This week in Usability & Productivity, part 24

After a light week, we’re now roaring back with a veritable avalanche of Usability and Productivity! Look at all this cool stuff:

New Features

• Discover now shows the release date for apps that have defined this information in their AppStream metadata (Aleix Pol and me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.14.0):
  
• After sharing an image with Imgur in Spectacle, the shared image link is automatically copied to the clipboard (me: Nate Graham, KDE Applications 18.08.0):
  
• Kate (and other apps using the KTextEditor framework) can now be configured to show a file’s total number of lines in the status bar (Shubham Jangra and Christoph Cullmann, KDE Frameworks 5.48)

Bugfixes

• The Network widget no longer has inappropriately large icons with certain themes in Plasma 5.13 (Jan Grulich, KDE Plasma 5.13.1)
• The new blur effect now works properly on Wayland when scaling is used and on secondary screens (Alex Nemeth, KDE Plasma 5.13.1)
• Copying from GTK applications to non-GTK applications on Wayland now works (Michal Srb, KDE Plasma 5.14.0)
• Fixed a case where Plasma could crash on login (David Edmundson, KDE Plasma 5.13.1)
• Fixed several crashes and hangs in Discover (Apeix Pol, KDE Plasma 5.12.6)
• Discover’s update notifier plasmoid now lists the correct number of total updates when some of them are security updates (Chris Holland, KDE Plasma 5.12.6)
• When multiple version of a KDE Plasma or app add-on are available, Discover now installs the latest one instead of a random one (Aleix Pol, KDE Plasma 5.12.3)
• Fixed a huge amount of bugs affecting Task Manager preview tooltips , including a lack of thumbnails for the tooltip of a running app’s second window , A window’s first tooltip being too wide , a window’s tooltip being too wide when Plasma is just started , and apps with multiple windows showing an extra tooltip after Plasma is restarted (Eike Hein, KDE Plasma 5.13.1). Thanks Eike!
• The “Minimize All” widget now behaves correctly when a single window is subsequently un-minimized (David Edmundson and Anthony Fieroni, KDE Plasma 5.13.1)
• Discover’s progress indicator is now more accurate when installing a single application (Aleix Pol, KDE Plasma 5.12.6)

UI Polish & Improvement

• It’s now possible to turn off the sliding wallpaper feature for the new “Switch Virtual Desktops” effect, and the “slide docks” feature is now off by default (Vlad Zagorodniy, KDE Plasma 5.14)
• On the System Settings Fonts page, the “to” label is now disabled when the controls on either side of it are also disabled (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.13.2)
• Discover’s Reviews section on the app page is now better laid out and allows you to write a review without having to open the review pop-up (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.14.0):
  
• The page for KDE Plasma and app add-ons now shows a donation link (Aleix Pol, KDE Plasma 5.13.2)
• All text in the Properties window is now selectable (me: Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.48):
  
• The permissions dialog now uses more user-friendly text for the different read and write states (me: Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.48):
  
• Moved Dolphin’s General settings page to the top so it now matches other KDE Applications and it’s the first thing you see when you open the Settings window (me: Nate Graham, KDE Applications 18.08.0):
  

See all the names of people who worked hard to make the computing world a better place? That could be you next week! Getting involved isn’t all that tough, and there’s lots of support available. Give it a try today ! It’s easy and fun and important.

If my efforts to perform, guide, and document this work seem useful and you’d like to see more of them, then consider becoming a patron on Patreon , LiberaPay , or PayPal . Also consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation .