2025 15-Minute Bug Initiative update

Wednesday, 26 March 2025  |  Nate Graham

It’s been several years since I announced Plasma’s 15-minute bug initiative, and you can see the weekly numbers in every week’s “This Week in Plasma” post. Today I thought I’d share a high-level recap of where we’re at as of the first quarter of 2025.

In short: really good. We dipped below 20 bugs for the first time today, with the number currently standing at 19! This is good progress; it was at 32 during last year’s update.

But wait a minute… 13 bugs in a year? That actually sounds pretty pathetic.

Well here’s the thing: we’re adding more bugs to the list all the time. So it’s basically a “oh wow, we’d better fix this soon before people notice it” list, and newly-discovered significant issues in git master are commonly marked as HI priority and fixed before they reach users — otherwise known as “QA”. 🙂

Last year, the total number of lifetime fixed 15-minute bugs was 231. Today, it’s 413. So actually, we fixed 182 15-minute bugs in the past year or so, and reduced the total number of outstanding 15-minute bugs by 13. With only 19 left, that means we’ve fixed over 95% of all 15-minute bugs ever!

If you look at the remaining bugs, some patterns emerge:

  • Hardware-specific issues (e.g. only certain ASUS laptops, or only certain screens)
  • Use of common though non-default settings (e.g. changing the scroll speed, hiding tray icons of Electron-based apps)
  • Intensive use of the system (e.g. filling the entire panel up with icons-only Task Manager icons, docking and un-docking a laptop to an external screen with carefully-curated window arrangements)
  • Random and unreproducible crashes (if they were reproducible, they’d have been fixed ages ago!)
  • And some egregious bugs that just need to be fixed! (we’re working on them)

How you can help

As always, help work on the existing 15-minute bugs if you can! If not, it’s always useful to work on bug triaging, so that more of those issues that will eventually become 15-minute bugs can get discovered earlier. Another impactful way is to donate to KDE e.V., the nonprofit that supports KDE on a ridiculously small budget. Prior donations have allowed KDE e.V. to recently start the process of hiring a Plasma developer, so it’s not a black hole!