Innbundet

These past two weeks were big for Wayland accessibility support, as Nicolas Fella did a lot of work to improve support for sticky keys to equal the state they were in on X11. This work is not complete, but so far it’s taken a big bite out of the open issues! The work lands in … Continue reading These past two weeks in KDE: fixing sticky keys and the worst crashes →

See you next week what what will probably be an extra large installment!

Every once in a while people ask me about my email routine, so I thought I’d write about it here. Everything I do starts with the philosophy that work and project email is a task queue. Therefore an email is a to-do list item someone else has assigned to me. Ugh, how horrible! Better get … Continue reading How I manage my KDE email →

New Features You can now turn on the “autoscrolling” feature of the Libinput driver, which lets you scroll on any scrollable view by holding down the middle button of your mouse and moving the whole mouse (Evgeniy Chesnokov, Plasma 6.2.0. Link) UI Improvements When zooming into or out of a document in Okular using Ctrl+Scroll, … Continue reading This week in KDE: autoscrolling →

We spent an enormous amount of time working on bug-fixing and polishing tasks for Plasma 6.1 this week. It was a big release, and there were some rough edges around the new edit mode. So we put quite a bit of time into making it integrate more seamlessly with the other existing modes, and generally … Continue reading This week in KDE: everything, I think →

Plasma 6.1 has been released to good reviews! We’ve spent the week fixing issues reported so far, as always. So far we’re in good shape here, with almost all the big issues fixed already. We’re still tracking a few more, such as cases where triple buffering introduced stuttering, or random QML widgets and System Settings … Continue reading This week in KDE: Plasma 6.1 cleanups →

Plasma 6.1 is due to be released in three days, and lots of attention went into final release readiness activities: QA, bug-fixing, performance profiling, auto-testing, stuff like that. Boring but important! And happily, reviews of the 6.1 beta are, like, really good. So we want to make sure that the final release doesn’t disappoint! In … Continue reading This week in KDE: Final Plasma 6.1 polishing and new features...

Today I’d like to share a new set of Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) for KDE’s software that I’ve written, replacing the old one. This work was done over the past several months in consultation with many KDE designers and developers; the merge request says 42 people were CCd, and almost 500 comments were posted during … Continue reading New Human Interface Guidelines →

Sorry for the interruption last week; I was on vacation. While I was vacating, my colleagues were in full-on fix-everything mode in preparation for the upcoming Plasma 6.1 release in a little over a week. And what a release it promises to be! I think this is going to be a good one, folks. Lots … Continue reading These past two weeks in KDE: massive stability work for Plasma 6.1 →

We’ll be back next week!

We just branched for Plasma 6.1 and released the beta, which means the window to add new features has now closed. But before it did, a ton of amazing stuff snuck in! Plasma 6.1 promises to be a large and impressive release. Probably the most impactful thing is triple buffering support on Wayland! This should … Continue reading This week in KDE: Triple buffering and other sources of amazingness →

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 … Continue reading This week in KDE: all about those apps →

This week a lot of work that has been in progress for weeks got merged! So check out the free goodies! And isn’t that amazing? Free stuff day after day, week after week. No price tag, no ads, no spying, no activation, no subscription, no nonsense. Just good work donated to the public. And not … Continue reading This week in KDE: our cup overfloweth with cool stuff for you →

This week we put some of the final Plasma 6.0 bugs to rest, and continued working towards Plasma 6.1 with a variety of UI improvements. Nothing ground-breaking this week, just a slow grind of useful work towards a solid release! UI Improvements Kate now considers a file as recent when it’s saved or closed, not … Continue reading This week in KDE: Looking towards Plasma 6.1 →

I recently went on Brodie Robertson’s Tech Over Tea channel for a second time. I guess I didn’t succeed at pissing him off enough on the first go-around, because he invited me back! Let’s see if I did a better job of it this time by telling him he was using Arch wrong. 😀 Anyway, … Continue reading Interview on Tech Over Tea about KDE’s position in the world →

New Features On System Settings’ Region & Language page, you can now choose how you’d like storage sizes to be displayed. This means you can change them to the more common MB and GB style, instead of MiB and GiB, for example. Note that the default value has not changed, but you have the option … Continue reading This week in KDE: megabytes and gigabytes for all →

For the past 8 days I’ve been in Berlin for what is technically four sprints: first a two-day KDE e.V. Board of Directors sprint, and then right afterwards, the KDE Goals mega-sprint for the Eco, Accessibility, and Automation/Systematization Goals! Both were hosted in the offices of KDE Patron MBition, a great partner to KDE which … Continue reading Berlin mega-sprint recap →

