This week in KDE: it’s gonna be amaaaaaaaaaaazing

Features and polish are coming in hot and heavy for Plasma and KDE apps! But have you heard about KDE’s wallpaper contest for Plasma 5.18? We held one of these for Plasma 5.16 and it resulted in the fantastic “Ice Cold” wallpaper, by Santiago Cézar. Now’s your chance to enter a wallpaper for Plasma 5.18, which is an LTS release, so it will be seen by millions of people for years! There are fabulous prizes by sponsor Tuxedo Computers. Check out the rules here: https://community.kde.org/KDE_Visual_Design_Group/Plasma_5.18_Wallpaper_Competition

New Features

Dolphin now lets you include tags in the search criteria (Ismael Asensio, Dolphin 20.04.0):
When searching in System Settings, the results list now shows the actual matches pages, not just the top-level categories (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.18.0):
The Network Monitor widget can now be configured to show transfer speeds in Bytes (George Vogiatzis, Plasma 5.18.0):
It’s now possible to enable and disable Do Not Disturb mode with a keyboard shortcut (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.18.0):

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Dolphin’s SVN commit dialog now works again (Nikolai Krasheninnikov, Dolphin 19.12.1)
Using a mouse wheel to scroll in Dolphin and the file dialogs no longer scrolls way too fast when using a view with large icons (me: Nate Graham and Arjen Hiemstra, Dolphin 19.12.1 and Frameworks 5.66)
Fixed a regression in the size of the weather widget’s temperature text when using a very short panel that I caused a few weeks ago while trying to make the text size identically match that of the clock widget. Now the issue is fixed and the text sizes really are always identical (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.17.5)
When you clear the clipboard contents, its last item is now really actually cleared (Piotr Dabrowski, Plasma 5.18.0)
When changing the font size, UI elements that dynamically enlarge or shrink themselves in response to font metrics now do so immediately in QML-based apps (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 5.66)
Manually-mounted NFS shares no longer show up twice in the Places Panel in Dolphin, file dialogs, and other apps (Méven Car, Frameworks 5.66)
Dates throughout KDE software no longer use ambiguous relative terms like “Last Monday” (was it the Monday of this week, or the previous one?); instead they revert to using absolute dates three days in the past or future (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.66)
In OpenSUSE, using Discover to install an app while there are are available updates no longer silently installs the updates too (Jonathan Kang, latest OpenSUSE PackageKit packaging)

User Interface Improvements

It’s now obvious which Plasma themes follow your system color scheme (Filip Fila and me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18):
The timeout indicator on notification popups is now circular and surrounds the close button (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.18.0):
There’s now a draggable proxy icon in the “file was downloaded” notification that you can drag to places and do cool stuff with it (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.18.0):
Plasma now shows you a notification warning you when a connected Bluetooth device is about to run out of battery power (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.18.0):
Task Manager tooltips now have a highlight effect when you hover over them (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0):
Various places throughout Plasma where things can be dragged now display open and closed grabby cursors as appropriate (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0):
The Plasma Networks widget no longer has two nearly-identical menu items in its context menu; everything’s been consolidated into just one (Jan Grulich, Plasma 5.18.0):
Notifications that you need to log into the Captive Portal page for a public network no longer become duplicated under certain circumstances, and disappear when you log into the network (Jan Grulich, Plasma 5.18.0)
The little downward-pointing arrows in Dolphin’s back and forward buttons are now smaller and no longer cause the buttons to widen, improving the appearance (Noah Davis, Plasma 5.18.0):

How You Can Help

If you’ve got artistic talent, rev up your digital paintbrushes and try your hand at getting your work seen by millions of Plasma LTS users for years to come in our wallpaper competition: https://community.kde.org/KDE_Visual_Design_Group/Plasma_5.18_Wallpaper_Competition!

More generally, have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved and find out more ways to help 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: building up to something big

We’ve got some really big things planned and in progress for Plasma 5.18 and Frameworks, and work proceeds smoothly. None of it is quite done yet, but we did land a number of nice bugfixes and user interface polish for issues that have been irritating people for years…and mere days! Have a look:

New Features

It’s now possible to configure Do Not Disturb mode to turn on and off with a global keyboard shortcut (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.18.0):
Grouping can now be turned off by default for the Icons-Only Task Manager if you want (Björn Feber, Plasma 5.18.0):

