Nate This Week in KDE October 8, 2022October 9, 2022

4 Minutes

Over the past two weeks, the KDE community has largely been preparing for and attending Akademy, the big annual in-person conference. It’s a great time to bond socially and discuss important topics face-to-face, and more on that later! Meanwhile we’ve also been getting Plasma 5.26 ready, which has benefited from a major focus on stability. Expect that to ramp up now that Akademy is finished. More on that later as well!

New Features

Ark now supports ARJ archives (Ilya Pominov, Ark 22.12. Link)

Kate and KWrite now have a welcome window when launched without any files open. (Eric Armbruster and Christoph Cullmann, Kate & KWrite 22.12. Link):

User Interface Improvements

In Dolphin, dragging-and-dropping a folder onto an empty area of the tab bar now opens it in a new tab (Kai Uwe Broulik, Dolphin 22.12. Link)

The animation for the Slide Desktops effect has been made a bit faster, due to popular demand (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.26. Link)

In the “new screen plugged in” chooser OSD, choosing “Extend Left” now actually makes the new screen extend left, and it extends from the current primary screen (Allan Sandfield Jensen, Plasma 5.26. Link 1 and link 2)

On System Settings’ Colors page, clicking the “From current wallpaper” option now updates the preview view immediately to show the accent color that will be used (Tanbir Jishan, Plasma 5.26. Link)

When transferring files using Bluetooth, the progress notification now shows more detailed and useful information (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.26. Link)

Uninstalling an app now removes its icon from the Kickoff Application Launcher’s favorites list/grid immediately (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.27. Link)

Picture of the Day wallpapers how have a nice cross-fade transition animation when switching from one picture to another, or to a different type of Picture of the Day picture (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27. Link)

The Breeze Window Decoration theme setting to continue displaying window borders for maximized and tiled windows has now been re-worded for clarity (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 5.27. Link)

The Media Frame widget’s “Show/hide background” setting now uses the standard user interface for this, with a button on its Edit Mode toolbar (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27. Link)

When replying to a text message using the KDE Connect plasmoid, the text field is now inline rather than in a separate dialog window (Bharadwaj Raju, KDE Connect 22.12. Link)

When you unmount a removable device in Dolphin, its Eject button now transforms into a busy indicator so you know when it’s safe to physically unplug it (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 5.100. Link):

Significant Bugfixes

(This is a curated list of e.g. HI and VHI priority bugs, Wayland showstoppers, major regressions, etc.)

Switching between Global Themes that include their own desktop layouts no longer sometimes causes Plasma to crash and lose your panels (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.24.7. Link)

System Settings no longer sometimes crashes when navigating away from the Thunderbolt page (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.24.7. Link)

On System Settings’ Users page, It is once again possible to change your user password and nothing else when using a recent version of the AccountsService library (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.24.7. Link)

In the Plasma X11 session, when repeated graphical crashes cause KWin to disable compositing, it will now periodically check to see if it’s better, and if it is, it will re-renable compositing so you don’t have to do it manually or lose compositing forever if you don’t know that this has to be done (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.26. Link)

Application Dashboard grid items now have two lines of text, so you can actually read longer labels (Tomáš Hnyk, Plasma 5.26. Link)

In the Plasma X11 session, when KWin crashes and auto-restarts–or is manually restarted–it no longer loses its mapping of windows to Activities (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.26. Link)

Fixed an issue that could occasionally cause apps like VLC and Firefox to stop refreshing after being used for a while (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.26. Link)

In the Networks plasmoid, networks no longer jump around and re-arrange themselves while you’re trying to connect to one or enter your password (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.26. Link)

Discover and other apps that can display animated images can no longer freeze when displaying certain PCX images (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Frameworks 5.99. Link)

Various System Monitor graphs no longer blink, stutter, and freeze when using an NVIDIA GPU (Łukasz Wojniłowicz, Frameworks 5.100. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

• 8 Very high priority Plasma bugs (down from 11 two weeks ago). Current list of bugs
• 47 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 44 two weeks ago). Current list of bugs
• 209 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed over these two weeks. Full list of bugs

…And everything else

This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! 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.