Planet KDE

Accessibility enhancements, new releases and performance boosts

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.

This week we enhanced the accessibility of a bunch of our most popular apps; released new versions of KleverNotes, KPhotoAlbum; and improved the performance and usability of KDE Connect, Kate, Konqueror, and more.

Let's get started!

Accessibility

We made the inline notifications that appear above the view in Dolphin, Gwenview, Okular, and many other applications fully accessible by keyboard and to screen readers. Applications will need to opt-in to actually have them announced though. (Felix Ernst, KDE Frameworks 6.8, Link, Dolphin 24.12.0, Link)

Dolphin Manage your files

After renaming a file, the renamed file is immediately selected. (Jin Liu, 24.12.0. Link)

Merkuro Contact Manage your contacts with speed and ease

The OpenPGP and S/MIME certificates of a contact are now displayed directly in Merkuro Contact. Clicking on them will open Kleopatra and show additional information. (Carl Schwan, 24.12.0. Link)

KAddressBook An address book manager

Fix a crash when editing a contact with a nonstandard phone type. (Jonathan Marten, 24.08.3. Link)

Kate Advanced Text Editor

We managed to reduce KDE's advanced text editor startup time by 250ms (Waqar Ahmed, 24.12.0. Link 1, link 2)

The Quick Open tool can now be used to search and browse the projects open in the current session (Akseli Lahtinen, 24.12.0. Link)

KDE Connect Seamless connection of your devices

The list of devices you can connect to now shows the connected and remembered devices separately. (Albert Astals Cid, 24.12.0. Link)

KCron Task Scheduler

Improve the clarity of the "Print Summary…" button. (Thomas Duckworth, 24.12.0. Link)

The printed output is now translated. (Carl Schwan, 24.12.0. Link)

KleverNotes Take and manage your notes

KleverNotes 1.1.0 is out! KDE's note-taking app has a faster Markdown parser, a better toolbar and a WYSIWYG-like editor. Read the full announcement!.

KMail A feature-rich email application

Fix the dates in the message lists being stuck at 'Today' and 'Yesterday' even after the day has changed. (Christoph Erhardt, 24.08.3. Link)

Konqueror KDE File Manager & Web Browser

Our venerable file explorer/web browser comes with improved auto-filling of login information. (Stefano Crocco, 24.12.0. Link)

KPhotoAlbum KDE image management software

KPhotoAlbum 5.13.0 is out. This is a small update that fixes numerous bugs and reworks timespan calculation. Read the full announcement

KStars Desktop Planetarium

KStars was ported to Qt6/KF6. (Jasem Mutlaq. Link)

KTorrent BitTorrent Client

It is now possible to specify an https URL as webseeds in the "Create a Torrent" dialog. (Jack Hill, 24.12.0. Link)

NeoChat Chat with your friends on matrix

KDE's homegrown Matrix instant messaging chat client comes with a redesigned general room settings dialog. (Carl Schwan, 24.12.0. Link)

Tokodon Browse the Fediverse

We have added an "Open Server in Browser" button in the profile editor. This lets you configure some settings not exposed via the API that Tokodon uses. (Joshua Goins, 24.12.0. Link)

Tokodon now clarifies that a user's notes are private. (Joshua Goins, 24.12.0. Link)

Improve the names and descriptions of various profile options. (Joshua Goins, 24.12.0. Link)

Tokodon now lets you manage your followers and following users. Which means, it's now possible to forcibly remove users from your followers list. (Joshua Goins, 24.12.0. Link)

Added a new "Following" feed, to quickly page through your follows and their feed similar to the now discontinued Cohost social network.

Platforms Android

Volker Krause posted a summary of all the improvements made to the Android platform on Android in October. This includes the retirement of Qt 5 Android CI, better translations lookup, dark mode support and more. Read the full blog post

SailfishOS

Thanks to Adam Pigg and rinigus, Qt6 and KF6 are now available on SailfishOS. This means Kirigami applications built with Qt6 can now be packaged on that platform. Read the announcement

...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 view 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.

Here’s an overview of recent work around Android platform support for KDE Frameworks and KDE applications, most of which is a direct result of discussions and work at Akademy and the Matrix conference.

Notification permission fixes

Porting Itinerary and NeoChat to use the KNotification permission API identified two issues around permission checks and callbacks on permission changes that resulted in the application seeing the wrong permission state. That’s fixed now.

Retirement of the Qt 5 CI

With the 24.08 KDE Gear release all our Android apps are based on Qt 6, including their stable release branches. We have therefore started with retiring the Android Qt 5 CI/CD infrastructure, which should save us both maintenance and computing resources.

As Qt 5 is meanwhile lagging behind several Android SDK versions it’s no longer a viable platform for producing APKs that work on up-to-date devices anymore anyway.

Android CI has meanwhile been removed from the KDE Frameworks 5 maintenance branches as well as from a few other libraries that still used it. The removal of Gitlab CI templates, Craft caches and container images will follow.

In particular this means the invent-registry.kde.org/sysadmin/ci-images/android-qt515 container image is deprecated and will be removed eventually. Please get in touch if you are still using this externally. Poppler’s CI was such a case for example.

QML file installation

The QML module macros in ECM used to install QML files to disk, besides bundling those via the Qt resource system as well. While that is still needed on most platforms due to some specific code in Kirigami, it’s unnecessary on Android where we rely solely on the bundled data.

This resulted in unnecessary content in the APKs, which has been fixed and makes all our APKs a bit smaller now.

Translation lookup order

The probably most visible change is a fix for a long standing bug in KI18n’s multi-language fallback lookup order, which would result in applications showing a wild mix of languages under certain conditions.

This happened when the primary device language was set to English but the country to anything but the US or the UK and one or more secondary languages were also selected. While not strictly limited to Android, there’s two factors that made it particularly prone to happen there:

• Newer Android versions allow language and country to be set fully independently, while on many other systems only certain predefined combinations are available.
• The language setting doesn’t just impact application translations but also text input, so many more users have multiple languages configured.

KI18n first looks for a translation for the specific language/country pair and then just the language, before falling back to the next configured language/country pair. If no translation is found it’ll eventually use the English/US source text.

Conceptually this is not wrong, but the implementation missed the fact that there is no “country-less” English translation but only the English/US source text. A configuration of English/Canada and French/Canada therefore previously resulted in a French translation rather than an English one, as it does now.

This has been backported and should be available in all our APKs with 24.08.2 latest.

Runtime language change

Thanks to input from Fabian during Akademy there’s also significant progress on having applications react to system language changes at runtime.

This basically consists of three parts:

• Propagate the native Android system configuration change to Qt, done in Qt CR 596175.
• Reset cached values inside KI18n on system language changes, done in KI18n MR 124.
• Trigger QML binding re-evaluation for i18n() calls on language changes, implemented in KI18n MR 127.

With those three changes applied and a few lines adjusted in the application code to make use of this large parts of the UI already follow system language changes automatically.

It’s far not perfect yet, as there’s more things that need to update in this case than just translated strings. Date/time formatting for example, as discussed in QTBUG-129727. But overall this is already much better than what I had expected and assumed to be feasible with realistic effort.

Dark mode support

As reported previously we have working support for dark mode since 24.08.1, thanks to Julius’ work on icon recoloring.

So far this required minimal changes to applications to enable it though. That has also been fixed, dark mode support is now automatically enabled for all applications using the Breeze style.

Outlook

There’s still more to do regarding Android platform integration. I’d say the two probably most pressing issues are the following:

• On some devices the font size is unusably small, caused by the display scale factor being wrong. Based on some investigation during Akademy the current working theory is that this is a race condition in Qt’s code reading that information. I have no device/setup that reproduces this problem unfortunately.
• Selecting files in the platform file dialog that are located on a cloud storage such as Nextcloud silently fails. That is, to the application selecting such a file looks as if the user had canceled the dialog. Here we know exactly why this happens (it’s explicit code in Qt doing this, for valid reasons), the challenge is rather to find a proper solution.

If you are interested in Android integration for KDE applications, feel free to join us in the #kde-android Matrix channel!

And I’d say it’s a pretty good release! As with all large sets of changes, there are a couple of regressions we’re tracking, particularly around the areas of external monitor brightness and multi-screen performance. They are being actively investigated. Other than those, so far all the issues have been fairly minor, requiring people to jump through various hoops to experience them. We’re still working on fixing them, of course! I’ll be writing up another post soon on these issues, discussing how they snuck into the final release, and what we can learn from the experience.

But in the meantime, here’s the Plasma team’s work from this week:

Notable UI Improvements

Removed some unintentional extra padding around everything on System Settings’ Touchpad page (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.2.1. Link):

Notable Bug Fixes

Fixed a regression in Plasma that caused pop-ups of widgets on a Plasma panel to get positioned partially off screen, but only if their parent panel was very small and positioned against on the left or top screen edge (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 6.2.1. Link)

Fixed a regression in the new “control all screens’ brightness” feature that caused the brightness slider for external screens to get duplicated with certain screens (Jakob Petsovits, Plasma 6.2.1. Link)

Fixed two minor window focus regressions caused by an intentional change in KWin’s multi-monitor focus behavior (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.2.1. Link 1 and link 2)

Fixed a porting regression that caused the virtual desktop switcher OSD to not appear when it should have (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.2.1. Link)

Fixed a porting regression that caused the first entry in the clipboard to temporarily not be removable after editing it (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.2.1. Link)

Fixed a porting regression that caused auto-mounted encrypted disks to mount normally as expected, but not show up correctly in Plasma’s Disks & Devices widget (Bohdan Onofriichuk, Plasma 6.2.1. Link)

Fixed three Plasma crashes affecting the System Tray and Disks & Devices widget under various circumstances (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.2.1. Link 1, link 2, and link 3)

Fixed a case where Plasma could crash in brightness-related code (Jakob Petsovits, Plasma 6.2.1. Link)

Fixed a bug in our KPipeWire library (which lives in Plasma) that caused screen recordings in Spectacle using the default VP9 video codec to be cut off at the end on slower systems (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 6.2.1. Link)

Fixed a bug that caused configuration pages of System Monitor widgets to not be scrollable when needed (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 6.2.1. Link)

Fixed an unusual bug that caused the system to fail to log out within the first 50 seconds after logging in, but only when the splash screen was disabled (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.2.1. Link 1 and link 2)

System Settings’ Wallpapers page now has a visible title as expected (Méven Car, Plasma 6.2.1. Link)

The Baloo file indexer service no longer tries to pointlessly index the content of .obj 3D model files (Someone going by the pseudonym “Archaeopteryx Lithographica”, Frameworks 6.8. Link)

Other bug information of note:

• 2 Very high priority Plasma bug (same as last week). Current list of bugs
• 35 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 30 last week). Current list of bugs
• 107 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed over the last week. Full list of bugs

Performance & Technical

Further optimized Discover’s launch speed (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 6.3.0 Link)

How You Can Help

If you’re a developer, work on fixing Plasma 6.2 regressions!

If you’re an enthusiastic user, don’t sweat them and upgrade anyway. It’s a fantastic release.

Otherwise, visit https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover additional 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! Or consider donating instead! That helps too.

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-41.

Why I use KDE

Tags: tech, kde, foss, ux

Looks like we properly live by the “simple by default, powerful when needed” tagline. Now there are also challenges, this article gives a nice balanced view.

https://www.osnews.com/story/140538/why-i-use-kde/

It’s Not Easy Being Green: On the Energy Efficiency of Programming Languages

Tags: tech, programming, performance, energy

Nice paper which debunks the choice of the language as an important factor for energy efficiency. The previous papers had a too simple model, this one puts forth a more complete causal model. There are many factors at play regarding energy efficiency, the programming language itself is not really one of them.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.05460

Google’s new phones can’t stop phoning home

Tags: tech, google, android, surveillance

It’s really time to get as many people as possible out of those toxic ecosystems…

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/08/water-thats-not-wet/#pixelated

It’s Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word - The Atlantic

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, business, scam

Indeed, we should stop listening to such people who are basically pushing fantasies in order to raise more money.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/10/sam-altman-mythmaking/680152/

The Static Site Paradox

Tags: tech, web, self-hosting, complexity

Excellent point, we made the web too complex for regular users. This is actually an issue in term of access and democracy for people to write content there.

https://kristoff.it/blog/static-site-paradox/

HTML for People

Tags: tech, web, html, self-hosting

There is hope! Nice intro for regular people who want to get into publishing a web site. Good way to bring some democracy back to the web.

https://htmlforpeople.com/

A modest critique of Htmx

Tags: tech, web, frontend, htmx

I don’t think I would side with the conclusion. It’s a worthwhile article to get a better idea of the pain points around htmx.

https://chrisdone.com/posts/htmx-critique/

My Wayland Your Wayland Our Wayland

Tags: tech, linux, wayland, foss, governance

Yes, the governance of Open Source projects can be tricky. This is part of the job though, and properly embraced we all go further. An example from the Wayland space.

https://www.supergoodcode.com/My-Wayland-Your-Wayland-Our-Wayland/

Modern PATH environment variable

Tags: tech, unix, system

Indeed, we should likely revisit what we put in our PATH environment variable. Some of it is old cruft which is now unnecessary.

https://blog.izissise.net/posts/env-path/

Iterating through matched characters in modern C++: views::filter and coroutine

Tags: tech, c++, coroutine, performance

Several ways to deal with the task, which are the performance implications? Clearly coroutines aren’t the best tool for the job here.

https://lemire.me/blog/2024/10/06/iterating-through-matched-characters-in-modern-c-viewsfilter-and-coroutine/

Approaches to concurrent programming

Tags: tech, multithreading

This is a neat broad introduction about the problems you will encounter when multiple threads are involved and how to approach them.

https://underlap.org/approaches-to-concurrent-programming

Why You Shouldn’t Forget to Optimize the Data Layout

Tags: tech, cpu, performance, memory

Data layout is essential for performance reasons. It is too often overlooked. If you want real speed you need to help the memory subsystem.

https://cedardb.com/blog/optimizing_data_layouts/

Building Real-Time Global Illumination

Tags: tech, gpu, graphics, shader

Another good tutorial about global illumination. Make sure to read part 2 as well.

https://jason.today/gi

Transforming colors with matrices

Tags: tech, colors, shader

Neat little introduction on color manipulation using matrices. Mentions the things to pay attention to.

https://lisyarus.github.io/blog/posts/transforming-colors-with-matrices.html

The Data Visualisation Catalogue

Tags: tech, data-visualization

Nice catalogue of ideas for data visualisation tasks.

https://datavizcatalogue.com/

This Post Is Not About Python

Tags: tech, tech-lead, engineering, decision-making

Nice post, and indeed it’s not about Python if you read until the end. It shows that it’s important to be able to make informed choices and not just pick your tech stack based on knee-jerk reactions.

https://jerf.org/iri/post/2024/not_about_python/

Put business logic in the application, not the database

Tags: tech, databases, design, performance

I’m not sure I’m sold on this one. Interesting food for thought but I’ll have to mull it over for a while I think. I’m concerned about the performance implications of querying like this.

https://www.infoworld.com/article/2269523/put-business-logic-in-the-application-not-the-database.html

Understanding and effectively mitigating code review anxiety

Tags: tech, codereview, psychology, cognition, anxiety, research

Still very early days on this topic, clearly more studies are required. Still this one is interesting and indicates are clear link between code review anxiety and code review avoidance. If you’re often procrastinating or rubber stamping code reviews, a workshop to reduce biases and showing you can manage your anxiety could improve things greatly.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10664-024-10550-9

From software to reality?

Tags: tech, science

The latest Nobel prizes indeed say something about the presence of computer scientists in other fields. Do we risk to delve too much on theoretical model? For sure using computers helps a lot, we have to be careful about not loosing empirical validation in the process.

https://lemire.me/blog/2024/10/09/from-software-to-reality/

Bye for now!

Friday, 11 October 2024

KDE today announces the release of KDE Frameworks 6.7.0.

KDE Frameworks are 72 addon libraries to Qt which provide a wide variety of commonly needed functionality in mature, peer reviewed and well tested libraries with friendly licensing terms. For an introduction see the KDE Frameworks release announcement.

This release is part of a series of planned monthly releases making improvements available to developers in a quick and predictable manner.

New in this version Breeze Icons

• Delete 32px colorful folder action icon symlink. Commit. Fixes bug #478493
• Add new knotes-symbolic.svg icon (22/32/48). Commit. Fixes bug #398901
• Format system-suspend-inhibited, system-suspend-uninhibited. Commit.
• Redesign system-suspend-inhibited, system-suspend-uninhibited. Commit.
• Fix recoloring in applications-multimedia-symbolic and applications-engineering-symbolic. Commit. Fixes bug #492879
• Add show-background icon. Commit. See bug #472863

Extra CMake Modules

• Merge output targets from multiple qt6_target_qml_sources() calls. Commit.
• Don't install QML files on Android. Commit.
• Propagate OUTPUT_TARGETS of qt6_target_qml_sources to the caller. Commit.
• Port Qt doc generation to qhelpgenerator. Commit.
• Correctly forward the OUTPUT_TARGETS argument of qt6_add_qml_module(). Commit.
• Set install destination for object files. Commit.
• Upstream FindGLIB2.cmake changes from Qt. Commit.
• KDEClangFormat: Ignore source files being in _install folder. Commit.
• Reenable individual targets for clang-format to enable better status reporting an parallelization. Commit.

KArchive

• K7zip: prevent crash when archive has no modification times for files. Commit.

KAuth

• Silence false positive clazy checks. Commit.

KCMUtils

• Drop obsolete includes and HAVE_X11. Commit.
• Always show title and caption in tooltip if truncated. Commit.

KColorScheme

• Follow system color scheme on Linux. Commit.
• Fix build against a static Qt. Commit.

KConfig

• Make unit tests work with a static Qt build. Commit.

KConfigWidgets

• General/widgetStyle -> KDE/widgetStyle. Commit.

KCoreAddons

• Make unit tests work with a static Qt build. Commit.
• Kcoreaddonsplugin: Link against Qt6::Network. Commit.
• Restore KProcess on Android. Commit.
• Don't build kprocesstest for Android/iOS. Commit.
• Fix build on ios. Commit.

KDBusAddons

• Kdbusservice: Don't unregister service name slightly before exit. Commit. Fixes bug #492300

KDeclarative

• Qpixmapitem: prevent a crash when there are no window yet. Commit.

KDocTools

• Provide option to enable relocatable docbook files on non WIN32 platforms. Commit.

KGuiAddons

• KCountryFlagEmoji: Improve fitting to the icon's bounding box. Commit.
• KCountryFlagEmoji: Fix emoji representation for non-country codes. Commit.
• KCountryFlagEmoji: Add test and demo cases for non-coutry codes. Commit.
• Fix window insets foreground coloring on older Android versions. Commit.
• Fix build with Qt < 6.7. Commit.
• Fix color luma computation for Android window insets. Commit.
• WaylandClipboard: fix QMimeData::urls() not working. Commit.
• Update version for window insets API to match reality. Commit.
• Add QML bindings for KWindowInsetsControllert. Commit.
• Add KWindowInsetsController. Commit.
• WaylandClipboard: make sure format list doesn't have duplicate items. Commit.

KHolidays

• Holiday_si_sl: added missing Slovenian commemoration day. Commit.

KI18n

• Make KTranscript work in static builds. Commit.
• Make QML API unit test work with static Qt builds. Commit.

KImageformats

• Fix endianness bug in PCX reader on big endian architectures. Commit.
• Fixed read of BGR32 and RGB555 formats. Commit.
• FIxed comparison of unsigned expression. Commit.
• Raw: Getting the image size does not need unpacking. Commit.

KIO

• [OpenFileManagerWindowJob] Fix crash when falling back to KRunStrategy. Commit. Fixes bug #486494
• Previewjob: Use .cache as temp folder, delete temp file after use. Commit. Fixes bug #494096. See bug #494061
• KFileItemActions: Try reading X-KDE-Show-In-Submenu as bool instead of string. Commit.
• KFilePlacesView: have setUrl() handle trailing slashes in place URLs. Commit.
• KFilePlacesItem: Use Solid to find home mount point. Commit.
• Fileitem,file_unix: simplify types for stat. Commit.
• Remove one level of three nesting in kdevtemplate. Commit.
• Knewfilemenutest: cleanup. Commit.
• Knewfilemenutest: test files and folders in ~/Templates. Commit.
• ConnectionBackenp: fix passing errorString. Commit.
• Knewfilemenu: Make ~/Templates work by simply placing files and folders there. Commit. Fixes bug #191632
• KFilePlacesItem: Cache groupType. Commit.
• Previewjob: avoid calling mkdir for path with two slashs. Commit.

Kirigami

• Add since info for new API. Commit.
• Re-enable cachegen on Android. Commit.
• Create CMake config file only once all build parameters are known. Commit.
• Fix unit tests when using a static build. Commit.
• PlatformTheme: fix crash when item is being destroyed. Commit.
• OverlaySheet: make default title vertically center aligned. Commit. Fixes bug #489357
• Fix clang-format version imcompatibilities and avoid turning formatting of. Commit.
• Dialog: Take header width into account, small fix for footerToolbar width. Commit.
• Workaround on incorrect palette update. Commit. Fixes bug #493654
• Platform: Check if weak pointer is expired in PlatformThemeChangeTracker ctor. Commit. Fixes bug #493652
• Dialog: Use footer buttons width if its wider than content. Commit.
• Fix sidebar text color in systemsettings. Commit.
• Use disabled text colors also for inherit-ing Theme instances. Commit. Fixes bug #433256
• Autotests/tst_theme: Add a test that verifies only one signal emission happens. Commit.
• Autotests/tst_theme: Remove waiting for events. Commit.
• Autotests/tst_theme: Explicitly mark root test objects as not inheriting. Commit.
• Add PlatformThemeChangeTracker to BasicTheme::sync(). Commit.
• Platform: Replace PlatformTheme::queueChildUpdate with ChangeTracker::Data flag. Commit.
• Platform: Don't use queued signals for batching change signals in PlatformTheme. Commit.
• Fix NavigationTabBar sizing on mobile. Commit.
• ContextualHelpButton: Clip to avoid text overflow. Commit.
• ContextualHelpButton: Fix flickering when the popup covers the button. Commit. Fixes bug #489688
• ColumnView currently allows having a QObject item inside its children list. Commit.
• ToolBarLayout: Add support for actions that are separators. Commit.

KNewStuff

• Don't emit twice slotEntryChanged. Commit. See bug #492557
• Qtquick: make sort/filter buttons like Discover/kcms. Commit.

KNotifications

• Fix Android notification permission check. Commit.
• Ensure notification permission request callback is run on the right thread. Commit.

KNotifyConfig

• Port to Qt Multimedia. Commit.
• Knotifyeventlist: Set the config paths in the right order. Commit.

KPackage

• Don't double emit emitResult(). Commit. Fixes bug #492557

KRunner

• Add querying property to RunnerManager. Commit.
• Convert to newer REUSE.toml format. Commit.

KStatusNotifieritem

• Document flatpak manifest requirements. Commit.

KSVG

• Fix typo in docs. Commit.

KTextEditor

• Port away from deprecated KPluralHandlingSpinBox. Commit.
• Fix unexpected space indentation in Go var group. Commit. Fixes bug #487054
• Read dir kateconfig on view creation. Commit. Fixes bug #489600
• Fix pressing on } inserts two lines instead of one. Commit. Fixes bug #479717
• Dont remove trailing spaces in markdown by default. Commit. Fixes bug #451648
• Multicursors: Avoid indenting the sameline twice. Commit.
• Blockmode: repair indent when the cursor is in the first column. Commit.
• Multicursor: Fix indent with multiple cursors. Commit.
• With latest syntax definition, more tests pass for ruby. Commit.
• Use more views. Commit.
• Avoid double signal emission. Commit.
• Less deprecated calls, works locally. Commit.
• Store multiline ranges spanning multiple blocks in TextBuffer. Commit.
• Remove MovingRange caching in TextBlock. Commit.
• Add hint the file might got moved. Commit. Fixes bug #476071
• Dont create selection highlights with multiple selections. Commit.
• Optimize killLine for multiple cursors. Commit.
• Completion: Allow async population of documentation. Commit.
• More const to avoid wrong use of these members. Commit.
• Ensure modify the renderer that is used for printing. Commit. Fixes bug #465526. Fixes bug #488605. Fixes bug #487081. Fixes bug #483550
• Fix text insertion with multiple cursors at same position. Commit. Fixes bug #492869
• Add command names for "Remove Spaces" and "Keep Extra Spaces". Commit.
• Minimap now follows the theme also for search matches. Commit.
• Run clang-format. Commit.
• Fix merging of selections in opposite directions. Commit. See bug #492869
• Fix secondary cursor at boundary of selection doesn't get removed. Commit. See bug #492869
• Fix warnings. Commit.

KTextWidgets

• Use static regex for reusable objects. Commit.
• Remove unused Q_D macro. Commit.

KUserFeedback

• Build master ECM as part of the Flatpak build. Commit.

KWidgetsAddons

• Fix crash with older Qt. Commit. Fixes bug #493060
• Fix build against a static Qt. Commit.
• KDateComboBox: emit dateEntered() on FocusOut. Commit.

Network Manager Qt

• Correctly read manually-specified ipv6 addresses from Networkmanager. Commit. Fixes bug #476008. Fixes bug #453453
• Simplify loops and avoid creating iterator on temporary. Commit.
• Use static regex for reusable objects. Commit.

Purpose

• [imgur] Restrict to actually supported MIME types. Commit.
• Add extraJsonTranslationPaths.txt file for purpose specific translations. Commit.
• Ensure KPlugin object contains no unstandardized keys. Commit.

QQC2 Desktop Style

• Kquickstyleitem: Don't crash if colors changed and style option is null. Commit.
• Kirigamiintegration: Track changes to PlatformTheme where needed. Commit.
• TextFieldContextMenu: Open menu by keyPressed at TextField.cursorRectangle position. Commit.

Solid

• Fstab: add missing signal override. Commit.
• Fstab: Emit accessibilityChanged only when actually changed. Commit.
• Get rid of implicit QString and QChar conversions. Commit.
• Get rid of implicit QByteArray to const char* conversions. Commit.
• [Fstab] Minor cleanups (new style connect, extraneous include). Commit.
• [Fstab] Remove mntent wrapper macros. Commit.
• [Fstab] Remove remnants of Solaris support. Commit.

Sonnet

• Fail if none of the plugins can be build. Commit.

Syndication

• Search for private link dependencies in static builds. Commit.

Syntax Highlighting

• Upload the uncompressed files. Commit.
• Odin: add missing items, fix attribute, add directive. Commit.
• Swift: fix detection of end of protocol method declaration. Commit. Fixes bug #493459
• Indexer: treats 1-character StringDetect as a DetectChar for unreachable rules and the merge suggestion. Commit.
• Indexer: check that WordDetect does not contain spaces at the beginning and end of text. Commit.
• Simplify installed xml syntax files to speed up reading. Commit.
• Indexer: replace some QString with QStringView and QLatin1Char with char16_t literal. Commit.
• Indexer: fix default value for char with LineContinuation. Commit.
• Orgmode.xml: Fix orgmode syntax highlighting not ending properly. Commit.
• Jira, Markdown, Org Mode: use rhtml syntax with erb language. Commit.
• Haml: complete the syntax and fix the highlighting of Ruby line following the change in ruby.xml. Commit.
• Ruby: fix %W, dot member, some parenthesis ; add ?c, escape char, etc. Commit. Fixes bug #488014
• Gleam: Minor modifications to syntax and example file. Commit.
• Remove truncase from Common Lisp. Commit.

We have just switched on the upgrade for KDE neon to rebase on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

We do this every two years and the 22.04 LTS base was getting increasingly crusty with old Pipewire causing problems and packages like Krita not compiling at all.

Follow the Noble Upgrade instructions or just click the notification that should appear soon.

The Kubuntu Team is happy to announce that Kubuntu 24.10 has been released, featuring the new and beautiful KDE Plasma 6.1 simple by default, powerful when needed.

Codenamed “Oracular Oriole”, Kubuntu 24.10 continues our tradition of giving you Friendly Computing by integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution.

Under the hood, there have been updates to many core packages, including a new 6.11 based kernel, KDE Frameworks 5.116 and 6.6.0, KDE Plasma 6.1 and many updated KDE gear applications.

Kubuntu 24.10 with Plasma 6.1

Kubuntu has seen many updates for other applications, both in our default install, and installable from the Ubuntu archive.

Applications for core day-to-day usage are included and updated, such as Firefox, and LibreOffice.

For a list of other application updates, and known bugs be sure to read our release notes.

Wayland as default Plasma session.

The Plasma wayland session is now the default option in sddm (display manager login screen). An X11 session can be selected instead if desired. The last used session type will be remembered, so you do not have to switch type on each login.

Download Kubuntu 24.10, or learn how to upgrade from 24.04 LTS.

Note: For upgrades from 24.04, there may a delay of a few hours to days between the official release announcements and the Ubuntu Release Team enabling upgrades.

We’re very happy to announce the latest release of Qt for Python 6.8. With every new release, we try to bring great things with Qt's new features and new trending ideas. For your convenience, you can check out what's new in Qt for Python 6.8 and what’s improved, along with the entire change log.   

Kirigami Addons is out. This releases contains mostly code cleanup and minor improvements. There is netherless a few relevant changes. Thanks to everyone who contributed some code.

New KAppTemplate’s template

A new KAppTemplate is available as a good starting point for application that manage multimedia libraries. It is based on shared design of Peruse, Arianna and the WIP Calligra Launcher.

Hopefully it helps people who want to develop game launchers and other type of specialized multimedia applications.

More templates are planned (e.g. for chat applications), so stay tunned!

FormCard

FormCard is the part of Kirigami Addons that received the most changes in this release. First of all, FormCard now use more consistent spacing and padding, which slighly less horizontal padding. Descriptions for radio and checkbox delegates are also put underneath the delegate’s main text and checkbox, in an effort to make FormCard a bit more compact.

Before After

Additionally FormComboBoxDelegate now lets you display an inline status similar to that is available in other FormCard’s delegates.

Finally FormCard.AboutKDE was renamed to FormCard.AboutKDEPage. This improve the naming consistency with other page compoenents. A compatibility wrapper on top of AboutKDEPage named AboutKDE is still available to not break any existing applications.

Deprecations

The Banner component is now deprecated. Kirigami.InlineMessage now has a position parameter which can be set to Header or Footer. Additionally with KDE Frameworks 6.8 Kirigami.InlineMessage will look exactly the same as Banner! So there is no more reasons for this component to exists in Kirigami Addons.

Other

Kirigami Addons supports static builds with a recent enough version of extra-cmake-modules.

Packager Section

You can find the package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with my GPG key.

Over 180 individual programs plus dozens of programmer libraries and feature plugins are released simultaneously as part of KDE Gear.

Today they all get new bugfix source releases with updated translations, including:

• dolphin: Ignore trailing slashes when comparing place URLs (Commit)
• kate: Fix session restore of tabs/views of untitled documents (Commit, fixes bug #464703, bug #462112 and bug #462523)
• konsole: Fix a crash when sending OSC 4 (RGB) color outside the 256 range (Commit, fixes bug #494205)

Distro and app store packagers should update their application packages.

• 24.08 release notes for information on tarballs and known issues.
• Package download wiki page
• 24.08.2 source info page
• 24.08.2 full changelog

I've been fixing cursor problems on and off in the last few months. Here's a recap of what I've done, explanation of some cursor size problems you might encounter, and how new developments like Wayland cursor shape protocol and SVG cursors might improve the situation.

(I'm by no means an expert on cursors, X11 or Wayland, so please correct me if I'm wrong.)

Why don't we have cursors in the same size anymore?

My involvement with cursors started back in the end of 2023, when KDE Plasma 6.0 was about to be released. A major change in 6.0 was enabling Wayland by default. And if you enabled global scaling in Wayland, especially with a fractional scale like 2.5x, cursor sizes would be a mess across various apps (the upper row: Breeze cursors in Plasma 6.0 Beta 1, Wayland, 2.5x global scale, the lower row: Same cursors in Plasma 6.0):

So I dug into the code of my favorite terminal emulator, Kitty, which at the time drew the cursor in a slightly smaller size than it should be (similar to vscode in the above image). I gained some understanding of the problem, and eventually fixed it. Let me explain.

How to draw cursors in the same size in different apps?

In X11, there used to be a standard set of cursors, but nowadays most apps use the XCursor lib to load a (user-specified) cursor theme and draw the cursor themselves. So in order to have cursors in the same theme and size across apps, we need to make sure that:

1. Apps get the same cursor theme and size from the system.
2. Apps draw the cursor in the same way.

The transition to Wayland created difficulties in both points:

1. Get the same cursor theme and size from the system

It used to be simple in X11: we have Xcursor.size and Xcursor.theme in xrdb, also XCURSOR_SIZE and XCURSOR_THEME in environment variables. Setting them to the same value would make sure that all apps get the same cursor theme and size.

But Wayland apps don't use xrdb, and they interpret XCURSOR_SIZE differently: in X11, the size is in physical pixels, but in Wayland it's in logical pixels. E.g., if you have a cursor size 24 and global scale 2x, then in X11, XCURSOR_SIZE should be 48, but in Wayland it should be 24.

The Wayland way is necessary. Imagine you have two monitors with different DPI, e.g. they are both 24" but monitor A is 1920x1080, while monitor B is 3840x2160. You set scale=1 for A and scale=2 for B, so UI elements would be the same size on both monitors. Then you would also want the cursor to be of the same size on both monitors, which requires it to have 2x more physical pixels on B than on A, but it would be the same logical pixels.

So Plasma 6.0 no longer sets the two environment variables, because XCURSOR_SIZE can't be simultaneously correct for both X11 and Wayland apps. But without them and xrdb, Wayland apps no longer have a standard way to get the cursor theme and size. Instead, different frameworks / toolkits have their own ways. In Plasma, KDE / Qt apps get them from the Qt platform integration plugin provided by Plasma, GTK4 apps from ~/.config/gtk-4.0/settings.ini (also set by Plasma), Flatpak GTK apps from the GTK-specific configs in XDG Settings Portal.

The last one is particularly weird, as you need to install xdg-desktop-portal-gtk in order fix Flatpak apps in Plasma, which surprised many. It might seem like a hack, but it's not. Plasma officially recommends installing xdg-desktop-portal-gtk, and this was suggested by GNOME developers.

But what for 3rd-party Wayland apps besides GTK and Qt? The best hope is to read settings in either the GTK or the Qt way, piggy-backing the two major toolkits, assuming that the DE would at least take care of the two.

(IMHO either Wayland or the XDG Settings Portal should provide a standard way for apps to get the cursor theme and size.)

That was part of the problem in Kitty. It used to read settings from the GTK portal, but only under a GNOME session. I changed it to always try to read from the portal, even if under Plasma. But that's not the end of the story...

2. Draw the cursor in the same way

It's practically a non-issue in X11, as the user usually sets a size that the cursor theme provides, and the app just draws the cursor images as-is. But if you do set a cursor size not available in the theme (you can't do that in the cursor theme settings UI, but you can manually set XCURSOR_SIZE), you'll open a can of worms: various toolkits / apps deal with it differently:

1. Some just use the closest size available (Electron and Kitty at the time), so it can be a bit smaller.
2. Some use the XCursor default size 24, so it's a lot smaller.
3. Some scale the cursor to the desired size, and the scaling algorithm might be different, resulting in pixelated or blurry cursors; Also they might scale from either the default size or the closest size available, resulting in very blurry (GTK) or slightly blurry (Qt) cursors.

The situation becomes worse with Wayland, as the user now specifies the size in logical pixels, then apps need to multiply it by the global scale to get the size in physical pixels, and try to load a cursor in that size. (If the app load the cursor in the logical size, then either the app or the compositor needs to scale it, resulting in a blurry / pixelated cursor.) With fractional scaling, it's even more likely that the required physical size is not available in the theme (which typically has only 2~5 sizes), and you see the result in the picture above.

One way to fix it (and why I didn't do)

It can be fixed by moving the "when we can't load cursors in the size we need, load a different size and scale it" logic from apps / toolkits to the XCursor lib. When the app requests cursors in a size, instead of returning the closest size available, the lib could scale the image to the requested size. So apps would always get the cursor in the size they ask for, and their own different scaling algorithms won't get a chance to run.

Either the default behavior can be changed, or it can be hidden behind a new option. But I didn't do that, because I felt at the time that it would be difficult to either convince XCursor lib maintainers to make a (potentially breaking) change to the default behavior, or to go around convincing all apps / toolkits to use a new option.

My fix (or shall we say workaround)

Then it came to me that although I can't fix all these toolkits / apps, they seem to all work the same way if the required physical size is available in the theme - then they just draw the cursor as-is. So I added a lot of sizes to the Breeze theme. It only has size 24, 36 and 48 at the time, but I added physical sizes corresponding to a logical size 24 and all global scales that Plasma allows, from 0.5x to 3x, So it's 12, 18, 24 ... all the way to 72.

It was easy. The source code of the Breeze theme is SVG (so are most other themes). Then a build script renders it into images using Inkscape, and packages them to XCursor format. The script has a list of the sizes it renders in, so I added a lot more.

And it worked! If you choose Breeze and size 24, then (as in the bottom row in the picture above) various apps draw the cursor in the same size at any global scale available in Plasma.