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Elisa is now able to work with music collections on external disks (Matthieu Gallien, Elisa 19.12.1)
Text file previews no longer have invisible text when using a dark theme (Ilia Kats, Dolphin 20.04)
It’s now possible to configure scanners with more than one scan source (Anton Arnold, Skanlite 20.04.0)
Fixed a common System Settings crash triggered by navigating to the Window Decorations page after the Colors page (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.17.5)
The Plasma Pager widget once again shows windows on other monitors (David Faure, Plasma 5.17.5)
Icons in the Activities list now look good when using a fractional scale factor (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.17.5):
The install buttons on Discover’s app lists no longer overflow their layout after searching for an app when the window is very wide (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.18.0)
Discover now shows nested comments for addons, and correctly reports the total number of comments (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, Plasma 5.18.0)
Dolphin no longer crashes when the information panel tries and fails to fetch information from a broken symlink (Ismail Asensio, Frameworks 5.65.1)
Discover now installs icon themes successfully (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, Frameworks 5.66)

User Interface Improvements

Dolphin and Kate now both use the same shortcuts for their built-in terminal views: F4 to open and close, and Ctrl+Shift+F4 to focus/de-focus (me: Nate Graham, Kate 20.04.0)
Open/Save dialogs now open with a sensible default size (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.17.4):
The Kickoff Application Launcher now shows app names first, rather than their subtitles (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0):
A Task Manager tooltip’s number badge (if present) now aligns perfectly with the close button (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.18.0):
The notifications system now shows you an appropriate message when it’s been disabled because something else is providing notifications or there is no notification widget/system tray item (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.18.0):
The System Settings Night Color page now has a clearer user interface (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0):
The System Settings Mouse page now has a better default size when opened standalone in its own window (me: Nate graham, Plasma 5.18.0)
Task Manager icons now use more different background colors to show their states (Niccolo Venderadi and Noah Davis, Frameworks 5.66):
The “Show Desktop” widget in the default panel now always uses a monochrome icon, and looks sharp at any size (Kai Uwe Broulik, and Noah Davis Frameworks 5.66):

How You Can Help

Do you like to categorize things? So do I! Then why not try your hand at triaging bugs? KDE’s faithful users file about 25 of them every day, and they all need to be looked at, categorized, moved to the correct products, marked appropriately, closed if the issue has already been fixed–in short, triaged. It’s fun and easy and can be done in 5-minute spurts during boring periods of the day. Triaging bugs is a super helpful way to relieve some of the developers’ burdens if you’re not a developer yourself–developers vastly prefer writing code and fixing bugs to triaging them! For more information, check out https://community.kde.org/Guidelines_and_HOWTOs/Bug_triaging!

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

Legislating is patch review

Patch review is a process by which newcomers and experts debate proposed changes to a codebase–a textual description of how a particular human-created system is to function. In KDE, we use Phabricator for this, but we’re switching to GitLab soon. Both serve the same purpose: to provide a forum where proposed changes can be discussed, revised, and decided upon.

It occurred to me recently that this sounds a bit like the process of lawmaking. Politicians propose bills (patches) that amend their government’s code of laws (codebase) which are passed through committees and hearings (the review process) and eventually get voted on (reviewed) and either pass (get merged) or require revision (go around for updates), or fail (get abandoned).

Pictured: typical 18th-century patch review process

I’m reasonably confident that there’s little overlap between politicians and software enthusiasts. In my home country of the USA for example, most of our federal government politicians are former lawyers, businesspeople, or educators. “Software engineer” is listed as a “more unusual” former profession.

This strikes me as a shame. While lawyers, businesspeople, and educators are quite unfamiliar with the process of transforming a proposal for improvement on a systemic scale into a permanent alteration of the rules that affects everyone, software people do it every day. Likewise, software people like us tend to have little experience in the political process. We act like we invented patch review, but our governments have been doing it for hundreds of years! The overlap got me thinking: perhaps there is something that each group can learn from one another.

Have a constitution

Governments write constitutions to make their foundational principles clear and obvious. That way, everybody knows which ideas are central to the society’s identity, and which ones are off-limits.

Lesson for software engineers: Make your software’s guiding principles, explicit, not implicit. People often figure this out organically, but it’s much easier if your software has a constitution-like document and clearly indicates which features are non-negotiable when it comes to proposing their implementation or removal.

Don’t neglect trust

If you have a bad relationship with the people reviewing your patch, they will suspect your motives, nitpick your changes, and generally react with low enthusiasm. Even if your patch is a good one, the reviewers’ opinion of it will be clouded by their judgment of you. Therefore, don’t neglect your social relationships and act like a jerk, or else the whole process basically doesn’t work.

Lesson for politicians: don’t ignore or damage your social relationships with your colleagues or else your entire job is a big waste of time. Adopt a mindset that legislation is a collaboration rather than a majority-rules deathmatch or an opportunity to make speeches on a stage. Also, arrive with pure motives. If you’re there to try to tilt the playing field towards your favored groups, the people who represent the opposite side will notice and oppose you at every turn, and you’re likely to have a frustrating and unproductive career full of outrage-filled press conferences but not much real accomplishment.

Review in stages

In governments, often bills undergo review by multiple committed before they’re presented to the full body for debate and voting. This is good, because it gives a chance for obvious mistakes to be corrected in advance of the final vote.

