KJournald 26.04 Features

KDE Gears 26.04 hit beta phase just a few days ago, so it is time to give an update on the new features in KJournald.

For 26.04, the main release goal was to have a natural integration of systemd user services and system services in the log view workflow. This means:

• When opening a journald database on a system, from now on per default both the system and user service log records are opened and both will be displayed in a joint view. — If you do not like this, got to “Current Journal” -> “Limit Accessed Logs” and choose your preference. That configuration then is also stored persistently over several boots.

Revisiting the overall UI with this feature in mind, we need few more changes to really make it fly:

• User units often are templated systemd services. This means, there is a single service definition but multiple instances of the service template with different parameters can be created. Using the traditional way to list every unique service in the filter criteria view (left side view) makes the filtering hard to use due to the number of services. So, as a new (opt-out; enabled per default) feature, templated services are grouped. So, for example, all my “app-org.kde.dolphin@[…].service” services can be enabled/disabled at once in the filter view. In the service name hover-info in the log view however, they still are displayed as full service names.
• Typically, due to user units being user workflow specific, there are a lot of systemd services that are not started in every boot, because a user can control their startup individually. For this reason, services and executables are now being pre-filter according to the selected boot. Log priorities are not (yet) taken into account for this pre-filtering, but at least only useful filter entries are shown, which should be a major usability gain on its own.

If you interested in the features, try out the KDE Gears beta release or just install the latest nightly build of org.kde.kjournaldbrowser from the KDE Flatpak nightly CI.