Planet KDE

As you have probably heard, two weeks ago a bunch of KDE contributors gathered in Berlin to attend to a sprint to move forward on current KDE community Goals.

I attended the sprint and it was a pleasure to get together with fellow KDE contributors, and discuss our experiences, our plans and aspirations.

Goal Work

My main objective for this Goal was to get automated GUI testing merged for Dolphin. This is important as it paves the way to better testing, accessibility improvements and power-usage measurement, making progress towards the three Goals at once.

I wanted to get this done, since last akademy, and I gave it a try but it wasn't fruitful then. This time with Harald around, selenium webdriver at spi author, I would get a chance to poke him to overcome my difficulties.

And indeed Harald was very helpful. It took me a while to setup properly my local testing environment. But then I could update the existing MR by Marco and iron it up slightly to get it merged.

Another objective I had coming to Berlin, was improving KIO-'s CI-testing situation. Currently a bunch of tests are failing and we don't require tests to pass for KIO. KIO is a very important library for Dolphin, as such I spend an important part of my contributor time on improving it, so this is quite important to me. I sent a fix for a test but CI can't really run this kind of test. Those test the launch of programs using systemd, except our tests run inside containers which limits what tests can do at runtime. We did a little progress, and I learned what needs to be done to fix this case. We need some work on our dev-ops side of things for those ones. A bunch other tests still need fixing.

Dolphin

And I got busy doing Dolphin reviews. A particular one of interests for developpers will be that there will be a git clone dialog in dolphin-plugins. Nikolai Krasheninnikov, the feature contributor, and myself are still improving it to be both nice and very practical.

There is another feature I have been reviewing, but it is too early to speak about publicly.

I also for the first time tried out neochat and I was pleased.

Chronicles of my odyssey revamping navigation gestures for Plasma Mobile

So, it’s been a while since I’ve last blogged. A lot has happened in the mobile Linux world since I made the post sharing the State of Linux on mobile. We’re 5 years further now, some distro options have disappeared and others have popped up, and although I’ve always been really optimistic about what Linux on mobile promises and can become I’ve never actually used it as my daily driver. Even though I work on postmarketOS and would say I know a fair bit about it’s shortcomings and possibilities, I’ve been relying on an Android phone for all this time to get me through life. And I’ve noticed that this is the case for a lot of people and especially developers in the Linux world.

Recently I decided this should change. How can we ever get Linux on mobile up to a state where we can use it as a proper replacement for the duopoly that is Android and iOS if nobody, including the developers, actually use it even though it’s already out there and available? I’m of course a KDE fan and would love to use Plasma Mobile specifically but it has a ton of papercut issues that could easily be solved if the developers actually noticed them by using it! So about two weeks ago I decided to get myself a new, second-hand, phone to actually daily drive postmarketOS with Plasma Mobile on and I’ll tell you about my experiences with it so far.

My setup

Although a lot of people still seem to think Pine64’s PinePhone (Pro) or Purism’s Librem 5 are the best options for a Linux phone out there, I would argue this is not the case any more. Besides the PinePhone being awfully slow hardware it is suffering from a lack of software support, the kernel is maintained by a single person in their spare time and has a ton of things not actually upstreamed to mainline, and the Librem 5 is way too expensive for what it offers and is made by a company that currently seems to have severe financial problems (they recently layed off most of their developers). Instead I would recommend a well supported (former) Android device, the postmarketOS wiki has a good list of well supported devices and specifically I would recommend getting a SDM845 device, namely the OnePlus 6/6T, SHIFT6mq (you can buy these brand new even) and the Xiaomi Pocophone F1. These are fully mainline supported and are easily buyable second-hand through platforms like eBay for not too much.

I however decided to get a Pixel 3A. This device is also fully mainline supported and I think it’s good to not have all attention focused on a few specific devices but get broader support available. The Pixel 3A was a popular phone when it was still newly sold so a lot of people might actually still have one laying around.

postmarketOS also supports a bunch of tablets which would actually be a really good use-case for Plasma Mobile.

Software

So as I mentioned earlier I’m a KDE fan, so of course I opt to run Plasma Mobile. I maintain a (semi-)nightly repository of all KDE packages that tries to build the entirety of KDE from git master every day. This has been proven very useful for Plasma Mobile development as newly merged changes can be quickly tested by consumers and also reduces the need to compile the entirety of Plasma on your phone if you want to change just a few lines in the code. It was made to support the transitioning to Qt6 but I find it so useful that I’ll keep it around in the future. So on my new phone I enabled this repository, executed the upgrade and rebooted into a fresh Plasma 6 installation straight from git master the day before.

It is good to note that although I’m definitely daily driving postmarketOS now, my sim-card is actually still in my Android phone. I do not currently trust the stability of phone calls, mostly when it comes to audio. We (postmarketOS) are working hard to improve the situation, especially by switching to PipeWire for audio hopefully soon, but for now I’m carrying two devices around having my Android phone share a hotspot to postmarketOS. The camera also currently doesn’t work so for that having the Android phone around for now is also still very useful. The camera however is making good progress with projects like libcamera making it possible to create camera applications and use it in browsers like Firefox.

So, what do I actually use this phone for? These are some of the use-cases I have and the applications I use for them:

• browsing the web with Angelfish
  • I would actually prefer to use Firefox to not support Google’s monopoly on the web by using a Chromium-based browser but I currently think Angelfish’s experience is better than the Firefox one on mobile
• make and keep track of notes with Marknote, for example shopping lists
• watch YouTube with PlasmaTube
• sync files and pictures from my NextCloud server with GhostCloud
  • I actually used this years ago when I still used SailfishOS. I was very glad to see it’s still around and even supports Ubuntu Touch and regular desktop Linux (and thus Plasma Mobile) as well nowadays. A Kirigami based-UI for this so it fits in better would be nice but it’s very usable as is
• chat on Matrix with NeoChat
• listen to my music with Elisa
• manage my local files with Index
• manage my calendar with Merkuro
• do offline turn-by-turn navigation with Osmin
  • I find this application incredible. In my mind navigation is a difficult to create app but Osmin works well and calculates routes very quickly (completely offline!). It’s not yet as feature-full as say OSMand on Android but it’s very usable
• browse the fediverse (Mastodon) with Tokodon
• check the weather with KWeather

This actually covers a huge part of what I would do on Android as well, now I just do these on postmarketOS instead using almost exclusively KDE applications! I’m still missing a few (for me) important things, most notably a Keepass-compatible client to get the passwords needed for aforementioned applications. I worked around that however by using KDEConnect to share my clipboard from my desktop where I just use KeepassXC. And of course the few Android applications that just don’t have FOSS-replacements like WhatsApp or my bank app, but I’m hoping either Waydroid or even the in my opinion more promising android-translation-layer (basically Wine for Android apps) can be used for that in the future.

Now although this is a very usable setup for me, when actually using this you’ll quickly notice a lot of small but annoying issues. These are all small in size and would easily be fixed if there were developers to experience them but accumulating together they make the whole experience a bit frustrating still. I’ve been reporting everything I could find so far (for example see all the issues I’ve made on just the Plasma Mobile shell). A few examples:

• several applications have multiple actions on the same button press, like NeoChat both opening a room and opening a context menu for it when pressing on a room in the room list, BUG: 486545
• Angelfish automatically switches to a newly opened tab which is unlike any other mobile browser, unexpectedly throwing the user off whatever they’re reading, and shows an unnecessary message telling the user the new tab has been opened which is blocking the button to go back to the previous tab, BUG: 486463
• QMLKonsole (the mobile alternative to Konsole) for some reason has it’s own button to open and close the keyboard but pressing it has various buggy behaviours, BUG: 355
• various applications have context hints that are meant to be shown on desktop when hovering an element but show up when pressing buttons or input fields on mobile, BUG: 360
• various desktop widgets are completely broken, BUG: 354
• sometimes (not often) the shell just crashes, I haven’t been able to find a good reproducer yet

Development

To a lot of KDE developers developing for Plasma Mobile is an unknown (and possibly scary) territory and they might not know how to do it easily. Will you compile everything on your device or cross-compile from your desktop instead, use kde-builder or do it manually? Of course this all comes down to personal preferences in the end but let me tell you how I do it.

Like I mentioned earlier I’m maintaining a nightly repository shipping the entirety of KDE from git master. I highly recommend using this repository so you can quickly test and use new features and bug fixes. Instructions to set this up are on the postmarketOS wiki.

Although compilation on device (e.g. using kde-builder) is most definitely possible, this is just regular good ol’ Linux after all, it’s a slow process due to the limited performance of a phone and might warm it up more than is safe for the device. Instead I would recommend using the lovely pmbootstrap tool we use for postmarketOS development and build on your way more performant PC instead. This tool builds software using Alpine’s simple APKBUILD format. You don’t have to worry too much about learning this format, these APKBUILDs already exist for basically every KDE package out there and you can just reuse these. After setting up pmbootstrap (pmbootstrap init) you can get such an APKBUILD for a KDE package either by manually downloading it from the upstream repository and placing it in the location pmbootstrap expects or run pmbootstrap aportgen --fork-alpine <package name>. This makes pmbootstrap get the APKBUILD from Alpine Linux and put it in your local checkout of postmarketOS packages.

The APKBUILD just downloaded can be used as is and you can now build the package with pmbootstrap build --arch <CPU architecture of the target device> but you probably want to use your local checkout of the code with your changes instead. For this pmbootstrap supports the --src argument which makes it build the same APKBUILD but with the source replaced for your local checkout. If your changes require any dependencies changed from what is currently provided by the package you can edit either the $makedepends or $depends (build dependencies and runtime dependencies respectively) variables in the APKBUILD ($depends might not exist, just create it if it doesn’t).

When you’ve successfully built the package you can send it to your device using pmbootstrap sideload <package name>. This will send it to a device running postmarketOS and let the packagemanager APK install it. Restart the application in question and your changes will be ready to test! pmbootstrap supports way more fancy features and I recommend you read it’s documentation to see what you can do.

Conclusion

In my opinion Plasma Mobile on postmarketOS is very usable right now but at the moment suffers from a lot of papercuts. I hope that since I now daily drive the system I can find all these papercuts, report them and possibly even fix one or two of them. But even more so I hope I can convince KDE developers to pick up a phone themselves and start using the system they’re in fact already developing for (95% of the Plasma Mobile stack is the same as Plasma Desktop and all the applications used were made to be used on desktop as well!). The system has a lot of potential and is already great to use, it just needs developers! Get a cheap second hand phone, flash postmarketOS on it and start using it!

I’m dreaming of a day where I’m not the only one at Akademy that not only has Plasma on their laptop but also their phone!

Our friends at postmarketOS hosted Plasma Mobile's lead developer Devin Lin on their podcast. You can find it on the postmarketos website

Akademy 2024 (the annual world summit for KDE) is happening in Würzburg, Saturday 7th – Thursday 12th September. (I hope you knew that)

First of all, if you're reading this and thinking, "Should i go to Akademy?" 

The answer is [most probably] YES! Akademy has something for everyone, be it coders, translators, promoters, designers, enthusiasts, etc.

Now, with this out of the way, one of the many things that makes Akademy is the talks on the weekend, and you know who has something to say? *YOU*

Yes, *YOU*. I'm sure you've been working on something interesting, or have a great idea to share.

*YOU* may think that your idea is not that great or the things you work on are not interesting, but that's seldomly the case when someone explains me their "boring" thing they've been working on, i always think "Wow that's great".

Ok, so now that I've convinced you to send a talk proposal, when better than *TODAY* to send it?

Yes I know the Call for Participation is open until the 24 of May, but by sending it today you make sure you don't forget sending it later and also [more important for me] you help those of us in the Program Committee not when the final date starts approaching and we don't have lots of talks yet because you all prefer sending talks on the very last minute.

So stop reading and send your talk today ;-)

This week we put some of the final Plasma 6.0 bugs to rest, and continued working towards Plasma 6.1 with a variety of UI improvements. Nothing ground-breaking this week, just a slow grind of useful work towards a solid release!

UI Improvements

Kate now considers a file as recent when it’s saved or closed, not just when it’s opened. This means your recent files list will no longer omit files you kept open for a long time while working on them (Christoph Cullmann, Kate 24.05. Link)

The panel icons for Kickoff (Application Launcher) and Kicker (Application Menu) widgets are now capped in size so they can’t grow ridiculously huge on thicccc panel (Akseli Lahtinen and me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.0.5. Link 1 and link 2)

System Settings no longer lets you choose GNOME’s Adwaita or High Contrast icon themes as your systemwide icon theme, because despite registering themselves as FreeDesktop-compatible icon themes, they are no longer actually designed to be used this way and will break everything from KDE if you try anyway (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.0.5. Link)

The screen that KWin considers active for the purpose of determining which screen to open new windows on is now determined by “last user interaction”, which includes things like mouse movement and keyboard focus. Hopefully this should better match people’s expectations (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Made the wallpaper chooser views frameless, matching the current styling of most other settings pages in System Settings and Plasma (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.1. Link 1 and link 2):

Plasma’s notifications now use a more appropriate icon for canceling jobs, and also elide long title text in the middle rather than on the left (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 6.1. Link 1 and link 2):

Ok, so maybe “plasma-brows…gration-host” is not a work of towering genius. The fact that a long ugly technical name is shown there is another bug we’ll investigate.

Refined the UI shown when changing global themes to make it clear what will happen and what’s potentially dangerous (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.1. Link 1 and link 2):

https://i.imgur.com/626VvQ2.mp4

When you use the command-line powerprofilesctl tool to change power profiles, the new state is now reflected in the Power and Battery widget (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Several Breeze icons (folder-encrypted, folder-decrypted, and folder-music) now have proper symbolic versions at their 16px and 22px sizes (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 6.2. Link)

Bug Fixes

Gwenview no longer fails to open large images; now its Qt 6 version can open the same size of image that the Qt 5 version could (Méven Car, Gwenview 24.05. Link)

On Wayland, KWin no longer crashes when it’s unable to open a socket to XWayland for some reason (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.0.5. Link)

Fixed a case where Plasma could crash while modifying the set of favorite apps in Kickoff (Application Launcher), Kicker (Application Menu), or another launcher menu using the same backend infrastructure (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.0.5. Link)

When using Qt 6.7, the System Tray popup is no longer sometimes inappropriately resized to a tiny nub, and also clicking a System Monitor widget showing GPU sensors no longer causes Plasma to freeze (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.0.5. Link 1 and link 2)

Fixed an extremely strange issue that could be triggered by opening any windows of IntelliJ IDE apps, and would cause other windows and Plasma panels to become transparent to clicks (Vyacheslav Mayorov, Plasma 6.0.5. Link)

When waking the system from sleep, quick-tiled windows no longer sometimes disappear, and vertically-maximized windows are no longer sometimes mis-positioned (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.0.5. Link 1 and link 2)

On X11, forcing tablet mode on when using a multi-screen setup with global scaling no longer causes one of the screens to scale everything incorrectly (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.0.5 Link)

Applied a workaround in KWin for an AMD GPU driver bug, which should reduce instances of random visual glitchiness (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Fixed another case of Korners, this time for menus in QtWidgets-based apps (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Resizing a window with a wallpaper chooser grid in it no longer sometimes causes the grid view’s header to disturbingly detach and appear in the middle of the view (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.1. Link)

More audio and video files now have appropriate icons, and when no suitable format-specific icon is found, the system will no longer fall back to an inappropriate symbolic speaker or filmstrip icon (Kai Uwe Broulik and me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 6.2. Link 1 and link 2)

Fixed a case in Kirigami where some UI elements would have incorrect colors when using mixed light/dark color schemes (Evgeniy Harchenko, Frameworks 6.2. Link)

After we fixed the “Pick your installation option popup” in the “Get new [thing]” windows, Qt 6.7 broke it again, so we fixed it again! This time moar betterer (Akseli Lahtinen and Ivan Tkachenko, Frameworks 6.3. Link)

Fixed an issue that caused apps with System Tray icons to inappropriately quit when deleting their tray icons (Tor Arne, Qt 6.7.2. Link)

Other bug information of note:

• 3 Very high priority Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
• 35 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 39 last week). Current list of bugs
• 126 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed over the last week Full list of bugs

Performance & Technical

Implemented a bunch of security hardening for our crash reporting system based on feedback from SUSE’s security team (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.0.5. Link)

Automation & Systematization

Added multiple autotests to ensure that mounting different types of mountable filesystems works as intended (Stefan Brüns, Frameworks 6.2. Link)

Added an autotest to make sure that Plasma-themes UI elements that should have the same height—such as text fields and buttons—still do even if the Plasma style is changed (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.1. Link)

…And Everything Else

This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! If you’re hungry for more, check out https://planet.kde.org, where you can find more news from other KDE contributors.

How You Can Help

The KDE organization has become important in the world, and your time and labor have helped to bring it there! But as we grow, it’s going to be equally important that this stream of labor be made sustainable, which primarily means paying for it. Right now the vast majority of KDE runs on labor not paid for by KDE e.V. (the nonprofit foundation behind KDE, of which I am a board member), and that’s a problem. We’ve taken steps to change this with paid technical contractors—but those steps are small due to growing but still limited financial resources. If you’d like to help change that, consider donating today!

Otherwise, visit https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover other ways to be part of a project that really matters. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE; you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to already be a programmer, either. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

I recently went on Brodie Robertson’s Tech Over Tea channel for a second time. I guess I didn’t succeed at pissing him off enough on the first go-around, because he invited me back! Let’s see if I did a better job of it this time by telling him he was using Arch wrong.

Anyway, Brodie was a fantastic host, and we talked about a number of topics such as KDE’s position in the world, institutional continuity, fundraising and financial stability, the difficulty of reporting and triaging bug, the challenges of packaging software, and windows that block WiFi signals.

I hope you enjoy it!

And here’s the link I mention at the end: https://kde.org/community/donations

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-18.

Radio Free Fedi - Sounds from the Fediverse to the Universe

Tags: tech, fediverse, streaming, culture

I’ve been listening to these radio channels the past few weeks. It’s quirky, it’s weird, it’s wild. I definitely recommend them to get out of your usual music bubble.

https://radiofreefedi.net/

We can have a different web

Tags: tech, internet, web, culture, history

Very nice account of how the Internet is nowadays and how it got there. I like the gardening metaphor which works nicely here. And yes, we can go back to a better Web again. It’s a collective decision though, that’s what makes it hard.

https://www.citationneeded.news/we-can-have-a-different-web/

Save the Web by Being Nice

Tags: tech, blog, web, social-media

Definitely this. Get the content you like known, send appreciation messages to the authors. This should keep the moribund web alive.

https://sheep.horse/2024/4/save_the_web_by_being_nice.html

Google Made Me Ruin A Perfectly Good Website: A Case Study On The AI-Generated Internet

Tags: tech, web, advertisement, google, criticism

Ever wondered why the quality of websites seems to go down? Well, here is a case study of what you end up needing to do if you try to fund a website through ads (like most websites).

https://theluddite.org/#!post/google-ads

Latest Google layoffs hit the Flutter and Python groups | Ars Technica

Tags: tech, google, flutter

Looks like Flutter’s days are counted. It seems it has peeked and announcements like this are likely to move people away from it. Time will tell of course.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/latest-google-layoffs-hit-the-flutter-and-python-groups/

The walls of Apple’s garden are tumbling down - The Verge

Tags: tech, apple, vendor-lockin

Indeed there are more and more signs of the Apple vendor lock-in to be in trouble. And that’s a good thing.

https://www.theverge.com/24141929/apple-iphone-imessage-antitrust-dma-lock-in

Having a machine room can mean having things in your machine room

Tags: tech, hardware, funny

Sure you can expect mice, but raccoons? This is a funny finding… well scary if you’re responsible of this machine room.

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/MachineRoomRaccoon

pyinfra automates infrastructure super fast at massive scale

Tags: tech, tools, infrastructure, deployment, python

Looks like an interesting tool for infrastructure automation. It’s all Python based which is an interesting departure from yaml files in that space. Could be a nice alternative to Ansible. I might take it out for a spin.

https://pyinfra.com/

run0

Tags: tech, security, tools, command-line, systemd

An alternative to the venerable sudo coming with systemd. Looks like it has interesting properties.

https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/devel/run0.html

Practical parsing with PEG and cpp-peglib - Bert Hubert’s writings

Tags: tech, parsing, c++

Time to leave Lex and Yacc behind? This is definitely a nice approach to make parsers nowadays.

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/practical-peg-parsing/

Bytecode VMs in surprising places

Tags: tech, bytecode

Bytecodes everywhere! Really it’s a very widespread trick, I didn’t expect some of those.

https://dubroy.com/blog/bytecode-vms-in-surprising-places/

Reflectively constructing enums at runtime - Highly Suspect Agency

Tags: tech, java

Probably shouldn’t do this in most case… but if it’s really needed and you can bare the pain, Java has solutions for you. This is an interesting dive in lower parts of the APIs.

https://highlysuspect.agency/posts/enum_reflection/

Brane Dump: The Mediocre Programmer’s Guide to Rust

Tags: tech, programming, rust, funny

Funny read, it has lots of good advice for starting up with Rust.

https://www.hezmatt.org/~mpalmer/blog/2024/05/01/the-mediocre-programmers-guide-to-rust.html

A Free-Space Diffraction BSDF

Tags: tech, 3d, physics, mathematics

Very cool BSDF. Should lead to better diffraction rendering in real-time 3D.

https://ssteinberg.xyz/2024/04/05/free_space_diffractions_bsdf/

Keep Out! — Little Workshop

Tags: tech, web, 3d

Good demonstration of what you can do with WebGL nowadays.

https://www.littleworkshop.fr/projects/keepout/

CC0 Textures & Models | Share Textures

Tags: tech, 3d, foss

Another great resource for nice models and textures for your 3D needs.

https://www.sharetextures.com/

Shader post-processing in a hurry

Tags: tech, shader, graphics

A nice list of little tricks to improve the image quality of your renders.

https://30fps.net/pages/post-processing/

Software Friction

Tags: tech, project-management

Interesting musing about the concept of friction in strategy. There are indeed a few lessons to learn from it in the context of software projects.

https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/software-friction/

Bye for now!

This blog post is the first one in a series where we are going to have a look at one exciting feature coming as a Technology Preview in 6.7.0: the ability to use QML and Qt Quick in your otherwise non-Qt Android apps as an Android View! We've also created an Android Studio plugin to help you keep the workflow simple. In this first post, we'll have an overview of the feature, what it entails, why we are adding it, and where you could benefit from it. In the following posts, we will show how to use it along with some code examples and take a closer look at the tooling, testing, and some possible use cases, such as 3D. 

The E-Banners for #Akademy2024 are now available!

Use them to promote Akademy on your websites, blogs, social media headers, or any other platform.

There are three different sizes to choose from. If you decide to use the banners, it would be great if you could link them to the Akademy website to help attract more visitors.

Let's spread the word about Akademy and make it a success!

(These banners were created by Andy B.)

Or FOFAFOSS. Rolls right off your tongue.

Like in many families, there's always a bit of.. turmoil and drama in FOSS. Something breaks (either on purpose or by accident), people get frustrated.. The usual. It is kind of to be expected when it comes to very social projects, like let's say, Linux desktop environments.

People have their own visions and ways to see things. They often clash. That's normal. It's quite human. I do like to think that Linux desktop environments especially are like siblings that have rivalries.

But we got to remember that it's not "us vs them" here. We don't have the resources to fight each other. We need to work together even with our incompatible visions sometimes. Otherwise things will keep fracturing and get even worse.. And nobody gains from that. Well, except the proprietary platforms. :P

In the end we all want to make good software for everyone to use and enjoy. Let's help each other to do that as well as we can.

Nothing wrong with "Oh you made that? Well watch this!" type of friendly rivalry however, it keeps us doing what we do best. :)

I just wanted to write this down as somekind of reminder that we got to remember to work together if we want to succeed. Even when frustrated.

And no I am not any high and mighty person to really say this, I have had my own share of frustrations and quips. This post serves also as a reminder for myself.

So let's try to work together as well as we can.

KDE will mentor ten projects in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) this year. GSoC is a program in which contributors new to open-source spend between 175 and 350 hours working on an open.source project.

Projects KDE Connect

ShellWen Chen will work on updating the SSHD library in the KDE Connect Android app which will improve the application's security and stability. Albert Vaca Cintora will mentor this project.

Labplot

LabPlot is a Data Visualization and Analysis platform. This summer, Kuntal Bar will work on adding 3D plotting support to cater to the evolving demands of scientific research. Israel Galadima will work on Python wrappers around the LabPlot C++ API. Alexander Semke will mentor both projects.

Arianna

Arianna is KDE's Epub viewer, and Ajay will work on porting the Javascript frontend from epub.js to Foliate.js, the library that powers Foliate. Carl Schwan will mentor this project.

Frameworks

Manuel Alcaraz will work on adding support for Qt for Python to some of the KDE Frameworks, enabling the large Python ecosystem to use them. Carl Schwan will also mentor this project.

Okular

Pratham Gandhi will work on improving Okular's support for Javascript forms. This is particularly important because Javascript-powered forms are used frequently in PDFs provided by local governments, and while Okular already partially supports them, many functions are not implemented. Albert Astals Cid will mentor this project.

Snaps

Soumyadeep Ghosh will work under Scarlett's direction and integrate the Snap ecosystem closer with KDE. This includes fixing the Discover integration with Snap and adding a Snap KCM to change the permission from Plasma System Settings.

Krita

Ken Lo will work under the supervision of Tiar and Emmet O'Neill on improving the pixel art workflow by adding the Pixel Perfect option to smooth out pixel art curves.

KDE Games

João Gouveia will implement the backend for a variant of the Mancala game as well as a solver under the supervision of Benson Muite and Harsh Kumar.

Kdenlive

Chengkun Chen will work on improving the support for subtitles in Kdenlive. More specifically, he will add full support for the Sub Station Alpha v4.00+ format which contains style information for Kdenlive. Jean-Baptiste Mardelle will mentor this project.

How it shall look… # Linux & BSDs # Windows # macOS # State on Fedora 40 Workstation & XFCE Spin… #

Screenshots taken from the GNOME bugtracker, copies to not stall their GitLab instance.

I think that is rather unpleasant and for e.g. the left icon-only border just an unusable insult.

Why? The Adwaita Icon Theme no longer follows the FDO icon naming spec #

There was no information that they want to break away from the icon naming ’the world’ does assume (given there is a spec). And now we have that state for our users there, at least on these spins.

That is not that nice, we did spend a lot of work to get our applications working cross-desktop and even cross-platform and now that…

I feel rather infuriated, finding this before going to sleep, even more after reading the feedback in the GNOME bugtracker and that this is just closed as ‘so be it’.

They added now at least a hint to the README:

Private UI icon set for GNOME core apps.

Ok, I assume that is then all fine.

No, it is not.

Then please don’t install it as FDO icon theme and break all FOSS apps that rely on the naming spec…

If you care for non ‘GNOME core apps’ to work per default properly on distributions like that, please either get them to fix it (hints are given in the linked issue) or get the distributions to install a compliant theme.

We can plan to work around this mess in the future on our side, but that will not un-break the application versions that are now already shipped to our users and non-KDE frameworks based stuff that will just run into the same issues.

Feedback #

You can provide feedback on the matching KDE Social, reddit or Hacker News post.

Last week, like many other people, I was in Berlin for the Mega^WGoals sprint. Natually the three goals (Sustainability, Accessibility, and Automatability; the three abilities) attracted a diverse crowd of people that brought also other topics, so it turned into a proper megasprint.

Being interested in all three goals made it a bit callenging to follow all relevant discussions unfortunately, but on the flip side it never got boring.

Most of my goal-related work was towards the automation goal. One thing I was working on is a CI job that checks for spelling mistakes in the code, so that those can be caught when doing a MR. A while ago I create a website that tracks which KDE projects are ported to Qt6. What started out as a joke for a talk turned out to be a useful tool for planning porting work. During the print I fixed the site to actually work correctly again and, most importantly, changed the text from “No” to “Yes” since most projects actually use Qt6 now. For a while the site also has auto-generated reports for other things, like showing which projects don’t yet have clang-format applied to them or which projects don’t enforce passing test in the CI. I used the latter list to enable this for the remaining projects that don’t have failing tests right now and prepared a change to the CI system that enforces passing tests by default. In the same spirit others and I also fixed some currently failing tests. We also discussed the idea of extending the site with more checks and turning it into a proper KDE site that isn’t hosted on my personal infrastructure.

Harald, Carl, and I worked on a dashboard to show the CI status for our project. This is something we haven’t really had since switching to Gitlab CI but is very useful e.g. as part of the release checklist. We do have a working prototype, but some things remain to be ironed out. As part of this we also fixed some of the currently failing builds.

My main contribution to the systainability goal was debugging why Nate’s NeoChat is using too much CPU. With a team effort we eventually pinpointed this to an invisible animation constantly repainting the window, which was then promptly fixed.

In terms of accessibility I was mainly involved in discussions about challenges and new developments with accessibility on Wayland. Expect to hear more on this soon.

In “off-topic” topics there were plently of discussions about visions, ideas, and challenges for our application development story. This included discussions on visions for design/UX, theming, API design, and software distribution. Being KDE’s Software Platform Engineer it is part of my responsibilities to facilitate these kinds of discussions. Later this year I want to host a sprint dedicated to application design to discuss and establish our vision there. If you are interested do reach out to me.

All in all it was a fun few days with great people. Thanks to MBition and Aleix for hosting us, and thanks to those donating to KDE to make these sprints possible.

Looking back at my blog, I find lots of mention of Amarok, the KDE audio player, in 2008, 2009, some KDE4-on-OpenSolaris stuff mentions it, and then a long silence until 2021. About a year ago, early 2023, the audio/amarok port was removed from FreeBSD ports. So naturally I was intrigued – maybe even excited – to see Amarok return from vacation with a 3.0 release. And I needed to try it on FreeBSD.

Many of the dependencies are (still) packaged on FreeBSD, so I installed a handful and tried building it on my still-KF5-based X11-based so last-gen Plasma Desktop workstation.

Somewhat to my surprise – I don’t imagine there is FreeBSD CI for Amarok – everything built, ninja install did the right things, and it starts! And toots and parples, clangs, bangs, blips and bloops are reproduced with excellent fidelity.

So, congratulations Amarok folk. It might even return to the FreeBSD ports collection, although – I’m gonna be honest here – I’m not sure it offers me anything in the way of music appreciation that command-line gst-play doesn’t give me. I am just that much more previous-last-gen.

I was looking at some code that sets file permissions – file modes – by calling chmod(2). The command-line chmod(1) has a bunch of possibilities for setting permissions, but the underlying system-call needs an int, and the C headers for it are annoying to use. So I fired up some C++ machinery to “make it nicer to use”.

tl;dr: scroll to the bottom for a compile-time, compact way of writing file permissions so that chmod(filename, "rwx--x--x"_mode) does something plausible, with good error messages in case of typo’s.

The manpage for chmod(1) is fairly extensive. There are two ways to specify a file mode, either in octal or symbolically. Octal is just a number, symbolically is much more complicated.

On the C API side, the manpage for chmod(2) shows you need a pathname and a mode, and there are a whole bunch of symbolic constants to use, like S_IRUSR.

How I think about file modes

It turns out I nearly always think about file modes in octal. I have somehow internalized things like “755 for executables” and “666 for crap” and “600 for files in ~/.ssh” but I don’t really have names for these things. If I think about it, I can use the symbolic manipulations like ugo+rw for crap. But I don’t see permissions in this symbolic form, and the octal form is persnickety in C source, probably because I don’t expect everyone to know “leading 0 means octal”.

But there is a form in which I see file modes every day: the output from ls -l, where permissions are shown with 10 characters, the first 10 on this line:

-rw-r--r-- 1 adridg users 0 Apr 30 11:46 example.txt

The first - says something about the type of file and is - for regular files, d for directories, l for symbolic links, and there are others, too. That’s not really the mode, though, while the next 9 characters are: each group of three shows r, w, and x in that order, or a - in each position, indicating the read, write, or execute bit for the corresponding class of logins. The first three are the current user, next three are group, the last three for others.

The C code to call chmod with this mode looks like

chmod("example.txt", 0644); chmod("example.txt", S_IRUSR | S_IWUSR | S_IRGRP | S_IROTH);

One is octal-arcane and the other is just arcane and hard-to-read.

Turning readable modes into numbers

So I thought to myself: I can write a C++ function that turns the 9-characters of the mode in text form, into an actual mode_t value (that’s an integer).

That’s a trivial exercise, really, although it gets a bit persnickety in error handling. I would just throw on an incorrect length, or any incorrect character, and leave it at that.

From there, though, I went on to: I can write a consteval C++ function that does the computation at compile-time (guaranteed to be only at compile-time, because consteval). This is a function that can only be called with a compile-time string literal, so the function signature is potentially:

consteval mode_t from_readable_mode(const char (&permission_string)[10])

The array-reference is to 10 characters because there are 9 mode characters, and then a trailing NUL byte (zero) in a string literal. This function can be called (in the context, sill, of chmod()) like so:

chmod("example.txt", from_readable_mode("rw-r--r--"));

and at compile-time that is already computed to be 420 (that’s 0644 octal).

The last step of make-it-cool (for an appropriate value of “cool”) is to turn the whole thing into a user-defined literal. In my source code I can now write

chmod("example.txt", "rw-r--r--"_mode);

Which really satisfies my own desire for “readable, compact, compile-time”.

Don’t get me started on Qt

For some reason, the values of QFileDevice::Permission are in hexadecimal, but written as hex, look like the corresponding octal values. So in Qt code if you don’t use the symbolic representation of the flags, and just go ram an integer into there, you get 0x644 meaning the same as 0660 in the call to chmod() and everything becomes just that much more confusing and fraught.

Meaningful error messages

C++ and “helpful, friendly, easy-to-read error messages” go together like peaches and .. battery acid? Like things that don’t go well together at all. In recent GCC versions there has been a marked improvement in the look of error messages.

With some judicious use of templates and naming of types, existing error messages can be improved. You still get a veritable torrent of messages, but if, somewhere in the middle, the error message (here, from Clang 17) says:

mode.h:26:9: note: subexpression not valid in a constant expression 26 | throw invalid_permission_character{}; mode.h:41:9: note: in call to 'expected_character_at_position(&"rwxbadbug"[0])' 41 | detail::expected_character_at_position<3, 'r'>(s) |

Then it’s a lot easier to decide that the character at position 3 – the letter b – is not expected, and maybe an r was expected there instead.

User-defined file mode literals

Here is the definition of my _mode literal. String-based literals get a pointer and a size, which is inconvenient because they don’t turn back into fixed-size arrays.

consteval mode_t operator""_mode(const char *s, size_t len) { if (len != 9) { throw detail::invalid_permission_string_length{}; } return detail::from_readable_mode_string(s); }

Anyway, if the string is the wrong size then a meaningful exception is thrown, which isn’t constexpr, so you get a meaningful error message:

mode.h:65:9: note: subexpression not valid in a constant expression 65 | throw detail::invalid_permission_string_length{}; main.cc:44:24: note: in call to 'operator""_mode(&"birb"[0], 4)' 44 | std::cout << "birb"_mode;

Here us the implementation of the function that does the actual work, turning the string into a mode_t:

consteval mode_t from_readable_mode_string(const char * const s) { return detail::expected_character_at_position<0, 'r'>(s) | detail::expected_character_at_position<1, 'w'>(s) | detail::expected_character_at_position<2, 'x'>(s) | detail::expected_character_at_position<3, 'r'>(s) | detail::expected_character_at_position<4, 'w'>(s) | detail::expected_character_at_position<5, 'x'>(s) | detail::expected_character_at_position<6, 'r'>(s) | detail::expected_character_at_position<7, 'w'>(s) | detail::expected_character_at_position<8, 'x'>(s); }

It’s really wordy, which is unfortunate, but by writing it like this, the error message – at least with Clang 17 – repeats the template parameters and mentions the specific subexpression that is problematic.

Here is a Clang 17 error message when using an inappropriate permission character:

mode.h:26:9: note: subexpression not valid in a constant expression 26 | throw invalid_permission_character{}; mode.h:44:9: note: in call to 'expected_character_at_position(&"------uwu"[0])' 44 | detail::expected_character_at_position<6, 'r'>(s) | mode.h:67:12: note: in call to 'from_readable_mode_string(&"------uwu"[0])' 67 | return detail::from_readable_mode_string(s);

Huh, I guess you can’t give uWu permission to others. The same error message from GCC 13 looks similar:

main.cc:44:18: in 'constexpr' expansion of 'operator""_mode(((const char*)"------uwu"), 9)' mode.h:67:45: in 'constexpr' expansion of 'detail::from_readable_mode_string(s)' mode.h:44:55: in 'constexpr' expansion of 'detail::expected_character_at_position<6, 'r'>(((const char*)s))' mode.h:26:9: error: expression '<throw-expression>' is not a constant expression 26 | throw invalid_permission_character{};

And here’s the implementation that turns a single character into a bit in a file mode value:

template<int position, char accept> consteval mode_t expected_character_at_position(const char * const permission_string) { const char c = permission_string[position]; if(c == accept) { return 1 << (8-position); } if(c == '-') { return 0; } throw invalid_permission_character{}; }

This is a bit wordy, but it ensures that position and the acceptable (expected) char are front-and-center in error messages, and that the expected character and - are the only characters for which this is a constant expression – everything else will fail because exceptions aren’t constexpr.

So there you have it, a compact constexpr representation of file modes with meaningful error messages. You can find the code in my personal GitHub repository playground, in the subdirectory mode/ . I won’t link it here because, frankly, it is time I get my ass in gear and migrate to some other forge.

I'm happy to have been able to attend my first in-person KDE event, the Automation & Systematization Sprint in Berlin. Previously, my contributions to KDE have consisted of submitting and triaging bug reports. During this weekend, I was able to meet some of the KDE team in person, and become more involved. I've started working with the Bugzilla Bot code, and plan to start digging into the automated test code.

The Bugzilla product list had fallen out of date, so first I updated that (yay, my first accepted MR!). I also started working on using the GitLab API to automate these updates. In the near future, I'll be tackling some requested improvements to the Bugzilla Bot. This will lessen the amount of boring manual bug chores and free people up to do more valuable work.

Thanks to the KDE team for being so friendly and willing to help me learn the development environment. I'm happy to have found more ways to contribute that I enjoy, and will be valuable to the project.

The Amarok Development Squad is happy to announce the immediate availability of Amarok 3.0 "Castaway"!

The new 3.0 is the first stable Qt5/KDE Frameworks 5 based version of Amarok, and first stable release since 2018, when the final Qt4 based version 2.9.0 was released.

The road to 3.0 has not been a short one. Much of the Qt5/KF5 porting was done in 2015 already, but finishing and polishing everything up has been a slow, sometimes ongoing and sometimes stalled process ever since. 3.0 Alpha was released in February 2021 and has been since used by many people, as have been nightly builds of git master available for various distributions. Now in the past few months, an effort was made to get everything ready for a proper 3.0 release.

Common usecases should work quite well, and in addition to fixing KF5 port related regressions reported in pre-releases, 3.0 features many bugfixes and implemented features for longstanding issues, the oldest such documented being from 2009. However, with more than 20 years of development history, it is likely that not every feature Amarok has been tested thoroughly in the new release, and specifically some Internet services that have changed their API in recent years are not available, at least for now. It might well be that getting them in better state wouldn't require huge effort, however, so if you know your way with Qt and KDE Frameworks and your favourite Internet music service does not work with Amarok 3.0, you are extremely welcome to join in and help!

In the following months, minor releases containing small fixes and additions, based on both newly reported and longer-standing bug reports and feature requests, are to be expected. Work on porting to Amarok to Qt6/KDE Frameworks 6 should start in the following months, the goal being to have a usable Qt6/KF6 based beta version in 2024 still.

One should observe that due to scripting framework port from QtScript to QJSEngine still being a work in progress, previous Amarok 2.x scripts are often not compatible. The script API documentation at community wiki is also partially out of date. Additionally, due to incompatibilities and other issues, KNewStuff downloading of scripts is disabled for the time being. Having script support in more polished shape is something to work on after an initial Qt6/KF6 version starts to be usable. It is also evident that the web site and community wiki pages largely originate from more than ten years ago, and contain partially outdated information. Some work on refreshing them and pruning the documentation to make it more maintainable is likely to happen during the following months.

Now it's time to Rediscover Your Music in the 2020's! Changes since 3.0 Beta (2.9.82) FEATURES:

• Added a visual hint that context view applets can be resized in edit mode.
• Display missing metadata errors in Wikipedia applet UI.
• Add a button to stop automatic Wikipedia page updating. (BR 485813)

CHANGES:

• Replace defunct lyricwiki with lyrics.ovh as lyrics provider for now. (BR 455937)
• Show only relevant items in wikipedia applet right click menu (BR 323941), use monobook skin for opened links and silently ignore non-wikipedia links.
• Don't show non-functional play mode controls in dynamic mode (BR 287055)

BUGFIXES:

• Fix loading of some Flickr photos in the photos context view applet and show more relevant photos. (BR 317108)
• Fix playlist inline play control slider knob & draw playlist delegate icons with higher DPI.
• Fix searching for composer and album info for local files in Wikipedia applet.
• Don't remove wrong songs from collection when contents of a folder, whose name is a substring of another collection folder, are changed (BR 475528)
• Prefer symbolic systray icon to fix colours in Plasma6 systray (BR 485748)

The complete ChangeLog, which includes the pre-releases, is available in the git repository.

To provide some insight on the road from 2.9.0 to 3.0.0, statistics collected from git repository are presented:

Commits and added/removed lines of code between 2.9.0 and 3.0 alpha (2.9.71)

l10n daemon script: 117 commits, +898, -192
Heiko Becker: 72 commits, +5641, -2112
Laurent Montel: 69 commits, +9478, -9697
Aroonav Mishra: 65 commits, +15474, -6808
Pino Toscano: 31 commits, +6892, -1637
Malte Veerman: 30 commits, +19466, -29990
Olivier CHURLAUD: 27 commits, +1106, -474
Yuri Chornoivan: 19 commits, +966, -806
Pedro de Carvalho Gomes: 8 commits, +145, -407
Pedro Gomes: 7 commits, +7222, -805
Luigi Toscano: 7 commits, +15, -14
Mark Kretschmann: 6 commits, +27, -17
Wolfgang Bauer: 5 commits, +31, -7
Tuomas Nurmi: 4 commits, +39, -23
Stefan Derkits: 4 commits, +20, -19
Andreas Sturmlechner: 3 commits, +189, -75
Aditya Dev Sharma: 3 commits, +47, -46
Stephan Wezel: 2 commits, +12, -7
Andreas Sturmlechner: 2 commits, +8, -6
Andreas Hartmetz: 2 commits, +2, -2
Victor Mataré: 1 commits, +7, -3
Tobias C. Berner: 1 commits, +5, -1
Thiago Sueto: 1 commits, +1, -1
Sven Eckelmann: 1 commits, +5, -3
Somsubhra Bairi: 1 commits, +1, -1
Simon Depiets: 1 commits, +2, -2
Rishabh Gupta: 1 commits, +1, -4
Nicolas Lécureuil: 1 commits, +4, -2
Nate Graham: 1 commits, +7, -7
Johnny Jazeix: 1 commits, +2, -2
Elbin Pallimalil: 1 commits, +11, -5
Christophe Giboudeaux: 1 commits, +1, -2
Antonio Rojas: 1 commits, +1, -0
Alexandr Akulich: 1 commits, +1, -1
Albert Astals Cid: 1 commits, +1, -0

Commits and added/removed lines of code between 3.0 alpha 2.9.71 and 3.0.0

l10n daemon script: 317 commits, +1597783, -75585
Tuomas Nurmi: 147 commits, +3813, -1550
Friedrich W. H. Kossebau: 9 commits, +1075, -1044
Jürgen Thomann: 8 commits, +130, -101
Heiko Becker: 8 commits, +187, -19
Pino Toscano: 6 commits, +3361, -24
Toni Asensi Esteve: 4 commits, +100, -13
Pedro de Carvalho Gomes: 4 commits, +51, -9
Mihkel Tõnnov: 4 commits, +4486, -800
Zixing Liu: 2 commits, +140, -8
Fabian Vogt: 2 commits, +9, -0
David Faure: 2 commits, +4047, -15
Damir Islamov: 2 commits, +401, -420
Yuri Chornoivan: 1 commits, +1, -1
Sebastian Engel: 1 commits, +21, -21
Nicolas Fella: 1 commits, +1, -1
Nicolás Alvarez: 1 commits, +7, -7
Nate Graham: 1 commits, +1, -0
Matthias Mailänder: 1 commits, +5, -0
Jonathan Esk-Riddell: 1 commits, +2, -6
Jakob Meng: 1 commits, +1, -1
Heiko Becker: 1 commits, +17, -17
Christophe Giboudeaux: 1 commits, +3, -4
Carl Schwan: 1 commits, +7, -2
Boris Pek: 1 commits, +1, -1
Andreas Sturmlechner: 1 commits, +2, -0

Packager section

You can find the package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with Tuomas Nurmi's GPG key.

The goal of KDE neon is to build all KDE’s software on a stable Ubuntu LTS base, we do it in an automated way and for the User edition have automated QA to deploy rapidly but safely. For the KDE 6 Megarelease there was a lot of updates and the system didn’t work as well as it ought, not all the update issues could be tested and this broke some the operating system on some people’s computer which is a horrible experience that should not happen.

What happened?

We were testing KF6, Plasma 6 and KDE Gear 24.04 in our unstable and testing repos for some time before the release. A week ahead of release we were building it in our User repo and testing upgrades. Jonathan, as release manager for both the MegaRelease and neon, travelled to Malaga to do an in person joint release with Paul from promo, this helped the coordinated release but lost some testing time. Some package transitions happened during the pre-release week which made the updates more complex than they had to be and meant extra work (for better end result in theory). Once the MegaRelease sources were published on Thursday the testing of Neon was ongoing and many later fixes were made to make for a successful upgrade on the tests. Neon’s KF6/Plasma6/KDE Gear 24.02 packages were published later on Thursday and Jonathan drove home, alas due to bad weather there was no internet available on the ferry limiting later fixes.

Although the semi automated upgrade tests passed this didn’t cover all cases and some people had incomplete upgrades due to packaging transitions being incomplete. This was fixed over the next day or two and also an update to the installer Calamares was brought in which turned out to have a bug with the final install setup so although upgrades now worked the ISO installs were broken. Quite horrible.

On the Monday Jonathan fixed some more upgrade issues and Calamares so the neon end of things was fixed but there remain other problems with KF6 and Plasma 6 which affect all distros and many of these have since been fixed and some are ongoing, many caused by the switch to Wayland or Akonadi switching to sqlite.

Issues?

There wasn’t one big problem that caught everyone. There was lots of small but significant problems which caught many people.

• KMyMoney package issues – needed a rebuild which we did after release
• Ocean sound theme not installed – new package which was added after release
• Palapeli packages in wrong location – an incomplete change that was made during the transition
• Video and pdf thumbnailers broken – these packages needed added to the main install
• KOrganizer had invalid dependency – that needed removed
• xwaylandvideobridge error on shared library – needed a rebuild
• libzxing needs soname bump – that transition needed completed
• akonadi not working on upgrade – for some reason some users had to manually reinstall the mysql akonadi backend
• Calamares install fails to happen – a bug from Calamares that was initially avoided but later included in our ISO
• OEM mode no longer worked – this affects Slimbook systems and some parts just needed ported to Plasma 6, ideally it would be code which was in Calamares and not in Neon

NVidia users had a number of issues often caused by the switch to Wayland. Most users can switch back to X11 to get it working but that is hardly a user friendly setup.

This is just a small sample, there were more similar issues.

Review

Neon is a small team, Jonathan working on it (alongside release duties for Plasma and Frameworks) from Blue Systems and top volunteer helper Carlos with occasionally Harald and others helping out.

We had a review with KDE’s QA star Nate of what happened and why and mitigations and we also had two open calls with neon community members where they gave their feedback.

Ponderings

The Plasma 6 and KF6 upgrades in neon were too fragile and caused too much pain for many of our users.

There wasn’t one single problem and many people had a perfectly good experience doing the upgrade but too many people were caught with problems which will be painful when you are just wanting to have a useful Linux system.

Conclusions

Our constantly rolling release model and small team means we can’t guarantee total stability so we will stop using terms like “rock solid base” on our website and emphasise the new-ness factor.

When doing big updates test and if travelling bring in other people to do testing and fixes.

We can’t support NVidia hardware as we don’t have the skills, time, hardware or access to source to fix it.

Switching to Wayland was a choice of Plasma and after a decade in development a necessary choice but we should be aware of issues there and communicate those.

Get more QA on ISO images, currently we don’t have any prior to release which is going to lead to problems.

Consider if we can to upgrade QA on older snapshots as well as the current one.

Consider how to do more QA on KDE PIM apps.

Thanks to all our lovely users for staying with us, sorry to those who we let down and those who have left us. Thanks to our community for staying supporting of each other and us as developers. Of course there’s plenty of alternatives if you want a slower release cycle (Kubuntu have just made a new LTS with Plasma 5) but if you want the freshest software from KDE then neon continues to be a great place to get it.

We are happy to announce the release of the Qt Visual Studio Tools version 3.2.0. Installation packages are now available at the Visual Studio Marketplace and download.qt.io.

This update of the Qt VS Tools extension adds experimental support for QML LSP server, as well as full support of the Qt VS Tools for Visual Studio 2022 on ARM64.



Qt MSBuild file support:

Alongside providing Qt-related MSBuild files within the Qt VS Tools package, we now offer them as a separate .zip download for your convenience. Starting from version 3.2.0, access the standalone Qt MSBuild files by visiting our public server download location: Official releases. 

Please refer to the project's Changelog for a list of all changes included in this release. Feel free to report any problems, or make any suggestions or comments, in the Qt Visual Studio Tools bug tracker.