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

New Features

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

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

User Interface Improvements

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…And everything else

Keep in mind that this blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! Tons of KDE apps whose development I don’t have time to follow aren’t represented here, and I also don’t mention backend refactoring, improved test coverage, and other changes that are generally not user-facing. If you’re hungry for more, check out https://planet.kde.org/, where you can find blog posts by other KDE contributors detailing the work they’re doing.

How You Can Help

Have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover ways to be part of a project that really matters. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE; you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to already be a programmer, either. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

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

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

New Features

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

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

User Interface Improvements

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…And everything else

Keep in mind that this blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! Tons of KDE apps whose development I don’t have time to follow aren’t represented here, and I also don’t mention backend refactoring, improved test coverage, and other changes that are generally not user-facing. If you’re hungry for more, check out https://planet.kde.org/, where you can find blog posts by other KDE contributors detailing the work they’re doing.

How You Can Help

Have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover ways to be part of a project that really matters. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE; you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to already be a programmer, either. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

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

This was another really really big week in KDE!

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

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

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

Other New Features

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Login scripts now run as expected when using systemd startup mode (Henri Chain, Plasma 5.22)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

User Interface Improvements

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…And everything else

Keep in mind that this blog only covers the tip of the iceberg (though this week it was perhaps a bigger tip than usual)! Tons of KDE apps whose development I don’t have time to follow aren’t represented here, and I also don’t mention backend refactoring, improved test coverage, and other changes that are generally not user-facing. If you’re hungry for more, check out https://planet.kde.org/, where you can find blog posts by other KDE contributors detailing the work they’re doing.

How You Can Help

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

New Features

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

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

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

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

User Interface Improvements

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Web Presence

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

One more thing

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

…And everything else

Keep in mind that this blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! Tons of KDE apps whose development I don’t have time to follow aren’t represented here, and I also don’t mention backend refactoring, improved test coverage, and other changes that are generally not user-facing. If you’re hungry for more, check out https://planet.kde.org/, where you can find blog posts by other KDE contributors detailing the work they’re doing.

How You Can Help

Have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover ways to be part of a project that really matters. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE; you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to already be a programmer, either. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

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

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

Other New Features

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

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

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

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

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

User Interface Improvements

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

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

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

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

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

Web Presence

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

…And everything else

Keep in mind that this blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! Tons of KDE apps whose development I don’t have time to follow aren’t represented here, and I also don’t mention backend refactoring, improved test coverage, and other changes that are generally not user-facing. If you’re hungry for more, check out https://planet.kde.org/, where you can find blog posts by other KDE contributors detailing the work they’re doing.

How You Can Help

Have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover ways to be part of a project that really matters. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE; you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to already be a programmer, either. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

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

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

New Features

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

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

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

User Interface Improvements

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Web Presence

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

…And everything else

Keep in mind that this blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! Tons of KDE apps whose development I don’t have time to follow aren’t represented here, and I also don’t mention backend refactoring, improved test coverage, and other changes that are generally not user-facing. If you’re hungry for more, check out https://planet.kde.org/, where you can find blog posts by other KDE contributors detailing the work they’re doing.

How You Can Help

Have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover ways to be part of a project that really matters. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE; you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to already be a programmer, either. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

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

Today I’d like to introduce an interesting new component that will eventually be rolled out in many KDE apps with menubars: KHamburgerMenu. This re-usable component allows QWidgets-based apps to show a custom hamburger menu w2hen the main menubar is hidden, like Dolphin already does. In fact, we are in the process of porting Dolphin’s custom implementation to use KHamburgerMenu. Here’s a sneak peek of the early alpha work:

Adopting KHamburgerMenu offers KDE apps many features and advantages:

1. It offers an escape valve for users who hide the menubar by accident! This is a surprisingly serious problem, and KDE’s bugtracker is littered with reports from users who did not figure out how to show their menubar again!
2. It allows users who want maximum vertical space to choose to hide the menubar without losing GUI access to the menu items, or having to activate the titlebar-based menubar or global menubar (maybe they don’t like those; we’re all about choice in KDE after all!).
3. Being a re-usable framework, KHamburgerMenu can be applied to KDE apps besides just Dolphin.
4. Though the hamburger menu shows a curated assortment of items from the main menubar, the app’s full menu structure is available from a sub-menu on the bottom (See “For 83 more actions:”, in the screenshot above) so nothing is ever completely hidden. This means that the curation of items can be more selective because there is no longer a need to cram everything into the main level to make sure it isn’t totally invisible to the user. This will result in hamburger menus whose contents are short and relevant.
5. The new hamburger button is just a regular toolbar item like all others, so you can relocate it, rename it, change its icon, or remove it entirely if you really do want to hide the menubar and not use a hamburger menu.

