For years KWin has offered modifier-only shortcut handling via an obscure and undocumented method of editing the kwinrc file. Well, no more: in Plasma 6.1, KDE’s shortcut choosers will accept lone modifier keys natively! This makes it much easier to, for example, re-bind what the Meta key does: now you can easily make it open Overview, KRunner, or anything else simply by assigning it directly to that something else. This work required extensive re-plumbing throughout KDE’s software stack and was undertaken by Yifan Zhu, closing multiple Bugzilla tickets in the process—some fairly old. Thanks a lot, Yifan! (Link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5, and link 6)

But that’s not all! Though bug-fixing is eternal, we’ve largely gotten over the hump for Plasma 6.0, and I’ve noticed that features and UI improvement have occupied more of people’s attention recently. So let’s start with a much-requested one…

New Features

Spectacle regains a Crop tool, this time integrated internally rather than coming from a 3rd-party annotations library. This also happens to fix a related bug (Noah Davis, Spectacle 24.05. Link 1 and link 2):

For laptops with RGB-backlit keyboards, Plasma has gained the ability to keep the backlight color in sync with the active accent color! And support for custom colors is coming too (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 6.1. Link 1 and link 2):

The new automatic crash reporter now gives you the option to let it always download debug symbols in the background to improve the crash reports it generates (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Going along with the theme of modifier-only shortcuts, you can now make an unused mouse button simulate pressing a modifier key alone (David Redondo, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Even though Snaps are supposed to auto-update, Discover has gained the ability to let you manually update them if desired (Kevin Ottens, Plasma 6.1. Link)

UI Improvements

Dolphin now shows a visible error message when you use a keyboard shortcut to trigger an action that can’t be performed in the current context, like cutting a file in a read-only folder (Jin Liu, Dolphin 24.05. Link):

In Elisa, you can now switch between list and grid views as you see fit (Jack Hill, Elisa 24.05. Link):

In Elisa, you can now search for albums on the Tracks page (Karl Hoffman, Elisa 24.05. Link)

You can now select multiple wallpapers in Plasma’s “add new wallpaper” dialog (Sahil Arora, Plasma 6.0.4. Link)

Changed Breeze-themed radio buttons and checkboxes to use the “Button” color role as most other interactive UI elements already do, which not only improves visual consistency, but also fixes a visual glitch in QtQuick-based software where these UI elements would have the wrong color some of the time (Akseli Lahtinen, Frameworks 6.1 and Plasma 6.1. Link 1, link 2, and link 3)

List headers in Kickoff now use the standard list header style seen in QtQuick-based KDE apps, which also necessitated creating a version of that component suitable for Plasma, so expect to see it showing up in more places too (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.1. Link 1 and link 2):

The Plasma Digital Clock widget’s holiday list picker no longer elides long text; instead it wraps the text, since there’s plenty of space to show it in the long already-scrollable list (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Bug Fixes

Okular no longer asks you for a password to open encrypted PDF documents where the encryption isn’t actually applied to simply opening them (Nicolas Fella, sponsored by TU Dresden, Okular 24.02.2. Link)

Fixed a set of related crashes in Plasma that appear to have been a subtle side effect of the recent fix to make apps in Kickoff’s favorite grid disappear immediately when uninstalled (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.0.4. Link)

Fixed another case where Plasma could crash when you plugged in a new screen (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.0.4. Link 1 and link 2)

Fixed a rare Plasma crash that could happen when clicking on certain System Tray icons (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.0.4. Link)

Fixed a case where Spectacle could crash after ending a screen recording when using certain GPU hardware (Fabian Vogt, Plasma 6.0.4. Link)

Fixed bug that had broken the ability to log out within 60 seconds of logging in when using Plasma’s systemd-enabled startup process (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.0.4. Link)

Fixed an issue that caused two-finger touchpad taps on the Task Manager to not open a context menu with certain, shall we say, “less than premium” touchpad hardware (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.0.4. Link)

Contributed code hardening for four additional crashes picked up by KDE’s automatic crash reporting system, which as you can tell is proving quite useful! (Fushan Wen again; he’s just that amazing! Plasma 6.0.4. Link 1, link 2, link 3, and link 4)

Fixed the date information in the tooltips of various clock widgets not being localized correctly (Albert Astals Cid, Plasma 6.0.4. Link 1 and link 2)

Fixed a variety of additional weird issues with mouse cursors in video games on Wayland (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.1. Link 1 and link 2)

Fixed some visual glitches that could happen on Wayland when you resize certain types of window that open in a maximized state (Ser Freeman, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Other bug information of note:

• 2 Very high priority Plasma bugs (down from 4 last week). Current list of bugs
• 34 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 35 last week). Current list of bugs
• 145 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed over the last week! Full list of bugs

Performance & Technical

Spectacle is now less likely to show up in its own screenshots when used outside of Plasma and KWin on X11 (Konstantin Kharlamov, Spectacle 24.02.2. Link)

By default, Partition manager now mounts volumes (other than / and /home) with the nofail flag so they don’t block boot-up when not available for some reason (Thomas Bertels, Partition Manager 24.05. Link)

Fixed a memory leak in Plasma’s Networks widget (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.0.4. Link)

Custom QML layouts for lock screens in Global Themes are no longer honored, as this is too security-sensitive (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.1. Link 1, link 2, link 3, and link 4)

The Dialog Parent effect (the thing that makes windows get dimmed when a child dialog window is open) now works on Wayland (Carlos Garnacho and David Redondo, Plasma 6.1 with Qt 6.8. Link)

Did a major code-quality overhaul of the Plasma Digital Clock and Calendar widgets, which fixed a bunch of fragility, warnings, and some minor glitches, with more to come soon (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Automation & Systematization

Wrote a tutorial on how to publish your Android-compatible KDE app on the Google Play store (Ingo Klöcker, link)

…And Everything Else

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

How You Can Help

KDE has become important in the world, and your time and labor have helped to bring it there! But as we grow, it’s going to be equally important that this stream of labor be made sustainable, which primarily means paying for it. Right now the vast majority of KDE runs on labor that KDE e.V. didn’t pay for, and that’s a problem. We’ve taken steps to change this with paid technical contractors—but those steps are small due to limited financial resources. If you’d like to help change that, consider donating today!

Otherwise, visit https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover other 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!

The bug-fixing continued this week with the aim of getting Plasma 6.0.3 into a great state. Already the big bugs you folks found have almost all been fixed, and this week a lot of time was spent on some X11 regressions and various crashes that our new automatic crash reporting system was able to find (thanks for submitting those! It really does help). A number of automated tests were also added, and finally some nice UI improvements to round things out. More exciting work is in progress too, but not quite ready to mention here!

New Features

Ark can now open and un-archive self-extracting .exe archive files (Kai Uwe Broulik, Ark 24.05. Link)

System Monitor’s “bar chart” style can now be shown horizontally, not just vertically (Jin Liu, Plasma 6.1. Link)

UI Improvements

Did you know then you can middle-click a file in Dolphin to open it with the first app in the “Open with some other app” sub-menu? I bet you didn’t! I didn’t either. Well, now the menu item for that app indicates this, you can find out! (Kai Uwe Broulik, Dolphin 24.05. Link):

Made the floating panel’s float/de-float animation smoother when using a scale factor, both when using a scale factor above 100%, and also just in general (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.0.3. Link 1 and link 2)

While you’re in Plasma’s global Edit Mode, you can now click anywhere on a panel to show that panel’s own configuration dialog, rather than having to aim for a tiny little icons-only “configure” button that appears at the end of the panel (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.1. Link):

Entries on System Settings’ Autostart page are now sorted alphabetically, rather than by the order in which they were added (Kristen McWilliam, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Mentioned on System Settings’ Mouse and Touchpad pages that using the middle-click emulation settings will increase click latency by 50ms, so you can make a more informed decision about whether or not to use them (Wladimir Leuschner, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Screen chooser OSD icons now respect the current accent color (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 6.1. Link):

Bug Fixes

Fixed a recent regression that caused Gwenview to crash when trying to play videos (Nicolas Fella, Gwenview 24.02.2. Link)

Fixed an issue in Okular that caused it to crash when closing a note annotation while spell checking was enabled (Albert Astals Cid, Okular 24.02.2. Link)

Installing a font on Wayland now actually works, rather than crashing System Settings (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.27.12. Link)

Fixed a fairly common way that you could get System Settings to crash by applying a new window decoration theme (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 6.0.3. Link)

Plasma no longer crashes when certain music videos are played in Spotify (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.0.3. Link)

Fixed a recent regression in System Monitor that caused it to crash when discarding changes after editing a page (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 6.0.3. Link)

Fixed a strange issue that could cause certain XWayland windows to continuously resize themselves when using certain fractional scale factors (Yifan Zhu, Plasma 6.0.3. Link)

Relaxed KWin’s requirement on Wayland that XWayland windows can only put content on the clipboard when they have keyboard focus, as this was not a requirement on X11 and enforcing it was breaking some XWayland-using apps (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.0.3. Link)

Fixed a recent Fitts’-Law-compliance regression in Qt on X11 that could cause panel widgets to not activate when clicking on pixels right against a screen edge (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.0.3. or Qt 6.6.3, Link 1 and link 2)

Fixed a recent regression that caused the network speed shown in the Networks widget to always appear as something crazily high (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 6.0.3. Link)

Fixed a recent regression on multi-monitor setups that caused Task Manager widgets to display tasks from the wrong screen and notifications on X11 to appear in the center of one of the screens, rather than the correct position (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.0.3. Link 1 and link 2)

Fixed a recent porting regression in System Monitor that had made it possible to drag pages up when re-ordering, but not down (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 6.0.3. Link)

Fixed a recent regression in the colors of the tiles in System Monitor widgets using the Color Grid visualization (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 6.0.3. Link)

Improved the robustness of the code that migrates custom global shortcuts from the old KHotKeys service to the new KGlobalAccel service (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 6.0.3. Link)

Fixed an issue with cursor-based camera control in some games on Wayland (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.0.3. Link)

The sub-pixel previews on System Settings’ Fonts page now display properly on Wayland (Du Yijie, Plasma 6.0.3. Link)

The Global menu’s compact button form now disables itself when the current app doesn’t have any global menus, rather than disappearing and causing your panel’s contents to bounce around (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.0.3. Link)

Fixed a recent regression causing “Total” sensors in System Monitor and its widgets to not work properly (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 6.1. Link)

