This week in KDE: performance improvements galore

This week a number of performance improvements landed for for areas as diverse as taking screenshots with Spectacle in the Plasma Wayland session, using the Plasma Wayland session in general with an Nvidia GPU, and entering or exiting Elisa’s “Party mode” and resizing the main window.

But that’s not all; we also added a bunch of nice new features and UI improvements:

New Features

Spectacle can now be invoked globally to take a screenshot of the window currently under the cursor using Meta+Ctrl+Print (Antonio Prcela, Spectacle 21.08)

Gwenview can now read embedded color profile information for image formats other than JPEG and PNG (Daniel Novomeský, Gwenview 21.08)

If your keyboard lacks a “mute microphone” key, you can now mute the default microphone using the Meta+speaker mute keyboard shortcut (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.22)

In the Plasma Wayland session, the System Tray now notifies you when something is recording the screen, and gives you the opportunity to cancel it (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.23)

KCommandBar has been added to all KXMLGui-using KDE apps, so you can start using it by hitting Ctrl+Alt+I in Dolphin, Gwenview, Okular, Konsole, Krita, Kdenlive, and so on! (Waqar Ahmed, Frameworks 5.83)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Spectacle is now much faster and more reliable in the Plasma Wayland Session (Vlad Zahorodnii, Spectacle 21.04.2)

Konsole no longer sometimes crashes when using the “random color scheme” setting (Luis Javier Merino Morán, Konsole 21.04.2)

Elisa’s fancy blur effects have been ported to use a lighter weight implementation, hugely improving the app’s visual performance when entering or exiting party mode or resizing the window (Tranter Madi, Elisa 21.08)

Dolphin no longer sometimes crashes when emptying the trash (Ömer Fadıl Usta) Dolphin 21.04.2)

In the Plasma Wayland session, disconnecting an external screen no longer causes all open Qt apps to crash (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.22)

Majorly improved the reliability of the Plasma Wayland session for users of Nvidia hardware with the proprietary driver (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.22)

Fixed a case where the new Plasma System Monitor app could crash on launch (David Redondo, Plasma 5.22)

The new Plasma System Monitor app no longer sometimes crashes when its main window is de-focused (David Redondo, Plasma 5.22)

The new Plasma System Monitor app now displays fully accurate disk usage information (David Redondo, Plasma 5.22)

Launching an app using the Kickoff Application Launcher no longer shows an unnecessary left-slide animation inside the popup before it closes (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.22)

Fixed tons of issues in the System Settings Virtual Desktops page, including a case of broken text display, the “Apply” button not becoming activated when it should, the “Defaults” button not bringing back removed virtual desktops, and several problems with the animation duration chooser (Nicolas Fella and David Edmundson, Plasma 5.22)

On System Settings’ Global Themes page, the “Use desktop layout from theme” button now correctly activates the Apply and Reset buttons (Cyril Rossi, Plasma 5.22)

Fixed a recent regression that could cause Dolphin to crash when searching for files (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 5.83

User Interface Improvements

Gwenview has now adopted KHamburgerMenu, giving it a cleaner look and a more approachable set of actions when the menubar is hidden (Noah Davis, Gwenview 21.08):

As a reminder, if you hate this, you can simply show the menu bar and the hamburger menu will disappear

Discover’s “Installed” view is now case-insensitive for searching (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.22)

The System Tray’s arrow uses to show the pop-up with hidden applets in it no longer appears when using the “Show all entries” setting (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.22)

The new Plasma System Monitor app now lets you search for multiple search terms separated with commas, just like the old KSysGuard app did (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.23)

Users are now told what they will be losing when they disable file indexing (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.23)

The Virtual Keyboard System Tray applet (which appears in the Plasma Wayland session) now disables itself completely if you have disabled the virtual keyboard globally (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.23)

On System Settings’ Virtual Desktops page, you can now double-click on a desktop’s name to rename it, and while you’re in renaming mode, the “Rename” button turns into a “Confirm new name” button (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.23)

Auto-generated avatar images used in various places in Plasma and apps now use flat colors for the backgrounds, rather than gradients (Jan Blackquill, Frameworks 5.83)

…And everything else

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

How You Can Help

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

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

This week in KDE: KCommandBar delivers ludicrous-mode productivity

This week I have another exciting new UI element to present: KCommandBar! You might have gotten the impression by my fawning over KHamburgerMenu that we care more about casual or novice users today… not so! KCommandBar is an expert-focused UI element implementing a HUD-style popup that aggregates all of the actions in a KDE app’s full menu structure, so that you can quickly activate features at the speed of thought! It’s like a KRunner inside your apps. You can also use it as a search, if you think a feature may exist somewhere but you don’t know where.

