This week in KDE: bug squashing and more

This week we continued fixing bugs in Plasma 5.17! We know that it was a bit buggier than the 5.16 release was, and we strive to do better. If you’d like to help out with this, please test our Plasma beta releases by switching to the unstable/beta testing repos in your rolling release distro of choice. For example, Arch and openSUSE Tumbleweed . Beta releases of KDE apps will show up in these repos as well. It’s super fun! Try it, you’ll like it!

New Features

• Dolphin now tells you what’s blocking unmounting a mounted volume (David Hallas, Dolphin 19.12.0):
  
• When importing photos, Gwenview no longer fails to import photos to paths containing slashes , and also now automatically creates folders as needed (Bard De Vries, Gwenview 19.12.0)
• The volume indicator icon on a Task Manager button can now be clicked to mute that audio source (Farid Boudedja and Bjöen Feber, Plasma 5.18.0):
  
• The weather widget can now show pressure in “millimeters of mercury” (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.18.0)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• Okular’s annotations now show times in your local time zone, not GMT (Oliver Sander, Okular 1.8.3)
• Dolphin’s embedded Konsole panel now recovers keyboard focus correctly after being closed and re-opened (Alex Miranda, Konsole 19.12.0)
• Konsole’s split view feature now respects the user’s preference to start or not to start in the current directory (Mariusz Glebocki, Konsole 19.12.0)
• We reverted the change to make checkboxes and radio buttons in GTK apps follow the colors in your color scheme . It ran afoul of a GTK bug that caused them to turn black when hovered over. We could not find a workaround for the GTK bug, so reverting the change was our only remaining option for the time being (Carson Black, Plasma 5.17.2)
• Fixed a common crash in System Settings when running on Wayland (Roman Gilg, Plasma 5.17.2)
• Random wallpaper slideshows are random again (oops, sorry about that) (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.17.2
• Discover can now cancel the installation of Snap apps without freezing (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.17.2)
• When Discover is run in another desktop environment, it no longer autostarts itself on login automatically , on the assumption that the other DE has its own update mechanism already (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.17.2)
• Discover now accepts URLs in the form “ appstream:[app] “ (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.17.2
• When using a color scheme that results in black text on the login and lock screens, the text no longer has a weird fuzzy black shadow behind it (Filip Fila, Plasma 5.17.2)
• The System Settings Virtual Desktops page no longer has a broken layout when using wordy languages like German or Brazilian Portuguese , and the Window Decorations page has a better default size when opened in a standalone window (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.17.2)
• KMenuEdit can once again apply changes that require creating a directory as a part of the save operation (Wolfgang Bauer, Plasma 5.17.2)
• The “bouncing app icon” animation played while launching apps is once again visible for people using the (default) “Resolution Independent” cursor size setting (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.17.3)
• The “Defaults” button in the System Settings Fonts page now works properly (Kevin Ottens, Plasma 5.18.0)
• Titles in non-multi-page System Settings pages that are written in QML no longer receive a background highlight when hovering the mouse over them (Marco Martin, Frameworks 5.64)

User Interface Improvements

• Dolphin’s extended search options view is now much more streamlined and space-efficient (Ismael Asensio, Dolphin 19.12.0):
  
• The Digital Clock settings window now shows an inline preview for the configured time format , which is especially useful when setting a custom format (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.18.0):
  
• The drawing tool icons have gotten a visual overhaul and are now more consistent with one another (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.64):
  
• Discover’s sidebar toolbar is now always at the top and doesn’t awkwardly scroll out of sight anymore (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.64):
  
• System Settings pages with multi-page navigation now display back and forward arrows in their headers to make navigation easier (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.64):
  http://s1.webmshare.com/AWWPN.webm

How You Can Help

I mentioned testing Beta releases earlier, but here’s something else! Do you like the idea of running a free software operating system made by KDE on your phone? I know I do. But did you know that KDE already has a mobile OS called Plasma Mobile? It’s real and it works and it needs your help to become mainstream! If this sounds like your cup of tea, check out https://www.plasma-mobile.org/findyourway/ . You can read the Plasma Mobile project’s weekly updates in a format similar to this one here: https://www.plasma-mobile.org/blog/

More generally, have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved and find out more 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 .