But this method has its limitations:

1. We can't do that to 3rd-party themes, as we don't have their source SVG.
2. It only works if you choose the default size 24. If you choose a different size, e.g. 36, and a global scale 3x, then the physical size 36x3=108 is not available in the theme, and you see the mess again. But we can't add sizes infinitely, as explained in Vlad's blog, the XCursor format stores cursor images uncompressed, so the binary size grows very fast when adding larger sizes.

Both limitations can be lifted with SVG cursors. But before getting to that, let's talk about the "right" way to fix the cursor size problem:

The "right" fix: Wayland cursor shape protocol

The simple and reliable way to get consistent cursors across apps is to not let apps draw the cursor at all. Instead, they only specify the name of the cursor shape, and the compositor draws the cursor for them. This is how Wayland cursor shape protocol works. Apps no longer need to care about the cursor theme and size (well, they might still need the size, if they want to draw custom cursors in the same size as standard shapes), and since the compositor is the only program drawing the cursor, it's guaranteed to be consistent for all apps using the protocol.

(It's quite interesting that we seem to went a full circle back to the original server-defined cursor font way in X11.)

Support for this protocol leaves a lot to improve, though. Not all compositors support it. On the client side, both Qt and Electron have the support, but GTK doesn't.

There are merge requests for GTK and Mutter, but GNOME devs request some modifications in the Wayland protocol before merging them, and the request seems to be stuck for some months. I hope the recent Wayland "things" could move it out of this seemingly deadlock.

Anyway, with this protocol, only the compositor has to be modified to support a new way to draw cursors. This makes it much easier to change how cursors work. So we come to:

SVG cursors

Immediately after the fix in Breeze, I proposed this idea of shipping the source SVG files of the Breeze cursor theme to the end user, and re-generate the XCursor files whenever the user changes the cursor size or global scale. This way, the theme will always be able to provide the exact size requested by apps. (Similar to the "modify XCursor lib" idea, but in a different way.) It would remove the limitation 2 above (and also limitation 1 if 3rd-party themes ship their source SVGs too).

With SVG cursors support in KWin and Breeze, I plan to implement this idea. It would also allow the user to set arbitrary cursor size, instead of limited to a predefined list.

Problems you might still encounter today Huge cursors in GTK4 apps

It's a new problem in GTK 4.16. If you use the Breeze cursor theme and a large global scale like 2x or 3x, you get huge cursors:

It has not limited to Plasma. Using Breeze in GNOME would result in the same problem. To explain it, let me first introduce the concept of "nominal size" and "image size" in XCursor.

Here is GNOME's default cursor theme, Adwaita:

"Nominal size" is the "cursor size" we are talking about above. It makes the list of sizes you choose from in the cursor theme settings UI. It's also the size you set in XCURSOR_SIZE. "Image size" is the actual size of the cursor image. "Hot spot" is the point in the image where the cursor is pointing at.

Things are a bit different in the Plasma default cursor theme, Breeze:

Unlike Adwaita, the image size is larger than the nominal size. That, combined with a global scale, triggers the bug in GTK4. Explanation of the bug.

XCursor allows the image size to be different from the nominal size. I don't know why it was designed this way, but my guess is so you can crop the empty part of the image. This both reduces file size, and reduces flicking when the cursor changes (with software cursors under X11). But the image size can also be larger than the nominal size, and Breeze (and a lot of other themes) uses this feature.

You can see in the above images that the "arrow" of nominal size 24 in Breeze is actually similar in size to the same nominal size in Adwaita. But the "badge" in Breeze is further apart, so it can't fit into a 24x24 image. That's why Breeze is built this way. In a sense, "nominal size" is similar to how "font size" works, where it resembles the "main part" of a character in the font, but some characters can have "extra parts" that go through the ceiling or floor.

This problem is already fixed in the main branch of GTK 4, but it's not backported to 4.16 yet, probably because the fix uses a Wayland feature that Mutter doesn't support yet. So at the moment, your only option is to use a different cursor theme whose "nominal size" and "image size" are equal.

Smaller cursors in GTK3 apps (most notably, Firefox)

The cursor code in GTK3 is different from GTK4, with its own limitations. You might find the cursor to be smaller than in other apps, and if you run the app in a terminal, you might see warnings like:

cursor image size (64x64) not an integer multiple of scale (3)

GTK3 doesn't support fractional scales in cursors. So if you have cursor size 24 and global scale 2.5x or 3x, it will use a scale 3x and try to load a cursor with a nominal size 24x3=72. And it requires the image size to be an integer multiple of the scale. So if your theme doesn't have a size 72, or it does but the image size is not multiple of 3, GTK3 fallbacks to a smaller unscaled cursor.

End words

OK, this is a long post. Hope I can bring you more cursor goodies in Plasma 6.3 and beyond.

After almost a year, we’re very pleased to announce a new release of KPhotoAlbum, the Linux/KDE photo management software!

There are two new features/changes:

• The “time ago”/birthday/age calculation has been reworked. Timespans should now be displayed in a nicer (more natural) way. Also, the age of people born on February 29 is now calculated correctly.
• The ‘--db’ command line argument now rejects any file name that is not either an existing directory or an index.xml file within an existing directory (cf. Bug #418647).

Apart from that, quite a number of bugs have been fixed (cf. the ChangeLog for more info): #477529, #477530, #477531, #477532, #478944, #479483, #481181, #483266, #444744 and #493849. And on top some bugs that weren’t reported as a bug in the first place :-)

One additional change that should be mostly interesting for the distributors is: The key used for signing the release has been updated. All PGP keys used to sign KDE software releases can be found in the sysadmin/release-keyring repo. My currently used key that I used to sign the tarball can also be found there, cf. tleupold@key2.asc.

… and what about Qt 6?!

Fear not! Of course, there will be a Qt6/KF6 release of KPhotoAlbum. We currently have a working Qt6/KF6 branch, so most of the porting is already done. Last thing that’s missing is a Qt6/KF6 release of Marble, which we use to display maps for geographic coordinates in photos (preferrably stored there using KGeoTag ;-). It seems like there will be such a release towards the end of the year. We will get KPhotoAlbum ready for Qt6/KF6 shortly afterwards. Stay tuned!

According to git log, the following individuals contributed commits since the last release:

• Boudhayan Bhattacharya
• Oliver Kellogg
• Tobias Leupold
• Randall Rude
• Johannes Zarl-Zierl

Have a lot of fun with KPhotoAlbum 5.13.0 :-)

— Tobias

I had the privilege of attending LAS this year. True to my role as a designer, I brought my camera and volunteered during the event to be a photographer. The venue and university of Monterrey were beautiful.

The main hall is a wall-to-wall glass building placed in the middle of campus. The pictures we got from there were so nice!

The day began with a review of OnlyOffice features and capabilities. We then reviewed the progress that Mexico has seen in advancing Open Source initiatives.

The sessions showcased a myriad of topics. They focused on how open source applications can make a difference in many areas. Other sessions focused on design guidelines, application-building logic, publication and efforts to promote Linux in education.

The work done by the organization was great. Internet access at the venue was strong, and allowed the team onsite to broadcast the sessions online. We were in a university setting. A team managed the broadcasting and sound for the venue and online audiences.

The city was beautiful and filled with great food.

During the conference I contributed with images that I will make available to the organizers soon.

Would love to come back!

Plasma 6 has come into its own over the last two releases. The wrinkles that always come with a major migration have been ironed out, and it’s time to start delivering on the promises of the new Qt 6 and Wayland technology platforms that Plasma is built on top of.

One of the outstanding issues has been to make Plasma a more artist-friendly environment by providing full support for the hardware that creative people need to get their work done.

So let’s start there…

What’s New For Digital Artists

Plasma 6.2 includes a smorgasbord of new features for users of drawing tablets. Open System Settings and look for Drawing Tablet to see various tools for configuring drawing tablets.

New in Plasma 6.2: a tablet calibration wizard and test mode; a feature to define the area of the screen that your tablet covers (the whole screen or a section); and the option to re-bind pen buttons to different kinds of mouse clicks.

All this is built into Plasma; there’s no need to install new drivers or software from device manufacturers.

And if your tablet is not yet supported, “We care about your Input” is a community-wide project that aims to provide support for unusual input devices. Let us know about your device so we can add it to the list!

Color Management

Related to the above — and to ensure consistent colors across monitors — we’ve implemented more complete support for the Wayland color management protocol, and enabled it by default.

We have also improved brightness handling for HDR and ICC profiles, as well as HDR performance. This will improve your experience when designing graphics, playing games, and watching videos.

A new tone mapping feature built into Plasma’s KWin compositor will help improve the look of images with a brightness or set of colors greater than what the screen can display, thus reducing the “blown out” look such images can otherwise exhibit.

Before After Power Management

Managing how much energy your system consumes and when are not only important for preserving its resources for when you need them, but also for using it in an environmentally responsible way.

You can now override misbehaving applications that block the system from going to sleep or locking the screen (and thus prevent saving power), and you can also adjust the brightness of each connected monitor machine separately.

As for the Power and Battery widget, it not only shows how much power is remaining, but also allows you to adjust power profiles for different scenarios. New in Plasma 6.2: hold down the Meta (Windows) key and press B to cycle through the different options one at a time. A little badge of a leaf will show up on the battery icon to indicate when the system is in power save mode, and a rocket for performance mode.

Discover and System Updating

Another thing we put you in complete control of is your software.

Plasma’s built-in app store and software management tool, Discover, now supports PostmarketOS packages for your mobile devices, helps you write better reviews of apps, and presents apps’ license information more accurately.

You can also now choose to shut down the system after applying an offline system update, in addition to the existing option to restart afterwards.

