Category: This Week in Plasma

This week in KDE: Wayland by default, de-framed Breeze, HDR games, rectangle screen recording

Yep you read that right, we’ve decided to throw the lever and go Wayland by default! The three remaining showstoppers are in the process of being fixed and we expect them to be done soon–certainly before the final release of Plasma 6. So we wanted to make the change early to gather as much feedback as possible.

But that’s not all, of course. This was another big week! Read on to see the rest:

Plasma 6

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

General info – Open issues: 118

The Breeze app style has gotten the visual overhaul you’ve all dreamed of: no more frames within frames! Instead Breeze-themed apps adopt the clean design of modern Kirigami apps, with views separated from one another with single-pixel lines! (Carl Schwan, link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5, link 6, link 7, link 8, link 9, and link 10):

In the Plasma Wayland session, there’s now preliminary support for playing HDR-capable games when using an HDR-capable screen! (Xaver Hugl, link)

Spectacle has gained support for rectangular region screen recording! (Noah Davis, link)

System Settings’ Printers page has gotten a major overhaul and now includes the features internally that it used to direct you to external apps for. The result is much nicer and more integrated, without a cascading soup of dialog windows (Mike Noe, link):

The Plasma Panel settings have been redesigned again, and this time everything is in one dialog; no more nested sub-menus! This work fixed 14 open bug reports (Niccolò Venerandi and Marco Martin, link 1 and link 2):

Ark is now significantly faster to compress files using xz and zstd compression, as they are now multi-threaded (Zhangzhi Hu, link)

When you run Flatpak apps, they’ll no longer prompt you to approve or deny “background activity”; the whole concept of this has been removed as it was kinda sus and not useful at all (David Edmundson, link)

There’s now a simple setting to disable notification sounds systemwide, for those of you who don’t like them (Ismael Asensio, link 1, link 2, and link 3):

Improved Plasma’s start time rather significantly–up to a few whole seconds (Harald Sitter, link)

The double-click speed setting returns, and now lives on System Settings’ General Behavior page. Before you ask why it’s not on the mouse Page, it’s because it affects touchpads too and that has its own page, and duplicating the setting on both pages seemed messy and ugly (Nicolas Fella, link)

Syncing your Plasma settings to SDDM now also syncs your desired NumLock state on boot (Chandradeep Dey, link)

In QtWidgets-based apps, you can open the context menu for the selected thing with the Shift+F10 shortcut (Felix Ernst, link 1 and link 2)

You can now open System Monitor with the Meta+Escape shortcut (Arjen Hiemstra, link)

Significant Bugfixes

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

Fixed a wide variety of multi-screen issues related to screens sometimes not turning on at the right times or becoming visually frozen until going to another VT and back (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.0. Link)

Fixed a bug that could cause desktop icon positions to be mis-remembered, especially if the system has ever had multiple screens connected (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.27.10. Link)

Fixed a bug that could cause Night Color to start transitioning to night mode at inappropriate times when using a certain combination of settings (Sanjay Swain, Plasma 5.27.10. Link)

Just in case you have a window that fails to set a minimum size, KWin no longer lets you resize it to a width of zero pixels, whereupon it would become invisible and impossible to find (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.0. Link)

In the “Get new [thing]” dialogs, items’ full descriptions are now visible, instead of getting cut off at some point (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 6.0. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

Automation & Systematization

Added a GUI test to make sure that Panel Edit Mode can be entered (Fushan Wen, link)

Added some GUI tests for functionality of the wallpaper chooser dialog (Fushan Wen, link)

Added some GUI tests for KRunner’s plugins and their presence in the relevant System Settings page (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

We’re hosting our Plasma 6 fundraiser right now and need your help! Thanks to you we’re past the 60% mark, but we’re not there yet! So if you like the work we’re doing, spreading the wealth 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 usable for daily driving now, but still in need of bug-fixing and polishing to get it into a releasable state by February.

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 in KDE: Plasma 6 Alpha approaches

Time has a way of creeping up, and the Plasma 6 alpha release is on November 8th. People are scrambling to get their features in before either the soft feature freeze (on Monday) or the hard one (a few weeks later). So this has been a week of big changes! Starting on Monday, we’ll officially start the process of convergence and shift focus to bug fixing and UI polishing, with the currently in-flight new features trickling in too.

