Planet KDE

Plasma developers are returning from their holidays and have provided us all with loads of goodies! Yep, this is a big one, especially in terms of the juicy user-facing changes in the areas of accessibility and support for digital artists. There's lots more as well too!

Notable New Features

It's now (or, depending on how long your memory is, once again) possible to configure your touchpad to be automatically disabled while a mouse is plugged in. (Jakob Petsovits, 6.3.0. Link)

On System Settings' Graphics Tablet page, it's now possible to map an area of a drawing tablet's surface to the entire screen area; previously only the reverse was possible. (Joshua Goins, 6.3.0. Link)

On System Settings' Graphics Tablet page, it's now possible to customize the pressure range of a stylus to chop off the high and/or low parts, should this be desirable for your hardware or preferences. (Joshua Goins, 6.3.0. Link)

KRunner and KRunner-powered search fields can now convert between "rack units" and other units of length. (Lea McLean, Frameworks 6.10. Link)

Discover now highlights sandboxed apps whose permissions will change after being updated, so you can audit such changes for shady behavior. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, 6.3.0. Link)

Notable UI Improvements

Overhauled the UI of System Settings' Graphics Tablet page to split it into multiple tabs, which greatly improves the organization. You can see it in the other screenshots of this blog post! (Joshua Goins, 6.3.0. Link)

On System Settings' Graphics Tablet page, a custom tablet calibration matrix is now expressed in a more standard way: now it appears as highlighted when changed while the "highlight changed settings" feature is in use, and it can also be saved and reset like any other setting. (Joshua Goins, 6.3.0. Link)

On System Settings' Graphics Tablet page, the pen testing feature now also shows information about pen tilt and pressure, if supported by the tablet and pen. (Joshua Goins, 6.3.0. Link)

Discover now shows a maximum of two columns even with a very wide window, which results in a less awkward UI because there was rarely or never enough room for a third column to have enough space to make a positive difference. (Rahul Vadhyar, 6.3.0. Link)

Editing desktop files for apps from the "Edit Application…" menu item in Kickoff and other launcher menus now opens the KMenuEdit app to show the app you'd like to edit, rather than a properties dialog. This lets you easily edit others as well, should it strike your fancy. (Oliver Beard, 6.3.0. Link)

When an application takes control of your screen and input devices because you granted it permission to do so (either in that moment or in the past), a system notification is now shown that lets you know how you can immediately terminate this and return control to yourself. (David Redondo, 6.3.0. Link)

Improved the accessibility-related keyboard navigation functionality of multiple Kirigami-based UI components, as well as users of them in Discover and KDE's XDG desktop portal implementation. (Christoph Wolk, Frameworks 6.10 and Plasma 6.3.0. Link 1, link 2 link 3, link 4, and link 5)

Improved support for mnemonics (those little underlines that appear underneath letters of triggerable UI controls when you hold down the Alt key) in Kirigami and a number of Plasma components (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 6.10 and Plasma 6.3.0. Link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5, link 6, and link 7)

Notable Bug Fixes

Fixed a bug that caused the System Tray's battery icon to always be visible when the power-profiles-daemon package isn't installed. (Jakob Petsovits, 6.3.0. Link)

When you set the wallpaper by dragging an image to the desktop (try it, it works!), it's now actually remembered the next time you log in. (Tino Lorenz, 6.3.0. Link)

Fixed a bug that would unexpectedly require that you copy items twice to get them into the clipboard, but only while the clipboard is configured to not store history and also prevent itself from being empty. (Fushan Wen, 6.3.0. Link)

Other bug information of note:

• 2 Very high priority Plasma bugs (same as two weeks ago). Current list of bugs
• 34 15-minute Plasma bugs (same as two weeks ago). Current list of bugs
• 140 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed over the last two weeks. Full list of bugs

Notable in Performance & Technical

Plasma now respects the system's configured URL for connectivity checks — which can be important especially when customized in an institutional or enterprise environment — rather than always consulting https://networkcheck.kde.org. (Ismael Asensio, 6.3.0. Link)

Further reduced the memory usage of Plasma's clipboard system, especially when set up to store a much larger than average number of history items. (Fushan Wen, 6.3.0. Link)

How You Can Help

KDE has become important in the world, and your time and contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we need your support to keep KDE sustainable.

You can help KDE by becoming an active community member and getting involved somehow. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE — you are not a number or a cog in a machine!

You don’t have to be a programmer, either. Many other opportunities exist:

• Triage and confirm bug reports, maybe even identify their root cause
• Contribute designs for wallpapers, icons, and app interfaces
• Design and maintain websites
• Translate user interface text items into your own language
• Promote KDE in your local community
• …And a ton more things!

You can also help us by making a donation! Any monetary contribution — however small — will help us cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors, and in general just keep KDE bringing Free Software to the world.

To get a new Plasma feature or a bugfix mentioned here, feel free to push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.

Happy new year everyone! It’s now 2025, we’ll see what it brings.

Unsurprisingly this week we got a couple of nice “2024 retrospective” articles in this edition, I expect more to show up in the coming weeks. Anyway, let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-01.

Open Source on its own is no alternative to Big Tech - Bert Hubert’s writings

Tags: tech, foss, business

Or why making a dent in the enterprise software space is hard for FOSS… The good news is, it’d require setting up whole ecosystems of services.

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/open-source-by-itself-is-no-alternative-for-big-tech/

The web is too big, or scaling down

Tags: tech, web, browser, complexity

The Web standards are indeed too complex. That severely limits the possibility of browser engine incumbents. I agree there’s a deeper lesson here about the scale of technologies.

https://scottrichmond.me/the-web-is-too-big/

Elon Musk and the right’s war on Wikipedia

Tags: tech, foss, knowledge, wikipedia, politics

Very good background information on the latest attempt at discrediting Wikipedia.

https://www.citationneeded.news/elon-musk-and-the-rights-war-on-wikipedia/

Does current AI represent a dead end?

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, complexity, emergence, reliability

This highlights quite well the limits of the models used in LLMs.

https://www.bcs.org/articles-opinion-and-research/does-current-ai-represent-a-dead-end/

Performance of LLMs on Advent of code 2024

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copilot

The results are unsurprising. They definitely confirm what we expected. The models are good at predicting the past, they’re not so great at solving problems.

https://www.jerpint.io/blog/advent-of-code-llms/

Things we learned about LLMs in 2024

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, economics, ecology, criticism

Good perspective on how the generative AI space evolved in 2024. There are good news and more concerning ones in there. We’ll see what 2025 brings.

https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/31/llms-in-2024/

Databases in 2024: A Year in Review

Tags: tech, databases, business

Good overview on how the databases landscape evolved the past year.

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pavlo/blog/2025/01/2024-databases-retrospective.html

Keeping secrets secret with git-crypt

Tags: tech, version-control, git, secrets, tools

Looks like a nice tool for a simple management of your project specific secrets.

https://blog.ktz.me/keeping-secrets-secret-with-git-crypt/

How does your URL parser handle Unicode? – Daniel Lemire’s blog

Tags: tech, web, standard, parsing

Parsers are required to normalize URLs but often they just don’t. To be kept in mind in your code.

https://lemire.me/blog/2025/01/02/how-does-your-url-parser-handle-unicode/

Rules for Writing Software Tutorials

Tags: tech, documentation, writing, tutorial

Need to write a tutorial? Here is a good set of rules to follow. Don’t be fooled, it sounds simple but it is hard work.

https://refactoringenglish.com/chapters/rules-for-software-tutorials/

Mistakes engineers make in large established codebases | sean goedecke

Tags: tech, legacy, engineering

Good advice to work with large legacy code bases. You better know it very well before you make large changes to it.

https://www.seangoedecke.com/large-established-codebases/

That’s not an abstraction, that’s just a layer of indirection

Tags: tech, design, complexity, simplicity, performance

Or why you shouldn’t insert an abstraction just for the sake of it. Also clearly not all abstractions are created equal.

https://fhur.me/posts/2024/thats-not-an-abstraction

Software Design is Knowledge Building

Tags: tech, software, design, knowledge, organization

Very nice piece. This is indeed mostly about building organizational knowledge. If someone leaves a project that person better not be alone to ensure some continuity… lost knowledge is very hard to piece back together.

https://olano.dev/blog/software-design-is-knowledge-building/

Bye for now!

About

Home Automation is mostly, as the name implies, about automation.

The machine you're in front of all work-day has an awful lot of useful information that can be useful in your home management.

I have a script lower my blinds if I turn on the camera during the afternoon as otherwise there's an annoying glare. My office lights and monitor both have a redder hue at night, but disabling night-mode on my PC automatically disables the main light performing redshift too. I want my screen to turn off not 10 minutes after activity, which is simultaneously both annoyingly too long and too short, but the moment the motion sensor in my room says I've left.

Home Assistant, the best open source home automation tool out there supports all of this, but it needs some hooks for the PC to tell it about the current state and invoke actions on the PC.

None of the existing solutions worked well for what I wanted. I wrote something for personal use a few years ago that worked great for me, I ran it in the background and didn't plan to take it further.
During the KDE Goals sprint another user suggested creating something very similar (https://phabricator.kde.org/T17435). That goal may not have been chosen, but it did motivate me to tidy up and document what I had and turn it into a more fleshed out project.

The App

I made a small daemon, named Kiot (derived from "KDE Internet of Things") that exposes this information to your Home Automation software.

This is pre-alpha software, there's no GUI configuration it relies on manually setting up a configuration file to point to your Home Automation server. If there's enough traction I might make it more packagable, and create a UI config over the Christmas break.

There's a bunch of sensors and actions shipped, but it contains a faux plugin system to make extension easy along with hooks for user supplied scripts.

• User activity
• Locked state
• Suspend/Power actions
• Camera in use
• Accent Colour
• Arbitrary Scripts
• Shortcuts
• Nightmode Inhibition

Using this from Home Assistant is then as straightforward as possible.

Checking it out

The repository can be found at https://github.com/davidedmundson/kiot which has setup instructions along with developer documentation (https://github.com/davidedmundson/kiot/blob/master/DEVELOPMENT.md) if you want to make any additional plugins.

