This week in KDE: Some cool new features

New Features

KDE Connect now supports the quick reply feature of Plasma’s notifications, allowing you to reply to a text message from within the notification itself! (Nicolas Fella, KDE Connect 21.08)

Kate now has an optional panel that displays all the TODO items in a project (Waqar Ahmed, Kate 21.08)

In the Audio Volume applet’s “Applications” tab, hovering over the name of an app that’s currently playing audio now displays which device it’s outputting to (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.22)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Partition Manager now correctly reports the S.M.A.R.T status for all disks (Yaroslav Sidlovsky, Partition Manager 21.04)

KCalc’s “Constants” buttons now have legible text when using a dark color scheme (Frederik Schwarzer, KCalc 21.08)

When using Okular on a multi-monitor system that supports and uses different scale factors for each screen, Okular now draws its window and content according to the scale factor of whichever screen it’s currently located on, rather than the highest one from among all connected screens (Oliver Sander, Okular 21.08)

Pasting saved Klipper text into GTK apps in the Plasma Wayland session now works (Fabio Bas, Plasma 5.21.4)

When applying a Global Theme to a new user, applet positions no longer get messed up when logging in as that user the second time (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.21.4)

Assigning a color to a sensor in the new Plasma System Monitor app no longer incorrectly applies it to every one (David Redondo, Plasma 5.21.4)

Scrolling on the desktop to switch between virtual desktops now respects the “Navigation wraps around” setting that you can set in the System Settings Virtual Desktops page (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22)

System Settings’ “Highlight changed settings” feature no longer gets confused by localized text in the Locations page (Méven Car, Plasma 5.22)

After setting a fractional scale factor (e.g. 125%) in the Plasma Wayland session, XWayland windows now respond properly to mouse input immediately, rather than requiring that the system be restarted first (Weng Xuetian, Plasma 5.22)

When uninstalling an item from a “Get New [thing]” window, the UI no longer sometimes claims that the uninstallation process is hanging forever even when it actually succeeded (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, Frameworks 5.81)

User Interface Improvements

It’s now possible to select the text of the filename in Dolphin’s information panel, so that it can be copied to the clipboard (me: Nate Graham, Dolphin 21.04)

When you open a document in Okular that was already open, Okular now switches to that document by default (the behavior is configurable) instead of opening it again in a new instance (me: Nate Graham, Okular 21.04)

Gwenview’s status bar now always lives at the bottom of the window (Noah Davis, Gwenview 21.08)

The wallpaper dialog’s “Positioning” Combobox is now the same width as all the other ones so all you OCD people can stop twitching uncomfortably now 🙂 (Filip Fila, Plasma 5.21.3)

When opening the Window Rules page from the titlebar context menu, it now opens in System Settings rather than in a strange custom dialog, which fixes various bugs including text not being copyable (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.22)

Improved the animation effect for the blue line that shows you which System Tray item is active (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.22)

Discover’s screenshot pop-up now has a visible close button so you don’t have to figure out that you click on the darkened background area to close it (Justin Zobel, Plasma 5.22)

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: Elisa grows up

This week I want to highlight something big: Elisa now has a full mobile interface, making it a first-class citizen on Plasma Mobile and Android! A ton of of the code is shared, thanks to KDE’s Kirigami user interface toolkit. Thanks very much to Devin Lin for this enormously impactful contribution that makes Elisa a fully convergent music player!

In addition we got a lot of work done on the new Plasma System monitor app, which is going to replace the venerable KSysguard by default in Plasma 5.22. It’s currently optional, so we’re very thankful for the amount of testing that adventurous people have done with it. This promises to make the full-roll out in Plasma 5.22 much smoother. Thank you everyone!

Other New Features

Kate now has a feature to let you jump back to the previous cursor position (Waqar Ahmed, Kate 21.04):

You are now notified and asked to back up your data when problems with your disk are detected that do not quite rise to the level of a full S.M.A.R.T failure, but are nonetheless worrying and could potentially cause data loss soon (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.22)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Konsole no longer crashes if you close a tab and then immediately use the “Bookmark all tabs as folder” action (Carlos Alves, Konsole 21.04)

Elisa can now play AAC files (Matthieu Gallien, Elisa 21.04)

When Dolphin is sorting by on-disk sizes, it no longer orders folders first when not asked to do so (Méven Car, Dolphin 21.04)

When you tell Gwenview to open a set of files that includes any files which happen to have the same name, it no longer somewhat terrifyingly shows an overwrite dialog prompting you to delete one of them which freezes and becomes non-interactive anyway (Méven Car, Gwenview 21.04)

Spectacle no longer inappropriately enables “on click” mode under certain circumstances (Vlad Zahorodnii, Spectacle 21.04)

Fixed a case where the new Plasma System Monitor app could crash on Wayland (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.21.3)

The “Force Font DPI” setting is once again usable on Wayland, so those of you who were using it to work around Wayland’s blurry fractional scaling can do so again (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.21.3)

Changing the settings of any of the System Monitor widgets now always results in the Apply button being enabled (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.21.3)

The “Amount of history to keep” setting in system monitor widgets and the new app now works (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.21.3)

Moving a widget within a page in the new Plasma System Monitor app now works (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.21.3)

The new Plasma System Monitor app now remembers its filter text if you switch away from the filtered view and then go back (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.21.3)

Text in table columns in the new Plasma System Monitor app is now always properly vertically aligned no matter what font settings you use (David Redondo, Plasma 5.21.3)

The new Plasma System Monitor app’s “Quit Application” dialog no longer mis-renders its checkbox when using certain fonts (David Redondo, Plasma 5.21.3)

Spectacle’s “Rectangular Region” mode once again works in the Plasma Wayland session (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.22)

When using Dropbox and setting its System Tray item to be “always hidden”, it now remembers this state after the computer is rebooted (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.22)

For apps which live in the System Tray and change the contents of their context menus, those menus are now properly displayed in the Plasma X11 session (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.22)

The Flickr picture of the day wallpaper now stores its API key in a central location so that it can be updated as needed, without people having to wait for updates to their software (Yunhe Guo, Plasma 5.22)

Fixed a case where System Settings could crash while installing new themes (Marco Martin, Frameworks 5.81)

File dialogs now add the correct filename extension while saving in the particular case when the document’s filename already ends with a period (Robert Hoffman, Frameworks 5.81)

Headsets with an integrated “Play/Pause” button now do what you expect every time that button is pressed, not only every second time (David Redondo, Frameworks 5.81)

Panel margins no longer change when compositing is disabled (Niccolò Venerandi, Frameworks 5.81)

User Interface Improvements

Konsole once again exposes the default profile in the UI, for those of you who missed it (Ahmad Samir, Konsole 21.04)

Okular’s support for FictionBook files has been enhanced to support <annotation> and <subtitle> tags (Yuri Chornoivan, Okular 21.04)

You can now set a keyboard repeat rate higher than 50 key events per second; the new maximum is 100 (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.21.3)

After moving or copying a file, the notification now indicates which app will open the file if you click on the “Open” button (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.22):

The checkbox in the Bluetooth System Tray applet to disable Bluetooth can now be used to enable it again as well (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.22)

The Plasma Vaults applet now offers a standalone “Show in File Manager” action that you can activate for open vaults to easily jump right there (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22):

Using Discover to update your Nvidia drivers (or any other packages with a license agreement) no longer prompts you to re-accept the license agreement unless it has actually changed (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.22)

Sticky Note widgets now ask for confirmation when you try to delete a note, but only when the note has real content in it–not when it’s empty or when you just created it from clipboard content (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22):

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The new Plasma System Monitor app now remembers the way you left your table columns and sidebars when you quit and re-launch it (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.22)

All of the Breeze icons that depict locked or unlocked states now follow the same visual convention of locked icons having a filled body and unlocked icons having a hollow body (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.81):

Web presence

Check out episode four of Niccolò’s series on how to create a Plasma theme:

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: Adaptive panel opacity and auto-restored unsaved documents in Kate!

A big Plasma feature was added this week: adaptive Plasma panel opacity! Now the panel and panel applets are more transparent than they were before, allowing more of a tint from the beautiful wallpaper on your desktop! But what’s this? You’re about to complain that you maximize all your windows so the increased transparency will look ugly? In fact, we now make your panel and panel applets 100% opaque when there are any maximized windows, ensuring no ugly effect! But what if you don’t want that either? Well, if you don’t want adaptive opacity we now let you make your panel and panel applets always transparent, or always opaque! Hopefully that should make everyone happy. 🙂 Let’s give a round of applause to Niccolò Venerandi and Jan Blackquill for this work, which will show up in Plasma 5.22.

Another notable feature got merged as well: the ability to have Kate automatically preserve and restore unsaved files or even unsaved changes in files when quit and re-launched! This feature makes use of Kate’s existing session functionality and is off by default for now pending lots of testing by adventurous users like yourself. 🙂 So please go test it out! To do so, make sure you’re using a session, or make one with the “Save Session As…” menu item in Kate’s Sessions menu. Then go to Kate’s settings window, navigate to the “Sessions” page, and check the checkboxes under “Automatically save and restore:” Méven Car implemented this long-awaited feature for Kate 21.04.

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Elisa now consumes less memory when you scroll around the app and see a lot of album art (Devin Lin, Elisa 21.04)

Elisa now saves playlist files in the .m3u8 format which supports UTF8-encoding and non-ASCII characters, and also allows you to open playlist files already in that format (me: Nate Graham, Elisa 21.04)

Renaming a file on a Samba share in such a manner that the only way its filename changes is that one letter is moved from uppercase to lowercase (or vice versa) now works (Harald Sitter, Dolphin 21.04)

The Flickr picture of the day wallpaper now works again; its API key had expired. This keeps happening, so we are investigating a more generic way of keeping it working consistently (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.18.7)

Plasma System Monitor applets no longer sometimes display a broken config window (David Redondo, Plasma 5.21.2)

Discover now always returns the appropriate number of apps when asked to find handlers for a file format (Aleix Pol Gonzales, Plasma 5.21.2)

The feature to automatically match header decoration styling for GTK headerbar apps now works on multi-user systems when multiple users are logged in at the same time (Alois Wohlschlager, Plasma 5.21.2)

There is no longer a blank entry in the Digital Clock’s time zone chooser; it now shows “Yangon”, a city in Myanmar (Willyanto, Plasma 5.22)

KRunner no longer dumps an ugly unprintable character in its search field when you hit the Escape, Backspace, or Delete key while the history view is open (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.21.2)

The bottom buttons in various System Settings pages no longer sometimes get cut off when using Plasma Mobile or using a system language with long text (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, Plasma 5.21.3)

The new Plasma System Monitor app no longer sometimes crashes after spending a lot of time minimized (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.21.3)

The “kill a process” dialog in the new Plasma System Monitor no longer suffers from a variety of minor visual glitches (David Redondo, Plasma 5.21.3)

When using the new Plasma System Monitor app to get new visual chart styles, the resulting window is no longer hilariously small (David Redondo, Plasma 5.21.3)

System Monitor widgets now correctly update their titles to reflect user-initiated changes immediately after such changes are made (David Redondo, Plasma 5.21.3)

The focus effect for buttons on the Lock, Login, and Logout screens now appears correctly again (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.21.3)

Menus in GTK apps once again have the same height as menus in KDE and Qt apps (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.21.3)

GTK apps using the new Libhandy library now display their top headerbars with the correct height (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.21.3)

Fixed a few issues in the Breeze Dark Global Theme which were causing it to not properly apply the intended color scheme and splash screen (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.21.3)

When the screen is turned off, the system no longer wastes CPU and GPU power drawing un-rendered components (Bhushan Shah, Plasma 5.22)

Search results in Kickoff which have icons provided by .ico files are no longer blurry (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 5.80)

Placeholder Text in Plasma text fields and text boxes now presents the correct cursor when you move your mouse over it and is never the wrong color or even inappropriately selectable (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.80)

User Interface Improvements

When using a wheel mouse, Gwenview’s image thumbnail view now scrolls by the same amount (matching Dolphin) no matter how large the thumbnails are (Arjen Hiemstra, Gwenview 21.04)

It’s now more obvious how to stop a presentation in Okular (Albert Astals Cid, Okular 21.04)

In Kate, the F11 key is now used to enter and exit fullscreen as it does in many other apps, rather than toggling line numbers on and off (Waqar Ahmed, Kate 21.04)

Gwenview now shows a quality chooser slider when saving images in the JPEG XL file format, if supported on your system (Daniel Novomeský, Gwenview 21.04)

Everything in Plasma and QML-based apps now fully respects your animation duration settings, including not animating anything at all when animations are disabled (me: Nate Graham and David Redondo, Plasma 5.22 with Frameworks 5.80)

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: a little bit of everything

Fixing up Plasma 5.21 continues, and we also did a lot of UI polishing this week:

New Features

A Task manager can now be configured to not cause its hidden panel to become visible when one of its apps or tasks receives a “needs attention” status (Michael Moon, Plasma 5.22)

You can now apply global themes, color schemes, cursor themes, plasma themes, and wallpapers from the command-line, using some fancy new CLI tools with names like plasma-apply-colorscheme (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, Plasma 5.22)

KDE apps now support the HEIF and HEIC image formats (Daniel Novomeský, Frameworks 5.80)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Spectacle’s compression quality setting can now be set to 100% (Natsumi Higa, Spectacle 20.12.3)

Having kio-fuse installed no longer breaks KRunner’s ability to display man: and info: URLs in your web browser (Fabian Vogt, kio-fuse 5.0.1)

The KWin window manager no longer sometimes crashes in the Plasma Wayland session when you copy something in an XWayland app and immediately paste it in a native Wayland app (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.21.1)

Plasma no longer sometimes crashes when closing the Audio Volume applet (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.21.1)

The new Plasma System Monitor app no longer crashes on close when a custom page was open (David Redondo, Plasma 5.21.1)

System Settings no longer crashes when you open and close the new Firewall page twice (Tomaz Canabrava, Plasma 5.21.1)

KRunner can once again execute executable script files (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.21.1)

You can once again delete or disable unwanted fonts from the System Settings Font Management page (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.21.1)

The Network Speed widget finally finally finally works again! (David Redondo, Plasma 5.21.1)

The screen selection OSD once again works with keyboard navigation (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.21.1)

The Lock/Logout applet can once again be configured to not show the “Shut Down” action (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.21.1)

The headers on System Settings pages are now horizontally aligned with the header over the sidebar (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.21.1)

Scrolling all the way to the bottom of any app list in Discover no longer causes a spurious “Loading more stuff…” indicator to appear at the bottom (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.21.1)