Big thanks to Felix Ernst for this work! It has been merged for Frameworks 5.81, and we are working on porting Dolphin and Gwenview to use it, hopefully to land in their 21.08 releases. And hopefully more will be coming too.

---

Some of you may be wondering, “Does KDE plan to kill off the menubar the way GNOME did? Have your feelings on this matter changed since you wrote a scathing criticism of headerbars and hamburger menus back in 2018?” My answers would be 1) no, we have no intention of killing off traditional menubars especially for large and complex apps, and 2) yes, my personal feelings on Hamburger menus have changed somewhat over time, particularly because KHamburgerMenu is engineered to avoid what we see as the drawbacks of the GNOME-style hamburger menu. However, I’ll have to expand on that in another blog post because this intro section is getting waaaaay too long! So stay tuned.

Edit: here you go: https://pointieststick.com/2021/04/03/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-hamburger-menu

Anyway, here’s the rest:

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

When Dolphin is configured to restore history on launch (as it does by default), if it is launched with a URL corresponding to a location that was already open last time, it now opens and focuses that location, rather than opening a redundant new tab for it (me: Nate Graham, Dolphin 21.04)

It’s no longer possible to use Dolphin’s “Mount ISO” action to mount the same ISO image multiple times (Kwon-Young Choi, Dolphin 21.04)

The FortiSSLVPN networkmanager plugin now works (Pedro Gomes, Plasma 5.21.4)

Single-keyboard-layout setups in the Plasma Wayland session no longer fail to load your keyboard options and variants (e.g. alternative Caps Lock behaviors) (Andrey Butirsky, Plasma 5.21.4)

Task Manager entries for apps capable of showing a numbered badge in the corner no longer sometimes pointlessly show a badge with the number zero in it (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.21.4)

Syncing your font size to the SDDM login screen now works in the case where the system is using its default font size, but that size differs from the default font size of the login screen (Eugene Popov, Plasma 5.21.4)

You can once again create new files on a writable FTP share using Dolphin’s “Create New…” menu (Méven Car, Frameworks 5.81)

The image thumbnailer no longer sometimes crashes when taking a screenshot (Méven Car, Frameworks 5.81)

The Baloo file indexer is now more reliably able to notice when files have been renamed or moved (Stefan Brüns, Frameworks 5.81)

User Interface Improvements

Gwenview’s initial window size the first time you launch it is now a more reasonable 1020×700 (me: Nate Graham, Gwenview 21.04)

Taking into account user feedback from last week regarding the new Plasma applet config dialog appearance, we decided to revert the changes and go back to the customary KDE style in the absence of consensus and work to simultaneously change all settings dialogs to use a new style (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.22):

Search fields in Discover and the “Get New [thing]” dialogs now automatically initiate a search a few seconds after you finish typing, if you haven’t already pressed the Enter key by that point (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen and me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.81 and Plasma 5.22)

The Digital Clock Applet’s option to always display the local timezone is now presented in a clearer way in the settings window (Momo Cao, Plasma 5.22):

When using our Breeze GTK theme, scrollbars in ancient GTK2 apps now look more similar to Breeze-style scrollbars in Qt apps (Marco Rebhan, Plasma 5.22)

…And everything else

Keep in mind that this blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! Tons of KDE apps whose development I don’t have time to follow aren’t represented here, and I also don’t mention backend refactorings, improved test coverage, and other changes that are generally not user-facing. If you’re hungry for more, check out https://planet.kde.org/, where you can find blog posts by other KDE contributors detailing the work they’re doing.

How You Can Help

Have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover ways to be part of a project that really matters. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE; you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to already be a programmer, either. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

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

Do you like things? I like things! Have all the things:

New Features

Kate and KWrite now have basic touchscreen scrolling support! (Daniel Tang, Kate 21.08)

System Settings now opens to a new “Quick Settings” page that displays some of the most commonly-used settings, and even includes a link to the wallpaper settings as well! (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.22):

There’s now an option for Digital Clock applets placed on a horizontal panel to force single-line display of both date and time irrespective of the panel’s height (Momo Cao, Plasma 5.22):

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

When activating KDE Connect’s standalone “Reply to message” window, it now comes to the front automatically instead of hiding annoyingly behind existing windows (at least on X11; on Wayland, nothing comes to the front automatically, but it will soon once our proposed cross-app activation protocol is merged and then we adopt it) (Bharadwaj Raju, KDE Connect 21.04)

Substantially improved the speed and performance of taking high DPI screenshots in Spectacle (Vlad Zahorodnii, Spectacle 21.08 or newer with Plasma 5.22 or newer)

Color scheme previews once again show the correct colors in the inner view section, and the preview no longer sometimes gets cut off at the bottom (David Redondo, Plasma 5.21.4)

