This week Plasma 5.25 reached its “soft feature freeze” date, at which point we don’t add any large new features or major code refactorings. This reduces risk and gives us a longer period of time to polish those changes before the final release. So as you can imagine, everyone rushed to merge their big stuff right before the deadline! As a result, this week I can present are tons of new features and important refactorings that fix multiple bugs. Check it out:
15-Minute Bugs Resolved
Current number of bugs: 70, same as last week. 2 added and 2 resolved:
The volume and brightness OSDs once again show their visual indicator bars on the lock and login screens (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.24.5)
When an application gives the system both an icon name and an image for its System Tray icon, the System Tray now prefers the icon name, so if there is such an icon in your icon theme, you’ll see that and it will respect your color scheme. This affected Telegram, for example (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.24.6)
New Features
You can now optionally give your panel a “floating” appearance! In this mode, it still functionally behaves identically to a traditional panel, and clicks in the empty area will be forwarded to the panel. In addition, the panel “un-floats” when there are any maximized windows (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 5.25):
Discover now shows you apps’ level of access to resources on your system! When an app is sandboxed, you get a fine-grained list of exactly the things that the app automatically has permission to do (Suhaas Joshi and Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.25):
The presentation here is still a bit rough, and will probably be cleaned up by the time 5.25 ships
When you uninstall a sandboxed app in Discover, it now offers you the ability to easily delete the settings and user data if you want to (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.25):
The Overview effect now offers the option to exclude minimized windows, just like Present Windows does (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.25)
Bugfixes & Performance Improvements
When you use Dolphin’s “Open Terminal” feature, it once again opens the terminal at the folder which is selected (if any) rather than always opening it at the current folder (Someone going by the pseudonym “oioi 555”, Dolphin 22.08)
Elisa now shows album art for songs and albums that have the covers embedded in the files, not just sitting next to them (Tranter Madi, Elisa 22.08)
System Monitor once again shows information for AMD GPUs (David Redondo, Plasma 5.24.6)
The Flickr and Simon Stålenhag Picture of the Day wallpapers no longer change more than once a day (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.24.6)
Text for menu items in the Global Menu once again follows the color scheme of the Plasma Theme (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.24.6)
System Settings’ Display Configuration page now shows the correct refresh rates in more circumstances (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.24.6)
Fixed one of the ways that the kded daemon could crash in the Plasma Wayland session (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.25)
Under the hood, the Present Windows and Desktop Grid effects have been rewritten to use the same backend as the Overview effect, which fixes a grand total of 44 Bugzilla tickets (!!!), gives them consistent visual styling, and modernizes their code to keep them maintainable going forward (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.25)
System Monitor charts using the “Horizontal Bars” style are now able to meaningfully show values equal to or very close to 0 (Trent McPheron, Plasma 5.25)
Fixed a memory leak when changing your wallpaper plugin (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.25)
When you change any of the paths in System Settings’ Locations page, any Places Panel bookmarks that pointed to the old locations are automatically updated to point to the new locations (Méven Car, Plasma 5.25)
System Monitor now shows the correct app icons for apps that were launched automatically at login (David Redondo, Plasma 5.25)
Breeze cursors are no longer ever so slightly smaller than they were intended to be (Chris Chris, Plasma 5.25)
Plasma no longer crashes if it can’t find the active theme (David Faure, Frameworks 5.94)
Dolphin no longer crashes when closed from the “Close Tab” list item from the command palette (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.94)
Fixed a bug that could cause file transfers to SMB shares to fail the second and/or subsequent times you make a transfer (Harald Sitter, Frameworks 5.94)
Fixed a memory leak affecting many Kirigami-based applications (Fushan Wen, Frameworks 5.94)
User Interface Improvements
Kate now shows its toolbar by default (Christoph Cullmann, Kate 22.08)
Kate’s Menu bar has been re-arranged a bit to make each one less huge and intimidating. In particular, there is now a new “Selection” menu that holds actions which will be applied only to whatever is selected (Eric Armbruster, Kate 22.08):
Various KWin scripts that are implemented in JavaScript (such as the Show Desktop effect) now that follow your fingers when activated with a gesture. Activate Show Desktop with a Touch Screen swipe to see some magic! (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.25)
A bunch more KWin effects are now activatable using touch screen edge swipes (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.25)
When you set up fingerprint authentication, the lock screen now lets you immediately unlock by putting your finger on the fingerprint reader; no need to click the “unlock” button with en empty password field anymore! (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.25)
You can now add locations and places to the “Favorites” list/grid in Kickoff, Kicker, and the Application Dashboard (Méven Car, Plasma 5.25):
Klipper’s configuration window has been re-organized a bit to have a new “Action Menu” page, which holds settings relevant to the actions menu when you are using any Klipper actions; if you’re not, you can safely ignore it entirely (Jonathan Marten, Plasma 5.25)
File open/save dialogs and inline icon views in various apps such as Kdenlive now let you scale icons up to 512 px size (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.94)
…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