Key repeat is really actually finally re-enabled by default again now. Sorry about this. 😦 (Jan Blackquill and David Edmundson, Plasma 5.21.2)

System Settings no longer crashes when clearing the history from the Activities page (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.21.2)

Screens in the System Settings Display Configuration page are once again draggable (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.21.2)

In the System Settings Icons page, the bottom row of buttons now moves buttons that can’t fit into the available space into an overflow menu, which is useful on Plasma Mobile in particular (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, Plasma 5.21.2):

Kickoff’s section headers which consist of more than just a single letter are no longer all caps (sorry for causing this regression) (Mikel Johnson, Plasma 5.21.2)

System Tray icons in very very thin panels should no longer be slightly blurry (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 5.21.2)

Virtual keyboards no longer cover Plasma panels when they’re visible (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.22)

Renaming an image file to have the same name that another also-renamed file used to have no longer causes the newly-renamed file to display the wrong thumbnail (Méven Car, Frameworks 5.80)

The Baloo file indexer no longer tries to index Ninja build files (Peter Eszalri, Frameworks 5.80)

Closing a “Get new [thing]” window no longer causes the view in the window that created it to scroll up to the top, if it was scrolled to a different position (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, Frameworks 5.80)

In the “Get new [thing]” dialogs, the icon in the top-left corner of each item indicating its status (installed, updatable, etc) no longer gets slightly cut off on the left side (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, Frameworks 5.80)

User Interface Improvements

NeoChat 1.1 is out with tons and tone of improvements! Sorry I haven’t been keeping up with them here. You can see it all over at Carl’s blog.

Konsole’s text reflow feature now works better for users of the zsh shell (Carlos Alves, Konsole 21.04)

Dolphin is now a bit faster to display thumbnail previews (Méven Car, Dolphin 21.04)

When using a color scheme without Header colors (e.g. the old Breeze color scheme), a line is no longer drawn between an app’s toolbar and the main content area (Various people, Plasma 5.21.1)

GTK headerbar apps now display minimize/maximize/etc buttons that match the rest of your apps even when you’re using an Aurorae window decoration theme (Alois Wohlschlager, Plasma 5.21.2)

Discover’s search for Flatpak apps now more heavily weights title matches and higher user ratings (Aleix Pol Gonzales, Plasma 5.22):

Discover now makes it clearer in the search and browse lists when an app comes from a non-default backend (Aleix Pol Gonzalez and me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22):

Discover’s compact/mobile view now makes it clear on the home page when there are updates available (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, Plasma 5.22):

When there is only one audio device available, you can hover your cursor over its generic name in the Plasma Audio Volume applet to see its full name, just in case you forgot which device was connected (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22):

Notifications that inform you of some kind of file operation with a known destination URL now always display an “Open containing folder” button (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.22)

Spinboxes in QML-based software will now send newly-changed values to the app immediately rather than requiring that you hit the return/enter key or de-focus the control (David Redondo, Frameworks 5.80)

When a sidebar is collapsed in a Kirigami app, that app’s toolbar content now moves with buttery smoothness (Marco Martin, Frameworks 5.80)

Web presence

Carl Schwan overhauled api.kde.org and online Kirigami documentation: https://carlschwan.eu/2021/02/26/documentation-improvements-in-kde/

Niccolò Venerandi published video number three in his video series about how to make a Plasma theme:

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: Plasma 5.21 is finally here!

This week we released Plasma 5.21 and have been hard at work fixing the bugs you fine folks have found with it. 🙂 Frankly I’m pretty exhausted after a long week so let’s just get right into it:

New Features

Kate now lets you perform basic git operations from within the app, such as viewing diffs, staging, committing, and stashing! (Waqar Ahmed, Kate 21.04)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Ark no longer asks for confirmation twice when you update a file in an archive (Jan Paul Batrina, Ark 21.04)

Keyboard repeat is no longer disabled (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.21.1, and most distros have already rolled it out early)

The Task Manager once again allows you to run non-distro-provided executable programs you’ve pinned to it (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.21.1)

The Plasma Wayland session no longer crashes on login when using an Nvidia Optimus laptop (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.21.1)

Trying to log out no longer sometimes just fails (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.21.1)

The fancy new Plasma System Monitor app introduced with Plasma 5.21 no longer crashes on launch when not using the optional Systemd startup feature (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.21.1)

Hard Disk Activity widgets now display the correct information again (David Redondo, Plasma 5.21.1)

Clicking on a screenshot in Discover now displays the correct one (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.21.1)

The Kickoff Application Launcher now works with a stylus (Mikel Johnson, Plasma 5.21.1)

Plasma no longer takes a long time to load when the splash screen is disabled when using the optional Systemd startup feature (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.21.1)

The KWin window manager regains an option to disable screen tearing protection and maximize the refresh rate irrespective of what the GPU says (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.21.1)