Hmm, does kate have a Block Selection mode? How do I activate it?

Oh, like that!k

Notice how it shows you the action’s keyboard shortcut too, so you can learn how to activate it even faster next time!

This UI element has been merged into the code but not yet rolled out for all KDE apps. Once this merge request is merged, all QWidgets-based KDE apps that use our KXMLGui framework (which is to say, most of them) will automatically get this feature for free! Big thanks to Waqar Ahmed for creating it!

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Dolphin’s split view closing animation no longer briefly shows the wrong view content in the left view before being closed (Felix Ernst, Dolphin 21.08)

Plasma no longer sometimes crashes when using the Audio Volume widget with full PipeWire support (David Redondo, Plasma 5.22)

In the Plasma Wayland session, connecting or disconnecting an external screen no longer sometimes immediately causes Plasma to crash (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.22)

In the Plasma Wayland session, windows that automatically close themselves no longer get stuck on the screen as half-transparent phantoms if you happened to have been dragging them at the moment when they closed themselves (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.22)

We pushed a better fix to prevent the network applet from erroneously showing a huge traffic spike the first time you open it that should hopefully fix it for good this time (David Redondo, Plasma 5.22)

System Monitor widgets now display the correct information when located on a panel (David Redondo, Plasma 5.22)

The new Plasma System Monitor app no longer sometimes visibly flickers when table views of apps or processes are updated (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.22)

In the Plasma Wayland session, sub-menus of hamburger menus from interactive notifications (e.g. for newly-taken screenshots) no longer open in their own separate windows (David Redondo, Plasma 5.22)

In the Plasma Wayland session, showing the titlebar app menu no longer temporarily makes an item named “KDE Daemon” appear in your Task Manager (David Redondo, Plasma 5.22)

In the Plasma Wayland session, Aurorae window decorations are no longer visually corrupted when using high DPI scaling (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.22)

When using the Breeze application style, the cursor no longer gets stuck in the “double headed arrow” shape when first moving over a resizable divider and then into a terminal panel, as in Dolphin (Fabian Vogt, Plasma 5.22)

The Icons-Only Task Manager’s “currently playing audio” indicator no longer overlaps with its numbered badge when the badge is visible (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.22)

The adaptive panel transparency feature and the Minimize All applet now work properly when using KWin’s “keep thumbnails for minimized windows” setting (Bharadwaj Raju and Abhijeet Viswa, Plasma 5.22)

In the Plasma Wayland session, external screens are now detected properly on multi-GPU systems (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.23)

Selecting folders in the folder selector dialog for Flatpak apps and others using XDG portals now works (Bharadwaj Raju, Frameworks 5.83)

When using a recent version of Qt, automatic spellchecking in Kate and KDevelop and other KTextEditor-based apps once again works out of the box without need to be turned off and back on again (Antonio Rojas, Frameworks 5.83)

User Interface Improvements

The tabs at the bottom of Gwenview’s sidebar now become icons-only at very small widths where the text would have previously been elided, and become icons+text at very wide widths (Noah Davis, Gwenview 21.08):

Dolphin’s Trash entry in the Places panel now has a context menu item to open the trash settings window (Saravanan K, Dolphin 21.08):

In Elisa, the inline Play button for playlist items now resumes playback when paused, rather than going back to the beginning of the song (Tranter Madi, Elisa 21.08)

System Tray applets with hamburger menus no longer redundantly show the same configure action inside them that is already visible available as a button on the header itself (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22):

In the new Plasma System Monitor app, you can now terminate the selected process/app by hitting the Delete key, just like you could in KSysGuard (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.22)

Clicking on any of the media controls on the lock screen no longer takes the keyboard focus away from the password field (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.22)

Using the Task manager’s “cycle through tasks with mouse wheel” no longer un-minimizes minimized tasks (Abhijeet Viswa, Plasma 5.22)

Widgets on the desktop now have a blurred background, making them more legible and better-looking compared to the previous transparent-without-blur background (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.23):

Retro wallpaper shows the effect better!

The Audio Volume applet’s Applications tab now distinguishes between applications that are currently playing or recording audio, and those that are not (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.23):

The System Settings Boot Splash page has been moved to the “Appearance” category (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22)

…And everything else

How You Can Help

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

1 year update on the ThinkPad X1 Yoga laptop

Last year I replaced my old laptop with a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga, and I wrote a preliminary review of it. This laptop is my only computer, used for both work and play. I’ve had it for a year, gotten used to some of my initial annoyances, and discovered a few new ones. So I thought I’d provide an update with some more long-term impressions.

What’s still annoying

Location of PrintScreen key

I have not been able to get used to having the PrintScreen key between the right Alt and Ctrl keys. I hit it by accident and open Spectacle all the time. So I have re-bound it in the Keyboard KCM to be a second Meta key, which is much more useful. Now I can do window tiling with one hand! However this means I lose my PrintScreen key. I initially re-bound the stupid useless Insert key to be a new PrintScreen key using xmodmap, but that only works on X11, and I have not yet found a Wayland-compatible solution that I am capable of making work over the long haul. I did succeed in performing the re-mapping using config files and submitted a merge request upstream to offer “Insert key is Printscreen” as a keyboard option, but it was rejected. Since applying the patch locally relied on modifying system files, my changes gets blown away on every system upgrade. Our keyboard KCM is in need of a generic and user-friendly way to let people re-bind keyboard keys without having to mess around with config files.

Battery life

Battery life remains lower than I would prefer, even after a number of kernel upgrades. I usually limit charging to 90% to preserve battery longevity, but when I let it charge to 100%, I’m still getting 5 hours max, even when I baby it and don’t use power-hungry apps. This is quite disappointing. The laptop I replaced easily got 8 hours, even with a smaller battery. So I know it isn’t my software being an energy pig. I haven’t done any international travel over the past year due to the pandemic, but once I do, this will become a real pain real fast.

Screen resolution and aspect ratio

While I love the sharpness of the laptop’s 3840×2160 4K display, this resolution is overkill for its 14″ screen size. At 200% scaling, things are too small. Currently I am using 200% scale with 11pt Noto Sans font, which takes advantage of a bug in Noto Sans in that 11pt is 22% bigger than 10pt, not 10% bigger like you would expect. The super high resolution also results in excessive power consumption, contributing to poor battery life. And the 16:9 aspect ratio is not ideal.

Later models of this laptop have a 16:10 screen, but with the same excessive 4K resolution. Boo.

A 14″ laptop screen ideally needs a resolution of 3200×2000 so that when you scale it to 200%, you get an effective resolution of 1600×1000. This is still perfectly sufficient to make the individual pixels invisible, but would draw less power and yield un-problematic 200% scaling for perfectly crisp and pixel-aligned visuals.

Lousy Intel CPU

This laptop has an Intel Comet Lake 10th gen Core i7-10510U CPU manufactured with a 14nm process. While it is faster than what I had before, performance is disappointing compared to AMD’s Ryzen CPUs, which also generate less heat and consume less power due to their more advanced 7nm manufacturing process. Graphics performance is also quite bad, though the 11th gen version is apparently much better. But overall a monster Ryzen 4800 or 5800 series CPU would be a much better fit, providing superior performance, lower heat, and better battery life. Sadly Lenovo does not offer those CPUs in this laptop. They should, because AMD’s offerings are clearly better in almost every way. You’d lose Thunderbolt support, but I haven’t plugged in one Thunderbolt device in ten years of owning laptops with Thunderbolt ports. I don’t even know if any of then work.

Can only charge it from the left side

It’s a minor thing, but after a year of use from many locations, it’s annoying to have to wrap the cord around the back of the laptop when I happen to be somewhere where the nearest power outlet is on my right side rather than my left side. This might be less of an issue if the machine got better battery life so I didn’t have to keep it plugged in all the time–but it doesn’t, so I do, and it is.

Wobbly USB-C ports

This is a common problem in many laptops, but I expect better for an expensive one. There is really no excuse for USB-C cord to be super wobbly after plugging it into the laptop. It makes the whole thing seem flimsy and weak. More firmness would be much appreciated.

What’s still great

Everything else! The touchpad, rest of the keyboard, speakers, display quality, build quality, durability, portability, port selection, and design are all wonderful. The software issues I ran into before have largely been fixed (at least in the Plasma Wayland session, which is almost usable day-to-day for me). With the above-mentioned problems fixed, it would be a perfect computer.

Alas, they persist, and I have not found one that meets all of my requirements. The hunt continues…

Window decorations revisited (or: using the right tool for the job)

Today let’s talk a bit about the importance of using the right tool for the job. There’s a bit about this in my post about KHamburgerMenu, about how it was not designed to be a universal thing for every app but rather the ones where it can makes sense. No need to shoe-horn everything into an identical paradigm.

So I want to use that context to talk a bit more about window decorations, and specifically client-side decorations–everyone’s favorite topic for getting the blood pumping! 🙂 But first, some terminology to make sure we’re all on the same page:

“Client-side” refers to content is drawn by the app or window itself (the “client”)

“Server-side” refers to content drawn for the app or window by something else (typically the window manager, or the “server”).

Now, KDE apps typically do not use client-side-decorated headerbars for their header areas like GNOME apps do. Instead, we generally hew to the traditional arrangement of a titlebar, menubar, and toolbar. The titlebar is “server-side” because it’s drawn by KWin, our window manager. Everything below the titlebar–such as the window’s menubar, toolbar, and content view–are drawn by the window itself; the window being a “client” of the window manager. Hence, “client-side”.

In the interest of aesthetics, our Breeze theme has recently been updated to visually merge these components, even though they’re still drawn by different parts of the stack and still serve different functions (though you can still drag the window from any empty area of the header, not just the titlebar). Here’s how it looks in Okular, a fairly traditional app with a titlebar, menubar, and toolbar:

…And for Dolphin, which has a hamburger menu in its toolbar by default rather than a menubar:

Not too bad, eh? Yet we have often been asked why we don’t use GNOME-style client-side decoration headerbars, which would provide the same merged look and save some vertical space too. I wrote a series of blog posts about this a few years ago which are still largely accurate, so I will paraphrase:

Why our apps don’t use CSD headerbars

If we did, they be worsened in the following ways:

They would either lose a lot of space used for dragging the window, or else lose the ability to click-and-drag-and-release to activate headerbar items in menus, comboboxes, pop-up menus, etc. You can’t have both with CSD headerbars.
There would be no place to display the name of the app, window, or open document–unless the app left a big empty space in the middle of the header for it. Even then it would be up to every app to implement this title itself, rather than it being an automatic thing provided by the window manager.
We would probably have to remove or severely restrict how customizable the toolbar can be given the above restrictions on space.
Also given the above restrictions, the CSD headerbar would probably have to omit some of the window decoration buttons currently present on the SSD titlebar, since they would be taking up a lot of space that apps would need. Customization flexibility would also be reduced.
Windows would all have to have hamburger menus with no provision for a traditional in-window menubar, since there is nowhere to put one in a CSD headerbar without it looking really weird.
When a window is not responding, the close button would not work to force-quit it, since it would be drawn by the thing that is not responding (the window) rather than a thing that is still working (the window manager)… unless the window manager itself implemented a hack for this. So it would not work in other window managers.
It would suck for people using our apps on other platforms without window manager level support for CSDs.

So there’s your answer. 🙂

But wait, what about DWDs?

“DWD” refers to “Dynamic Window Decorations“, an old KDE proposal to marry visual appeal of CSDs with some of the functionality of SSDs by allowing the app to pass various actions to the window manager, which would then put them in the titlebar for the app. The proposal looked pretty like CSD apps do, and would have solved problem #6 and #7 from the above list, and improved on problem #4–but the other problems would have remained. So the idea was ultimately shelved and we did not apply it to our app windows. Too much cost, not enough benefit. That’s how it goes, sometimes.

