This week in KDE: endless bugfixing

One of the challenges of such a sprawling software catalog that allows such extensive customizability is, well, bugginess. More code and more options means more bugs. So the bugfixing is a never-ending challenge, and it’s what we focused on this week! Not only do we work on fixing bugs, but there’s also a lot of exciting work going on in the background to unify various codebases, use of more shared code, and adopt common frameworks, both for backends and user interfaces. It’s not very glamorous work, but you’ll see the impact in reduced bugginess going forward!

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• When using the “Show Containing Folder” action present in many KDE apps, the item is now correctly highlighted if the folder containing it was already visible in an existing Dolphin window (Alexander Saoutkin, Dolphin 19.12.3)
• Fixed a visual glitch in Okular’s rendering of thumbnails while scrolling (Albert Astals Cid, Okular 19.12.3
• Okular now correctly renders rotated images in comic book files (Albert Astals Cid, Okular 20.04.0)
• Dolphin’s Samba support now works with IPv6 addresses (Harald Sitter, Dolphin 20.04.0
• Fixed a common Plasma crash when adding or removing widgets (Aleksei Nikiforov, Plasma 5.18.3)
• The System Settings Audio page no longer has an unnecessary bottom scrollbar and now looks fine when using a fractional scale factor (George Vogiatzis, Plasma 5.18.3)
• Changing the titlebar button order now applies that change to running GTK3 apps immediately (Mikhail Zolotukhin, Plasma 5.18.3)
• Throughout KDE apps, text in the user interface which is supposed to be bold is now rendered in bold as intended (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.68)
• The “Run in Terminal” option now works when using Wayland and Konsole is the default terminal emulator (Wolfgang Bauer, Frameworks 5.58
• Various icons in Plasma now better respect and reflect your color scheme (David Redondo, Frameworks 5.68)
• The Baloo file indexer now notices and re-indexes files that have been changed during the initial indexing process (Stefan Brüns, Frameworks 5.68)
• The new “Get new [thing]” window’s thumbnails view now works (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, Frameworks 5.68)

User Interface Improvements

• Elisa’s shuffle mode now visually re-arranges the songs in the playlist so you can see the shuffled order (Alexander Stippich, Elisa 20.04.0):
  http://s1.webmshare.com/Kx65b.webm
• For the Telegram app, we added a new monochrome system tray icon and refined the app icon to be more true to the original (Rocket Aaron, Frameworks 5.68):
  

How You Can Help

In Plasma 5.19, we really want to make a push on our Breeze Theme Evolution work. It’s proceeding, but would go faster with your help! There are tons and tons of mockups in the linked task and its child tasks, and what we really need at this point is people willing to help implement them. QML skills are helpful, and C++ is also useful for the needed work on the Breeze theme itself. If this sounds interesting to you, don’t be shy, step right up!

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 .