I’ve started to worry that mentioning really small weird bugfixes week after week gives the impression that KDE software is buggier than it really is. The truth is that all responsibly maintained projects are constantly landing these kinds of maintenance bugfixes, so it’s probably a bit misleading to be talking about them all the time.
Instead, I’m going to try only mentioning the big, consequential bugfixes: the ones for bugs marked HI or VHI priority, that have with multiple duplicates, that are really significant in effect, etc. Hopefully this should improve the signal-to-noise ratio in the blog posts.
I’ll still mention new features and significant user interface improvements, of course.
We continue chewing through bugs this week, and now I’m mentioning the “very high priority” Plasma bugs in addition to the “15 minute bugs” which are slightly lower priority. Plasma developers reading along are encouraged to prioritize the very high priority bugs. 🙂
Very high priority Plasma Bugs Resolved
Current number of bugs: 26, down from 29. 3 resolved:
The KScreen screen handling service is now more lenient about detecting screens as unique, which should fix various weird screen-and-desktop-layout-related problems caused by hotplugging screens and docks where both the screen ID and connector ID change during the hotplug (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.26)
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!
This week, Aleix Pol Gonzalez put a ton of work into Discover, which you’ll see throughout the post! Beyond that, it was a Plasma-heavy week, with developers adding several useful new features, polishing the UI, and fixing a large number of high-priority issues.
15-Minute Bugs Resolved
I’m going to start mentioning “very high priority” Plasma bugs here too, as I think it makes sense for them to inherently be considered 15-minute bugs as well. For now I’m going to put them in the “added and also fixed” bucket, but I could add them to the total count instead, if folks think it would be more accurate. This would bring the total up to 79. Or I could mention them separately. Let me know what you think.
Current number of bugs: 51, down from 52. 5 added and 6 resolved:
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!
The highlight effect for hovered windows in the new Present Windows and Desktop Grid effects is now larger, making it easier to see (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.26):
In the Comic Strip widget, the context menu item that previously said “Run associated application” now says “Open in [default web browser]” (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.26)
Visual transitions in the Pager widget (e.g. when you move, maximize, or tile a window) are now animated (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.26):
In the Plasma X11 session, the “Window shade” feature once again works (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.25.4)
In the Plasma Wayland session, the cursor launch feedback animation played when launching an XWayland app now stops playing once the app has launched (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.25.4)
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!
Dolphin, Gwenview, and Spectacle now use the XDG Portals interface for dragged-and-dropped files, which allows them to successfully drop files into sandboxed apps without punching a hole in the sandbox by giving it access to your entire home folder or the system’s temp folder (Harald Sitter, version 22.08 of these apps)
Dolphin’s “Show Statusbar” action now additionally lives in the Settings menu, where these kinds of view-specific preferences can typically be found in QtWidgets-based KDE apps (Kai Uwe Broulik, Dolphin 22.08):
The “Show Desktop” widget and shortcut have been renamed “Peek at Desktop” to make clearer what they’ll actually do, and to provide more contrast with the alternative “Minimize all Windows” action (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.26):
If you’re about to comment “I hate this style, it looks terrible!” then at least you might be happy to learn that we can change it in a central place, since this UI is data-driven with the presentation being separate.
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!
For Frameworks 5.97, Slava Aseev has implemented support in KWallet for the org.freedesktop.secrets standard, which allows KDE apps to be more compatible with 3rd-party credential storage methods. In terms of real-world impacts, the Minecraft launcher should no longer ask you to log in every single time you open it!
Finally on our list of big changes, for Plasma 5.26 Harald Sitter has added support in KDE’s crash reporter for sending crash information to a self-hosted instance of Sentry a server-side crash tracing service that will eventually be capable of injecting debug symbols automatically. It may sound technical and boring, but over time it should lead to crash reports becoming more actionable, wasting less of everyone’s time.
Beyond those, we have a pretty good assortment of other changes to present as well!
15-Minute Bugs Resolved
Current number of bugs: 53, down from 57. 0 added, 2 found to already be fixed by something else, and 2 fixed as a part of the merged Region & Language page! Thanks, awesome people.
Clicking on a Konsole notification about a particular session now takes you to that session in Konsole (Kasper Laudrup, Martin Tobias Holmedahl Sandsmark, and Luis Javier Merino, Konsole 22.08)
Text changes made in the “Name” field of file open/save dialogs is now undoable and redoable (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.97)
Message dialogs with “Yes” and “No” buttons are changing their text to be more descriptive in multiple pieces of KDE software (Friedrich W. H. Kossebau, the next versions of a bunch of things)
In the Plasma Wayland session, using a global keyboard shortcut to launch an application with startup animation turned off now inhibits the startup animation as expected (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.25.3)
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!
In the Plasma Wayland session, activating windows using a touchscreen in the Overview, Present Windows, and Desktop Grid effects once again works (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.25.3)
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!
Plasma 5.25’s first bugfix release came out a few days ago, and the next one is due early next week. Hopefully most of the bugs you folks found will have been fixed! And among those are few 15-minute bugs too.
Occasionally people ask, “Jeez, it feels like you guys are fixing bugs all the time… shouldn’t they all be fixed by now? Why is your software so buggy?” Thing is, that’s the nature of software. There are always more bugs to fix, no matter how long you work at it. And the more people who use it, the more bugs they’ll find. This is universal, for every piece of software. The best metric is not really “number of bugs fixed,” but rather “egregiousness of bugs fixed.” You want to see that the bugs we fix get weirder and more esoteric over time, which indicates that the basics are becoming more reliable. We’re not all the way there yet, but I believe we are making progress!
15-Minute Bugs Resolved
Current number of bugs: 59, down from 65. 0 added, 2 found to be upstream issues, and 4 resolved:
In the Plasma X11 session, the search icon displayed inside search fields throughout Plasma widgets and KWin effects is no longer comically large (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.96)
The “Open With…” dialog that you’ll see in non-sandboxed apps now has a “Get more Apps in Discover…” button, just like the different-looking dialog seen in sandboxed apps (Jakob Rech, Frameworks 5.96):
And yes, before you ask, it’s silly that we have two different “Open With…”dialogs with different appearances and codebases. Unifying them is an active area of work!
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!
Plasma 5.26 will resolve a major pain point for users of the Wayland session with high DPI screens: you’ll now be able to choose how you want your XWayland-using apps to be scaled:
By the compositor–ensuring uniform scaling, but blurriness (this is the status quo)
By the apps themselves–allowing them to use their pre-existing X11 high DPI capabilities, if they have them, but leaving apps without such capabilities at the wrong scale
So if all the XWayland apps you use support high DPI scaling properly on X11, you can use this new setting to make them look nice and crisp at your chosen scale factor:
This setting is currently off by default in Plasma 5.26, but we’re considering turning it on by default after more testing. Big thanks to David Edmundson and Aleix Pol Gonzales for this work!
Beyond that, the focus was on fixing bugs discovered in Plasma 5.25, and you’ll see quite a few mentioned here.
15-Minute Bugs Resolved
Current number of bugs: 65, up from 64. 1 added and 0 resolved.
Using the properties dialog or KMenuEdit to edit an application’s .desktop file that happens to be a symlink now works as expected (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.96)
…And everything else
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!
Because that’s clearly the most important thing this week, right!?
Anyway, Plasma 5.25 is going to be released in a few days, and it’ll be huge! Accordingly, feature work for 5.26 is starting to land alongside bugfixing for 5.25.
15-Minute Bugs Resolved
Current number of bugs: 64, down from 65. 2 found to already be fixed (thanks to whoever fixed them!) and 1 added.
You can now drag windows between screens in the Overview and Present Windows effects (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.25)
Scrolling over the Media Controller widget’s icon now changes the volume of the app playing media in steps of 5%, not 3%, so now it matches the default step size when changing the whole system volume. Also like the system volume, the step size is configurable! (Oliver Beard, Plasma 5.26)
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!
Adventures in Linux and KDE 