While we hammer away at polishing up Plasma 5.27, features and user interface changes are starting to land for Plasma 6! We took a big bite out of the 15-minute bugs, too. Goodies for everyone!

New Features

System Settings’ Default Applications page now lets you choose your preferred application for a much wider variety of file types! (Méven Car, Plasma 6.0. Link):

Throughout Kirigami-based apps, standard list items with elided text now display a tooltip on hover showing the full text (Ivan Tkachenko, Frameworks 5.103. Link)

User Interface Improvements

Elisa now increments a song’s play count when it finishes playing, not when it starts (Frisco Smit, Elisa 23.04. Link)

The accent color picking UI has been condensed to it takes up less space, which opens up room for us to add other settings there in the future, such as day/night color scheme switching, which is in progress! (Tanbir Jishan, Plasma 6.0. Link):

The OSD that appears when you switch audio devices now also shows the battery level of the new audio device you switched to (if that device has a battery and reports battery info, of course) (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 6.0. Link):

Framed views with rounded corners in QtQuick-based software no longer have tiny “korners”-style visual glitches in the corners (Ivan Tkachenko, Frameworks 5.103. Link):

Significant Bugfixes

(This is a curated list of e.g. HI and VHI priority bugs, Wayland showstoppers, major regressions, etc.)

Using a keyboard shortcut to close a window by dragging it around no longer causes it to leave a ghostly non-interactive shadow of itself hanging around (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.27. Link)

Upgrades of Flatpak runtimes with have a new version available are once again marked as such appropriately in Discover, rather than being listed as a “refresh” of the existing version (though that’s still possible too) (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.27. Link)

Viewing System Settings’ Application Style page no longer sometimes causes the CPU usage to spike when certain 3rd-party application styles are installed (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.0. Link)

Fixed two issues with Plasma panel widget pop-up placement that could cause popups to be inappropriately centered on their panels when using a multi-monitor setup or when the panel is not maximized to take up all available space on its screen edge (Niccolò Venerandi, Frameworks 5.103. Link)

Spectacle’s “Copy to clipboard right after taking a screenshot” feature once again works in the Plasma Wayland session (David Redondo, Frameworks 5.103. Link)

In QtQuick-based software, it’s no longer possible to drag things around in scrollable views that shouldn’t be draggable, like items in sidebars and lists (Marco Martin, Frameworks 5.103. Link)

Fixed a ton of little miscellaneous glitches with scrollbars in QtQuick-based software (Ivan Tkachenko, Frameworks 5.103. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

• 9 Very high priority Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
• 42 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 51 last week). Current list of bugs
• 108 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed this week. Full list of bugs

Automation & Systematization

Updated the included documentation for System Settings’ Global Themes, Colors, Cursors, Desktop Session, Plasma Search, Task Switcher, Screen Edges, General behavior pages! (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 5.27. Link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5, link 6, link 7, link 8, link 9)

Added documentation for Aurorae window decorations! (Natalie Clarius. Link)

…And everything else

This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! If you’re hungry for more, check out https://planet.kde.org, where you can find more news from other KDE contributors.

How You Can Help

Please test the Plasma 5.27 beta! Bug reports filed against the beta version (5.26.90) get looked at and prioritized. It really helps. And of course, if you’re a developer, fixing those bugs is massively impactful too. You might also want to check out our 15-Minute Bug Initiative. Working on these issues makes a big difference quickly!

Otherwise, visit https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover 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!

And finally, KDE can’t work without financial support, so consider making a donation today!

Like others, I’m sitting in the train from Brussels to Paris after a very intensive week-end. Indeed, FOSDEM 2023 did happen. After being suspended for two years during the pandemic, at least for the in person version, it is back. I couldn’t ignore this and had to go!

Now let’s see for my quick and very own biased recap of the week-end.

The Talks

I managed to attend a few talks and take written notes. I miss my old tablet, I would have preferred to get back into sketch noting. Maybe next time…

Graphics: A Frame’s journey

A nice talk from Daniel Stone who really knows the topic in depth. I admit I expected something a bit less high level though. Still, if you are curious about how the graphics stack is structured on Linux it was definitely worth attending.

It does a very good job about explaining DRM/KMS, EGL, GBM respective roles and how they align. Also shows how Wayland is purposefully aligned with KMS. I managed to get a few extra information I didn’t expect on the topic.

Definitely recommended.

4K HDR video with AV1: A Reality Check

It’s been a few years now that I end up attending a talk I didn’t expect for various reasons. This year it was definitely this one, I didn’t mark it down at all on my hit list but ended up being in the Open Media room when it was presented.

It was definitely outside my comfort zone and still I found it very interesting and accessible enough. It explained quite well HDR content display and how AV1 handles it.

I admit I was a bit fascinated by the part talking about testing the rendering and if the standards are properly respected. It’s clearly a very complex work. Lots of very subtle details to get a test lab right. Indeed you even need to take care of the immediate environment of the lab since it can impact the perception of colors!

Unexpected as I said but I don’t regret it.

Understanding the energy use of Firefox

Nowadays I’m definitely getting more curious about the energy use of the software we use daily… and what is more commonly used nowadays than your web browser really?

Well, this is in part why the Mozilla people added energy profiling to the Firefox Profiler. It’s not only important from a sustainability, it also has a direct impact on the user experience in terms of noise, heat and battery use.

This type of profiling requires to look at CPU use, GPU use, thread wake ups, network use. They tended to waste energy a lot due to wake ups, invisible animations, timers. They introduced tooling around the task manager to ease hunting down those problems.

This coupled to telemetry allowed them to have a global picture of how the browser operates in the wild. The total daily consumption globally would require a small power station to satisfy it. Definitely not a small thing!

Anyway, it all allowed them to make several targeted fixes which improved the situation greatly. Still more improvements needed of course and experiments to run to see how they’ll behave in the wild.

Interesting stuff and definitely a tool I’ll use in the future, because… well see the next talk.

What’s new with the Firefox Profiler

I stayed in the same room to know more about the new features around the Firefox Profiler. Unfortunately it started late and needed to be a bit rushed.

They added nice improvements to it recently like - power profiling (with Watts and CO2 estimations) - source code view and inline call stacks - one click profiling for tabs - localization - lots of documentation improvements

But the thing I’m the most excited about is the importers they added. This turns it into a generic interface to explore profiler data and this one being very nice and thorough… Right now they can import traces from: chromer, perf, ART trace and callgrind. There’s even a Java JFR profiler compatible with it.

I find it really cool to see an ecosystem growing around it.

Open Source in Environmental Sustainability

This one was really not what I expected. I was looking for something on how FOSS project can do better in terms of Environmental Sustainability, it was more a survey about FOSS projects aiming at environmental sustainability topics. Fair enough, I was wrong, still worth listening to.

Unfortunately I didn’t find it very well delivered, the pace was a bit too slow or maybe energy was a bit lacking. Also they were some biases in the information collected or what they were looking at which rubbed me the wrong way.

Still I got a few interesting nuggets out of it. There seems to be an overly large presence of the communities, academia and governmental agencies in such projects. Companies are almost nowhere to be seen. Somehow the incentives must be lacking.

It also showed how well green washing unfortunately works. The current investment ratings in term of sustainability are definitely untrustworthy. For instance, the disconnect between carbon credits and the amount of carbon storage really happening is staggering.

I thus agree with the diagnostics, the models used for those ratings should be opened. This is necessary for provability and traceability. This indeed makes Open Source the most underestimated strategy for climate sustainability. Without it we can be easily misled.

Deep Dive Into Query Performance

For this one the title was very much misleading. It had nothing to do with a deep dive and was very much high level.

The advices were sound of course but I expected to learn more and get more tips on how to squeeze performance out of queries not only diagnose where the bottlenecks are.

Still I got away with a few tools to look at and assess if they can really help us - SQLcommenter to pass metadata to the database; - pg_stat_monitor to get deeper query performance insights.

So clearly not the best talk I’ve seen. The tools mentioned might be worth checking out.

Matrix 2.0

I was very curious to get news about Matrix progress. Also Matthew Hodgson is a good speaker and entertainer so hoped it’d be time well spent.

It definitely was! The amount of progress from the Matrix community is just very impressive. In his demo packed talked we’ve been shown: - how much the performance overall improved - how the multiparty VoIP features are doing great - the possibilities to have down the line a Matrix in P2P mode - and their new ThirdRoom client which provides virtual spaces features, I’m especially excited about its use of glTF as the base scene format and the fact that it works with the WebXR APIs

It was also great to see that more governments and agencies are making use of it now. It’s clearly spreading and getting traction. Hopefully the Digital Market Act will push further that momentum and the development of the bridges.

Very interesting times for this protocol, let’s hope it keeps going strong.

The enioka Gang

It’s been a few years that a few enioka Haute Couture developers have been attending FOSDEM. This year more of us did attend and also we managed to bring people from our sister company enioka Consulting with us. Our group thus exploded in size with a head count well above 15!

I thought it was a good opportunity to run a little experiment and asked them each to tell me about their favorite talk of the week-end. Here is what they came up with.

• DuckDB: Bringing analytical SQL directly to your Python shell
  This is a column database embedded in a Python process (although other bindings are available). It’s kind of a column based sqlite providing zero copy integration with Pandas and Numpy. All of this while providing a 100% SQL based interface.

• Building a Semantic Search Application in Python, Using Haystack
  How to easily create semantic search applications using this NLP framework and models from HuggingFace. This was an interesting talk about a tool which will be very useful to us.

• Automated short term train planning on OSRD
  How to insert a train at the last minute in a trafic plan defined weeks ago. The SNCF network works on this problem WITHOUT using AI!

• Similarity Detection in Online Integrity
  Collection of tools developed by Meta to identify pictures and videos to be considered “illegal”. It’s interesting to see the diversity of solutions they use, ranging from hash comparison to neural network. The platforms collaborate there through NCMEC, a solution to share detected illegal content. If you’re concerned your nudes might leak you can get them on the NCMEC list and avoid their publication. Forgotten from this talk is obviously the content moderators. Meta claims to rely on its “community” (sic).

• pip install malware
  A dynamic talk which shows the best practices and things to pay attention to when producing a library published via a package manager (like pip). It covers how malevolent packages can be installed by typo squatting, “hidden” dependencies, popularity theft (starjacking) and how to prevent it.

• Kerberos PKINIT: what, why, and how (to break it) An accessible explanation of Kerberos and of the PKINIT extension allowing to use X509 certificates to authenticate users. I also covers how its FreeIPA implementation could lead to privilege escalation.

• A deep dive inside the Rust frontend for GCC
  Nice presentation and progress report on the GCC frontend to compile Rust code.

• OpenSTEF: Open Source energy predictions
  A use case of Open Source tool to manage energy. In particular to predict congestions on the electrical grid.

• Understanding the energy use of Firefox
  How telemetry helps to figure out Firefox’s energy consumption, and how its profiling tools allow to optimize this consumption.

• Melrōse, a music programming environment
  A python framework to generate MIDI sequences. It comes with an advanced language to write melodies, harmonies and rythmes altogether. For me the main interest in the framework are the methods which allows to easily compose. Also the code is reinterpreted at each iteration so the generated sequence can be modified from one loop to the next.

• Kotlin Multiplatform for Android & iOS library developers
  Return on experience of two developers using Kotlin for Android and iOS native applications. They showed how to best leverage Kotlin by fine tuning and working around OS specific bugs with annotations.

• Application Monitoring with Grafana and OpenTelemetry
  Or how to monitor your applications with Open Source tools to store and explore as a whole the traces, logs and metrics.

The Hallway Track

As you can notice, I didn’t attend many talks… That’s because FOSDEM main value comes from the “hallway track”. It’s best to meet and chat with people as much as possible. And I can tell you it did happen!

It was a real pleasure to reconnect with people I appreciate and love there. Hugs, conversations and drinks were in order. Thank you all for that, hope to see you all again soonish!

It was also nice to meet new friendly faces. For instance, I used the opportunity to congrats the Penpot people for announcing their official launch (what they’re doing is really exciting and important, I wish them success).

But now it’s over… Time to cross the border again and crash on my bed. Exhausted but satisfied.

Another busy week!

In the snap world, I have been busy trying to solve the problem of core20 snaps needing security updates and focal is no longer supported in KDE Neon. So I have created a ppa at https://launchpad.net/~scarlettmoore/+archive/ubuntu/kf5-5.99-focal-updates/+packages

Which of course presents more work, as kf5 5.99.0 requires qt5 5.15.7. Sooo this is a WIP.

Snapcraft kde-neon-extension is moving along as I learn the python ways of formatting, and fixing some issues in my tests.

In the Debian world, I am sad to report Mycroft-AI has gone bust, however the packaging efforts are not in vain as the project has been forked to https://github.com/orgs/OpenVoiceOS/repositories and should be relatively easy to migrate.

I have spent some time verifying the libappimage in buster is NOT vulnerable with CVE-2020-25265 as the code wasn’t introduced yet.

Skanpage, plasma-bigscreen both have source uploads so the can migrate to testing to hopefully make it into bookworm!

As many of you know, I am seeking employment. I am a hard worker, that thrives on learning new things. I am a self starter, knowledge sponge, and eager to be an asset to < insert your company here > !

Meanwhile, as interview processes are much longer than I remember and the industry exploding in layoffs, I am coming up short on living expenses as my unemployment lingers on. Please consider donating to my gofundme. Thank you for your consideration.

GoFundMe

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2023-05.

The AI Crowd is Mad

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt

A few interesting points in there. Too much hype and important points are glanced over, we’d all benefit from them being more actively explored.

https://proofinprogress.com/posts/2023-02-01/the-ai-crowd-is-mad.html

Meta Was Scraping Sites for Years While Fighting the Practice - Bloomberg

Tags: tech, facebook

Oh the irony! Are we surprised? No not really… apparently who wields the tool makes it acceptable or not.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-02/meta-was-scraping-sites-for-years-while-fighting-the-practice

Merchant: Big Tech is using layoffs to crush worker power - Los Angeles Times

Tags: tech, work, hr, business

Looks like an attempt to sow fear in the workers at Big Tech. Hopefully it’ll lead instead to a better organization of the workers across the industry and people leaving Big Tech altogether to join less toxic environments.

https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2023-01-30/column-how-big-tech-is-using-mass-layoffs-to-bring-workers-to-heel

The Transformer Family Version 2.0 | Lil’Log

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning

Very nice summary of the architecture in the latest trend of transformer models. Long but comprehensive, a good way to start diving in the topic.

https://lilianweng.github.io/posts/2023-01-27-the-transformer-family-v2/

Writing a Custom SQLite Function (in C) - Part 1

Tags: tech, sqlite

An interesting but sometimes forgotten possibility for extending SQLite. Keep in mind this can lead to bad coupling between the software and the DB though which could carry interesting challenges around upgrades for instance.

https://www.openmymind.net/Writing-A-Custom-Sqlite-Function-Part-1/

Undefined behavior, and the Sledgehammer Principle | The Pasture

Tags: tech, programming, c, c++

Excellent conclusion to the recent turmoil around undefined behaviors. The way they are currently used as definitely a problem, they shouldn’t be ignored in your code (although that’s admittedly not that easy). There’s hopefully a path forward.

https://thephd.dev/c-undefined-behavior-and-the-sledgehammer-guideline

Data for Decisions - Max Countryman

Tags: tech, data, knowledge, decision-making

Too often forgotten. Data is indeed a mean to an end. It’s not outright knowledge and will require work to be useful. It better be aligned with your needs if you want to use it for decision making.

https://www.maxcountryman.com/articles/data-for-decisions

My critique of “the Spotify Model”: Part 1 | by Jason Yip | Jan, 2023 | Medium

Tags: tech, agile

OK, this is the best critique of the “Spotify Model” I’ve seen around. There’s been plenty of unfair criticism thrown at this “model” (never aimed to be something you fully replicate though, hence the complaints I think). This one is properly balanced and doesn’t just throw everything in the garbage bin, it takes the model bits by bits and try to highlight where the limits are. Very constructive.

https://jchyip.medium.com/my-critique-of-the-spotify-model-part-1-197d335ef7af

I’m Now a Full-Time Professional Open Source Maintainer

Tags: tech, foss, business

Interesting business model. Could be a new path for at least some maintainers to be sustainably funded. Still a lot of unknowns though… probably worth keeping an eye on it.

https://words.filippo.io/full-time-maintainer/

Estimating Square Roots in Your Head

Tags: mathematics

Interesting method to estimate square roots. I didn’t know about it, quite clever.

https://gregorygundersen.com/blog/2023/02/01/estimating-square-roots/

Bye for now!

After the announcement upstream, Fedora’s @kde-sig follows up by making KDE Gear 22.12.2 available on Fedora 37.

As per Fedora’s policy, the software will first land on updates-testing and after receiving feedback and karma it will land on the updates repository.

If you want to help, make sure to follow the instructions on the update. You only need to run:

sudo dnf upgrade --enablerepo=updates-testing --refresh --advisory=FEDORA-2023-17c31eabf7

Feel free to join us at our Matrix room!.

There has been plenty of activity around KDE Itinerary since the last summary post two month ago, including work to leverage train onboard APIs and improved event support.

New Features

Extended event support

While transport-related tickets are most often in focus when talking about Itinerary, it can also handle other bookings relevant on the road, such as hotel reservations and event tickets. In particular the handling of events received a number of updates.

Data import and data extraction:

• Opening an event URL from Mobilizon with Itinerary will import the corresponding event. This doesn’t even use ActivityPub yet, supporting that eventually will give us even more event details and will allow automatic updates.
• Generic iCal data without semantic annotation can now also be imported directly.
• There’s new and/or improved data extractors for Eventim, Indico, Kinoheld, Meetup and Pretix.

Displaying event information in the app:

• Seat reservations are now shown in the full level of detail when available.

• Event websites and descriptions are shown on the event details page.
• Apple Wallet event tickets are now rendered correctly also when containing image assets that are outside the specified sizes, by applying downscaling or tiling.

Improved barcode scanner

Importing tickets by scanning their barcodes has been available for some time, but didn’t always work reliably under poor light conditions. For those cases the barcode scanner now allows to turn on a torch light if available (which is the case on most phones).

Events

After three years there will be an in-person FOSDEM again, starting tomorrow, with the KDE stand in building K as usual.

On Saturday 13:35 in room AW1.126 there will be a talk about how we make use of public transport and ticket barcode data in Itinerary, as part of the Railways and Open Transport track.

That’s not the only upcoming event though, Itinerary will also be present at the FOSSGIS-Konferenz on March 15-18 in Berlin with a talk about how we use OSM data (in German).

Distribution

To address the persisting problem of Google blocking updates to Itinerary in the app store due to the health certificate feature there’s now a plan to move that feature to a separate app. That would then of course not be available in the Google store, but would be limited to free platforms.

Infrastructure Work

Onboard API

Several train and bus operators offer Wi-Fi on their vehicles, and often this comes together with a portal website showing current journey information. The latter is typically power by some form of onboard API which reports the current speed and position of the vehicle as well as information about the route and possible disruptions.

Work has started on a new library to make use of this. For this we are monitoring which Wi-Fi network we are currently connected to, and if it’s one we know the onboard API for continuous updates of the current position and journey are retrieved.

While Wi-Fi names differ from operator to operator there’s only a few vendors of onboard information systems, so we can often cover many operators with the same code. Still we have to look at each operator and add the necessary configuration. That’s where we again need help from everyone traveling, please note Wi-Fi names and capture communication between the portal website and its backend when encountering such systems!

So far we have CD Railjet, DB ICE, FlixBus coaches, SNCF Inoui and Thalys covered.

Showing this information in the app is straightforward and can be useful, but the real value comes from using this for further assistance features:

• Are you on the right train? That’s not always as obvious as one might think, considering for example multi-set trains that split up along the way.
• Are we there yet? That is obvious for the traveler, but it’s tricky for the app. Especially disruptions shortly before arrival can get lost, as the online routing services we query for this simply might not have that information fast enough. This then results in not getting further updates on the estimated arrival time, and no support in finding an alternative for a missed connection.

And that’s not even all that can be done here, there’s already suggestions to use this data to assist with connecting to the right Wi-Fi when detecting a corresponding access point, or to extend the same approach to airport and train station Wi-Fi systems.

Finding traveler names

There are a few ticket barcode formats that predate Unicode and as such only contain ASCII transliterations of passenger names. Flight boarding passes are the most prominent example, being even limited to a maximum of 20 uppercase ASCII letters.

Unless your name happens to be compatible with those restrictions, that leads to more or less mutilated and truncated spellings. And that’s not only a cosmetic issue, it makes merging data from different sources much harder.

Often the properly spelled name is found in the same document containing the bardoe though. For this case we now have a new component in the extractor that uses names found in barcodes and then searches for their proper spelling in PDF documents and Apple Wallet passes.

While this tends to produce good results on many airline documents it is still limited to Latin scripts. It’s probably possible to extend that to other scripts using ICU’s transliteration capabilities, but we’d need enough sample documents for those cases for testing first.

Software accessibility

Itinerary’s accessibility with assistive tools such as screen readers has a lot of room for improvements to put it mildly. With KDE having made software accessibility an explicit goal and with the recent work on using the AT-SPI interface also for automated testing it’s high time we change that.

A number of improvements have been implemented already, both in the app as well as in underlying libraries, to improve the structure exposed over AT-SPI and to add textual information to icon-only elements. But there is still a long way to go.

Static extractor builds

For use in e.g. Nextcloud we have the ability to do a full static build of the travel document extractor, as that significantly simplifies server-side deployment.

This used to be done with a custom Docker image manually and now has been redone as a Gitlab job on KDE’s CI infrastructure. While at it, a few more things were improved:

• Static linking against zlib, so the extractor is independent of the zlib version installed on the target system.
• Switch the build job to CentOS 7, which reduces the required glibc version down to just 2.17.
• Set search paths for translation catalogs automatically, so deployment requires no further step than unpacking the archive generated by the CI job in an arbitrary location.

Further improvements are being worked on, such as making KI18n use embeded iso-codes caches, something that would also benefit e.g. Android APKs.

Fixes & Improvements

Travel document extractor

• Improved extractors for MÁV, Trenitalia, NH and Premier Inn hotels as well as the caesar-data and onepagebooking booking engines.
• Fix determining the year of travel from context for RCT2 tickets that don’t contain the year.
• Improve merging of different reservations for the same train trip when there are slight variations in arrival time or destination spelling.

Public transport data

• Support new GBFS v2.3 vehicle and propulsion types such as cargo bikes and hybrid engines.
• Fix filtering of floating vehicles by distance. This makes rental bikes show up on the station map correctly again.

Indoor map

Rendering engine improvements:

• Support rendering icons using real-world rather than screen sizes. Sizes can be specified explicitly in the MapCSS style or taken from OSM tag values.
• Support MapCSS tag setting expressions. This allows styles to overwrite OSM tag values and have those values considered in the subsequent style evaluation.
• Consider pen width when computing polyline bounding boxes. This fixes interacting with near horizontal or near vertical ways.
• Kate can now highlight MapCSS styles.
• Don’t search for the next opening time arbitrarily into the future. This fixes a potential infinite loop in certain “always closed” opening hours expressions.

Map content improvements:

• Override suspicious layer tags on building elements. Those can exist in the OSM data due to optimizations for the general outdoor renderer but result in wrong stacking orders in the indoor view, with building (background) elements covering foreground details.
• Show building and room entrances, barrier blocks and trees.
• Also consider the building tag for determining the element name.
• Show element description texts when available.
• Handle more tagging variants for disused/closed amenities/shops.
• Floor level topology fixes in OSM for major railways stations in Brussels, Vienna and Dresden.