The back arrow in System Settings’ sidebar header no longer looks wrong when using a non-Breeze icon theme (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.21.1)

Syncing your user settings to the SDDM login screen now actually causes non-default font settings to take effect there, at least when using SDDM 0.19 or later (Filip Fila and David Redondo, Plasma 5.21.1)

Section headers in the new Kickoff menu’s “All Applications” category are no longer lowercase when the first item in that section begins with a lowercase letter (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.21.1)

Your wobbly windows once again wobble correctly (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.21.1)

Vertical and horizontal maximization now works in the Plasma Wayland session (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.22)

System Settings’ Window Rules page now enabled its “Apply” button as soon as you change anything, not when you move to something else (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.22)

KTextEditor-based apps no longer crash when you clear all of their bookmarks (Christoph Cullmann, Frameworks 5.80)

Plasma no longer crashes when you install a Windows app using WINE (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 5.80)

The buttons on either side of KRunner’s text field no longer display glitchy tooltips when no search results are visible (Noah Davis, Frameworks 5.80)

System Settings now arranges the columns in the correct order when using a right-to-left language and a large window size (Marco Martin, Frameworks 5.80)

Grid views in System Settings and elsewhere no longer display irritating misalignment for adjacent items where one has a subtitle and the other does not (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.80):

The Baloo file indexer no longer tries to index .swp swap files (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.80)

User Interface Improvements

Discover no longer truncates reviews shown on app pages (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.21.1)

The System Settings Boot Splash page now uses the nicer new-style Get New [Thing] dialog (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.22)

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: Plasma 5.21 approaches!

There are just a few days left before Plasma 5.21 is released, so get ready! And check out all this cool stuff too. Train doesn’t stop!

New Features

Kate’s project plugin now offers you the ability to switch git branches right there in the main UI (Waqar Ahmed, Kate 21.04):

Plasma’s Audio Volume applet now offers you the opportunity to change a device’s audio profile right there in the applet, without having to go elsewhere (Kai Use Broulik, Plasma 5.22):

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Kate no longer sometimes creates a new document when closing tabs with a middle-click (Jan Paul Batrina,c Kate 21.04)

Dolphin no longer crashes when viewing large folders in Tree view (Felix Ernst, Dolphin 21.04)

QML-based apps that override the theme no longer crash when that theme is Breeze (David Redondo, Plasma 5.21)

Neither Plasma nor the whole session will crash when dragging a file over a Task Manager entry in the Plasma Wayland session (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.21)

Fixed a bug that could cause widgets to sometimes be irremovable from a panel (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 5.21)

Non-Task-Manager panel applets once again respect Fitts’ law regarding their click targets (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 5.21)

The buttons in Plasma’s “new screen connected” OSD once again work (David Redondo, Plasma 5.21)

KRunner’s Locations runner now works again (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.21)

Plasma no longer sometimes crashes when deleting an activity (Willyanto, Plasma 5.21)

Disk monitoring widgets now show the correct information for current throughput and no longer display “Total Uploaded” when they should be displaying “Upload Rate” (David Redondo, Plasma 5.21)

Discover is now substantially faster to launch (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.21)

Fedora’s Anaconda installer now works in the Plasma Wayland session (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.21)

Discover no longer sometimes shows bogus extra sources in its “Sources” menu when viewing the details page for a Flatpak app (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.21)

KWin now detects hot-plugged VR headsets (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.21)

Reducing the screen brightness to the lowest level such that it turns off the backlight no longer causes the backlight to flicker back on for a moment before turning off again (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.21)

Scrollbars in Breeze-GTK-themed GTK apps no longer display stepper arrows when they shouldn’t (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.21)

Discover’s “Write a review” sheet is no longer almost unusably narrow (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.21.1)

It’s now possible to immediately apply newly-downloaded wallpapers whose names include a space (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, Frameworks 5.79)

When comparing two files in the move/copy overwrite dialog, size differences larger than 2 GiB are no longer erroneously described as being 16 EiB (!!!) (Méven Car, Frameworks 5.80)

Konsole no longer crashes when searching for new appearance settings using the Get New [thing] dialog (Alexander Lohnau, Frameworks 5.80)

Slightly improved the launch speed of all Kirigami-using apps (Arjen Hiemstra, Frameworks 5.80)

The few remaining settings pages that open in standalone windows now look good again (Ismael Asensio and me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.80):

User Interface Improvements

Gwenview now allows you to change the quality/compression level for other lossy image formats, such as WEBP, AVIF, HEIF, and HEIC (me: Nate Graham, Gwenview 21.04)

Kate now enables by default the feature to cut or copy the current line when nothing is selected and you use the cut or copy action (Alexander Lohnau, Kate 21.04)

Resizing Dolphin’s window now re-arranges the icons using a single smooth animation, not a weird two-part animation (Felix Ernst, Dolphin 21.04)

Hitting the escape key while in Okular’s full-screen view now returns to the windowed view (Michael Augaitis, Okular 21.04)

