Planet KDE

Hi, I'm Jakob and this is my new KDE blog. Let's see how this goes as I haven't blogged for literally decades. I started working on Plasma code sometime last year and hope to play a tiny part in setting the stage for world domination improving user experiences like so many other awesome and dedicated contributors do every week.

When thinking about how to contribute to KDE, many people probably still think that you have to write actual code. While it’s true that C++ and QML is at the heart of our applications, it’s just one puzzle piece of many that make up a successful product. Besides donating money to KDE or developers like me individually, there’s much more you can do to support us: promo work, drawing icons, brainstorming ideas, writing documentation, triaging bug reports or writing new ones, or in this case sending the relevant piece of hardware to a developer. Every single contribution counts!

It’s been at least ten years since I last used an optical drive

A key ingredient to KDE’s cross-platform story is Solid, our device integration framework. It lets applications enumerate devices, such as hard drive partitions, USB thumb drives, but also batteries and peripherals, in a platform-independent way. When it comes to hardware, sometimes emulating its behavior is tough and even a virtual machine might not behave exactly the same as the real thing. Here’s the story of how the donation of a portable DVD drive let me unlock a massive performance boost.

On Linux, to enumerate storage devices it talks to UDisks2 on DBus. You can actually view all the information yourself by using qdbusviewer or d-feet and navigate to the org.freedesktop.UDisks2 service on the System Bus. The Places panel found in applications like Dolphin but also the Device Notifier applet in System Tray query Solid for interesting storage devices to display to the user.

On a typical system, there’s plenty of mount points (particularly Snap is notorious for creating lots of loop devices) which we don’t want to show. Nevertheless, we have to fetch them all to decide whether they’re interesting to us. For example, usually only storage devices explicitly listed in fstab, mounted from /media (your typical USB stick drive), or originating in the user’s home directory (an ISO image in your Downloads folder) are displayed.

Currently, owing to Solid’s modular nature and the fact that a lot of its original code was written in KDE 4 times where many API conveniences in DBus and UDisks didn’t exist yet, Solid uses the DBus Introspectable interface to enumerate all devices. This gives us an XML description of the available interfaces and object paths on the service. As you can imagine, receiving and processing that data string can be quite expensive. Furthermore, for every device that was enumerated, a Solid Device instance is created which then fetches all properties from all interfaces on the relevant object, which again can be slow. The DBus interfaces an object implements in UDisks gives us a good idea of what type of storage we’re dealing with, for example org.freedesktop.UDisks.Loop contains properties regarding loop devices, such as the original path of the image file that has been mounted, which in turn is also a org.freedesktop.UDisks.Block device, and so on.

Retrieving a mount point via DBus, eventually you realize that “47” is forward slash.

There must be a better way to do this, right? There is! It’s called org.freedesktop.DBus.ObjectManager. It lets you fetch all objects and their properties in a single call. This would allow Solid to query everything at once on startup and then only fetch individual properties when they get invalidated or a new device is plugged in at runtime.

Both encrypted drives and optical media are somewhat special in that they’re a drive (or container) containing the actual media or partition. While a USB stick just disappears entirely as you unplug it, a DVD drive will only have its media ejected. It means we need to monitor the drive and check its media availability and then announce the disc inside of it. However, when I asked fellow KDE developers to test my changes, the patch-set worked fine with the CD-ROM drive emulated in a virtual machine but failed miserably with a legit drive. The situation with Audio CDs was even worse since they don’t have a regular file system associated with. And guess what: there’s also CDs that contian both audio and data.

I asked around on KDE’s Matrix channels whether someone might have a spare USB CD-ROM drive and is willing to help. The other day MartinR approached me in the KDE neon channel and said he had a spare one he could mail somewhere. When it arrived a week later, I immediately tried it out (it’s been some time since I’ve seen a device with a USB Y cable) and it indeed let me iron out a bunch of remaining issues with the original patch-set. There’s other examples, too, where having the actual hardware is key. For instance, in order to properly develop HDR support in KWin, the developers need to have an actual screen capable of displaying it.

