This week in KDE: Stable desktop icons and even better gestures

It was a mostly bugfixy week, without so much feature and UI work. As a result, we have some very exciting 15-minute bugfixes this week that should really improve desktop icon stability! But we didn’t forget UI improvements entirely, and now the Wayland session touchpad gesture to switch between virtual desktops follows your fingers! Read about all that and more:

15-Minute Bugs Resolved

Current number of bugs: 73, down from 75. 1 added and 3 resolved:

Discover no longer constantly crashes either on launch or when you visit the Installed page if you have the Flatpak backend activated with certain types of Flatpak remotes (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.24.5)

Manually-arranged desktop icons no longer get reset to the alphabetical sorting mode when you restart the computer! (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.24.5)

Desktop icons now remember their positions on a per-resolution basis! (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.24.5)

Current list of bugs

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

You can now drag-and-drop things from Ark onto items in Dolphin’s Places panel, and it will extract those items there just like you would expect (Kai Uwe Broulik, Dolphin 22.04)

In the Plasma Wayland session, Yakuake now opens itself on the active screen, just like KRunner also now does (Martin Seher, Yakuake 22.08)

In the Plasma Wayland session, fixed a case where KWin could crash while the screen was locked (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.24.5)

In the Plasma Wayland session, unlocking the screen no longer causes various visual glitches all over the place (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.24.5)

Activating Task Manager tasks by using a Meta+[number] keyboard shortcut now always does what you expect irrespective of how many grouped tasks you have and whether they were last accessed using the mouse or keyboard (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.24.5)

In the Plasma Wayland session, the “Virtual Desktops” KWin window rule now works properly (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.24.5)

In the Plasma X11 session, fixed a case where KWin could crash when you close the lid of your laptop while an external screen is plugged in (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.25)

Grouped Task Manager tasks’ tooltips now resize and arrange themselves properly when using an RTL language (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.25)

On System Settings’ Cursors page, cursor previews once again display animations when you hover your cursor over them (David Redondo, Plasma 5.25)

In the Plasma Wayland session, the Task Manager no longer shows incorrect icons for XWayland-using web apps (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.25)

KDE apps that are capable of opening .psd files no longer crash when opening one such image that is malformed (Albert Astals Cid, Frameworks 5.94)

When you have various widgets in your panel that open popups when clicked, clicking on them no longer opens the popups with an absurdly, unusably small size (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Frameworks 5.94, though I have emailed distros and asked them to backport it to 5.93)

Highlight effects once again appear on hover in applets still using the old deprecated PlasmaComponents 2 version of the highlight, such as Legacy Kickoff (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Frameworks 5.94)

User Interface Improvements

In the Plasma Wayland session, the “slide” gesture to switch virtual desktops now follows your fingers and animates the desktops in the correct direction! (Eric Edlund, Plasma 5.25)

System Settings’ Night Color page now tints the screen how it will look in real life as you drag the slider to choose a color, so you can see the effect live (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.25)

Even though it isn’t 100% technically correct, 1360×768 and 1366×768 screens are now listed as having the “16:9” aspect ratio in System Settings’ Display Configuration page (Felipe Kinoshita, Plasma 5.25)

Changes not in KDE that affect KDE

Jan-Marek Glogowski and Michael Weghorn have done a lot of work recently to fix many LibreOffice bugs affecting KDE users, including the entire interface being too small on Wayland when using scaling, button popups not opening, Math menus being accessible in tabbed mode, and pasting text from Firefox turning it into Chinese. These are all fixed in various bugfix releases of LibreOffice 7.3.x!

…And everything else

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

How You Can Help

If you’re a developer, check out our 15-Minute Bug Initiative. Working on these issues makes a big difference quickly!

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

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

This week in KDE: a feast for the eyes

Those finger-following touchscreen gestures have started to land, and we have a lot more than that too! This week is overflowing with positive visual changes that I think you’re all really going to like:

15-Minute Bugs Resolved

Current number of bugs: 75, down from 76. 0 added and 1 resolved:

Accent colors are no longer darkened a bit when using a dark base color scheme (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.24.5)

Current list of bugs

New Features

When you change the color scheme, the screen now smoothly cross-fades between the old and new colors! (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.25):

Shamelessly copied from the GNOME effect, which was a really good idea. Soon this will be extended to also cross-fade when you change the Global Theme and Plasma Style too!