The new Wayland-specific keyboard layout applet now has text that scales with the thickness of the panel it’s located on (Andrey Butirsky, Plasma 5.21)

System Settings’ Window Decorations page now uses the fancy shiny new QML-based Get New [thing] window instead of the old funky QWidgets one (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.22)

System Settings’ Virtual Desktops page now supports the “Highlight changed settings” feature (Cyril Rossi, Plasma 5.22)

You can now configure the Disks & Devices applet to play a sound when a device can be safely removed (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22)

Web Presence (ooh, let’s try out a new section)

Carl Schwan overhauled Kate’s website to use our fancy modern new theme:

Niccolò Venerandi published part two in his video series about how to create a plasma theme:

Leszek Lesner published a video about kio-fuse, which makes it easier to interact with remote files:

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.

The FOSS honor culture

Tux with rocket launcher, taken from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tux_Born_to_Frag.jpg

In the real world, anthropologists often make a distinction between Honor cultures and Law cultures:

  • Honor cultures emphasize the idea of “honor”–whose modern analogue might be “reputation”–to encourage pro-social behavior and fulfillment of contracts. You gain or lose honor/reputation based on the above, but you can also lose it when challenged by others, which necessitates often brutal and violent action to regain it. Historically, Honor cultures have often arisen in areas with little law enforcement or central authority; order is thus personally enforced.
  • Law cultures by contrast ensure order by having a broad and well-defined set of rules with a central authority that punishes rulebreaking. Everybody knows the rules, and knows that they will be punished for breaking them, often severely. In Law cultures, order is centrally enforced; people are free to trust one another and act pro-socially as much as possible because their safety is backstopped by the promise and threat of centralized consequences when rules are broken.

Honor cultures today are often considered primitive and backwards, while Law cultures are considered civilized and advanced. There’s a pretty logical reason for this: real-world Honor cultures have tended to evolve brutal and violent methods of regaining lost honor, including dueling, kidnapping, forced marriage, “honor killings”, and family blood feuds. The ordinariness of brutality in Honor cultures tends to push away the gentle and intellectual when migration opportunities exist, so they are weak and poor in a world where power and wealth come from knowledge. Thus Law cultures are ascendant today, and Honor cultures are on the wane… except in one notable area: the internet.

On the internet, there is no real central authority to punish rule-breakers, and there isn’t even a codified set of rules! Each website is basically someone’s private property, and personal behavior on that virtual property requires adherence to the owner’s rules. It’s up to the owners to police their domains, ensure standards of conduct, personally punish violators, maintain their own community reputation, and so on. Is this sounding familiar yet? The internet has evolved a pseudo Honor culture to maintain a semblance of order!

And FOSS communities, being largely digital in nature, follow suit. Though we do occasionally meet up in person, within the physical boundaries of Law cultures (or at least we will again once the global pandemic is over), most FOSS interactions happen online, where the tenets of Honor culture are more applicable.

Now, there’s one major difference between internet Honor culture and physical Honor culture: you can’t kidnap or murder someone over the internet, so regaining your lost honor or repairing an impugned reputation has to be non-violent! It doesn’t have to be pleasant–a jerk may deploy an invective-filled rant, a troll campaign, or a denial-of-service attack–but it can’t physically harm or kill anyone. This removes the most objectionable aspect of traditional, real-world Honor cultures.

It’s worth noting that in the FOSS world, our competitors are closed-source software corporations, which generally operate physically and according to the rules of Law culture: “perform this task or get punished”; “obey the hierarchy to ensure your career path”; “here is your financial bonus for good performance”; and so on. And like real-world Honor vs Law cultures, the FOSS world tends unfortunately to be weaker and poorer than the closed-source one. Earning a living doing FOSS development is a common struggle. And our market share is much lower even though our output is generally better, and always more trustworthy over the long term. Overall, our internet Honor culture causes us to fit less well into the rest of the Law-culture world of rules, laws, financial instruments and hierarchies: corporations effortlessly partner, merge, hire, fire, invest, divest, buy, and sell using legal instruments, while in the FOSS world, these activities generally take place in the realm of the personal, and therefore happen much more slowly, if at all.

However the most successful FOSS projects are supported by Law-culture institutions to help bridge the gap: Firefox has the Mozilla corporation; KDE has the KDE e.V., Blender has the Blender Foundation, and so on. In the same way that a corporation existing in a democracy can be internally a dictatorship, a FOSS community in a Law culture can be internally an Honor culture. Thus internet-based FOSS Honor cultures may avoid being destroyed and retain our cultural distinctiveness and effectiveness in the face of real-world Law cultures.

I wonder if over time we will be pushed into becoming more of a Law culture to maintain and expand our competitiveness with the closed-source world, or whether our Law-culture institutions will prove a sufficient interface and allow us to remain internally an Honor culture. Food for thought, at least.