KWin Wayland running in HDR mode on a portable OLED screen, courtesy of Xaver (the picture of course doesn’t do it justice)

The change isn’t actually merged yet as I am in the process of writing a fake UDisks2 service for Solid. This would let us run a bunch of automated tests, particularly for the weird cases, and ensure that my refactor doesn’t cause any regressions. Solid has unit tests for its general working but not specifically to the way it interacts with UDisks2. A bug in Solid that renders your data accessible (sorry about that encrypted drives bug the other week) or causes the shell or some KDE background service to crash upon plugging in a device would be a disaster.

Having said all of that, let me thank you again very much, without your generous donation I would not have been able to realize this project. On my laptop, the time it took to initialize a KFilePlacesModel went down from 55–60 ms to just under 20 ms. The number of DBus calls it places to the UDisks2 service went down from around 60 “get all properties”, 45 “introspect”, and 15 “get this particular property” calls to a single “get all managed objects” call, and one “introspect” call I have yet to hunt down. I’m sure our users will very much appreciate a faster starting Dolphin and snappier file dialog! Also many thanks to Fabian Vogt and notably Jan R. for continued advice and testing.

If you have a KDE development setup (and if you don’t, go set one up), please test this Solid patch, and let me know if it causes any trouble for you!

Make sure you commit anything you want to end up in the KDE Gear 24.05
releases to them

Next Dates

• April 25 2024: 24.05 Freeze and Beta (24.04.80) tag & release
• May 9, 2024: 24.05 RC (24.04.90) Tagging and Release
• May 16, 2024: 24.05 Tagging
• May 23, 2024: 24.05 Release

https://community.kde.org/Schedules/KDE_Gear_24.05_Schedule

This week I’m attending two sprints: a KDE e.V. Board sprint which is already done, and a KDE Goals mega-sprint, which begins today! My “Automate and systematize internal processes” goal is represented there and I’m hoping we have a great time brainstorming and fixing stuff. And also that we eat lots of Döner kebabs. So many Döner kebabs. All the Döner kebabs.

New Features

Spectacle regains its “blur factor” feature, so now if you want your blurred areas to be even blurrier, you can do that without having to draw a blur over the same area multiple times (Noah Davis, Spectacle 24.05. Link)

You can now copy the text of a column in System Monitor (Joshua Goins, Plasma 6.1. Link)

UI Improvements

The Plasma Digital Clock’s Islamic calendar feature now respects the locale-specific numbering system, which means for example that people living in Arabic-speaking countries that use western-style Arabic numerals will now see those rather than eastern-style Arabic numerals (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.0.5. Link)

Removed the “Clear all” button on the fingerprint authorization enrollment UI, because it was a big obvious footgun you could use to destroy all your work to enroll fingerprints (Arthur Zamarin, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Normally I don’t mention changes to Welcome center, but this is a fairly large one: the “Simple by default” page is no longer a big dumb picture of System Settings, but rather shows you a nice mock desktop where you can hover or click on elements to learn what they are and what they do. System Settings is now mentioned on the “Powerful When Needed” page (me: Nate Graham and Oliver Beard, Plasma 6.1. Link):

On System Settings’ Night Light page, the time input fields for manual time mode are no longer a nightmare, because they’ve been replaced with a set of spinboxes (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 6.1. Link):

Yes, ideally these would use a dedicated time picker UI component, but one thing at a time

Information about Night Light transition times is now shown in the tooltip for the Brightness and Color widget (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 6.1. Link):

System Settings’ Screen Locking page has also now adopted the “buttons in the header” paradigm, this time for its “Configure Appearance” button (Jakob Petsovits, Plasma 6.1. Link):

Bug Fixes

Fixed a number of issues in various pieces of KDE software caused by changes in Qt 6.7 (Felix Ernst, Noah Davis, and Fushan Wen, Dolphin & Spectacle 24.05 and Plasma 6.0.4. Link 1, link 2, and link 3)

Spectacle no longer badly misbehaves when asked to take a screenshot of a screen with a scale factor of less than 100% (Noah Davis, Spectacle 24.05. Link)

Fixed an issue whereby Spectacle’s feature to save screenshots with an increasing number sequence would number the screenshots incorrectly in certain circumstances (Noah Davis, Spectacle 24.05. Link)

Closing your laptop’s lid with the keyboard backlight illuminated now correctly restores its brightness level when you open the lid again (Anthony Vital, Plasma 6.0.4. Link)

Fixed multiple issues whereby parts of Plasma would fail to save changed settings if Plasma quickly crashed, exited unexpectedly, or was terminated in an unclean way (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.0.5. Link)

Plasma no longer crashes when removing standalone launcher widgets for apps with no “Open With” context menu action (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.0.5. Link)

Fixed multiple issues with keyboard focus and selection with search results in Plasma’s Application Dashboard widget—which you may notice is visibly on life support, but this constitutes some of that support (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.0.5. Link)

Plasma’s screen chooser OSD once again works as expected on X11 (Fushan Wen and David Redondo, Plasma 6.0.5. Link 1 and link 2)

The Grid layout for System Monitor sensors once again looks good in constrained spaces, such as a thick Plasma panel (Akseli Lahtinen, Plasma 6.0.5. Link)

Fixed a major regression that prevented LUKS-encrypted disks from being decrypted by KDE software using the Solid framework (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 6.2, but distros should be backporting it to their 6.1 packages too. Link)

Those increasingly ubiquitous contextual help buttons that open explanatory tooltips when clicked no longer have a weird empty space on the right side of their tooltips (Shubham Arora, Frameworks 6.2. Link):

Fixed a Breeze icon that was not changing its color properly when using non-default color schemes (Evgeniy Harchenko, Frameworks 6.2. Link)

Other bug information of note:

• 3 Very high priority Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
• 38 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 36 last week). Current list of bugs
• 137 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed over the last week Full list of bugs

Performance & Technical

Kolourpaint has been ported to Qt6 (Carl Schwan, Kolourpaint 24.05. Link)

On Wayland, implemented support for the remote desktop portal’s ConnectToEIS method. This enables applications like Synergy and Barrier that have Wayland support for sending emulated input events to do so in a more convenient way than using the existing methods. Full support for input-leap is pending, but in progress (David Redondo, Plasma 6.1. Link)

System Settings’ Keyboard page has been ported to QML, retaining most of its prior styling but with a modern and extensible codebase (Evgeny Chesnokov, 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!

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-16.

The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet afloat

Tags: tech, internet, infrastructure

Very fascinating piece. This shows the underappreciated job of maintaining the subsea cables needed for the Internet to function and how extreme the conditions can be. Definitely a peculiar life for the folks in that trade… also shows the repairs are clearly underfunded and that not enough people are embracing this career. And now, add geopolitics to the mix, it should make you wonder how all of this work at all and for how long it’ll keep working.

https://www.theverge.com/c/24070570/internet-cables-undersea-deep-repair-ships

Where The Wild Things Are: Brute-Force SSH Attacks In The Wild And How To Stop Them : Flux Research Group

Tags: tech, ssh, security

Interesting study on the brute force attacks against SSH. It gives plenty of insights and leads to a potential approach to detect most of them.

https://www.flux.utah.edu/paper/singh-nsdi24

Neverest CLI

Tags: tech, email, tools, command-line

Looks like a nice tool to backup and restore emails. Probably to check out next time you migrate your emails to another server.

https://pimalaya.org/neverest/cli/latest/

Mysterious Moving Pointers - blomqu.ist

Tags: tech, c++, memory

Interesting case… even though honestly we shouldn’t need to dig out this kind of details.

https://blomqu.ist/posts/2024/move/

Traces the shared-object dependencies of a binary, and graphs them

Tags: tech, library, dependencies

Neat little tool. Since I had to do this kind of work a few times, this is indeed a good idea to have a public and maintained script for it.

https://github.com/stolk/sotrace

Create graphs from your CommonJS, AMD or ES6 module dependencies

Tags: tech, dependencies, javascript, tools

Looks like a nice tool to explore dependencies in JS based projects.

https://github.com/pahen/madge

Setting up PostgreSQL for running integration tests

Tags: tech, tests, performance, databases, postgresql

Interesting use of database templates and memory disks to greatly speed up test executions.

https://gajus.com/blog/setting-up-postgre-sql-for-running-integration-tests

WebXR retro computer simulation | Dom Pajak

Tags: tech, web, 3d, xr

Funny side project. This shows well many of the challenges one should expect when working on mixed reality projects. It’s also nice to see how the ecosystem matured for such features in the browser.

https://www.dompajak.com/blog/webxr-beeb-virtual-beeb/index.html

Spectral Ray Tracing

Tags: tech, 3d, art, physics

Interesting approach to have a ray tracer which doesn’t quite follow physics for artistic purposes.

https://larswander.com/writing/spectral-ray-tracing/

What we talk about when we talk about ‘root cause’ · GitHub

Tags: tech, failure, project-management, product-management

This is definitely an ambiguous term. You need to know where stand the people employing it in order to figure out the exact meaning of “root cause”.

https://github.com/readme/guides/root-cause

Why you need a “WTF Notebook”

Tags: management, coaching, learning, organization

Definitely this. Listen and write down issues before you start to complain. There might be reasons why things are as they are. Take the time to understand them and refine to have a better feedback.

https://www.simplermachines.com/why-you-need-a-wtf-notebook/

Mental Health in Software Engineering

Tags: tech, work, life, management, burnout, health

A good reminder that mental health can be hard to keep in check in our profession. Pay attention to how you feel, anxiety is a sneaky foe. Lots can be done to improve if taken care of early enough.

https://vadimkravcenko.com/shorts/mental-health-in-software-engineering/

This is a teenager

Tags: sociology, politics, data-visualization

Excellent visualization which shows how adverse experiences during childhood shape our lives as adults.

https://pudding.cool/2024/03/teenagers/

Bye for now!

Hey everyone! Here is a new video explanation of the changes we have done. This time we tackled Labplot, maps, and media icons! Can you believe it? We are now officially past the mid-way for the icons. So exciting!

For protecting the privacy of our users and the security and integrity of their systems, usage of transport encryption and authentication is crucial for any network communication. HTTP over TLS (HTTPS) is probably the most widespread set of protocols for that. What do we need to look out for when using this in our applications?

Akademy 2024 will be a hybrid event held simultaneously in Würzburg, Germany, and Online.

Hundreds of participants from the global KDE community, the wider free and open source software community, local organisations and software companies will gather at this year's Akademy 2024 conference. The event will take place in Würzburg and Online from Saturday 7th September to Thursday 12th September.

KDE developers, artists, designers, translators, users, writers, sponsors and supporters from around the world will meet face-to-face to discuss key technology issues, explore new ideas and strengthen KDE's innovative and dynamic culture.

Register now and join us for engaging talks, workshops, BoFs and coding sessions. Collaborate with your fellow KDE contributors to fix bugs, pioneer new features and immerse yourself in the world of open source.

For more information about the conference, visit the Akademy 2024 website.

Targeting Android as a platform is attractive for our applications, both as a intermediate proving ground for Plasma Mobile, and due to the large market share. For new Kirigami-based applications that is a fairly straightforward process thanks to the portability of Qt. There is however also lots of valuable code predating mobile UI considerations, and functional gaps in Qt, which is where KDE Frameworks can help. What do we have already, what still needs to be done, and how can we do it?

This talk introduces LibreOffice's new Qt5-based KDE frontend because at the end of the day, the best free and open-source office suite deservers to be well-integrated into the best free and open-source desktop environment 😃

Get an introduction to the Qt Quick based KNewStuff components, the context of why they exist, and find out how you can use them in your own applications.

Tuesday, 16 April 2024. Today KDE releases a bugfix update to KDE Plasma 6, versioned 6.0.4.

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

• Foldermodel: Export urls to the Desktop Portal on drag and copy. Commit.
• System Monitor: Fix the column configuration dialog being too small on the overview page. Commit. Fixes bug #482008
• Applets/battery: Check actual battery for charge state workaround. Commit.

View full changelog

Currently, we are observing an incredible development in technologies, especially in Artificial Intelligence field. Indeed, by learning from massive data, AI is particularly good at some tasks that normal algorithms cannot achieve as good level of performance, such as: image classification, speech recognition, object detection, tendency prediction, feature extraction, etc. Moreover, new AI algorithms with the emergence of neural networks and deep learning even makes AI models more robust, so that they can now give better prediction without any limitation in improving themselves.

Being aware of those assets, digiKam team has considered using deep learning in digiKam. Thus, this presentation aims to introduce a new implementation of facial recognition in digiKam, based on deep learning models and OpenCV DNN module, so as to improve the performance of facial recognition module.

How can a community like KDE benefit from a developer portal...and what is a developer portal, anyway? This talk aims to answer those questions, and offers practical advice for building a developer portal. The insights from this session can serve as guidance and inspiration to all contributors who want to make sure their community keeps growing and thriving.

Next week KDE will release Applications 19.04, overhauling most of the suite of programs usually packaged with KDE's Plasma desktop. This new version makes KDE's applications more user-friendly, consistent with each other and smoother across the board.

Okular gets, among other improvements, support to show and verify digital signatures on PDFs. This feature is essential to use KDE's document viewer for business or if you need to exchange documents in any official capacity... like when negotiating an international peace treaty. Digital signatures allow you to establish the authenticity of a document, whether it has been tampered with or not, and confirm where it has come from and who sent it.

Attributions:

Ye oldie public domain footage and French Reel Victor Military Band Burchenal music available from:
https://archive.org

"Sun Lotion" by Steadman CC By-NC-ND available from:
http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Steadman/The_Bitter_End/08_sun_lotion
(along with many more banging tunes)

Peace treaty footage available from:
Clintonlibrary 42: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMkYd9teJEBlCOwDan6qPpg
One News New Zealand: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRdbeElPWvSumxERqoR7ZUA
European Commission: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMPaviJxybo1RTdzvYcU91A

Many thanks to the content creators that make their work available for free and under generous free licenses. Without your generosity, making videos like this one would not be possible.

The second maintenance release of the 24.02 series is out with performance optimizations when moving clips in the timeline and across multiple project bins, packaging improvements to macOS and Windows versions and fixes to copy/paste of effects, rotoscoping, Nvidia encoding among others.

Full changelog

• Fix blurry folder icon with some project profiles. Commit.
• Fix timeline not following playhead. Commit.
• When copy/paste effects from a group, only paste effects for the active clip. Commit. Fixes bug #421667.
• Optimize group move (don’t update clip position twice). Commit.
• Fix nvidia encoding. Commit.
• Multiple improvements for timeline keyboard grab (don’t test each frame on a move, scoll timeline accordingly, don’t lose focus on app switch). Commit.
• Update to last commit: only sync shortcuts if there was a change. Commit.
• Fix: editing toolbar config discards newly set keyboard shortcuts. Commit.
• Increase Qt6 limit for max image size. Commit. See bug #484752.
• Fix: Ensure secondary bins have a title bar when needed and that the dock widgets list is always correctly sorted. Commit.
• Don’t perform bin block twice on main bin. Commit.
• Fix: lag moving clips from one bin to another and unneeded monitor clip reload. Commit.
• Fix crash and color theme broken on Windows when opening a project by double click. Commit.
• Try to fix empty monitor when switching to/from fullscreen on Mac. Commit.
• Fix mem leak on save. Commit.
• Add more locks around xml producer, fix autosave triggered on project open. Commit.
• Mediabrowser: ensure thumbnails are generated after changing the view. Commit.
• Enable video thumbnails in media browser for Win/Mac. Commit.
• Fix: don’t propose existing name for new sequence. Commit. Fixes bug #472753.
• Fix crash in sequence clip thumbnails. Commit. See bug #483836.
• Ensure we never reset the locale while an MLT XML Consumer is running (it caused data corruption). Commit. See bug #483777.
• Add icon data to shared-mime-info. Commit.
• Fix: favorite effects menu not refreshed when a new effect is set as favorite. Commit.
• Fix: Rotoscoping not allowing to add points close to bottom of the screen. Commit.
• Fix: Rotoscoping – allow closing shape with Return key, don’t discard initial shape when drawing it and seeking in timeline. Commit. See bug #484009.
• Fix: cannot translate the “P” for Proxy in timeline. Commit. Fixes bug #471850.
• Fix white background and blank monitor on Windows after going back from fullscreen. Commit. Fixes bug #484081.
• Fix wrong KDEInstallDirs on Windows. Commit.
• Fix recent commit not allowing to open files. Commit.
• Don’t crash opening aa corrupted project file with no tracks. Commit.
• Fix: cannot move compositions properly in timeline with Qt6. Commit. Fixes bug #484062.
• Proxy clip: highlight proxy in file manager when opening the folder. Commit.

The post Kdenlive 24.02.2 released appeared first on Kdenlive.

We’re a few weeks after the KDE 6 Megarelease and while many people have it working well there were too many problems in KDE neon’s rollout.

We’ll be hosting two Open Door Chats on KDE meet tomorrow (Tue 16 April) where users can talk to the developers to talk about any problems you had.

https://meet.kde.org/b/jon-0yw-xqi-sk6 The access code will be posted on the KDE neon Telegram group and Matrix room or e-mail jr@jriddell.org for it

Chats at 09:00 UTC (10:00 BST, 11:00 CEST) and 19:00 UTC (20:00 BST, 21:00 CEST) Tue 16 April 2024

uses QTextDocument for it’s WYSIWYG text editor. This is surpringly quite powerful and thanks to some code borrowed from KMail rich text editor, it wasn’t hard to implement huge part of the markdown specification.

But while QTextDocument is great, I hit quickly some limits. This is why I started fixing some of them and I already have some patches up for review in Qt.

Default table style

By default the style of the tables looks straight from the 90s, I submitted a patch to use something a bit nicer: https://codereview.qt-project.org/c/qt/qtbase/+/554132

Old style

New style

This is easy to change in the app itself and this is already the case in Marknote and NeoChat table rendering, but by default I believe Qt should provides a nice style so that apps don’t need to figure out how to overwrite the default style.

While working on this, I also noticed that the border-collapse property was not supported by the layout engine in QtQuick and only in QtWidget. This resulted in the border of the tables to be twice as thick as they should be. This was fortunately fixed by a simple patch: https://codereview.qt-project.org/c/qt/qtdeclarative/+/554151

Responsive images

A width and an height can be assigned to an image in a QTextDocument by using the respectives html attributes <img height="500" width="500" \>.This works correctly when the window size is known and static but less so then the window can be resized as will be the user. A common technique in web design is to add the following styles to the website:

img { max-width: 100%; }

And while QTextDocument support some CSS properties, max-width wasn’t implemented. Adding the support for more properties in the HTML and CSS parser is quite simple as it was just forwarding the value of the max-width attribute to the QTextImageHandler, and a bit complicated was the handling of the % unit as previously only px and em was supported by Qt.

This resulted in two more patches, one for QtTextDocument and QtWidget and one for QtQuick.

Future

Hopefully these patches will be reviewed and merged soon. Afterward I want to add support for a few more CSS properties like: border-radius for images and some other elements, as well the border-{width, style, color} properties for paragraphs to better support <blockquote /> (important when displaying emails).

Unix like systems with X11 or Wayland

All Unix like systems with either X11 or Wayland are well supported since ever.

Linux with X11 and now Wayland is for a long time the primary system on that Kate work happens.

Over the years it was, like most of the KDE applications, ported to various BSD variants.

Be it some mainstream Linux distribution like Fedora or a niche one like NixOS, Kate is available as binary package. You love BSD? From FreeBSD to OpenBSD, you can get a Kate package via your normal package system.

And in the normal case, you can just build it from source on your own, all needed patches should be in our repositories upstream. If that is not the case for your system, please help to upstream them.

Below the current state of the master branch compiled on NixOS unstable with Wayland.

How to compile Kate on your own on a Unix like system and start to help to develop it can be found out here.

Windows

Since several years there are activities in the KDE community to provide our libraries and applications for Windows.

Even if that is a non-free platform, we can reach out to new users and developers that might later be then even interested to switch a full open platform.

Progress is slow, but steady. We have Kate and some other applications in the official Windows Store and nightly build for more of them. With reasonable effort you can develop Kate on Windows with Craft.

Below the current state of the master branch running on Windows 11 inside VirtualBox.

If you like to try that, use the nighly installer linked on the Kate website.

macOS

Beside Windows, the major other non-free platform Kate tries to support is macOS.

We have nighly build available for that and you can, like on Windows, develop Kate with the help of Craft.

Below the current state of the master branch running native on my M2 ARM Mac Mini.

Same as for Windows, if you like to try that, use the nighly installer for either ARM or Intel Macs linked on the Kate website.

Other Platforms

Naturally there are more than the above mentioned operating systems around.

Beside the mobile ones like Android and iOS that are not that interesting for Kate, many other desktop operating systems exist.

Even if the Kate team itself doesn’t put active work it them, that doesn’t mean Kate can’t run there.

Without any active work on our side, for example a Kate port for Haiku was done. Some one-liner patches for that got even upstreamed.