Reworking and porting my KRunner plugins

Writing KRunner plugins was my first real developer experience with KDE. I started out right after graduating from school in 2019. Since then, I continued to maintain my plugins and correct some of the code-crimes that have been committed. This continued adding some features, removing too obscure features, getting user feedback and also making sure the plugins are easy to install without too much developer knowlege being needed. By maintaining the KRunner framework, I also deprecated lots of API and provided cleaner alternatives as part of the efforts for KDE Frameworks 6. Those changes had to be applied to all the plugins. I also contributed to other developer’s plugins that I found useful.

In this post, I will give you an overview of the different plugins and show you, how they may be useful to your workflow.
All the below mentioned Plugins are compatible with Plasma5 and Plasma6, meaning even users of LTS distributions can utilize them. KRunner plugins also work in the normal application launchers - meaning you should really give those a look!

EmojiRunner

This is a utility to search and copy emojis. On X11, you may paste them using xdolib. To ensure you get the emojis you like the most quickly, it is possible to configure favorites in the dialog. Custom emoji, emoji+text entries and aliases can also be added in the config module.

https://github.com/alex1701c/EmojiRunner/

JetBrains plugin

While I love Kate and neovim for doing code editing, having JetBrains IDEs is amazing when working on bigger Java/JavaScript projects. To improve the integration into KDE Plasma, the KRunner plugin searches for the installed JetBrains IDEs and reads the recently opened projects of them. Those can be shown and filtered in KRunner. This allows one to directly launch the right project from KRunner!

Sometimes one may find oneself navigating projects in Dolphin. For this case, a context menu counterpart exists. In there, you find the options to open the folder in the installed JetBrains IDEs. In case the folder is known as a project, the options are presented at the top-level.

https://github.com/alex1701c/JetBrainsRunner
https://github.com/alex1701c/JetBrainsDolphinPlugin

VSCode/Codium workspaces integration plugin

Next to opening recent JetBrains projects, this plugin allows one to open workspaces configured in VSCode. It is pretty straightforward - just install the “Project Manager” plugin in VSCode or Codium, add a few projects and enjoy opening them directly from KRunner.

https://github.com/alex1701c/krunner-vscodeprojects/

Firefox plugin

Having multiple profiles in Firefox may be useful for separating the work one is doing, managing different extensions or different settings. However, switching between them is rather annoying. Manually adding actions to the desktop file may work, but is rather cumbersome and not as flexible.

This plugin allows you to integrate Firefox profiles automatically in KRunner. It also allows for sorting, opening private windows as actions and also adds them to the desktop file. Meaning, you can right-click on Firefox in the taskbar or the launcher and have the actions there available.

https://github.com/alex1701c/krunner-firefox

NordVPN plugin

This plugin allows you to easily connect to NordVPN servers, disconnect and view the status. A configurable status is available in KRunner or an extended one when clicking/pressing enter on the respective result. When connecting, a country, city or specific server may be entered.
It is no advertisement or recommendation! Just saying :D

https://github.com/alex1701c/NordVPNKrunner/

TmuxRunner

Tmux is a terminal multiplexer that allows you to have multiple terminals in the same window (split screen, or multiple “tabs”). You may also detach from it without killing the processes. This is one of the advantages of using it instead or in addition to for example Konsole’s tabs.

Keeping track of the sessions might be a bit hard though. To solve this issue, this plugin provides an overview of the currently active sessions and allows you to create new ones with optionally a specified name. The sessions will be opened in the configured terminal - by default Konsole.

https://github.com/alex1701c/TmuxRunner

QuickWebShortcuts

While I have given the official webshortcuts quite a bit of love over the years, there may be some things lacking. For example, there is always the separator character (colon or space) that separates your query from the provided search, like “dd:testme”. With this plugin, you only need to type one out. Additionally, it can provide search suggestions!

https://github.com/alex1701c/QuickWebShortcuts

VeracryptRunner

This plugin allows one to add and search mount configurations for Verarcrypt. This includes file/device paths, display name, mount path and keyfiles. Optionally, on X11, the password can be read and entered directly using the command line “pass” password manager.

Other mentions

I have the one or other, maybe less useful plugin. Like an integration for KWallet or a little timer utility.
For users of VirtualBox, https://github.com/alvanieto/vbox-runner can be very useful. I contributed a merge requests to allow the plugin to work with KF5 and KF6.

Whilst commit numbers aren't a perfect measure of anything whatsoever, they do still provide a good indication of whether a project is healthy or faltering. It's useful to keep an eye on them, and the start of the year is a good time to do that.

I like graphs, everyone likes graphs, they need no further introduction.

Frameworks

Plasma

KWin

Conclusions

My main reason for sharing is before I gathered some data I had a negative feeling about the community health, but none of the data backs it up and it was unfounded, it's hard to get a sense of the state of how the year has gone when you're busy living in it.

There was a bit of a boon last year with KF6/ Plasma 6.0 and this year did see a drop relative to that, but it's merely returning to the former average rather than being anything to worry about. The most important graph is how many new authors and contributors we're getting on a year-by-year basis. The number of total and new contributors is relatively consistent.