Accessibility

Since we made improving accessibility a community-wide project, we have increased the ways in which Plasma is easy to use for everyone.

In Plasma 6.2, we overhauled System Settings’ Accessibility page and added colorblindness filters. We also added support for the full “sticky keys” feature on Wayland.

UI/Visual Design

And of course, improving the look and feel of Plasma is always a high priority from one release to the next.

In Plasma 6.2, we tweaked accent colors and the System Tray, reworked the Widget Explorer, and unified the look of dialogs and pop-ups. Finally, we improved the Welcome Center, sound effects, and actions.

Many of these changes are subtle, but will provide a smoother and more enjoyable experience.

And All This Too…

• The Weather Report widget now shows “feels like” temperatures, adds more information for BBC weather forecasts, and more.
• You can turn off window borders in the Pager widget.
• The Minimize All widget now minimizes only windows on the current virtual desktop and activity.
• You can now give custom names to your custom shortcuts.
• There's now an integrated cropping tool when setting a new user avatar.
• We’ve added a once-a-year donation request notification — please consider using it to show your love for Plasma by donating!

…and there’s much more going on as well: numerous stability and performance improvements, smaller visual changes, more Wayland protocols, and more! Check out the complete changelog for Plasma 6.2.

I just installed a new FreeBSD desktop machine. For this one, I wanted to have KDE Plasma6, since that’s already running on my Linux laptop and gaming machine – and it’s time for me to dogfood on FreeBSD. Here’s some notes.

Base Install

FreeBSD has a Live ISO and a graphical installer. For licensing reasons, it isn’t Calamares (which is GPLv3). So I use the text-based installer. I downloaded the FreeBSD 14.1 memstick image. From boot to reboot into an installed system takes less than five minutes, but then you have an old-school UNIX system: a login: prompt.

From there:

• log in as root
• switch the package repository to latest
• pkg install pkg, to get the package manager
• pkg install git cmake, because you’re a developer
• pkg install plasma6-plasma, which is an 800MiB download
• pkg install sddm, because you’ll want a login-manager
• pkg install drm-kmod, because you need a graphics driver

I have an AMD RX550 video card (cheapest I could get this year) in the machine, so then to set that graphics driver:

• sysrc kld_list=amdgpu

Make sure DBus will run as a system service:

• sysrc dbus_enable=yes

Create a regular user and add them to the video group.

Then reboot.

KDE Plasma6 X11 by Hand

At this point, the system has KDE Plasma6 installed, but it won’t come up (the login manager isn’t enabled, for instance) so we need some convenience things from The Before Times to do a little testing. (Installed as “automatic” so they are easy to remove later).

• pkg install -A xinit xterm

As a normal user, create ~/.xinitrc and put this in it:

#! /bin/sh exec /usr/local/bin/startplasma-x11

Then make it executable and start X11 (like it’s 1994):

• chmod 755 .xinitrc
• startx

Voila. KDE Plasma6. Note that, in this state, there are no applications besides xterm and KInfoCenter (and a handful of other KDE Plasma internal things). There’s no configuration applied to the system. The window manager does not honor alt-tab or alt-F4. Use ctrl-Q to quit KInfoCenter.

But X11 is soooo passé. Let’s move on to the Future!

Any Wayland by Hand

First, let’s install some convenience things that will help in debugging.

• pkg install -A river foot

Like I wrote 3 years ago about river, it just works. You’ll need the example configuration file so that super-shift-E exits the compositor and window manager. super-shift-enter gets you a terminal window.

I started river as a regular user with

• ck-launch-session river

KDE Plasma6 Wayland by Hand

Yeah, right.

So there was a brief time in 2021 that it worked. Since then, not so much – certainly not for me, not from the regular ports tree. So this post is a start of “ok, let’s give it another shot”.

I know that Wayland can work on FreeBSD with hardware rendering – that’s why that river section is there.

Here is a very short script that can launch KDE Plasma6 with software rendering. The resulting desktop experience is rather slow.

#! /bin/sh export KWIN_COMPOSE=Q exec /usr/local/bin/ck-launch-session \ /usr/local/lib/libexec/plasma-dbus-run-session-if-needed \ /usr/local/bin/startplasma-wayland

So the TODO part of this post is: figure out why opening dri/card0 fails when kwin_wayland is not using the software renderer.

KDE Applications5 and KDE Plasma6

Yeah, right.

Most (maybe even all) of the KDE Applications – for instance, konsole, or kmail – are still KDE Frameworks 5 based. Unfortunately, there are KDE Frameworks that have file-collisions between versions 5 and 6. As an example, package kf6-baloo and kf5-baloo both want to install a libbalooplugin.so. I mentioned the co-installability problem a half-year ago, but we haven’t fixed it since.

Edit 2024-10-08: this is entirely a packaging problem, where we could install the things to separate prefixes. That hasn’t happened, because of a lack of person-time to actually do it (and test it).

On this front I think we’re at a chicken-and-egg place: we would like to switch wholesale to newer applications releases and just drop the existing KDE Applications 5, but are so bogged down with Other Stuff that it’s not happening. On the Linux side of things KDE Applications 6 are doing fine.

All that said, there’s the KDE-FreeBSD ports development fork with a branch where newer KDE-FreeBSD packages are prepared. That already has a KF6-based KMail. So the TODO part of this section is: I need to double-check what’s holding that up.

Takeaways

• for a nice KDE Plasma6 experience on a BSD, why not try OpenBSD?
• KDE-FreeBSD has a nasty amount of hardware-testing to do.
• The future is here, just not in the ports tree.

At work-work the system uses, for historical reasons, a lot of SystemV shared memory. The SysV shared memory API has C functions like shmat(2). There is also a different shared memory API, POSIX shared memory, which has functions like shm_open(3). For reasons, on some work-work systems we’re constrained to Python 3.7 and no additional libraries. I wanted to mess with the shared memory on such a system, from Python for convenience, so I wrote some very simple wrappers. Here’s a recap.

As usual, corrections are welcome, or tips (by email). I write these notes as much for future me as anyone else.

Here is the core of the story (I have also added this to my personal GitHub repository, which I won’t link because it’s not future-proof storage).

import ctypes lib = ctypes.cdll.LoadLibrary(None) shmget = lib.shmget shmget.argtypes = [ctypes.c_int, ctypes.c_size_t, ctypes.c_int] shmget.restype = ctypes.c_int shmget.__doc__ = """See shmget(2)"""

This works on FreeBSD, where SysV shmem is in the core libraries. On Linux, I think you need to call LoadLibrary("librt"). Anyway, wrapping the library-loading to be safe isn’t the point here.

Once ctypes has loaded a library, you can extract function pointers from the library. By adding annotations, you can give the Python function the same prototype as the C manpage for shmget.

Note that the manpage points to some special flag values. For those, you need to dig into the C headers. On FreeBSD, the special value IPC_PRIVATE is equal to 0, so that’s easy enough to write in Python. The following snippet is then sufficient to create a shared memory segment (one that is 1024 bytes large and world-readable) and print out its ID. The returned value is -1 on error.

print(shmget(0, 1024, 0o644))

The ID can be cross-checked with command ipcs -m (it’s installed by default on FreeBSD and in my KDE Neon machine, so seems like a common tool). To get rid of the segment, ipcrm -m <id> does the trick.

Similar wrappers are there for shmat, shmdt and shmctl – but those wrangle void * in C, and how does that work with Python?

The void pointer

CTypes has a c_void_p type, which can be created from None (a null pointer, seems reasonable) and returned from C functions. It can cast to-and-fro (in classic C style, the thing in memory is what I say is in memory) to other pointer types, and without a typed-pointer type at the machine level that just works (but don’t ask me how).

So the C function int shmctl(int shmid, int cmd, struct shmid_ds *buf) gets these types in Python: shmctl.argtypes = [ctypes.c_int, ctypes.c_int, ctypes.c_void_p], which presents the struct-pointer as a void-pointer.

The function void *shmat(int shmid, const void *addr, int flag) works similarly. When calling it, unless you have specific address needs, parameter addr can be nullptr (er .. ok, this is C, so NULL and in Python None). The pointer it returns is where the shared memory is attached.

Actually doing something with a void * takes work in C, it also takes work in Python with ctypes. You can cast to an int * for instance, with iaddr = ctypes.cast(addr, ctypes.POINTER(ctypes.c_int)) (a cast to char * is also readily available).

A special case is when you need to provide a void * to some C function. Where do they come from? In C you would just declare a (character) buffer of some size and pass it in. In Python, ctypes.create_string_buffer() does the job. Give it a size and get a memory-managed buffer.

Wrangling shared-memory segment destruction

There’s shmget() to create a segment, shmat() to attach (map it into memory of a process) to it, shmdt() to detach from a segment, but destroying a shared-memory segment does not have a simple C call to do it. There is shmctl() which does special-control-actions on a shared-memory segement, and destruction is one of them.

I ended up writing this little wrapper.

def shmrm(shmid : int) -> int: return shmctl(shmid, 0, None) Sending messages

As an experiment, I wrote a program that can create, read, write and destroy a shared-memory segment. By writing (from one invocation) and then reading (from another invocation) I can “send” messages from the past! Or to the future! It is nearly as convenient as writing the messages to a file.