If you work on some port of our stuff and need to upstream stuff, please contact us. Even if you work on a non-mainstream system, as long as the patches are not too intrusive, we are interested to have them.

Help us!

Naturally the most of our developers are working on the Linux or some BSD.

That means the other systems are always in need of more people to help out, both on the programming and testing side.

For Kate, testing should be easy, grab a nighly build for Windows or macOS on the Kate website. Or even better, get Craft running, that will make it easier to contribute, too.

One recent topic that needs love is the removal of DBus for Windows/macOS/Android and other systems that don’t use it normally.

If you are up to help with that, here that is coordinated. The current state is already sufficient that the nightly builds of Kate no longer hang on e.g. macOS, but still some frameworks like KIO will need more work.

Just don’t get that wrong, DBus is great on the Linux or BSD systems that use it natively, but it is a pain on systems that have no notion of DBus and leads there to hangs or the spawning of unwanted processes. Beside that, the usefulness is low there, as there are no services on the bus to communicate with anyways.

This week something big got merged: support for Explicit Sync on Wayland!

What does this do? In a nutshell it allows apps to tell the compositor when to display frames on the screen, reducing latency and graphical glitches. The effect should be particularly noticeable with NVIDIA GPUs, which only support this rendering style, and not having support for it on Wayland was the most common source of random graphical glitches and slowdowns.

This work was done by Xaver Hugl, and lands in Plasma 6.1. You can read more about it in a recent blog post he wrote on the topic!

In addition to that impactful but technical change, this was a week of many UI improvements and bug fixes as well:

UI Improvements

Improved the visual quality of cross-screen screenshots that Spectacle takes when using multi-screen setups where the screens have different scale factors (Noah Davis, Spectacle 24.05. Link)

Improved quality of blurs, pixelations, and shadows in Spectacle’s annotations (Noah Davis, Spectacle 24.05. Link)

KWrite now shows a hamburger menu by default instead of a traditional menu bar, and the hamburger menu has gained an assortment of curated actions on the top to speed up access to them (Nathan Garside and Christoph Cullmann, KWrite 24.05. Link 1, link 2, and link 3):

Just KWrite! Nothing has changed for Kate.

Filelight now throws fewer annoying modal dialog windows in your face: it now shows directory access errors using inline placeholder messages, and failures to add duplicate exclusion paths using small toasts/passive notifications (Han Young, Filelight 24.05. Link 1 and link 2)

In the “Get New [Thing]” dialogs, the warning shown at the top is now different and more warningy if the available content has the potential to run executable code on your system (David Edmundson and me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.1 and Gear apps 24.05. Link 1 and link 2):

In Plasma’s traditional Task Manager widget, the threshold for showing any text is now smaller, so you’ll see text more often even at relatively narrow task widths. This is based on the idea that if you’re using this widget, it’s because you want to see text! (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.0.4. Link)

On Wayland, the Dialog Parent effect that dims parent windows when dialogs are active now temporarily disables the dimming when the dialog window is a color picker that’s currently picking a screen color (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 6.1. Link)

System Settings’ Virtual Desktops page has now adopted the common “controls on the header row” paradigm to increase the apace available for content (Jakob Petsovits, Plasma 6.1. Link):

In Plasma’s Power and Battery widget, the controls and UI for blocking sleep and screen locking have moved from the header into the view, matching the location of other interactive controls and preventing the header from becoming super chunky when multiple apps are inhibiting sleep and screen locking (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 6.1. Link):

System Monitor now shows a tooltip with the full text when you hover over an elided piece of text in one of the table views (Joshua Goins, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Made the header message on System Settings’ File Search page frameless and border-touching, making use of new API created to enable this purpose. This API was also used for the message in the “Get new [thing]” dialog shown earlier. So expect to see more of this kind of thing in the coming weeks! (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.1. Link 1 and link 2):

Folder popups invoked from a Plasma panel can now be resized if you’d like more space to see everything in them (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 6.1. Link)

If you preferred the old style of app launching in Plasma’s traditional Task Manager widget whereby an app’s pinned launcher would disappear when launched, you can now get that back (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Middle-clicking a desktop in KWin’s Overview effect no longer instantly removes it, because this made it too easy to accidentally destroy your layout (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.1. Link)

