KDE Archive

Yep you read that right, we’ve decided to throw the lever and go Wayland by default! The three remaining showstoppers are in the process of being fixed and we expect them to be done soon–certainly before the final release of Plasma 6. So we wanted to make the change early to gather as much feedback as possible. Excellent news. Of course, distributions will still be able to opt for the unmaintained, deprecated X.org if they want to, but most distributions will opt for Wayland, as all the major ones have been doing for a while now.

Another week of KDE Plasma 6 big smashing and new features, and it’s a long list of good stuff. The biggest news this week: The Overview and Desktop Grid effects have been merged together into one, with fluid and natural-feeling touchpad gestures to transition between all states. It’s really awesome work, and also fixed a ton of open bug reports! There’s quite a few other things in here, such as indicators for when the camera is in use in the system tray, fixes for floating panels, improved systemd integration so killing processes when logging out should be less buggy, and a whole lot more.

A month has passed since the last Plasma 6 status update, so it’s time for another one! First, what you’ve all been waiting for: a release date! We’ve decided that Plasma 6 will be released in early February of 2024. We don’t have a specific day targeted yet, but it’ll be in that timeframe. I’m feeling quite confident that the release will be in excellent shape by then! It’s already in good shape right now. 5 months should provide enough of a runway for a solid final release. Following the development of Plasma 6 has been an interesting ride, and it seems it’s in a good state – and these five months will make it even better.

For KDE Plasma 6, the KDE team intends to remove a number of old features and bits of code that haven’t been touched in ages or simply don’t make sense to keep around. Most of it is truly stuff few will use, but there’s some interesting ones in there that might make some users a little sad. First, they intend to remove the icon view from the settings application, leaving only the sidebar view that’s been the default for a while now. This one bugs me, because I only use the icon view – it’s what I use on every other platform, too. The sidebar view might be more modern, but I find it difficult to find anything in there. The reasoning behind its removal is that the code has simply not been touch in a while, and features like search highlighting aren’t even available in icon view. Second, they’re removing Unsplash integration, which kind of sucks. The reason? AI. This one is quite sad, as no one wanted to remove it. Alas, we had to because Unsplash changed their terms of service to preclude Plasma’s usage of it, as a way of fighting automated data scrapers for AI training models. With a heavy heart, we removed it. So the next time anyone asks you what AI can do for humanity, now you have a concrete answer: prevent Plasma 6 from shipping an Unsplash Picture of the Day wallpaper plugin. Thanks, AI! Third, and I love this one, they’re finally fixing the weird issue where the selected Plasma style would overwrite some of the icons from the system-wide icon theme. This feature originally served the purpose of allowing monochrome icons to be set in Plasma, but this is simply no longer needed and only leads to confusion. There’s a lot more that’s being cleaned up and removed, so take a peek at the list to see if your favourite obscure feature is getting cut. Of course, as Nate Graham notes, if you wish for some of these features to stay – you can pick up the code and work on it.

KDE Plasma 5.27, a Long Term Support release and the final release in the Plasma 5 series which is based on Qt 5, has been released. Plasma 5.27 brings exciting new improvements to your desktop, and the first thing you’ll notice when firing up Plasma is our new Konqi-powered wizard which will guide you through setting up the desktop. Other big new features include a window tiling system, a more stylish app theme, cleaner and more usable tools, and widgets that give you more control over your machine.

Window outlines! Yet another KDE contribution by yours truly! This was fun. Not easy at all, but fun. I’m pretty happy how they turned out. A small feature, but a fun read to learn how, exactly, it was implemented.

This new version brings many improvements: the accent colour can now be set based on the prominent colour from the current desktop background image (it updates if you use slide-show wallpapers) and it applies to more graphical elements. The global theme settings page lets you pick and choose which parts to apply, and floating panels add a margin all around the panel to make it float while no window is maximised. Touchscreen mode can now be activated by detaching the screen, rotating it 360, or enabling it manually. The overview effect can be activated by gestures on a touchpad or touchscreen, using the same smooth Wayland gestures GNOME has implemented as well. The application page for Discover has been redesigned and gives you links to the application’s documentation and website, and shows what system resources it has access to. Panels can now be navigated with the keyboard, and you can assign custom shortcuts to focus individual panels. And much, much more.

Today the KDE Community releases Plasma 5.24, a Long Term Support (LTS) release that will receive updates and bugfixes until the final Plasma 5 version, before we transition to Plasma 6. This new Plasma release focuses on smoothing out wrinkles, evolving the design, and improving the overall feel and usability of the environment. Highlights for this release include: a new overview effect for managing all your desktops and application windows (similar to the overview in GNOME), easy discovery of KRunner features with the help assistant, and unlocking screen and authentication using fingerprint reader. You will also notice a new Honeywave wallpaper, the ability to pick any color for UI accents, and critically important Plasma notifications now come with an orange strip on the side to visually distinguish them from less urgent messages.

25 years ago today, Matthias Ettrich sent an email to the de.comp.os.linux.misc newsgroup explaining a project he was working on. The latest and direct result of that email (plus a quarter of a century of relentless experimentation, development and innovation) has just landed in KDE’s repositories. This time around, Plasma renews its looks and, not only do you get a new wallpaper, but also a gust of fresh air from an updated theme: Breeze – Blue Ocean. The new Breeze theme makes KDE apps and tools not only more attractive, but also easier to use both on the desktop and your phone and tablet. Of course, looks are not the only you can expect from Plasma 25AE: extra speed, increased reliability and new features have also found their way into the app launcher, the software manager, the Wayland implementation, and most other Plasma tools and utilities. Except for 1.0, I’ve used every release of KDE extensively, and its developers have every right to be damn proud of the amazing collection of frameworks and applications they’ve built. As with everything, KDE is not for everyone, but there’s no denying it’s a versatile, attractive, extensible, and fun to use environment.

Plasma Mobile 21.07 has been released, with a ton of improvements and fixes. The shell is now more responsive, by improving performance of the panel. On top of that, there’s countless fixes and improvements in the various applications, such as the podcasts application, the dialer, the SMS app, and more.

Now, KDE apps typically do not use client-side-decorated headerbars for their header areas like GNOME apps do. Instead, we generally hew to the traditional arrangement of a titlebar, menubar, and toolbar. The titlebar is “server-side” because it’s drawn by KWin, our window manager. Everything below the titlebar–such as the window’s menubar, toolbar, and content view–are drawn by the window itself; the window being a “client” of the window manager. Hence, “client-side”. KDE’s approach is so much better and more sane than the CSDs in GNOME. CSDs have wreaked havoc in the world of GTK desktops, with Xfce in particular suffering hard due to its use of Xfwm, causing a giant rift between the looks of Xfwm and the CSDs of many GTK applications. The main issue here is that a title bar is a title bar for a reason – I don’t want it littered with buttons and other widgets that belong to the application, not the window. I guess I’m just getting old.

KDE Plasma’s theming system is actually quite complex. It has many ways to be customized. It’s normal ever for expert users to not fully get how it works. I’ll try to explain how it works to the best of my knowledge. I’m pretty sure most KDE users here are more than aware of all of this stuff, but it’s still a good and concise overview for newcomers to KDE.

The beta for the upcoming 5.21 release of the KWinFT projects is now available. It contains a monumental rewrite of KWinFT’s windowing logic. Read on for an overview of the changes and why this rewrite was necessary. KWinFT is such a poster child for open source development. Someone wasn’t happy with KWin, a core aspect of their desktop, and put their money where their mouth is and forked it into something that they think is better. I wouldn’t be surprised to see parts of KWinFT, or even the project as a whole, make its way to become KDE’s default window manager.

KDE developer Nate Graham has penned a post detailing some of the things the KDE project is working on that should come to full fruition next year. There’s quite a few things here, but the biggest one is probably KDE’s maturing support for Wayland. I’ll be honest: before 2020 the Plasma Wayland session felt like a mess to me. Nothing worked properly. But all of this changed in 2020: suddenly things started working properly. I expect the trend of serious, concentrated Wayland work to continue in 2021, and finally make Plasma Wayland session usable for an increasing number of people’s production workflows. That’s good news, and I hope the move to Wayland fixes my biggest issue with Linux on laptops: playing video is a massive assault on your battery and fans.