This week in KDE: We have migrated to GitLab!

After years of using Phabricator, KDE has officially begun the migration to GitLab ! So far we are using it for patch review, and developer task tracking will be migrated soon. We are still using Bugzilla for bugs and feature requests as migrating those functions to GitLab is a significant project in and of itself! Already the KDE community is enjoying GitLab’s smoother workflow; why not take advantage of this and submit a merge request ?

But that’s not all: big changes for Plasma 5.20 have started to land too. It promises to be a very significant release! Check it out:

New Features

• When you right-click on an underlined file in Konsole, the context menu now displays the standard “Open with” menu so you can open the file in a non-default GUI app (Tomaz Canabrava, Konsole 20.08.0):

  

• The Free Space Notifier has been re-implemented as a critical notification, so it’s now less likely to be missed . Also, it now monitors the root filesystem if you have your home directory on a separate partition (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.20.0):
  
• The System Settings Users page has been rewritten from scratch, which fixes most of the open bugs with the old one (Carson Black, Plasma 5.20.0):
  

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• When a document opened in Okular’s Presentation View is re-loaded on disk, it no longer repeatedly shows notifications about wanting to be opened in presentation view (Arshad Husain, Okular 1.11.0)
• Discover no longer always opens on login when session restoration is in use (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.18.6)
• The “Apply” button in the System Settings Night Color page is now always active at the correct times (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.19.0)
• The emoji picker window now starts searching as soon as you start typing now starts searching as soon as you start typing (me: Nate Graham and Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.19.0)
• Fixed a crash unplugging screens on Wayland (Méven Car, Plasma 5.20.0)
• The Global Menu applet now has the correct hover behavior: you can slide the mouse over to the next menu to close the current one and open that other one (Carson Black, Plasma 5.20.0)
• When using a low-end system with only software rendering available, desktop files and folders now have an outline under their label so that they’re always visible (Bruno Gonçalves, Plasma 5.20.0):
  

  

• System Settings no longer crashes when opening external apps listed in the sidebar, such as openSUSE’s YaST (David Faure, Frameworks 5.71)
• The “Get New [thing]” windows no longer shows error messages twice (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, Frameworks 5.71)

User Interface Improvements

• Dolphin’s elision behavior has been refined; it no longer middle-elides long file and folder labels, but rather elides on the right, and always keeps the file extension (if present) visible after the ellipses (Méven Car, Dolphin 20.04.2)
• After taking into consideration user feedback last week about Konsole’s colorized tabs feature, the appearance was adjusted for greater usability and aesthetics (Gustavo Carneiro, Konsole 20.08.0):
  
• When Discover is loading more results, the “Still looking” label is now positioned properly , and both of the placeholder-style messages that include spinning busy indicators are now consistent in appearance (Aleix Pol Gonzales and me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.19.0 and 5.20.0):
  
• Feedback OSDs for things like volume and brightness changes are now more compact so they don’t obscure the main view so much (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.20.0):
  
• The Battery and Brightness applet now has a more comprehensible user interface for displaying apps which are preventing lock and sleep, and allowing the user to override this (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.20.0):
  
• Menu titles/section headers now look the part (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.20.0):
  

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• Breeze style tabs are now two pixels taller, making them consistent with the height of buttons and text fields (Noah Davis, Plasma 5.20.0)
• You’re now warned if you try to create a file with a space at the beginning of end (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.71):
  
• The mouse icon has been re-done and is now distinguishable against both light and dark backgrounds (Chris Escargot and Noah Davis, Frameworks 5.71):
• SpinBoxes in Plasma can now have their values modified by scrolling over them or clicking/tapping-and-dragging on the number (note: this only affects SpinBoxes in Plasma, not in apps; scrolling is already implemented there and click/tap-and-drag-manipulation will be coming later) (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.71)

How You Can Help

KDE Software is made by people just like you, often on their free time! If you know a KDE developer, send them a kind note. Developers like to put on a logical face but they need love and care too, especially during trying times like these.

More generally, have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover 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 .