This week we announced a beta of the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.13 release, and so far the internet seems pretty excited about it. 🙂 But we’re nowhere near done, and here’s another week of Usability and Productivity enhancements to highlight:
New Features
- Discover now shows the download speed in the transactions overlay (Aleix Pol, KDE Plasma 5.13.0)
- Discover now shows transactions’ command-line output when using Arch Linux (Aleix Pol, KDE Plasma 5.13.0)
Bugfixes
- When switching categories using the sidebar in System Settings, you are now prompted to apply or discard unsaved changes (David Edmundson, KDE Plasma 5.13.0)
- When multiple user accounts are present, logging into any of them no longer causes one of the other ones to not appear in the User Manager System Settings page (Valeriy Malov, KDE Plasma 5.12.6, KDE Plasma 5.12.6)
- Fixed a common crash in Discover (Aleix Pol, KDE Plasma 5.12.6)
- The “Open Wallpaper Image” menu item in the desktop’s context menu now works (Oded Arbel, KDE Plasma 5.12.6)
- The “Minimize all windows” widget no longer breaks the Application Launcher menu when any unminimizable dialogs are open (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.13.0)
- KRunner searches are now case insensitive for the first letter (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.12.6)
- The timer on the logout options screen now works correctly when more than one screen is attached (David Edmundson, KDE Plasma 5.13.0)
UI Polish & Improvement
- The systemwide single-click/double-click setting is now located in the Workspace Behavior System Settings page (Furkan Tokac, KDE Plasma 5.13.0):
- The Look & Feel System Settings page now displays an informational warning when the “Use desktop layout from theme” checkbox is checked (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.13.0):
- The context menu for notifications that have images or files in them now has all the “Open” entries grouped together on top for easier access and a clearer user interface (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.13.0):
- The Quick Share Plasmoid’s icon is now the same size as system tray icons, so it doesn’t look out of place next to them (Chris Holland, KDE Plasma 5.13.0):
- Gwenview now displays the preview of a folder’s content at high resolution even when the folder itself has a low-resolution icon (Peter Mühlenpfordt, KDE Applications 18.04.1):
- Clicking on a pop-up note in Okular now brings it forward if there’s another note overlapping it (Simone Gaiarin, KDE Applications 18.08.0)
- Okular’s search results are now easier to differentiate from highlight annotations (Oliver Sander)
- Baloo (the file indexer) now ignores more types of development files, using fewer resources and easing Node.js development (me: Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.47)
- Scrolling over tabs in Plasma, QML apps, and Kirigami apps now switches the active tab, just like it does for QWidgets-based apps like Dolphin and Konsole (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Frameworks 5.47)
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.
Adventures in Linux and KDE 
Hi!, nice to read in this series of posts how the interface is evolving.
I have 1 question and 1 suggestion:
Question
I’m using the latest Ubuntu who use Gnome, it is possible try Plasma without reinstall the OS?
Suggestion
For a next phase, I think would be useful start thinking on Plasma as a component based design system, what do you think?
Separate the system in styles and components can be useful to maintain consistency trough the whole interface, also good for documentation, see this examples
https://design.firefox.com/photon/welcome.html
https://airbnb.design/building-a-visual-language/
https://material.io/design/introduction/#principles
http://govuk-elements.herokuapp.com/
https://polaris.shopify.com/
At the moment I’m only find this documentation about Plasma: https://userbase.kde.org/Plasma (let me know if are other)
Hope can help!
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For the most part, KDE Software is very well modularized. This was a big goal of version 5 (e.g. KDE Frameworks 5 & Plasma 5). It’s generally not recommended to install multiple desktop environments alongside one another, as there are usually conflicts. The best way to try KDE Plasma without installing it is to use a Live USB disk for a KDE-using Linux distro, such as Kubuntu, OpenSUSE, or KDE Neon.
