Howdy folks! Here’s a reminder about our Plasma 5.16 wallpaper competition. We’ve gotten lots of wallpapers, but there’s a little more than two weeks left and still plenty of time to submit you gorgeous entries! As a reminder, the winner also receives a Slimbook One computer! Here are the rules.
Let me also take the opportunity to clarify what it is that we’re looking for, overall. We want wallpapers with the following characteristics:
Still good-looking with some desktop icons on top of it
Here are some stylistic suggestions, too: Avoid having a central foreground element framed within a background. This feels very confining. Try having the foreground go out of the frame and appear off-center. Also, try to avoid large areas of super bright colors, as these can be visually overwhelming and look uncomfortable when closing or minimizing windows. Pastels often work better than bright neon colors.
But first, I want to draw everyone’s attention to our Plasma 5.16 wallpaper competition. In addition to getting their wallpaper used as the default background for millions of users of KDE Plasma 5.16, the winner also receives a Slimbook One computer! So what are you waiting for!? Go and submit an awesome wallpaper! Here are the rules. If you’re looking for inspiration, check out the last six wallpapers:
When searching for the “Log Out” command using the Kickoff Application Launcher’s built-in search feature, it’s now the top entry (Björn Feber, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
Refined the System Settings Window Decorations page’s drag-and-drop user interface (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
Next week, your name could be in this list! Not sure how? Just ask! I’ve helped mentor a number of new contributors recently and I’d love to help you, too! You can also check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved, and find out how you can 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!
Welcome to week 68 in KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative! Like many others, this one is full of nice little quality-of-life fixes that should make your experience of using KDE software nicer. Have a look-see:
Next week, your name could be in this list! Not sure how? Just ask! I’ve helped mentor a number of new contributors recently and I’d love to help you, too! You can also check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved, and find out how you can 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!
System Settings pages written in QML that are opened standalone now have the correct window height by default. This fixes the Fonts, Workspace Behavior, Mouse, Touchpad, and Launch Feedback pages (Marco Martin, KDE Frameworks 5.58):
Fixed a regression in dolphin that was preventing the “Create New” button from being added to the toolbar (me: Nate Graham, and Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Applications 19.04.1)
Next week, your name could be in this list! Not sure how? Just ask! I’ve helped mentor a number of new contributors recently and I’d love to help you, too! You can also check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved, and find out how you can 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!
The button to mute notification sounds now works anytime, rather than only after you’ve adjusted the volume slider at least once (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.15.5)
Finally I’d like to give a shout-out to KDE developer Matthieu Gallien, who is developing KDE’s next-generation music player Elisa, which is shaping up nicely. I’m close to using it as my daily driver. Give it a try via KDE’s nightly Flatpak builds, or compile it from source.
Eagle-eyed readers will no doubt notice many visual papercuts, but they’re being worked on!
Next week, your name could be in this list! Not sure how? Just ask! I’ve helped mentor a number of new contributors recently and I’d love to help you, too! You can also check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved, and find out how you can 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!
Here’s week 65 in KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative, and I’m happy to announce a long-anticipated improvement: High DPI support in Gwenview! Check it out:
List items in the Kickoff Application Launcher now have more compact side margins, which particularly looks good when using a panel on the side or top of the screen (Noah Davis, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
Next week, your name could be in this list! Not sure how? Just ask! I’ve helped mentor a number of new contributors recently and I’d love to help you, too! You can also check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved, and find out how you can 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!
Next week, your name could be in this list! Not sure how? Just ask! I’ve helped mentor a number of new contributors recently and I’d love to help you, too! You can also check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved, and find out how you can 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!
Here’s a mid-week guest post from two relatively new but very enthusiastic KDE contributors: Filip Fila and Krešimir Čohar. You’ll probably recognize their names from prior blog posts because they’ve been doing a lot of great work lately! And they’d like to share the results of their first major project: refreshing the lock and login screens’ look-and-feel in the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.16 release.
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Hi, we’re Filip and Krešimir, we’re new to KDE and we have been working on sprucing up the lock, login, and logout screens for Plasma 5.16. In this post we’ll be highlighting some of the key changes we made and why.
Improved looks
It’s no secret that we started out by toying with the idea of removing the blur effect from the login screen. On the other end of the extreme lay our so-called wallpaper fader, which would apply a lot of blur and darken wallpapers to the point that it was actually starting to look like a bug. So we decided on a compromise – tone down the fader effect and make the background pretty but with labels you can actually make out.
Before and after
Improved visual hierarchy
Every single label on your login screen being 9pt is hardly ideal, and sometimes information just has to take priority. With that in mind, we’ve made:
the usernames most prominent (12pt by default)
followed by the login fields and action buttons (11pt by default)
…and the rest stays the same or gets bumped from 9pt to 10pt in the case of the login screen. It should be also be noted that the font sizes are modular now and that you even have the option to change the default font size in SDDM.
Yet another improvement is a new magnification effect for the user in focus – so you can be certain you’re logging into the right user account:
Improved controls
Instead of being glued-on icons with a label, action buttons now have some visual feedback. When hovering over them you’ll get a subtle transparent background and the text will also light up a bit:
Some of the icons have been reworked or replaced with new ones:
The login button has been simplified (because why have a really wide button with a label you have to translate?):
Before and after
The end result should look like something like this:
We’ve had a lot of fun implementing all of these changes, our knowledge of Plasma and of computer science in general has increased by leaps and bounds, and the process and the results have been incredibly rewarding. We’re hoping that this login screen will stand the test of time and that it’ll also encourage others to contribute, because yes – it’s worth it.
Let us know if you have any comments or ideas regarding what we’ve been doing!
It’s time for week 63 in KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative. These things are getting so huge I’m going to have to start splitting them up into multiple posts, because KDE contributors just don’t stop fixing and improving things! Expect more to come soon, but for now, here’s what we’ve got for you:
Discover’s Updates page received a major usability overhaul: apps and packages now have distinct “downloading” and “installing” phases, and after an item has finished installing, it disappears from view (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
When closing Task Manager tasks by middle-clicking on them, as long as the cursor stays over the Task Manager, the remaining tasks do not resize as they reposition themselves to be under the cursor, so you can keep middle-clicking the same pixel to quickly close more tasks (Thomas Surrel, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
Breeze-themed Kirigami inline messages no longer have a drop shadow on the bottom, giving them a sleeker look and 100% visual consistency with their QWidget counterpart used in non-Kirigami apps (Filip Fila, KDE Frameworks 5.57)
Next week, your name could be in this list! Not sure how? Just ask! I’ve helped mentor a number of new contributors recently and I’d love to help you, too! You can also check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved, and find out how you can 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!
Week 62 for KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative is here, and we didn’t let up! We’ve got new features, bugfixes, more icons… we’ve got everything! Take a look:
When when using X11 and the KWin window manager’s compositing is interrupted or stopped in the middle of the Present Windows effect, mouse and keyboard input no longer get disabled (Vlad Zagorodniy, KDE Plasma 5.15.3)
The qtquick2 style framework is now listed as a runtime dependency for Plasma, which should hopefully provide a helpful hint to packagers that it needs to be installed and reduce the incidence of people who use certain distros seeing ugly user interfaces on QML/Kirigami apps (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
In Kate, KWrite and other apps like KDevelop that use the KTextEditor framework, text selection now works like it does everywhere else: when text is selected, the left arrow key moves the insertion point one character to the left of the beginning of the selection, and the right arrow key moves the insertion point one character to the right of the end of the selection (Loh Tar, KDE Frameworks 5.57)
Spectacle’s filename template chooser now has clickable tokens (David Redondo, KDE Applications 19.04.0):
The “Find” action in Yakuake, the embedded terminal in Dolphin and Kate, and any other users of the Konsole KPart now has a keyboard shortcut by default (Nicolas Fella, Yakuake 3.0.6)
Next week, your name could be in this list! Not sure how? Just ask! I’ve helped mentor a number of new contributors recently and I’d love to help you, too! You can also check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved, and find out how you can 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!
Adventures in Linux and KDE 