Planet KDE
Looking back: What's next? - Akademy 2024
By Nicolas Fella
This year we completed the major milestone of releasing Plasma 6 and KDE Frameworks 6, the culmination of years of work across the community. In this talk we are going to look at how we approached this transition, what went well, what didn't, and what we can learn for the future.
We are also going to explore what might come next in the future of KDE development.
Lint all the things! - Akademy 2024
By Albert Astals Cid and Alexander Lohnau
QML is a great language to write fast User Interfaces but given its runtime nature it makes it a bit fragile to refactors. This lightning talk will try to convince you to enable qmllint in your compilation steps so that QML issues are found on compile time instead of runtime.
JSON files play an important role in KDE's sources: We use them as metadata files for applets, embed them in plugin metadata.
In order to avoid runtime problems or implicit type conversions, a CI job is added to all repos. But this is only a small benefit of the improved validation and schema efforts.
This talk will highlight some benefits and show you, how you may utilize them.
KWin Effects: The Next Generation - Akademy 2024
By David Edmundson
Plasma 6 saw the return of the desktop cube, but the underlying story is so much bigger. KWin gained support for an entire new infrastructure to tightly couple QtQuick with Kwin's own rendering and with Kwin's content available.
In this talk we go through the problems with the current approach, what we created, and look at what this enables creative people (like you!) to do next.
KDE to Make Wines — Using KDE Software on Enterprise Desktops a Return on Experience - Akademy 2024
By Kevin Ottens
If we told you there is a company with hundreds of desktops running KDE Plasma? If we also told you they've been using it for more than 10 years? Finally, what if we told you they're in Australia and making wines? Wouldn't you be curious to know more about them and what they think of our software?
Well, good for us they do exist: they are De Bortoli Wines, an Australian winemaking company.
It turns out they became an enioka Haute Couture customer and we developed an interesting relationship. The work they pushed our way has been interesting and challenging. As such this gave us an interesting insight on how KDE software can be used and the constraint such entreprise desktops can encounter.
We ended up looking at application code like Okular, to frameworks like KIO, or even dug deeper exploring issues close to the kernel. This might give ideas of features to prioritize or tests to carry to cater to such users.
If you're interested in the enterprise desktop use case, or if you like to hear about funny bugs and wine labels, this talk will be for you.
KDE Apps Initiative - Akademy 2024
By Carl Schwan
This talk is about the my new KDE Apps initiative, to try to get people to write more KDE applications. I will describe the current state of the KDE app ecosystem and explain why it is important to get more KDE apps and what we can do to improve the situation.
This will be continuation of this blog post and includes the progress made since then.
KDE's CI and CD infrastructure - Akademy 2024
By Ben Cooksley, Hannah von Reth, Julius Künzel, and Volker Krause
From compiling, automated testing, linting and license verification over producing application packages for various platforms to shipping signed production releases to app stores, KDE's CI/CD system offers many ways to support you in developing software and getting it to your users.
With the migration from Jenkins to Gitlab which was concluded earlier this year, the CI/CD infrastructure not only gained new capabilities but also became more accessible for contributors to set up and customize things. In this talk, we will give an overview of the available features and how to best employ those for your application.
We will cover continuous integration (CI), that is compiling, testing and linting changes as they appear in Git or in merge requests, on all supported platforms as well as continuous delivery (CD), that is producing ready-made runnable/installable application packages in various formats, for testing individual changes or for production releases to app stores.
Finally we'll also look at current developments and future plans.
Web Review, Week 2024-39
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-39.
We have lift-off! Element X, Call and Server Suite are ready!Tags: tech, matrix, ux
Definitely a big announcement for Matrix. Could it be the beginning of going mainstream? I suspect it’ll be now or never. I’m slightly concerned about the desktop support being apparently ignored, the UX there is far from great still.
https://element.io/blog/we-have-lift-off-element-x-call-and-server-suite-are-ready/
Tags: tech, mozilla, privacy, surveillance, gdpr
It was to be expected that complaints against Mozilla could happen in Europe. They’ve been asking for it lately…
https://noyb.eu/en/firefox-tracks-you-privacy-preserving-feature
Tags: tech, data, culture, history, ecology
Excellent piece, we’re a civilisation whose culture is built on shifting sands and… toy plastics. Guess what will survive us?
https://lilysthings.org/blog/no-data-lasts-forever/
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, criticism, law
This is clearly less high profile than the Scarlett Johanssen vs OpenAI one. Still this shows it has the potential to become a widespread (even though shady) practice. This might need some regulation fairly soon.
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/they-stole-my-voice-ai
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, science
This is indeed important to be able to run such models locally. Will still require more optimization but it’s slowly getting there. The reproducibility it brings is especially necessary for science.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02998-y
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, security, safety
People are putting LLM related feature out there too hastily for my taste. At least they should keep in mind the security and safety implications.
https://owasp.org/www-project-top-10-for-large-language-model-applications/
Tags: tech, automotive, security
Could we just stop connecting cars with web access for features we don’t really need? Please?
https://www.wired.com/story/kia-web-vulnerability-vehicle-hack-track/
Tags: tech, c++, security, safety
Lots of good stuff definitely coming. This should definitely help make it more approachable to lots of people.
https://github.com/CppCon/CppCon2024/blob/main/Presentations/Peering_Forward_Cpps_Next_Decade.pdf
Tags: tech, c++, rust, security, safety
Excellent proof of why you don’t want to “rewrite it all in Rust”. It’s important to respect the old code and focus on applying safety practices on the new code. This is also why the upcoming changes to C++ are worth it, it might improve the interoperability factor almost for free.
https://security.googleblog.com/2024/09/eliminating-memory-safety-vulnerabilities-Android.html
Tags: tech, linux, kernel, rust
Despite the drama, Rust is slowly making its way into the kernel.
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/991062/b0df468b40b21f5d/
Tags: tech, linux, system
Wondering what io_uring is for? This is a good explanation.
https://mazzo.li/posts/uring-multiplex.html
Tags: tech, cpu, portability
Nice list of common portability issues one can encounter at the machine architecture level. But don’t be fooled, this doesn’t have implications only for C and C++, those problems leak in higher level languages as well.
https://blogs.gentoo.org/mgorny/2024/09/23/overview-of-cross-architecture-portability-problems/
Tags: tech, python
Interesting problem I didn’t realize PyPI had. Indeed I hope they start looking into reproducibility issue to reduce the bandwidth and space they use.
https://kristoff.it/blog/python-training-wheels/
Tags: tech, python, refactoring
Interesting trick to help with project wide renames for Python codebases.
https://jackevans.bearblog.dev/refactoring-python-with-tree-sitter-jedi/
Tags: tech, tools
What can I say? I love Makefiles as well.
https://switowski.com/blog/i-like-makefiles/
Tags: tech, tools, version-control, git
Ooh! This looks like a really neat improvement. I wonder how reliable this is, I’ll definitely test it.
https://github.com/tummychow/git-absorb
Tags: tech, software, design
Nice short post about cohesion in software design. Also gives clue about what proxy we can use to gauge this cohesion.
https://explaining.software/archive/similar-but-different/
Tags: tech, architecture, microservices, reliability, research
I’m obviously not in love with the complexity this type of architecture brings. That being said, this thesis brings an interesting approach to better detect failure scenarios in such systems.
https://christophermeiklejohn.com/publications/cmeiklej_phd_s3d_2024.pdf
Tags: tech, architecture, organization, conway
This law is unfortunately too little known. Here is a nice and short primer. Be careful though, it’s short but packed with information, might require more reading around the concepts highlighted in this article.
https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/Conway%27s+law
Tags: tech, project-management, quality, metrics
When I read the content of this article I wonder how useful the metrics really were. I mean clearly they helped the team realize which changes to bring… but the practice changes were all somewhat conventional in a way. You go a long way when you focus on quality and create the space for it.
https://medium.com/booking-com-development/dora-metrics-at-work-46c835a86a89
Bye for now!
The Dot is closed. Long live KDE Planet!
As KDE grows, so does the interest in each of its projects. Gathering all KDE news in one place no longer works. The volume of updates coming from the KDE community as a whole has become too large to cover in its entirety on the Dot. With this in mind, we are archiving the Dot, but keeping its content accessible for historical reasons.
The news coming out of the community was curated and edited for the Dot. The current rate of news items being published today would've not only made that impractical, but would have also led to things being unjustly left out, giving only a partial view of what was going on.
But we are not leaving you without your source of KDE news! We have figured out something better: we have worked with KDE webmasters to set up a blogging system for contributors. You can now access Announcements, Akademy, the Association news, and the news from your favorite projects directly, unfiltered, unedited, straight from the source.
Or... If you want to keep up with what is going on in ALL KDE projects and news on a daily (often hourly) basis, use the Planet! Access it on the web or add an RSS feed to your reader. You can also follow KDE news as it happens in our Discuss forums and talk about it live with the rest of the community. You can even follow @planet.kde.org@rss-parrot.net on Mastodon to stay up to date.
If you just want the highlights, check out our social media:
Krita 5.2.5 Released!
Krita 5.2.5 is here, bringing over 50 bugfixes since 5.2.3 (5.2.4 was a Windows-specific hotfix). Major fixes have been done to audio playback, transform mask calculation and more!
In addition to the core team, special thanks to Maciej Jesionowski, Ralek Kolemios, Freya Lupen, Michael Genda, Rasyuqa A. H., Simon Ra and Sam James for a variety of fixes!
Changes since 5.2.3:- Correctly adjust audio playback when animation framerate is changed.
- Fix no layer being activated on opening a document (Bug 490375)
- [mlt] Fix incorrect usage of get_frame API (Bug 489146)
- Fix forbidden cursor blinking when switching tools with shortcuts (Bug 490255)
- Fix conflicts between mouse and touch actions requested concurrently (Bug 489537)
- Only check for the presence of bt2020PQColorSpace on Windows (Bug 490301)
- Run macdeployqt after searching for missing libs (Bug 490181)
- Fix crash when deleting composition
- Fix scaling down image with 1px grid spacing (Bug 490898)
- Fix layer activation issue when opening multiple documents (Bug 490843)
- Make clip-board pasting code a bit more robust (Bug 490636)
- Fix a number of issues with frame generation (Bug 486417)
- A number of changes related to qt6 port changes.
- Fix black canvas appearing when "Limit animation frame size" is active (Bug 486417)
- WebP: fix colorspace export issue when dithering is enabled (Bug 491231)
- WebP: preserve color profile on export if color model is RGB(A)
- Fix layer selection when a layer was removed while view was inactive
- Fix On-Canvas Brush Editor's decimal sliders (Bug 447800, Bug 457744)
- Make sure file layers are updated when image size or resolution changes (Bug 467257, Bug 470110)
- Fix Advanced Export of the image with filter masks or layer styles (Bug 476980)
- Avoid memory leak in the advanced export function
- Fix mipmaps not being regenerated after transformation was finished or cancelled (Bug 480973)
- [Gentoo] Don't use xsimd::default_arch in the pixel scaler code
- KisZug: Fix ODR violation for map_*
- Fix a crash in Filter Brush when changing the filter type (Bug 478419)
- PSD: Don't test reference layer for homogenous check (Bug 492236)
- Fix an assert that should have been a safe assert (Bug 491665)
- Set minimum freetype version to 2.11 (Bug 489377)
- Set Krita Default on restoring defaults (Bug 488478)
- Fix loading translated news (Bug 489477)
- Make sure that older files with simple transform masks load fine & Fix infinite loop with combination of clone + transform-mask-on-source (Bug 492320)
- Fix more cycling updates in clone/transform-masks combinations (Bug 443766)
- Fix incorrect threaded image access in multiple clone layers (Bug 449964)
- TIFF: Ignore resolution if set to 0 (Bug 473090)
- Specific Color Selector: Update labels fox HSX (Bug 475551)
- Specific Color Selector: Fix RGB sliders changing length (Bug 453649)
- Specific Color Selector: Fix float slider step 1 -> 0.01
- Specific Color Selector: Fix holding down spinbox arrows (Bug 453366)
- Fix clone layers resetting the animation cache (Bug 484353)
- Fix an assert when trying to activate an image snapshot (Bug 492114)
- Fix redo actions to appear when undoing juggler-compressed actions (Bug 491186)
- Update cache when cloning perspective assistants (Bug 493185)
- Fix a warning on undoing flattening a group (Bug 474122)
- Relink clones to the new layer when flattening (Bug 476514)
- Fix onion skins rendering on layers with a transform masks (Bug 457136)
- Fix perspective value for hovering pixel
- Fix Move and Transform tool to work with Pass-Through groups (Bug 457957)
- JPEG XL: Export: implement streaming encoding and progress reporting
- Deselect selection when pasting from the clipboard (Bug 459162)
If you're using the portable zip files, just open the zip file in Explorer and drag the folder somewhere convenient, then double-click on the Krita icon in the folder. This will not impact an installed version of Krita, though it will share your settings and custom resources with your regular installed version of Krita. For reporting crashes, also get the debug symbols folder.
Note: We are no longer making 32-bit Windows builds.
- 64 bits Windows Installer: krita-5.2.5-setup.exe
- Portable 64 bits Windows: krita-5.2.5.zip
- Debug symbols. (Unpack in the Krita installation folder)
- 64 bits Linux: krita-5.2.5-x86_64.appimage
The separate gmic-qt AppImage is no longer needed.
(If, for some reason, Firefox thinks it needs to load this as text: right-click on the link to download.)
MacOSNote: We're not supporting MacOS 10.13 anymore, 10.14 is the minimum supported version.
- MacOS disk image: krita-5.2.5.dmg
We consider Krita on ChromeOS as ready for production. Krita on Android is still beta. Krita is not available for Android phones, only for tablets, because the user interface requires a large screen.
Source code md5sumFor all downloads, visit https://download.kde.org/stable/krita/5.2.5/ and click on "Details" to get the hashes.
KeyThe Linux AppImage and the source .tar.gz and .tar.xz tarballs are signed. You can retrieve the public key here. The signatures are here (filenames ending in .sig).
Plasma Browser Integration 2.0
I’m pleased to announce the immediate availability of Plasma Browser Integration version 2.0 on the Chrome Web Store and Microsoft Edge Add-ons page. This release updates the extension to Manifest Version 3 which will be required by Chrome soon. The major version bump reflects the amount of work it has taken to achieve this port.
