This week in KDE: power management galore
This was a big week for backend work, especially on the subject of power management and energy efficiency!
Plasma 6
General info – Open issues: 81
New Features
Welcome Center’s first page can now be customized by distros–or for that matter, by users (me: Nate Graham, link)
User Interface Improvements
The KDE desktop portal implementation now supports the new cross-desktop accent color standard (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27.8 Link)
The separator line between the titlebar/toolbar area in KDE apps and the content below it is now drawn at the correct stroke weight with a high DPI screen (Carl Schwan, Plasma 5.27.8. Link)
KRunner-powered searches now only show you sleep modes that are actually supported by the system, and you can also now find them by searching for the word “power” (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 6.0. Link 1 and link 2)
After the work done last week to improve cursor responsiveness and lower power usage in the Plasma wayland session… we did some more! (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.0. Link)
The notifications about low and critically low battery power are now worded in a shorter and clearer way (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.0. Link)
The Lock/Logout widget no longer changes in height when configured to only show one item (Yannick, Plasma 6.0. Link)
Improved the keyboard navigation and accessibility properties of Discover’s Reviews viewer and entry page (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 6.0. Link 1 and link 2)
Other Significant Bugfixes
(This is a curated list of e.g. HI and VHI priority bugs, Wayland showstoppers, major regressions, etc.)
Fixed a glitch in Dolphin that could cause the view to not display the correct files after clearing the text entered in the search field (Amol Godbole, Dolphin 24.02. Link)
When run in a VM, Plasma now disables auto-suspend as this can sometimes cause the VM to hang (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 5.27.8. Link)
Hybrid Sleep now actually works (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 5.27.8. Link)
System Settings’ Accessibility page no longer erroneously asks you to save your changes when you leave it without having actually made any changes (Jürgen Dev, Plasma 5.27.8. Link)
The Baloo file indexing service no longer re-indexes everything after every reboot when using the Btrfs filesystem (Tomáš Trnka, Frameworks 6.0. Link)
The file dialog is once again capable of saving to files with quotes in their names (Andreas Bontozoglou, Frameworks 6.0. Link)
In various QtWidgets-based apps, star ratings are no longer inaccurate when using icon themes that lack the rating-unrated icon (Felix Ernst, Frameworks 6.0. Link)
Other bug-related information of interest:
- 4 Very high priority Plasma bugs (up from 3 last week). Current list of bugs
- 58 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 57 last week). Current list of bugs
- 110 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed this week. Full list of bugs
Automation & Systematization
Improved some autotests in Plasma and KPipeWire (Fushan Wen and David Edmundson, link 1 and link 2)
…And everything else
This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! 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, work on Qt6/KF6/Plasma 6 issues! Plasma 6 is usable for daily driving now, but still in need of bugfixing and polishing to get it into a releaseable state by the end of the year.
Otherwise, visit https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover other 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!
And finally, KDE can’t work without financial support, so consider making a donation today! This stuff ain’t cheap and KDE e.V. has ambitious hiring goals. We can’t meet them without your generous donations!