KDE's 15-Minute Bug Initiative Gets Underway

KDE developer Nate Graham has sorted through plans for the 15-minute bug initiative for focusing on correcting many low-hanging bugs affecting the KDE desktop that should be able to be quickly discovered by users.

In recent months KDE developer Nate Graham, who is also known for his wonderful KDE weekly development summaries, has been figuring out how to improve KDE's reliability and one of the main drivers is working on bugs that should take only "15 minutes" or less to be something normal users would encounter.

Per the now-published list of 15-minute bug criteria, these are bugs that affect KDE's default setup, are 100% reproducible, something basic that doesn't work or looks visually broken, may cause a crash, requires a reboot or terminal command to fix, there is no workaround, a recent regression, or a bug report with more than five duplicates.

There are 56 initial bugs being treated as part of this 15-minute bug initiative. Some of those bugs include Firefox having an empty/transparent window on resume, relogging into the desktop can result in a black screen with a mouse pointer, the NetworkManager widget freezes when encountering VPN connection issues, setting the screen brightness to 0 on an OLED screen irreversiblty turns the screen off, Discover taking ~5 minutes to fetch updates with the Flatpak back-end, Wayland crashes, the battery applet not appearing in the system tray, ensuring the password is percent-encoded and never sent to logs, and an assortment of other issues.

More details on the KDE 15-Minute Bug Initiative via Nate's blog. The hope is that this new initiative will improve KDE's quality and help it achieve greatness in 2022.