Things being unchanged and boring doesn't make for a good post title (hence the Youtube-level embellishing) but is a good place for such a large project.

The 3rd graph included is a measure of how many make up the bulk of commits. If this is 1, it means a sole dev is running the project and that's an unhealthy place to be if they ever leave. If it's too high it means there isn't a core team maintaining it. There's no "right" number, but I feel it's a really interesting metric, especially seeing what happened in Kwin.

About the stats

Graphs were generated from the same scripts used by Curl's dashboard (https://curl.se/dashboard.html). It doesn't have all the stats Curl has as each needed some manual poking to make it more generic.

Frameworks and Plasma stats were made by locally git filterbranching all repos into a mega-repo and using that as a base.

I use several non-KDE Qt-based applications which I tend to compile manually from source to use the same non-distro-provided Qt version that I compile KDE software against.

I’ve noticed that I don’t update them as often as the rest of the system, so I decided to see if I can add them to kdesrc-build.

The packages-to-be-built definitions are located in repo-metadata/module-definictions which already contains a few 3rd-party libraries that the KDE frameworks and applications use.

Adding the Strawberry player (fork of Clementine, which was a fork of Amarok 1.x) to the build, was quite straight-forward. I just needed to define the repository, cmake options to make it build the Qt6 version instead of the Qt5 one, and the branch I want to build from.

module strawberry repository https://github.com/strawberrymusicplayer/strawberry.git cmake-options -DBUILD_WITH_QT6=ON branch master end module

For applications with normal cmake setup, it is as easy as that. But there are applications like recoll which don’t have a CMakeLists.txt file in the top level, and kdesrc-build doesn’t like that.

To ensure that kdesrc-build finds the real src directory for cmake, I needed to do something completely hackhish. I had to pass the path to the source directory, which is otherwise defined automatically by kdesrc-build for each project it builds, to cmake-options:

module recoll repository https://framagit.org/medoc92/recoll.git cmake-options \ -DRECOLL_QT6_BUILD=1 \ -DRECOLL_ENABLE_SYSTEMD=0 \ -DRECOLL_ENABLE_WEBENGINE=1 \ -DRECOLL_ENABLE_X11MON=0 \ -S /kde/src/recoll/src branch master end module

Fortunately, kdesrc-build appends cmake-options the normal cmake arguments, so my -S path overrides the path that kdesrc-build defines.

You can support my work on Patreon, or you can get my book Functional Programming in C++ at Manning if you're into that sort of thing. -->

https://kde.org/announcements/gear/24.12.0

I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday! Your present from me is shiny new application snaps! There are several new qt6 ports in this release. Please visit https://snapcraft.io/store?q=kde

I have also fixed the Krita snap unable to open/save bug. Please test –edge!

I am continuing work on core24 support and hope to be done before next release.

I do look forward to 2025! Begone 2024!

If you can help with gas, I still have 3 weeks of treatments to go. Thank you for your continued support.

https://gofund.me/573cc38e

Tuesday, 31 December 2024. Today KDE releases a bugfix update to KDE Plasma 6, versioned 6.2.5.

Plasma 6.2 was released in October 2024 with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience.

This release adds a month's worth of new translations and fixes from KDE's contributors. The bugfixes are typically small but important and include:

• KScreenLocker: X11locker lower m_background when hiding. Commit. See bug #483163
• Powerdevil Daemon: Don't crash in PowerDevil::Core::unloadAllActiveActions(). Commit. Fixes bug #492349
• Discover: UpdatesPage, Fix update description box overlapping with its text. Commit. Fixes bug #491821

View full changelog

I use Hugo to build my website (which you can explore the source code to on GitHub.) And because I love using KDE applications whenever I can, I do all of my editing - from config files, CSS and Markdown for posts - in Kate.

My song & dance when I want to edit my website is a bit inefficient. I would use Kate, then manually navigate to my folder. Or I would invoke Kate from the command-line to do the same. Then I would open a separate Konsole window (and sometimes the integrated terminal) in order to launch Hugo to build the site. I would then open up a separate terminal to perform git operations.

So I have created a neat workflow that I think is worth sharing, in case you didn’t know Kate had these features. This also serves as documentation to myself whenever I want to re-create it.

Sessions #

The first and easiest improvement is to use sessions. You can manage these under the “Session” menu item at the top of Kate.

My sessions window.

Instead of opening a fresh Kate session each time, the folder I was in (which is always my site’s folder) and the open documents I have are saved automatically. Note that you probably need the Projects plugin enabled to have access to the “Projects” tab where it’s state is also saved in the session.

External Tools #

The next thing to tackle is making it easier to launch Hugo. We can accomplish this by using External Tools, which is managed under Settings or under the Tools menu item. I have two, one for launching Hugo and the other for stopping it.

These external tools can be pinned to the “Main Toolbar ” in the Configure Toolbars window.

These external tools are self-explanatory, but I set the working directory to %{Project:Path} to ensure it’s running at the site root. I also have it set to spit out the Hugo output into the pane, but it doesn’t actually display until the process quits which seems like a bug in Kate.

The output pane when Hugo is finished

It’s not a huge deal, as the output is displayed when I use the “Stop Hugo” action. I suggest using the “-O” argument of hugo server to automatically open your default web browser when Hugo completes initialization.

Ideas #

It would be cool to have a preview pane that automatically finds the Markdown file you’re editing and navigate to it, which seems possible. Another nicety would be a native Kate plugin to handle launching/stopping/configuring the Hugo server. But this workflow is already a big improvement over what I had before.

The Amarok Development Squad is happy to announce the immediate availability of Amarok 3.2 "Punkadiddle"!

2024 was the year that finally introduced a Qt5/KF5 based Amarok 3 release in April, and it was followed by a number of 3.x bugfix and feature releases. Now, to conclude 2024, it is time for Amarok 3.2.0. The most interesting change is probably the ability to build the same codebase on both Qt5 and Qt6. Qt5/KF5 is still the recommended, tested configuration, for now. Qt6 version should be usable, but in addition to any unknown issues, there are a number of known issues documented in README.

Additionally, 3.2.0 includes e.g. collection filtering and Ampache related features and fixes, oldest resolved feature request being from 2013. Multiple long-standing crash bug reports have been closed lately, and probable fixes for various issues observed in crash report data have been introduced. Amarok 3.2.0 should thus feature slightly improved stability. Some 3.2.x bugfix releases are to be expected in 2025, before the focus shifts to preparations for an "Amarok 4".

Changes since 3.1.1 CHANGES:

• Building an experimental Qt6/KF6 Amarok version is now possible
• Allow filtering collection by lack of tag / empty tag (BR 325317)

CHANGES:

• Amarok now depends on KDE Frameworks 5.108
• Show current track context applet by default

BUGFIXES:

• Probably fix occasional crashes when filtering collection (BR 492406)
• Probably fix occasional crashes when clearing CompondProgressBars
• Fix context view applets on Qt6/KF6
• Fix Ampache login on server version 5.0.0 and later (BR 496581)
• Fix crash if Ampache login is redirected (BR 396590)

The git repository statistics between 3.1.0 and 3.2.0 are as follows:

l10n daemon script: 68 commits, +41987, -35275
Tuomas Nurmi: 46 commits, +723, -4854
Raresh Rus: 3 commits, +41, -53
Ian Abbott: 1 commit, +17, -3
Heiko Becker: 1 commit, +0, -3

Getting Amarok

In addition to source code, Amarok is available for installation from many distributions' package repositories, which are likely to get updated to 3.2.0 soon, as well as the flatpak available on flathub.

Packager section

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

One of the much requested feature for Kdenlive was a modern background removal tool.

Among the many features and enhancements that will come in 2025, we are excited to announce a preview version with a background removal tool using object masks. The feature is based on SAM2‘s object segmentation. You can download the Kdenlive test alpha version from the links at the bottom of this page.

Since this is a testing preview version, the binaries are not signed and you might need to manually allow the install on Windows.

Here is a quick demo of how the feature works in screenshots:

1. Add a clip to your project
2. Select a zone to apply the background removal
3. Click on the Mask button
4. Select Configure to setup the tool (to be done only the first time)

1. Click on Install in the Object detection setup

Go drink a coffee while the module is being downloaded and installed (between 5 and 15 minutes depending on your internet connection). Currently there is not much feedback from the install, we will improve this so just be patient.

Kdenlive downloads the smallest model by default. Once it shows up, you can close the dialog and start using the feature.

1. Click on the Create new mask button
2. Click on the object you want to keep (foreground)
3. When the white mask appears, click on Generate Mask
4. The video mask task starts, drink another coffee

When the video mask is created, it will appear in the mask manager dialog (2).

1. Drag your clip zone from the clip monitor to timeline
2. Select the newly created mask
3. Click on Apply Mask

https://kdenlive.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/dino-final.mp4

Success, you can now enjoy your video without the background.

Of course, this feature can also be used for other exciting things like applying an effect or a color correction to a specific object only.

Keep in mind that this is an alpha version, we will enhance and polish it for the upcoming 25.04 version. Happy editing!

Linux AppImage download:

https://files.kde.org/kdenlive/unstable/kdenlive-25.04.0-alpha-x86_64.AppImage.mirrorlist

Windows download:

https://files.kde.org/kdenlive/unstable/kdenlive-25.04-alpha-x86_64.exe.mirrorlist

Flatpak:

Check our experimantal nightly version (see instructions at the bottom of our download page)

The post Kdenlive new year preview appeared first on Kdenlive.

Unfortunately, there won't be any "This Week in KDE Apps" blog post this week as I (Carl) and others are at the #38C3 (Chaos Communication Congress) in Hamburg. But if you are also there, don't hesitate to come by and say hi.

Screen magnification is an accessibility feature that enlarges the screen to make text, images, and other user interface components easier to see or read. It is not something that requires constant developer attention, however, in Plasma 6.3, the zoom plugin received some improvements that I’d like to go over quickly.

Pixel grid A script element has been removed to ensure Planet works properly. Please find it in the original post.