Konqi surfing the world wide webPlasma Browser Integration bridges the gap between your browser and the Plasma desktop. It lets you share links, find browser tabs and visited websites in KRunner, monitor download progress in the notification center, and control music and video playback anytime from within Plasma, or even from your phone using KDE Connect!
Despite the version number, there aren’t many user-facing changes. This release comes with the usual translation updates, however. Since this release doesn’t bring any advantage to Firefox users over the previous 1.9.1, it will not be provided on the Mozilla add-ons store.
We have taken the opportunity of reworking the extension manifest to make the “history” permission mandatory. When the browser history KRunner module was originally added, the permission was optional as we feared it might scare users away when presented with a scary permission warning when updating the extension.
(also see the Changelog Page on our Community Wiki)
Dolphin plugins 24.08
Since dolphin-plugins 24.05, you can git clone from dolphin with dolphin-plugins git plugin.
Once the plugins are installed and Git is enabled in the context menu settings, you have this context menu action available:
And this shows this git clone dialog (with my french locale):
You can paste a git repository url and it will fetch its branches. If you happen to have a url in your clipboard or a git clone command line, it will directly extract it as the repository url.
This was spearheaded by Nikolai Krasheninnikov, thanks. I participated a bit as well and reviewed it.
There is still opportunity to improve the git implementation, like having a better commit dialog. That would be a nice and simple new contributor opportunity :)
Skrooge 2.33.0 released
- Correction bug 485366: Differnce in different Report-Selections (2)
- Correction bug 484156: "Monthly Report" Last month grahic failure
- Correction bug 489784: Importing a QIF the account type is changed
- Correction bug 492287: Skrooge 2.32.0 freezes while opening existing .skg files, but import is fast
- Correction bug 493062: Another Problem with QIF and Character "/"
- Correction bug: Fix mimetype of .sta file
- Correction bug: Remove dependency on QCA. So, old password protected files are no more supported.
- Correction bug: Fix translation issue in "Incomes vs Expenditures" dashboard widget
This Week in KDE Apps
Welcome to the second post in our "This Week in KDE Apps" series! If you missed it we just announced this new series last week and our goal is to cover as much as possible of what's happening in the KDE world and complete Nate's This Week in Plasma.
This week we had a new Ruqola, KDE's Rocket.chat client, release and a new GCompris release. There is also news regarding NeoChat, KDE's Matrix chat client; Itinerary, the travel assistant that lets you plan all your trips; the Dolphin file browser; Marble, KDE's map application application; the Okular document view and more.
Let's get started!
DolphinDolphin now ensures that the Trash always correctly shows all trashed files of all connected storage devices, even if they get dynamically connected or disconnected. (Akseli Lahtinen, 24.12.0. Link)
Made the lists of recent files and locations update more reliably. (Méven Car, 24.12.0. Link)
FilelightResolved a bug that caused the graphs to sometimes be mis-rendered until hovered with the pointer. (Harald Sitter, 24.12.0. Link)
ItineraryItinerary can now handle geo:// URLs by opening the "Plan Trip" page with a pre-selected arrival location. This is supported both on Android and Linux. (David Redondo, 24.12.0. Link)
Itinerary now defaults to showing the new two-level trips/timeline view. (Volker Krause, 24.12.0. Link)
Trip groups can now be restored from backups. (Volker Krause, 24.12.0. Link)
KDE PIMFixed a crash when auto-discovery of or connection to Exchange Web Resources has failed (Daniel Vrátil, 24.08.2. Link)
OkularImplemented support for more types of items in comboboxes of PDF forms. (Pratham Gandhi, 24.12.0. Link)
Improved the speed and correctness of printing for the common case of not needing to rasterize the document and not needing to print annotations. (Oliver Sander, Albert Astals Cid, and Nicolas Fella sponsored by TU Dresden, 24.12.0. Link)
Improved the UX of digitally signing a document (Nicolas Fella sponsored by TU Dresden, 24.12.0. Link)
SpectacleImproved visual quality for screenshots taken at non-fractional scale factors. (Noah Davis, 24.08.2. Link)
MarbleMarble was ported to Qt6. (Gilles Caulier & Carl Schwan, 24.12.0. Link)
The Kirigami UI — which was last updated in 2017 — was significantly rewritten and modernized. (Carl Schwan, 24.12.0. Link).
NeoChatThe NeoChat team meet at the Matrix Conference in Berlin which ended up being productive! Learn more at Carl's mastodon post.
Fix two semi-common crashes reported to Sentry. (Tobias Fella & James Graham, 24.08.2. Link 1, Link 2, Link 3)
An F-Droid build is again available in KDE's F-Droid repository. (Tobias Fella & Volker Krause)
Fixed various visual papercuts for NeoChat on Android and Plasma Mobile. (Carl Schwan, 24.08.2 and 24.12.0. Link, Link, Link, Link, ...)
KDE ConnectThe Ping and Find Remote Device plugins were ported to Kotlin. (TPJ Schikhof, Link 1, Link 2)
LabPlotAdd possibility to apply functions on curves directly on the plot. This makes it is possible to, for example, calculate the differences between curves, scale or shift curves, etc. (Martin Marmsoler. Link)
Kate
Improved the visuals of Kate's inline code formatting tooltips. The content of these tooltips can now also be displayed in a special context tool view which can be enabled in the Behavior settings (Karthik Nishanth, 24.12.0. Link)
GCompris
GCompris 4.2 is out with some bug fixes and graphical improvements for multiple activities. More information is available in the release announcement.
RuqolaRuqola 2.3.0 — the KDE Rocket.chat client — is out with an administrator mode, a new welcome page, and better support for the custom markdown syntax of Rocket.chat. More information is available in the release announcement.
OtherEamonn Rea made many Kirigami application remember their size across launches:
...And Everything ElseThis 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 InvolvedThe KDE organization has become important in the world, and your time and contributions have helped achieve that status. As we grow, it’s going to be equally important that your support become sustainable.
We need you for this to happen. 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.
Kubuntu Oracular Oriole (24.10) Beta released
The beta of Kubuntu Oracular Oriole (to become 24.10 in October) has now been released, and is available for download.
This milestone features images for Kubuntu and other Ubuntu flavours.
Pre-releases of Kubuntu Mantic Minotaur are not recommended for:
- Anyone needing a stable system
- Regular users who are not aware of pre-release issues
- Anyone in a production environment with data or workflows that need to be reliable
They are, however, recommended for:
- Regular users who want to help us test by finding, reporting, and/or fixing bugs
- Kubuntu, KDE, and Qt developers
- Other Ubuntu flavour developers
The Beta includes some software updates that are ready for broader testing. However, it is an early set of images, so you should expect some bugs.
We STRONGLY advise testers to read the Kubuntu 24.10 Beta release notes before installing, and in particular the section on ‘Known issues‘.
You can also find more information about the entire 24.10 release (base, kernel, graphics etc) in the main Ubuntu Beta release notes and announcement.
To enable Flatpaks in KDE’s Discover in Kubuntu 24.10, run this command:
sudo apt install flatpak plasma-discover-backend-flatpak
To enable the largest Flatpak repository, run this command:
flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
Log out and log back in (or restart) to re-initialize the XDG_DATA_DIRS variable, otherwise, newly installed Flatpak apps will not run or appear in the startup menu.
This week in Plasma: polishing like mad
The core Plasma team has entered full-on bug-fixing mode until Plasma 6.2.1, and what a week of bug-fixes it was! We’re nailing regressions reported in the beta release as they appear, as well as older bugs we didn’t manage to get to yet. I’m incredibly impressed with the team and their tremendous work this week!
In addition, a few features and UI changes postponed from Plasma 6.2 have started to land in 6.3.
Notable New FeaturesPlasma’s Widget Explorer sidebar now gives you the opportunity to remove all instances of a widget, which can help when you have a stuck widget hidden somewhere (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 6.3.0. Link):
Notable UI ImprovementsWith multiple screens showing wallpaper slideshows, the transition times for each screen’s slideshow are now synced so they happen at the same moment (Sebastian Meyer, Plasma 6.3.0. Link)
Loosened the criteria for mouse button re-binding, so for example you can now swap the “Back” and “Middle Click” buttons (Paul Dann, Plasma 6.3.0. Link)
The Emoji Selector window now remembers its window position (on X11) and size (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.3.0. Link)
For notifications that you can pause, the “Pause” button now becomes a “Resume” button after you press it, instead of being checkable (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.3.0. Link)
In Plasma’s Networks widget, networks you’re not connected to no longer have Configure buttons, because clicking on them didn’t actually do anything useful anyway (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.3.0. Link)
The checkboxes on System Settings’ Bluetooth page have been replaced with switches, because they’re for instant-apply settings (Christoph Wolk, Plasma 6.3.0. Link)
Notable Bug FixesFixed a bug that could cause System Settings to crash when leaving its Wallpaper page (Méven Car, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
Fixed a bug that could cause Plasma to crash under certain circumstances when applying certain global themes (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
Fixed a case where plasma-browser-integration-host (the process that communicates with web browsers that have Plasma Browser Integration installed) could crash when windows were closed (Méven Car, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
Closing a Plasma widget while a tooltip for one of its UI elements is open no longer causes the tooltip to remain visible and awkwardly jump to the panel itself; now the tooltip also disappears as you would expect. This also fixes a related crash (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 6.2.0. Link 1 and link 2)
Fixed a bug that could cause the logout process to get stuck on a black screen on X11 (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
Moving a window to another virtual desktop using a method that does not switch to that desktop no longer leaves no window focused on the current desktop (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
Fixed a bug that caused real-fake-session-restore to not work properly on Wayland (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
The footer on Discover’s updates page no longer sometimes gets visually broken (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
When configuring Plasma’s Digital Clock widget to show seconds and using 24-hour time, the time display no longer gets cut off on narrow vertical panels (Akseli Lahtinen, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
Fixed an issue that could cause Plasma’s edit mode to misbehave in strange ways when there are widgets on the desktop and auto-hide panels (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
Plasma’s “Minimize All Windows” widget no longer sometimes fails to restore them on Wayland; now this always works (Christoph Wolk, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
System Settings once again remembers its window size, position (on X11), and maximization state as expected (Akseli Lahtinen, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
On X11, you can now open the color scheme editor on System Settings’ Colors page more than once (Albert Astals Cid, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
Fixed the “two clicks to rename” feature on the Plasma desktop when using systemwide double-click mode so that it works properly (Christoph Wolk, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
Fixed a bug that caused it to be impossible to change power profiles in the Plasma widget under certain circumstances. There may be other such bugs too BTW; this only fixed one of them (Jakob Petsovits, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
KWin’s global “Move Mouse to Focus” shortcut now does something more sensible on Wayland by moving the pointer to the focused window instead of the top-left corner of the screen (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
The Audio Volume widget can once again display its complex view (rather than a dumb giant icon) when placed in an extremely thick panel (Christoph Wolk, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
Made it possible to translate four labels on System Settings’ Touchpad page which were previously untranslatable and hence always shown in English (Victor Ryzhykh, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
Plasma’s feature to sync your keyboard’s LED color with the system’s accent color (where supported) can now be permanently disabled if you don’t use it or like it (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
When using an auto-hide Plasma panel, it can no longer be accidentally opened invisibly while in KWin’s Overview effect, which would also cause it to briefly get stuck open after leaving Overview (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
Plasma’s Power and Battery widget no longer sometimes mis-labels batteries on systems with removable batteries or multiple batteries (Oliver Beard, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
Fixed a bug that caused some Plasma widgets’ pop-ups to not have their top corners rounded as intended (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
Throughout QtQuick-based KDE software, pressing a keyboard’s “Show Menu” key now opens the menu under the focused item if there is one, rather than always opening it under the cursor (Evgeny Chesnokov, Frameworks 6.7. Link)
Throughout KDE software, the “Upload to Imgur” sharing plugin now only lets you try to upload file types that Imgur actually supports (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 6.7. Link)
The informational tooltips seen all over the place in System Settings that you can access by clicking on a little button with the info symbol on it no longer flickers between visible and invisible if it opens right under the cursor (Ismael Asensio, Frameworks 6.7. Link)
Global shortcuts for activating Kickoff no longer break if you restart Plasma with plasmashell --replace (David Edmundson, Frameworks 6.7. Link). Also, friendly reminder that if you’re using Plasma’s systemd startup integration — which you probably are since it’s on by default for distros that ship systemd — the correct way to restart Plasma is systemctl restart --user plasma-plasmashell.service.
Other bug information of note:
- 1 Very high priority Plasma bug (same as last week). Current list of bugs
- 36 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 33 last week). Current list of bugs
- 181 (!) KDE bugs of all kinds fixed over the last week. Full list of bugs
In Discover, moved the processing of app ratings to another thread so it can’t block the UI thread and make the app feel slow and laggy when the network is slow (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
Launching an app that lacks a .desktop file (e.g. an app packaged as an AppImage) no longer causes a brief screen freeze whose length is proportional to the size of the app’s executable (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
Optimized how KDE software in general finds mountpoints, which can result in a significant speed-up for various apps’ file-based use cases — up to 80% for one of them! (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 6.7. Link)
How You Can HelpPlease test the Plasma 6.2 beta release! We’ve focused a lot on stability for this release and want to make sure we haven’t missed anything big before the final release in about a month. Your bug reports do not go into a black hole; we triage every one! So enthusiastic testing and bug reporting is encouraged. I’ve noticed fewer bug reports for this beta than previous ones, and I don’t believe for an instant that it’s because the release is already perfect! Go out there and file those bug reports!
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.
Upcoming tablet input changes in Plasma Wayland
This blog post provides the heads-up about planned tablet input changes that are brewing for Plasma 6.3. KWin provides support for the tablet input protocol, but things are different on the client side. Some apps support it, some do not. If an application supports the tablet input protocol, great, it will receive tablet input events as is. On the other hand, if the application does not support the tablet input protocol, then KWin will fake tablet input as pointer input. In Plasma 6.3, KWin will stop doing that and I think that we should briefly talk what led us to such a decision and what impact it will have.
Originally, when the tablet input protocol support had landed in KWin, there were still pretty few applications and toolkits that supported it. Emulating tablet input was a fairly reasonable decision, otherwise you would have likely not been able to use tablet in the Plasma Wayland session at all. As time went by, more and more clients gained native support for the tablet protocol. Unfortunately, in meanwhile, we had also started noticing various issues with tablet emulation.