Here’s the write function. It attaches the shared-memory segment and then writes a Pascal-style string to that memory (Pascal-style in the sense of “starts with a length, followed by the actual data, no NUL-termination”). For bloggy purposes I have removed error-handling.

def write(shmid : int, v : str): addr = shmat(shmid, ctypes.c_void_p(None), 0) iaddr = ctypes.cast(addr, ctypes.POINTER(ctypes.c_int)) caddr = ctypes.cast(addr, ctypes.POINTER(ctypes.c_char)) ustring = v.encode("utf-8") iaddr[0] = len(ustring) for i in range(len(ustring)): caddr[4+i] = ustring[i] return shmdt(addr)

Here, shmat() returns a void * and I cast that to two typed pointers to the segment. I haven’t figured out how to do pointer arithmetic, so on the assumption there are 32-bit integers, the integer goes first and then the message goes starting at byte (char) number 4.

Takeaways

CTypes is really cool! It makes wrangling C APIs in Python .. well, let’s call it “acceptable”.

Starting with Python 3.8, everything I’ve written above is unnecessary because there is a good shared-memory abstraction in the standard Python library, but for my work-work purposes in a very restricted environment, this particular tool has turned out to be really useful.

This weekend "The KDE Alberts"[1] attended Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit 2024 in Sunnyvale, California.

The Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit is an annual unconference that every project participating in Google Summer of Code 2024 is invited to attend. This year it was the 20th year celebration of the program!

I was too late to take a picture of the full cake!

We attended many sessions ranging from how to try to avoid falling into the "xz problem" to collecting donations or shaping the governance of open source projects.

 

We met lots of people that knew what KDE was and were happy to congratulate us on the job done and also a few that did not know KDE and were happy to learn about what we do.

 

We also did a quick lightning talk about the GSOC projects KDE mentored this year and led two sessions: one centered around the problems some open source application developers are having publishing to the Google Play Store and another session about Desktop Linux together with our Gnome friends.

 

All in all a very productive unconference. We encourage KDE mentors to take the opportunity to attend the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit next year, it's a great experience! 

 

[1] me and Albert Vaca, people were moderately amused that both of us had the same name, contribute to the same community and are from the same city.

Marble gets an update, KDE Connect gets a speed boost, and Kate gets all fluttery

Welcome to a new issue of “This Week in KDE Apps”! In case you missed it, we announced this series a few weeks ago, and our goal is to cover as much as possible of what's happening in the world of KDE apps and supplement Nate's This Week in Plasma published yesterday.

This week we had new releases of Tellico and Krita. We are also covering news regarding KDE Connect, the link between all your devices; Kate, the KDE advanced text editor; Itinerary, the travel assistant that helps you plan all your trips; Marble, KDE's map application; and more.

Let's get started!

Dolphin Manage your files

Dolphin now uses ripgrep-all or ripgrep for content search when Baloo indexing is disabled. Detailed information (Jin Liu, 24.12.0. Link)

The checksum and permissions tab in the property dialog used by Dolphin and other KIO-enabled applications is now more consitent with the other tabs. (Thomas Duckworth, Frameworks 6.8. Link)

Kaidan User-friendly and modern chat app for every device

Kaidan, KDE's XMPP instant messaging app, improves support for group chats. (Melvin Keskin, Link)

Kate Advanced Text Editor

Kate adds out of the box support for debugging Flutter projects. (Waqar Ahmed, 24.12.0. Link 1, link 2)

The option to 'Reopen latest closed documents' has been added to the tab context menu. (Waqar Ahmed, 24.12.0. Link)

Kdenlive Video editor

KDE e.V. and Kdenlive have posted two job offers for contractors to work on Kdenlive. Will this be your opportunity to contribute to KDE and get paid too?

KDE Connect Seamless connection of your devices

KDE Connect starts up much faster on macOS — startup time has gone from 3s to 100ms! (Albert Vaca Cintora, 24.12.0. Link)

Kleopatra Certificate Manager and Unified Crypto GUI

Kleopatra makes its decryption errors easier to understand when content was encrypted with a certificate you don't have. (Tobias Fella, 24.12.0. Link)

Krita Digital Painting, Creative Freedom

Krita 5.2.6 is out and fixes a critical issue that popped up in last week's release. More information.

Krusader File Manager

Krusader has been migrated to Qt6 and KF6. (Alex Bikadorov, 3.0.0. Link)

KStars Desktop Planetarium

KStars 3.7.3 is out with exciting features for astrophotography buffs. You're going to want to update if you're using multiple cameras with per-camera targeting and scheduling, leader-and-follower jobs, and focus synchronization. Read more here!

Weather View real-time weather forecasts

KWeather removes the "Add current location" button, as it doesn't work anymore since the shutdown of Mozilla's location service. (Devin Lin, 24.08.2. Link)

The setup wizard has been overhauled. (Devin Lin, 24.08.2. Link)

KDE Itinerary Digital travel assistant

A new bi-monthly blog post about Itinerary and the infrastructure behind it is out: August/September in KDE Itinerary

Itinerary now extracts membership ids in German-language Eurostar (Thalys) tickets (Luca Weiss, 24.08.2. Link)

It can extract seat reservation data from SBB QR codes (Volker Krause, 24.08.2. Link)

If you are arranging accommodations, Itinerary can handle German language variants of NH Hotels booking confirmations (Volker Krause, 24.08.2. Link)

LabPlot Interactive Data Visualization and Analysis

The Color Maps Browser now has multiple view modes. Including one that shows detailed information about the used colors in the color map and that also allows to copy those values. (Alexander Semke, Link)

Added a new visualization type: Run Chart, (Alexander Semke, Link)

NeoChat Chat with your friends on matrix

NeoChat has a fix for a frequent and random crash on Android caused by receiving a notification. (James Graham, 24.12.0. Link)

The hover actions for the messages are now more reliable. (Carl Schwan, 24.12.0. Link)

Marble Virtual Globe

Marble Behaim got a new logo, similar to the Marble Maps logo. (Mathis Brüchert, 24.12.0. Link)

Marble Maps routing functionality was ported to Qt6 and redesigned. (Carl Schwan, 24.12.0. Link)

Spectacle Screenshot Capture Utility

Spectacle fixed a crash when saving while the system's timezone is misconfigured (Noah Davis, 24.08.2. Link)

Tellico Collection Manager

Tellico, the KDE app that helps you manage all your collecions, is out with version 4.0.1. This version includes fixes for Qt6. More information.

Tokodon Browse the Fediverse

Tokodon fetches public servers and displays them in a list for registration. The list is fetched from joinmastodon.org and more filtering options will be added later. (Joshua Goins, 24.12.0. Link)

Instead of wrapping all the tags for a post, they are now made scrollable. (Joshua Goins, 24.12.0. Link)

Apps on Windows

KDE Apps on windows now have better looking tooltips and menus without black corners. (Carl Schwan, Breeze 6.2.1. Link)

Third Party Applications

To get your application mentioned here. Please contact us on invent or in Matrix.

Kraft Quotes and invoices for small business

Kraft is a desktop app making it easy to create offers and invoices quickly and beautifully in small companies. Version 1.2.2 was just released and contains some small bug fixes. This is the last release before Kraft 2.0. More information.

…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 KDE's Planet, where you can find more news from other KDE 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 help KDE continue bringing Free Software to the world.

To get your application mentioned here. Please let us know in invent or in Matrix.

SVG cursor themes is a new feature in Plasma 6.2, which we are really excited about. In this blog post, I would like to provide more background behind what motivated us to add support for them, what they are, and how to build them.

(Classic) cursor theme format

A cursor theme is a collection of images defining the contents of various cursor shapes and additional metadata (for example, the human readable name of the theme, whether the cursor theme inherits/extends another cursor theme, etc). On disk, it looks as follows

The cursors/ directory contains a list of Xcursor files and symbolic links to represent cursor shape aliases, e.g. the arrow being an alias for default. The XCursor format has been in use for a very long time now and it has a pretty simple structure

The layout of an XCursor file

An XCursor file consists of a header that includes a magic number to determine whether particular file is actually an XCursor file, the size of the header in bytes, the file version, and the number of ToC entries. Every ToC entry provides the information about the corresponding chunk, for example the chunk type and where the chunk can be found in the file. Lastly, a chunk contains some useful data. A chunk may contain image data or text data, etc.

For example, here’s the image data that can be found in the “default” cursor shape file in the Adwaita cursor theme

As you can see, the Adwaita cursor theme provides the following sizes: 24, 32, 48, 64, and 96.

The index.theme files looks as follows

[Icon Theme] Inherits=breeze_cursors Name=Cool Cursor Comment=That is a cool cursor theme

Cursor themes can be found in $DATADIR/icons directories. For example, /usr/share/icons or ~/.local/share/icons.

X11 vs Wayland cursors

Xcursor cursors are used both on X11 and Wayland, but the way how the cursor size is interpreted is different on the two platforms. X11 assumes that the cursor size is specified in the device pixels, while Wayland assumes that it’s in the logical pixels. Logical pixels have the same visual size across various devices, while physical pixels are specific to particular device. For example, 24 logical pixels on an output with a scale factor of 2 corresponds to 48 physical pixels.

Cursor sizes in Xcursor files are specified in the device pixels.

Another very important detail is that the XCURSOR_SIZE environment variable is treated differently by X11 and Wayland native applications. For example, if XCURSOR_SIZE is set to 24 and the output scale is 2, an X11 application would load a cursor with the size 24, but a Wayland application would effectively load a cursor with the size 48 (24 * 2) because it would see that the output is scaled so the provided cursor needs to be scaled accordingly as well.