Arguably, it will be too hard to read text if the screen is “too” zoomed in. There are several ways how this case can be handled. For example, the magnification factor can be capped (e.g. to x8 or x10), or do nothing and just display blurry upscaled screen contents… or display something else.

With the old behavior, the zoom plugin used not to do anything special when the magnification factor reaches a high value, but with the new behavior, it is going to display the individual pixels on the screen. This can be very useful to developers, designers, etc.

System settings

In addition to the new pixel grid mode, the system settings for the zoom plugin received minor polishing to look more consistent with other config modules.

Future improvements

Keyboard shortcuts are not the only way how the zoom plugin can be triggered. For example, it can be also triggered by pressing Meta and Control keys and scrolling the mouse wheel to zoom. However, it is not exposed anywhere in the user interface and some people may prefer zooming with just the Meta key pressed. In order to address the discoverability issue of the mouse wheel gesture and allow using a different combination of modifier keys, there is already a patch to add the corresponding system setting, but it’s 6.4 material. It would be also nice to move screen magnifier settings from the desktop effects config module to the accessibility config module.

Last but not least, the zoom effect currently uses the bi-linear magnification filter, which produces okay-ish visual results, but it’s worth looking for alternative upscaling algorithms that handle edges better so zoomed in text looks less blurry.

Changelog

Hello,

I need your help. I’ve created a first version of Skrooge that can be built on KF6 and Qt6 (Its temporary number version is 2.33.8).

I use it daily for managing my own accounts. However, before releasing an official version, I’d like some of you to test it and provide feedback by reporting any issues you encounter.

I’m counting on you! To get started, check out the download section and the README.md.

Thanks in advance!

After almost a year, I finally found some time to dive back into Krita. I stumbled upon the Memileo Impasto Brushes bundle, which mimics the texture and thickness of real paint—perfect for adding depth and dimension. Inspired to try them out, I created this quick one-hour painting.

Let’s go for last web review of 2024!

This is Your Brain On Surveillance: New Study Reveals How Awareness of Being Watched Alters Our Brains - The Debrief

Tags: tech, surveillance, psychology, cognition

It looks like it’s not only impacting negatively our privacy. The linked paper (good to read as well) hints at negative impacts on mental health as well. Still needs to be fully validated but it doesn’t look good already.

https://thedebrief.org/this-is-your-brain-on-surveillance-new-study-reveals-how-awareness-of-being-watched-alters-our-brains/

The era of open voice assistants has arrived - Home Assistant

Tags: tech, smarthome, foss

Nice move from the home assistant people. Such open and privacy respecting hardware is needed.

https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2024/12/19/voice-preview-edition-the-era-of-open-voice/

The Ghosts in the Machine, by Liz Pelly

Tags: tech, music, copyright

You love artists and their music? You probably should get off Spotify then… because they’re clearly at war to reduce even further how much they pay artists. Clearly it’s not about discovering artists anymore, it’s about pumping cheap stock music to increase their margin. Also its clear the remaining musicians trapped in that system will be automated away soon… you don’t need humans to create soulless music.

https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians/

My colleague Julius

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, criticism, knowledge

OK, this is a nice parabole. I admit I enjoyed it.

https://ploum.net/2024-12-23-julius-en.html

Can AI do maths yet? Thoughts from a mathematician

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, mathematics

Looks like we’re still a long way from mathematical accuracy with the current generation of models. It made progress of course.

https://xenaproject.wordpress.com/2024/12/22/can-ai-do-maths-yet-thoughts-from-a-mathematician/

Lua is so underrated

Tags: tech, programming, language, lua

It’s a not niche indeed but has its place in some applications.

https://nflatrea.bearblog.dev/lua-is-so-underrated/

Simpler and faster parsing code with std::views::split – Daniel Lemire’s blog

Tags: tech, c++, performance

A good reason to use more modern C++20 APIs for parsing code.

https://lemire.me/blog/2024/12/21/simpler-and-faster-parsing-code-with-stdviewssplit/

A Simple ELF

Tags: tech, unix, elf, system

Nice little introduction to the ELF format.

https://4zm.org/2024/12/25/a-simple-elf.html

Electronics Test Gear on the Cheap

Tags: tech, electronics

Price of such gear definitely went down indeed.

https://bigdanzblog.wordpress.com/2024/12/25/electronics-test-gear-on-the-cheap/

Server-Sent Events (SSE) Are Underrated

Tags: tech, web, http

This is definitely an overlooked alternative to websockets. It doesn’t apply everywhere of course but when it does it’s a good pick.

https://igorstechnoclub.com/server-sent-events-sse-are-underrated/

On Long Term Software Development - Bert Hubert’s writings

Tags: tech, engineering, supply-chain, complexity, dependencies, maintenance

There is some good advice in this piece. If you want to maintain something for a long time, some aspects need to be thought out from the beginning.

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/on-long-term-software-development/

Problem Driven Development | Stay SaaSy

Tags: tech, project-management, product-management, engineering, quality

Struggling with making your first technical roadmap? Driving it from measurable problems is a good first step.

https://staysaasy.com/engineering/2024/12/17/problem-driven-development.html

The number pi has an evil twin… - Mathstodon

Tags: mathematics

Interesting thread. I didn’t know about this family of constants. Fun stuff.

https://mathstodon.xyz/@johncarlosbaez/113703444230936435

Bye for now!

This blog post will guide you through the entire process of preparing your Qt for Android app with CMake for publishing on the Play Store. By the end, you’ll be ready to distribute your Qt app to millions of Android users, buckle up! 

Like every year I take a couple of days off at the end of the year to wind down and spent time with the family. The year has brought many major changes, both to KDE and to me personally: We did the KDE MegaRelease 6, the next major update to KDE’s software suite. Plasma 6 further made Wayland the default graphical session. I also spent a lot more time in Qt itself, particularly Qt Wayland, rather than KDE code. Anyhow, between family visits and feasts there’s always some time for quality KDE hacking.

That’s right: Monitoring task progress in Konsole while busy doing something else

I’ve always been a huge fan of Windows 7’s task bar with its progress reporting and Jump Lists. Nine years ago (wow, really?!) I added support for the Unity Launcher API to Plasma’s task bar in order to display download and copy progress. The other day I was browsing systemd changelog when I stumbled upon:

The various components that display progress bars […], will
now also issue the ANSI sequences for progress reports that Windows Terminal understands. Most Linux terminals currently do not support this sequence (and ignore it), but hopefully this will change one day.

I hope so, too! Guess whose Konsole understands ConEmu-specific OSC (Operating System Command), the stuff systemd uses, for progress reporting now? There’s still a few quirks to be worked out since Konsole allows you to have multiple split views within the same tab. Nevertheless, we’ve got plenty of time until the next KDE Gear release in April 2025 to finalize it. Moreover, I asked kde-builder (KDE’s meta build system and spiritual successor to kdesrc-build) to support it, so you could monitor KDE compile progress at a glance.

I’m a scratch-your-own-itch type of guy. When I finally got fed up with Element (a Matrix chat client) in a browser window eating my CPU, I gave our own NeoChat application a try. The first thing I added was a “Copy Link Address” context menu when hovering a link in addition to fixing the missing “Edit” entry. Next, I had the window title include the chat room name since that’s what I am usually looking for in my task bar. Finally, Kirigami’s Avatar component can now load its image asynchronously which should speed up scrolling through the timeline and lists of rooms and users.

Ink marker colors shown again in redesigned Printer Manager

Speaking of Kirigami, Qt 6.8 added an animateClick function to buttons. It briefly flashes and then triggers it. This is now used throughout Kirigami in keyboard shortcut handling, bringing it in line with the Qt Widget world. Qt 6, too, has a concept of “accent color” for a few releases. Plasma’s accent color system predates it, though, so there’s some friction between the two. While we don’t have a proper Kirigami Theme API for it yet, at least setting the highlight now also sets the accent color. With that, ink cartridge levels have the appropriate marker colors in printer settings again. Speaking of accent color, I just backported some changes we made for Frameworks 6 to Frameworks 5 to ensure that KF5 apps can interpret Breeze Icons from KF6 properly, notably fixing the black folder icons.

I hope you also got the chance to spend some time with your loved ones. If you enjoyed what the KDE Community brought you this year, please consider donating to our Year End Fundraiser or to me personally, so we can continue rocking in 2025!

Discuss this post on KDE Discuss.

Welcome to a new issue of "This Week in KDE Apps"! Every week we cover as much as possible of what's happening in the world of KDE apps.

AudioTube YouTube Music app

AudioTube now shows synchronized lyrics provided by LRCLIB. This automatically falls back to normal lyrics if synced lyrics are not available. (Kavinu Nethsara, 25.04.0. Link)

Dolphin Manage your files

Quickly renaming multiple files by switching between them with the keyboard arrow keys now correctly starts a renaming of the next file even if a sorting change moved it. (Ilia Kats, 25.04.0. Link)

Fixed a couple of regressions in the 24.12.0 release. (Akseli Lahtinen, 24.12.1. Link 1, link 2, link 3)

KDE Itinerary Digital travel assistant

Improved the touch targets of the buttons in the bottom drawer which appears on mobile. (Carl Schwan, 24.05.0. Link)

Akonadi Background service for KDE PIM apps

Improve the stability of changing tags. Now deleting a tag will properly remove it from all items. (Daniel Vrátil, 24.12.1. Link 1 and link 2)

KMail A feature-rich email application

The tooltip of your folder in KMail will now show the absolute space quota in bytes. (Fabian Vogt, 25.04.0. Link)

KMyMoney Personal finance manager based on double-entry bookkeeping

An initial port of KMyMoney for Qt6 was merged. (Ralf Habacker. Link)

Krita Digital Painting, Creative Freedom

Krita has a new plugin for fast sketching. You can find more about this on their blog post.

KTorrent BitTorrent Client

Added the support for getting IPv6 peers from peer exchange. (Jack Hill, 25.04.0. Link)

LabPlot Interactive Data Visualization and Analysis

We now show more plot types in the "Add new plot" context menu. (Alexander Senke. Link)

LabPlot has announced a new dedicated user manual page.