Info Center’s “About this System” page now shows you more relevant information about your hardware, such as the product name, manufacturer, and serial number (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.25):

Showing the serial number requires an extra click so that you don’t accidentally reveal it when you take a screenshot of the window, as many people like to do

The Plasma Wayland session gained support for the “screencast session restore” protocol, which means that apps using XDG portals (such as Flatpaks and Snaps) which implement the protocol (such as OBS since version 27.2.0) won’t have to ask for permission to restore the screen every time you launch them after you’ve granted it once (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.25)

There’s now a new “Crashed Processes Viewer” app that can be used to graphically see crashes collected by coredumpctl and access their developer details (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.25):

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

KIO no longer crashes while trying to open an unreadable file in an SFTP location (Harald Sitter, kio-extras 22.04)

Album list views in Elisa no longer display the tracks in the wrong order (me: Nate Graham, Elisa 22.08)

In the Plasma Wayland session, fixed a case where a misbehaving app could cause KWin to crash (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.24.5)

In the Plasma Wayland session, changing your screen configuration in certain ways (e.g. rotating and moving a screen while not also changing its refresh rate) no longer sometimes causes KWin to crash (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.24.5)

In the Plasma Wayland session, when a window requests activation using the official Wayland activation protocol so that it can raise its own window, but this gets denied by KWin for whatever reason, now the window’s Task Manager icon uses the orange “needs attention” background color, just like on X11 (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.24.5). If you encounter an app that does *not* get the orange background on its Task Manager icon when it fails to activate (e.g. when clicking on a notification sent by Thunderbird or Telegram), this means that the app in question does not implement the activation protocol at all, and it should! So go report this to its developers.

The Global Menu widget now works properly when you turn on its optional “be a hamburger menu” mode that is typically used for vertical panels (David Redondo, Plasma 5.24.5)

In the Plasma Wayland session, KRunner now appears on the active screen when shown, just like it does on X11 (Martin Seher, Plasma 5.25)

Discover no longer sometimes hangs forever when you visit its “About” page (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Frameworks 5.94)

Kate, KWrite, and other KTextEditor-based apps no longer crash when you define a new file type for the app to open (Waqar Ahmed, Frameworks 5.94)

Checkboxes and radio buttons in Plasma are no longer sometimes blurry, cut off at the bottom, or slightly squashed when you use certain combinations of fonts and font sizes (Noah Davis, Frameworks 5.94)

The Places Panels in Dolphin, open/save dialogs, Gwenview, and all other QtWidgets-based apps are now touch-friendly (Steffen Hartlieb, Frameworks 5.94)

User Interface Improvements

https://kde.org and all of it subdomains now auto-detect your browser language and show you content in your native language, if it’s available (Phu Nguyen, right now!)

Elisa’s playlist now displays adjacent songs from different albums in a much more compact and prettier way (Tranter Madi, Elisa 22.08):

Elisa now displays Bit Rate and Sample Rate metadata using sensical units (Jack Hill, Elisa 22.04):

The color theme configuration page in Kate and KWrite has received a big UI overhaul (Waqar Ahmed, Kate & KWrite 22.08):

In Kate and KWrite, typing an opening bracket character now automatically inserts the closing one after the text insertion point by default (Christoph Cullmann, Kate & KWrite 22.08)

The four-finger swipe up gesture to open the Overview effect now follows your fingers! (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.25):

The Network widget now shows contextually-relevant items in the expanded view of each list item, rather than a context menu. This makes them more discoverable and fully touch-compatible (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.25):

The Window List applet has been rewritten to modernize and future-proof its codebase, which also makes it keyboard-navigable and shows the active window’s icon and name in its Panel version, just like the classic Mac OS window menu did (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.25):

The “RGB Range” and “Overscan” controls in System Settings’ Display Configuration page now have help buttons you can click or hover over to learn what they do, as these are rather technical features need some explanation (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.25):

System Settings’ Energy Saving page now displays percentage labels by both of the brightness sliders (Edo Friedman, Plasma 5.25)

KRunner’s help button now disappears when you’ve disabled the Help runner (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.25)

Placeholder messages throughout Kirigami-based KDE apps and Plasma are now more readable, nicer-looking, and have slight visual differences between actionable and informational messages (Felipe Kinoshita, Frameworks 5.94):

The Breeze icon theme’s “debug step” icons are now more visually clear and nice-looking (Jan Blackquill, Frameworks 5.94):

…And everything else

How You Can Help

If you’re a developer, check out our 15-Minute Bug Initiative. Working on these issues makes a big difference quickly!

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

This week in KDE: Get ready for a big one!

…But first, let me mention up front that those touchpad gesture improvements I teased last week aren’t quiiiite ready, but they’re very close now. Hopefully next week! In their stead, we have an enormous number of Plasma bugfixes and UI improvements, tons of goodies for KWrite users, and finally a truly colossal number of enhancements for touch-friendliness when in Tablet Mode.

“Hey, what is Tablet Mode?”, you might ask. It’s a feature of the Plasma Wayland session in which everything becomes more touch-friendly. If you have a convertible laptop, it’s activated by flipping back the screen to make it into–you guessed it–a tablet! But it will also trigger on phones and other touch devices without a pointing device, such as the Steam deck as long as no mouse is plugged in (only once it uses the Wayland session, of course).

At the moment it is a Wayland-only feature that requires physical hardware support, but that could change and I personally would be in favor of letting people manually toggle it.

Anyway, get ready for a big one!

15-Minute Bugs Resolved

Current number of bugs: 76, same as last week. 2 added and 2 resolved:

The folder popup you can open to show the contents of folders on the desktop is no longer annoyingly two pixels too narrow to display an additional grid cell (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.24.5)

When using a Plasma Vault with the GoCryptFS backend, unlocking the vault now causes it to appear in the Places panel, just like vaults using the CryFS and EncFS backends (Ivan Čukić, Frameworks 5.93)

Current list of bugs. Get cracking! 😎

New Features

KWrite now internally uses the exact same codebase as Kate but simply turns off a bunch of programmer-centric features. This makes it much more consistent with Kate, more maintainable, and it will have fewer bugs. And now it has tabs! You can read more about it here on the Kate blog (Christoph Cullmann, KWrite 22.08):

Picture of the Day wallpapers now lets you preview the image and see image metadata right there in the config window! (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.25):

You can even click the preview to go to the image’s source URL, or click the little inline save button to save it locally!

Now, when you enter Tablet Mode, all interactive UI elements (including titlebar buttons) that are styled with the Breeze theme become larger and more touchable! (Marco Martin and Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.25:

You can now manually adjust the spacing between Icons-Only Task Manager icons, and when you’re in Tablet Mode, the spacing is automatically set to its highest level for improved touchability, just like we do for System Tray icons (Tanbir Jishan and me: Nate Graham):

In the Plasma X11 session, you can now configure all the buttons of Wacom ExpressKey Remote devices (Someone going by the pseudonym “oioi 555”, wacomtablet 3.3.0):

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Monitors in multi-monitor setups once again power off when you disable them (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.24.4)

When Discover installs updates for packages that have multiple architectures available (e.g. both 32-bit and 64-bit versions, due to having Steam installed), it now installs the updates for all architectures rather than a pseudo-random set of them, which would blow up your system! 🤯 (Alessandro Astone, Plasma 5.25, but it may be backported to 5.24.5 soon)

kio-fuse now works within the open/save dialogs of sandboxed apps, meaning that you can now use such apps to open and save files to Samba shares and other network locations, for example (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.25)

Discover now shows the description and license information for local packages (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.25)

Discover now shows you the correct author name for packages without a specific author set that live in a project group. In practice, this means that a while bunch of KDE apps will now list “KDE” as the author (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.25)

The Bing Picture of the Day wallpaper plugin will now download the 4K versions of images if you have a screen with a resolution greater than 1080p (Fushan Wen and Yunhe Guo, Plasma 5.25)

Headings in Plasma widgets once again appear as expected when you’re using the “Breeze Light” or “Breeze Dark” Plasma themes that have hardcoded colors, rather than the “Breeze” Plasma theme that respects your app color scheme (Marco Martin, Frameworks 5.93)

Draggable list items in Kirigami-based apps now move much more smoothly with no jerks or glitches (Tranter Madi, Frameworks 5.93)

User Interface Improvements

When using per-folder view properties in Dolphin, a variety of locations now use more relevant view settings: for example the search view list includes a column shows you the actual location of all matches; the Trash view list view has columns that show the “original location” and “Deletion time”; the “Recent Files” and “Recent Locations” searches group items by day; and so on (Kai Uwe Broulik, Dolphin 22.04):

Tabs in Kate and KWrite no longer fully span the whole window width by default, and the whole tab bar now only appears after a second document is opened, just like in other tabbed KDE apps (Christoph Cullmann, Kate & KWrite 22.08)

Filelight now has a “go to overview” action that will take you back to the homepage (Harald Sitter, Filelight 22.08)

In the Overview effect, you can now swipe down on a window to close it, and window close buttons are now always visible rather than appearing only on hover (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.25)

Notifications for job progress now show a percentage value by the progress bar for those of you who prefer reading text to looking at something visual (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.25):

The Margins Separator widget is now much smaller, but becomes larger and more visually obvious in Edit Mode (Tanbir Jishan, Plasma 5.25)

The Audio Volume widget no longer shows virtual devices by default, though you can show them again if you do actually use them (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.25)

System Settings’ Users page no longer lists a placeholder email address in the “Email Address” field, because it’s 2022 and people generally know what an email address is and how it’s structures (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.25)

Album art in the Media Player widget now smoothly cross-fades when it changes, rather than abruptly blinking (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.25):

