Jan Grulich

Upcoming news in Plasma 5.5

It’s been a while since Plasma 5.4 release and we are now approaching feature freeze for Plasma 5.5 so I would like to share with you what news you can expect in plasma-nm. This time we have major changes only in our connection editor although most of you wouldn’t probably even notice them. This is going to be a short list unfortunately given I have less time and less ideas, but at least something, right?

So, what is new?

WPA/WPA2 Enterprise validation
WPA/WPA2 Enterprise validation was the only one missing validation in our connection editor and without it we let you to save your WPA/WPA2 Enteprise configuration even when it was wrong or some option was missing. Now you should be able to save your configuration only when it’s valid for NetworkManager. In addition to check for missing properties, we check (in case of TLS authentication) whether provided private key can be decrypted with given private key password (works only for pkcs12 and PEM formats).

New password field widget
Option to show/hide the password and option to not store the password were removed as standalone widgets and they are now part of the password field. I did this to make the UI less complicated and also because I like it, however this introduced some accessibility issues which need to be addressed somehow once I have time to do that (mentioned this here as a commitment that I’ll really do something about that).
plasma-nm-password-widget

Other changes

  • OpenVPN improvements (better properties descriptions, new options)
  • added tooltips to most common options
  • some bugfixes and other minor improvements which are not worth mentioning

11 thoughts on “Upcoming news in Plasma 5.5

  1. Will an issue with dual monitors, crashing dolphin, konsole, etc. be repaired in Plasma 5.5? If not, it is still not usable.

    1. Dual monitors support has been improved in Plasma 5.4 and also in Qt 5.5 (thanks to Daniel Vrátil) and I can say that for me it finally works as it should (with 3 external monitors). I don’t unfortunately know about crashes in dolphin or konsole or in any other application so I can’t answer on this question.

      1. Thank’s for reply.
        I am pleased to hear that something was done in this way.
        Actually both new Kubuntu 15.10 and openSUSE Leap 42.1 have a problem with this. At least in combination with Intel graphics card.

        Which graphics card do you use?

    1. There are improvements only in OpenVPN plugin, unfortunately not in Openconnect. It’s a bit complicated with VPN plugins, because if we don’t have access to problematic VPN server and there is no way how we can reproduce it then it’s difficult to fix the issue if we don’t spot it at the first glance.

  2. Hi,
    Is the ability to have network connexion ordering/preferences (other than signal strength) finally available in this release ? This is a much awaited feature.

    Thanx,

  3. Please add the ability to KDE’s NetworkManager of importing an *.ovpn file for setting up an OpenVPN connection. This much needed feature already exists for Gnome users, yet is lacking for KDE users, and greatly simplifies creating a VPN connection. Thank you.

    1. This is already there, just open the connection editor and go to File → Import VPN. You are not the first asking about this which means that we have to improve that and make it more visible/accessible.

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