KDE 6 MegaRelease

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

General info – Open issues: 113

Discover now has a better way to present app ratings: now it shows a big overview of the ratings with quotations from the best ones, and you can still read all of them in a popup like before. When you do, they’re now sorted by “relevance” which is a determined by combination of recency, helpfulness votes, and the version being reviewed matching the version available to you (Marco Martin, link 1 and link 2):

Discover’s search has been hugely improved, and now generally always returns the results you’re expecting when you search for something that exists and is available (Marco Martin, link):

Please excuse the lack of app icons; this is a local setup issue on my machine that I haven’t fixed yet, not a bug in Discover

System Settings’ Energy Saving page has been rewritten in QML, which fixed all of the open bug reports for the old one, and also has a nicer and easier-to-parse visual design (Jakob Petsovits, link):

When using a Plasma style without the grouped task indicator SVG (of which Breeze is now one), the Task Manager now switches to a fancy new style to show grouped tasks (me: Nate Graham. Link):

Still slightly work-in-progress and subject to change based on feedback

Vertically-space-limited line graphs in System Monitor and the Plasma widgets of the same name no longer let their legends get cut off (Arjen Hiemstra, link):

Pen input using a graphics tablet can now be manually re-mapped to the entire desktop area consisting of all screens, not just a single screen (Aki Sakurai, link)

Transient dialog windows (i.e. windows that close with the Escape key that you typically open from another window, like settings dialogs) are now handled in the Plasma Wayland session like they are on X11: they no longer appear in the Task Manager as separate windows, propagate “needs attention” status to their parents, and so on (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

Ark can now extract files from multi-volume ZIP files (Ilya Pominov, Ark 24.02. Link)

When using “Repeat this track” mode in Elisa, manually skipping forward or back to the next or previous tracks now works as expected (Quinten Kock, link)

KRunner’s web shortcuts runner now has two new entries: Codeberg (search for “cb [search term]”) and PyPi (search for “pypi [search term]”) (Salvo Tomaselli, link)

Other Significant Bugfixes

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

Fixed one of the most common random crashes in Plasma or when changing audio device settings in System Settings (David Redondo, Plasma 5.27.9. Link)

Fixed an extremely subtle threading bug that could cause Plasma or KWin to randomly crash when files being watched for changes got certain types of changes with certain timings, which in Qt 6 became easier to trigger by switching Kate or Konsole profiles while KRunner’s Kate Sessions or Konsole Profiles runners were active (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.0 and Plasma 5.27.10 with Frameworks 5.112. Link)

It’s no longer possible for the screen locker to break when you either had an extremely large number of session-restored apps, or any of your session-restored apps did something naughty and silently exhausted the system’s session restoration resources. Instead, when either of these things happens, Plasma will warn you about it and prevent the resource exhaustion (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.0. Link)

When using NetworkManager 1.44, restarting the NetworkManager system service–which sometimes happens automatically when the computer goes to sleep and then wakes up again– no longer causes the Networks widget in the System Tray to either disappear or stop displaying any networks (Ilya Katsnelson, Frameworks 5.112. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

…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

We’re hosting our Plasma 6 fundraiser right now and need your help! We’re almost to the 50% mark of our goal of 500 members, so if you like the work we’re doing, joining up and spreading the wealth is a great way to share the love. 🙂

If you’re a developer, work on Qt6/KF6/Plasma 6 issues! Plasma 6 is usable for daily driving now, but still in need of bug-fixing and polishing to get it into a releasable state by February.

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!

These past 2 weeks in KDE: Wayland color management, the desktop cube returns, and optional shadows in Spectacle

Aaaaaand it’s a big one! I challenge anyone to read this week’s (well, these past two weeks’) report and not find something they’ve been wanting for a long time. 🙂

Plasma 6

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

General info – Open issues: 109

Per-screen color management is now supported in the Plasma Wayland session for up to sRGB screens! You can assign ICC color profiles to each screen and apps will do the right thing. And colors picked using the Color Picker applet are now color-managed appropriately as well (Xaver Hugl, link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5, and link 6)

The Desktop Cube effect returns! It now lives in the kdeplasma-addons repo and you can trigger it with the Meta+C shortcut (Vlad Zahorodnii, link):

When Spectacle is run on Plasma 6, you can now take “Active Window” and “Window Under Cursor” screenshots that optionally omit window shadows! (Kristen McWilliam, link):

Discover has started to undergo many small UI improvements: a nicer background color for cards views; better visual alignment for cards on search and browse pages; smarter behavior in the sidebar while searching; more robust display of screenshots for apps and backends without thumbnails correctly specified; Flatpak apps with low-level PipeWire access are now correctly marked as having access to the audio system; and app sizes for Flatpak apps are now more concise and readable (Marco Martin, Arjen Hiemstra, Jonah Brüchert, and me: Nate Graham, link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5, and link 6)

On the subject of Discover, its Application Details page has gotten a new rewritten screenshot viewer, which is vastly better than the old one in every way and fixes multiple bugs (Ivan Tkachenko, link):

The Overview effect now has an option to only perform a KRunner-powered search when searching, rather than also filtering windows based on the search text (Dashon Wells, link)

