This week in Usability & Productivity, part 49

There’s big news in Usability & Productivity : Firefox 64 can now use native KDE open/save dialogs! This is optional, bleeding-edge functionality so no distros ship with it yet, but it’s pretty simple to enable yourself:

1. Make sure you’re using Firefox 64
2. Install the xdg-desktop-portal and xdg-desktop-portal-kde packages
3. Set GTK_USE_PORTAL=1 somewhere in your environment. Putting it in Firefox’s Desktop file works. Here’s how: https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/a5cxwk/firefox_v64_can_now_use_the_kde_file_selection/ebmemp1/

Once you do this, Firefox should use native KDE open/save dialogs! Please give this a shot and test it out so bugs ( like the empty filename field ) can be found and fixed, which will make distros more likely to turn it on automatically. On that subject, I’ve filed tickets to get this integrated by default for Kubuntu and Manjaro .

Of course that’s not all: a lot of improvements have been made to Discover, Plasma, and, heck, all over the place!

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• Plasma no longer crashes when clicking on the clipboard dialog’s “Disable this Popup” button (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.14.5)
• In Discover, when viewing a Snap app’s available channels, the version of the app available in each channel is now displayed (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.14.5)
• Discover’s app progress detail view no longer visually changes when you hover the mouse over a task, because nothing happens when you click on it (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.14.5)
• In Ubuntu-based distros, Discover now respects the system’s user-configurable check-for-updates frequency setting (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.14.5)
• Discover no longer futilely offers to show dependencies for locally-downloaded packages (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.14.5)
• Discover once again shows a Cancel button in its toolbar when an app is in the middle of installing (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• Discover now displays the correct set of information for locally-downloaded Flatpak packages that have fetchable metadata (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• Discover no longer crashes when uninstalling multiple apps in rapid succession (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• Fixed a weird bug in Discover that could cause the Featured list to lose entries after installing an app when multiple backends and sources are configured (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• In System Settings, it’s once again possible to set a font DPI lower than 96 (David Edmundson, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• When a dialog window is open and its parent window is minimized, the dialog window now gets minimized too (Vlad Zagorodniy, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• In Discover and other Kirigami-based apps, scrollable views’ scrollbars no longer overlap the content and no longer unexpectedly scroll to the top under certain circumstances (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Frameworks 5.54)
• The context menu for Trash icons on the desktop once again shows the “Empty Trash” menu item (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Frameworks 5.54)
• Drop-down menus in QML-and-Kirigami-based apps no longer have background highlights that are sometimes too short (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Frameworks 5.54)
• SQLite files now get appropriate icons (me: Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.54):
  

User Interface Improvements

• While in Panel Edit Mode, it’s now a bit easier to figure out how to move a panel : the cursor changes to a more appropriate icon when hovered over the Screen Edge button, and when you click on it instead of dragging it, a helpful tooltip appears letting you know what to do (Björn Feber, KDE Plasma 5.15.0):
  
• The button on a panel that allows you to enter Panel Edit Mode and configure your panel now uses the standard “Configure” icon, instead of a hamburger menu icon (Björn Feber, KDE Plasma 5.15.0):
  
• The context menu for desktop icons is now identical to Dolphin’s (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.15.0):
  Folder view on the left, Dolphin on the right
• Improved the user interface of the list view in the Desktop Effects System Settings page in various ways (Björn Feber, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• Discover now remembers your preferred sort order on the search results and Installed pages (KDE Plasma 5.15.0, Alex Pol Gonzalez)
• Discover’s Sources page now has a better interaction model : the list items are no longer uselessly clickable, and items that can be somehow interacted with have inline buttons (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.15.0):
  

Next week, your name could be in this list! Not sure how? Just ask! I’ve helped mentor a number of new contributors recently and I’d love to help you, too! You can also check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved , and find out how you can help be a part of something that really matters. You don’t have to already be a programmer. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

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 .