A bunch of random Breeze icons that can appear in the System Tray which weren’t changing color properly when using non-default color schemes now do change color properly (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 6.1. Link 1 and link 2)

Fixed a source of mysterious random pointless “Unknown Open Collaboration Service API error.(0)” messages when browsing for content in the “Get New [thing]” dialogs (Albert Astals Cid, Frameworks 6.1. Link)

Fixed a recent Qt regression in System Monitor that caused it to crash when attempting to open the details sidebar on the Applications page (Nicolas Fella, Qt 6.6.3. Link)

Other bug information of note:

• 3 Very high priority Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
• 34 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 36 last week). Current list of bugs
• 149 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed over last week. Full list of bugs

Performance & Technical

Kup’s Plasma widget has been fully ported to Plasma 6, so it should start working again with the next Kup release (Simon Persson, link)

Global shortcuts for volume control are now handled by a KDED module rather than the last-active instance of the Audio Volume widget, which was fragile and caused the shortcuts to break if there was no such widget, or if you had two and deleted one and didn’t restart Plasma immediately (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Automation & Systematization

Wrote a tutorial for creating KWin effects, and moved it to develop.kde.org (Vlad Zahorodnii and Carl Schwan, link)

Moved the “getting started with KDE development” documentation/tutorial to develop.kde.org, which is a better home for it (Thiago Sueto, link)

Added a whole bunch of tests in KWin to ensure that X11 windows behave properly (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Added a test to make sure that KRunner’s main UI works (Fushan Wen, link)

Added a test to make sure the screen locking shortcut works (Kristen McWilliam, link)

…And Everything Else

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

How You Can Help

Please help with bug triage! The Bugzilla volumes are still high right now and help is appreciated. If you’re interested, read this.

Otherwise, visit https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover other 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!

As a final reminder, 99.9% of KDE runs on labor that KDE e.V. didn’t pay for. If you’d like to help change that, consider donating today!

In addition to lots and lots of Plasma 6 stability work and the beginning of Plasma 6.1 feature work, Dolphin received large amount of development this week, resulting in some nice improvements. Check it out!

New Features

KSSHAskPass (which has the best name of any app in the world, change my mind) now supports SK-type SSH keys (Franz Baumgärtner, KSSHAskPass 24.05. Link)

Gave the Web Browser widget the option to always load a specific page every time, or remember the last-browsed-to one (Shubham Arora, Plasma 6.1. Link):

Info Center has a new page showing you technical audio information for debugging purposes (Shubham Arora, Plasma 6.1. Link)

The icon chooser dialog now has a filter so you can see only symbolic icons, or no symbolic icons (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 6.1. Link):

UI Improvements

Dolphin’s icon once again changes with the accent color (Kai Uwe Broulik, Dolphin 24.02.1. Link)

Most of Dolphin’s bars now animate appearing and disappearing (Felix Ernst, Dolphin 24.05. Link):

Some folders in Dolphin get special view settings applied by default, such as the Trash and Recent Files/Folders locations. Now these special view settings get applied to those folders even if you’re using the “use same view settings for all folders” setting (Jin Liu, Dolphin 24.05. Link)

Dolphin now has a new tab in its settings window for settings about its panels, which were previously hidden away in a context menu. So far just the Information Panel is represented there, but others may be added later! (Benedikt Thiemer, Dolphin 24.05. Link):

Made touch scrolling in Konsole work better (Willian Wang, Konsole 24.05. Link)

Improved the way Konsole’s text cursor scales on Wayland, especially with fractional scale factors (Luis Javier Merino Morán, Konsole 24.05. Link)

Okular already lets you scroll around a document with the hjkl keys. Now if you hold down the Shift key while doing it, it scrolls 10 times faster! (Someone going by the pseudonym “GI GI”, Okular 24.05. Link)

KRunner-powered search fields in Overview and the Search widget show the same search ordering that other ones already do (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 6.0.2. Link)

The Power and Energy widget now hides its “Show Battery percentage on icon when not fully charged” option when the system has no batteries (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 6.0.2. Link)

With non-random wallpaper slideshows, Plasma now remembers the last-seen one and starts from there the next time you log in (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.0.2. Link)

Improved keyboard navigation in Kirigami sidebars powered by the GlobalDrawer component (Carl Schwan, Frameworks 6.1. Link)

Increased the size of the “Get new Plasma Widgets” dialog (Me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 6.1. Link)

Bug Fixes

Fixed one source of issues with the lock screen breaking on X11 by showing a black background. There may be more, and we’re on the case for those too (Jakob Petsovits, Plasma 6.0.2. Link)

Fixed a way that the Battery Monitor widget could cause Plasma to crash (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 6.0.2. Link)

Fixed a way that Plasma could crash when you middle-click tasks in the Task Manager, or rapidly left-click on random audio-playing tasks (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.0.2, Link 1 and link 2)

On X11, clicks no longer get eaten on part of top panels (Yifan Zhu, Plasma 6.0.2. Link)

On X11, lock and sleep inhibitions once again work (Jakub Gocoł, Plasma 6.0.2. Link)

Fixed most of the incorrectly-colored System Tray icons when using mixed dark/light themes. There’s still one remaining source of this that we found, which is also being worked on (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 6.0.2. Link)

