KDE Plasma 5.15 Beta Released With Some Grand Improvements

[shmerl]

It's been done with integers for convenience on the behalf of developers. Problem is, convenience back in the 90s doesn't mean convenience later, and tends to lead to many issues, just like the Y2K bug (which to be fair, was originally due to space constrictions)

Is there a bug that proposes to switch to double / float?

[Baguy]

I was wondering why they used integers in the first place? It's obvious that only floats would do the job properly. Do they have problems scaling by non integers, wtf?

It's been done with integers for convenience on the behalf of developers. Problem is, convenience back in the 90s doesn't mean convenience later, and tends to lead to many issues, just like the Y2K bug (which to be fair, was originally due to space constrictions)

[mzs.112000]

I hoped to see some news about adding proper support for .Appimage programs like marking such a program executable automatically, if it's not, when you try to open it and also add an option, probably on right-click menu to install permanently and add shortcut to it to the start menu for it.
Aso I hoped to see some news about Plasma keeping in sync the display resolution with the scaling factor.
Every time I plug in my 4k monitor, Plasma switches automatically to its native resolution (4K - 3840 × 2160), but the scaling factor still remains at 1, instead of 2, and I have a hard time navigating to the control panel ans switching it manually since everything is so small and barely readable at the distance I'm keeping my 4K monitor.

In any case, congratulations to all KDE developers and thank you very much for another awesome release!

I agree about scaling and HiDPI displays, but I don't think AppImage's should be made executable automatically, that's a big security risk....

[Danny3]

I hoped to see some news about adding proper support for .Appimage programs like marking such a program executable automatically, if it's not, when you try to open it and also add an option, probably on right-click menu to install permanently and add shortcut to it to the start menu for it.
Aso I hoped to see some news about Plasma keeping in sync the display resolution with the scaling factor.
Every time I plug in my 4k monitor, Plasma switches automatically to its native resolution (4K - 3840 × 2160), but the scaling factor still remains at 1, instead of 2, and I have a hard time navigating to the control panel ans switching it manually since everything is so small and barely readable at the distance I'm keeping my 4K monitor.

In any case, congratulations to all KDE developers and thank you very much for another awesome release!

[Vistaus]

How is the redesign of System Settings coming along? There was a post last year or so about a completely new look for System Settings (including a CSD IIRC?), but I've heard nothing about it since.

[darkbasic]

The wayland scale system is based around integers

Instead of piling up workarounds on top of workarounds on a brand new display protocol, why didn't anybody think about damn fixing the protocol instead? It still needs to gain user adoption and it's already ancient and outdated? WTF!?

[shmerl]

- Plasma 5.15 on Wayland has received more protocol coverage, support for virtual desktops, touch drag-and-drop support, and other changes.

I wonder if that means that KMail won't flicker any more. It's little things like that that are keeping me on X11.

There was some recent progress on the flickering bug: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=387313

[cl333r]

Fractional Scaling

I was wondering why they used integers in the first place? It's obvious that only floats would do the job properly. Do they have problems scaling by non integers, wtf?

[shmerl]

Native file dialogs in Firefox are rather broken:

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=402206

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1516290

[marccollin]

Fractional Scaling

A requested feature is to allow fractional scaling for QHD monitors which are roughly 1.5 times the resolution of standard monitors, but not the full 4k.

The wayland scale system is based around integers, but because the scaling is based around a normalised co-ordinate system, the compositor can show a display at a scale of 1.5 whilst clients are rendering for a 2x display with no changes in the client.



Patchset consists of XdgOutput support in both kwin and Qt so that windows that position themselves (such as xwayland clients, or plasmashell) can know the correct logical size of the screen and then relevant changes in kwin/kscreen to implement the extra fractional part.

Unfortunately as this requires a change in Qt to function properly. this won’t be available in our UI until Plasma depends on the Qt version that contains this support, probably around March 2019. Stupid desktop Linux.

http://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/category/kde/