Plasma 5.24 is almost ready!
I mentioned last week that I haven’t been posting about fixes for regressions in 5.24 that never got released, because there would be too many. Nonetheless people have been working very hard on this, and we’re down to only 7, with two of them having open merge requests! Working on those is appreciated, as it helps improve the stability of the final release in a week and a half.
15-Minute Bugs Resolved
Current number of bugs: 83, down from 87. Current list of bugs
After waking up the system, the desktop is no longer sometimes shown for a moment before the lock screen appears (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.25)
New Features
Konsole now lets you automatically switch to a different profile when you connect to a specific remote server using SSH (Tomaz Canabrava, Konsole 22.04)
Dolphin now optionally lets you see image’s dimensions below their icons in icon view (Kai Uwe Broulik, Dolphin 22.04):
Bugfixes & Performance Improvements
Fixed a wide variety of issues with the metadata and lyrics in Elisa’s Now Playing view failing to appear or update properly (Yerrey Dev, Elisa 22.04)
Gwenview now launches a bit faster, particularly when there are a lot of remote mounts (Nicolas Fella, Gwenview 22.04)
Plasma no longer sometimes crashes on login when certain apps that display System Tray items launch automatically (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.24)
In the Plasma Wayland session, KWin no longer sometimes crashes when dragging screenshots from Spectacle to XWayland apps (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.24)
In the Plasma Wayland session, KWin no longer crashes when you unplug an external monitor that was in “only use external monitor” mode (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.24)
In the Plasma Wayland session, when an app is started in fullscreen mode and then made windowed, it will now be placed in a location that respects the current window placement mode, rather than always appearing in the top-left corner of the screen (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.24)
In the Plasma Wayland session, screencasting no longer causes the cursor to be visually clipped (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.24)
In the Plasma Wayland session, when you unplug and re-plug an external screen, XWayland apps that want to launch on the primary screen (such as many games) no longer to get confused and open on the wrong screen (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.24)
In the Plasma Wayland session, cursor app launch feedback effects now respect the global timeout value for it that you can set in the System Settings Launch Feedback page (David Redondo, Plasma 5.24)
Keyboard navigation between widgets in the Widget Explorer sidebar now works that way you would expect it to (Noah Davis, Plasma 5.24)
Disk read/write sensors in System Monitor widgets and the app of the same name no longer report bogus values the first time they update (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.24)
Shrinking System Monitor’s window to a very small size now causes text to properly elide instead of overflow (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.24)
System Monitor widgets can now be dragged using touch while in Edit Mode (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.24)
Custom icons that use SVG images referred to by their path rather than their name once again appear correctly on folders and apps on the desktop (Fushan Wen, Frameworks 5.91)
Changing any of the standard shortcuts (e.g. for Copy or Paste) on System Settings’ Shortcuts page now takes effect instantly, rather than making you restart first (David Redondo, Frameworks 5.91)
KDE apps like Dolphin that scan for network mounts and disks when launched now launch more quickly when you have a lot of Snap apps installed (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 5.91)
This isn’t KDE software, but it affected a lot of our users, so I’m listing it here anyway: Firefox no longer constantly asks to be made the default browser on launch when it’s being run with the GTK_USE_PORTAL=1 environment variable (as some distros do by default) to make it use KDE file dialogs instead of GNOME file dialogs (Emilio Cobos Álvarez and Robert Mader, Firefox 98)
User Interface Improvements
The Properties dialog no longer shows the Details tab when everything it contains is already visible on the General tab (Kai Uwe Broulik, Dolphin 22.04)
Dolphin’s shortcuts configuration window now includes shortcuts from Konsole that will be used in the embedded terminal view, so you can re-assign them if you’d like (Stephan Sahm, Dolphin 22.04)
Filelight can now be found by searching for a variety of common keywords like “usage” and “disk space” (Nikolai Weitkemper, Filelight 22.04)
KRunner now returns better search results for very short search strings of only one or two letters (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.24)
You can now find KMenuEdit in app launchers, KRunner, and Discover (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.25):
Menu items in QtWidgets-based apps now also become taller when in Tablet Mode, just like menu items in QtQuick apps! However Unlike those, QtWidgets apps will have to be restarted first due to technical limitations (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.25)
Task Manager tooltip window thumbnails now smoothly fade in instead of appearing abruptly (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.25)
Discover now provides an indication of the number of search results and the number of items in the currently viewed category (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.25):
Spacing between System Tray icons is now configurable, and automatically switches to its widest setting when in Tablet Mode (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.25)
System Settings’ Display Configuration page now calls your device’s built-in screen a “Built-in Screen”, rather than assuming it is a laptop and calling it a “Laptop Screen” (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.25)
…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
If you’re a developer, check out the list of remaining Plasma 5.24 regressions, or 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