Welcome to an even more humongous week in KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative!

I’d like to specially highlight one very important fix this week: external hard drives are now safely powered off when unmounted. The fix is in KDE Frameworks 5.52, which will be released in approximately three weeks, and I’d like to give a big thanks to Stefan Brüns who fixed it!

Speaking of Stefan, he and Igor Poboiko have been doing an absolutely smashing job fixing Baloo over the past two weeks. A lot of their work is hard to blog about because it’s not immediately user-facing (though I’ve included as much as possible below), but between the two of them, they’ve made an enormous number of improvements to Baloo that should make it work faster and more smoothly in a lot of subtle ways.

But obviously that’s not all; take a look at the rest of the week’s work:

New Features

It’s now possible to download and install new wallpaper plugins straight from the wallpaper chooser (Chris Holland, KDE Plasma 5.15.0):



Bugfixes

UI Polish & Improvement

Also, I want to mention that we’re aware of two high-profile issues in Discover that slipped by testing and made it into the 5.14.release:

We apologize for these bugs and we’re working to get them fixed quickly!

One of the reasons why bugs like this squeak through is that we don’t have enough pre-release QA testers. You could be one of them, and next week, your name could be in this list! Just check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved, and find out how you can help be a part of something that really matters. You don’t have to already be a programmer. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

If my efforts to perform, guide, and document this work seem useful and you’d like to see more of them, then consider becoming a patron on Patreon, LiberaPay, or PayPal. Also consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.