Today’s post should have something in it for everyone! Early holiday gifts!
New Features
You can now change your wallpaper to any image using its context menu! (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.24):
Don’t worry, it shows up in Dolphin’s context menu too!
It’s now possible to manually reverse the alignment of Task Manager tasks, which can be useful in some panel setups, including having a Task manager next to a Global Menu (Tanbir Jishan, Plasma 5.24)
In the Plasma Wayland session, there is now a barebones drawing tablet page in System Settings. It doesn’t have much in it right now, but more will be added over time (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.24)
It’s now possible for Global Themes to specify and change Latte Dock layouts (Michail Vourlakos, Plasma 5.24)
Bugfixes & Performance Improvements
Restarting Elisa no longer removes files from the the playlist that were added using the “Files” view (Matthieu Gallien, Elisa 21.12.1)
All of Elisa’s icons now full change their colors as expected when you change the global color scheme (me: Nate Graham, Elisa 21.12.1)
Scrolling over Gwenview’s zoom combobox to change the zoom level now works more predictably and reliably (Felix Ernst, Gwenview 21.12.1)
In the Plasma Wayland session, the setting to make Spectacle automatically copy a just-taken screenshot to the clipboard when invoked using global keyboard shortcuts now works (Méven Car, Spectacle 22.04)
Fixed a memory leak in the thumbnail preview generator (Waqar Ahmed, kio-extras 22.04)
Konsole’s scrolling performance is now 2x faster! (Waqar Ahmed, Konsole 22.04)
Fixed a variety of memory leaks that could cause KWin to crash when opening various 3rd-party apps or the new Overview effect (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.23.5)
System Settings no longer sometimes crashes when you try to install or update Global Themes (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.23.5)
The Kickoff application launcher no longer fails to search properly when there are multiple instances of it (Noah Davis, Plasma 5.23.5)
Searching through installed apps in Discover no longer shows all Flatpak apps, regardless of installation status (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.23.5)
In the Plasma Wayland session, mouse and touchpad settings to let you toggle between “Flat” and “Adaptive” acceleration profiles now work (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.23.5)
In the Plasma Wayland session, applying a “No titlebar and frame” window rule no longer makes the window become super tiny (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.23.5)
In the Plasma Wayland Session, switching Activities no longer causes a weird dummy entry to appear in the Task Manager (David Redondo, Plasma 5.23.5)
Plasma no longer sometimes crashes when unmounting a removable disk using the Disks & Devices applet (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.24)
In the Plasma Wayland session, various Chromium-based web browsers now show their windows properly (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.24)
In the Plasma Wayland session, you can now use the default Meta+Tab shortcut to cycle through more than two activities at a time (David Redondo, Plasma 5.24)
In the Plasma Wayland session, the “Minimize All Windows” applet now works (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.24)
In the Plasma Wayland session, drag-and-drop now works on FreeBSD distros (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.24)
The Task Manager context menu’s “Show in all Activities” item once again works (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.24)
Rotating the a monitor that’s displaying full-screen content now causes the content to be re-laid-out properly (Jiya Dong, Plasma 5.24)
Pressing the Escape key while dragging a panel applet while in Edit mode now cancels the drag rather than causing it to weirdly get stuck where it is (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.24)
Merged the first of many upcoming multi-screen fixes, which should help with panels and desktops becoming mixed up when screens are removed and re-attached (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.24)
Linked buttons in GTK apps styled with the Breeze GTK theme now have a raised and conjoined appearance so you can tell they’re linked (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.24):
Fixed a way that KDE Connect could crash with certain clipboard text (Méven car, Frameworks 5.90)
Certain tooltips in Plasma applets no longer display visual glitches in the corners when using the Breeze Plasma theme (Noah Davis, Frameworks 5.90):
Indeterminate progress bars no longer visually overflow while animating (Noah Davis, Frameworks 5.90)
User Interface Improvements
When you use Okular’s “Digitally Sign” feature, it now alerts you immediately if you have no valid digital certificates, rather than letting you first try to place the signature and then telling you (Albert Astals Cid, Okular 22.04)
When you try to use Gwenview’s camera importer without the support package that it requires, it now detects this and guides you through installing it (Fushan Wen, Gwenview 22.04):
When using the systemwide double-click setting, in Dolphin you can now ctrl-double-click on a folder to open it in a new tab, and shift-double-click on a folder to open it in a new window (Alessio Bonfiglio, Dolphin 22.04)
Discover now lets you open and install locally-downloaded Flatpak apps from repos not active on the system, and tells you that installing them will add their repo (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.24):
The excessively large bottom padding in that message is a known bug that will eventually be fixed
It’s now possible to open Info Center via a button on the “About this System” page in System Settings (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.24):
Searching for “Version” now finds the “About this System” Info Center page (Nikolai Weitkemper, Plasma 5.24)
System Settings’ Display & Monitor page now displays the scale factor used for each screen in the screen visualization view (Méven Car, Plasma 5.24):
Uploading an image to Imgur now displays the result using a system notification and also now shows you the delete link, so you can remove the uploaded image if you uploaded something you didn’t mean to or regret (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 5.90):
stat jobs performed by KDE software no longer ever spawns a notification that says “Examining”, as these are not helpful or actionable at all; instead the operations are performed silently (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 5.90)
…And everything else
Keep in mind that 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 blog posts by other KDE contributors detailing the work they’re doing.
How You Can Help
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