All the Plasma widgets that display placeholder messages when empty now show icons too, in addition to text (Fushan Wen and me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.25):

System Settings’ Display Configuration page can now tell you exactly what setting a screen to be “Primary” actually does! (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.25):

Discover’s “What’s the risk of proprietary software?” sheet is now opened by clicking on a more conventional button, rather than a link that might make you think it’s going to open a web browser (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.25):

When you create a new file from Dolphin, the desktop, or anything else that uses the standard “create new file” functionality, the pre-selected part of the filename no longer includes the extension (Fushan Wen, Frameworks 5.93):

…And everything else

How You Can Help

If you’re a developer, check out our 15-Minute Bug Initiative. Working on these issues makes a big difference quickly!

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

This week in KDE: Progress on gestures and 15-minute bugs!

This week some of the in-progress work on touch gestures was merged, and now the edge swipe gesture to trigger KWin’s Overview and Desktop Grid effects will follow your fingers, just like you’d expect!

Big thanks to Marco Martin for implementing this improvement, which will be in Plasma 5.25. More is in the pipeline too, including finger-following touchpad gestures for the Overview effect and virtual desktop Slide effect. Hopefully I’ll be able to announce them as finished next week. 🙂

15-Minute Bugs Resolved

Current number of bugs: 76, down from 79. Current list of bugs

When you have a vertical panel and a horizontal panel, the horizontal panel no longer overlaps and hides buttons on the edit mode toolbar for the vertical panel (Oleg Solovyov, Plasma 5.24.3; this actually went in two weeks ago but I didn’t notice it!)

Logging into Plasma no longer becomes slower the more images you’ve added to your wallpaper settings (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.25)

Dragging a panel from one screen edge to another no longer sometimes causes it to disturbingly get stuck in the middle of the screen (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.25)

New Features

When sharing a folder using Samba, there is now a folder permission helper window to help you get the permissions right (Slava Aseev, kdenetwork-filesharing 22.08)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

KRunner-powered searches are now case-insensitive when matching text for System Settings pages, so you can find them more easily (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.24.4)

When running the Plasma Wayland session in a VM, clicking on something now causes the click to actually go to the correct place, rather than being slightly offset (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.24.4)

Applying various boot splash screens in System Settings now works (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.24.4)

“Get New [thing]” dialogs once again work when you’re using your system in a language other than English (Alexander Lohnau, Frameworks 5.93)

Menus for text fields in QtQuick apps no longer show a separator as the first item or make space for invisible items (Gabriel Karlsson, Frameworks 5.93)

The arrows in shortcuts windows in QtWidgets-based apps are now high-dpi compatible (Someone going by the pseudonym “snooxx 💤” Frameworks 5.93)

User Interface Improvements

The menu items in Dolphin’s Back/Forward menu now show icons (Kai Uwe Broulik, Dolphin 22.08):

The bar that shows a disk’s usage level in Dolphin is now always visible, rather than only appearing on hover (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 5.93)

The Battery and Brightness applet’s power profiles slider now shows its two extreme states with icons, and indicates the current mode with text above the slider like other sliders do. This prevents text from ever getting cut off in languages that use very long words for “Power Save,” “Balanced,” and “Performance.” (Ivan Tkachenko and Manuel Jesús de la Fuente, Plasma 5.25):

Lists of recent documents now implement a FreeDesktop standard that governs this, which means they are now synced with GTK/GNOME apps. So for example you can open a file in Gwenview and it will appear as a recent document in the “Open File” dialog in GIMP! (Méven Car and Martin Tobias Holmedahl Sandsmark, Frameworks 5.93

…And everything else

How You Can Help

If you’re a developer, check out our 15-Minute Bug Initiative. Working on these issues makes a big difference quickly!

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

This Week in KDE: coming tomorrow!

The normal weekly post will be delayed a day. Consider it extra time to merge your changes. 🙂

This week in KDE: Back to those 15-minute bugs

This week we got two good 15-minute bugs fixed, with a few more in progress that have a target merge date of next week! And of course there’s a good smattering of other positive changes as well:

15-Minute Bugs Resolved

Current number of bugs: 79, down from 81. Current list of bugs

All the notifications that were suppressed while you were in Do Not Disturb mode no longer flood the screen when you leave Do Not Disturb mode; instead, they just appear in the history pop-up, ready for you to read them there (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.25)

Folders in Recent Documents lists throughout Plasma now display their real folder icons instead of a broken-looking “unknown” icon (Méven Car, Plasma 5.25)

New Features

KRunner now has its own config window rather than re-using the systemwide search plugins page in System Settings, and in that window it now lets you disable the behavior where typing text while the desktop is focused will open it (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.25):

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Ark’s “Extract here” context menu items no longer do so much unnecessary work, making Dolphin’s context menu faster to open and causing fewer hangs on network locations (Kai Uwe Broulik, Ark 22.04)

Opening a new Private window in Firefox using its Task Manager task context menu no longer sometimes opens the window with the path to your home directory in the URL field (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.24.4)

When using a Global Menu, closing the active app now clears the menubar rather than leaving its menu there as a zombie (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.24.4)

Window titlebar buttons now get reversed as expected when you’re using the system with a right-to-left language (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.24.4)

KWin’s blur effect no longer sometimes results in flickering for windows that use blurred backgrounds (Mathias Tillman, Plasma 5.24.4)

Clicking the “Launch” button in Discover to launch an app now always results in only one thing getting launched, instead of sometimes launching several things (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.25)

When used in right-to-left-text mode, a variety of QtQuick controls now look correct, including sliders (Jan Blackquill, Frameworks 5.93)

Showing the “Get New Widgets” window from the Widget Explorer sidebar no longer blocks/freezes the rest of Plasma until it’s closed (Alexander Lohnau, Frameworks 5.93)

User Interface Improvements

GTK applications using the Breeze-GTK theme now fully match the new appearance used in KDE apps (Jan Blackquill and Artem Grinev, Plasma 5.25)

The Plasma Wayland session’s touchpad gestures now let you reverse the direction of your fingers to cancel an in-progress gesture, when the effect in question supports it; right now only Desktop Grid does, but more are coming soon! (Eric Edlund, Plasma 5.25)

The “active job progress” notification icon in the System Tray now shows you the average completion percentage in its tooltip (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.25):

The Media Controller applet now shows a tooltip indicating the elapsed playback time when you drag the slider handle (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.25):

Lists of recent documents in Task Manager Task context menus can now contain recent things that aren’t files, such as folders and even abstract concepts like “Recent Downloads” and “Recent connections” (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.25)

Discover can now warn you about the risks of installing proprietary software (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.25):

This’ll appear when you click on that “What’s the risk?” link

Discover now shows you the size of installed apps and other content on its “Installed” page (Jonas Knarbakk, Plasma 5.25)

The desktop context menu has lost its “Lock Screen” and “Log Out” items, to slim it down to only what’s relevant (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.25):

Of course you can add them back if you want, since this menu’s contents are configurable

…And everything else

How You Can Help

If you’re a developer, check out our 15-Minute Bug Initiative. Working on these issues makes a big difference quickly!

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

This week in KDE: fewer korners, more multi-cursor, better apps

Rejoice all, for the infamous “Korners” bug has been fixed! This issue caused 3rd-party window decoration themes with rounded corners to display a square blur area when using burred backgrounds. Themes are now able to (and must) specify a mask graphic that will clip the blur area to the visible area of the window decorations. Thanks to Michail Vourlakos for implementing this fix in Plasma 5.25!

But that’s not all in the Big Deal department, for Kate and other KTextEditor-based apps finally have multi-cursor support! You can create multiple cursors in three ways:

Alt+Click in different places to add new cursors there
Press Alt+Ctrl+up/down to add new cursors on lines above or below the current one
Select multiple lines of text and press Alt+Shift+I to put a cursor on each one

Thanks so much to Waqar Ahmed for this amazing work, which will be in Frameworks 5.93!

15-Minute Bugs

Current number of bugs: 81, same as last week. Current list of bugs

Other New Features

Okular now opens to a welcome screen when you launch it without a document (Jiří Wolker, Okular 22.04):

On System Settings’ Shortcuts page, you can now assign global shortcuts to launch arbitrary commands and script files, as well as just apps (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.25)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Dolphin and various other places once again show thumbnails for Krita (.kra) image files (Alexander Lohnau, Dolphin 22.04)

Kate’s settings window is no longer too big to fit in small screens; it is now able to scroll in such a situation (Christoph Cullmann, Kate 22.04)

All of Elisa’s shortcuts now always work no matter which language you are using it in (Olivier Trichet, Elisa 22.04)

When Elisa is configured to minimize to the System Tray when its main window is closed, clicking on its tray icon now raises the window to the front as well (Olivier Trichet, Elisa 22.04)

Inline “Save” buttons embedded inside PDF documents now work in Okular (Albert Astals Cid, Okular 22.04)

In Gwenview, shortcuts for “go to next” and “go to previous” no longer stop working once you reach a video file (Elliot Lester, Gwenview 22.04)

System Settings no longer sometimes crashes when you switch between Sidebar and Icons view (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.24.3)

The icon size popup in System Settings’ Icons page once again has the correct size (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.24.3)

In the Plasma Wayland session, when you have entered the Desktop Grid effect with a four-finger swipe up gesture, you can now exit it with a four-finger swipe down gesture, and the animation is a bit smoother too (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.24.4)

In the Plasma Wayland session, the “RGB Range” feature no longer sometimes randomly gets confused and disables itself (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.24.4)

In the Plasma Wayland session, sharing/recording/streaming your screen no longer sometimes results in the image being inappropriately rotated 180 degrees (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.25)

Items downloadable through the “Get new [thing]” system that contain files with TAR archives whose mime types evaluate to “x-tar” can now be downloaded and used (Alexander Lohnau, Frameworks 5.93)

A variety of Kirigami list items now display their inline buttons properly when using a right-to-left language (Jan Blackquill, Frameworks 5.93)

Day/month/year in calendar applets are now always visible when using 3rd-party Plasma themes that have opaque selection effects (Ivan Čukić, Frameworks 5.93)

In the Plasma X11 session, “Get new [thing]” windows now have a close button in their titlebar (Alexander Lohnau, Frameworks 5.93)

User Interface Improvements

Elisa’s playlist item buttons now collapse into a menu when there’s not enough room to show them (Tranter Madi, Elisa 22.04):

Items in Elisa’s left sidebar now become thicker in Tablet Mode but are thinner by default, and the view’s scrollbar no longer overlaps the icons when it is collapsed into icon mode (Tranter Madi, Me: Nate Graham, and Jack Hill, Elisa 22.04)

Elisa’s metadata window can now be closed by pressing the Escape key (Adam Hill, Elisa 22.04)

EPub files now display thumbnails (Michał Goliński, Dolphin 22.04):

In Gwenview, the left and right arrow keys now always switch between items when you’re in View mode, no matter what part of the UI has keyboard focus (me: Nate Graham, Gwenview 22.04)

Battery charge thresholds are now only shown for internal batteries, which after all are the only batteries they apply to (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.24.3)

The grid view of wallpapers is now sorted by wallpaper name, rather than semi-randomly-looking (Noah Davis, Plasma 5.24.3)

In the Plasma Wayland session the virtual keyboard now smoothly slides into place when it appears and disappears (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.25)

The clipboard applet now remembers the last type of barcode you used for the purpose of sharing clipboard items with barcodes (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.25)

On the Breeze SDDM login screen theme, changing the keyboard layout or session no longer causes the password field to lose keyboard focus (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.25)

Headers of QML-based pages in System Settings really finally actually don’t flicker anymore when you switch pages (Devin Lin, Frameworks 5.93)

The Breeze Plasma style arrow graphic now looks like all other Breeze-styled arrows (Artem Grinev, Frameworks 5.93):

Web presence

We finally added the Steam Deck to https://kde.org/hardware! 🙂 (Momo Cao, right now)

The download link at https://neon.kde.org is now much more prominent (Guillherme Silva, right now)

…And everything else

How You Can Help

If you’re a developer, check out our 15-Minute Bug Initiative. Working on these issues makes a big difference quickly! This is the second week with no 15-minute bugs resolved, and it would be nice to refocus on those. I know everyone’s busy, but they ain’t gonna fix themselves. 🙂

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

This week in KDE: Firmware security page

Unfortunately we didn’t get any 15-minute bugs fixed this week, and overall activity was lower than usual. I suspect at least part of the reason is fallout from the ongoing war in Ukraine, which has affected several prominent Ukrainian KDE contributors and also cut off Russian contributors from many of their usual internet resources. Some humanitarian aid and media organizations that you can donate to may be found here. Let us all hope for peace, and remain united in our pursuit to build the finest and most humane software.

Nevertheless, back in KDE land we did accomplish quite a bit, including a fancy new “Firmware Security” page in Info Center!

15-Minute Bugs Resolved

None! 😦

Current number of bugs: 81, up from 80. Current list of bugs

New Features

Skanpage now lets you configure which scanner settings are visible on its scanner options sidebar, in case you regularly use any uncommon or non-default scanner options (Alexander Stippich, Skanpage 22.04)

KRunner and other KRunner-powered searches can now convert teaspoons and tablespoons to and from each other and other units (Corbin Schwimmbeck, Frameworks 5.92):

Just in case that was something you ever wanted to know

Info Center now has a new “Firmware Security” page that provides information about the security of your system’s low-level components (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.25):

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

In the Plasma Wayland session, Yakuake’s “slide up/slide down” animation now works (Tiernan Hubble, Yakuake 22.04)

Adding tracks to Elisa’s playlist when shuffle mode is being used no longer causes the added tracks to have the wrong names (Martin Seher, Elisa 22.04)

