its System Tray icon, the System Tray now prefers the icon name, so if there is such an icon in your icon theme, you’ll see that and it will respect your color scheme. This affected Telegram, for example (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.24.6)

Current list of bugs

New Features

You can now optionally give your panel a “floating” appearance! In this mode, it still functionally behaves identically to a traditional panel, and clicks in the empty area will be forwarded to the panel. In addition, the panel “un-floats” when there are any maximized windows (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 5.25):

Discover now shows you apps’ level of access to resources on your system! When an app is sandboxed, you get a fine-grained list of exactly the things that the app automatically has permission to do (Suhaas Joshi and Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.25):

The presentation here is still a bit rough, and will probably be cleaned up by the time 5.25 ships

When you uninstall a sandboxed app in Discover, it now offers you the ability to easily delete the settings and user data if you want to (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.25):

The Overview effect now offers the option to exclude minimized windows, just like Present Windows does (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.25)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

When you use Dolphin’s “Open Terminal” feature, it once again opens the terminal at the folder which is selected (if any) rather than always opening it at the current folder (Someone going by the pseudonym “oioi 555”, Dolphin 22.08)

Elisa now shows album art for songs and albums that have the covers embedded in the files, not just sitting next to them (Tranter Madi, Elisa 22.08)

System Monitor once again shows information for AMD GPUs (David Redondo, Plasma 5.24.6)

The Flickr and Simon Stålenhag Picture of the Day wallpapers no longer change more than once a day (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.24.6)

Text for menu items in the Global Menu once again follows the color scheme of the Plasma Theme (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.24.6)

System Settings’ Display Configuration page now shows the correct refresh rates in more circumstances (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.24.6)

Fixed one of the ways that the kded daemon could crash in the Plasma Wayland session (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.25)

Under the hood, the Present Windows and Desktop Grid effects have been rewritten to use the same backend as the Overview effect, which fixes a grand total of 44 Bugzilla tickets (!!!), gives them consistent visual styling, and modernizes their code to keep them maintainable going forward (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.25)

System Monitor charts using the “Horizontal Bars” style are now able to meaningfully show values equal to or very close to 0 (Trent McPheron, Plasma 5.25)

Fixed a memory leak when changing your wallpaper plugin (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.25)

When you change any of the paths in System Settings’ Locations page, any Places Panel bookmarks that pointed to the old locations are automatically updated to point to the new locations (Méven Car, Plasma 5.25)

System Monitor now shows the correct app icons for apps that were launched automatically at login (David Redondo, Plasma 5.25)

Breeze cursors are no longer ever so slightly smaller than they were intended to be (Chris Chris, Plasma 5.25)

Plasma no longer crashes if it can’t find the active theme (David Faure, Frameworks 5.94)

Dolphin no longer crashes when closed from the “Close Tab” list item from the command palette (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.94)

Fixed a bug that could cause file transfers to SMB shares to fail the second and/or subsequent times you make a transfer (Harald Sitter, Frameworks 5.94)

Fixed a memory leak affecting many Kirigami-based applications (Fushan Wen, Frameworks 5.94)

User Interface Improvements

Kate now shows its toolbar by default (Christoph Cullmann, Kate 22.08)

Kate’s Menu bar has been re-arranged a bit to make each one less huge and intimidating. In particular, there is now a new “Selection” menu that holds actions which will be applied only to whatever is selected (Eric Armbruster, Kate 22.08):

Various KWin scripts that are implemented in JavaScript (such as the Show Desktop effect) now that follow your fingers when activated with a gesture. Activate Show Desktop with a Touch Screen swipe to see some magic! (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.25)

A bunch more KWin effects are now activatable using touch screen edge swipes (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.25)

When you set up fingerprint authentication, the lock screen now lets you immediately unlock by putting your finger on the fingerprint reader; no need to click the “unlock” button with en empty password field anymore! (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.25)

You can now add locations and places to the “Favorites” list/grid in Kickoff, Kicker, and the Application Dashboard (Méven Car, Plasma 5.25):

Klipper’s configuration window has been re-organized a bit to have a new “Action Menu” page, which holds settings relevant to the actions menu when you are using any Klipper actions; if you’re not, you can safely ignore it entirely (Jonathan Marten, Plasma 5.25)

File open/save dialogs and inline icon views in various apps such as Kdenlive now let you scale icons up to 512 px size (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.94)

…And everything else

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!

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

This week in KDE: Porting everything to QtQuick

Well OK not literally everything. But… a lot of things! The KWin scripts KCM, Filelight, and DrKonqi. What does this mean? From a user perspective, mostly not much except for better visuals that align them better with modern KDE UI design. But it also means better-separated internals, more modern code, and easier hackability for the UI. The software’s lifespan increases and we get closer to everything using the same tech stack. It’s important stuff.

In addition, you should find lots of nice bugfixes and even a few new features!

15-Minute Bugs Resolved

Current number of bugs: 70, down from 73. 2 added, 2 found to be duplicates of other 15-minute bugs, and 3 resolved:

Certain monitors no longer constantly power-cycle in a loop when connected (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.24.5)

Everyone can once again change their Favorites in Kickoff and Kicker and have those changes persist after restarting Plasma or the computer (Méven Car, Plasma 5.24.5)

After installing a Flatpak app using Discover, there’s no longer still a misleading “Install” button there anyway (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.24.5)

Current list of bugs

New Features

Skanpage now supports exporting searchable PDFs using optical character recognition! (Alexander Stippich, Skanpage 22.08):

Dolphin now lets you sort by file extension if you prefer that (Eugene Popov, Dolphin 22.08)

In the Plasma Wayland session, you can now change the resolution of your screen to resolutions beyond the officially supported ones, just like you can in the X11 session (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.25)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Dolphin’s Terminal Panel no longer gets de-synced from the view itself (Felix Ernst, Dolphin 22.04.1)

Elisa’s “Load Playlist…” and “Save Playlist…” actions now work from the global menu (Firlaev-Hans Fiete, Elisa 22.04.1)

Text in Filelight’s tooltips is no longer clipped away at the ends (Harald Sitter, Filelight 22.08)

Plasma no longer sometimes randomly crashes when you have more than one app with multiple windows open and you interact with one of their Task Manager tooltips (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.24.5)

In the Plasma Wayland session, KWin no longer crashes when connected USB-C monitors wake up from their power-save states (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.24.5)

The Global Menu widget no longer shows menus that the app has marked as hidden, such as the “Tools” Menu in Kolourpaint (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.24.5)

In the Plasma Wayland session, KWin no longer crashes when you close a laptop and re-open it when its internal screen is set to turn off when closed (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.25)

In the Plasma Wayland session, fixed another way that KWin could crash when you disconnect an external screen (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.25)

In an app using xdg-desktop-portals (e.g. sandboxed Flatpak and Snap apps), when you use a file dialog to access a file in a remote location that automatically gets mounted using kio-fuse under the hood, the next time you open the file dialog again, it will open showing the original location, not its weird-looking kio-fuse mountpoint (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.25)

Closing a window that spawned a child “Get New [thing]” window now closes the child window too, rather than letting it keep living, and then the parent app either crashes or has an invisible window that can’t be shown again until you kill the app using System Monitor or a terminal window (Alexander Lohnau, Frameworks 5.94)

Apps like Konsole that allow you to set a custom color scheme for the whole window that overrides the system’s default color scheme are now substantially faster to launch (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 5.94)

User Interface Improvements

The KWin Scripts KCM has been ported to QtQuick, modernizing its appearance and making future maintenance simpler (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.25):

Filelight has been ported to QtQuick, modernizing its appearance and making future maintenance simpler (Harald Sitter, Filelight 22.08):

DrKonqi’s crash reporting wizard has been ported to QtQuick too! But honestly you should barely notice the difference (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.25)

For apps using xdg-desktop-portals, the app chooser dialog now looks and behaves better (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.25):

For those of you who disliked the change to always skip minimized tasks when scrolling over the Task Manager to switch tasks, it’s now configurable (Abhijeet Viswa, Plasma 5.25)

…And everything else

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!