Lesson for software engineers: use a multi-step patch review process, with relevant experts in control at each step of the way. For example, the big-picture software architects should review a patch for to make sure it conceptually makes sense in the first place; then backend programmers should dive into its technical implementation; the UI designers should go over its user interface, and so on.

Keep patches small

Large patches are hard to review and fill the reviewers with a sense of dread. They touch many things and therefore have more opportunities to change something in a way that a stakeholder will object to. They often get bogged down in process and conceptual arguments. For these reasons, it’s best to keep patches small and focused, and split a large change into a series of individually-manageable patches that each depend on one another, known as a dependency chain.

Lesson for politicians: avoid 1,000 page mega-bills. If a bill needs to be enormous in order to work, there’s probably a deeper conceptual issue with it that everyone senses.

Have an institutional memory

Records of how bills are moved along in the lawmaking process are kept meticulously. This preserves institutional memory, so that newcomers don’t make the same mistakes that their older colleagues and forefathers already learned from.

Lesson for software engineers: Keep records of why decisions were made–and even more importantly, why they were reverted. If you move from one infrastructure system to another, migrate all the data so history isn’t lost. This prevents the phenomenon of newcomers who propose the same changes and repeat the commit/regress/revert cycle.

Make reversion easy

When a patch causes regressions, it can be reverted. Oftentimes it’s better to fix it, but if the fixes are too invasive or the regressions outnumber the benefits, it may be a better idea to revert the change and try again. Making reversion easy promotes a culture of innovation and experimentation. People won’t be as worried about merging things, because if they cause problems, it’s easy to undo the changes. Change becomes playful and fun, rather than consequential and scary.

Lesson for politicians: Don’t make it too hard to repeal bad laws. When a newly-passed law causes problems in a society, it’s tempting to try to amend it to fix the problems, and sometimes this works. But sometimes it just needs to be re-done from scratch, like a bad patch in software. Being willing to repeal laws that aren’t working defuses tension. That said…

Don’t rush

Bills and patches that get through their processes quickly are often problematic, riddled with unseen regressions and unanticipated consequences. This is much less common in governments, because the lawmaking process usually has deliberate safeguards put in place to ensure that a bill is not transformed into a law too quickly before there’s been adequate time for debate.

Lesson for software engineers: Take your time so you don’t push out buggy, regression-filled software. However…

Don’t make your users live on the master branch

Rushing isn’t such a huge deal as long as you have a QA process and discrete releases. These tools provide time for regressions to be fixed and rough edges to be smoothed out. When patches can be evaluated in a safe sandbox of sorts and subsequently tweaked before their effects are released to users, it’s not so bad to move quickly. But you can’t expose your users to the churn stirred up by a fast process; it needs to be contained internally.

Lesson for politicians: You don’t need so much process surrounding lawmaking if you don’t roll out all approved changes immediately. Before new bills take effect, let them simmer for a while in a “release branch” where they can undergo QA so that regressions can be found before they’re inflicted on unsuspected citizens (users)!

As software people, there are lessons we can take from our governments’ successes (and more often these days it seems, their failures), because this aspect of our professions overlaps quite a bit. It also exposes an uncomfortable truth: changing the rules and behaviors of a system that effects everyone is inherently political. That’s why we invented patch review processes: to make sure that important voices are heard, that the system doesn’t become inhumane for people who depend on it, and that its overall trajectory is positive.

Personally I’m a lot more sanguine about the prospect of this in software than government right now, and I think that’s something that needs to change. The efficacy and positive societal impacts of our governments’ lawmaking seems to be at a bit of an ebb at the moment. But there may come a point in time when our experience in patch review becomes useful on a larger stage, and benefits not only users of KDE software, but also the people of the world. We shouldn’t be afraid of politics; our everyday experiences in KDE are in fact the prefect preparation! Far from being distant and scary, it’s something we’re engaging in–and succeeding at–every time we contribute to KDE. I think it’s time for us to become active in applying those lessons to the societies that we live in.

This week in KDE: Easy Emoji input and more

Something cool this way comes… easy Emoji input! Speaking personally, lack of easy Emoji input on Plasma has been irritation for years. But no longer! Plasma now has a built-in Emoji chooser similar to the ones on other competing operating systems. Ours is invoked with the Meta+period keyboard shortcut.

Here it is:

Let’s give a big hand to to Aleix Pol Gonzalez for implementing this! It’ll be available in Plasma 5.18, and in the meantime we’re going to continue to improve its polish, integration, and discoverability.