When you have fingerprint or smartcard authentication set up, you can now use that method on the lock screen, OR your password, rather than only being able to use your password after failing at the other auth method several times. This is only for the lock screen right now and not also the Polkit authentication dialog, but that’s being explored as well (Janet Blackquill, link 1 and link 2)

The headers of settings dialogs in QtWidgets-based apps are now styled to look the same as System Settings and other Kirigami-based apps (Waqar Ahmed, link):

KFontView now works as expected on Wayland (Kai Use Broulik, link)

System Settings’ Shortcuts page has been modernized a bit to avoid the “chunky footer” style used in Plasma 5 (Mike Noe, link):

More than doubled the speed of KRunner’s Recent Documents runner, among other various improvements (Alexander Lohnau, link)

The infinite scrollable calendar in the Digital Clock widget is now vastly more responsive (Fushan Wen, link)

Type-ahead find in Dolphin now causes the matching file to be centered in the window when using Details view (Amol Godbole, link)

In Elisa, playlist items now play on a single-click rather than a double-click, and when you try to play a song that has since been deleted or renamed, you’re warned of this appropriately (me: Nate Graham, link 1 and link 2)

The “Get New [thing]” dialog now has an appropriate minimum size (Oliver Beard, link)

Other Significant Bugfixes

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

Fixed a case in the Plasma Wayland session where logging in would cause KWin to immediately crash and throw you back to the login screen (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.27.9. Link)

Fixed the most common crash in Plasma that could manifest when closing notifications, by backporting a Qt patch that fixes it, since it’s already fixed in Plasma 6 (Marco Martin and David Edmundson, the latest release of the KDE Qt 5 Patch Collection, link)

Fixed a semi-common crash in Discover when installing Flatpak apps (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.27.9. Link)

Various KWin-provided global shortcuts that were always intended to be on by default–such as for switching virtual desktops–now are (Joshua Goins, Plasma 5.27.9. Link)

Fixed a race condition that caused the “Show in Activities” menu item in the window menu to only sometimes be visible (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.27.9. Link)

Fixed an irritating screen flicker that would show up when using touchpad gestures to switch virtual desktops with animations globally disabled (Quinten Kock, Plasma 5.27.9. Link)

Fixed the most common crash in System Monitor that could sometimes cause it to blow up when quitting or switching pages (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 6.0. Link)

Fixed a case where file associations could be inherited in the wrong order, causing certain document types to open in the wrong apps under certain circumstances (David Redondo, Plasma 6.0. Link)

Fixed an issue that could cause complex display arrangements involving daisy-chained DisplayPort screens to be arranged randomly after wakeup, reboot, or hotplug (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.0. Link)

In the Plasma Wayland session, using a stylus to interact with System Settings’ Tablet page no longer makes the rest of System Settings unresponsive to stylus input (Aki Sakurai, Plasma 6.0. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

For Developers

You can now easily build a whole Plasma desktop session plus associated apps like System Settings and Discover by running kdesrc-build workspace (Nicolas Fella, link)

When setting up kdesrc-build, it now defaults to building everything against Qt6 (Thiago Sueto and Mariua Pa, link 1 and link 2)

Automation & Systematization

Added some autotests for the Kirigami NavigationTabBar and NavigationTabButton components (Ivan Tkachenko, 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

We’re hosting our Plasma 6 fundraiser right now and need your help! If you like the work we’re doing, spreading the wealth is a great way to share the love. 🙂

If you’re a developer, work on Qt6/KF6/Plasma 6 issues! Plasma 6 is usable for daily driving now, but still in need of bug-fixing and polishing to get it into a releasable state by February.

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 in KDE: colorblindness correction filters

This week there’s a lot of news on the accessibility front in particular! Beyond that, we have a fairly juicy assortment of other new features and user interface improvements, so have a look:

Plasma 6

General info – Open issues: 103

KWin now includes an effect that can change the colors on the whole screen to better support people with various forms of color-blindness! (Fushan Wen, link):

The F10 key is now used in most KDE apps (with more being ported soon) to open the main menu or hamburger menu. This means that the keyboard shortcut to create a new file had to be changed to Ctrl+Shift+N, which also makes it more consistent with what’s used in other environments (Felix Ernst, link)

Kate, KWrite, and other KTextEditor-based apps gained support for speaking text from the document! (Christoph Cullmann, link)

Throughout QtQuick-based KDE software, scrolling using a mouse wheel now smoothly animates the view! Smooth scrolling, baby! Note that this is different from inertial scrolling for touchpads, which is not implemented yet. For more information, see this wiki page. (HeCheng Yu and Fushan Wen, link)

When your Panel has a Task Manager widget on it, the feature to add panel launchers (as opposed to pinned Task Manager apps) has been hidden to avoid confusing people. You can still add them manually if you want, but the way to do it is no longer so in-your-face. As a part of this, the Traditional Task Manager has been changed so that its pinned launchers no longer disappear by default when used to launch an app; they now stay where they are and can be used to open new instances, so they feel more like panel launchers now. This is configurable if you liked the old approach better, of course! (Niccolò Venerandi, link 1 and link 2)

LibreOffice documents now appear in Plasma’s “Recent Documents” list (Méven Car, link)

Cursor theme previews are no longer drawn too small when using scaling on Wayland, and are no longer pixelated when using a fractional scale factor (Fushan Wen, link 1 and link 2)

Locally-downloaded and manually installed packages installed using Discover can now be upgraded and uninstalled (Alessandro Astone, link)

Offline Updates in Discover now report their progress more accurately (Alessandro Astone, link)

In the Plasma Wayland session, it’s now possible to mirror (as in, visually flip) a display if needed (Xaver Hugl, link)

Other User Interface Improvements

The default location where Spectacle saves screenshots and screen recordings has been changed; now they are saved to ~/Pictures/Screenshots and ~/Videos/Screencasts, respectively. And of course these default settings can be changed if you’d prefer them to be saved elsewhere! (Noah Davis, Spectacle 24.02. Link)

Elisa’s color scheme chooser menu now looks native, not kinda weird (Jack Hill, Elisa 24.02. Link)

Other Significant Bugfixes

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

Fast user switching from a passwordless user account now works (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.27.9. Link)

In Dolphin, the “Create New” menu now correctly enables and disables itself as needed when you switch tabs (Amol Godbole, Dolphin 24.02. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

Automation & Systematization

Added an autotest to make sure the Panel’s Edit Mode toolbox works (Fushan Wen, link)

Added some autotests to make sure the new Kirigami list delegates work properly; more on that soon! (Ivan Tkachenko, 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

We’re hosting our Plasma 6 fundraiser right now and need your help! If you like the work we’re doing, spreading the wealth is a great way to share the love. 🙂

If you’re a developer, work on Qt6/KF6/Plasma 6 issues! Plasma 6 is usable for daily driving now, but still in need of bug-fixing and polishing to get it into a releasable state by February.

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 in KDE: re-organized System Settings

Plasma 6

General info – Open issues: 91

System Settings’ sidebar has gotten a much-needed re-organization! This is still under development and may change a bit before the final release, so don’t consider the following screenshots 100% final. Probably 90% final. But anyway, but here’s what we’ve got right now (me: Nate Graham, link):

Changed who handles screen arrangements in the Plasma Wayland session: until now, it was KScreen, whereas now for Plasma 6, KWin has absorbed that functionality. This will make it much easier to ensure a good UX here because state will be centralized in one location, rather than having it be synchronized across two components that need to be in communication with one another. This proved fragile throughout Plasma 5. The work has already fixed three bugs, with more to come. Ultimately this means that KScreen is now feature-frozen, and no further changes to multi-screen handling on X11 should be expected in Plasma 6 (Xaver Hugl, link)

While Discover is fetching updates, its progress bar now corresponds much closer to actual reality, instead of being more like a random number generator (Alessandro Astone, link 1 and link 2)

Discover now lets distros opt into turning on dependency auto-remove for apps that are removed with Discover (Alessandro Astone, link)

When the screen resolution or scale changes–which can happen when additional screens are plugged in–the wallpaper now instantly resizes to the new desktop geometry rather than doing an animated fade, which in this context just looked weird and glitchy and broken (Marco Martin, link 1 and link 2)

Improved the Breeze Night Color icon (Philip Murray, link):

Other New Features

Spectacle’s screen recording feature gained support for recording using the VP9 codec (CPU rendering only for now, but GPU acceleration is coming soon). In the process, the default location where screen recordings get saved to has been made customizable (Noah Davis, link 1, link 2, and link 3)

Other Significant Bugfixes

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

Fixed a bug in Discover that could cause it to crash for some people after searching, or even when just launching the app (Harald Sitter, link 1 and link 2)

In the Plasma X11 session, various QtQuick-based dialog windows will no longer be missing their close buttons (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.27.9. Link)

Apps and Plasma can no longer crash when told to use DBus to launch an app with a malformed .desktop file name that’s out of compliance with the spec (David Redondo, Frameworks 5.111. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

Automation & Systematization

Added more GUI tests for the Battery & Brightness widget, the Clipboard widget’s barcode page, and the System Settings Users page’s avatar chooser sheet (Fushan Wen, link 1, link 2, and link 3)

…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

We’re hosting our Plasma 6 fundraiser right now and need your help! If you like the work we’re doing, spreading the wealth is a great way to share the love. 🙂

If you’re a developer, work on Qt6/KF6/Plasma 6 issues! Plasma 6 is usable for daily driving now, but still in need of bug-fixing and polishing to get it into a releasable state by February.

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 in KDE: time for the new features

The floodgates opened this week, and a lot of consequential in-progress work was merged: juicy new Plasma 6 features, long-awaited bugfixes, spicy automated testing, and more!!!

Plasma 6

General info – Open issues: 94

The Overview and Desktop Grid effects have been merged together into one, with fluid and natural-feeling touchpad gestures to transition between all states. It’s really awesome work, and also fixed a ton of open bug reports! (Niccolò Venerandi, link):

In the Plasma Wayland session, there’s now a System Tray monitor that shows you when something is using the camera, just like we already have for screen recording and microphone usage (Fushan Wen, link 1 and link 2):

Floating panels now have nice shadows, and when they de-float, they no longer have ugly chunky margins! Additionally, when the panel is floating, any popups opened from it are floating too, with nice rounded corners on all sides. Oh, and with this blocking work done, we’ve made floating panels on by default! (Niccolò Venerandi, link 1, link 2, link 3, and link 4):

There’s now a new global shortcut (Meta+Alt+L by default) to switch between the current and last-used keyboard layout, which can be useful for people who have more than two layouts but commonly switch between two of them on a regular basis (Mihail Milev, link 1 and link 2)

Icons drawn by Kirigami.Icon–which in Plasma 6 is nearly all of them in KDE’s QML software–now look better and sharper when using a fractional scale factor (Marco Martin, link)

Fixed multiple focus issues in System Settings: it’s now possible to focus the sidebar again after focusing the main page, and also pressing the down arrow key in System Settings’ search field now moves focus to the list view, which is especially helpful after searching for something (Fushan Wen, link 1 and link 2)

Started improving the presentation of the permissions of Flatpak apps in Discover, including using better icons, more user-friendly text, and showing the “sound system access” permission, which we had previously been ignoring (me: Nate Graham, link 1, link 2, and link 3)

The setting to toggle “offline updates” no longer uses that confusing terminology anymore (me: Nate Graham, link):

The “About” pages in System Monitor and Filelight were both ported to the new Form Card style (Carl Schwan, link 1 and link 2)

For a cleaner and less confusing presentation, common shortcut-choosing views now hide the local-only columns when all shortcuts are global, just like we already hide the global-only columns when all shortcuts are local (me: Nate Graham, link)

Made some fixes to monitor handling that should decrease the likelihood of the monitor instantly waking up right after being put to sleep (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.0. Link)

When using the Plasma systemd integration (which is on by default when you have systemd), Plasma is now more comprehensive about killing processes when logging out, which should prevent crashes at logout and dangling zombie processes that can prevent logging in again. This might end up being backported, too! (David Edmundson, link)

When using a Panel on the bottom screen edge, Task Manager tooltips that include media controls are no longer sometimes positioned in the wrong place (David Edmundson, link)

Breeze-themed GTK2 apps no longer look wrong (well, not as wrong, at least) when using a dark theme (Someone going by the pseudonym “Mors Mortium”, link)

It’s now possible to remove a favorite from Kickoff and other launcher menus whose underlying app or file has since been deleted (Méven Car, link)

Page headers throughout Kirigami-based software will no longer sometimes elide titles when there’s plenty of room for them when using certain combinations of fonts and font sizes (Ivan Tkachenko, link)

Other Significant Bugfixes

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

It’s no longer possible for the lock screen to break and show the dreaded “the screen locker is broken” screen due to QML cache corruption as a result of running out of space on the system. To be clear, it can still break for other reasons too, but we are working on tracking those down as well! (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.27.9. Link)

Fixed the actual root cause in KDE software for the “ever-growing ScreenMapping config file key causes Plasma to crash or fail to launch new apps” issue. And that fix also allowed us revert the stopgap fix to cap the number of mappings and fix icons being always unsorted when there was a huge amount of stuff on the desktop (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.27.9. Link)

Fixed multiple issues with Discover’s reviews popup, including being too slow and sometimes failing to load or submit reviews (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.27.9. Link 1, link 2, and link 3)

KMenuEdit once again correctly creates .desktop files with exec= keys that point to executable files that have spaces or other special characters in their file paths (Méven Car, Plasma 5.27.9. Link)

In KRunner and KRunner-powered searches, searching for recent files is once again correctly completely case-insensitive as expected (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.27.9. Link)

Fixed a fairly complex issue that was causing Flatpak-based GNOME apps to display text without any anti-aliasing when run in Plasma (Timothée Ravier, Plasma 5.27.9. Link )

If a touchscreen calibration matrix has been configured, KWin now respects it (someone doing by the pseudonym “The Official GMan”, Plasma 5.27.9. Link)

It’s now possible to use the keyboard to focus buttons in the toolbars of KDE apps using the KXMLGui framework (Felix Ernst, Frameworks 5.111. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

Automation & Systematization

Added basic UI tests for the applets and System Settings pages that live in plasma-workspace! (Fushan Wen, link 1 and link 2)

Fixed various problematic autotests in the Kirigami and KSvg frameworks, and made it mandatory for them to pass before merge requests can be merged (Marco Martin, link 1 and link 2)

…And everything else

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

How You Can Help

If you’re a developer, work on Qt6/KF6/Plasma 6 issues! Plasma 6 is usable for daily driving now, but still in need of bugfixing and polishing to get it into a releaseable state by the end of the year.