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

This week in KDE: Major accent color and Global Theme improvements

If last week’s post was heavy on the bugfixes, this week we’re overflowing with juicy features! But don’t worry, we didn’t forget about the 5-minute bugs and managed to squash three. Feast your eyes:

15-Minute Bugs Resolved

Current number of bugs: 72, down from 73. 2 added and 3 resolved:

The Battery widget now always appears in the System Tray on login, instead of sometimes being missing until you manually restart Plasma (Jolene K, Plasma 5.24.5)

The date displayed in the Digital Clock widget now always matches the real date (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.24)

In the Plasma X11 session, volume OSDs no longer sometimes appear in the top-left corner of the screen (Jim Jones, Frameworks 5.94)

Current list of bugs

New Features

When you click on a Global Theme in System Settings, it will now tell you what changes it’s going to make, and it gives you the opportunity to only apply certain parts of it! (Dominic Hayes, Plasma 5.25):

You can now set your accent color to be automatically generated based on the colors in the current wallpaper! It even changes the accent color automatically when the wallpaper changes! (Tanbir Jishan, Plasma 5.25):

You can now edit your color scheme to make the accent color subtly tint all of its colors! And color schemes can now be configured this way by default, so folks uploading color schemes to store.kde.org can also set a tint for them out-of-the-box (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.25):

The amount of tint is configurable too, you you can make the tint subtle or ridiculously garish, according to your aesthetic preferences. And yes, this works with wallpaper-aware accent colors too!

For apps using xdg-desktop-portals (e.g. Flatpak and Snap apps), Plasma now supports the new “Dynamic launcher” portal that allows apps to create and edit .desktop files for better system integration (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.25)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Spectacle no longer disables all the buttons when you cancel taking a screenshot if there was already one in the main window at the time (Antonio Prcela, Spectacle 22.04.1)

Elisa no longer needs to be restarted after you embed a category in the sidebar, or change the thing that’s embedded in the sidebar (me: Nate Graham, Elisa 22.04.1)

In the Plasma Wayland session, SDL apps no longer crash when an external screen is unplugged (Weng Xuetian, Plasma 5.24.5)

The Comics widget once again works (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.24.5)

On System Settings’ Quick Settings page, the “Change Wallpaper…” button now works when you have more than one Activity (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.24.5)

Searching in KRunner, Application Launcher, Overview (or any other KRunner-powered search) now returns matches that are text files, or use a file format that inherits from the plaintext format (Julian Rolfes and Natalie Clarius, Plasma 5.24.5)

Closing the Widget Explorer sidebar now deletes it, saving some memory and fixing a bug whereby the previous search query would be inappropriately remembered the next time you open it (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.24.5)

KRunner no longer hangs forever when you ask it to define a “word” with spaces in it (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.25)

For apps using xdg-desktop-portals (e.g. Flatpak and Snap apps), quitting or killing the app while one such portal dialog is open now closes the dialog too (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.25)

KWin rules are now re-evaluated when the set of active screens changes, so they will be correctly applied at more times (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.25)

Plasma no longer sometimes crashes when you change the wallpaper from the context menu item for image files in Dolphin or on the desktop (Jakub Nowak, Frameworks 5.94)

User Interface Improvements

Filelight’s old homepage that displayed subtly inaccurate and incorrect information has been replaced with a standard-style welcome page that doesn’t mislead you (Harald Sitter, Filelight 22.08):

Ark now displays real on-disk sizes for folders inside archives, rather than the number of items they contain (Andrey Butirsky, Ark 22.08)

Dolphin can now optionally display “Author” metadata below filenames in icon mode (Kai Uwe Broulik, Dolphin 22.08)

Discover now shows all application categories in the first level of its sidebar, rather than nested one level deep (Taavi Juursalu, Plasma 5.25):

The Networks widget’s details view now shows the frequency and BSSID of the currently connected WiFi network (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.25)

There is now a standard “loading” placeholder component in Kirigami that Kirigami apps are being ported to use, so you will always see a consistent loading indicator (Felipe Kinoshita, Frameworks 5.94):

Right-clicking on path items in URL navigators throughout KDE apps now gives you an option to open that location in a new window if you’d like, not just a new tab (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.94)

…And everything else

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!

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