More New Features

Dolphin now has an action and keyboard shortcut (Ctrl+Shift+F4) to focus and de-focus the terminal panel for super hyper mega productivity (Roman Inflianskas and me: Nate Graham, Dolphin 20.04.0):
Gwenview can now import photos both to or from remote locations (Bart De Vries, Gwenview 20.04.0)
It’s now possible to browse 7Zip archives in Dolphin, Krusader, the file dialogs, and other apps that have a URL navigator (Natsumi Higa, Applications from version 20.04.0)
It’s now possible to choose what happens when you click in the scroll track in a KDE app: scroll up or down one page, or zoom to the clicked location (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0):
It’s now possible to make local HTML files open in an app other than your default browser without impacting your ability to open links in that browser. This can be very useful for web development! (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.65)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Okular no longer creates unwanted pop-up notes and dialogs when using a stylus and hovering it close to the screen surface (Tobias Deiminger, Okular 1.9.0)
Fixed a common crash that could prevent Plasma from starting at all after adding the Printer widget and having multiple pending jobs in the print queue or multiple completed jobs visible under certain circumstances (Albert Astals Cid, Print Manager 19.12.1)
Menu item text for Kate’s external plugins are now translated (Dominik Haumann, Kate 19.12.1)
Editing partitions in KDE Partition Manager no longer resets your touchpad settings (!!!) (Andrius Štikonas, Partition Manager 4.0.2)
Discover’s search field no longer expands beyond the toolbar it’s located in when you paste multi-line text inside it; instead, the newlines are stripped (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.17.4)
Discover’s tasks view no longer has a selected item, so the progress bar never becomes invisible (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.17.4):
Discover’s screenshot pop-up now has better margins on all sides (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.17.4)
When choosing a weather station in the weather widget, you no longer need to double-click on an item or click and then hit the return key to make the window’s “Select” button activate (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.17.4)
Disabling MIME-based actions in Klipper now actually disables MIME-based actions in Klipper (Tranter Madi, Plasma 5.17.5)
When using the Icons view in System Settings, navigating between multiple pages no longer occasionally results in the page title not changing properly (Filip Fila, Plasma 5.16.5)
The “Search” widget has regained its icon in the Widget Explorer (Filip Fila, Plasma 5.17.5)
Fixed keyboard navigation in open/save dialogs such that using the return key to enter a folder when the file viewer is focused no longer unexpectedly saves the file in there (Méven Car, Frameworks 5.65)
When you drag a URL from a web browser to Dolphin or the desktop, the resulting icon now has the correct icon (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 5.65)

User Interface Improvements

When importing photos with Gwenview, information and errors are now displayed in a more-user-friendly format using inline messages (Bart De Vries, Gwenview 20.04.0)
Improved the user interface for wired network configuration (Jan Grulich, Plasma 5.18.0)
The Plasma Network Manager applet’s Details tab now shows more information about the selected network (Francesco Bonanno, Plasma 5.18.0):
Drop shadows for Application screenshots in Discover now look better, particularly when using a dark theme (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0):

How You Can Help

Ar you good at web design? KDE has approximately five hundred million (okay, slight exaggeration) websites in need of visual refreshing and technical improvement! Our web team is desperately overworked and in need of help–yours, perhaps. 🙂 Each individual person who joins in will be making a humongous difference! If this sounds like your cup of tea, check out https://community.kde.org/KDE.org

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

This week in KDE: GTK CSD support and more!

I’ve got big news today. Something major landed: full support for the GTK_FRAME_EXTENTS_ protocol, which hugely improves the user experience for running GTK apps that use client-side decoration headerbars! This includes GNOME apps and an increasing number of 3rd-party GTK apps too. In particular, these apps now display window shadows and have proper resize areas without needing to use a thick border. Here’s how Gedit now looks:

It’s almost native-looking! And it fits right in with the rest of your apps.

I’d like to extend a big thanks for Vlad Zahorodnii who has been working hard on this for months! The feature lands in the upcoming Plasma 5.18 LTS.

But wait, there’s more…

More New Features

All Plasma widgets can now show or hide the background frame when placed on the desktop (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.18.0):
Plasma Network Manager now supports WPA3 encryption (Jan Grulich, Plasma 5.18.0)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

When using Dolphin’s built-in search feature, text you enter no longer automatically becomes double-quoted (Ismael Asensio, Dolphin 19.12.0)
Fixed a bug that could cause the “Open Containing Folder” feature to fail to launch Dolphin after the first time it was used (Elvis Angelaccio, Dolphin 19.12.0)
Konsole now automatically strips out “file://” when pasting local URLs (Ahmad Samir, Konsole 20.04.0)
An invisible square that eats clicks no longer appears in the top-left corner of the screen after you suspend compositing and restart KWin while an app that displays a System Tray icon is running (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.17.4)
Album art on the lock screen no longer becomes outrageously gigantic when the media title is really really long (Apurv Jyotirmay, Plasma 5.17.4)
The weather widget’s weather station configuration window now has a better default size and margins, and the “no weather stations found” text no longer overflows the view (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.17.4):
When using the Task Manager to unminimize a group of minimized windows, the windows are restored stacked in the order they were minimized rather than semi-randomly (Eike Hein, Plasma 5.18.0)
The cursor no longer unexpectedly changes its appearance when hovering over a GTK app by default (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.18.0)
Network Notifications no longer displays almost-invisible icons when using a dark plasma theme but a light apps color scheme (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.18.0)
This is more of a developer quality-of-life improvement, but compiling the Keyboard KCM in plasma-desktop is now much faster and no longer brings your system to its knees with a recursive forkbomb (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.18.0)
Tab views in QML-based user interfaces now match the background color of the frame when using many non-default color schemes (Filip Fila, Frameworks 5.65)
Fixed the margins on a variety of standalone dialog and assistant windows (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.65)