This week I’m attending two sprints: a KDE e.V. Board sprint which is already done, and a KDE Goals mega-sprint, which begins today! My “Automate and systematize internal processes” goal is represented there and I’m hoping we have a great time brainstorming and fixing stuff. And also that we eat lots of Döner kebabs. So … Continue reading This week in KDE: sprints, enhancements, and kebabs →

This week something big got merged: support for Explicit Sync on Wayland! What does this do? In a nutshell it allows apps to tell the compositor when to display frames on the screen, reducing latency and graphical glitches. The effect should be particularly noticeable with NVIDIA GPUs, which only support this rendering style, and not … Continue reading This week in KDE: Explicit Sync →

For years KWin has offered modifier-only shortcut handling via an obscure and undocumented method of editing the kwinrc file. Well, no more: in Plasma 6.1, KDE’s shortcut choosers will accept lone modifier keys natively! This makes it much easier to, for example, re-bind what the Meta key does: now you can easily make it open … Continue reading This week in KDE: real modifier-only shortcuts and cropping in Spectacle...

This week I’d like to highlight a very cool development: the automatic crash reporting facility in the Plasma 6 version of our venerable DrKonqi crash report wizard. Automatic reporting is opt-in, but so far lots of people are opting in, and we’re using this data to get a much better picture of the crashes that … Continue reading This week in KDE: looking forward towards Plasma 6.1 →

Every week veteran KDE contributor Kevin Ottens posts a bunch of thought-provoking links on his blog, and last week’s post contained one that I found particularly enlightening: 40 years of programming It’s a collection of wisdom written from someone named Lars Wirzenius who started his software development career decades ago and has seen it all. … Continue reading Free software wisdom →

The bug-fixing continued this week with the aim of getting Plasma 6.0.3 into a great state. Already the big bugs you folks found have almost all been fixed, and this week a lot of time was spent on some X11 regressions and various crashes that our new automatic crash reporting system was able to find … Continue reading This week in KDE →

In addition to lots and lots of Plasma 6 stability work and the beginning of Plasma 6.1 feature work, Dolphin received large amount of development this week, resulting in some nice improvements. Check it out! New Features KSSHAskPass (which has the best name of any app in the world, change my mind) now supports SK-type … Continue reading This week in KDE: Dolphin levels up →

In today’s other blog post, I mentioned how we’ve been getting a huge number of bug reports since the Mega-Release. If you’re not in software engineering, this probably seems like a bad thing. “Oh no, why so many bugs? Didn’t you test your software properly!?” Since most people are not involved in software engineering, this … Continue reading How YOU Help With Quality →

The floodgates are fully open and developers have started landing juicy features for Plasma 6.1! But not just that… we asked for bug reports and you folks gave us bug reports! Usually we get 30-50 per day, but now we’re up to 150-200. It’s kind of crazy. Now, this doesn’t mean the software is actually … Continue reading This week in KDE: a deluge of new features →

It’s come to our attention that some changes made for KWin in Plasma 6 aren’t compatible with the old and outdated software-rendering graphics drivers in VirtualBox. Thankfully there’s a solution: enable 3D acceleration in the machine settings. It not only resolves the issue, but also enables all the fancy graphical effects you would expect to … Continue reading PSA: enable 3D acceleration in your VirtualBox VMs →

The KDE Mega-Release came out a few days ago and I’m happy to report that it went well. Initial impressions seem to be overwhelmingly positive! I’ve been doing extra bug triage and social media monitoring since then to see if there were any major issues, and so far things look really good on the bug … Continue reading This week in KDE: a smooth release →

The mega-release has been such a mega amount of work that I’m a bit behind on my blogging, but don’t worry, the normal TWiK post will be out around this time tomorrow! Thanks for your patience, everyone.

Welp, the mega-release is pretty much carved in stone now, and set for a release in four days! Lots of people have worked really hard on it for over a year, and we hope you love it! Nevertheless, I’m sure our diligent QA-obsessed users will waste no time in finding all the issues we missed, … Continue reading This week in KDE: real fake session restore →

This week the focus was on annoying longstanding issues, and a whole bunch of them are now history! If you’ve used KDE software for any significant amount of time, I bet you noticed and were annoyed by at least one of the issues mentioned below, and can now rejoice at their annihilation! This effort has … Continue reading This week in KDE: longstanding issues crushed →

The KDE 6 mega-release is due in a little under three weeks! And folks have remained in diligent bugfixing-and-polishing mode, because we want this release to be as smooth and drama-free as possible! If you haven’t already tried it out, this is a good time to. Find all the bugs that are bugging you so … Continue reading This week in KDE: Inching closer →