The radius of rounded corners throughout Breeze-themed UI elements has now been standardized at 5px, much better than the previous random assortment of corner radii that ranged generally from 2-5px, with some being as high as 8 or 16px! This is an easily bikeshedded topic, so please try to restrain yourselves; check out all the other screenshots in this post, which feature the change—I bet you thought they looked pretty good before I explicitly mentioned that the corner radius had increased, right!? (Akseli Lahtinen, Plasma 6.1 and Frameworks 6.2. Link)

Bug Fixes

In Dolphin’s Details view, navigating to a subdirectory no longer resets the current sort mode (Felix Ernst, Dolphin 24.02.2. Link)

Gwenview no longer inappropriately blocks sleep and screen locking when simply viewing an image (Daniel Strnad, Gwenview 24.02.2. Link)

Fixed a nasty bug in Spectacle that could cause the rectangular region overlay to get stuck on screen when taking a rectangular region screenshot right after a screen recording without quitting and re-launching Spectacle first (Noah Davis, Spectacle 24.05. Link)

Plasma’s Night Light feature no longer unintentionally connects to Mozilla Location Services to geolocate you for the purpose of figuring out the Night Light transition time when you don’t have that setting turned on (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 5.27.12. Link)

Plasma no longer crashes when you close the notification that gives you an opportunity to undo removing an Icon widget (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 6.0.4. Link)

Modal font dialogs in Plasma 6 are now ugly, but at least they work again; our previous styling approach caused them to end up non-interactive and has been reverted for now pending a better solution (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 6.0.4. Link)

Discover once again shows you everything you have installed on its “Installed” page—not just an assortment of packages that depended on what distro you were using (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.0.4. Link)

When scrolling down in one app category on Kickoff and then switching categories, random items from the former category no longer sometimes appear inappropriately on the new page (David Redondo, Plasma 6.0.4. Link)

On Wayland, the color picker dialog no longer returns incorrect colors when an ICC profile is applied to the display (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.0.4. Link)

Fixed a strange issue whereby items in Plasma’s list view mode Folder View popups on a panel could only be highlighted when moving the cursor downwards, rather than upwards (Akseli Lahtinen, Plasma 6.0.4. Link)

Fixed a bug that made it possible, under certain circumstances, to drag a window completely off the screen (Yifan Zhu, Plasma 6.0.4. Link)

On Wayland, the clipboard menu that appears when you hit Meta+V no longer goes underneath windows set to always be on top (Tino Lorenz, Plasma 6.0.4. Link)

In KWin’s Overview effect, the thumbnails for inactive virtual desktops are now live, not static (David Redondo, Plasma 6.0.4. Link)

Fixed a problem creating new Wireguard VPNs (Stephen Robinson, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Keyboards are no longer sometimes shown as mice on System Settings’ Mouse page (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Rapidly toggling the “Floating” setting for a Plasma panel on and off no longer sometimes causes the panel to get stuck in a position where it’s not floating, but also detached from the screen edge (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Discover no longer mislabels apps that get removed from a Flatpak repo as being not installed when they are in fact still installed (Aleix Pol and Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Fixed a case where KDE apps could run out of memory when told to open certain types of malformed image files (Mirco Miranda, Frameworks 6.1. Link)

Fixed the most common crash in the Baloo file indexing service, with 113 duplicates as of the time of writing (Christoph Cullmann, Frameworks 6.2. Link)

Fixed a rare case where KIO could exhaust all memory while trying and failing to process HTTP requests under certain unusual circumstances (Harald Sitter, Frameworks 6.2. Link)

WebDAV files accessed through Dolphin or other KDE apps once again show the correct modification times (Fabian Vogt, Frameworks 6.2. Link)

Other bug information of note:

• 3 Very high priority Plasma bugs (up from 2 last week). Current list of bugs
• 36 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 34 last week). Current list of bugs
• Again 145 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed over the last week! Full list of bugs

Performance & Technical

After Qt changes regressed this, changing color schemes is once again nearly instant, giving the “blend changes” KWin effect enough time to provide a smooth transition between the colors (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 6.2 Link)

Files and folders on the desktop that are copied or dragged are now made available via the Portals system, so dropping them into sandboxed apps now works as expected (Karol Kosek, Plasma 6.0.4. 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

KDE 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, which I am a board member for), and that’s a problem. We’ve taken steps to change this with paid technical contractors—but those steps are small due to 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!