Itinerary app

• Continue the transition to the Kirigami Mobile Forms UI component, the generic ticket and program membership pages use those as well now.
• Determine proper time ranges for the map view on non-transit elements (events, hotels, restaurants, etc). This is necessary for opening hours to be taken into account on the map display.
• Also allow reverse geo coding in the place editor, that is look up the address based on an already available geographic coordinate.
• Fix too aggressive merging of generic Apple Wallet passes.
• Do not accept rotation gestures on the location picker map, making it behave more predictably on touch interactions.

How you can help

Feedback and travel document samples are very much welcome, and there are plenty of other things that can be done without traveling as well. The KDE Itinerary workboard or the more specialized indoor map workboard show what’s on the todo list, and are a good place for collecting new ideas. For questions and suggestions, please feel free to join us on the KDE PIM mailing list or in the #kontact channel on Matrix.

Over 120 individual programs plus dozens of programmer libraries and feature plugins are released simultaneously as part of KDE Gear.

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

• dolphin: Don't recurse into symlinks when counting directory contents (Commit, fixes bug #434125)
• kdeconnect: Fix ssh authentication using pubkey on recent openssh versions (Commit, fixes bug #443155)
• libkdegames: Fix finding knewstuff themes (Commit, fixes bug #464288)

Distro and app store packagers should update their application packages.

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

This is a non-comprehensive list of all of the major work I’ve done for KDE this month of January. I think I got a lot done this month! I also was accepted as a KDE Developer near the start of the month, so I’m pretty happy about that.

Sorry that it’s pretty much only text, a lot of this stuff isn’t either not screenshottable or I’m too lazy to attach an image. Next month should be better!

Custom icon theme in Tokodon

I threw all of the custom icons we use in Tokodon into a proper custom icon theme, which should automatically match your theme and includes a dark theme variant. In the future, I’d like to recolor these better and eventually upstream them into Breeze.

See the merge request.

KXMLGUI tooltips

As part of cleaning up some KDE games-related stuff, I also looked into the issue of duplicate “What’s This?” tooltips. This also fixes that visual bug where you can close normal tooltips that don’t have “What’s This?” information to actually open.

See the merge request.

KBlocks background changes

This one isn’t merged yet, but in the future - KBlock themes authors will be able to specify where to pin the background instead of having it stretched by default.

See the merge request.

Kirigami “About KDE” dialog

I added something that’s been wanted for a while, Kirigami’s own “About KDE” dialog! It’s currently sitting in Add-ons, but will most likely be moved in the future. If you would like to suggest what we do about the About pages/windows in KDE, please check out the proposal.

See the merge request.

Media improvements in Tokodon

I did a lot of work improving media in Tokodon this month, including fixing the aspect ratios scaling correctly, video support (not merged yet) and other miscellaneous fixes. I also caught a bunch of blurhash bugs along with making the timeline fixed-width so images aren’t absurdly sized on a typical desktop display.

See the media layout fixes, three attachment fix, and the video support merge requests.

Krita.org dark theme

I’m starting to get involved in improving the KDE websites, and currently working on the new Krita.org website and adding a proper dark theme to it.

See the work-in-progress merge request.

Gwenview MPRIS fixes

Not merged yet (due to MPRIS bugginess in general?) but I cracked a shot at improving the MPRIS situation with Gwenview. Notably, slideshow controls no longer “hang around” until a slideshow is actually happening.

See the open merge request.

CMake Package Installer

I worked a little on solving the kdesrc-build issue of manual package lists, and created cmake-package-installer. It parses your CMake log and installs the relevant packages for you. I want to start looking into hooking this into kdesrc-build!

See the repository.

KDE Wiki improvements

I made some misc changes to the Community Wiki this month, mostly centered around fixing some long-standing formatting issues I’ve noticed. The homepage should be more descriptive, important pages no longer misformatted (or just missing?) and the Get Involved/Development page should be better organized.

Misc Qt patches

I cherry-picked a Qt6 commit fixing video playback in QML, which should appear in the next Qt KDE Patch collection update, mostly for use in Tokodon when video support lands. I also submitted an upstream Qt patch fixing WebP loading, meant for NeoChat where I see the most WebP images.

See the GStreamer cherry-pick and the WebP patch.

Window Decoration KCM overhaul

This isn’t merged yet (but it’s close!) so it barely misses the mark for January, but I’ll include it anyway. I’m working on making the Window Decoration KCM frameless and give it a new look that matches the other KCMs.

See the merge request.

Flatpak applications are based on runtimes such as KDE or Gnome Runtimes. Both of these runtimes are actually based on Freedesktop SDK which contains essential libraries and services such as Wayland or D-Bus.

Recently there were a lot of discussion about supply chain attacks, so it might be interesting to ask how Freedesktop SDK was built. The answer can be found in freedesktop-sdk repository:

sources:
- kind: ostree
  url: freedesktop-sdk:releases/
  gpg-key: keys/freedesktop-sdk.gpg
  track: runtime/org.freedesktop.Sdk.PreBootstrap/x86_64/21.08
  ref: 0ecba7699760ffc05c8920849856a20ebb3305da9f1f0377ddb9ca5600be710b

So it is built using an older version of Freedesktop SDK image. There is now an approved merge request that completely reworks bootstrapping of Freedesktop SDK. It uses another intermediate docker image freedesktop-sdk-binary-seed that bridges the gap between freedesktop-sdk and live-bootstrap.

So what is this live-bootstrap? If you look at parts.rst you’ll see that it is a build chain that starts with 256 byte hex assembler that can build itself from its source and also 640-byte trivial shell that can read list of commands from the file and executes them. Then it proceeds building 130 (as of the moment of writing) other components and in the process builds GCC, Python, Guile, Perl and lots of other supporting packages. Furthermore, each component is built reproducibly (and this is checked using SHA256 hash).

Some caveat: at the moment freedesktop-sdk-binary-seed still uses older binary of rustc to build rustc but in principle one could leverage mrustc to build it. Or possibly rust-gcc will become more capable in future versions and will be able to bootstrap rustc.

So unless your flatpak application uses rust, it will soon be buildable from sub 1 KiB binary seed.

QCoro 0.8.0 Release Announcement

This is a rather small release with only two new features and one small improvement.

Big thank you to Xstrahl Inc. who sponsored development of new features included in this release and of QCoro in general.

And as always, thank you to everyone who reported issues and contributed to QCoro. Your help is much appreciated!

The original release announcement on qcoro.dvratil.cz.

Improved QCoro::waitFor()

Up until this version, QCoro::waitFor() was only usable for QCoro::Task<T>. Starting with QCoro 0.8.0, it is possible to use it with any type that satisfies the Awaitable concept. The concept has also been fixed to satisfies not just types with the await_resume(), await_suspend() and await_ready() member functions, but also types with member operator co_await() and non-member operator co_await() functions.

QCoro::sleepFor() and QCoro::sleepUntil()

Working both on QCoro codebase as well as some third-party code bases using QCoro it’s clear that there’s a usecase for a simple coroutine that will sleep for specified amount of time (or until a specified timepoint). It is especially useful in tests, where simulating delays, especially in asynchronous code is common.

Previously I used to create small coroutines like this:

QCoro::Task<> timer(std::chrono::milliseconds timeout) {
    QTimer timer;
    timer.setSingleShot(true);
    timer.start(timeout);
    co_await timer;
}

Now we can do the same simply by using QCoro::sleepFor().

Read the documentation for QCoro::sleepFor() and QCoro::sleepUntil() for more details.

QCoro::moveToThread()

A small helper coroutine that allows a piece of function to be executed in the context of another thread.

void App::runSlowOperation(QThread *helperThread) {
    // Still on the main thread
    ui->statusLabel.setText(tr("Running"));

    const QString input = ui->userInput.text();

    co_await QCoro::moveToThread(helperThread);
    // Now we are running in the context of the helper thread, the main thread is not blocked

    // It is safe to use `input` which was created in another thread
    doSomeComplexCalculation(input);

    // Move the execution back to the main thread
    co_await QCoro::moveToThread(this->thread());
    // Runs on the main thread again
    ui->statusLabel.setText(tr("Done"));
}

Read the documentation for QCoro::moveToThread for more details.

Full changelog

See changelog on Github