This week in KDE: more Plasma 6 dev

Saturday, 16 September 2023 | Nate Graham

This week it was pretty much all Plasma 6 all the time. With the release date four and a half months away, work is kicking into high gear to make sure that we hit our deadline!

Plasma 6

General info – Open issues: 87

Made even more cursor responsiveness improvements for the Plasma Wayland session! The cursor is really very responsive now 🙂 (Xaver Hugl, link)

This work as also substantially improved latency in general, especially for games (Xaver Hugl, link)

Kickoff now has an option to move its sidebar over to the other side of the main view. This has better Fitts’ Law adherence and zero risk of accidental category switching if you use the mouse pointer to activate Kickoff and launch Favorites more often than you activate it with the Meta key or switch categories (Forest Ix, link)

The default keyboard shortcut used to open the Activity Switcher has been changed to Meta+A, so that its prior shortcut Meta+Tab can be used some something else, which is coming soon… (Niccolò Venerandi, link)

When you have Powerdevil configured to hibernate after a period of sleep, invoking sleep using KRunner now respects that preference and hibernates at the appropriate time (Natalie Clarius, link)

Sped up the launch time of Plasma and QtQuick-based KDE apps by loading the mobile text editing toolbar on demand, rather than always (Fushan Wen, link 1 and link 2)

fstab-mounted NFS drives no longer produce duplicate items in the Places panel of various KDE apps and the open/save dialog (MĂ©ven Car, link)

Discover now shows release data for SteamOS system updates in a prettier and more comprehensible way (Jeremy Whiting, link)

Discover’s “About” page now uses the newer and more attractive FormCard style (Carl Schwan, link):

A variety of QtWidgets-based dialog windows that have menubars or toolbars now use the common unified header style that KDE’s app windows use (Carl Schwan, link):

Created a new standard component: Kirigami.InlineViewHeader, and ported a bunch of list and grid views to use it (me: Nate Graham, link):

The “Upgrade your distro now” notification message is no longer radioactive (Oliver Beard, link)

Other Significant Bugfixes

(This is a curated list of e.g. HI and VHI priority bugs, Wayland showstoppers, major regressions, etc.)

Spectacle now takes Rectangular Region screenshots correctly when you’re using any screen scale factors less than 100% (Noah Davis, Spectacle 24.02.0. Link 1 and link 2)

Fixed a case where the touchpad daemon could randomly crash (Gabriel Souza Franco and Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27.8. Link)

Fixed a rare case where KWin would crash in the Plasma Wayland session when waking from sleep (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.27.9. Link)

The Alt+Tab window switcher is now fully accessible via the standard Orca screen reader in the Plasma Wayland session (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27.9. Link)

While updating a lot of Flatpak apps at the same time, discover can no longer exhaust the system’s set of available file handles and then fail (Discover 5.27.9. Link)

Automatically turning off the keyboard backlight when on battery power now works, if you’ve configured it to do this (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 6.0. Link)

Fixed a bug that could cause KIO-using apps to crash when trying to overwrite a file under certain circumstances (Kevin Ottens, Frameworks 5.111. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

Automation & Systematization

Added autotests for KHamburgerMenu (Felix Ernst, link)

Added more autotests for window placement in KWin (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Fixed a flaky autotest for the Task Manager in Plasma, and also expanded it to cover more things (Fushan Wen, link)

Fixed a flaky autotest in KIO (MĂ©ven Car, link)

…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!