You can once again scrub through songs played in Spotify using the Media Player widget (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.0.2. Link)

Fixed several issues with panel widgets (including Kickoff) incorrectly passing focus to their parent panel when activated (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 6.0.2. Link)

Dragging widgets to or from panels no longer sometimes causes Plasma to crash or makes the widget get stuck in ghost form on the desktop (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.0.3. Link 1 and link 2)

On Wayland, adding a second keyboard layout now causes the relevant System Tray widget to appear immediately, rather than only after Plasma or the system was restarted (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.0.3. Link)

Fixed a way that Bluetooth pairing could fail (Ajrat Makhmutov, Plasma 6.0.3, Link)

On X11, the screen chooser OSD works again (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.0.3. Link)

Breeze GTK is once again the default GTK theme (Fabian Vogt, Plasma 6.0.3. Link)

Yet again fixed the login sound so that it actually plays (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.0.3. Link)

Reverted to an older and better way of sending pointer events on Wayland, which fixes multiple issues involving windows and cursors teleporting unexpectedly while dragging to maximize or de-maximize windows (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.1. Link 1, link 2, and link 3)

Fixed a bunch of weird cursor issues with GPUs that don’t support variable refresh rate properly (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Fixed a source of xdg-desktop-portal crashes on boot (David Redondo, Frameworks 6.1 Link)

Fixed two issues with the “Get New [thing]” dialogs that caused them to not show installation progress correctly, and get stuck after uninstalling something (Akseli Lahtinen, Frameworks 6.1. Link 1 and link 2)

System Monitor charts now appear properly for users of 10+ year-old Intel integrated GPUs (Arjen Hiemstra, Frameworks 6.1. Link)

More UI elements throughout QtQuick-based KDE software stop animating when animations are globally disabled, which also fixes an issue where Plasma button highlights would disappear with animations are globally disabled (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 6.1. Link 1 and link 2)

Other bug information of note:

• 3 Very high priority Plasma bugs (up from 2 last week). Current list of bugs
• 36 15-minute Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
• 207 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed over last week. Full list of bugs

Performance & Technical

Fixed a source of 25-second Plasma startup delays when using KDE Connect with Bluetooth disabled or absent (Simon Redman, the next KDE Connect release, though most distros have already backported it. Link)

Fixed another source of slow Plasma startups caused by using the Bing picture of the day wallpaper (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.0.2. Link)

KWin now does direct scan-out even for rotated screens (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Reduced the size of all the wallpapers in the plasma-workspace-wallpapers repo by 10 MB (Martin Rys, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Ported Kile to KDE Frameworks 6. Hopefully this should presage a new release soon (Carl Schwan, link)

Automation & Systematization

Wrote a tutorial about setting up your app’s continuous integration system to package and publish to the Windows store (Ingo Klöcker, link)

Added some autotests for X11-specific window behavior (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Other

Rewrote a some chunks of text on KDE neon’s website to make it reflect reality: it is a distro, its target users are those who want KDE stuff fast and can tolerate some instability, and you shouldn’t use the package manager to get apps (me: Nate Graham, link 1, link 2, link 3, and link 4)

…And Everything Else

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

How You Can Help

Please help with bug triage! The Bugzilla volumes are extraordinary right now and we are overwhelmed. I’ll be doing another blog post on this tomorrow; for now, if you’re interested, read this.

Otherwise, visit https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover other 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!

As a final reminder, 99.9% of KDE runs on labor that KDE e.V. didn’t pay for. If you’d like to help change that, consider donating today!

The floodgates are fully open and developers have started landing juicy features for Plasma 6.1!

But not just that… we asked for bug reports and you folks gave us bug reports! Usually we get 30-50 per day, but now we’re up to 150-200. It’s kind of crazy.

Now, this doesn’t mean the software is actually really buggy. It means that people are using the software! Most of the bug reports actually not about KDE issues at all: graphics driver issues, bugs in themes, and bugs in 3rd-party apps. And many are duplicates of existing known issues, or really weird exotic issues only reproducible with specific combinations of off-by-default settings.

Of course some are more significant, but at this point I think we’ve got most of them fixed. There are still a couple open–such as slow login and black lock screens with certain setups–but both have open merge requests to fix them, so I expect those to be fixed pretty soon too.

New Features

You can now split embedded terminal views in Kate horizontally or vertically (Akseli Lahtinen, Kate 24.05. Link)

You can now configure whether the magnifier in Spectacle’s Rectangular Region mode is always on, always off, or only on while holding down the Shift key (Noah Davis, Spectacle 24.05. Link)

There are now “edge barrier” and “corner barrier” features when you’ve using a multi-screen setup. These barriers add virtual spacing between screens, so that it’s easier for you to click on the pixels touching shared screen edges. Why would you want to do this? For example to make auto-hide panels between screens possible, and to make it easy to click the close button of a maximized window with another screen next to it. Note that these features are Wayland-only. And yes, you can turn these features off if you don’t like them, and also adjust the size of the barrier’s virtual space (Yifan Zhu, Plasma 6.1):

You can now hide the Web Browser widget’s navigation bar, making it suitable for cases where it’s simply monitoring the same web page you never navigate away from (Shubham Arora, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Manual session saving now works on Wayland. Note that until real session restore is added, this will be hooking into the “real fake session restore” feature I blogged about a few weeks ago (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.1. Link)

