It was a mostly bugfixy week, without so much feature and UI work. As a result, we have some very exciting 15-minute bugfixes this week that should really improve desktop icon stability! But we didn’t forget UI improvements entirely, and now the Wayland session touchpad gesture to switch between virtual desktops follows your fingers! Read about all that and more:
15-Minute Bugs Resolved
Current number of bugs: 73, down from 75. 1 added and 3 resolved:
Discover no longer constantly crashes either on launch or when you visit the Installed page if you have the Flatpak backend activated with certain types of Flatpak remotes (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.24.5)
Manually-arranged desktop icons no longer get reset to the alphabetical sorting mode when you restart the computer! (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.25, but we may consider backporting it to 5.24.5)
Desktop icons now remember their positions on a per-resolution basis! (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.25, but since the same commit fixed both this bug and the preceding one, if we backport that to 5.24, this fix will come along for the ride too)
Bugfixes & Performance Improvements
You can now drag-and-drop things from Ark onto items in Dolphin’s Places panel, and it will extract those items there just like you would expect (Kai Uwe Broulik, Dolphin 22.04)
In the Plasma Wayland session, Yakuake now opens itself on the active screen, just like KRunner also now does (Martin Seher, Yakuake 22.08)
In the Plasma X11 session, fixed a case where KWin could crash when you close the lid of your laptop while an external screen is plugged in (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.24.5)
In the Plasma Wayland session, fixed a case where KWin could crash while the screen was locked (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.24.5)
In the Plasma Wayland session, unlocking the screen no longer causes various visual glitches all over the place (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.24.5)
Activating Task Manager tasks by using a Meta+[number] keyboard shortcut now always does what you expect irrespective of how many grouped tasks you have and whether they were last accessed using the mouse or keyboard (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.24.5)
In the Plasma Wayland session, the “Virtual Desktops” KWin window rule now works properly (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.24.5)
Grouped Task Manager tasks’ tooltips now resize and arrange themselves properly when using an RTL language (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.25)
On System Settings’ Cursors page, cursor previews once again display animations when you hover your cursor over them (David Redondo, Plasma 5.25)
In the Plasma Wayland session, the Task Manager no longer shows incorrect icons for XWayland-using web apps (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.25)
KDE apps that are capable of opening .psd files no longer crash when opening one such image that is malformed (Albert Astals Cid, Frameworks 5.94)
When you have various widgets in your panel that open popups when clicked, clicking on them no longer opens the popups with an absurdly, unusably small size (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Frameworks 5.94, though I have emailed distros and asked them to backport it to 5.93)
Highlight effects once again appear on hover in applets still using the old deprecated PlasmaComponents 2 version of the highlight, such as Legacy Kickoff (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Frameworks 5.94)
User Interface Improvements
In the Plasma Wayland session, the “slide” gesture to switch virtual desktops now follows your fingers and animates the desktops in the correct direction! (Eric Edlund, Plasma 5.25)
System Settings’ Night Color page now tints the screen how it will look in real life as you drag the slider to choose a color, so you can see the effect live (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.25)
Even though it isn’t 100% technically correct, 1360×768 and 1366×768 screens are now listed as having the “16:9” aspect ratio in System Settings’ Display Configuration page (Felipe Kinoshita, Plasma 5.25)
Changes not in KDE that affect KDE
Jan-Marek Glogowski and Michael Weghorn have done a lot of work recently to fix many LibreOffice bugs affecting KDE users, including the entire interface being too small on Wayland when using scaling, button popups not opening, Math menus being accessible in tabbed mode, and pasting text from Firefox turning it into Chinese. These are all fixed in various bugfix releases of LibreOffice 7.3.x!
…And everything else
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 more news from other KDE contributors.
How You Can Help
If you’re a developer, check out our 15-Minute Bug Initiative. Working on these issues makes a big difference quickly!
Otherwise, have a look at Get Involved - KDE Community Wiki 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