If you were hoping for a tidy conclusion, I’m afraid I have to disappoint you: this blog post is mostly a random idle musing. 🙂

(Header image taken from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tux_Born_to_Frag.jpg)

This week in KDE: KWin gains direct scan-out, and Gwenview gets a lot of love

Plasma 5.21 is almost here, but we’ve already fixed almost all the issues found during the beta and are hard at work on the next big thing! This includes some very juicy morsels…

New Features

You can now open a folder in Kate’s “Project” view by passing it as a command-line parameter (e.g. kate ~/path/to/some/folder) (Alexander Lohnau, Kate 21.04)

In Gwenview, it’s now possible to disable the “bird’s eye view” in the bottom-right corner when zoomed in on an image (Madhav Kanbur, Gwenview 21.04)

in the Plasma Wayland session, KWin now does direct scan-out for fullscreen views (e.g. games), which should improve performance and reduce latency (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.22)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Gwenview no longer exhibits a variety of visual artifacts when panning and zooming in on an image when using a High DPI scale factor (Vlad Zahorodnii, Gwenview 20.12.2)

Gwenview’s JPEG quality chooser now works again (Madhav Kanbur, Gwenview 20.12.3)

Gwenview now uses a newer OpenGL drawing view, which makes hardware-accelerated transitions work on Wayland and fixes various other bugs and glitches (Madhav Kanbur, Gwenview 20.12.3)

The new Breeze theme changes no longer make the 3rd-party Cantata app (and potentially others) crash on launch, and also no longer produce a light-colored line directly below the intended dark one that separates a window’s “Tools Area” (titlebar, menubar, toolbar) from the rest of the window (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.21)

KRunner’s matching has been restored to its former glory: it no longer prioritizes multi-word sub-string matches over single-word exact matches, and just has more accurate matching in general (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.21)

Fixed screen rendering for multi-GPU output in the Plasma Wayland session (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.21)

Firefox now updates its view correctly in the Plasma Wayland session (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.21)

People using weak Intel GPUs no longer suffer diminished performance and smoothness both in general, and specifically with Firefox scrolling (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.21)

Menu items in GTK-based apps are no longer too tall (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.21)

Files which contain non-ASCII characters can now always be opened (Tusooa Zhu, Frameworks 5.79)

Dolphin no longer crashes when you skip moving or copying multiple files in quick succession during a large move or copy operation (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.79)

KDE apps which were closed while maximized now always re-open maximized, and if they were later un-maximized and closed, they will re-open un-maximized (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.79)

User Interface Improvements

The “Start a Slideshow” menu item in Dolphin’s context menu now only appears if the selection includes more than one image or a folder with more than one image in it (Méven Car, Gwenview 21.04)

You can now mute and unmute the microphone by clicking on its System Tray indicator with a left click, in addition to a middle-click (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.21)

You can now double- or triple-click in a notification to select text as you can in other text views, which is useful for quickly selecting and copying the text of a one-time code sent to you from a website that’s displayed as a notification through the magic of KDE Connect forwarding text messages to your computer (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.22)

Notifications for file operations now display the destination as a clickable link, so you can jump right there if you want to (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.22):

The System Tray’s animations are now more spatially consistent, swooshing the view in the opposite direction from the icon you clicked on. On a vertical panel, a cross-fade is used instead because a vertical swoosh would look really weird. (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.22)

Telegram’s system tray icon now uses correct colors and respects your color scheme (Rocket Aaron, Frameworks 5.79):

The Present Windows effect can now activate when only one window is open (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22)

The Get New [thing] windows now have a streamlined sorting and filtering UI (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, Frameworks 5.79):

Ratings for items in the Get New [thing] windows now display a number to correspond to the stars (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, Frameworks 5.79):

Oh And One More Thing

KDE Consistency goal leader Niccolò Venerandi has produced a beautiful video showing people the basics of making Plasma themes! Check it out:

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: Getting ready for Plasma 5.21

We spent the week largely working on polishing up Plasma 5.21 and fixing all the bugs you folks found in the beta! Or internal QA seems to be improving because there don’t seem to be as many this time around, and we’ve already got most of them fixed. Hallelujah! So hopefully 5.21 should be a fairly smooth release. Famous last words, eh?

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Fixed a case where Elisa could crash when moving to the next song (Matthieu Gallien, Elisa 20.12.2)

Spectacle no longer secretly stays running in the background if you cancel taking a rectangular region screenshot using the global shortcut (Meta+Shift+PrintScreen by default) (Antonio Prcela, Spectacle 20.12.2)

Pressing the Escape key in Konsole while the search field is visible now only closes it if it’s currently focused (Anton Maminov, Konsole 21.04)

The new Breeze Light color scheme is now applied to new user accounts as expected (David Redondo, Plasma 5.21)

The new System Settings Login page now lets you change the wallpaper as expected and remembers the session you selected when using auto-login (David Redondo, Plasma 5.21)

Wallpapers added to the list of available wallpapers can once again be removed (Cyril Rossi, Plasma 5.21)

Searching on Discover’s “Installed” page once again works (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.21)

