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 release the first beta of what will become KDE Gear 24.12.0. If your distro provides testing package, please help with testing. Meanwhile, and as part of the 2024 end-of-year fundraiser, you can "Adopt an App" in a symbolic effort to support your favorite KDE app.

This week, we are particularly grateful to George Fakidis, tmpod, Paxriel for showing their support for Okular; Ian Lohmann, Anthony Perrett, Linus Seelinger and Nils Martens for Dolphin, Erik Bernoth for Arianna and Daniel Lloyd-Miller and mdPlusPlus for KDE Connect.

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. So consider donating today!

Getting back to all that's new in the KDE App scene, let's dig in!

Global Changes

KWidgetsAddons, a collection of add-on widgets for QtWidgets, and KUnitConversion now have Python bindings. (Manuel Alcaraz Zambrano, KDE Frameworks 6.9.0. Link 1 and link 2)

The "About" page of Kirigami applications now provides helpful "Copy" button that lets you copy system information, which can be useful when filling a bug report. The same feature was also implemented for QtWidgets-based applications. (Carl Schwan, Kirigami Addons 1.6.0 and KDE Frameworks 6.9. Link for Kirigami apps and link for QtWidget apps)

Additionally Joshua added icons to the "Getting involved", "Donate", and other actions for the Kirigami version. (Joshua Goins, Kirigami Addons 1.6.0. Link)

The "share" context menu of many applications can now copy the data to clipboard. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Frameworks 6.9.0. Link)

Alligator RSS feed reader

Alligator now lets you bookmark your favorite posts. (Soumyadeep Ghosh, 25.04.0. Link)

The selected feed will also now be highlighted correctly and the text of an article can now be selected and copied. (Soumyadeep Ghosh, 24.12.0. Link and link 2)

AudioTube YouTube Music app

Fix parsing certain playlists. (Eren Karakas, 24.12.0. Link)

Clock Keep time and set alarms

Fix a crash of the Clock Daemon when waking up. (Devin Lin, 24.12.0. Link)

digiKam Photo Management Program

Digikam 8.5.0 is out! This releases improves the Face Management system, adds colored labels to identify important items, increases its list of supported languages to 61, and fixes over 160 bugs.

Read the full announcement

Dolphin Manage your files

When Dolphin is started on a location which does not report a storage size (for example "remote", or "bluetooth") the status bar will no longer pointlessly show a empty storage size indicator for a split second before hiding it again. (Felix Ernst, 25.04.0. Link)

Gwenview Image Viewer

We fixed a bug where indexed-color or monochrome-palette images (e.g. from pngquant) would render with garbled colors or black and white noise when zoomed. (Tabby Kitten, 24.12.0. Link)

KDE Itinerary Digital travel assistant

Itinerary's Matrix integration now uses encrypted Matrix rooms by default and Itinerary can now do session verification, which is going to be mandatory in the future. (Volker Krause, 25.04.0. Link 1 and link 2). Volker also fixed various small issues with the Matrix integration (too many to list them all) and backported these fixes for the 24.12.0 release.

Kate Advanced Text Editor

It is now possible to disable the autocompletion popup which appears when you are just typing. (Waqar Ahmed, 25.04.0. BUG 476620)

KCalc Scientific calculator

We redesigned the bit edit feature of KCalc. (Tomasz Bojczuk, 25.04.0. Link)

Kdenlive Video editor

Several Kdenlive effects got the capacity to animate their parameters with keyframes. (Bernd Jordan, Julius Künzel, and Massimo Stella, 25.04.0. Link 1, link 2, link 3 and link 4)

Keysmith Two-factor code generator for Plasma Mobile and Desktop

Keysmith can now import OTPs from andOTP's backup files. (Martin Reboredo, 25.04.0, Link)

Akonadi Background service for KDE PIM apps

Fixed a crash when migrating old iCal entries in Akonadi to be properly tagged. (Daniel Vrátil, 24.12.0. Link)

Fix style of configuration dialogs for Akonadi agents on platforms other than Plasma. (Laurent Montel, 24.12.0. Link)

