A few weeks ago, some of us discovered that KDE apps just looked terrible when run in GNOME. A lengthy discussion on icon theming ensued, with various improvements made on both sides. The KDE effort was spearheaded by Christoph Cullmann, as already described in his post on the subject. In a nutshell, KDE apps opting into the new system that are run outside of Plasma will always have the Breeze style and icons available, unless overridden by the system or the user. Apps opting in so far include Kate, Konsole, and Dolphin. Feel free to help opt more apps in by using those commits as inspiration!
Dolphin itself also received a lot of special attention this week, in addition to other cool stuff:
New Features
Dolphin now gives you the option to enable previews for folders on remote locations. Be aware that this can cause slowdowns, and the UI tells you that, too (Sergey Katunin, Dolphin 24.08. Link):
Discover now handles the case where one of your Flatpak apps has been marked as “end of life” and replaced with another one; it gives you the opportunity to switch to the new one, or cancel and keep using the old one anyway (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.1. Link):
UI Improvements
Dolphin’s ability to let you change things as root when kio-admin is installed has received a big upgrade: now it shows you a warning telling you what bad things you can do if you’re not careful, and also keeps a banner visible while you’re in root mode (Felix Ernst, Dolphin 24.08. Link):
Dolphin has received a number of UI improvements and better handling for viewing read-only folders (Jin Liu, Dolphin 24.08. Link)
Switched Spectacle over to using the common style for immutable toolview tabs in Kirigami apps (me: Nate Graham, Spectacle 24.08. Link):
KMenuEdit no longer annoyingly prompts you for confirmation when you delete a group (Kenny Hui, Plasma 6.1. Link)
The icons shown in our dialogs no longer themselves depict dialogs for mega dialog-ception; now they’re just normal colored icons (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 6.3. Link):
Bug Fixes
Attempting to open multiple “New Folder” dialogs on a slow network location no longer causes Dolphin to crash (Akseli Lahtinen, Dolphin 24.08. Link)
Very small SVG images are now displayed properly in thumbnail previews (Méven Car, kio-extras 24.08. Link)
Fixed a case where our authentication system could crash and leave apps unable to request authentication (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.0.5. Link)
Turning on HDR mode no longer makes the screen colors wrong when using Night Color (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.0.5. Link)
Screens using fractional scale factors no longer get a weird row of pixels on the bottom edge that are held to the color of previously opened windows (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.0.5. Link)
Fixed several Plasma crashes that were introduced by porting some custom drag-and-drop code to the upstream Qt thing, but turns out to not be suitable for our purposes. Reverting to our custom code fixes the crashes (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 6.1, Link 1 and link 2)
When Chromium-based browsers are running in native Wayland mode, dragging and dropping files into websites no longer makes them freeze and crash. This was a complicated bug largely caused by Chromium doing something unusual, but KWin now handles it properly (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.1. Link)
Visiting System Settings’ File Search page no longer sometimes causes a long hang when the file indexer is under heavy load (Janet Blackquill, Frameworks 6.3. Link)
If for some reason you want to use the Kickoff application launcher to search for a single character, close Kickoff, and then do the same thing again, the second search will now show results as expected (Alexander Lohnau, Frameworks 6.3. Link)
KSvg items and Kirigami.Icon used in Plasma now re-color re-colorable SVG images in the expected way when they’re displayed in Plasma irrespective of color scheme. This makes the CatWalk cat look correct while using a mixed light/dark global theme like Breeze Twilight (Marco Martin, Frameworks 6.3. Link):
Other bug information of note:
- 3 Very high priority Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
- 39 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 38 last week). Current list of bugs
- 106 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed over the last week Full list of bugs
…And Everything Else
This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! If you’re hungry for more, check out https://planet.kde.org, where you can find more news from other KDE contributors.
How You Can Help
The KDE organization has become important in the world, and your time and labor have helped to bring it there! But as we grow, it’s going to be equally important that this stream of labor be made sustainable, which primarily means paying for it. Right now the vast majority of KDE runs on labor not paid for by KDE e.V. (the nonprofit foundation behind KDE, of which I am a board member), and that’s a problem. We’ve taken steps to change this with paid technical contractors—but those steps are small due to growing but still limited financial resources. If you’d like to help change that, consider donating today!
Otherwise, visit https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover other ways to 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!
