This week in KDE: Double-click by default

This was a week of huge changes and improvements, starting with our headliner! Yes it’s true, by default in Plasma 6, you’ll single-click to select files and folders, and double-click to open them. The patches have now landed, done by me. This remains user-configurable, of course.

But there’s a whole lot more to talk about as well! This is gonna be a big one…

More Plasma 6 awesomeness

General info – Open issues: 87

KWin’s blur effect has been totally rewritten for better reliability. Among other things, this fixes the infamous glitches that have been appearing for people using fractional scale factors as well as the blocky cursor trails for users of NVIDIA and some AMD GPUs (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

When a KDE app crashes and you click on the “Report bug” button in the notification, the DrKonqi crash reporting wizard you’ll see has now been hugely simplified and includes an option to report the crash automatically to our new Sentry-based crash tracker, no need for a Bugzilla account! (Harald Sitter, link):

System Settings’ Autostart page now lets you see the technical details about entries’ startup sequences which lets you debug why they might not be behaving as expected (Thenujan Sandramohan, link):

Cycling through keyboard brightness level keys (e.g. with Fn+Space on many laptops) now shows an OSD for the change (Natalie Clarius, link)

When toggling the keyboard backlight off and back on, it now remembers its previous brightness level (Natalie Clarius, link)

The minimum screen brightness is now always 1, and the minimum keyboard brightness is now always 0, ensuring that the screen backlight never turns off completely at minimum brightness, while the keyboard backlight always does (me: Nate Graham and Natalie Clarius, link 1 and link 2)

The “Alternative widgets” popup has been modernized and now has the typical hover highlight effect (Lukas Spies, link)

It’s now possible to change the wallpaper immediately after changing the desktop containment type (e.g. switching from Folder View to Desktop or back) (Fushan Wen, link)

In the System Tray configuration window, the icons shown to represent the widgets now match the actual icons shown in the System Tray itself (me: Nate Graham, link):

The project to fully remove the concept of icons in the Plasma style has been completed, so now all icons come from the systemwide icon theme. In addition, we have also completed the project to remove the ability to globally change the size of toolbar, dialog, and small icons in some KDE apps that respected these global settings (not all did), in order to reduce the number of ways to scale things on the system so that people will be more likely to use one of the supported methods. For more information about these planned and previously announced changes, see https://pointieststick.com/2023/07/26/what-we-plan-to-remove-in-plasma-6/.

Other User Interface Improvements

Dolphin’s settings window has gotten an overhaul to re-arrange things to be more logical (Dimosthenis Krallis, Dolphin 23.12. Link)

The initial location for Elisa’s “Files” view is now user-configurable but defaults to the system’s “Music folder” location (Me: Nate Graham, Joshua Goins, and Eduardo Bray, Elisa 23.12. Link 1 and Link 2)

KCalc now remembers its window size, and position too on X11 (Gabriel Barrantes, KCalc 23.12. Link)

Apps using the KHolidays framework now have support for holidays in Tanzania (Lukas Sommer, Frameworks 5.110. Link)

Settings dialogs for QtWidgets-based apps now have a search field in the header area that can be used to find settings on individual pages!!! (Waqar Ahmed, Frameworks 6.0. Link):

Improved the Breeze icon for .bak and other backup files (Alexander Wilms, Frameworks 6.0. Link)

Other Significant Bugfixes

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

Fixed a way that Plasma could crash when launching an app using the Task Manager while its tooltip was open (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27.8. Link)

Implemented a workaround for a weird issue that could cause Plasma to eventually slow down and crash on systems that frequently change monitor arrangements. A better fix will be coming for Plasma 6 (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.27.8. Link)

Fixed a way that taking screenshots using Spectacle could fail in the Plasma X11 session (Noah Davis, Plasma 5.27.8. Link)

Sensors in System Monior and the widgets of the same name now work properly when your system is using the C locale (Maciej Stanczew, Plasma 5.27.8. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

• 5 Very high priority Plasma bugs (down from 6 last week). Current list of bugs
• 59 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 60 last week). Current list of bugs
• 91 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed this week. Full list of bugs

Automation & Systematization

A long-failing test in the plasma-workspace has been fixed, in the process requiring fixes to various things that were actually broken that the text had caught–imagine that! (Marco Martin, link)

Wrote extensive autotests for the Powerdevil profile generator code (Jakob Petsovits, link)

Tests are now required to pass before a merge request can be merged in the plasma-framework, plasma-workspace, plasma-desktop and print-manager repos (Harald Sitter and me: Nate Graham, link 1, link 2, link 3, and link 4)

Changes not in KDE that affect KDE

Firefox now supports the Wayland fractional scaling protocol, so it will be smoother and better looking when using a fractional scale factor (Emilio Cobos Álvarez and Robert Mader, Firefox 118. Link)

Fixed a common way that Qt-based apps could crash when disabling a screen (Axel Spörl, Qt 5.15.12, or the latest snapshot of the KDE Qt patch collection. Link)

Fixed a major graphical glitch affecting people using certain AMD GPUs (Melissa Wen, Linux kernel 6.5. Link)

Sped up the glCopyTexSubImage2D graphical operation on integrated Intel GPUs, which helps various KWin effects (Sviatoslav Peleshko, Mesa 23.3, 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!