This week in KDE: Wayland by default, de-framed Breeze, HDR games, rectangle screen recording

Saturday, 11 November 2023 | Nate Graham

Yep you read that right, we’ve decided to throw the lever and go Wayland by default! The three remaining showstoppers are in the process of being fixed and we expect them to be done soon–certainly before the final release of Plasma 6. So we wanted to make the change early to gather as much feedback as possible.

But that’s not all, of course. This was another big week! Read on to see the rest:

Plasma 6

(Includes all software to be released on the February 28th mega-release: Plasma 6, Frameworks 6, and apps from Gear 24.02)

General info – Open issues: 118

The Breeze app style has gotten the visual overhaul you’ve all dreamed of: no more frames within frames! Instead Breeze-themed apps adopt the clean design of modern Kirigami apps, with views separated from one another with single-pixel lines! (Carl Schwan, link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5, link 6, link 7, link 8, link 9, and link 10):

In the Plasma Wayland session, there’s now preliminary support for playing HDR-capable games when using an HDR-capable screen! (Xaver Hugl, link)

Spectacle has gained support for rectangular region screen recording! (Noah Davis, link)

System Settings’ Printers page has gotten a major overhaul and now includes the features internally that it used to direct you to external apps for. The result is much nicer and more integrated, without a cascading soup of dialog windows (Mike Noe, link):

The Plasma Panel settings have been redesigned again, and this time everything is in one dialog; no more nested sub-menus! This work fixed 14 open bug reports (Niccolò Venerandi and Marco Martin, link 1 and link 2):

Ark is now significantly faster to compress files using xz and zstd compression, as they are now multi-threaded (Zhangzhi Hu, link)

When you run Flatpak apps, they’ll no longer prompt you to approve or deny “background activity”; the whole concept of this has been removed as it was kinda sus and not useful at all (David Edmundson, link)

There’s now a simple setting to disable notification sounds systemwide, for those of you who don’t like them (Ismael Asensio, link 1, link 2, and link 3):

Improved Plasma’s start time rather significantly–up to a few whole seconds (Harald Sitter, link)

The double-click speed setting returns, and now lives on System Settings’ General Behavior page. Before you ask why it’s not on the mouse Page, it’s because it affects touchpads too and that has its own page, and duplicating the setting on both pages seemed messy and ugly (Nicolas Fella, link)

Syncing your Plasma settings to SDDM now also syncs your desired NumLock state on boot (Chandradeep Dey, link)

In QtWidgets-based apps, you can open the context menu for the selected thing with the Shift+F10 shortcut (Felix Ernst, link 1 and link 2)

You can now open System Monitor with the Meta+Escape shortcut (Arjen Hiemstra, link)

Significant Bugfixes

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

Fixed a wide variety of multi-screen issues related to screens sometimes not turning on at the right times or becoming visually frozen until going to another VT and back (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.0. Link)

Fixed a bug that could cause desktop icon positions to be mis-remembered, especially if the system has ever had multiple screens connected (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.27.10. Link)

Fixed a bug that could cause Night Color to start transitioning to night mode at inappropriate times when using a certain combination of settings (Sanjay Swain, Plasma 5.27.10. Link)

Just in case you have a window that fails to set a minimum size, KWin no longer lets you resize it to a width of zero pixels, whereupon it would become invisible and impossible to find (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.0. Link)

In the “Get new [thing]” dialogs, items’ full descriptions are now visible, instead of getting cut off at some point (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 6.0. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

Automation & Systematization

Added a GUI test to make sure that Panel Edit Mode can be entered (Fushan Wen, link)

Added some GUI tests for functionality of the wallpaper chooser dialog (Fushan Wen, link)

Added some GUI tests for KRunner’s plugins and their presence in the relevant System Settings page (Fushan Wen, 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

We’re hosting our Plasma 6 fundraiser right now and need your help! Thanks to you we’re past the 60% mark, but we’re not there yet! So if you like the work we’re doing, spreading the wealth is a great way to share the love. 🙂

If you’re a developer, work on Qt6/KF6/Plasma 6 issues! Which issues? These issues. Plasma 6 is usable for daily driving now, but still in need of bug-fixing and polishing to get it into a releasable state by February.

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!