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!

And finally, KDE can’t work without financial support, so consider making a donation today! This stuff ain’t cheap and KDE e.V. has ambitious hiring goals. We can’t meet them without your generous donations!

This week in KDE: an unfrozen panel for NVIDIA Wayland users

Though the number of total Plasma 6 known issues rose this week, we managed to fix some major and longstanding ones from Plasma 5! You might recognize a few in the text below. Ultimately, these were deemed more pressing than the comparatively minor new ones. We’ll be continuing to hammer those bugs, but we do need help–your help! Discovering bugs is important, but so is fixing them, and we need help to get it done.

Plasma 6

General info – Open issues: 90

Fixed the infamous issue of Panels visually freezing in the Plasma Wayland session when using a non-Intel GPU in conjunction with the Basic QtQuick render loop and Task Manager previews turned on (David Edmundson et al, link)

Searching for apps, System Settings pages, and other things classified internally as “services” in KRunner and other KRunner-powered search tools (such as Kickoff) now matches English text as well when using the system in a language that’s not English (Alexander Lohnau, link)

When using a single-row Icons-Only Task Manager, the last opened task on the row is no longer sometimes missing under certain circumstances (Marco Martin, Link)

Fixed a bug that could cause auto-started apps with System Tray icons to sometimes not show their System Tray icons as expected until manually quit and re-launched (David Edmundson, link)

Fixed various cursor glitches and brokenness when using rotated screens in the Plasma Wayland session on a GPU that supports hardware cursors (Xaver Hugl, link)

The “Manually block sleep and screen locking” switches of multiple Battery and Brightness widgets are now synchronized; when one is toggled, all of them will change as well (Natalie Clarius, link)

Repeated messages on the lock screen now do a little bounce, rather than piling up and repeating themselves (me: Nate Graham, link):

Reduced resource usage in QtQuick apps that have mnemonics–those little underlines below letters when you hold down the Alt key (Kai Uwe Broulik, link 1 and link 2)

The menu item that says “Enter Edit Mode” now changes to “Exit Edit Mode” when you’re already in Edit Mode (me: Nate Graham, link)

The Kirigami.BasicListItem component has been deprecated with a planned removal in KF6, because it was too slow, heavy, and inflexible, worsening performance in QtQuick apps that used a lot of them. In its place are a new set of lightweight components that are thin wrappers around the standard Qt ItemDelegate, CheckDelegate etc. components, plus some more basic building blocks for making custom list items. This provides most of the convenience of BasicListItem, without the performance overhead (Arjen Hiemstra, link)

Other Significant Bugfixes

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

Gwenview now displays images more correctly when using a fractional scale factor in the Plasma Wayland session (Kai Uwe Broulik, Gwenview 24.02. link)

Fixed multiple bugs in Elisa that could cause odd and incorrect behavior when you re-arrange the contents of the playlist around the currently-playing song (Jack Hill, Elisa 24.02. Link)

Filelight once again respects the settings regarding folders exclusions and filesystem boundaries (Yifan Zhu, Filelight 23.08.2. Link)

When closing a document in Kate and KWrite that has unsaved changes, you’ll no longer see two dialogs asking you if you want to save them (Kai Uwe Broulik, Kate and KWrite 23.08.2. Link)

Widgets using the standard Plasma Calendar integration will no longer sometimes display holidays from the default region, rather than the selected one (Eugene Popov, Plasma 5.27.9. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

Automation & Systematization

Added some autotests for MPRIS media playback global shortcuts (Fushan Wen, link 1 and link 2)

…And everything else

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

How You Can Help

If you’re a developer, work on Qt6/KF6/Plasma 6 issues! Plasma 6 is usable for daily driving now, but still in need of bugfixing and polishing to get it into a releasable state by the end of the year.

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!

And finally, KDE can’t work without financial support, so consider making a donation today! This stuff ain’t cheap and KDE e.V. has ambitious hiring goals. We can’t meet them without your generous donations!

This week in KDE: more Plasma 6 dev

This week it was pretty much all Plasma 6 all the time. With the release date four and a half months away, work is kicking into high gear to make sure that we hit our deadline!