When using a session, Kate now correctly saves its list of open documents/tabs when the app is automatically quit by logging out, restarting, or shutting down, so that the next time you open it, it shows that you were working on last time (Waqar Ahmed, Kate 22.04)

Dolphin’s context menu is now significantly faster to open when Ark is installed (Kai Uwe Broulik, Ark 22.04)

In the Plasma Wayland session, screen sharing/recording/casting in full-screen apps now works (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.24.3)

In the Plasma Wayland session, colors are no longer sometimes weirdly dithered with certain hardware (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.24.3)

The “Help” buttons in Info Center once again work (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.24.3)

In the Plasma Wayland session, the virtual keyboard no longer overlaps half of your vertical panel setup (if you are using such a setup) when it appears (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.24.3)

When showing seconds in a Digital Clock applet, seconds no longer skip at minute changes (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.24.3)

In the Plasma Wayland session, hitting the Escape key while dragging something now cancels the drag like you would expect (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.25)

In the Plasma X11 session, rotating a touchscreen no longer leads to touches going to the wrong area of the screen; everything now works as you would expect (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.25)

Dolphin and Gwenview no longer crash when you drag a file or folder over the top of their Places panels (Someone going by the pseudonym “Snooxx”, Frameworks 5.92)

User Interface Improvements

Compressing files from Dolphin’s context menu now produces an archive file whose filename is based on the names of the compressed files, not the folder they live in (Méven Car and me: Nate Graham, Ark 22.04)

System monitor bar charts no longer erroneously lack spacing between bars (John Fano, Plasma 5.24.3):

Applet labels in the System Tray grid view are now vertically aligned such that the first line in multi-line labels always matches other applets even those with 1 or 3 lines (Michail Vourlakos, Plasma 5.24.3):

Text in Breeze-styled vertical tabs is now vertically centered in the tabs, rather than awkwardly top-aligned (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.24.3)

Menu items in Breeze-styled GTK apps are now exactly the same height as menus in Qt and KDE apps (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.25)

KRunner and other KRunner-powered searches now let you spellcheck words in any language with enabled dictionaries, not just the primary one (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.25)

The quick process view window that you can see by pressing Ctrl+Esc now remembers its size and position (in the X11 session, at least), and gets initially placed according to the specified window placement mode (Eugene Popov, Plasma 5.25)

…And everything else

How You Can Help

If you’re a developer, check out our 15-Minute Bug Initiative. Working on these issues makes a big difference quickly!

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

This week in KDE: Bugfixing Plasma 5.24

Well, I know I said Plasma 5.24 was a smooth release, and it mostly has been! But nonetheless all of you have found various bugs afflicting your varied and diverse use cases, and we’ve been working hard to fix them this week. Some very important multi-monitor fixes and long-term improvements also landed which should be welcome for people with often-docked laptops.

15-Minute Bugs Resolved

Current number of bugs: 80, down from 83. Current list of bugs

You will no longer see an unnecessary “Connection Activated” notification right after you log in (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.24.2)

Mappings of desktops and panels in multi-screen setups should now be much more robust since invalid screen entries won’t be added to it under certain circumstances anymore (Plasma 5.24.3, Marco Martin)

Fixed one of the most common cases of Plasma crashing on launch in the Plasma Wayland session when you have a multi-monitor setup (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.25)

New Features

Skanpage now lets you share scanned documents (including multi-page PDFs) using the standard KDE sharing system (Alexander Stippich, Skanpage 22.04). If you haven’t checked out Skanpage yet, give it a whirl. It’s really nice!

You can now change your user avatar to be a plain abstract “user” icon in front of a colored background of your choice (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.25):

Added a bunch of new web search queries (Thiago Sueto, Frameworks 5.92). If you don’t know about KRunner’s web search capabilities, you can learn about it here!

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Using Ark to extract Zip archives with empty folders no longer causes those folders to have their “last accessed” dates set to sometime in the future (Albert Astals Cid, Ark 21.12.3)

Ark can now successfully create multi-part 7zip archives whose individual parts are each under 1Mb (Max Brazhnikov, Ark 21.12.3)

Kate once again always jumps to the previously-open tab when the current tab is closed (Waqar Ahmed, Kate 22.04)

Dolphin’s main view now handles right-to-left languages properly (Jan Blackquill, Dolphin 22.04)

Fixed a visual glitch in Dolphin’s main view that could be triggered by zooming (Eugene Popov, Dolphin 22.04)

In the Plasma Wayland session, fixed one of the ways that KWin could crash when you enable a disabled external monitor (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.24.2)

System Settings no longer sometimes crashes when you change a monitor’s refresh rate (Marek Beleščiak, Plasma 5.24.2)

Fixed one of the ways that Plasma could crash when undocking a docked laptop (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.24.2)

