We are busy working on the bug reports folks are filing about the Plasma 5.25 beta, and as of right now, we’re down to 15. Working on these is a great way to make a difference quickly!
In addition, features that didn’t make it into Plasma 5.25 are starting to land in 5.26. There’s some very cool stuff this week, so let’s jump in:
15-Minute Bugs Resolved
Current number of bugs: 64, up from 63. 3 added and 2 resolved:
In the Plasma X11 session, Plasma notifications, OSDs, and widget pop-ups are no longer inappropriately minimizable, maximizable, and tilable (Luca Carlon, Plasma 5.26)
Fixed another way that KWin could crash when plugging in or unplugging an HDMI monitor (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.24.6)
New Features
You can now change the color scheme used by Okular independently of the system color scheme (George Florea Bănuș, Okular 22.08):
Elisa now allows you to disable the automatic music scan on startup, and only do it manually (Jerome Guidon, Elisa 22.08):
The pop-ups of Plasma widgets in the panel are now resizable from their edges and corners just like normal windows, and they remember the sizes you set, too! (Luca Carlon, Plasma 5.26):
The Dictionary widget can now be configured to show results from more than one dictionary at once, but not necessarily all of them (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.26):
Bugfixes & Performance Improvements
Uninstalling service menu items from Dolphin now works for services menus that have any symlinks in their sets of installed files (Christian Hartmann, Dolphin 22.08)
In the Plasma Wayland session, Plasma no longer immediately crashes right after login when you have an external screen connected in “switch to external screen” mode (someone amazing but probably Vlad, Xaver, or Marco; Plasma 5.25)
The System Tray popup no longer sometimes fails to open after you click on the Notifications icon in the hidden view (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.25)
KWin’s “Zoom” effect now works while you’re in the Overview effect and no longer causes glitches when you zoom into a part of the screen that contains a Plasma widget with a blurred background (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.25)
Closing the password prompt without entering a password on System Settings’ “Login Screen (SDDM)” page no longer shows a blank error message (Someone going by the pseudonym “oioi 555”, Plasma 5.25)
Multi-line inline messages throughout QtQuick-based software no longer fail to display their text properly under certain circumstances (Ismael Asensio, Frameworks 5.95)
When viewing files in the trash, the process of generating previews for the ones that don’t already have previews no longer results in the files being copied to /tmp (Méven Car, Frameworks 5.95)
In Konsole, the “Get new Color Schemes” window once again works properly (David Edmundson and Alexander Lohnau, Frameworks 5.95, but distros should be backporting it sooner)
User Interface Improvements
In Dolphin’s Details view, when you right-click on an empty part of the view, the row under the cursor will visibly become unselected and pasting files will now paste into the currently visible view, rather than the folder for the row that was right-clicked (Felix Ernst, Dolphin 22.04.2)
The “Eject” button next to mounted disks in Dolphin’s Places panel no longer appears for internal disks and those manually added to your etc/fstab file (Kai Uwe Broulik, Dolphin 22.08)
When you use Spectacle to copy an image to the clipboard, the notification it sends no longer confusingly talks about saving things (Felipe Kinoshita, Spectacle 22.08)
When Okteta (a KDE hex editor app) is installed, previewing files with Ark no longer opens Okteta unless they are actually binary files (Nicolas Fella, Ark 22.08)
Discover now displays a more actionable and relevant error message when you launch it without any app backends available, including a special message tailored specifically for Arch Linux (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.25):
The “None” entry in System Settings’ Splash Screen page is now always listed last (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.25)
You can now close Discover while software is being installed, removed, or updates, and it will turn into a system progress notification (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.26):
Description text in the “Get new [thing]” windows is now selectable and copyable (Fushan Wen, Frameworks 5.95)
You can now convert from teaspoons and tablespoons if you only need to know the equivalent of a single one, and also to and from “sq m”, “sq km” and other common abbreviations (Ahmad Samir, and me: Nate Graham Frameworks 5.95)
…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! Also, check out the list of Plasma 5.25 beta bugs; those are also important.
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