Your old system monitor applets on panels now get correctly migrated to the new ones rather than disappearing (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.21)

Top- and right-positioned panels can now be resized by dragging in the direction you want to resize towards (David Redondo, Plasma 5.21)

Changing your Global Theme to one with a different color scheme now immediately updates the colors of GTK apps too, not just Qt or KDE apps (David Redondo, Plasma 5.21)

System Settings’ home page now lets you use the keyboard to open any of the pages in the “Frequently used” list (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.21)

Authentication dialogs now work properly when using the optional Systemd Startup feature (Rex Dieter, Plasma 5.21)

The Plasma Wayland session now opens the correct number of kwin_wayland processes (one, lol) when using the optional Systemd startup feature (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.21)

GTK4 apps no longer still display window shadows when maximized (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.21)

There is no longer an odd one-pixel horizontal line at the top of the screen while viewing full-screen content in SMPlayer and LibreOffice and probably various other apps too, when using the new Breeze widget theme (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.21)

Task Manager window thumbnails for Firefox are no longer sometimes blank in the Plasma Wayland session (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.21)

Context menus for panel applets no longer bizarrely appear as a tiny standalone window in the Plasma Wayland session (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.21)

Middle-clicking the desktop to add a sticky mote with the clipboard contents now works again (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.21)

Really long monitor names can no longer blow up the layout of System Settings’ Display Configuration page (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.21)

Plasma no longer freezes if you edit the .desktop file of a running program (David Redondo, Frameworks 5.79)

The Baloo file indexing service now properly indexes files in hidden folders if you’ve told it to do so (Stefan Brüns, Frameworks 5.79)

Okular’s search bar once again closes when you hit the Escape key (Albert Astals Cid, Frameworks 5.79)

The icon for Kickoff in Plasma’s “Alternatives” panel now reflects its new appearance (Frameworks 5.79)

User Interface Improvements

Gwenview’s inline video player now displays the current and remaining time next to the timeline (Madhav Kanbur, Gwenview 21.04):

When Kate’s embedded terminal panel is open, it now switches directories properly when a new document is opened (Jan Paul Batrina, Kate 21.04)

Restored the “scroll to switch displayed time zone” feature of the Digital Clock (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.21):

The new Kickoff no longer switches between the “Applications” and “Places” tabs on hover by default; you need to click (Noah Davis, Plasma 5.21)

The new Kickoff now has a “Configure” button visible in the main UI (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.21):

The Info Center app can now tell you whether you’re using X11 or Wayland (Méven Car, Plasma 5.22)

Desktop widget handles are now much more legible, especially when using a dark color scheme and a dark or visually busy wallpaper (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.22):

Plasma’s Audio Volume applet now remembers the last tab you were looking at even after Plasma or the computer are restarted (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.22)

Comboboxes in QML-based apps now change the displayed item at an appropriate speed when scrolling over them using a touchpad (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.79)

System Settings pages with grid views now adhere to the standard appearance style for hovered grid items (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.79)

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.

On Stewardship

What’s going on with GameStop right now got me thinking about the relevance to what we do in KDE.

For those not closely following it, here’s what’s happening: a small army of individual investors has purchased as many shares of the GameStop company as possible, calling the bluff of several large hedge funds that bet against GameStop by selling borrowed shares, mistakenly borrowing more shares than actually exist. Oops. A lot of these individual investors used a popular trading app named Robinhood, which it turns out is controlled by one of the companies betting against GameStop. So yesterday, Robinhood prohibited buying more GameStop shares, only selling. This drove the price lower and allowed some of the hedge funds to get out at a lower price than they otherwise would have had to accept, and reduced the value of Robinhood’s own users’ GameStop shares.

The people using Robinhood–whose name seems pretty ironic in retrospect–believed they could trust its owners to be good stewards of their money and investment desires, but this turned out to be false: when the owners were caught between serving their users and serving themselves, they chose the latter.

It got me thinking about platform stewardship. When things are going well, it’s easy to be a good steward. The challenge arrives when your own interests, money, or feelings are imperiled by doing the right thing for the people counting on your wise maintainership of the platform. If you let your own desires get in the way, people will start to distrust you and leave your platform.

In KDE, we also have a platform that people depend on, and trust us to be good stewards of. By and large we don’t have the same potential financial conflicts of interest, but others are possible when it comes to our feelings and other personal interests: we might want see ourselves as kings of a little digital kingdom, or want the software to reflect our own preferences rather than those of our users, or whatever.

In the interest of remaining wise stewards of our platform, we must always resist these desires. Not only are they selfish, but they are ultimately short-sighted and would lead to us losing users and credibility. By and large I think KDE community members already do a great job of this! And that’s a good thing, because the bigger we grow, the more important we will become, and the more frequent these potential conflicts of interest will become. In the face of these challenges, we must retain our culture of stewardship, and I feel fairly confident that we will!

Full disclosure: I own a symbolic one share of GameStop. It was not purchased using Robinhood. 🙂