Qt 6.12 introduces Qt Canvas2D. Its API echoes the HTML5 canvas and the older Qt Quick Canvas element, both of which developers and AI models have seen many times in training data.
Another Akademy attended, here's some photos!
Hello hello! It was that time of the year where I go to KDE Akademy, talk to fellow nerds, almost lose my voice due to socializing and eat a lot of nice food.
This time Akademy was in Graz, Austria. I had never been in Austria before. This time I also had to travel alone due to my wife being busy with studying.
Traveling alone was nervewracking for sure, but somehow I managed to do it. Unless I am dreaming and wake up under a bench in Frankfurt airport or something.
Now I do not have a lot of photos, but I tried. I am bad at photos, many of them are super shakey or bad. But maybe these are interesting anyway.
Let me know if you want me to blur your face, I tried my best avoid those who had red lanyards!!!
I spent first 6h in a midnight train from home to Helsinki and could not sleep. Then I went from Helsinki to Frankfurt on a plane, I slept like two hours maybe. And from Frankfurt I went to Graz on a plane, also managed to sleep a bit.
At airport I met fellow KDE people and we managed to figure out our way to the hotel together.
The moment I arrived there, there was a welcome event on top of some building with bunch of food and drink. I had good time though I was super tired and the place was fully packed so I had barely any energy or will to try to properly socialize.
I genuinely do not remember much, it was a lot of travel and brain fog due to sleep deprivation lol.
Akademy finally properly begins and I go to the venue after good nights sleep. I didn't take much photos at the venue as I spent time just watching the talks, but I managed to take couple photos.
At evening we went for a dinner, and there was A LOT of people around Graz as apparently there was some festival. More chaos, I do not like crowds, but it was interesting.
During day two I spent most of the time at the venue as well, and the new KDE Goals were announced: I am one of the KDE Goal champions now! Yay!
The goal I am champion of is Next Generation Styling for KDE.
See the youtube video of the goals, our little speech timestamped: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwv4SQSvx9g&t=2559
(I am the guy in full black with the Xenia shirt.)
So yes, make Union bug reports! :)
After the talks and goal stuff, we had a KDE birthday party! KDE is 30 years old now, so we had food and cake.
(The first image is just me being stupid dont mind me)
Konqi sadly did not survive the party....
No photos from these, as I spent all my time in them. BoFs are tiny group hacking/discussion/etc sessions about stuff. I attended Union related BoFs but I also held my own: Desktop icons!
There will be it's own blogpost about the desktop icon BoF soon:tm:.
Otherwise I do not have much as I spent a lot of time just hacking on Union and less listening lol.
We went to a chocolate factory!!!
I've never been in one but it was very fun. And chocolatey.
There was like 300 tasting things for different processing phases of chocolate, from the chocolate beans to the full product.
I tried to taste it all. I really, really tried. At the end of it though I felt rather sick and did not want any more lol.
Despite feeling like I never want to see any more chocolate in my life, it was very fun. Apparently there was some other part of the place too that was like a zoo full of chocolate but I was so tired of it at the end I kinda skipped it and just drank water outside.
Yes, the theme of this trip is pretty much "i was very tired."
After stuffing ourselves full of chocolate, we went to another place nearby that was really pretty, on top of a hill, where we had a lunch. A lot of bread and cheese and ham and whatnot to put on the bread, and a lot of drinks too.
Thursday I spent hacking on Union together with Arjen and Noah. We are still trying to get the widgets side work nicely, though it works rather well already.
After that, I said goodbye to Konqi (and other people) and had a weird pizza that was half regular and half calzone.
On Friday, we travelled together to airport and went eventually our separate ways to wherever we went.
I got home at midnight and finally could say hi to our snek Mochi again.
Akademy was really fun. I will make more technical post about the desktop icon stuff when I can. It was very great to meet fellow nerds and discuss all things KDE.
I had great time. Even as someone who really does not like traveling.
See you at Akademy 2027! Or KDE Goal sprints! :)
Right after my GSoC tenure ended, I took off to Austria for attending Akademy. This was my first time outside my country and also my first birthday in another country!
I met Albert Astals Cid and Sune Vuorela who mentored and helped me during my GSoC tenure on Poppler and Okular.
I also got to meet Christoper Cullman who had merged my first contributions into KDE to the Kate editor.
