This week in KDE: Tons of UI improvements and bugfixes

This week we made great progress on a lot of UI issues and bugs, and I bet you’ll find at least one issue that was annoying you fixed among these!

15-Minute Bugs Resolved

Current number of bugs: 51, down from 52. 1 added and 2 resolved:

Discover no longer sometimes fails to fetch reviews for apps, especially right after being launched (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.24.6)

The Overview effect’s keyboard shortcut should no longer sometimes randomly get broken (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.26)

Current list of bugs

New Features

Non-EXIF textual metadata stored inside PNG images is now extracted and displayed in the Properties dialog (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 5.97):

User Interface Improvements

Discover no longer misleadingly shows you error notifications about offline updates that succeeded but for some off reason resulted in the underlying PackageKit backend producing a weird “[thing] is already installed” message (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.24.6)

The “Add Rule” sheet on System Settings’ Firewall page is now fully readable and looks better (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.25.4)

The highlight effect for hovered windows in the new Present Windows and Desktop Grid effects is now larger, making it easier to see (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.26):

Discover now shows you a “Loading…” placeholder while it’s still loading the reviews for an app (Aleix Pol Gonzalez and me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.26):

On the Panel Edit Mode toolbar, those little draggable handles now display tooltips when hovered so that you can figure out what they do, and you can also double-click on them to reset them to their original states (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.26):

In the screen chooser dialog for sandboxed apps that want to record the screen (such as OBS when run from Snap or Flatpak), the list items in the view now behave more rationally if you double-click on them (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.26)

When a sandboxed app is recording the screen and the System Tray shows an icon to forcibly stop the recording, clicking on it now displays a context menu with “Stop Recording” in it rather than just stopping the recording immediately before you’ve had a chance to figure out what it does (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.26)

In the Comic Strip widget, the context menu item that previously said “Run associated application” now says “Open in [default web browser]” (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.26)

Visual transitions in the Pager widget (e.g. when you move, maximize, or tile a window) are now animated (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.26):

In the properties dialog, when a file has GPS coordinates in the metadata, this information is now displayed as a clickable link (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 5.97):

The “Help Center” app’s icon is now always colorful when using the Breeze icon theme, just like other app icons are (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.97)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Context menu items of the Comic Strip widget that don’t work when then you’re offline or before the current strip has loaded now disable themselves rather than letting you click on them and then making Plasma crash (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.24.7)

In the Plasma X11 session, the Color Picker widget is once again able to pick screen colors (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.24.7)

Submitting usefulness for reviews in Discover once again works (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.24.7)

In the Plasma Wayland session, fixed a way that KWin could crash when you press physical buttons on a connected drawing tablet (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.25.4)

You can once again navigate between windows and desktops using the keyboard in the Desktop Grid effect (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.25.4)

In the Plasma X11 session, the “Window shade” feature once again works (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.25.4)

In the Plasma Wayland session, the cursor launch feedback animation played when launching an XWayland app now stops playing once the app has launched (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.25.4)

Fixed the final way that menu titles could get cut off when a long menu title is paired with short menu items (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.25.4)

On System Settings’ Colors page, the color scheme previews are now 100% accurate and actually reflect their colors (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.25.4)

In the Plasma Wayland session, sub-menus in the Kicker Application Menu can now be fully navigated with the keyboard (Someone awesome, Plasma 5.26)

Plasma is now faster to load (Xuetian Weng, Plasma 5.26)

When saving files in a sandboxed app in a folder that has a lot of stuff in it already, you will no longer sometimes randomly see pointless notifications that say “Examining: failed” (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.26)

In-window menubars in QtQuick apps now display the correct background color when using a color scheme with Header colors, such as Breeze Light and Breeze Dark (Kartikey Subramanium, Frameworks 5.97)

Spectacle and other apps now correctly detect the installation status for OBS Studio, Vokoscreen, and other 3rd-party apps in their “install other apps” menu (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 5.97)

…And everything else

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

How You Can Help

If you’re a developer, check out our 15-Minute Bug Initiative. Working on these issues makes a big difference quickly!

Otherwise, 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.