KDE Developers Polish The Desktop Ahead Of Next Month's Plasma 5.22

[phoronix]

Phoronix: KDE Developers Polish The Desktop Ahead Of Next Month's Plasma 5.22

KDE developers remain very active polishing up the KDE desktop and addressing various bugs ahead of next month's Plasma 5.22 feature release...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=KDE-Polishing-5.22-Next-Month

[ms178]

Trying out Manjaro with KDE-git revealed a pleasent surprise while opening their new systemsettings overview page - every time you open systemsettings, it simply remains unresponsive and crashes after some seconds. It can be worked around thankfully (by opening a submenue with a right click on the settings icon) but I would have hoped that QA caught and fixed that sooner.

[Hans Bull]

Good to see improvements in Gwenview - which is already miles ahead from eog.

[ngraham]

Trying out Manjaro with KDE-git revealed a pleasent surprise while opening their new systemsettings overview page - every time you open systemsettings, it simply remains unresponsive and crashes after some seconds. It can be worked around thankfully (by opening a submenue with a right click on the settings icon) but I would have hoped that QA caught and fixed that sooner.

QA consists of the people running git master versions of KDE software, i.e. people like me and you. I haven't run into this issue which is why I didn't find it and fix it. But you did... can you share the URL of the bug report that you filed so that we can investigate the issue and fix it?

[smartalgorithm]

nice improvements for PipeWire too, very very welcoming changes!
thanks!

[ms178]

QA consists of the people running git master versions of KDE software, i.e. people like me and you. I haven't run into this issue which is why I didn't find it and fix it. But you did... can you share the URL of the bug report that you filed so that we can investigate the issue and fix it?

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=436779

[extremesquared]

They could really use a small team to take a step back, define a universal Alt/Meta + Tab expected behavior, and then go at all the window/activity/desktop switching bugs and inconsistencies in a focused manner. And looking at how long some alt-tab bugs have been around, maybe prioritize higher. Keyboard-based multitasking is one of the most core expected functionalities of a DE and these are a legitimate annoyance for what is really the only modern linux workstation-oriented DE.

[ngraham]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=436779

Thank you! Unfortunately your crash report did not include a backtrace of the crash. Let's follow up in the bug report itself.

[ngraham]

They could really use a small team to take a step back, define a universal Alt/Meta + Tab expected behavior, and then go at all the window/activity/desktop switching bugs and inconsistencies in a focused manner. And looking at how long some alt-tab bugs have been around, maybe prioritize higher. Keyboard-based multitasking is one of the most core expected functionalities of a DE and these are a legitimate annoyance for what is really the only modern linux workstation-oriented DE.

What are the strange behaviors and inconsistencies? I use Alt+Tab 5000 times a day and it's working pretty well for my use cases at least.

[extremesquared]

What are the strange behaviors and inconsistencies? I use Alt+Tab 5000 times a day and it's working pretty well for my use cases at least.

1. Make three activities and try to navigate between them forwards / backwards ([Shift+]Meta + Tab) in a predictable way. This one is chaotic enough that I still can't figure out a model for the current behavior.
I believe this report exists already on bugs.kde.

2. Attempt to set up keyboard shortcuts that will walk forwards and backwards through windows such that two forwards followed by two backwards returns to the same window. It doesn't need to be default behavior, but settings suggest it can be configured, when in fact forward 'stacking' sequence and reverse 'stacking' sequence are two different seemingly random orders.
System settings --> window management --> task switcher

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=410594

I'm still on 5.20 for what it is worth. I have just learned to live with the annoyances, but they are pretty visible and sloppy.