Port away IMAP resource from KWallet and use QtKeychain instead. This ensures your email's credentials are correctly stored and retrieved on other platforms like Windows. (Carl Schwan, 24.12.0. Link)

KMail A feature-rich email application

Reduce temporary memory allocation by 25% when starting KMail. If you are curious how, the merge requests are super interesting. (Volker Krause, 24.12.0. Link 1, link 2, and link 3)

Kodaskanna A multi-format 1D/2D code scanner

Kodaskanna was ported to Qt6/KF6. (Friedrich W. H. Kossebau. Link)

KRDC Connect with RDP or VNC to another computer

We added various options related to security of the RDP connection and the redirection of smartcards to the remote host. (Roman Katichev, 25.04.0. Link)

Kup Backup scheduler for KDE's Plasma desktop

We rephrased all yes/no buttons in Kup's notifications to use more descriptive names. (Nate Graham, 25.04.0. Link)

NeoChat Chat on Matrix

When receiving stickers with NeoChat, they will be displayed with a more appropriate size (256x256px). Same with custom emoticons, which are now displayed with the same height as the rest of the message. (Joshua Goins, 24.12.0. Link)

We don't show the filename underneath images anymore, and also make the download file dialog fill out the filename by default. (Joshua Goins, 24.12.0. Link 1 and link 2)

We redesigned the list of accounts in the welcome page. Now we show the display name and avatar of your accounts there, which makes it easier to recognize. (Joshua Goins, 24.12.0. Link)

We rearranged the room, file and message context menus. (Joshua Goins, 24.12.0. Link 1 and link 2)

Tokodon Browse the Fediverse

Add "Open in Browser" action to profile pages. (Sean Baggaley, 24.12.0. Link)

Fix various issues on Android, most prominently ensure all icons required by Tokodon are packaged correctly. (Joshua Goins, 24.12.0)

... And Everything Else

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

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

Get Involved

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

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

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

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

Thanks to Tobias Fella and Michael Mischurow for the proofreading.

When working on an application it’s not uncommon to be testing with your own configuration and data, and often more in a power-user setup of that application. While that has advantages it’s easy to lose sight of how the application looks and behaves when first opened in a clean environment.

Testing in a clean environment

Testing the first use experience is technically easy, you just have to delete the entire application state and configuration, or create a new user account. However that’s very cumbersome and thus wont be done regularly.

Fortunately there are more convenient and less invasive shortcuts.

Isolated XDG environment

For many applications we get very far already by separating the XDG directories. That includes configuration files, application data and state as well as cached data.

This means creating four new directories and pointing the following environment variables to one of those:

• XDG_CACHE_HOME (cached data)
• XDG_CONFIG_HOME (configuration files)
• XDG_DATA_HOME (application data)
• XDG_STATE_HOME (application state)

Running an application in such an environment will make it not see any of its existing state and configuration (without destroying that). That is, as long as the entire state and configuration is actually stored in those locations.

A somewhat common exception is credential storage in a platform service like Secret Service or KWallet. Those wont be isolated and depending on the application you might not get a clean first use state or you might be risking damaging the existing state.

Multi-instance Akonadi

Other services used by an applications might need special attention as well. A particularly complex one in this context is Akonadi, as it contains a lot of configuration, state and data.

Fortunately Akonadi has built-in support for running multiple isolated instances for exactly that reason. All we need is setting the AKOANDI_INSTANCE environment variable to a unique name and we get our own separated instance.

Automation

Given the above building blocks we can create a little wrapper script that launches a given application in a clean ephemeral environment:

import os
import subprocess
import sys
import tempfile

xdgHome = tempfile.TemporaryDirectory(prefix='testing-')
for d in ['CACHE', 'CONFIG', 'DATA', 'STATE']:
    os.mkdir(os.path.join(xdgHome.name, d))
    os.environ[f"XDG_{d}_HOME"] = os.path.join(xdgHome.name, d)

os.environ['AKONADI_INSTANCE'] = 'testing'

subprocess.call(sys.argv[1:])

subprocess.call(['akonadictl', '--instance', 'testing', 'stop', '--wait'])
xdgHome.cleanup()

I’ve been using this on Itinerary since some time, and it became additionally useful with the introduction of Appium-based UI tests, as those run in a similarly isolated environment.

If you need something slightly longer living, launching a shell with this wrapper is also possible. In that you then can launch your application multiple times, e.g. for testing whether changes are persisted correctly.

Limitations

There’s one unsolved issue with how this isolates applications though: D-Bus. Applications claiming a unique D-Bus service name wont be able to run alongside a second instance this way, so you will have to shut down an already running instance during testing. In most cases that’s not a big deal, but quite inconvenient when working on one of your main communication apps.

I looked at two possible ways to isolate D-Bus (both relatively easy to integrate in a wrapper script):

• xdg-dbus-proxy: This can limit access to certain host services, but has no way of having a second isolated instance of a service.
• Running a separate D-Bus session bus: Having a second instance of a service is no problem then, but we have no way to access host services anymore (which means also no credential storage service etc).

Neither of those help with the applications I work on, but they might nevertheless be viable in other scenarios.

Overall, the more entangled an application is in platform state, the harder it becomes to achieve this kind of isolation, and the more you’ll need to customize how to do this. It quickly pays off though, an easy and always available way to quickly test things in a clean state has been super helpful.

This week no major new features were merged, so we focused on polishing up what we already have and fixing bugs. That's right, Phoronix readers; we do in fact regularly do this! And let me also remind folks about our ongoing 2024 fundraiser: in it, you can adopt a KDE app to have your name displayed as an official supporter of that app. If you love KDE or its apps, this is a great way to show your appreciation.

We're almost halfway to our year-end goal with 6 weeks to go. That's not bad, but I know we can get there quickly and unlock the stretch goals. So check it out! And after that, check out this stuff too:

Notable UI Improvements

When using a color scheme with Header colors such as Breeze Light and Breeze Dark, the color scheme editor no longer confusingly offers the opportunity to edit the Titlebar colors, which aren't used for such color schemes. Instead, you need to edit the Header colors. (Akseli Lahtinen, 6.2.4. Link)

The System Tray no longer shows tooltips for items in the hidden/expanded view that would be identical to the visible text of the item being hovered with the pointer. (Nate Graham, 6.2.4. Link)

The first time you use Plasma to create a network hotspot, it gets assigned a random password by default, rather than no password. (Albert Astals Cid, 6.3.0. Link)

In KRunner-powered searches, you can now jump between categories using the Page Up/Page Down and Ctrl+Up/Ctrl+Down. (Alexander Lohnau, 6.3.0. Link 1 and link 2)

Implemented support for the "Highlight changed settings" feature for most of System Settings' Drawing Tablet page. (Joshua Goins, 6.3.0. Link)

Discover now shows installation progress more accurately when downloading an app that also requires downloading any new Flatpak runtimes. (Harald Sitter, 6.3.0. Link)

When you have multiple Brightness and Color widgets, adjusting the screen brightness in one of them now mirrors this change to all of them, so they stay in sync. (Jakob Petsovits, 6.2.4. Link)

Added a new symbolic icon for WINE, which allows the category that WINE creates in Kickoff to use a symbolic icon that matches all the others. Also improved the existing colorful icon to better match the upstream branding. (Andy Betts, Frameworks 6.9. Link)

Notable Bug Fixes

Speaking of WINE, we fixed a recent regression that caused WINE windows to display black artifacts around them. (Vlad Zahorodnii, 6.2.4. Link)

The feature to save a customized Plasma System Monitor widget as a new preset once again works. And we added an autotest to make sure it doesn't break again! (Arjen Hiemstra, 6.2.4. Link)

Fixed an extremely strange issue that could cause an actively focused XWayland window to lose the ability to receive keyboard and pointer input when the screen was locked using the Meta+L keyboard shortcut. (Adam Nydahl, 6.2.4. Link)

Fixed a recent regression that caused System Monitor to stop gathering statistics for some ARM-based CPUs. (Hector Martin, 6.2.4. Link)

Discover once again allows you to update update-able add-ons acquired using the "Get New [thing]" windows, which had gotten broken in the initial release of Plasma 6. (Harald Sitter, 6.3.0. Link 1 and link 2)

Fixed a case where the real session restoration feature in the X11 session wouldn't restore everything correctly. (David Edmundson, 6.3.0. Link)

Fixed a visual glitch affecting Kirigami's SwipeListItem component which would give it the wrong background color when using Breeze Dark and other similar color schemes, and could be prominently seen on Discover's Settings page. (Marco Martin, Frameworks 6.9. Link)

Fixed a major Qt regression that caused the lock and login screens to become non-functional under various circumstances. (Olivier De Cannière, Qt 6.8.1, but distros will be back-porting it to their Qt 6.8.0 packages soon, if they haven't already. Link)

Fixed a Qt regression that caused the error dialog on "Get New [Thing]" windows to be visually broken until the window was resized. (David Edmundson, Qt 6.8.1. Link)

Fixed another Qt regression that caused clicking on a virtual desktop to switch to it in KWin's overview effect to stop working after you use the Desktop Cube at least once. (David Edmundson, Qt 6.8.1. Link)

Other bug information of note:

• 2 Very high priority Plasma bugs (down from 4 last week). Current list of bugs
• 36 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 37 last week). Current list of bugs
• 119 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed over the last week. Full list of bugs

Notable in Performance & Technical

We've re-enabled the ability to turn on HDR mode when using version 565.57.1 or later of the NVIDIA driver for NVIDIA GPU users, or version 6.11 or later of the Linux kernel for Intel GPU users. These are the versions of those pieces of software that have fixed the worst bugs affecting HDR on those GPUs. (Xaver Hugl, 6.2.4. Link 1 and link 2)

Fixed a performance issue that affected users of multi-monitor setups while using a VR headset. (Xaver Hugl, 6.2.4. Link)

Reduced the slowness and lag that you could experience when drag-selecting over a hundred items on the desktop. (Akseli Lahtinen, 6.3.0. Link)

Implemented support for the xdg_toplevel_icon Wayland protocol in KWin. (David Edmundson, 6.3.0. Link)

How You Can Help

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear digiKam fans and users,

After five months of active maintenance and many weeks triaging bugs, the digiKam team is proud to present version 8.5.0 of its open source digital photo manager.

Generalities

More than 160 bugs have been fixed and we spent a lot of time contacting users to validate changes in pre-release versions to confirm fixes before deploying the program to production.

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-46.

No GPS required: our app can now locate underground trains

Tags: tech, mobile, sensors, gps, transportation

Now this is definitely a smart trick to estimate position in tunnels.

https://blog.transitapp.com/go-underground/

OpenAI, Google and Anthropic Are Struggling to Build More Advanced AI - Bloomberg

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt

More signs of the generative AI companies hitting a plateau…

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-11-13/openai-google-and-anthropic-are-struggling-to-build-more-advanced-ai

Releasing the largest multilingual open pretraining dataset

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, data, copyright, licensing

It shouldn’t be, but it is a big deal. Having such training corpus openly available is one of the big missing pieces to build models.

https://simonwillison.net/2024/Nov/14/releasing-the-largest-multilingual-open-pretraining-dataset/#atom-blogmarks

Everything I’ve learned so far about running local LLMs

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

This is an interesting and balanced view. Also nice to see that local inference is really getting closer. This is mostly a UI problem now.

https://nullprogram.com/blog/2024/11/10/

When Machine Learning Tells the Wrong Story

Tags: tech, cpu, hardware, security, privacy, research

Fascinating research about side-channel attacks. Learned a lot about them and website fingerprinting here. Also interesting the explanations of how the use of machine learning models can actually get in the way of proper understanding of the side-channel really used by an attack which can prevent developing actually useful counter-measures.

https://jackcook.com/2024/11/09/bigger-fish.html

Abusing Ubuntu 24.04 features for root privilege escalation

Tags: tech, linux, security

Nice chain of attacks. This shows more than one vulnerability needs to be leveraged to lead to root access. This provides valuable lessons.

https://snyk.io/blog/abusing-ubuntu-root-privilege-escalation/

Way too many ways to wait on a child process with a timeout

Tags: tech, unix, linux, system

The title says it all. This is very fragmented and there are several options to fulfill the task. Knowing the tradeoffs can be handy.

https://gaultier.github.io/blog/way_too_many_ways_to_wait_for_a_child_process_with_a_timeout.html

The CVM Algorithm

Tags: tech, databases, algorithm

This is a nice view into how a query planner roughly works and a nice algorithm which can be used internally to properly estimate the number of distinct values in a column.

https://buttondown.com/jaffray/archive/the-cvm-algorithm/

Mergiraf

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

Looks like a nice way to improve handling of merge conflicts. I’ll test this one out.

https://mergiraf.org/

Opposite of Cloud Native is?

Tags: tech, cloud, complexity, vendor-lockin, self-hosting

Definitely a good post. No you don’t have to go all in with cloud providers and signing with your blood. It’s often much more expensive for little gain but much more complexity and vendor lock in.

https://mkennedy.codes/posts/opposite-of-cloud-native-is-stack-native/

Booleans Are a Trap

Tags: tech, design, type-systems

Avoiding boolean parameters in library APIs should be a well known advice by now. Still they should probably be avoided when modeling domain types as well.

https://katafrakt.me/2024/11/09/booleans-are-a-trap/

Complex for Whom?

Tags: tech, design, complexity

Good musing about complexity. Very often we need to move it around, the important question is where should it appear. For sure you don’t want it scattered everywhere.

https://notes.billmill.org/link_blog/2024/11/Complex_forWhom.html

What makes concurrency so hard?

Tags: tech, distributed, complexity

Interesting reasoning about what is hard in systems with concurrency. It’s definitely about the state space of the system and the structure of that space.

https://buttondown.com/hillelwayne/archive/what-makes-concurrency-so-hard/

Algorithms we develop software by

Tags: tech, programming, craftsmanship, engineering, problem-solving

Interesting musing on the heuristics we use when solving problems. There are good advices in there to make progress and become a better developer.

https://grantslatton.com/software-pathfinding

Bye for now!

KDE Gear is our release service for many apps such as mail and calendaring supremo Kontact, geographers dream Marble, social media influencing Kdenlive and dozens of others. KDE needs you to test that your favourite feature has been added and your worst bug has been squished.

You can do this with KDE neon Testing edition, built from the Git branches which get used to make releases from. You can download the ISO and try it on spare hardware or on a virtual machine to test them out.

But maybe you don’t want the faff of installing a distro. Containers give an easier way to test thanks to Distrobox.

Install Distrobox on your normal computer. Make sure Docker or podman are working.

Download the container with

distrobox create -i invent-registry.kde.org/neon/docker-images/plasma:testing-all

Then start it with
distrobox enter all-testing
And voila it will mount the necessary bits to get Wayland connections working and keep your home directory available and you can run say

kontact

and test the beta for the mail app.

All of KDE's Google Summer of Code (GSoC) projects are complete.

GSoC is a program where students or people who are new to Free and Open Source software make programming contributions to an open source project.

This post summarizes the outcomes of KDE project participating in GSoC 2024.

Projects

Arianna

• Port Arianna to Foliate-js:

Ajay Chauhan worked on porting Arianna from epub.js to use Foliate-js. The work will hopefully be merged soon.

Frameworks

Python bindings for KDE Frameworks:

Manuel Alcaraz Zambrano, implemented Python bindings for KWidgetAddons, KUnitConversion, KCoreAddons, KGuiAddons, KI18n, KNotifications, and KXmlGUI. This was done using Shiboken. In addition, Manuel wrote a tutorial on how to generate Python bindings using Shiboken. The complicated set of merge requests are still being reviewed, and Manuel continues to interact with the KDE community.