UI Improvements

When you have Spectacle configured to not take a screenshot when launched, the window that appears on launch now gives you the opportunity to take a screen recording too (Noah Davis, 24.05. Link)

Search results for pages in System Settings now better prioritize exact name matches (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 6.0.1. Link)

Using a keyboard shortcut to activate the Calculator widget on a Panel now passes focus to it correctly so you can start typing to calculate things immediately (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.0.2. Link)

When using the Kicker Application Menu launcher, you can now do calculation and unit conversion, and find the power and session actions by searching for them (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.1. Link)

The new “Shake cursor to find it” effect is now enabled by default (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.1. Link)

The new Printers page in System Settings now does a better job of helping you figure out what to do next when it finds a driverless network printer that doesn’t have the right drivers installed (yes, that sounds like a contradiction, but such is life) (Mike Noe, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Panel widgets’ popups now close when you click on an empty area of the Task Manager (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.1. Link)

By default, XWayland apps are now allowed to listen for non-alphanumeric keypresses, and shortcuts using modifier keys. This lets any global shortcut features they may have work with no user intervention required, while still not allowing arbitrary listening for alphanumeric keypresses which could potentially be used maliciously (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Bluetooth connection failures are now additionally mentioned in the widget pop-up itself, right next to the thing you clicked on to try the connection which is where your eyeballs were probably still looking (Patrik Fábián, Plasma 6.1. Link)

The width of the clipboard history popup that appears when you press Meta+V now has a width that’s capped at a lower, more sane level when you’re using an ultrawide screen (Dominique Hummel, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Bug Fixes

Gwenview no longer crashes when opening certain FITS image files (Albert Astals Cid, Gwenview 24.02.1. Link)

Minimizing a Dolphin window no longer causes all of its panels to get hidden (Nicolas Fella, Dolphin 24.02.1. Link)

Fixed a glitch with multi-line text selection in Okular (Okular 24.02.1. Link)

While dragging a file in Dolphin, if it happens to pass over other files and linger there for a bit, the other files no longer get immediately opened (Akseli Lahtinen, Dolphin 24.05. Link)

Plasma no longer crashes when you open Kickoff or Kicker while uninstalling an app that’s in the Favorites list (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.0.1. Link)

Launching/activating items with the Enter key in the Kicker Application Menu once again works (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.0.1. Link)

“Get [app name]” search results from KRunner once again work (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 6.0.1. Link)

Fixed a regression with System Tray icon support that caused some apps’ tray icons to show the wrong icon (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 6.0.1. Link)

When you drag multiple files from Dolphin onto the desktop, they no longer stack on top of one another until Plasma is restarted (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.0.1. Link)

Discover no longer crashes when you search for various fairly common terms, including “libreoffice” (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 6.0.2. Link)

Fixed the “Move to Desktop > All Desktops” titlebar menu item on X11 (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 6.0.2. Link)

Fixed a case where Plasma could exit (not crash) with a Wayland protocol error after turning screens off and back on again (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.0.2. Link)

Fixed a case where KWin could crash when a window was opened on a secondary screen plugged into a secondary GPU (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.0.2. Link)

Our previous fix for VLC and MPV not being able to go full screen turned out not to be enough, so we beefed it up, and now it should actually always work (Łukasz Patron, Plasma 6.0.2. Link 1 and link 2)

Fixed a bug that could cause Night Color to not work on systems with certain graphics hardware (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.0.2. Link)

The first search result in the Kicker Application Menu is no longer sometimes covered up by the search field (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.0.2. Link)

When you drag a window off the left side of the screen on X11, the cursor no longer moves unexpectedly (Yifan Zhu, Plasma 6.0.2. Link)

Setting your system language to “C” on System Settings’ Region & Language page no longer mangles the text of the previews for individual formats (Han Young, Plasma 6.0.2. Link)

Fixed a case where Discover could crash on launch when its Flatpak backend is active (David Redondo, Plasma 6.1. Link)

When you have a Panel at the top of the screen, showing its config dialog no longer overlaps the global Edit Mode Toolbar; instead, the toolbar jumps down to the bottom of the screen where there’s plenty of space for it (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Downloading items in the “Get New [thing]” dialogs that only have a single file available once again works (Akseli Lahtinen, Frameworks 6.1. Link)

Various actions throughout KDE apps that open the default terminal app–such as Dolphin’s “Open Terminal Here” menu item–once again work (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 6.1. Link)

“Horizontal bars” graphs in various System Monitor widgets now use the right colors (Arjen Hiemstra, Frameworks 6.1. Link)

Menu items in context menus for text fields in QtQuick-based apps are now translated (Evgeny Chesnokov, Frameworks 6.1. Link)

Made a bunch of places icons in the Breeze icon theme respect the accent color, just like their compatriots (Someone going by the pseudonym “leia uwu”, Frameworks 6.1. Link)

Other bug information of note:

• 2 Very high priority Plasma bugs (down from 3 last week). Current list of bugs
• 36 15-minute Plasma bugs (3 more than last week). Current list of bugs
• 173 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed over last week. Full list of bugs

Performance & Technical

Fixed a source of lag and frame drops on some systems with certain graphics hardware (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.0.1. Link)

Automation & Systematization

Wrote a tutorial for how to set up automatic publishing of your KDE app to KDE’s F-Droid repository (Ingo Klöcker, Link)

Updated the tutorial for how to write a System Settings page (KCM) to reflect modernity (Akseli Lahtinen, Link)

Added an autotest ensuring that a special feature of KConfig and desktops files works (David Faure, Link)

…And Everything Else

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

How You Can Help

Please help with bug triage! The Bugzilla volumes are extraordinary right now and we are overwhelmed. I’ll be doing another blog post on this tomorrow; for now, if you’re interested, read this.