Plasma 6

General info – Open issues: 87

Made even more cursor responsiveness improvements for the Plasma Wayland session! The cursor is really very responsive now 🙂 (Xaver Hugl, link)

This work as also substantially improved latency in general, especially for games (Xaver Hugl, link)

Kickoff now has an option to move its sidebar over to the other side of the main view. This has better Fitts’ Law adherence and zero risk of accidental category switching if you use the mouse pointer to activate Kickoff and launch Favorites more often than you activate it with the Meta key or switch categories (Forest Ix, link)

The default keyboard shortcut used to open the Activity Switcher has been changed to Meta+A, so that its prior shortcut Meta+Tab can be used some something else, which is coming soon… (Niccolò Venerandi, link)

When you have Powerdevil configured to hibernate after a period of sleep, invoking sleep using KRunner now respects that preference and hibernates at the appropriate time (Natalie Clarius, link)

Sped up the launch time of Plasma and QtQuick-based KDE apps by loading the mobile text editing toolbar on demand, rather than always (Fushan Wen, link 1 and link 2)

fstab-mounted NFS drives no longer produce duplicate items in the Places panel of various KDE apps and the open/save dialog (Méven Car, link)

Discover now shows release data for SteamOS system updates in a prettier and more comprehensible way (Jeremy Whiting, link)

Discover’s “About” page now uses the newer and more attractive FormCard style (Carl Schwan, link):

A variety of QtWidgets-based dialog windows that have menubars or toolbars now use the common unified header style that KDE’s app windows use (Carl Schwan, link):

Created a new standard component: Kirigami.InlineViewHeader, and ported a bunch of list and grid views to use it (me: Nate Graham, link):

The “Upgrade your distro now” notification message is no longer radioactive (Oliver Beard, link)

Other Significant Bugfixes

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

Spectacle now takes Rectangular Region screenshots correctly when you’re using any screen scale factors less than 100% (Noah Davis, Spectacle 24.02.0. Link 1 and link 2)

Fixed a case where the touchpad daemon could randomly crash (Gabriel Souza Franco and Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27.8. Link)

Fixed a rare case where KWin would crash in the Plasma Wayland session when waking from sleep (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.27.9. Link)

The Alt+Tab window switcher is now fully accessible via the standard Orca screen reader in the Plasma Wayland session (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27.9. Link)

While updating a lot of Flatpak apps at the same time, discover can no longer exhaust the system’s set of available file handles and then fail (Discover 5.27.9. Link)

Automatically turning off the keyboard backlight when on battery power now works, if you’ve configured it to do this (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 6.0. Link)

Fixed a bug that could cause KIO-using apps to crash when trying to overwrite a file under certain circumstances (Kevin Ottens, Frameworks 5.111. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

Automation & Systematization

Added autotests for KHamburgerMenu (Felix Ernst, link)

Added more autotests for window placement in KWin (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Fixed a flaky autotest for the Task Manager in Plasma, and also expanded it to cover more things (Fushan Wen, link)

Fixed a flaky autotest in KIO (Méven Car, link)

…And everything else

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

How You Can Help

If you’re a developer, work on Qt6/KF6/Plasma 6 issues! Plasma 6 is usable for daily driving now, but still in need of bugfixing and polishing to get it into a releaseable state by the end of the year.

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!

And finally, KDE can’t work without financial support, so consider making a donation today! This stuff ain’t cheap and KDE e.V. has ambitious hiring goals. We can’t meet them without your generous donations!

This week in KDE: power management galore

This was a big week for backend work, especially on the subject of power management and energy efficiency!

Plasma 6

General info – Open issues: 81

New Features

Welcome Center’s first page can now be customized by distros–or for that matter, by users (me: Nate Graham, link)

User Interface Improvements

The KDE desktop portal implementation now supports the new cross-desktop accent color standard (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27.8 Link)

The separator line between the titlebar/toolbar area in KDE apps and the content below it is now drawn at the correct stroke weight with a high DPI screen (Carl Schwan, Plasma 5.27.8. Link)

KRunner-powered searches now only show you sleep modes that are actually supported by the system, and you can also now find them by searching for the word “power” (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 6.0. Link 1 and link 2)

After the work done last week to improve cursor responsiveness and lower power usage in the Plasma wayland session… we did some more! (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.0. Link)

The notifications about low and critically low battery power are now worded in a shorter and clearer way (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.0. Link)

The Lock/Logout widget no longer changes in height when configured to only show one item (Yannick, Plasma 6.0. Link)

Improved the keyboard navigation and accessibility properties of Discover’s Reviews viewer and entry page (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 6.0. Link 1 and link 2)