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Impressive. Thanks for the attention to detail. And also, thanks for this: https://marc.info/?l=kde-i18n-doc&m=152563073208905&w=2
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Don’t thank me, thank Pino! 🙂
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Awesome work! I was just thinking how hard is it to make shadow smaller for inactive windows, because now it is exactly the same. And i see that as an issue, since every other known desktop environment reduces the intensity for inactive window shadows.
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Right, it’s on my to-do list, in fact!
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As a new Plasma user, I am struggling with how to use KRunner more effectively. I am coming from Gnome-Do and later Synapse (which I am still using in Plasma until I can see if KRunner can replace it).
My main workflow is to open a containing folder in dolphin based on typing part of the folder name. So in Synapse by typing “pac” it would prompt for /data/1-work/dev/packages and hitting enter would open a dolphin folder to this “packages” location.
Am I missing something for KRunner to be able to do this? It seems to only be able to “find” folders by using the FQDN, so I need to type /data/1-work/dev/pac then it would find.
In short, I *think* Baloo is indexing the filenames (well, maybe it only indexes files NOT folders?), but KRunner doesn’t allow a sort of “fuzzy folder search”?
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The pacman update for Discover is a really nice improvement. I always used discover as a merely update notifier, because I couldn’t see in a simple way what’s happening. I had to open a terminal to follow the log file… and at that point, it was easier to just launch pacman -Syu.
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Yes, this came out of a conversation with various Arch users and the Arch KDE packager. It turned out that a major objection was the lack of a log viewer, because Arch’s package management approach was designed with the requirement that users to read the log.
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That’s one of the things that I really love about KDE. It’s rare that a project this big has also a group of developers that actually interacts with the users.
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I love the update log output from pacman. It’s so clear and well put. Discover felt messy and weird without it (parallel downloads or no clear graphical sign when many packages were downloaded at the same time so it took a while till you saw even 1% in some random package). It’s awesome that discover starts to feel like in a place with the system now.
Change of single/double click is a good one as well. Previous place was counter intuitive.
Krunner being case sensitive may not be that good. Do I understand it right, that wen searching, let’s say firefox, I have to start typing Fi… and not fi because krunner won’t output results? I would rather have it as option that I can turn it on/off,
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Actually it’s the opposite: KRunner searches are now case INsensitive, so you *don’t* have to type “Firefox” have Firefox be the top entry.
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Thanks. How could I misread it? Facepalm ;).
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It’s great KDE is changing so much and so fast. It’s getting better and better every week. But (and there is always a but), is any work done on Kdenlive? On the bugreport page I see a very long list of bugs and it seems they are not handled, although I am probably wrong here. This morning I helped somebody on the Manjaro forums who had problems with version 18.04.1: colorclips all turned white instead of having the color as intended. Managed to find an older snapimage and now he can continue to do his job.
Please don’t only create new flashy things, also make programs work as intended and above all bugfree.
Thanks.
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Kdelive is actively developed. Please file bugs for any issues you encounter. There are a lot of open bugs because it’s a huge project!
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(previously attempting posting but got stuck “awaiting moderation”: trying again with spaces around / in file paths)
As a new Plasma user, I am struggling with how to use KRunner more effectively. I am coming from Gnome-Do and later Synapse (which I am still using in Plasma until I can see if KRunner can replace it).
My main workflow is to open a containing folder in dolphin based on typing part of the folder name. So in Synapse by typing “pac” it would prompt for / data / 1-work / dev / packages and hitting enter would open a dolphin folder to this “packages” location.
Am I missing something for KRunner to be able to do this? It seems to only be able to “find” folders by using the FQDN, so I need to type / data / 1-work / dev / pac then it would find.
In short, I *think* Baloo is indexing the filenames (well, maybe it only indexes files NOT folders?), but KRunner doesn’t allow a sort of “fuzzy folder search”?
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What you describe works just fine for me. Does it work for you if you type “paca” instead of just “pac”
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