I attended some talks that I could mostly understand. For example, "Are we really going to use the same Desktop UX forever?" by Scott Jensen
Some talks of which I knew 50-60% of what's going on,
And then some talks, I had no idea about what's happening lol (but they sounded interesting anyways)
I also attended some BoFs like i18n, NFC (which sounded interesting), and one BoF which was about organizing Akademy. The "organizing Akademy" BoF was especially helpful because Bhushan Shah talked with me and other fellow contributors about doing a cki (conf kde india) so I learned some things there.
When they said in the movie that there are roughly 300 varieties of chocolates we can try, I thought I could try all of them. But I couldn't eat anymore than 30 -_-
It was a good event and I enjoyed my time there. Thanks KDE for making it happen.
As usual, crossing the Atlantic is tough for me. I'm just too tall, and the seats are, well... just too small. Not to mention the stress of receiving a message on the day of the trip saying that my flight had been moved four hours earlier! I dropped everything I was doing and ran to the airport, only to dicover that it was a mistake in the "system". Add to that the delays and the the risk of missing the connection... Lufthansa did not play well this trip but everything worked out in the end!
My second Akademy was simply amazing. It was also more special beacause it was the KDE 30th anniversary edition. Unfortunately I did not get to try the Konqi cake.
I am very proud to be part of the KDE community - a welcoming, friendly, diverse and free group of people who are making the world a better place. I you ask me what is KDE in one word, I would say hope.
Camille, from the Kdenlive team, asked us to document our trip, so I did a short edit.
One of the highlights of my trip was to announce the new KDE Goals. This cycle, the community voted for:
We are currently scheduling our kickoff meeting to get things organized. I am sure many of you are eager to contribute, so stay tuned for further news.
We also did a recap of the last cycle and handed the certificates of appreciation to the champions. Congrats to them, they really raised the bar!
My favorite accomplishments, in no particular order:
I only got to participate in two BOFs.
The first was the Mentorships one hosted by Paul and Ansh, where I got to give a preview of the Beacon Program, the work that I've been building with universities for the last two semesters.
I also participated in Drunk KDE - Brand personality of KDE hosted by Aniqa and Kieryn. Boy that was a fun one! We got to think about KDE's branding and it contemplated lot's of issues that need to be worked on. Aniqa is compiling all our input and we'll hopefully get things moving afterwards.
The second highlight was getting together with the Kdenlive crew. Although it was a very quick, as most of the team stayed only for the weekend, we managed to get a lot done. We organized future sprints, started planning our upcoming fundraising campaign, discussed some promo tasks, and we even finally managed to merge the features section of the Kdenlive home page.
We also did a lot of testing and UX brainstorming for the upcoming keyframe timeline.
Unfortunately, for most of the trip, Jean-Baptiste was under the weather, so Julius and I had to fill in for his talk.
I loved Graz, Austria's second largest city. It is so welcoming and chill. I bought a weekly transport pass but ended up using it so little... did a lot of walking.
I was happy that I got to do some last minute sightseeing before catching the plane back home. After all the clock tower and the mountains were the inspiration for this year's edition.
A nice surprise was the Steirisches Backhendl served at TU Graz was just delicious. Styrian fried chicken (in pumpkin seed oil) served with a tangy potato salad and lingonberry jam.
This was my second Akademy, not only as a participant but also part of the organizing team.
We've been meeting religiously every Tuesday to organize this edition. Each time with different background lights from Harald's streaming setup.
All the graphics of this edition were made using free software programs like Inkscape for the general graphics creation, Scribus to export the PDF for printing, Blender for the intro graphics animations, and Kdenlive for video editing.
Also a HUGE shoutout to the CCC Video Operation Center (C3VOC) team. I really hope that we have consolidated this partership with them and can continue partnering with them for future Akademies. Speaking of which, the call for hosts is still open.
Lot's of luv to the beautiful, lean, mean Akademy-making team who put together such a fantastic edition. Can't wait for the next one with you all.
Some of the team. <3
FOSSY was held in Vancouver, Canada this year on the University of British Columbia campus.
This was my first conference as a KDE representative sitting at the KDE sponsors table. I don’t know if we were the biggest sponsor at FOSSY, but we certainly had the most people and tables in the sponsors area. We also had the most things to play with. A drawing tablet, a surface table with drawing pen, a steam deck, a rpi4 with small touchscreen, as well a various types of laptops.
