Tuesday, 15 October 2024. Today KDE releases a bugfix update to KDE Plasma 6, versioned 6.2.1.

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

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

• Discover Snap: Don't crash when a null channel is returned. Commit. Fixes bug #492657
• Kcms/wallpaper: fix crash when wallpaper config has invalid values. Commit.
• Spacebar: Fixup SMS sending. Commit.

Sorry my blog updates have been MIA. Let me tell you a story…

As some of you know, 3 months ago I was in a no fault car accident. Thankfully, the only injury was I ended up with a broken arm. ER sends me home in a sling and tells me it was a clean break and it will mend itself in no time. After a week of excruciating pain I went to my follow up doctor appointment, and with my x-rays in hand, the doc tells me it was far from a clean break and needs surgery. So after a week of my shattered bone scraping my nerves and causing pain I have never felt before, I finally go in for surgery! They put in a metal plate with screws to hold the bone in place so it can properly heal. The nerve pain was gone, so I thought I was on the mend. Some time goes by and the swelling still has not subsided, the doctors are not as concerned about this as I am, so I carry on until it becomes really inflamed and developed fever blisters. After no success in reaching the doctors office my husband borrows the neighbors car and rushes me to the ER. Good thing too, I had an infection. So after a 5 day stay in the hospital, they sent us home loaded with antibiotics and trained my husband in wound packing. We did everything right, kept the place immaculate, followed orders with the wound care, took my antibiotics, yet when they ran out there was still no sign of relief, or healing. Went to doctors and they gave me another month supply of antibiotics. Two days after my final dose my arm becomes inflamed again and with extra spectacular levels of pain to go with it. I call the doctor office… They said to come in on my appointment day ( 4 days away ). I asked, “You aren’t concerned with this inflammation?”, to which they replied, “No.”. Ok, maybe I am over reacting and it’s all in my head, I can power through 4 more days. The following morning my husband observed fever blisters and the wound site was clearly not right, so once again off we go to the ER. Well… thankfully we did. I was in Sepsis and could have died… After deliberating with the doctor on the course of action for treatment, the doctor accepted our plea to remove the plate, rather than tighten screws and have me drive 100 miles to hospital everyday for iv antibiotics (Umm I don’t have a car!?) So after another 4 day stay I am released into the world, alive and well. I am happy to report, the swelling is almost gone, the pain is minimal, and I am finally healing nicely. I am still in a sling and I have to be super careful and my arm was not fully knitted. So with that I am bummed to say, no traveling for me, no Ubuntu Summit

I still need help with that car, if it weren’t for our neighbor, this story would have ended much differently.

https://gofund.me/00942f47

Despite my tragic few months for my right arm, my left arm has been quite busy. Thankfully I am a lefty! On to my work progress report.

Kubuntu:

KDE Snaps:

All release service snaps are done! Save a few problematic ones still WIP.. I have released 24.08.2 which you can find here:

https://snapcraft.io/publisher/kde

I completed the qt6 and KDE frameworks 6 content packs for core24

Snapcraft:

I have a PR in for kde-neon-6 extension core24 support.

That’s all for now. Thanks for stopping by!

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

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 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.