This week in KDE: Plasma 6 development continues

Much bugfixing happened this week, and as a result, the number of open issues only rose by 2 compared to last week. In addition, feature work and planned UI changes are in development and getting merged!

Plasma 6

General info – Open issues: 84

More 1st-party widgets and System Tray icons are now always monochrome and symbolic no matter the thickness of the Panel they live on, even if there are colorful icons at large sizes. This includes the Trash, Folder, and Minimize All widgets and KTeaTime’s System Tray icon (me: Nate Graham, link 1, link 2, link 3, and link 4)

Updated the layout and visuals of the per-app notification configuration page in System Settings (me: Nate Graham, link):

When falling back to software rendering, the Icon widget’s text label now gets a rounded black rectangular background, just like the ones for desktop icons (Mike Noe, link)

Bluetooth-based internet connections are now distinguished with a new icon (Manuel Jesús de la Fuente and Ismael Asensio, link 1 and link 2):

The “Open” toolbar buttons on many QtWidgets-based KDE apps have now grown a little arrow button off to the side that provides quick access to recent documents (Kai Uwe Broulik, link):

Throughout QtQuick-based KDE software, small icons rendered with Kirigami.Icon will no longer sometimes be automatically and inappropriately masked in black with all of their color being lost; this is now purely an opt-in thing, which fixes a ton of bugs (me: Nate Graham, link)

Other New features

All KDE apps now support the QOI image format (Ernest Gupik, Frameworks 5.110. Link)

Other user Interface Improvements

Two-finger pinch zoom gestures in Okular now zoom in on the midpoint between your fingers, as you would expect (Nicolas Fella, Okular 23.12. Link)

In Elisa, clicking on an item in the sidebar now takes you right to that thing even if you were already in a child page of the clicked thing (Jack Hill, Elisa 23.12. Link)

Kolourpaint now lets you zoom in much more (Moritz Zwerger, Kolourpaint 23.12. Link)

Other Significant Bugfixes

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

Spectacle no longer crashes when the screen configuration changes while it’s running (Albert Astals Cid, Spectacle 23.08. Link)

Fixed a strange bug that could cause Plasma to crash when some widgets updated their contents while their popups were open (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27.8. Link)

Pressing the Meta key to open and close the Kickoff Application Launcher no longer steals focus from whatever window had focus before (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27.7.1. Link)

KDESU works again on Kubuntu (Fabian Vogt, Frameworks 5.10. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

• 6 Very high priority Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
• 60 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 58 last week). Current list of bugs
• 98 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed this week. Full list of bugs

Things not in KDE that affect KDE

The InputCapture portal has been merged upstream into xdg-desktop-portal, offering support on Wayland for apps like Barrier and Input Leap that need to be able to remotely control key and pointer input! Note that support in KDE’s portal extension has not yet been implemented, but that’ll be coming too (Peter Hutterer, xdg-desktop-portal 1.18. 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.

How You Can Help

If you’re a developer, work on Qt6/KF6/Plasma 6 issues! Plasma 6 is usable for daily driving now, but still in need of bugfixing and polishing to get it into a releaseable state by the end of the year.

Otherwise, visit https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover other 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!

And finally, KDE can’t work without financial support, so consider making a donation today! This stuff ain’t cheap and KDE e.V. has ambitious hiring goals. We can’t meet them without your generous donations!