Actually I lied, we totally use DWDs already… sort of

You might not have realized it, but Plasma’s System Tray uses the rough concept of the DWD paradigm and has for a few Plasma releases! Here, take a look at the Clipboard applet:

That “clear” action with the broomstick is drawn by the “server” (in this case, the System Tray popup) but the action came from the applet (which is acting as the client)! the Clipboard applet told the System Tray, “Hey, here’s a “Clear history” action for you to display with this icon, that tooltip text, and so on”. And the System Tray itself took care of turning that action into a clickable button. The Configure icon next to it is the same.

This arrangement was actually not deliberate; we kind of re-discovered the DWD concept by accident. But it turned out to work really well in the System Tray. This is because the System Tray popups don’t suffer from any of the remaining problems plaguing CSDs:

The System Tray popup is not movable by dragging, so you can fill the top bar with lots of stuff without impairing that or losing the click-drag-release method of getting at menu items.
The name of the applet isn’t robbing anything of space because because these are every small applets with a limited set of features; the number of actions is super limited.
The header actions don’t need to be customizable because the full set of actions can be presented by default.
Not being a movable window, there are no relevant window decoration buttons to customize, except for the single “Pin” button that keeps the popup open, which we can always show because there’s always space for it.
These applets never had full menubars anyway, so nothing has been lost.

To be clear, there are still no DWDs for app windows, and there probably never will be–because they would basically just be slightly-less-bad CSD headerbars. However the DWD concept really shines for small platform-specific widgets!

It’s all good

So like KHamburgerMenu, we now have another tool in our toolkit. We can apply it to the parts of our software where it makes sense, without feeling the pressure to force it everywhere. Because the best craftsmanship really does come from using the right tool for the job.

This week in KDE: the Plasma 5.22 beta is here!

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

New Features

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

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

User Interface Improvements

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

What’s really cool is that it responds to your customizations. For example, because I’ve added the “Add New…” action to my toolbar, it isn’t in the hamburger menu. But I’ve removed the “Filter…” action, so it goes into the hamburger menu.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…And everything else

How You Can Help

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

This week in KDE: UI improvements abound

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

New Features

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

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

User Interface Improvements

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And yes, we know that the “Configure Energy Saving…” item in the hamburger menu is redundant. This is a known bug that will hopefully be fixed soon.

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

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

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

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

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

…And everything else

How You Can Help

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

This week in KDE: Support for GPU hot-plug and FreeSync, and so much more

This was another really really big week in KDE!

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

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

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

Other New Features

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

User Interface Improvements

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…And everything else

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

How You Can Help

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

Our stuff is really pretty good

Today is my birthday, and I’ve reached the phase of life where I don’t need or want presents anymore–just a bit of time spent with some of the people who are important to me. And maybe some Chinese food. 🙂

But today I got a nice present anyway: a glowing review of Plasma from Igor Ljubuncic of Dedoimedo. Go check it out! Igor is a tough reviewer, and always manages to find things to complain about whenever he reviews software, including ours. I’m very happy that he thinks our offerings are so far ahead of everyone else’s.

So let’s keep it that way! But who made this happen? YOU! You, my faithful readers! You, KDE developers and translators and promo people and other contributors! You, KDE distro packagers! You, bug reporters! You, users who spread the word and convert your friends and classmates and colleagues and spouses and parents. All of us are responsible for this success, because we care about the future of computing being high-quality and user-friendly. So happy birthday to everyone! Let’s keep on making the world a better place.

This week in KDE: Overflowing with UI and accessibility improvements

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

New Features

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

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

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

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

User Interface Improvements

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

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

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

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

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

Next we’re going to replace those little spiky triangles with dots

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Web Presence

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

One more thing

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

…And everything else

How You Can Help

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

This week in KDE: Offline updates are now optional

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

And yeah, all these update-related options live in System Settings, not in Discover itself

Other New Features

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

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

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

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

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

User Interface Improvements

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

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

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

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

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

Web Presence

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

…And everything else

How You Can Help

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