So, what’s the reasonable thing to do about it? Fix the bugs of course. And we did. But there is still a set of issues that cannot be addressed without bringing more complexity in already too complex code that we are struggling to keep afloat. Enough is enough.
Q: What’s new in 6.3?A: Starting since 6.3, tablet input emulation will be deprecated and disabled by default. Note that you can enable it back by setting the KWIN_WAYLAND_EMULATE_TABLET=1 environment variable.
Q: When will tablet input emulation be dropped?A: There is no concrete milestone at the moment.
Q: What does it mean to you? (as a user)A: Hopefully, nothing. The major toolkits such as GTK, Qt, and SDL already provide support for the tablet protocol, so does Xwayland. So, you should be able to use tablet without any issues in X11 applications or Wayland native applications that use the aforementioned toolkits. Chromium/Electron still does not provide native support for tablet input on Wayland, but it’s also worth noting that most of those applications run through Xwayland by default unless the user sets some command-line arguments.
If your favorite application does not work with tablets, please tell it to the developers of that application so they know that there’s demand for such an operation mode.
Q: What should I do? (as a toolkit developer)A: Please add support for tablets! If your toolkit already supports the tablet input protocol, wonderful, no work to do. \o/
Q: Is KWin alone by stopping emulating tablet input?A: No, it is not. Mutter (the Wayland compositor in GNOME Shell) doesn’t emulate tablet input either.
Closing wordsDeprecating tablet emulation is disappointing but the options that we have are not great either. It’s either bring in more complexity in order to fix the existing issues (plus even more code to ensure that the pointer focus is managed correctly when using both pointer and tablet) into an already too complex codebase or just do nothing special about applications that don’t opt in into tablet input. Hopefully, the remaining applications and toolkits that still miss tablet support add it in the near future. If you have more thoughts about it, please reach out to us at our matrix room.
Qt Gradle Plugin 1.0 Released
Qt Gradle Plugin 1.0 (QtGP) build tool has been released. You can include it in your Android builds from Maven Central.
Web Review, Week 2024-38
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-38.
Is Tor still safe to use?Tags: tech, tor, privacy
The quick answer is yes. The longer answer is that more effort is still required to ensure the network has enough diversity of nodes to stay healthy.
https://blog.torproject.org/tor-is-still-safe/
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, business, economics, criticism
This is a very harsh and bleak view on the current generative AI craze. Clearly it survives on some sort of weird faith that things will magically improve. Some decision makers clearly run fully on said faith and lost all kind of realistic view of the situation. They are just very disconnected from the user’s needs.
There’s even a funny quote in there: “Generative AI must seem kind of magical when your entire life is either being in a meeting or reading an email”.
When this bubble bursts, it’s hard to predict what the fallout will be on the tech industry… for sure it won’t be pretty. It also begs the question: what is this industry going to do next? There’s clearly no plan after generative AI.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/subprimeai/
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, politics, ecology
Need to illustrate how much the current AI arm race is an ecological and social problem? Here is a very pathological case. This is what you get when you let the tycoons behind this completely unchecked.
https://www.npr.org/2024/09/11/nx-s1-5088134/elon-musk-ai-xai-supercomputer-memphis-pollution
Tags: tech, oracle, surveillance
People are gasping in horror with Larry Ellison’s latest claims… but really they should realize he’s not dreaming big. All of that is already here in one form or another. Maybe it was time to protest years ago?
https://www.404media.co/larry-ellisons-ai-powered-surveillance-dystopia-is-already-here/
Tags: tech, security, war, battery
Or why we should all be concerned and condemn the latest pager and walkie-talkie attacks. They clearly opened a Pandora’s box, it’d be surprising not to see more of those from various organizations. The funds and efforts required make it affordable enough.
https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/2024/turning-everyday-gadgets-into-bombs-is-a-bad-idea/
Tags: tech, javascript, trademark, law, oracle
This is a good initiative. It makes no sense for Oracle to still cling onto JavaScript has a trademark.
Tags: tech, c++
Interesting proposal for a superset of C++ bringing a safe subset. Could it be a way to improve C++ use for the coming decade?
Tags: tech, asynchronous, multithreading, io
Or why going through an event loop might be more work initially but will make some things easier longer term. Nice way to frame how threads are bringing some opaque state.
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/tech/ThreadsAsyncIOAndCancellation
Tags: tech, linux, kernel, realtime
Definitely good news if you have to maintain a real-time Linux system for industrial use. No more patches to carry over.
Tags: tech, kernel, rust
An interesting endeavor to create you own OS using another language than one of the usual ones.
Tags: tech, databases, sqlite, backup
Wish to use SQLite in production? You better have a good backup strategy. This article explains the main available options.
https://oldmoe.blog/2024/04/30/backup-strategies-for-sqlite-in-production/
Tags: tech, shell, scripting
Shell scripts deserve to be well designed like this indeed.
https://nochlin.com/blog/6-techniques-i-use-to-create-a-great-user-experience-for-shell-scripts
Tags: tech, shader, vulkan, directx
This is good news. DirectX being the other big graphics API if it adopts SPIR-V as interchange format it’ll open the way to more shader reuses.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directx-adopting-spir-v/
Tags: tech, web, frontend, webgpu, 2d, graphics
Looks like an interesting tool to have in the box for 2D effects on the web.