KDE Connect

Update SSHD library in KDE Connect Android app

The main aim of ShellWen Chen's project was to update Apache Mina SSHD from 0.14.0 to 2.12.1. The older version has a few listed vulnerabilities. The newer library required additional code to enable it to work on older Android phones, up to Android API 21.

KDE Games

Implementing a computerized opponent for the Mancala variant Bohnenspiel:

João Gouveia created Mankala engine, a library to enable easy creation of Mancala games. The engine contains implementations for two Mancala games, Bohnenspiel and Oware. Both games contain computerized opponents, João also started on a QtQuick graphical user interface. The games are functional, but additional investigation on computerized opponents may help improve their effectiveness.

Kdenlive

Improved subtitling support for Kdenlive:

Subtitling support has been improved for Kdenlive. Chengkun Chen added support for using the Advanced SubStation (ASS) file format and for converting SubRip files to ASS files. To support this format, Chengkun Chen also made subtitling editor improvements. The work has been merged in the main repository. Documentation has been written, and will hopefully be merged soon.

Krita

Creating Pixel Perfect Tool for Krita:

Ken Lo worked on implementing Pixel Perfect lines in Krita. As explained by Ricky Han, such algorithms remove corner pixels from L shaped blocks and ensure the thinnest possible line is 1 pixel wide. Implementing such algorithms well is of use not only in Krita, but also in rendering web graphics where user screen resolutions can vary significantly. The algorithm was implemented to work in close to real time while lines are drawn, rather than as a post processing step. Ken Lo's work has been merged into Krita.

Labplot

Improve Python Interoperability with LabPlot

Israel Galadima worked on improving Python support in LabPlot. Shiboken was used for this and it is now possible to call some of LabPlot functions from Python and integrate these into other applications.

3D Visualization for LabPlot:

Kuntal Bar added 3D graphing capabilities to LabPlot. This was done using QtGraphs. The work has yet to be merged, but there are many nice examples of 3D plots for bar charts, scatter and surface plots.

Okular

Forms/Javascript support improvement for Okular:

Pratham Gandhi worked on improving the forms/Javascript support in Okular. Around 25 requests have been merged to improve various features, some in the backend and some directly visible, such as fixing the size of the radio buttons or check boxes, or the one pictured below to improve the handling of floating numbers in different locales.

Snaps

Improving Snap Ecosystem in KDE:

Snaps are self contained linux application packging formats. Soumyadeep Ghosh worked on improving the tooling necessary to make KDE applications easily available in the Snap Store. In addition, Soumyadeep improved packaging of a number of KDE Snap packages, and packaged MarkNote. Finally, Soumyadeep created Snap KCM, a graphical user interface to manage permissions that Snaps have when running.

Next Steps

The 2024 GSoC period is finally over for KDE. A big thank you to all the mentors and contributors who have participated in GSoC! We look forward to your continuing participation in free and open source software communities and in contributing to KDE.

Qt Creator 14 has removed support for its Python 2 pretty printers.

Earlier this year I had the pleasure of visiting the KDE Akademy 2024 in Würzburg. It had been a few years since my last visit to Akademy and it was great to see old friends and meet new ones. Besides socializing, my main task was to talk to as many KDE people as possible about the privact project and its integration into KDE. Knowing the KDE community, not surprisingly this resulted in lots of interesting discussions.

Most importantly, I gave a talk about the current state of privact’s integration with KUserFeedback. If you missed it, here is the recording:

As a follow-up, we had 2 BoFs on Monday to discuss the next steps. Felix was kind enough to join me to provide more technical developer insights than I can give.

As a first teaser for you: In the short term, the privact approach will allow KDE to do proper user research, thereby enabling us to do data-driven UX without compromising user privacy. In the longer term, privact aims to restore digital privacy for everyone, even outside of KDE, even outside of FLOSS. You can learn more in upcoming posts or on the privact homepage.

The individual feedback on the privact approach during Akademy was very good, which is why we now want to start communicating with the larger KDE community. So this post is not only to report about my attendance at Akademy, but also to start blogging again on Planet KDE and to check if the aggregation works.

Hello World Planet KDE!

We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 15 RC!