Otherwise, visit https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover other 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!

As a final reminder, 99.9% of KDE runs on labor that KDE e.V. didn’t pay for. If you’d like to help change that, consider donating today!

Welp, the mega-release is pretty much carved in stone now, and set for a release in four days! Lots of people have worked really hard on it for over a year, and we hope you love it! Nevertheless, I’m sure our diligent QA-obsessed users will waste no time in finding all the issues we missed, and we’ll work as hard as we can to fix them.

But once those are fixed too, the focus will eventually begin to shift once more towards features. And we have big ideas for new features to ship in Plasma 6.1 and beyond! With the architectural work done over the past year, a lot of very exciting possibilities have been unlocked. I think we’re going to see Plasma 6 as a pretty amazing springboard for next-gen stuff very quickly.

And to start things off, we have two nice new features that are landing in Plasma 6.1 already:

New Features

Even though we don’t have real session restore on Wayland yet (it’s still waiting for the protocol to be finalized), now we have the next best thing: fake session restore that simply re-opens apps you had open at the last logout and relies on them to have internally saved their own state appropriately. This works on X11 too (where apps that remember their window positions can do that as well), and it applies to all windows not covered by real session restore. As a result, now all your apps should always re-launch properly on login, rather than only the random-seeing assortment of session-restore-supporting apps re-launching on login. This feature is controlled by the existing setting that turns on or off session restore (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.1. Link)

In the Overview and Present windows effect, the way that windows are arranged is no longer configurable between two imperfect options: now there is only one layout algorithm and it’s waaaaaaay better than the old one! Windows are now arranged much more regularly and it ditches the very haphazard feeling of the old default algorithm, fixing multiple bugs causing weird window layouts including the infamous “stairway to heaven” arrangement (Yifan Zhu, Plasma 6.1. Link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5):

UI Improvements

When dragging a file or folder over another folder in Dolphin with the option turned on that opens the folder if you hold the dragged file there for a moment, the hovered folder now displays a little animation showing it open a bit (Felix Ernst, Dolphin 24.05. Link):

Headsets that report their battery status properly now benefit from a nice icon in all the places in Plasma that can show battery status (Severin Von Wnuck-Lipinski Plasma 6.1. Link)

The desktop context menu has lost its “Refresh” action which was infrequently used and did not actually fix most problems of missing icons that people might want to use it for. This makes the context menu lean and mean, and now nobody will have reason to say it’s “bloated” ever again! You can still manually refresh with F5 if needed (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.1. Link):

Bug Fixes

When connecting an iPhone or other Apple mobile device to your machine using a cable, and that phone has a name with an apostrophe in it (e.g. “Konqi’s iPhone”), now it works (Kai Uwe Broulik, kio-extras 24.02. Link)

Fixed the most common KWin crash on X11, which was commonly seen when the screen arrangement changed (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.27.11. Link)

Changing the Address, Name Style, Paper Size, or Phone Numbers settings on System Settings’ Region & Language page now actually takes effect (Timo Velten, Plasma 5.27.11. Link)

Fixed an issue that could cause the screen to turn black with only a movable cursor after switching from one virtual terminal to another one with certain graphics hardware (Jakob Petsovits, Plasma 5.27.11. Link)

Wind speed is now properly refreshed over time in forecasts provided by EnvCan in the Weather widget (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.27.11. Link)

Fixed a bug that could causing dragging-and-dropping Task manager icons to sometimes stop working (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.0. Link)

KWin’s Zoom effect can now fully zoom into all areas of complex multi-screen setups (Michael VanOverbeek, KWin 6.0. Link)

A process named “ksmserver-logout-greeter” no longer shows up in your Task Manager while the logout screen is visible (Akseli Lahtinen, Plasma 6.0. Link)

Fixed a visual glitch that could cause window outlines to become slightly disconnected from their windows at certain window sizes when using certain fractional scale factors (Akseli Lahtinen, Plasma 6.0.1 Link)

Fixed a visual glitch that could cause windows on rotated displays to be briefly rotated incorrectly after becoming visible when using the “Glide” effect (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.0.1. Link)

Fixed a case where KWin could crash when using the relatively old 340-series of NVIDIA drivers (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.0.1. Link)

Fixed a way that Plasma could crash when manually restarted using systemd (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.1. Link)

The shortcut chooser in the panel configuration dialog now respects your Plasma style’s color scheme as expected (Marco Martin, Frameworks 6.0. Link)

Toast-style notifications sent by Kirigami-based apps no longer visually overflow when they have a large amount of text in them (Jack Hill, Frameworks 6.0. Link)

Other bug information of note:

• 3 Very high priority Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
• 30 15-minute Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
• 169 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed over last week. Full list of bugs

Performance & Technical

Improved Dolphin’s startup time by between 2% and 17% (Felix Ernst, Dolphin 24.05. Link)

Automation & Systematization

Added an autotest to ensure the proper functionality of text field context menus in QtQuick-based software (Fushan Wen, link)

…And Everything Else

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

How You Can Help

Thanks to you, our Plasma 6 fundraiser has been a crazy success! I originally thought the goal of 500 new KDE e.V. supporting members was over-optimistic, but you’ve all proven me happily wrong. We’re now up to an amazing 850 members. Thank you everyone for the confidence you’ve shown in us; we’ll try not to screw it up! 🙂 For those who haven’t donated to become members yet, spreading the wealth via this fundraiser is a great way to share the love. 🙂

If you’re a developer… sheesh, take a break for a few days. You’ve earned it!

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

This week the focus was on annoying longstanding issues, and a whole bunch of them are now history! If you’ve used KDE software for any significant amount of time, I bet you noticed and were annoyed by at least one of the issues mentioned below, and can now rejoice at their annihilation! This effort has dropped the number of 15-minute Plasma bugs to its lowest level ever–just 30. The Mega-Release will be shipped in under two weeks, and we want it to be as fabulous as possible!

Pre-Mega-Release

…But first, some bugfixes backported to Plasma 5.27!

Fixed a way that KWin could crash in the Plasma Wayland session (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.27.11. Link)

Files copied to the clipboard are now made available to sandboxed apps using the portal system, so you can paste them into those apps (Karol Kosek, Plasma 5.27.11. Link)

After opening your laptop’s lid, the brightness of its backlit keyboard is now correctly restored to the same value it had before the lid was closed (Werner Sembach, Plasma 5.27.11. Link)

KDE 6 Mega-Release

(Includes all software to be released on the February 28th mega-release: Plasma 6, Frameworks 6, and apps from Gear 24.02)

UI improvements

When a panel popup is open, clicking on an empty area of the panel will now close it (David Edmundson, link)

When you try out a Global Menu and all your apps’ in-window menubars get hidden, if you later change your mind and remove the Global Menu, all of those apps’ in-window menubars now re-appear automatically instead of remaining hidden until manually shown again (David Edmundson, link)

When any of your physically connected screens are marked as disabled, opening System Settings’ Display & Monitor page now always shows an enabled screen when it opens, rather than sometime showing one of the disabled screens (David Edmundson, link)

Added Breeze icons for OpenVPN and Cisco VPN configuration files (Kai Uwe Broulik, link):

Bug fixes

Important note: I don’t mention fixes for bugs that were never released to users; it’s just too much for me (it would probably be too much for you to read as well), and most people never encountered them in the first place. Because we’re in the middle of a big Plasma dev cycle, there are a lot of these bugs! So big thanks to everyone who’s made it a priority to fix them!

Fixed several common random-seeming crashes in Plasma’s Activities backend code (Harald Sitter, link)

Fixed a significant annoyance that would, in most distros, cause several types of files to be opened in the wrong apps by default (e.g. images opened in Okular rather than Gwenview) until the first time the user changed any of the file associations (Harald Sitter, link)

Fixed a visual glitch in Gwenview that could cause image thumbnails to overlap when using a fractional scale factor (David Edmundson, link)

in Spectacle, drawing annotations with a touchscreen or a stylus no longer draws additional random-seeming straight lines in weird places (Marco Martin, link)

Shift+dragging windows to custom-tile them now works even if you’ve set your keyboard to do something exotic like emulate the Caps Lock key when pressing both Shift keys together (Xaver Hugl, link)

Fixed a case where the cursor failed to disappear as expected in certain WINE games (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Fixed a memory leak seen in Spectacle when recording the screen (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, link)

Other bug information of note:

• 3 Very high priority Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
• 30 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 32 last week). Current list of bugs
• 135 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed over last week. Full list of bugs

Post-Mega-Release

Gwenview now has a minimal “Spotlight View” mode in which all the normal UI is hidden, and all you see is the image and the window titlebar (Ravi Saifullin, Gwenview 24.05. Link):

The warning on System Settings’ Proxy page no longer inaccurately warns you that Chromium-based browsers don’t respect it, which isn’t true anymore (Someone going by the pseudonym “Chaotic Abide”, kio-extras 25.04. Link)

Fixed the most common crash in Discover for Plasma 6.1, and we’re scoping out options for fixing it for 6.0 as well (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 6.1. Link)

System Settings’ Screen Locking page now has a clearer UI for selecting times (Kristen McWilliam, Plasma 6.1. Link):

There’s now a KWin window rule you can use for controlling the status of Adaptive Sync for individual windows (Ravil Saifullin, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Performance & Technical

KWin now supports direct scan-out when run in a nested manner inside another compositor (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Landed some major performance improvements for thumbnail generation in Gwenview and file listing in general (Arjen Hiemstra, Mega-Release 6. Link 1 and link 2)

Landed some major performance improvements for Spectacle’s Rectangular Region mode (Noah Davis, Spectacle 24.05. Link)

The spacings used throughout Plasma and Kirigami-based apps are no longer based on font sizes, and are now simply hardcoded to various static values, as they are in QtWidgets-based apps. This should slightly increase visual consistency everywhere, and make it possible over time to build UIs with more predictability in their spacings. This is more of a long-term thing, but it’s an exciting first step! (Noah Davis, Kirigami 6.0. Link)

…And Everything Else

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

How You Can Help

Thanks to you, our Plasma 6 fundraiser has been a crazy success! I originally thought the goal of 500 new KDE e.V. supporting members was over-optimistic, but you’ve all proven me happily wrong. We’re now up to an amazing 825 members, blown past our stretch goals, and 1000 members by launch time seems like it might even be feasible. Thank you everyone for the confidence you’ve shown in us; we’ll try not to screw it up! 🙂 For those who haven’t donated to become members yet, spreading the wealth via this fundraiser is a great way to share the love. 🙂

If you’re a developer, work on final Qt6/KF6/Plasma 6 issues! Which issues? These issues. Plasma 6 is very close to a release and in a good state, but could still benefit from some final bug-fixing and polishing. And as I mentioned before, if you haven’t tried it out yet, please do!

Otherwise, visit https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover other 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!

The KDE 6 mega-release is due in a little under three weeks! And folks have remained in diligent bugfixing-and-polishing mode, because we want this release to be as smooth and drama-free as possible! If you haven’t already tried it out, this is a good time to. Find all the bugs that are bugging you so we can hopefully fix them before the final release!

KDE 6 Mega-Release

(Includes all software to be released on the February 28th mega-release: Plasma 6, Frameworks 6, and apps from Gear 24.02)

UI improvements

KWin’s “Active screen follows mouse” setting is now gone; now the active screen is always the one with the cursor on it, or the last one that was tapped with a touchscreen. This turns out to be much simpler and it’s what we think most people wanted anyway, hopefully alleviating complaints about OSDs and new windows opening on unexpected screens (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

You can now set the data range manually for “horizontal bars” charts in System Monitor and its widgets (Arjen Hiemstra, link)

When you use the System Tray’s “Always show all entries” option, now it actually does always show all entries, instead of sneakily keeping some of them hidden anyway according to some internal logic which was not obvious (Jin Liu, link)

Searching through clipboard entries is now case-insensitive (Yifan Zhu, link)

Bug fixes

Important note: I don’t mention fixes for bugs that were never released to users; it’s just too much for me (it would probably be too much for you to read as well), and most people never encountered them in the first place. Because we’re in the middle of a big Plasma dev cycle, there are a lot of these bugs! So big thanks to everyone who’s made it a priority to fix them!

Fixed an issue affecting the Plasma X11 session that could cause the screen to end up black with only a movable cursor when you wake your system from sleep while using an NVIDIA GPU with its proprietary drivers (David Redondo, link)

CPU temperature sensors now work for a variety of Intel and AMD motherboards where they didn’t previously work (Arjen Hiemstra, link 1 and link 2)

When System Monitor’s window opens in maximized state, de-maximizing it now returns it to its pre-maximized geometry as expected (Arjen Hiemstra, link)

In various Kirigami-based apps, double-clicking on a page to open it multiple times is no longer interpreted that way–because opening the same page multiple times makes no sense–which avoids accidentally breaking the app (Arjen Hiemstra, link)

KScreen is now smarter about choosing better-matching screen settings when told to make one screen mirror another (Yifan Zhu, link)

Buttons and scrollbars in the Sticky Notes widget are now always distinguishable no matter what color you choose for the background of the note and no matter what your system color scheme is (me: Nate Graham, link)

A couple of Plasma UI elements with text on them that weren’t previously translatable now are (Emil Sari, link)

When your Task Manager is set up to only show tasks from the current screen, now this still keeps working when you switch around your screen arrangement without restarting Plasma (Someone awesome, link)

Header text in System Tray applets now elides instead of overflowing with a small window size and very long applet text (me: Nate Graham, link)

Other bug information of note:

• 3 Very high priority Plasma bugs (down from 4 last week). Current list of bugs
• 32 15-minute Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
• 145 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed over last week. Full list of bugs

Post-Mega-Release

When you hit the Alt+Tab shortcut with no windows open, you’ll now see a nice “No open windows” message instead of a broken-looking task switcher or even nothing (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.1. Link)

The ancient feature to add a spacer in your window titlebars returns! (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.1, link)

Automation & Systematization

Added an autotest to make sure that loading Digital Clock plugins still works (Fushan Wen, link)

…And Everything Else

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

How You Can Help

Thanks to you, our Plasma 6 fundraiser has been a crazy success! I originally thought the goal of 500 new KDE e.V. supporting members was over-optimistic, but you’ve all proven me happily wrong. We’re now up to an amazing 800 members, blown past our stretch goals, and 1000 members by launch time seems like it might even be feasible. Thank you everyone for the confidence you’ve shown in us; we’ll try not to screw it up! 🙂 For those who haven’t donated to become members yet, spreading the wealth via this fundraiser is a great way to share the love. 🙂

If you’re a developer, work on Qt6/KF6/Plasma 6 issues! Which issues? These issues. Plasma 6 is very close to a release and in a good state, but could still benefit from some final bug-fixing and polishing. And as I mentioned before, if you haven’t tried it out yet, please do!

Otherwise, visit https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover other 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!