Other Significant Bugfixes

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

Fixed a glitch in Dolphin that could cause the view to not display the correct files after clearing the text entered in the search field (Amol Godbole, Dolphin 24.02. Link)

When run in a VM, Plasma now disables auto-suspend as this can sometimes cause the VM to hang (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 5.27.8. Link)

Hybrid Sleep now actually works (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 5.27.8. Link)

System Settings’ Accessibility page no longer erroneously asks you to save your changes when you leave it without having actually made any changes (Jürgen Dev, Plasma 5.27.8. Link)

The Baloo file indexing service no longer re-indexes everything after every reboot when using the Btrfs filesystem (Tomáš Trnka, Frameworks 6.0. Link)

The file dialog is once again capable of saving to files with quotes in their names (Andreas Bontozoglou, Frameworks 6.0. Link)

In various QtWidgets-based apps, star ratings are no longer inaccurate when using icon themes that lack the rating-unrated icon (Felix Ernst, Frameworks 6.0. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

Automation & Systematization

Improved some autotests in Plasma and KPipeWire (Fushan Wen and David Edmundson, link 1 and link 2)

…And everything else

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

How You Can Help

If you’re a developer, work on Qt6/KF6/Plasma 6 issues! Plasma 6 is usable for daily driving now, but still in need of bugfixing and polishing to get it into a releaseable state by the end of the year.

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!

And finally, KDE can’t work without financial support, so consider making a donation today! This stuff ain’t cheap and KDE e.V. has ambitious hiring goals. We can’t meet them without your generous donations!

This week in KDE: Custom ordering for KRunner search results

This was a big week for KRunner! In addition, the number of open Plasma 6 issues continues to tick down. Thanks to everyone who’s been making this happen!

Plasma 6

General info – Open issues: 81

You can now manually configure certain types of search results in KRunner to be high priority and hence always appear first in the results list! (Alexander Lohnau, link):

KRunner has also received a lot of performance work (Alexander Lohnau, link)

Landed some nice performance work for KWin as well, including making it do less unnecessary work by avoiding repainting layers of the screen that haven’t changed at all (Xaver Hugl, link)

Did a Plasma performance push too, resulting in various parts of Plasma and System Settings launching in some cases hundreds of milliseconds faster (Fushan Wen, link 1, link 2, link 3, and link 4)

The Breeze icon theme’s “refresh” icon and all other icons that use a similar “circle with arrows” style of iconography have now been updated with a new arrow style that looks nicer (Philip Murray, link):

The Breeze icon theme now has more colorful weather icons to match additional weather conditions supported by various weather providers (Alois Spitzbart, link)

When supported, KRunner and KRunner-powered searches now let you manually initiate “Hybrid Sleep”, which is when the system goes to sleep immediately and then hibernates in a few hours (Natalie Clarius, link):

The Display Configuration widget is now less intrusive on your System Tray, and only appears in the visible part if you’ve enabled Presentation Mode (Fushan Wen, link)

Improved the “your distro shipped Discover without its app backends” message to be shorter and more comprehensible (me: Nate Graham, link)

Explanatory text of placeholder messages found throughout Kirigami-based apps is now mouse-selectable and copyable, and can contain clickable links (me: Nate Graham, link)

User Interface Improvements

Preview thumbnails for HDR images being viewed in non-HDR mode apps are now converted to the sRGB color space, ensuring that they’re actually viewable (Mirco Miranda, kio-extras 23.12. Link)

Konsole’s multi-process architecture gained support for putting each process in its own Systemd cgroup when using (Systemd, of course), which makes them show up correctly as children of Konsole in System Monitor (Theodore Wang, Konsole 23.12. Link)

We now support public holidays in Benin (Lukas Sommer, KDE Frameworks 5.110. Link)

Other Significant Bugfixes

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

Fixed yet another way that Plasma could crash when switching Global Themes (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.27.8. Link)

The Widget Explorer’s category filter once again works for people using the system in a language other than English after we broke this recently, sorry! (David Redondo, Plasma 5.27.8. Link)

Fixed one of the most common random generally unexplainable-to-the-user crashes in Plasma (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.0. Link)

In the Plasma Wayland session, the “Maximized” window placement mode no longer gets inappropriately applied to OSDs (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.0. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

Automation & Systematization

Added a bunch of autotests for Kirigami.PlaceholderMessage (Ivan Tkachenko, link)

Added a bunch of autotests for the Media Controller widget (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

If you’re a developer, work on Qt6/KF6/Plasma 6 issues! Plasma 6 is usable for daily driving now, but still in need of bugfixing and polishing to get it into a releaseable state by the end of the year.

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!

And finally, KDE can’t work without financial support, so consider making a donation today! This stuff ain’t cheap and KDE e.V. has ambitious hiring goals. We can’t meet them without your generous donations!