KDE Usability & Productivity: Week 69

It’s time for your weekly dose of KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative!

But first, I want to draw everyone’s attention to our Plasma 5.16 wallpaper competition . In addition to getting their wallpaper used as the default background for millions of users of KDE Plasma 5.16, the winner also receives a Slimbook One computer! So what are you waiting for!? Go and submit an awesome wallpaper! Here are the rules . If you’re looking for inspiration, check out the last six wallpapers :

Anyway, here’s the Usability & Productivity work:

New Features

• The System Tray now shows a microphone icon to notify you when some app is using the microphone (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
  
• The Skanlite scanning app received High DPI support (Alexander Volkov, Skanlite 2.2)
• You can now easily switch all playing audio streams to a different device (Valerio Pilo, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
  

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• Discover and the Get New [thing] dialogs now show a placeholder image instead of a big ugly blank white square for items that have no screenshots (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, fixed right now on the server)
• The Baloo file indexing service no longer crashes while trying to index malformed JPEG files or .spx files containing GIS data (Alexander Stippich and Stefan Brüns, KDE Frameworks 5.58)
• Symlinks to programs with no icons of their own now have a default icon (Harald Sitter, KDE Frameworks 5.58):
  
• Fixed a bug that could cause wireless networks to disappear from the network list after a failed connection (Oleg Solovyov, KDE Plasma 5.15.5)
• The KWin window manager now correctly displays emojis in window titlebars (Vlad Zagorodniy, KDE Plasma 5.15.5):
  
• Discover no longer tries to translate keyboard shortcuts (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
• Discover now correctly lists all available Flatpak runtime updates on the Updates page (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
• KInfoCenter now shows the correct amount of memory on 32-bit systems (Christoph Feck, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
• Fixed an issue on Wayland that could cause blur in menus to become un-blurred the second time the menu is opened (David Edmundson, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
• The KWin window manager no longer crashes when compositing is turned off and the current window is closed while selected in the alt-tab interface (Vlad Zagorodniy, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
• Assigning tags to files on the desktop no longer results in the creation of new tags with the wrong name (Stefan Brüns, KDE Applications 19.04.1)
• Invitation emails in KMail are no longer deleted after replying to them (Allen Winter, KDE Applications 19.08.0)

User Interface Improvements

• It’s now possible to switch between normal input move and vi input mode using the status bar in Kate and other KTextEditor-based apps, like KDevelop (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Frameworks 5.57):
  
• It’s now possible to quickly switch the “Show Desktop” widget for “Minimize all” (if you prefer that behavior instead), by right-clicking on it and clicking “Alternatives” (Björn Feber, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
  
• The Virtual Desktop/Activity pager’s label is now more legible when a Virtual Desktop or Activity has a lot of open windows (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
  
• The Plasma network configuration window no longer lets you try to enter a password that cannot possibly be correct for the given network connection –such as a password for a WPA-PSK protected wifi network with less than 8 characters (Oleg Solovyov, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
• When searching for the “Log Out” command using the Kickoff Application Launcher’s built-in search feature, it’s now the top entry (Björn Feber, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
• Refined the System Settings Window Decorations page’s drag-and-drop user interface (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
  
• On Plasma widgets’ “Keyboard Shortcuts” settings page, the “remove shortcut” button is now the same height as the “assign shortcut” button , and the explanatory text is simpler and clearer (Filip Fila and me: Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.58 and KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
  

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 you find KDE software useful, consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation .