KDE Weekly Update: Enhancements for Productivity and User Experience

KDE Developer Nate Graham is back with his usual KDE weekly update blog post with interesting updates. This week's KDE updates bring a focus on quality-of-life features, enhancing both productivity and user experience. These updates introduce per-monitor brightness control, an option to update and shut down, Okular Text-to-speech, and several other noteworthy improvements.

Let us start with the new features added in KDE.

Table of Contents

• Per-Monitor Brightness Control
• “Install Update and Shut Down” Functionality
• Okular’s Enhanced Text-to-Speech
• UI improvements
• Bug Fixes

Per-Monitor Brightness Control

The Plasma Brightness widget now offers individual brightness sliders for each connected monitor that supports this feature. This allows for customised brightness levels on each screen, catering to different lighting environments or display preferences. Users can still adjust the brightness of all monitors simultaneously using global shortcuts, keyboard keys, or by scrolling over the widget. This feature depends on the UPower service and kernel support for backlight controls.

For more details about this feature, refer this link:

• KDE Plasma 6.2 Introduces Per-Monitor Brightness Control Functionality

"Install Update and Shut Down" Functionality

The "update then shut down" feature in KDE Plasma 6.2.0 enables users to initiate a system update and automatically shut down their computer upon completion. This eliminates the need for users to manually shut down their systems after the update process, offering greater convenience.

This feature addresses the limitation of having to wait for updates to finish before being able to safely shut down the computer. Users previously had the option to "update and reboot" or simply "reboot" and postpone updates.

This feature is accessible through the logout screen and Discover, KDE's software centre. Upon selecting "Install Updates & Shut Down", the computer reboots into an offline updater and proceeds with the update process. Once the updates are installed, the system will automatically shut down.

This functionality relies on PackageKit, a system service that manages software installation and updates, for offline updates. The implementation involves specific icons designed for "offline updating" within the logout screen and Discover's notification system.

Okular's Enhanced Text-to-Speech

Okular, KDE's document viewer, has improved its text-to-speech feature to give users more control over audio playback. Previously, users could only choose to have Okular read the entire document or the current page. The latest update introduces a "speak text from current page" feature, allowing for greater flexibility in listening to documents.

This enhanced functionality addresses the needs of users who read long documents in multiple sittings. With the new feature, users can pick up where they left off without having to manually navigate to that point in the document. It also enables users to skip sections at the beginning of a document, such as tables of contents or copyright information.

Here's how the feature works:

• Users can access the text-to-speech functionality through the "Tools" menu in Okular.
• The new option, "speak text from current page," appears alongside existing options to "speak whole document" and "speak current page".
• When a user selects this new option, Okular begins reading the document aloud, starting from the first word on the current page and continuing to the end of the document.

This enhancement builds upon Okular's existing text-to-speech capabilities, providing a more convenient and user-friendly experience for those who rely on this feature.

UI improvements

Here are some notable UI improvements to KDE:

• "Add Widgets" Sidebar Overhaul: The "Add Widgets" sidebar has been redesigned with several user-focused changes for better usability:
  • It now appears on the right side of the screen when accessed from a right-screen-edge panel.
  • The grid cells are wider to accommodate longer text without awkward word wrapping or truncation.
  • The filter button now resembles a drop-down menu, more accurately reflecting its functionality.
  • Sorting is now locale-aware, correctly handling accented characters.
  • Buttons and menu items now read "Add or Manage Widgets," reflecting the sidebar's expanded role as a hub for adding and removing widgets.
  • Spacer widgets, previously only accessible through the panel settings dialogue, are now available in the sidebar.
  • The dialogue for installing manually downloaded widgets now accepts all valid file types.
• Battery Icon Power Profile Indicator: When a non-default power profile is active, a badge now appears on the battery icon, allowing users to see both the battery status and the current power profile. This currently only works with the Breeze icon theme; third-party themes will need to incorporate additional icons to support it.
• Panel Popup Alignment: Panel popups originating from widgets at the edge of a panel with limited width now align their edges with the panel more effectively.
• Consistent Language Code Size: The size of language code labels displayed in the system tray no longer fluctuates subtly based on letter shapes when switching keyboard layouts.

Bug Fixes

The notable bug fixes in KDE are:

• Spectacle Pasting Issue Resolved: When Spectacle, KDE's screenshot tool, is set to save in a format other than PNG by default, pasting a copied screenshot now functions reliably across all applications. Previously, some applications that didn't explicitly support non-PNG image pasting, such as Firefox and Chromium, would receive a PNG version even if a different format was preferred.
• Kickoff Favourites Navigation Fixed: Users can once again navigate Kickoff's favourites grid view using the arrow keys.
• KWin Crash Addressed: A bug that could lead to KWin crashes, particularly when X11 or XWayland applications manipulated the window stacking order in specific ways, has been fixed.
• LibreOffice Calc Clipboard Issue Fixed: Copying text from LibreOffice Calc cells to the clipboard is now consistently possible, even without changing clipboard settings to always store images. Previously, this action might have failed to transfer the text unless the clipboard was configured to store images.
• Stylus Tooltip Positioning Fixed: Tooltips should no longer appear at the last known mouse pointer location when using a stylus for system interaction.
• Media Player Widget Crash Fixed: A bug that could cause Plasma to crash when a Media Player widget on the panel (not the system tray) played certain songs with specific title lengths has been resolved. The bug seems to have been triggered by a layout issue caused by the song titles' length.
• Keyboard Layout Shortcut Issue Addressed: An issue preventing modifier-only global shortcuts from switching keyboard layouts as intended on the lock screen and in other contexts within the X11 session has been fixed.
• Shortcut Export Functionality Enhanced: The shortcut export function on the System Settings' Shortcuts page now includes custom script shortcuts, enabling them to be imported and used elsewhere.

And, that's all for this week. For detailed update, refer Nate Graham's official blog post in the following link:

• https://pointieststick.com/2024/08/23/this-week-in-kde-per-monitor-brightness-control-and-update-then-shut-down/

Last Week's KDE Update:

• KDE Weekly Update: System Settings Get a Modern Makeover

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