Features and User Interface Improvements – Adventures in Linux and KDE

After last week’s bug marathon, this week we focused more on features and UI improvements, some of which were driven by HIG, as I wrote yesterday. But we also managed to reduce bugs! Everything is going well, I think.

Notable New Features

Konsole gained a feature to automatically save all output from a terminal view to a file in real time (Theodore Wang, Konsole 24.12.0. Link):

Distributors can now customize the default set of favorite apps shared between Kickoff, Kicker and Application Dashboard (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

The Information Center has a new page with technical information about memory (Thomas Duckworth, Plasma 6.2.0. Link):

Notable user interface improvements

When asking KWin to open a window whose minimum height is always greater than the screen, it no longer places it with the title bar cut off at the top, which would make it impossible to move without knowing the minimum height. Meta+drag feature. Instead, KWin will make sure the title bar is visible and position the window so that only the content at the bottom is cut off (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.1.4. Link)

Refined how KRunner matches text to system settings pages, so it will be less aggressive in showing them to you for search text with very weak matching (Fabian Vogt, Plasma 6.1.4. Link)

Plasma’s digital clock now asks for “tabular digits” in case the active font has this feature as an option but is disabled by default. This ensures that all numeric characters are a fixed width so that the time display does not jump around throughout the day (Calum Smith, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

The Graphics Tablet page in System Settings now tells you when your tablet doesn’t support orientation switching, so you don’t think it’s our fault (Joshua Goins, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

I made a series of UI tweaks to the KWin Rules page of System Settings, which also fixed a bug with weird scrolling behavior (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

The Plasma logout screen fade-to-black effect animation speed now reacts instantly to changes in the overall animation speed, and the technical change to make this possible also fixed a performance issue with the animation (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.2.0. Link 1 and Link 2)

Improved accessibility of the ContextualHelpButton And KeySequenceItem library components, as well as several controls on the System Settings Shortcuts page (Christoph Wolk, Frameworks 6.5 and Plasma 6.2.0. Link 1, Link 2 and Link 3)

In Dolphin’s Visible Places panels, Open/Save dialogs, and many other places, items now display tooltips with relevant information when hovered over. This feature is only enabled when built with Qt 6.8, as versions 6.7 and earlier suffer from a bug that prevents it from working properly (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 6.5. Link)

Notable bug fixes

Discover no longer crashes on distributions built with assertions enabled (like Neon) when run with a language where categories have been mistranslated and overlap (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.1.4. Link)

After changing the current system timezone in system settings and quitting the app, it now closes properly, no longer secretly remaining open in the background as a zombie and preventing you from opening it again (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 6.1.4. Link)

Moving screenshots and other files from Plasma notifications to Chromium-based apps (Chrome, Discord, etc.) now works as expected (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.1.4. Link)

Fixed a bug in the free space notifier that caused it to report nearly full partitions that are read-only, as on immutable OS style distributions like Fedora Kinoite (Timothée Ravier, Plasma 6.1.4. Link)

I found and fixed the source of the issue where KWin’s new triple buffering feature was sometimes causing stuttering instead of the expected smooth animations (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.1.4. Link)

Fixed a recent regression that caused multi-row Task Manager widgets to take up too much space on Plasma panels using the “Fit to Content” size mode (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 6.1.4. Link)

Fixed an issue in KWin that caused native Wayland applications to receive incorrect information about the order in which modifier keys were pressed (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

The “Click on the track to scroll one page at a time” feature — which no longer worked in Frameworks 6.0 due to changes in Qt — works again (Ivan Tkachenko, Frameworks 6.5. Link)

Other bug information to note:

Outstanding in terms of performance and technique

Sticky Keys feature “Disable when two keys are held down” now works on Wayland (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Discover now natively supports installing and updating packages for PostmarketOS (Alexey Min and Davin Lin, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Following an evaluation by the SUSE Security Team, we have implemented a security enhancement that allows KAuth to use file descriptors instead of file paths, and have implemented support for this feature on the System Settings login screen page (Athul Raj Kollareth, Frameworks 6.5 and Plasma 6.2.0. Link 1 and Link 2)

Correction of the source of the findInCache with a lastModified timestamp of 0 is deprecated log spam, especially on immutable OS style distributions like Fedora Kinoite (Timothée Ravier, Frameworks 6.5. Link)

Outstanding in automation and systematization

In Elisa, a test to restart the file indexer was added, a perpetually broken test was fixed, and the “tests must pass” feature was enabled to ensure that tests do not break in the future (Jack Hill, link)

…And all the rest

This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! If you want to know more, check out https://planet.kde.org, where you can find more information from other KDE contributors.

How you can help

If you have multiple systems or an adventurous personality, you can really help us out by installing Plasma betas using your distribution’s available repositories and reporting bugs. Arch, Fedora, and openSUSE Tumbleweed are examples of distributions that are great for this purpose. So please give the Plasma betas a try. It really helps us out! If you’re very adventurous, live on the nightly repositories. I’ve been doing this full-time for 5 years with my one computer and it’s surprisingly stable.

Sounds too scary? Consider donating today instead! It helps too.

Otherwise, visit https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to find out more ways to be part of a project that really matters. Every contributor makes a huge difference in KDE; you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You also don’t need to be a programmer already. I wasn’t when I started. Give it a try, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!