This week in Usability & Productivity, part 34

Amazing how time flies. We’re already on week 34 for KDE’s Usability & Productivity reports!

First I want to specially highlight some critically important fixes for Samba shares that landed this week:

• KDE apps can now save files to samba shares that have been mounted by GNOME’s gvfs system , which is common when using Nautilus to access Samba shares, or more generally when using KDE Software on GNOME (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Frameworks 5.50)
• Guest access for Samba shares created by Dolphin now works again (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Frameworks 5.50)
• Fixed a case where navigating to smb:// in a KDE app could cause the app to crash (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Frameworks 5.50)

I’m very happy to report that more Samba improvements are on the way too, including a critical fix for an issue that causes silent data loss when using a non-KDE app that performs atomic saves (such as LibreOffice or Blender) to save modified files that are located on a Samba share originally accessed from Dolphin.

My sense is that that poor samba sharing support is a strategic issue causing pain to many of our users and preventing others from using our software. I’d like to verify this theory, so if these fixes benefit you or you’ve experienced more pain points with Samba beyond what’s already fixed or planned, please share in the comments.

New Features

• The Properties dialog now shows information about the item’s filesystem, and if applicable, the mountpoint and “mounted from” location (Shubham Jangra, KDE Frameworks 5.50):
  
• Okular’s hierarchical table of contents view now has the ability to expand and collapse everything, or just a specific section (Peter Wu, KDE Applications 18.12.0):
  

Bugfixes

• Fixed a bug that could cause Discover to hang forever after trying to perform updates (Aleix Pol, KDE Plasma 5.12.7)
• Fixed a memory leak in Discover that could manifest when browsing add-ons (David Hallas, KDE Plasma 5.12.7)
• Plasma now correctly handles SSH VPN tunnels (Catherine Z., KDE Plasma 5.14.0)
• Placeholder text inside text and search fields throughout Plasma is now actually visible with light color themes (David Edmundson, KDE Plasma 5.14.0)
• The Picture of the Day wallpapers now actually update their pictures once a day (Kristopher Ives, KDE Plasma 5.12.7)
• Multi-monitor support for hot-plugged primary screens now works properly (Robert Hoffman, KDE Plasma 5.14.0)
• Scrollbars in LibreOffice now work correctly when using the Breeze GTK theme and the GTK3 LibreOffice backend (Alexander Kernozhitsky, KDE Plasma 5.12.7)
• KDevelop now looks good on HiDPI screens (Friedrich Kossebau, KDevelop 5.3):
  Here pictured running on Windows
• After using Okular to annotate a PDF with links and then saving it, the links now still work (Albert Astals Cid, KDE Applications 18.08.1)

UI Polish & Improvement

• The somewhat confusing “Switch User” screen and its functionality have been merged into the regular lock screen for greater usability (David Edmundson, KDE Plasma 5.14.0)
• The Plasma Widget Explorer’s text field now lives on its own row and is visible by default (Scott Harvey and me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.14.0):
  
• Discover’s “Update All” button is now disabled while updates are still being fetched (Aleix Pol, KDE Plasma 5.14.0)
• Dolphin’s Information Panel and tooltips now always shows previews (where available) for the selected/hovered file or folder (Fabian Vogt, KDE Applications 18.12.0)
• When hovering the mouse over a link in Okular, the URL is now shown anytime the link could be clicked on, instead of only when in Browse mode (Oliver Sander, KDE Applications 18.12.0)

Next week, your name could be in this list! Just check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved , and find out how you can help be a part of something that really matters.

If my efforts to perform, guide, and document this work seem useful and you’d like to see more of them, then consider becoming a patron on Patreon , LiberaPay , or PayPal . Also consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation .