Planet KDE

We’re in the home stretch now!

Plasma and Gear apps have branched, which means anything committed to master and not backported is going into the next release after the mega-release next month. For Plasma, the next one is 6.1, and for Gear apps, it’s 24.05. Quite a few new features and UI improvements are starting to accumulate there! Here are a few:

Dolphin now periodically auto-saves its open windows and tabs, so you don’t lose state if the app crashes or the system is restarted unexpectedly (Amol Godbole, Dolphin 24.05. Link)

In Dolphin, you can now configure whether backup and trash files are shown when hidden files are made visible (Méven Car, Dolphin 24.05. Link)

In Dolphin, you can now pop out a split view pane into its own new window (Loren Burkholder, Dolphin 24.05. Link)

Fixed an issue in Dolphin that could cause it to freeze when you use it to duplicate the same file multiple times (Eugene Popov, Dolphin 24.05. Link)

Okular now supports displaying popup menus in certain kinds of PDF documents that include them (Alexis Murzeau, Okular 24.05. Link)

Spectacle now lets you use more placeholders for screenshot and screen recording filenames (Noah Davis, Spectacle 24.05. Link 1 and link 2)

The Networks system tray popup can now tell you a network’s channel in addition to its frequency (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

KDE 6 Mega-Release

(Includes all software to be released on the February 28th mega-release: Plasma 6, Frameworks 6, and apps from Gear 24.02)

General info – Open issues: 237

UI improvements

Plasma’s global Edit Mode toolbar now has an “Add Panel” button that lets you add panels. With this located there, the desktop context menu has now lost its “Add Widgets” and “Add Panels” menu items since the functionality is fully available in the global Edit Mode. This makes the menu smaller and less overwhelming by default. Of course, if you want those menu items back, you can just re-add them. (Akseli Lahtinen and me: Nate Graham, link 1, link 2, and link 3):

In the portal-based “Choose a screen/window to record” dialog, items are now chosen with a single-click, unless the dialog is in multi-select mode, in which case a double-click will choose one (because a single-click only selects it). Also, in multi-select mode, the items have little checkboxes in the corner so you know that you can select more than one (Yifan Zhu and me: Nate Graham, link 1, and link 2):

This dialog could still use more UI polish, which is being scoped out Bug fixes

Important note: I don’t mention fixes for bugs that were never released to users; it’s just too much for me (it would probably be too much for you to read as well), and most people never encountered them in the first place. Because we’re in the middle of a big Plasma dev cycle, there are a lot of these bugs! So big thanks to everyone who’s made it a priority to fix them!

Powerdevil no longer fails to start at login when using the ddcutil-2.0.0 library and certain DDC-compatible monitors (David Edmundson, link). Note that we also have reports of new issues for people using ddcutil-2.1.0, but those are different and need separate investigation, which is ongoing.

Did some more work to ensure that visual glitches in QtQuick apps are minimized when using a fractional scale factor. There’s still more work to do for text and window outlines/shadows, but you should no longer see weird tearing-related glitches in buttons and icons (Arjen Hiemstra and Marco Martin, link)

Made KWin more robust when restoring settings for multi-screen arrangements when any of the screens are missing their EDIDs (Stefan Hoffmeister, link)

When using a weather provider that gives forecasts longer than 7 days (like EnvCan), the right edge of the Weather widget’s forecast never gets cut off when viewed in the System Tray (Ismael Asensio, link)

Your Plasma panels will no longer flicker oddly when certain full-screen games do something rather odd by repeatedly switching their windows between full-screen and maximized states (Xaver Hugl, link)

The “Window Type” window rule–which did not work on Wayland–has been replaced with a new “Window Layer” rule which works better for the purposes people typically use it for (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Other bug information of note:

• 3 Very high priority Plasma bugs (down from 4 last week). Current list of bugs
• 35 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 37 last week). Current list of bugs
• 127 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed over last week. Full list of bugs

Performance & Technical

Improved the speed of various config file lookups used very commonly throughout KDE software by 13-16% (Friedrich Kossebau, link)

Fixes for KF5

We’ve also got a few nice fixes for KF5 software this week!

Fixed an issue when moving or copying large number of files that could cause some of them to get skipped (and potentially lost) after skipping duplicated folders (Eugene Popov, Frameworks 5.115. Link)

Fixed an issue that caused folders inside network shares/mounts to be non-expandable in Details view (Alessandro Astone, Frameworks 5.115. 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

Thanks to you, our Plasma 6 fundraiser has been a crazy success! I originally thought the goal of 500 new KDE e.V. supporting members was over-optimistic, but you’ve all proven me happily wrong. We’re now up to an incredible 665 members and unlocked both stretch goals! It’s pretty humbling. Thank you everyone for the confidence you’ve shown in us; we’ll try not to screw it up! For those who haven’t donated ot become members yet, spreading the wealth via this fundraiser is a great way to share the love.

If you’re a developer, work on Qt6/KF6/Plasma 6 issues! Which issues? These issues. Plasma 6 is very usable for daily driving now, but still in need of some final bug-fixing and polishing to get it into a solid state by February.

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!

Why KMines? #

Minesweeper is a tragically underrated puzzle game. While I recall examining the mysterious array of gray squares as a child, it wasn't until adulthood that I took the time to learn the rules of the game. Despite my late start, however, I still count minesweeper as a classic. These days, good minesweeper clones are hard to come by. I settled on GNOME's Mines for a while, but as the look of GTK applications on my QT-based KDE Plasma Desktop sets my teeth on edge, I ditched it for KMines in short order. While I enjoyed the game, I found the themes shipped with KMines a bit dated, so I thought I'd make my own.

The Clean Blue Dark KMines theme The Drama #

I didn't quite know what I was getting into when I started working on my themes. I had expected there'd be a simple way to add themes through the KMines settings menu, or by dropping an SVG somewhere in your file-system. If only it were so simple. Adding a theme to KMines requires setting up a full-on KDE development environment, re-compiling KMines from source each time you want to test it, and then, of course, submitting a merge request to the git repository. Thanks to the help of some very patient souls in various KDE Matrix channels, I was able to work through all of this, but I found the process so tricky that I submited a second merge request, this time to the repository for develop.kde.org, for a page documenting the process. Now I realise that some developers out there are going to read through this and wonder if I was dropped on my head as an infant, but in my defense, when it comes to software development, I'm a humble designer and Jamstack web developer. This is all very new to me, and I was expecting a much more streamlined process for what I saw as simple visual tweaks.

The Clean Blue Light KMines theme Why High Contrast #

When submitting my initial design, a KDE contributor who had been helping me via Matrix pointed out that they found the theme difficult to parse visually as the contrast was quite low. I hadn't considered contrast ratios here, my thinking being that I didn't need to; I was just making one theme among many, after all, and users could choose any theme that worked best for them. After some consideration, however, it dawned on me that my theme would likely be the only modern-looking theme in the release, so it would be ideal if it were as accessible as possible. With this in mind, thanks to the feedback of one helpful individual, instead of one pretty but low contrast theme, I decided to make two modern high contrast themes, one light and one dark, targeting the WCAG AAA standard for contrast.

Coming in Plasma 6! #

With thanks to those KDE contributors who helped make it happen, the merge request containing these two themes scraped by the skin of its teeth past the closing door of a feature-freeze and will be available with Plasma 6 this February!

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-03.

Cat and Girl - 4000 of My Closest Friends

Tags: tech, copyright, law, art, ethics

How does it feel to just want to put something creative out there without being exploited? Very touching comic on the topic.

https://catandgirl.com/4000-of-my-closest-friends/

AI: the not-so-good parts - Xe Iaso

Tags: tech, ai, ethics

As an industry we definitely should think more often about the consequences of our actions. The incentives are indeed pushing us to go faster without much critical thinking.

https://xeiaso.net/talks/2024/prepare-unforeseen-consequences/

OpenAI Quietly Deletes Ban on Using ChatGPT for “Military and Warfare”

Tags: tech, gpt, war, ethics, business

Unsurprising move, they claim it’s for the betterment of mankind but in practice it’s mostly about capturing as much market share as possible.

https://theintercept.com/2024/01/12/open-ai-military-ban-chatgpt/

AI poisoning could turn open models into destructive “sleeper agents,” says Anthropic

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, security, supply-chain

The tone pointing at “open models” is wrong but the research is interesting. It still proves models can be poisoned (open or not) so traceability and secured supply-chains will become very important when using large language models.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/01/ai-poisoning-could-turn-open-models-into-destructive-sleeper-agents-says-anthropic/

Will the new judicial ruling in the Vizio lawsuit strengthen the GPL?

Tags: tech, foss, law

Very interesting ruling, this opens the door to more parties being able to sue to enforce the GPL not just the authors.

https://blog.tidelift.com/will-the-new-judicial-ruling-in-the-vizio-lawsuit-strengthen-the-gpl

Unity’s Open-Source Double Standard: the ban of VLC - mfkl

Tags: tech, vlc, 3d, foss, business

This is a stupid move on Unity’s part… they’re built on LGPL but ban others in their store to have LGPL dependencies. Shame on them. Good move from Videolabs though, wish them lots of success.

https://mfkl.github.io/2024/01/10/unity-double-oss-standards.html

Pluralistic: The Cult of Mac

Tags: tech, apple, interoperability, security

Apple keep indeed attracting a bunch of cultists… and this allows them to keep abusing their other customers.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones

Each Facebook User is Monitored by Thousands of Companies – The Markup

Tags: tech, facebook, attention-economy, surveillance

Some more insights on the extent of the companies snitching to Facebook.

https://themarkup.org/privacy/2024/01/17/each-facebook-user-is-monitored-by-thousands-of-companies-study-indicates

Meta/Threads Interoperating in the Fediverse Data Dialogue Meeting yesterday

Tags: tech, fediverse, facebook

Interesting notes, there seems to be good faith on the Meta side for now… but this leaves more questions than answers still.

https://reb00ted.org/tech/20231208-meta-threads-data-dialogue/

Where is all of the fediverse?

Tags: tech, fediverse, self-hosting, infrastructure

Interesting stats, not that easy to gather. This gives a good overview of where the fediverse instances are hosted though.

https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/who-hosts-the-fediverse-instances

Making my website faster - Cliffle

Tags: tech, web, fonts, css, optimization

Nice set of tricks to optimize load and render time of webpages.

https://cliffle.com/blog/making-website-faster/

LeftoverLocals: Listening to LLM responses through leaked GPU local memory | Trail of Bits Blog

Tags: tech, gpu, machine-learning, security

Interesting vulnerability, not all vendors are impacted though. GPU memory leaks can have unforeseen impacts.

https://blog.trailofbits.com/2024/01/16/leftoverlocals-listening-to-llm-responses-through-leaked-gpu-local-memory/

Speedbump: TCP proxy for simulating variable, yet predictable network latency

Tags: tech, networking, tools

Looks like an interesting tool to simulate difficult network conditions.

https://github.com/kffl/speedbump

Willow Specifications

Tags: tech, protocols, data, networking, p2p

Looks like an interesting protocol for resilient peer to peer data stores. Let’s see how it spreads.

https://willowprotocol.org/

Beware of misleading GPU vs CPU benchmarks

Tags: tech, cpu, gpu, computation, economics

A good reminder that even though GPU tend to be faster, the added complexity and price might not be worth it in the end.

https://pythonspeed.com/articles/gpu-vs-cpu/

Using pre-commit hooks makes software development life easier

Tags: tech, git, craftsmanship, tools

Can definitely recommend. The pre-commit project also make managing those a breeze.

https://itnext.io/using-pre-commit-hooks-makes-software-development-life-easier-ef962827aa96

Using “will” and “should” in technical writing | James’ Coffee Blog

Tags: tech, documentation, writing

Pick your words wisely. If it does happen every time use “will”.

https://jamesg.blog/2024/01/17/will-should/

Everyday storytelling for engineers. The CAO Method.

Tags: tech, engineering, communication

Nice suggestion for talking about your work in various type of situations. Definitely worth trying to frame it like this.

https://tonyfreed.substack.com/p/everyday-storytelling-for-engineers

Does Working from Home Boost Productivity Growth? | San Francisco Fed

Tags: tech, remote-working, economics

Interesting report. Apparently so far a more widespread use of remote work doesn’t seem to boost of hinder productivity growth at large scale.

https://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/publications/economic-letter/2024/january/does-working-from-home-boost-productivity-growth/

The warrior culture of ancient Sparta did some weird things to their society.

Tags: history, politics

Or why nationalism and war mongering are unwelcome dead ends. I never understood this fascination for Sparta by some people… if you look at what it was without some misplaced romanticism, it definitely looked like an horrible and paranoid environment to live in.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/01/sparta-300-warriors-history-slavery.html

Bye for now!

Ruqola 2.1 Beta (2.0.81) is available for packaging and testing.

Ruqola is a chat app for Rocket.chat. This beta release will build with the current release candidate of KDE Frameworks 6 and KTextAddons allowing distros to start to move away from Qt 5.

URL: https://download.kde.org/unstable/ruqola/
SHA256: 2c4135c08acc31f846561b488aa24f1558d7533b502f9ba305be579d43f81b73

Signed by E0A3EB202F8E57528E13E72FD7574483BB57B18D Jonathan Esk-Riddell jr@jriddell.org
https://jriddell.org/esk-riddell.gpg

Disclaimer: I am not one of KDE's masterminds or spokespersons. I am a mere bystander with few unimportant commits. I follow KDE's ecosystem and other developments in the free software world. In the following, I share some thoughts and my personal opinion.

Talks about new programming languagesAfter 30 years of C code, the Linux kernel opens itself to a second high-level language: Rust. Since fall of 2022 the kernel mainly gained infrastructure work. Some experiments show promising results like a Rust-based network driver or a scheduler.Recently, Git developers started to discuss how to allow Rust code in our beloved version control system. Far from having reached a consensus, its media coverage and heated discussions in forums show how interested the public is in this topic.Other projects try to replace established software by rewritten from scratch Rust ones: uutils coreutils, sudo-rs, librsvg, Rustls. Heck, Rewrite it it Rust (RiiR) has become a meme.
We already have a new programming language!KDE is close to its 6th Megarelease, with one major change being based on Qt 6. Qt 6 requires C++17 which -- as of today -- is perceived as modern C++ and is a leap compared to C++11. It is possible to write modern software with C++17. Still, additional tools like C++ Core Guidelines or Cppcheck are advised to keep the number of preventable bugs low.Most of the projects mentioned in the introduction are using C. This inflicts more pain to the developers and thus using Rust is more attractive. For sure, a fair portion of RiiR arguments do not apply to KDE's C++ code base.Problems with C++ remainC++ cannot adapt to modern ways like including a borrow checker or a less complicated syntax, as this would break compatibility. As much as C++ improved as a language, its compilers, and its ecosystem, it is not enough to be considered a good choice for new projects. NIST and NSA advice to move away from C++.Other problems like complicated tooling with variations on different platforms (build systems, compiler, linker, debugger, dependency management), mixed-in C-style code, difficult to parse C++ code, cannot be solved.I fear that in a not to distant future, C++ might be perceived as an outdated choice to learn and people might less likely consider to join KDE as contributors.
What can be done?In the past, GNOME adopted Vala as a new language to solve the short-comings of C. Vala seems to be dead. Going with Rust did not lead to a project-wide adoption.Some people are working on Qt bindings for Rust, e.g., CXX-Qt from KDAB. I am not sure if Qt itself is working on something similar. At least there is no go-to binding.
Beside the hot topic Rust, two big players invest in ways to have good interoperability with existing code bases and a modern language: Cpp2 / cppfront and Carbon.Cpp2 is a new language from Herb Sutter, who chairs the C++ working group. The idea is to have a transpiler cppfront producing modern C++ code. Cpp2 is not backward compatible to C++ and thus not limited in introducing new ways or removing existing parts. Cpp2 promises to integrate seamlessly in existing C++ code bases as it is compiled into C++ code.Carbon is a project by Google developers and follows a different approach. It aims to provide a new language that can use all C++ features in interfaces, even templates with all bells and whistles.Discuss our futureI do not want to whine about C++. I want to start a discussion on how KDE's future might look like. KDE was always driving innovations. We helped CMake to become one of the most important build systems for C++. KDE 4.0 introduced the semantic desktop. KHTML's code base was the nucleus for today's big browsers.Probably we should have this discussion as a BoF at Akademy 2024 or other places where KDE's masterminds and people with a feeling for future trends come together and form/formulate future directions. In the meantime, I start a discourse thread.Personally, I would like to see some push for Cpp2. More important, I want to see that we are actively shaping KDE's future.

It’s a pleasure to be on the OpenUK New Year’s Honours list for 2024. There’s some impressive names on there such as Richard Hughes of Packagekit and other projects at Red Hat, Colin Watson who was at Ubuntu with me and I see is now freelance, Mike McQuaid was previously of KDE but is now trying a startup with Mac packager Workbrew for Homebrew.

OpenUK run various activities for open tech in UK countries and KDE currently needs some more helpers for a stall at their State of Open Con in London on Feb 6 and 7 February, if you can help do get in touch.

KDE’s 6th releases will happen next month bringing with it the refresh of code and people that a new major version number can bring, I think KDE’s software in the coming year will continue to impress.

My life fell apart after some family loss last year so I’ve run away to the end of the world at Finesterre in Galicia in Spain for now, let me know if you’re in the area.

The new year has just begun and we have six weeks left before the final release! The most noticeable change since my last post is obviously that we have decided on the wallpaper to be used in Plasma 6.0! But of course there’s more going on under the hood than just that.

My desktop isn’t usually that tidy

I actually spent most of my time in Qt Wayland rather than KDE code lately but more on that in an upcoming blog post once all my changes have been integrated. Nevertheless, there are still plenty of Wayland-related and other improvements on the Plasma, Frameworks, and KDE Gear side to talk about here.

XDG Foreign Everywhere

After my previous experience of revamping the KWin Window Killer and having learned how to use the XDG Foreign Protocol (a Wayland protocol for exporting a surface to enable a different process to attach to it), I looked at all the places we have a helper application show a window in another application. This is actually done a lot more often than I thought and thus I added API in KWindowSystem for both exporting and importing windows on Wayland.

Since the export side is only really needed on Wayland, I added (un)exportWindow(QWindow*) functions in KWaylandExtras (a utility namespace with Wayland-specific windowing system functionality) along with a windowExported signal once that has been performed. Setting a foreign parent windows can already be done by using KWindowSystem::setMainWindow or even just QWindow::fromWinId. Both of them take a WId (a long int usually) which means that a string-based handle received from the compositor doesn’t play well with the existing APIs.

In case of KWindowSystem I just added a QString overload. The clever part is that it also understands a long int in a string, thus you just feed a token received as a string from QCommandLineParser or stdin verbatim into the API (even supports using 0x and 0b prefixes) and have it do the right thing on all platforms. That way you only have to special-case the export part for Wayland but the importing side will “just work”. Lifetime of the objects is tied to the actual window and there’s no additional resource tracking logic needed on the application side besides calling those functions, pretty neat.

Both kdialog and keditfiletype support XDG Foreign handles for their relevant attach/parent argument now. It is important to have all “public” command-line tools adjusted for 6.0, thereby knowing it’s a Qt 6 build is enough to tell whether it will understand the string or refuse to start on being unable to parse it as a number. If you know of any other tools that might need adjustment, please do tell. The KAuth Framework for executing privileged tasks as well as the KDE PolicyKit agent also learned how to create and understand those handles. This ensures the password prompt is attached to the window it came from (e.g. when changing settings). There’s still plenty of places where KAuth is used without setting a parent window on the executed action but at least the infrastructure is all there now.

More fractional scaling goodness

Of course I accomplished a few more fixes for fractional scaling. The pixmap created by Item.grabToImage now captures it with the proper scale factor. I also made a fix for then using that grab result in a Drag handler (not merged yet). Together with another fix for Plasma’s Folder View and a KWin change I did a while ago we should finally have crisp pixmaps when dragging icons on the desktop. That was a lot more entangled than I anticipated with the scale factor discarded at pretty much every opportunity along the way.

Left to right: Original item, original blurry capture, fixed rendering (salmon for illustration)

TextInput and TextEdit also re-render themselves immediately when the scale factor changes. This fixes sticky notes on the desktop being blurry until interacted with as well as spin boxes and other editable controls in apps like System Settings. The issue was addressed for labels some time ago but similar treatment was needed for input fields, too.

It’s the little things…

I talked about Dolphin’s icon rendering in September and now file thumbnails are properly rendered with fractional scaling, too, both in the main file view and the information sidebar. Méven Car worked on high-dpi support for thumbnailers previously and the switch to Frameworks 6 was a good opportunity to change the wire-format used for communication between app and thumbnailer to use a floating-point number for the scale factor instead of an integer. While at it, I also fixed the “tick” icon to accept input on the address bar. Furthermore, mouse cursor theme previews in System Settings are also scaled smoothly. Incidentally, KWin’s bouncing cursor (startup feedback) is scaled according to the cursor size on Wayland, too.

Speaking of Dolphin, the Places sidebar no longer lets you drag one place into another one. While I found that Windows also lets you do that (macOS doesn’t), I don’t really see the point, unless you want to drag your Documents folder to an external hard drive directly? More importantly, though, it makes re-arranging places very finicky since the drop area in-between places is very small. Obviously, it is still possible to drag files and folders from the main view and elsewhere onto an entry in the Places panel to copy/move/link it to the folder or hard drive in question.

In order to fix KWin’s screen edge triggering inadvertently while selecting text in an application and nudging the corner of the screen, I disabled them completely when a mouse cursor is pressed. However, I wasn’t entirely happy with this (and people in the comments weren’t either) and now it’s possible to drag a file into a screen edge and peek at the desktop to drop it there. Making the new overview effects work with drag and drop is going to be a lot more work, so it’s left for a later time. I’d also love to be able to switch virtual desktops while dragging a file, just like we do when touching the screen edge while dragging a window.

That irksome Konsole font bug finally squashed!

On the subject of broken rendering, I also found a way to improve font rendering in Konsole after the removal of QFont::ForceIntegerMetrics in Qt 6. From what I can tell Konsole entirely relies on the fact that all characters are the same width. Apparently, even with a Monospace font under certain conditions thanks to Hinting and Kerning this may not be entirely the case. Forcing full hinting on the font used seems to ensure that no such trickery is going on. If you still see broken fonts when text is highlighted or selecting it, check that your distribution doesn’t force any particular font settings here.

Anything else Okular’s annotation bar now showing proper page numbers and annotation contents

As a heavy user of Okular’s fantastic annotation feature where you can add labels, sticky notes, shapes, lines, and all sorts of other markers to a (PDF) document, I slightly improved the Annotation sidebar: Custom page numbers are now displayed (pages in a PDF aren’t necessarily strictly numbered but there can be Roman numerals for the index, for example, just like in a real book) and the textual content of the annotation, if any, is shown as well to more easily identify which item is which.

Libksysguard learned SI prefixes for Ampere, Volt, Watt, and Watt-hour units. Should I ever upgrade to a Petawatt solar installation, System Monitor has got me covered. KMessageDialog gained a beep function for playing the relevant notification sound (warning, error, etc), for applications that implement a custom message box and already depend on KWidgetsAddons but don’t want to pull in KNotification just for this. It is now used by Kate’s “Save?” dialog which looks like a message box when saving a single file but because it may also display a list of files is a custom implementation. I also had a look at how to make Qt’s own QMessageBox play the KDE sounds but this is routed though the Qt accessibility framework and I wasn’t sure how to hook into that without jeopardizing more important components of it like the AT-SPI interface.

Do you want to install updates or what?

With the prevalence of Offline Updates (i.e. restarting the system and installing updates in a minimal environment) there’s now a dedicated “Reboot & Install Updates” button on the logout screen to skip installing updates and just reboot. This could surely be extended in the future, e.g. shut down without installing updates or install them now instead of on next boot and so on but at least you can now easily reboot the system without installing updates if you want to.

One of the first changes exclusive to Plasma 6.1: WiFi channel display.

Finally, even though we’re all busy squashing any remaining bugs for the 6.0 release, it has been branched off into the “stable” release branch and the repositories are again open for gentle feature development (which includes anything that needs new translations). I just merged a tiny change exclusive to Plasma 6.1: displaying the WiFi channel number next to its frequency in connection details.

Discuss this post on KDE Discuss.

It is a really impressive Season of KDE this year -- we have selected a total of 18 projects!

To all of our new contributors, thank you very much for your drive to gain experience and improve FOSS at the same time. The mentors and mentorship team, as well as the broader KDE community, are sure you'll create something fantastic over the next 10 weeks.

Figure :

Group photo of several members of the KDE community at Akademy 2022 in Barcelona, Spain. The KDE community enthusiastically welcomes all new contributors! (Image: CC BY 4.0)

Translation Projects

We have 2 projects to translate multiple apps into Hindi:

• Asish Kumar will work on translating KTorrent, KDE connect, Cantor, and Merkuro
• Akash Kumar will work on translating Tellico and Merkuro

They will be mentored by Benson Muite and Raghavendra Kamath.

Kdenlive

We have 2 projects:

• Ajay Chauhan will work on adding multi-format rendering to Kdenlive
• Iceneko will enable editing of keyframe curves and advanced keyframe types in Kdenlive

They will be mentored by Julius Künzel and Jean-Baptiste Mardelle.

KDE Eco / Accessibility

We have 5 projects:

• Athul Raj Kollareth will work on improving KdeEcoTest tool using kwin scripting API and uinput
• Amartya Chakraborty will work on adding support for Windows in KdeEcoTest
• Sarthak Negi will work on Testing and development of KEcoLab
• Aakarsh MJ will work on Testing and development of KEcoLab
• Pradyot Ranjan will work on Selenium automation of energy measurements / accessibility tests for KDE applications

They will be mentored by Karanjot Singh, Emmanuel Charruau, Nitin Tejuja, Rishi Kumar, and Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss.

Cantor / LabPlot

8 projects have been accepted for these two applications:

• Dhairya Majmudar and Saksham Gupta will work together on extending the embedded documentation for supported Computer Algebra Systems Project
• Mahfuza Humayra Mohona will work on enhancing Cantor's and LabPlot's documentation by adding QtHelp Conversion and User Accessibility
• Anshul Dalal will work on integrating KTextEditor into Cantor
• Krish Jain will work on enhancing Cantor with package management capabilities
• Israel Galadima will work on downloading/importing of data sets from kaggle.com
• Mihir Kumar Singh will work on integrating TSDB support to LabPlot
• Raphael Wirth will work on MCAP Support for LabPlot

They will be mentored by Alexander Semke.

KWin

1 project has been selected:

• Anurag Thakur will work on moving brightness control to KWin and adding per-screen brightness control

They will be mentored by Xaver Hugl.

The 18 contributors will start developing on 17 January under the guidance of their mentors. SOK will end 31 March. Check out the full SOK 2024 timeline.

Let's warmly welcome all of them and make sure the beginning of their journey with KDE is successful!

You will be able to follow the progress via blog posts published on KDE's planet.