KDE e.V. supports the KDE community, and has a staff of people to make that happen. Your contributions make that possible. I’ve been saying that for ages. But did you know that the FreeBSD Foundation supports the FreeBSD community, and works on the same basis? There’s even an open position for Userland work! It’s largely C, but an underlying idea is to make things better for desktop environments and end-users. Now who could that help?
No surprise, given that I recently wrote that it was a “slow month” for my Free Software activities, that I skipped FOSDEM too. My recurring memory of the event is cold, sleet, snow, miserable weather and a cold draft across the KDE booth – and returning from the event with a hangover and recharged, nonetheless, by seeing how the whole Free Software world hangs together.
Many years ago at FOSDEM I spoke with .. somebody, but they were nice and helpful and from the Kiwi Test CMS project, and so I’ve encouraged its use at work-work. It still doesn’t pay off for that project in terms of money or support, but .. we might get there eventually. I hope I can gently figure out how we might sponsor a handful of projects we use, even if it’s only a tenner a month.
Seems like Kevin had a good time at FOSDEM (another tradition: bedtime stories, but we must meet IRL for that). I’ve heard happy stories from other folks, but no regrets: I can just look forward to Linux App Summit (April) and Akademy (July) later in the year.
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!
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)
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):
(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:
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)
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I still have a ways to go to cover my bills this month, I will continue with my work until I cannot, I hate asking, but please consider a donation. Thank you!Let’s go for my web review for the week 2023-05.
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
Tags: tech, facebook
Oh the irony! Are we surprised? No not really… apparently who wields the tool makes it acceptable or not.
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.
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/
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/
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
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
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
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/
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:
[ade]
@marcdeop:matrix.orgsudo dnf upgrade --enablerepo=updates-testing --refresh --advisory=FEDORA-2023-17c31eabf7Feel 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.
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:
Displaying event information in the app:
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).
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).
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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:
Further improvements are being worked on, such as making KI18n use embeded iso-codes caches, something that would also benefit e.g. Android APKs.
Rendering engine improvements:
Map content improvements:
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:
Distro and app store packagers should update their application packages.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
