I promised new features soon, and here they are! There are plenty of positive UI changes too. Hopefully what this week's post lacks in quantity will be made up by depth, because these are some nice changes that have been in development for quite some time. Have a look:
I am a simple man, I see an update with “oodles” in its title, I get excited 
It’s heartening to see success.
Obviously you have enough data to see:
Very few users even visit this KDE forum - or possibly any other Linux forum for that matter and
Many users are extremely vocal in opposing such measures.
Most other users visit rarely (when they have issues) and then not at all - because mostly they can take care of their systems and muddle through with the odd search.
However, there are enough people who don’t mind throwing a few coins in the hat.
Some people do feel guilty about taking advantage (as most of us do) for years without even paying for a single cup of tea… and without hearing the story or being physically hooked in from the desktop, we could continue to do so until the project simply disappears.
It wouldn’t be the first, or the last time.
Bravo!
I miss the Like button as it was on Nate’s blog. Even if I didn’t comment, I could somehow send the acknowledgment and praise with that. blogs.kde don’t seem to have that nice feature.
@michaldybczak, Nate’s blog is WordPress-based, whereas blogs.kde.org is a completely custom implementation of the rendered HTML that the Hugo MD > HTML converter provides. They’d have to implement some kind of account system and/or OAuth to provide what WordPress does.
A bit like how Git(Hub/Lab) Pages and/or Wikis are frequently chosen instead of MediaWiki despite how much better the MW UX is, it’s because it’s easier to use the same Markdown markup across services, even if the UX is worse.
That very first feature has me excited, even if I’ll probably never use it[1], as it’s been my biggest paper-cut on first setup on notebooks (the only machines where I use multi-monitor setups, and I like both/all screens having as near as possible panels 
). Is there a chance to expand/re-use this feature to provide a “clone panels from the main/X screen to this one” in the display settings?
[1]: For personal use, I’ve been cloningrsync/btrfs send-ing the drive of the old machine into the new one, and blkdiscard-ing the drive on the old one, awaiting reinstallation and reassignment to somebody else.
As always a nice one, Nate!
In cases you don’t have your custom cover at hand, you are welcome to use this one made with Bing Creator:
Holy moly,
FINALLY that hover feature can be switched off. That was a UX nightmare from the start.
Just a small story concerning that feature:
I visited the KDE booth at a trade show way back then when they showed prereleases of KDE 4 and I noticed that the different pages of the start menu were switched on hover - as mentioned a terrible, terrible UX. I immediately told that to the person manning the booth and they told me that all these features are preliminaty and they also meant that this will not be in the final version…
Truth be told, it was in KDE 4 and to be honest, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back and I left the KDE eco system for good back then. Switched to macOS and Gnome 2 - later xfce on the Linux side.
I only returned to KDE when that start menu was retired (far too late) towards the end of the 5.XX line. Unfortunately still the irritating hover feature was in the new start menu - which made it inferior to whiskermenu from xfce in my opinion.
That is FINALLY over - thank you!
Nate, I am very grateful for you and the KDE team. Your hard work is extremely useful for us.
Despite that, I have to say I am really disappointed in how bug report #481069 and the referenced merge request was handled.
I believe that the bug report itself already proved that the original removal assumption “this feature is niche” was in error. And, while I understand that it might be implemented in the wrong place, or that it might not be the ideal implementation, as long as there is no good alternative and no security issues, I believe the right decision should be to keep the feature.
And most of the times, there is no simple alternative for this feature. I, for example, have to manually turn off my TV with the remote every time I leave the computer, now. And if I forget to do it (like I often do because of how used I am to the automation), I get oled burn-in as a result.
I respect David and am thankful for all his contributions, but shutting down Andreas effort like that is a mistake, in my opinion.
Since KDE is home to the popular drawing software Krita, I doubt you’ll see an official KDE blog embrace AI generated art.
@eeeeeeeeee, ultimately, I can’t imagine anyone would mind (since they wouldn’t notice) if it were actually any good. However, it never is in the situations that matter. There’s always an extra finger, or it just looks dreadful (like the aforementioned).
However, you’re right in that we can always just ask the Krita community to work for free if we say that we’ll feature their artwork. I reckon threatening them that we’ll use AI if they don’t would be an even better incentive!
@LZZ, Re-implement "Run a command" notification event trigger (!143) · Merge requests · Frameworks / KNotifications · GitLab
I’m uncomfortable deciding not to revisit the prior decision now that we’ve found people using this feature for valid purposes.
Maybe we can brainstorm alternative paths forward, of the old feature in its prior form is unacceptable?
It’s really not much code though; this plus plasma/plasma-workspace!4096 is under 200 lines. What’s the big harm?
No, that’s not how any of this works. Artists use krita, contribute to krita, donate to the development of krita, recommend krita to their friends, etc. because it isn’t like any of the proprietary options whose developers disrespect and devalue artists and their art.
it will simply sit there, rather than un-tiling and teleporting to a potentially unexpected place
Well how are we supposed to accidentally discover inter-dimensional travel now?!?
(I just really enjoyed the phrase “teleporting to a potentially unexpected place”)
And on a serious note, the Kickoff menu hover-off-by-default will make it a lot easier for my kids to navigate their laptop with the trackpad, so that is a nice bonus!
@eeeeeeeeee, it was a joke. I damn hope I’m not so unfunny I’ve gotta start using /s…
The kind of on its face ridiculous crap that real people say in earnest about people, people’s labour and its worth in FOSS communities and in conversations about art is beyond parody.
Nothing you can say is outlandish enough that there isn’t some techbro freeloader in the github issues of a mobile app, or self proclaimed AI artist in between tweets praising the latest crypto shitcoin, who said something similar or worse and meant it. Irony is dead.
@eeeeeeeeee, don’t pay heed to them. Techbros are a temporary scourge, whose time we’ve the unfortunate luck of living in.
Eventually, the investors shall run out of cash, and the grandfathers shall realize that maybe, just maybe, they shouldn’t trust the nice man on the telephone that a photograph of an ape shall make them wealthy beyond their wildest dreams.
I only have one constructive criticism at the moment regarding the Sound section of System Preferences, there are too many horizontal lines for my taste and it is somewhat confusing to the eye.
OMG, can’t wait for Feb 11!!!