Okular View and annotate documents

We improved how we are displaying the signature and certificate details in the mobile version of Okular. (Carl Schwan, 25.04.0. Link)

When selecting a certificate to use when digitally signing a PDF with the GPG backend, the fingerprints are rendered more nicely. (Sune Vuorela, 25.04.0. Link)

It's now possible to choose a custom default zoom level in Okular. (Wladimir Leuschner, 25.04.0. Link)

Merkuro Mail Read your emails with speed and ease

Merkuro Mail now lets you search across your emails with a full text search. (Carl Schwan, 25.04.0. Link)

Additionally, the Merkuro Mail sidebar will now remember which folders were collapsed or expanded as well as the last selected folder across application restarts. (Carl Schwan, 25.04.0. Link)

PowerPlant Keep your plants alive

We started the "KDE Review" process for PowerPlant, so expect a release in the comming weeks.

We added support for Windows and Android. (Laurent Montel, 1.0.0. Link 1, link 2 and link 3)

Ruqola Rocket Chat Client

Ruqola 2.4.0 is out. You can now mute/unmute other users, cleanup the room history and more. Read the full announcement.

Tokodon Browse the Fediverse

This week, Joshua spent some time improving Tokodon for mobile and in particular for Android. This includes performance optimization, adding missing icons and some mobile specific user experience improvements. (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link 1, link 2 and link 3). A few more improvements for Android, like proper push notifications via unified push, are in the work.

Joshua also improved the draft and scheduled post features, allowing now to discard scheduled posts and drafts and showing when a draft was created. (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link)

We also added a keyboard shortcut configuration page in Tokodon settings. (Joshua Goins and Carl Schwan, 25.04.0. Link 1 and link 2)

Finally, we created a new server information page with the server rules and made the existing announcements page a subpage of it. Speaking of announcements, we added support for the announcement's emoji reactions. (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link)

WashiPad Minimalist Sketchnoting Application

WashiPad was ported to Kirigami instead of using its own custom QtQuick components. (Carl Schwan. Link)

…And Everything Else

This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! If you’re hungry for more, check out Nate's blog about Plasma and be sure not to miss his This Week in Plasma series, where every Saturday he covers all the work being put into KDE's Plasma desktop environment.

For a complete overview of what's going on, visit KDE's Planet, where you can find all KDE news unfiltered directly from our contributors.

Get Involved

The KDE organization has become important in the world, and your time and contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we're going to need your support for KDE to become sustainable.

You can help KDE by becoming an active community member and getting involved. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE — you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to be a programmer either. There are many things you can do: you can help hunt and confirm bugs, even maybe solve them; contribute designs for wallpapers, web pages, icons and app interfaces; translate messages and menu items into your own language; promote KDE in your local community; and a ton more things.

You can also help us by donating. Any monetary contribution, however small, will help us cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors and in general just keep KDE bringing Free Software to the world.

To get your application mentioned here, please ping us in invent or in Matrix.

In less than a week from now KDE will again be present at the 38th Chaos Communication Congress (38C3) in Hamburg, Germany.

Chaos Communication Congress

Even bigger than FOSDEM and much wider in scope many impactful collaborations during the past couple of years can be traced back to contacts made at Congress. Be it KDE Eco, joint projects with the Open Transport community, the weather and emergency alert aggregation server or indoor routing to just name a few.

KDE Assembly

At last year’s edition, 37C3, we had a KDE assembly (think “stand” or “booth” at other events) for the first time. That not only helps people to find us, it’s also very useful anchor point for the growing KDE delegation.

This year we’ll further improve on that, by being there with even more people and by having the KDE assembly as part of the Bits & Bäume Habitat. That not only comes with some shared infrastructure like a workshop space but also puts us next to some of our friends, like OSM, FSFE and Wikimedia.

We’ll be in the foyer on floor level 1 next to the escalators (map).

More of our friends and partners have their own assemblies elsewhere as well, such as Matrix and Linux on Mobile.

A special thanks goes again to the nice people at CCC-P and WMDE who helped us get tickets!

Talks & Workshops

We’ll also have three talks by KDE people, all of them featuring collaborations beyond the classical KDE scope.

• Jonah will talk about the free and open public transport routing service Transitous on day 2 at 12:00 on stage YELL.
• Nucleus from FOSSWarn and I will present the joint work on emergency and weather alert aggregation and distribution infrastructure, on day 4 at 16:40 on stage HUFF.
• Joseph’s talk Opt Green: Coordinating a Windows 10-to-Linux upcycling campaign across Free Software communities worldwide will be on day 2 at 11:00 on stage YELL.

There will also be two workshops chaired by Jospeh on the latter subject:

• Upcycling old laptops with Linux for kids, on day 3 from 12:00 to 15:00 in Saal 5.
• A BoF on Coordinating a Windows 10-to-Linux upcycling campaign, on day 4 from 13:00 to 15:00 in the Bits & Bäume workshop area.

Make sure to monitor the schedule for last-minute changes though.

See you in Hamburg!

Looking forward to many interesting discussions, if you are at 38C3 as well make sure to come by the KDE assembly!