User Interface Improvements

The sidebar toolbar in Discover is now a real toolbar that doesn’t scroll away. My change to do this had to be reverted because it caused problems in some apps, but Marco Martin graciously picked it up and re-implemented it in a better way. Thanks Marco! (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.18.0)
Discover’s Task progress sheet now looks like it’s supposed to (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.18.0):
Visible notifications now move out of the way rather than disappearing when the System Tray popup is open in the same area (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.18.0):
The user avatar shown in the Kickoff Application Launcher is now framed in a circle, just like on the lock and login screens (Scott Harvey and me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0):

How You Can Help

Do you love KDE’s apps? Would you like to help develop for them? I knew you would. 🙂 It’s really fun, and you can have a major impact. Many of KDE’s apps are quite beginner-friendly; among them are Dolphin, Elisa, and Spectacle. See the full list here! These apps’ maintainers as well as KDE’s experienced developers are happy to help and mentor newcomers who want to contribute. For more information on how to get help and who to ask, see https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved#Start_Here.21

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

This week in KDE: Polishing it up

We’re nearing the release of the 19.12 versions of many KDE apps, and in the first third of the Plasma 5.18 cycle. With this week, all the major regressions from 5.17 that I’ve been tracking have gotten fixed! If you’re still suffering from other 5.17 regressions not listed here and not yet fixed, please let me know. We want to make sure that the 5.18 LTS release is as smooth and stable as possible.

New Features

When KFind or another external search app is installed, Dolphin now shows a quick link to open it (which can also be added to the toolbar) (Piotr Henryk Dabrowski, Dolphin 20.04.0):
The Properties dialog now shows a button that will take you to the target of a symlink (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.65):

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Refreshing the music collection in Elisa no longer creates momentary duplicate entries (Matthieu Gallien, Elisa 19.12.0)
When a single song is in Elisa’s playlist and repeat is active, that song now actually repeats when it is finished playing (Alexander Stippich, Elisa 19.12.0)
Discover’s Updates page no longer has a broken layout, sorry about that (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.17.4)
Maximized or vertically-tiled windows no longer exhibit odd behaviors with respect to shadows and window sizes when de-maximized or un-tiled (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.17.4)
Picture Of The Day wallpaper slideshows are once again usable from the lock screen (Yunhe Guo, Plasma 5.17.4)
Tree views in GTK or GNOME applications are now visible when using a dark color scheme (Carson Black, Plasma 5.17.4)
The list of applications and system services in the System Settings Notifications page now has full keyboard navigation (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.17.4)
When using a Weather widget on a horizontal panel with the temperature display turned on, the size of the text now matches the size of the text for the default Digital Clock (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.17.4):
A Folder View widget in a panel now uses the correct text color for selected (not highlighted) items (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.17.4):
When entering your password on the lock screen, if the computer goes back to sleep while the password is still entered into the password field, it’s now cleared so people can’t see it when the computer wakes up again (Méven Car, Plasma 5.18.0)
Changing your user’s real name in the System Settings Users page no longer resets the picture (Méven Car, Plasma 5.18.0)
When changing your user picture, if you cancel the password prompt, your picture is no longer changed anyway (Méven Car, Plasma 5.18.0)
Improved the reliability of fetching icons from internet sources in Kirigami-based apps, which should improve stability across the board in Discover, since it makes heavy use of this functionality (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Frameworks 5.65)
The “Network” place in Dolphin now shows its true name in the Information Panel (Méven Car, Frameworks 5.65)
Searching in Discover (and GNOME Software, and the pkcon command-line tool) is now case-insensitive on openSUSE (Carson Black, PackageKit 1.1.13)

User Interface Improvements

Improved High DPI support in Yakuake so various icons are no longer blurry (Nicolas Höft, Yakuake 19.12.0)
Dolphin’s URL navigator now auto-completes text as you type (Noah Davis, Dolphin 20.04.0)