“XCURSOR_SIZE=24 dolphin -platform xcb” (left) vs “XCURSOR_SIZE=24 dolphin -platform wayland” (right). Note that “Apply scaling themselves” has been selected in the display settings in Plasma Wayland Limitations of Xcursor

The most painful thing about Xcursor is its lack of the proper HiDPI support. As it was said in the previous chapter, the cursor size in Xcursor files is specified in the device pixels. On X, it’s not a problem because all geometries are specified in the device pixels. It also means that if you change the scaling factor on X, you need to change the cursor size manually so the cursor is not too small. On Wayland, the cursor size is specified in the logical pixels so the compositor and the clients have to scale the cursor size in order to match the output scale. For example, if the configured cursor size is 24 and the window is on an output with a scale factor of 2, the application needs to load an Xcursor cursor with the size 48. If the cursor theme provides cursors with such a size, perfect! But what if it doesn’t? At the moment, every compositor and client applies its own policies. Some find the cursor with the closest size and use that, some find the cursor with the closest size and then scale it to match the requested size at the cost of adding some blurriness, and so on. It’s a mess. Because neither compositors nor clients can agree how to handle such a case, you could easily observe the cursor changing its size when moving between windows owned by different applications or when moving the cursor between the window and its decoration, e.g.

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

It’s worth noting though that this issue can be worked around by using the cursor-shape protocol because with it, the application can delegate the compositor the task of loading and displaying cursors. But the bottom line is that the Xcursor format is unsuitable for the HiDPI model that we have present on Wayland.

Another issue with the Xcursor format is that the image data is stored in an uncompressed format. It is okay if you need to provide cursors with small sizes, for example up to 72, but there are cases when you need to display a cursor at a very large size. For example, one such a case is the shake cursor accessibility feature in the Plasma Wayland session.

With the shake cursor feature enabled, the cursor will be inflated when it’s shaken. In order to operate, it needs to load the default cursor shape with a size around 250. If cursor themes provided images for such sizes, their package sizes would easily blow up beyond the 100MiB mark. That’s not good. And as a workaround, in Plasma 6.1, the shake cursor uses its own high resolution images of the Breeze cursor themes.

A script element has been removed to ensure Planet works properly. Please find it in the original post. Shake cursor without any workarounds in 6.1 A script element has been removed to ensure Planet works properly. Please find it in the original post. Shake cursor with workarounds in 6.1

The XCursor format was perfectly suitable for the use cases that existed back in the late 90s and early 2000s, but things have changed over the years and its current raster nature can’t keep up with the use cases that we have now (2024). We’ve got fractional scaling, we’ve got accent colors, we’ve got features that enlarge the cursor, and so on.

SVG cursor format

First of all, let’s build a list of requirements that the svg cursor format must satisfy:

• obviously, it must support the ability to define cursor contents using svg files so we can fix HiDPI issues, etc
• easy porting process for existing clients and compositors
• it should be easy to develop and analyze svg cursor themes. Xcursor is a binary file format, which requires a special tool to create Xcursor files, we would like to avoid that with svg cursors
• last and the most important requirement is that there must be some compatibility with the existing cursor theme format. We must not be required to write a new system settings module to handle the new cursor format, and the apps that don’t support svg cursors should easily fallback to the Xcursor format.

Here’s how a cursor theme providing svg cursors would look like

index.theme has the same format both for XCursor and SVG cursors. cursors/ directory contains the XCursor cursors, and cursors_scalable/ contains the SVG cursors.

In cursors_scalable/, every cursor shape must have its own directory, or if it’s an alias, then it must be a symlink. Every cursor shape directory must contain the cursor image and a metadata.json file providing the information about the cursor.

For a static cursor, the metadata.json file looks as follows

[    {        "filename": "default.svg",        "hotspot_x": 4,        "hotspot_y": 4,        "nominal_size": 24    } ]

The filename property specifies the filename of the svg file. The hotspot_x and the hotspot_y properties specify the coordinates of the hot spot. The hot spot in the cursor determines the point where interaction with other elements on the screen occurs, e.g. clicks. The nominal_size property specifies the cursor size that the svg file represents. The nominal size is used to decide how much the svg image and the hotspot coordinates need to be scaled in order to get a cursor with the requested size. Note that the nominal size can’t be determined based on the <svg>‘s width and height attributes because there exist themes such as Breeze whose canvas is bigger than the represented cursor size. As an example, in the Breeze cursor theme, the canvas size is 32x32 even though the represented cursor size is 24 in order to accommodate for additional elements that can be attached to the arrow cursor, e.g. a little circle with a plus sign or a question mark.

For an animated cursor, the metadata.json file looks as follows

[ { "filename": "wait-01.svg", "delay": 30, "hotspot_x": 16, "hotspot_y": 15, "nominal_size": 24 }, { "filename": "wait-02.svg", "delay": 30, "hotspot_x": 16, "hotspot_y": 15, "nominal_size": 24 }, ... { "filename": "wait-42.svg", "delay": 30, "hotspot_x": 16, "hotspot_y": 15, "nominal_size": 24 } ]

The only new thing is the delay property. The delay property indicates the animation delay to the next frame.

A cursor theme that ships SVG cursors is required to have XCursor cursors too. This is needed to provide fallback for legacy applications that are unaware of the cursor-shape-v1 protocol or simply too old applications that are unlikely to be changed anymore. This restriction might be lifted in the future.

It is worth mentioning that SVG supports animations natively. However, that approach was not chosen for cursor animations for two reasons: to allow caching svg render results more easily and require fewer changes in the compositors and the apps to adapt the svg cursor format.

You can find the json schema for metadata.json over here.

Accent colors

Since the cursor contents is specified using the SVG format, it should be possible to re-color the cursor based on the currently configured accent color. As of now, it is not implemented, but, in general, this is doable and perhaps such a feature will be added to Plasma some day.

Standardization

This cursor format is not officially standardized. We are looking forward to making it upstream, but for now, the main focus is on confirming that the new format lives up to our and cursor creator needs.

To cursor theme creators

Breeze and Breeze Light are the only two cursor themes that support SVG cursors at the moment, but we would love to see custom themes adapting them too so users experience fewer issues with fractional scaling or other features in Plasma when using their favorite 3rdparty cursor themes. We would also like to hear feedback from the cursor theme creators regarding whether it’s easy to adapt this cursor format or whether some additional features are needed. You can reach out to us at Matrix in the #kwin room https://webchat.kde.org/#/room/#kwin:kde.org or in the kwin mailing list.

Examples

If you need an example of a cursor theme that supports SVG cursors, please check the Breeze cursor theme.

Closing words

The new SVG cursor format is amazing. Please try it!

Plasma 6.2 will be released in just three days! In the end we did revert the notification changes I mentioned last week, so users of Plasma 6.2 won’t experience any new issues with notifications. The list of verified 6.2 regressions is extremely small, with most being low importance. We will of course eventually get them fixed anyway! But they aren’t release blockers.

Notable New Features

Distros can now customize the set of apps shown on Discover’s homepage in the “Editor’s Choice” section (Jarred Wilson, Plasma 6.3.0. Link)

Notable UI Improvements

We’ve returned to the older style of default audio device naming from Plasma 6.1, plus a few extra heuristics to hopefully make it even better when using PipeWire. And don’t worry, the new feature to rename devices remains present (Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Discover now only shows the total size of available updates once it’s finished checking for them, so the number is always accurate and doesn’t bounce around (Soumyadeep Ghosh, Plasma 6.3.0. Link)

Notable Bug Fixes

Fixed the most common Plasma crash on X11, which was often encountered when waking up a sleeping monitor (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Fixed a common case where KWin could crash when using Overview to search for stuff (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Fixed two a somewhat common seemingly random Plasma crashes (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.2.0. Link 1 and link 2)

Fixed an issue that could, under certain circumstances, cause KWin to freeze when connecting or disconnecting an external monitor to a laptop (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Fixed a bug that could cause System Monitor sensors configured with certain combinations of faces and sensors to become permanently invisible! (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Improved the robustness of Plasma’s startup code, so that it doesn’t fail to launch when the kactivitymanagerd daemon is slow (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Fixed an issue that could cause animations to get stuck on certain screens with the Adaptive Sync feature turned on (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Removed the animations from Plasma’s Pager widget because they were too subtle to notice most of the time, and triggered a Qt bug that wrecks laptop battery life with auto-hidden panels. The Qt bug is under investigation, but at least now you should hit it less often (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Fixed one of the bugs that could cause icon positions on the desktop to get reset after monitors turned off and back on again. This may also fix a very common similar bug where positions get reset when the resolution changes; that’s still being verified. And of course there may be other bugs with positioning as well, but this was one of them and it’s fixed now! Others are under Investigation (Akseli Lahtinen, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Fixed KWin’s “Toggle Raise and Lower” functionality so that it does in fact lower the window again (Jarek Janik, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Fixed a regression that caused the title of any components using Kirigami.OverlaySheet to be vertically mis-positioned (Fushan Wen, Frameworks 6.7. Link)

Changing regional settings for your user is now more reliable in the case where your distro or its installer set the value of all of the LC_* properties at a systemwide level — as apparently happens on Ubuntu (Han Young, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Made sure that pointer acceleration in XWayland games with screen scaling is the same as in native Wayland apps (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.2.1. Link)

Other bug information of note:

• 2 Very high priority Plasma bug (up from 1 last week). Current list of bugs
• 30 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 33 last week). Current list of bugs
• 137 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed over the last week. Full list of bugs

How You Can Help

You know what? Have a rest. It’s not feasible to work all the time; breaks are important too. Everyone’s been working so hard on Plasma 6.2, and I think the results are going to be great. Make sure not to neglect your mental health! Rest when you need it. Were all humans with physical bodies.

Otherwise, visit https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover additional 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! Or consider donating instead! That helps too.