Fixed another way your panel could disappear when screens are added, removed, or wake up from sleep (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.24.2)

Deleting a non-active user in System Settings’ Users page no longer causes the UI to break (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.24.2)

When using Panel Spacer applets to center another applet on a panel, it no longer flickers and wobbles around when one of the applets on the other side of either of the spacers changes in size (Martin Seher, Plasma 5.24.2)

The Virtual Desktop Pager applet no longer lets app icons visually overflow the space they are contained within when used on a short panel, and now shows window outlines correctly when you’re using Qt scaling on X11 (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.24.2)

Fixed a big recent regression in multi-monitor+multi-GPU setups in the Plasma Wayland session (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.24.3)

Right-clicking on a System Tray app icon no longer causes the right-clicked app to get activated when left-clicking other Task Manager items (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.24.3)

You can once again apply changes to System Settings’ Touchpad page (Fabian Vogt, Plasma 5.24.3)

The plasma_session process no longer leaks a bunch of memory (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.24.3)

Adjusting the backlight of your screen now always works when using certain types of multi-GPU systems (Xingang Li, Plasma 5.24.3)

Discover no longer occasionally displays app or firmware text styling incorrectly (Tobias Fella, Plasma 5.24.3)

File dialogs are now faster to open when their initial view is a network location (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.24.3)

System Settings’ Firewall page no longer always tells you that the default policy is “Allow” regardless of what the system’s actual default policy is (Lucas Biaggi, Plasma 5.25)

In the Plasma Wayland session, launching DBus-activatable GTK3 apps now works (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 5.92)

User Interface Improvements

Elisa’s playlist has been mostly rewritten to use standard Kirigami components which fixes multiple bugs such as touch scrolling being broken and rearranging playlist songs being unreliable, halves the number of lines of code, simplifies the implementation, and improves the presentation (Tranter Madi, Elisa 22.04):

Kate’s quick search bar (invoked with Ctrl+F) no longer replaces the status bar while it’s visible (Waqar Ahmed, Kate 22.04)

Added tooltips and exhaustive expanded help text to Gwenview’s “Fit” and “Show Thumbnails” buttons (Felix Ernst, Gwenview 22.04)

Your name no longer gets elided on the login screen when it’s more than about 11 characters long and there is more than one user account on the system (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.24.3)

When you’re using offline updates, and an offline update has failed to complete, and Discover shows you a notification with the option to “Repair System”, clicking on that button now provides you some feedback about what it’s doing, and also tells you when the repair operation succeeds or fails ( Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.25)

Discover now shows a message in the app when you are running an old unsupported version of your distro, and bugs you to upgrade (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.25)

Breeze-themed tab bars now have better contrast with dark color schemes (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.25):

Kirigami FormLayout section headers are now bold, to make them visually stand out from the content in their sections (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.92):

…And everything else

How You Can Help

Please consider donating to UNICEF or another reputable relief organization working to provide humanitarian aid right now in Ukraine, where several prominent KDE contributors live–not to mention 43 million other people who have suddenly found themselves in a warzone. When the world is on fire, always be a helper.

If you’re a developer, check out our 15-Minute Bug Initiative. Working on these issues makes a big difference quickly!

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

It’s normal and it works

I read a comment on Phoronix recently that reminded me why I love KDE Plasma:

“KDE is normal and it works”

We can ignore the argument to which this is a response, and forgive alcade for confusing the name of the community with the desktop environment. Regardless, “KDE is normal and it works” is in a nutshell what I think makes KDE Plasma such a unique and shining point of light in the FOSS world.

Plasma uses a normal, familiar layout: Panel on the bottom with an app launcher, pinned apps, system tray, and clock; desktop icons; visible buttons that mostly have text labels; minimize/maximize/close buttons on windows. You know, normal stuff. You can change everything, but it starts out normal, unlike other desktop environment projects that are explicitly abnormal–being controversially opinionated about matters of design or having an unusual component layout. This is fine! Their departures from what’s normal may in fact be better, and their developers and users they certainly think so. But tons of people out there don’t want “may be better”, they want “normal.” And that’s fine too. Our software is for them.

And KDE Plasma works. It has its bugs, but it is basically a solid and reliable piece of technology that isn’t missing major features, either because of a lack of resources or because design decisions preclude supporting them. It is not a hobbyist science project missing key functionality that might break entirely. It doesn’t re-invent itself every year or two and become something different that might stop meeting your needs or tastes. It has actionable plans for adapting to industry changes surrounding it that are actively being carried out; it is not on a path to become obsolete or a technical dead end. No, it’s just it’s an imperfect and boring piece of infrastructure you can nonetheless rely on.

I think the world needs something with those characteristics, and and that’s why I like it and work on it.