Tags: tech, gui, html, web, frontend, complexity
A good list to design HTML forms. The bar is indeed high and there’s value in simplicity.
https://daverupert.com/2024/09/good-forms/
Tags: tech, web, frontend, css
This is indeed an interesting new CSS selector. Opens the door to doing more in a declarative way and with less Javascript.
https://www.joshwcomeau.com/css/has/
Tags: tech, management, metrics
We should definitely be more wary of metrics indeed. They help for a while, but at some point you’ll necessarily get unfortunately burnt by them. The only fallback is “good judgement”… do what you can with this.
https://buttondown.com/hillelwayne/archive/goodharts-law-in-software-engineering/
Tags: tech, team, management
Nice tricks to help the team jell. I should try this more.
https://brittonbroderick.com/2024/08/18/building-aggressively-helpful-teams/
Bye for now!
Akademy 2024 (in Würzburg!)
This year Akademy was in Würzburg (shock! horror!). I think its not too far fetched to say that we pulled it successfully.
How it came to beDuring last years Akademy in Thessaloniki the idea came up given the high density of KDE people in the area to hold Akademy in Würzburg. On top we had the perfect venue in mind: two lecture halls for talks, BoF rooms and a ample common area for people to hack and socialize. I had such thoughts in the back of my mind for a while but did not share or go through with them.
However what Akademy does is it makes you talk to people and Tobias convinced it me that we should do it and more people even agreed that Akademy in Würzburg would be a good idea! (Of course some of these encouragers this does not mean work organizing Akademy like it would mean for us…) So on the second-to-last day of Akademy I sat down and wrote an email to my former university professor to enquire about the possibility of doing Akademy in the building that we envisioned.
And just like that, after some informal talks during Akademy and a meeting at the University and sending in a proposal after the Call for Hosts later you end up having weekly meetings to talk about and plan the next installment of Akademy.
How it did goThere were some problems but I think all in all this year Akademy went very well. I heard so much praise and positive feedback it felt a bit surreal at first (as did Sunday evening when all the talks were done). The most stressful situation for me happened on Sunday afternoon when I retrieved my charging phone from the team room to discover that the social event could not go ahead as planned and trying to manage that with the rest of the team. I think the resulting evening was very nice and chill and you could feel my relieve. I heard there was even an afterparty afterwards at the bar where we had held the welcome event.
Of course during the event there are always minor issues that need dealing with and looking out for those, dealing with them and trying to make sure everything is running smoothly (and the stress coming these things) meant that I couldn’t (and was not in the right state of mind) to focus much on the talks. When the BoF days started this was bit better but only on Thursday after the day trip I felt in a ‘conference mood’ and was able to focus fully on the BoFs that I was attending and sit down and hack a bit. If you want to learn more about the actual conference many people have blogged about it on the planet or read the report on the Akademy website.
In the end I think it’s fair to say that Akademy was a success. Made possible by KDE e.V. (go donate!), the sponsors, all the people of the Akademy team local and non-local, all the Volunteers on short and on long notice an last but not least all the awesome attendees - there would be no Akademy without any people. Thank you to you all! I am excited to learn about where next years Akademy will be (you can do it as well - it’s not hard and you get an awesome award on top) and looking forward to attending it as ‘normal Attendee’ and meeting everyone again there (if not earlier).
Release GCompris 4.2
Today we are releasing GCompris version 4.2.
It contains bug fixes and graphics improvements on multiple activities.
This version adds translation for Latvian.
It is fully translated in the following languages:
- Arabic
- Bulgarian
- Breton
- Catalan
- Catalan (Valencian)
- Greek
- UK English
- Esperanto
- Spanish
- Basque
- French
- Galician
- Croatian
- Hungarian
- Indonesian
- Italian
- Lithuanian
- Latvian
- Malayalam
- Dutch
- Norwegian Nynorsk
- Polish
- Brazilian Portuguese
- Romanian
- Russian
- Slovenian
- Albanian
- Swedish
- Swahili
- Turkish
- Ukrainian
It is also partially translated in the following languages:
- Azerbaijani (97%)
- Belarusian (87%)
- Czech (97%)
- German (96%)
- Estonian (96%)
- Finnish (95%)
- Hebrew (96%)
- Macedonian (90%)
- Portuguese (96%)
- Slovak (84%)
- Chinese Traditional (96%)
You can find packages of this new version for GNU/Linux, Windows, Android, Raspberry Pi and macOS on the download page. This update will also be available soon in the Android Play store, the F-Droid repository and the Windows store.
Thank you all,
Timothée & Johnny