This week in KDE: Holiday features

This is a light week as KDE contributors have been taking well-deserved breaks during this holiday season. Nevertheless, all was not quiet and many nice improvements and bugfixes were merged!

New Features

In the Plasma Wayland session, you can now zoom in and out on images in Gwenview using pinch gestures on your touchpad! (Bharadwaj Raju and Carl Schwan, Gwenview 23.04. Link)

Kate and KWrite now have options to always open each file in its own window, rather than tabs of one window (Christoph Cullmann, Kate & KWrite 23.04. Link)

Elisa now supports creating and opening .pls playlist files (Marius Pa, Elisa 23.04. Link)

When you try to use a VPN type whose plugins are not installed, the notification that tells you this now offers you the opportunity to install them (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.27. Link)

It’s now possible to configure the Color Picker widget to display up to 9 color preview dots for quick use (in case you didn’t know, you can drag colors out of them and onto something else), or none at all if you don’t use them because you use the widget as just a way to get color code values into your clipboard (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27. Link):

User Interface Improvements

Okular’s sidebar has been ported to use QDockWidget, which makes it able to be relocated to other sides of the window or un-docked to become a free-floating window (Eugene Popov, Okular 23.04. Link)

When configuring a VPN fails because plasma-nm was compiled without support for any of its optional plugins that provide this functionality, the notification warning you about it now includes a button to report a bug that will take you to your distribution’s bug tracker, because they’re the source of the issue (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.27. Link)

Significant Bugfixes

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

When permanently deleting a file, the “Delete permanently” button once again has keyboard focus by default (Felix Ernst, Dolphin 22.12.1. Link)

In the Plasma Wayland session, after KWin has restarted for any reason, session-ending actions such as Log Out, Restart, And Shut Down now work (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.27. Link)

The Persian and Indian national calendars now show their correct month names (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27. Link 1 and link 2)

Other bug-related information of interest:

• 5 Very high priority Plasma bugs (up from 4 last week). Current list of bugs
• 47 15-minute Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
• 99 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed this week. Full list of bugs

Automation & Systematization

Added some more autotests for the Baloo file indexing service (Albert Astals Cid, Frameworks 5.102. Link)

After once again fixing a bug with symlinked files for wallpaper slideshows not appearing, added an autotest to make sure it doesn’t happen again (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.26.5. Link)

…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.

2022 Fundraiser

KDE’s end-of-year fundraiser is in full swing and we’re close! As of the time of writing, we’re at a hair over 17,000€, out of the 20,000€ goal. So please consider making a donation!

But guess what! Veteran KDE contributor Albert Astals Cid is offering to match 10% of people’s donations until the end of the year or the goal is reached; how cool is that!? Thanks so much, Albert!

To take advantage of this, after you make your donation here, email [email protected] with your name/email and CC [email protected]. And then go tell Albert on his blog what a cool guy he is!

We can do it!

Other Ways To Help

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

Otherwise, visit 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!