How You Can Help

The KDE Frameworks 6 sprint is happening right now! Much work and planning for the future is being done. Alas, in just three days, all the work will not get done. This is where you can help! The KF6 workboard is chock full of small, manageable to-do items just begging for someone to knock a few out. Maybe you? 😉

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

This week in KDE: touchy and scrolly and GTK-ey and iconey

There are some neat things to report and I think you will enjoy them! In particular, I think folks are really going to like the improvements to GNOME/GTK app integration and two sets of touch- and scrolling-related improvements to Okular and the Kickoff Application Launcher, detailed below:

New Features

GTK and GNOME apps now inherit the font, icon, cursor, and toolbar style settings for KDE apps instead of making you set them separately somewhere else (Mikhail Zolotukhin, Plasma 5.18.0)
Checkboxes and radio buttons in GTK3 apps once again follow the colors in the color scheme. An upstream librsvg change fixed the issues we were having with this feature earlier, so we could bring it back for the next Plasma release! (Carson Black, Plasma 5.18.0)
When scrolling in Okular with the mouse, touchscreen, or keyboard keys, the scroll transitions are now animated and have inertia. I find this to be a huge improvement for reading documents with a convertible laptop! (Kezi Olio, Okular 1.10.0)
The Kickoff Application Launcher now has hugely improved touch support, including touch scrolling, drag-and-drop, and press-and-hold to show items’ context menus (Steffen Hartlieb, Plasma 5.18.0)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Dolphin’s git integration is now more reliable when displaying the status and available actions for large repos (Maciej Dems, Dolphin 19.12.0)
When using Details view in Dolphin, the “Date Photographed” column is no longer empty for JPEG files containing valid EXIF Date/Time data (Méven Car, Dolphin 19.12.0)
Fixed a bug that could cause the lock screen to get stuck while media was playing that included square album art (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.17.3)
Rotated displays now remember their positions relative to other displays after the system is rebooted (Roman Gilg, Plasma 5.17.3)
Scrollbar handles once again have the correct colors in GTK apps and Firefox (Carson Black, Plasma 5.17.3)
Fixed a common crash in System Settings that could be triggered by visiting the same category twice (David Edmundson, Frameworks 5.65)
Disk images that have been mounted and unmounted now disappear from the Devices Notifier applet as expected (Rok Mandeljc, Frameworks 5.65 )
File deletion is now multi-threaded, so for example deleting a large file no longer freezes Dolphin (Méven Car, Frameworks 5.65)

User Interface Improvements

When the cursor is hovered over a file in dolphin, the information about that file shown in the status bar no longer disappears after a second (Méven Car, Dolphin 19.12.0)
File metadata is now available while the Baloo file indexer is performing its initial indexing (Stefan Brüns, Dolphin 20.04.0)
KMenuEdit’s search field is now focused by default, like other apps with always-visible search fields (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0)
The color picker icons now use familiar eyedropper-style imagery (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.65):
There are new icons for Search and the Baloo file indexer (Alexander Stippich, Frameworks 5.65):
Spectacle now offers OBS Studio as another option for screen recording (Méven Car, Frameworks 5.65)

How You Can Help

Do you like icons? Of course you do! But more importantly, are you interested in helping to make them? I bet you are! And you should be, because there’s lots to do! Luckily, it’s actually really easy, and we have a page in the Human Interface Guidelines that describes the rules to help guide you along. Icons in the Breeze icon theme are vector SVG files, and we use Inkscape to make and edit them. I started doing it recently with no prior experience whatsoever in either icon design or the Inkscape program. My work was crude, but VDG members very gently and patiently helped me along, and you can do it too! Here’s how: https://community.kde.org/Guidelines_and_HOWTOs/Submit_an_icon

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

This week in KDE: 5.17 and beyond

We’re mid-cycle in Plasma 5.17 and still working hard to fix bugs and regressions, while planning for Plasma 5.18, our next LTS release! There’s also been continued work on our apps. Check it out:

New Features

Dolphin’s information panel can now optionally be configured to show condensed dates (Ismael Asensio, Dolphin 19.12.0):
It’s now possible to hide the clock on the lockscreen until the password prompt appears, turning it into a 100% faithful reproduction of an old-school screensaver (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.18.0)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Tabs in Konsole once again visually indicate activity (Petr Velan, Konsole 19.12.0)
Gwenview is now faster to load images located on a potentially slow network share (Robert Hoffman, Gwenview 19.12.0)
GTK2 apps like GIMP and Inkscape no longer have mismatched background colors under certain circumstances (Mikhail Zolotukhin, Plasma 5.17.3)
The “Launch” buttons in Discover now work on openSUSE Leap and Tumbleweed (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.17.3)
Discover no longer displays a big empty area where the screenshots should be for apps whose metadata specify invalid screenshots (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.17.3)
Scrolling in Discover is no longer choppy when using Wayland (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.17.3)
Clicking on the right-most pixel in a maximized or right-tiled Firefox window once again interacts with the scrollbar as expected (Carson Black, Plasma 5.17.3)
When using the Weather widget in a narrow vertical panel with the temperature display shown below the icon, its label no longer gets cut off on the right and left sides (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.17.3):
When using Icon View in System Settings, the pages for SDDM and KWallet no longer show an ugly gray icon in the corner of the sidebar icon (Filip Fila, Plasma 5.17.3)
It’s once again possible to search for widgets and other add-ons from the main Featured page in Discover (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0)
The Touchpad System Tray applet no longer stays open after losing focus (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.18.0)
The behavior when left- or right-clicking on System Tray icons after hiding and showing them is now more reliable (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.18.0)

User Interface Improvements

Selected Desktop items now subtly change their appearance to become an inactive highlight when something else gains focus (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0):

How You Can Help

Qt 6 is around the corner! …And everything will need to be ported to use it. But don’t worry, the 5 -> 6 transition promises to be a relatively smooth one thanks to the Qt folks working hard on compatibility and us having already started the work of porting our software away from deprecated APIs. on that subject, it’s a great way to help out if you’re into backend work and appreciate a clean codebase. Check out the Phabricator workboard for the KF6 transition to learn more!

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

This week in KDE: bug squashing and more

This week we continued fixing bugs in Plasma 5.17! We know that it was a bit buggier than the 5.16 release was, and we strive to do better. If you’d like to help out with this, please test our Plasma beta releases by switching to the unstable/beta testing repos in your rolling release distro of choice. For example, Arch and openSUSE Tumbleweed. Beta releases of KDE apps will show up in these repos as well. It’s super fun! Try it, you’ll like it! 🙂

New Features

Dolphin now tells you what’s blocking unmounting a mounted volume (David Hallas, Dolphin 19.12.0):
When importing photos, Gwenview no longer fails to import photos to paths containing slashes, and also now automatically creates folders as needed (Bard De Vries, Gwenview 19.12.0)
The volume indicator icon on a Task Manager button can now be clicked to mute that audio source (Farid Boudedja and Björn Feber, Plasma 5.18.0):
The weather widget can now show pressure in “millimeters of mercury” (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.18.0)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Okular’s annotations now show times in your local time zone, not GMT (Oliver Sander, Okular 1.8.3)
Dolphin’s embedded Konsole panel now recovers keyboard focus correctly after being closed and re-opened (Alex Miranda, Konsole 19.12.0)
Konsole’s split view feature now respects the user’s preference to start or not to start in the current directory (Mariusz Glebocki, Konsole 19.12.0)
We reverted the change to make checkboxes and radio buttons in GTK apps follow the colors in your color scheme. It ran afoul of a GTK bug that caused them to turn black when hovered over. We could not find a workaround for the GTK bug, so reverting the change was our only remaining option for the time being (Carson Black, Plasma 5.17.2)
Fixed a common crash in System Settings when running on Wayland(Roman Gilg, Plasma 5.17.2)
Random wallpaper slideshows are random again (oops, sorry about that) (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.17.2
Discover can now cancel the installation of Snap apps without freezing (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.17.2)
When Discover is run in another desktop environment, it no longer autostarts itself on login automatically, on the assumption that the other DE has its own update mechanism already (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.17.2)
Discover now accepts URLs in the form “appstream:[app]“ (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.17.2
When using a color scheme that results in black text on the login and lock screens, the text no longer has a weird fuzzy black shadow behind it (Filip Fila, Plasma 5.17.2)
The System Settings Virtual Desktops page no longer has a broken layout when using wordy languages like German or Brazilian Portuguese, and the Window Decorations page has a better default size when opened in a standalone window (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.17.2)
KMenuEdit can once again apply changes that require creating a directory as a part of the save operation (Wolfgang Bauer, Plasma 5.17.2)
The “bouncing app icon” animation played while launching apps is once again visible for people using the (default) “Resolution Independent” cursor size setting (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.17.3)
The “Defaults” button in the System Settings Fonts page now works properly (Kevin Ottens, Plasma 5.18.0)
Titles in non-multi-page System Settings pages that are written in QML no longer receive a background highlight when hovering the mouse over them (Marco Martin, Frameworks 5.64)

User Interface Improvements

Dolphin’s extended search options view is now much more streamlined and space-efficient (Ismael Asensio, Dolphin 19.12.0):
The Digital Clock settings window now shows an inline preview for the configured time format, which is especially useful when setting a custom format (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.18.0):
The drawing tool icons have gotten a visual overhaul and are now more consistent with one another (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.64):
Discover’s sidebar toolbar is now always at the top and doesn’t awkwardly scroll out of sight anymore (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.64):
System Settings pages with multi-page navigation now display back and forward arrows in their headers to make navigation easier (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.64):

How You Can Help

I mentioned testing Beta releases earlier, but here’s something else! Do you like the idea of running a KDE-endowed free software operating system on your phone? I know I do. But did you know that KDE already has a mobile platform called Plasma Mobile? It’s real and it works and it needs your help to become mainstream! If this sounds like your cup of tea, check out https://www.plasma-mobile.org/findyourway/. You can read the Plasma Mobile project’s weekly updates in a format similar to this one here: https://www.plasma-mobile.org/blog/

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

This week in KDE: Goodbye Noble Cashew

Plasma has a brand-new way to edit and customize widgets and panels: a global “edit mode” that can be entered using the context menu for the desktop and panel, or pressing-and-holding on the desktop with a touchscreen. While in this mode, widgets and panels are editable and movable. This solves a number of problems and yields the following improvements:

The Desktop toolbox (that little hamburger menu in the corner of the screen that nobody liked) is now gone forever!
The modes are now much clearer, with “Locked” mode being a mostly hidden thing for system administrators.
The panel toolbox button (the “two sliders” icon at the end of your panel) is now hidden unless you’re in the global edit mode, which means that the bottom-right-most pixel of the screen can be used to trigger the Present Windows widget, or any other widget you put at the very end of a panel.
Editing widget size and position is much faster while in this new edit mode.
The panel context menu has been made more useful, and now displays more panel-related actions.

Here’s a video of it in action:

This work was mostly done by Marco Martin, with assistance from Björn Feber, and ideas from many others in the KDE VDG. The remaining rough edges will be polished before the release of Plasma 5.18 (which is an LTS release, let us not forget). Overall I find it to be a huge improvement!

But wait, there’s more! Much, much more…

(Other) New Features

Toolbar items in Kirigami-based apps now respond dynamically to the amount of space available: when there’s lots of horizontal space, they all appear with icons and full text. As the amount of space decreases, they lose their text and then move into an overflow menu on the right-hand size of the window (Arjen Hiemstra, Frameworks 5.64):

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Fixed a common crash with wallpaper slideshows which could even crash your lock screen (David Redondo, Plasma 5.17.1)
KRunner no longer crashes when used to switch to an open window (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.17.1)
The System Settings Mouse page’s “Flat” acceleration settings really actually finally works now! (Mirai Komachi, Plasma 5.17.1)
System Settings no longer displays empty items on the home page for pages that aren’t installed (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.17.1)
In the System Settings Display Configuration page, the visualizations of each connected screen is now larger and more usable when more than one screen is connected, and text within them is no longer elided (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.17.1)
Widgets on the desktop no longer lose their positions when an additional display is connected (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.17.2)
KRunner’s default shortcut now works again for new installs (Fabian Vogt, Plasma 5.17.2)
The Minimize All widget now correctly un-minimizes windows that it’s minimized (Vlad Zagorodniy, Plasma 5.17.2)
The System Settings Window Decorations page no longer has a broken layout when using wordy languages like German or Brazilian Portuguese (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.17.2)
Fixed keyboard input when screen sharing on Wayland (Jan Grulich, Plasma 5.18.0)
The System Tray now correctly displays special “I need attention” icons for apps (such as Konversation) that have defined them (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.18.0)
The System Settings Night Color page now shows units for the “Transition Duration” setting (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0):
When you use the “Get New [thing]” functionality on the various System Settings pages, subsequent searches for a different thing from a different page no longer display items from the first search (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, Frameworks 5.64)
The icon used on the “Get new [thing]” buttons now imply downloading rather than marking something as a favorite (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.64):
Konsole no longer leaves behind potentially large files in the system’s temp folder when it crashes or is quit by the system when shutting down or restarting (Mariusz Glebocki, Konsole 19.12.0)
Dolphin now selects the correct file when using keyboard type-ahead and selecting a previously-selected file (Méven Car, Dolphin 19.12.0)

User Interface Improvements

Spinboxes in the Audio Volume applet’s settings window, Weather widget’s settings window, and various System Settings pages now let you enter numbers using the keyboard so you don’t need to go insane manually clicking on the tiny arrows to change the values (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.17.1)
Discover’s search field is now focused by default, so you can search as soon as the program opens (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0)
In the System Settings Display Configuration page, it’s now more obvious that screens can be dragged around to re-arrange them (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0):
The System Settings Night Color page now displays explanatory labels below the color temperature slider so you know what it will do (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.18.0):
Discover now shows each item’s category in search and browse lists (me: Nate Graham, 5.18.0):
The System Settings Night Color page now has an explanatory label to help you understand what it does (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0):
List headers in QWidgets-based apps and System Settings pages now look the same as they do in the newer QML-based software (David Redondo, Plasma 5.18):

How You Can Help

Check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved and find out ways to help be a part of something that really matters. You don’t have to already be a programmer. 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.