In the new Plasma System Monitor app, the right sidebar’s content no longer sometimes gets cut off (David Redondo, Plasma 5.21.4)

Changing the volume no longer sometimes causes it to get increased or decreased by one percentage point more or less that the amount you would expect it to be adjusted by (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22)

In the Plasma Wayland session, changing random settings in System Settings or switching Global themes no longer sometimes randomly causes Plasma or KWin to crash (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.22)

In the Plasma Wayland session, the Task Manager is now capable of cycling through windows of a grouped task on click exactly as in the X11 session (Usarin Heininga, Plasma 5.22)

KRunner’s history drop-down menu now always works even if you’re using a crusty old Plasma theme that’s a fork of an old version of Breeze and hasn’t been updated in ages and ages (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.22)

The National Geographic picture of the day wallpaper now works again, and has been future-proofed a bit to hopefully make it less likely to break in the future if the source URLs change again (George Dietrich, Plasma 5.22)

System Settings now shows whether the Window Behavior page has any changed settings with the customary orange dot in the sidebar when using its “Highlight Changed Settings” feature (Cyril Rossi, Plasma 5.22)

Drag-and-drop operations in the Plasma Wayland session no longer activate every single window that the cursor passes over while dragging (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.22)

Pressing the Esc key in the new Plasma System Monitor app while a popup is open no longer closes both the popup and also any other closable thing below it that was also open (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.22)

KRunner no longer sometimes launches apps as the wrong user under certain circumstances (Fabian Vogt, Frameworks 5.81)

Unmounting a mounted volume after opening and then closing any files on it no longer gets stuck (David Faure, Frameworks 5.81)

Dolphin no longer sometimes crashes when playing a video preview in the Information Panel, and also uses a bit less memory when doing so (Harald Sitter, phonon-vlc 0.11)

User Interface Improvements

Kate and KWrite now tell you what to do instead if you mistakenly run them with sudo or kdesu to try to edit root-owned files (me: Nate Graham, Kate 21.04):

The subtitle for Plasma Vaults items now wraps, so that the error next never gets elided before the useful part of the message can be printed (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.21.4):

Discover’s notification now retains its interactive button when viewed in the notifications applet, so you can click on it to open Discover and start the update (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.22)

Klipper’s hidden feature to show a pop-up with all the saved clipboard entries right at the cursor position is now bound to the Meta+V shortcut, so now it’s super easy to press that and see all the saved clipboard entries and call up whichever one you want! Apparently Windows 10 just implemented something like this, but it turns out we’ve had it for years, probably decades. 🙂 (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22):

Taking into account user feedback, we have reverted the change to System Settings that put the Global Themes item into the sidebar’s header area, in favor of a new approach that simply indents all the child pages below it. This also restores the ability to click on the whole header area to go back (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.22):

The configuration windows for Plasma applets have received a visual overhaul which makes them more consistent with other modern KDE apps and also fixes a bunch of bugs, particularly regarding the desktop configuration view not remembering its size and sometimes abruptly changing its size (Carl Schwan, Plasma 5.22):

The Highlight Windows effect that is displayed by default when switching windows no longer shows ghost outlines of non-highlighted windows that can cause a bizarre jumble on the screen when many windows are stacked on top of one another at the same or similar positions (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.22)

Breeze tabs now have a subtle colored line on the top of the active tab, which makes it clear which tab is active when there are only two, especially when using a dark color scheme (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.22):

It’s now possible to delete installed Splash Screens installed using the Get New Splash Screens window straight from the System Settings page itself, without having to go back to that window (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.22)

The Emoji Selector window now offers an option to clear the history of recently-used Emojis (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22):

The scrollbar mini-map in Kate and other KTextEditor-based apps now respects your active color scheme (Jan Paul Batrina, Frameworks 5.81)

Kate, KWrite, and other KTextEditor-based apps no pointlessly longer prompt you to save your changes when you close a document that’s both blank and also unsaved, because in this circumstance, there are no changes (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.81)

…And everything else

Keep in mind that this blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! Tons of KDE apps whose development I don’t have time to follow aren’t represented here, and I also don’t mention backend refactorings, improved test coverage, and other changes that are generally not user-facing. If you’re hungry for more, check out https://planet.kde.org/, where you can find blog posts by other KDE contributors detailing the work they’re doing.

How You Can Help

Have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover ways to be part of a project that really matters. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE; you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to already be a programmer, either. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

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

This week I want to highlight something big: Elisa now has a full mobile interface, making it a first-class citizen on Plasma Mobile and Android! A ton of of the code is shared, thanks to KDE’s Kirigami user interface toolkit. Thanks very much to Devin Lin for this enormously impactful contribution that makes Elisa a fully convergent music player!

In addition we got a lot of work done on the new Plasma System monitor app, which is going to replace the venerable KSysguard by default in Plasma 5.22. It’s currently optional, so we’re very thankful for the amount of testing that adventurous people have done with it. This promises to make the full-roll out in Plasma 5.22 much smoother. Thank you everyone!

Other New Features

Kate now has a feature to let you jump back to the previous cursor position (Waqar Ahmed, Kate 21.04):

You are now notified and asked to back up your data when problems with your disk are detected that do not quite rise to the level of a full S.M.A.R.T failure, but are nonetheless worrying and could potentially cause data loss soon (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.22)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Konsole no longer crashes if you close a tab and then immediately use the “Bookmark all tabs as folder” action (Carlos Alves, Konsole 21.04)

Elisa can now play AAC files (Matthieu Gallien, Elisa 21.04)

When Dolphin is sorting by on-disk sizes, it no longer orders folders first when not asked to do so (Méven Car, Dolphin 21.04)

When you tell Gwenview to open a set of files that includes any files which happen to have the same name, it no longer somewhat terrifyingly shows an overwrite dialog prompting you to delete one of them which freezes and becomes non-interactive anyway (Méven Car, Gwenview 21.04)

Spectacle no longer inappropriately enables “on click” mode under certain circumstances (Vlad Zahorodnii, Spectacle 21.04)

Fixed a case where the new Plasma System Monitor app could crash on Wayland (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.21.3)

The “Force Font DPI” setting is once again usable on Wayland, so those of you who were using it to work around Wayland’s blurry fractional scaling can do so again (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.21.3)

Changing the settings of any of the System Monitor widgets now always results in the Apply button being enabled (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.21.3)

The “Amount of history to keep” setting in system monitor widgets and the new app now works (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.21.3)

Moving a widget within a page in the new Plasma System Monitor app now works (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.21.3)

The new Plasma System Monitor app now remembers its filter text if you switch away from the filtered view and then go back (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.21.3)

Text in table columns in the new Plasma System Monitor app is now always properly vertically aligned no matter what font settings you use (David Redondo, Plasma 5.21.3)

The new Plasma System Monitor app’s “Quit Application” dialog no longer mis-renders its checkbox when using certain fonts (David Redondo, Plasma 5.21.3)

Spectacle’s “Rectangular Region” mode once again works in the Plasma Wayland session (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.22)

When using Dropbox and setting its System Tray item to be “always hidden”, it now remembers this state after the computer is rebooted (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.22)

For apps which live in the System Tray and change the contents of their context menus, those menus are now properly displayed in the Plasma X11 session (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.22)

The Flickr picture of the day wallpaper now stores its API key in a central location so that it can be updated as needed, without people having to wait for updates to their software (Yunhe Guo, Plasma 5.22)

Fixed a case where System Settings could crash while installing new themes (Marco Martin, Frameworks 5.81)

File dialogs now add the correct filename extension while saving in the particular case when the document’s filename already ends with a period (Robert Hoffman, Frameworks 5.81)

Headsets with an integrated “Play/Pause” button now do what you expect every time that button is pressed, not only every second time (David Redondo, Frameworks 5.81)

Panel margins no longer change when compositing is disabled (Niccolò Venerandi, Frameworks 5.81)

User Interface Improvements

Konsole once again exposes the default profile in the UI, for those of you who missed it (Ahmad Samir, Konsole 21.04)

Okular’s support for FictionBook files has been enhanced to support <annotation> and <subtitle> tags (Yuri Chornoivan, Okular 21.04)

You can now set a keyboard repeat rate higher than 50 key events per second; the new maximum is 100 (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.21.3)

After moving or copying a file, the notification now indicates which app will open the file if you click on the “Open” button (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.22):

The checkbox in the Bluetooth System Tray applet to disable Bluetooth can now be used to enable it again as well (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.22)

The Plasma Vaults applet now offers a standalone “Show in File Manager” action that you can activate for open vaults to easily jump right there (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22):

Using Discover to update your Nvidia drivers (or any other packages with a license agreement) no longer prompts you to re-accept the license agreement unless it has actually changed (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.22)

Sticky Note widgets now ask for confirmation when you try to delete a note, but only when the note has real content in it–not when it’s empty or when you just created it from clipboard content (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22):

.

The new Plasma System Monitor app now remembers the way you left your table columns and sidebars when you quit and re-launch it (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.22)

All of the Breeze icons that depict locked or unlocked states now follow the same visual convention of locked icons having a filled body and unlocked icons having a hollow body (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.81):

Web presence

Check out episode four of Niccolò’s series on how to create a Plasma theme:

How You Can Help

Have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover ways to be part of a project that really matters. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE; you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to already be a programmer, either. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

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