Tellico 4.3 is available, with some additional capabilities, improvements, and bug fixes. I’ve received several code contributions from new people in the last few months and I wanted to say thanks. Depending a little on how I count it, Tellico turns 25 years old next month. It’s always been a hobby; I’m not a programmer by trade or training, and so I’m always gratified when other folks find my little tool useful and provide feedback, bug fixes, and even code contributions.
Recently Michael Tunnell interviewed Aleix and I on the subject of KDE’s 30th birthday, Wayland, LTS software, the new Union theming engine, and more! If you’re interested, you can check it out here. Note: if you work at Microsoft, please don’t watch and get any big ideas! 
After a long week of working lots and making lots of connections, here is what happened this year during Akademy!
The Union + Ocean goal was selected for the next two years as a priority for the Community. “Yay for more work!”.
I am so excited and thankful to the Community that saw this work as important for the future. I am committed to doing a lot more for it and during Akademy, we communicated about what our combined development path will be.
I can’t wait for the work ahead!
Thank you @KDE!
Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!
This week about 200 KDE contributors and enthusiasts attended Akademy, but somehow people still found the time to be productive! Plasma contributors released the second beta of Plasma 6.8 and landed a bunch of user interface improvements and bug fixes.
As always, this is only a curated subset of everything that happened in Plasma over the week.
Check it out:
Click feedback for System Tray icons now works a lot better (even if it remains inconsistent with other things, which is also being worked on!). (Kamil Wolter, KDE Bugzilla #520915)
The focused tab in a Plasma tab bar now looks less like a link, which it isn’t. (Christoph Wolk, libplasma MR #1584)
You can now use the “Switch to Last-Used Keyboard Layout” keyboard shortcut on the lock screen. (Pavel Lunin, kscreenlocker MR #373)
Password fields throughout Plasma now show an explanatory tooltip when you hover over the little eyeball icon that shows and hides the characters of the password. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #525790)
Muting an app or window from its Task Manager entry no longer closes the preview tooltip for it. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #521174)
Dragging the QR Code of an item in the Clipboard widget now shows it visually attached to the pointer during the drag. (Kai Uwe Broulik, plasma-workspace MR #7108)
KRunner-powered searches are now more flexible about currency conversions: you can now put the currency symbol on either side of the number and it will still recognize it as something that can be converted. (Alex Čižinský, KDE Bugzilla #446045)
Copying text in Info Center now shows some visual feedback so you know it worked. (Mradul Pal, kinfocenter MR #313)
You can now search for a weather station whose name includes punctuation without including the punctuation in your search. For example, you can search for “st louis” to find weather stations for “St. Louis”. (Bohdan Onofriichuk, KDE Bugzilla #515637)
Fixed a bug that could make logout, shutdown, or restart fail if there was already another attempt to do so running in the background. (Gregor Papez, KDE Bugzilla #525911)
Fixed a bug in the Weather Report widget that could make it get stuck after canceling a search that returned any results from the BBC. (Bohdan Onofriichuk, kdeplasma-addons MR #1133)
Fixed a regression that made CPU Information get cut off in Info Center. (Nate Graham, KDE Bugzilla #523197)
Plasma no longer crashes when you delete a starred clipboard entry from the Meta+V popup. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #526007)
Long labels can no longer overlap on System Settings’ Shortcuts page. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #525725)
Fixed a bug in the Weather Report widget that could mis-report the night temperature for weather stations from the wetter.com provider. (Bohdan Onofriichuk, KDE Bugzilla #520315)
Queries in KRunner-powered searches longer than 63 characters no longer spam the journal log with hundreds or thousands of pointless messages. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #525983)
The Dictionary widget’s minimum size no longer breaks its layout. (Christoph Wolk, kdeplasma-addons MR #1138)
Plasma’s Bluetooth setup wizard can now be used to find and pair Bluetooth Low Energy devices while something else on the system (such as KDE Connect) holds open a discovery session for other devices. (Robert August Vincent II, KDE Bugzilla #526178)
The C.UTF-8 locale is now available on System Settings’ Region & Language page. (Nate Graham, KDE Bugzilla #438290)
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.
Would you like to help put together this weekly report? Introduce yourself in the Matrix room and join the team!
Beyond that, you can help KDE by directly getting involved in any other projects. Donating time is actually more impactful than donating money. 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.
You can also help out by making a donation! This helps cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors, and in general just keeps KDE bringing Free Software to the world.
Push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.
@the_epicman:matrix.org
GSoC
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