This week in KDE: polishing up Plasma 5.19

This week we plunged into fixing issues in Plasma 5.19 that slipped through QA as well as some older ones–a truly enormous number in all! We are taking to heart your pleas to focus on stability and polish. But of course we also worked on some new features too, because we can walk and chew bubblegum at the same time!

New Features

Spectacle’s timer feature and Shift+Printscreen (take full screen screenshot) and Meta+Shift+Printscreen (take rectangular region screenshot) shortcuts now work on Wayland (Méven Car, Plasma 5.20 and Spectacle 20.08.0)

Yakuake now shows a system tray item when running (which is optionally hide-able of course), so it’s easier to tell that it’s running and so that there’s a graphical way to summon (Maximillian Schiller, Yakuake 20.08.0)

It’s now possible to perform searches in a new private/incognito window using KRunner’s web shortcuts (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.20)

KRunner’s web shortcuts runner now includes a module for searching the Arch wiki ; search for “arch: foobar” in KRunner to try it out! (Alexander Lohnau, Frameworks 5.72)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Okular’s form-filling feature now works more reliably for certain forms using JavaScript (Albert Astals Cid, Okular 1.10.3)

Apps removed from the favorites list shared across Kickoff, Kicker, and Application Dashboard now always stay removed after you reboot (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.18.7)

Fix Plasma 5.19 regression: the Battery & Brightness applet now appears in the system tray again (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.19.1)

Fix Plasma 5.19 regression: The System Tray battery icon is no longer vertically mis-aligned when not showing the battery percentage (Michail Vourlakos, Plasma 5.19.1)

Fix Plasma 5.19 regression: System Tray icons set to “always show” are now always shown (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.19.1)

Fix Plasma 5.19 regression: resolved various display issues with the new Hard Disk monitor (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.19.1)

The Kicker Application Menu no longer suffers from a visual glitch whereby the search results list is too small when there are a lot of favorite items (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.19.1)

Copying system information to the clipboard no longer includes trailing spaces and newlines (Claudius Ellsel, Plasma 5.19.1)

System Settings no longer crashes when you visit the Thunderbolt page and then switch to another page (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.19.1)

Fix Plasma 5.19 regression: the Screen Edges effects now works again (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.19.2)

Fix Plasma 5.19 regression: the “Configure Window Manager” menu item from the titlebar context menu now works again (Méven Car, Plasma 5.19.2)

Fix Plasma 5.19 regression: WiFi network names in the Networks applet no longer interpret HTML, preventing maliciously-crafted network names from doing potentially nefarious things (me: Nate Graham, 5.19.2

Fix Plasma 5.19 regression: the Global Menu applet once again updates itself correctly when the current application changes (Carson Black, Plasma 5.19.2)

Fix Plasma 5.19 regression: KRunner’s window is once again positioned correctly when using a high DPI screen and the PLASMA_USE_QT_SCALING=1 environment variable (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.19.2)

Fix Plasma 5.19 regression: there is no longer a faint blue outline around the circular timeout indicator for notification pop-ups (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.19.2)

Interacting with the media controls on the lock screen will now pause the timer that determines when the UI fades out (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.19.2)

Copying system information to the clipboard in English now actually uses English for everything (Claudius Ellsel, Plasma 5.19.2)

The search feature in the new System Monitor configuration pages now works (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.19.2)

The circular timeout indicator in notification popups no longer leaves a faint blue outline around the outside edges as it rotates (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.19.2)

Picture of The Day wallpapers now work on the lock screen (Yunhe Guo, Plasma 5.20)

Fix Plasma 5.19 regression: Placeholder messages in Plasma applets now respect the Plasma style and color scheme (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.20, though I have asked distros to backport it to 5.19 )

Fix Plasma 5.19 regression: After entering the password for a Wi-Fi network in the networks applet, you’re no longer pointlessly asked for the same password again in a dialog box (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.20, though I have asked distros to backport it to 5.19 )

The Plasma panel no longer appears on top of full screen apps and views when on Wayland (somebody awesome, Plasma 5.20)

The trash now automatically purges its records for files that are deleted by hand, preventing a situation where the whole system would freeze because it was trying in vain to collect information about files that no longer existed (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.72)

Monochrome icons in QML-based software are no longer often subtly blurry (Noah Davis, Frameworks 5.72)

Clicking on the scrollbar in certain scrollable Kirigami sheets no longer unexpectedly closes the sheet (Ismael Asensio, Frameworks 5.72)

Setting a default web shortcut now works (Alexander Lohnau, Frameworks 5.72)

The legal notice in KHelpCenter is now readable no matter what color scheme you’re using (Yuri Chornoivan, Frameworks 5.72)

Fixed a graphical glitch that could cause notification pop-ups’ timeout indicators to be drawn as a black square on old graphics hardware (Yaroslav Sidlovsky, Frameworks 5.72)

User Interface Improvements

Dolphin now displays remote shares and FUSE mounts with their user-friendly display name rather than the full path (Méven Car, Dolphin 20.08.0)

The new System Monitor widgets now have more sane default sizes (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.19.2)

System Tray items now respect Fitts’ Law ; you can activate on the nearest applet when clicking on the pixel adjacent to the screen edge, making the click target effectively infinite in that direction (Michail Vourlakos, Plasma 5.20)

The Plasma audio applet and System Settings page now filter out unused audio devices by default to avoid cluttering up the view . You can however still show them if you’d like (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.20):

Discover now shows you when an application listed in the search or browse list comes from a different source than your default source (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.20):

The layout of the Digital Clock widget’s calendar pop-up has been refined and streamlined in response to user feedback (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.20):

Shadows for pop-ups in GTK3 apps using the Breeze-GTK theme now better match the shadows in Qt-based apps (Somebody going by the pseudonym “Toluschr,” Plasma 5.20)

The Web Shortcuts window now has a sane default size when opened from the System Settings Krunner page (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.20)

The “Switch Application Language.. “menu item has been relocated from the Help menu to the Settings menu and renamed to “Configure Language…” to match the style of other items in that menu (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.72):

How You Can Help

Have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover ways to help 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!

Finally, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation .