Skip to content

Welcome to Planet KDE

This is a feed aggregator that collects what the contributors to the KDE community are writing on their respective blogs, in different languages

Saturday, 10 June 2023

As many users have noticed, our 23.04.0 release didn’t go as smoothly as planned. Several major regressions affected the release, resulting in a poor user experience. We are well aware that most users want stability above all else, and with our growing user base we really need to improve on that front.

So for Kdenlive 23.08, we plan to focus only on bug reporting and regression testing to avoid repeating the mistakes of the 23.04 release. Our intention is to improve our test suite, and also to create a repository of sample project files, with automated scripts that open the files, render them, and compare the results to a reference render.

This should allow us to catch regressions and be much safer when releasing a new version with major changes, as was the case with nested timelines in 23.04.0.

It’s also important to realize that Kdenlive relies on dozens of other projects and libraries, and that some of the recent problems were caused by upstream or downstream issues, so don’t blame us for everything :).

Regarding our fundraising

Here is the first report on what we are doing with the money and what is planned for the future.

We are very happy with the success of the campaign and will try to report every 4 months on what we have achieved with the money raised. At first, not everything went as planned. The reorganisation of the Kdenlive maintainer ‘s schedule to have more time for Kdenlive is not going as fast as hoped, so he is still in a transition period. This will change by the end of the year, with the goal of having a healthier weekly schedule with two full days dedicated to Kdenlive instead of the current one day plus all available spare time.

The figures

As of mid-February 2023, we had received 677 donations totalling: €23,170.
Platform and processing fees were €1,067 €, and €4,420 € (20 %) will go to KDE to cover infrastructure, maintenance and support costs. This leaves €17,683 € for Kdenlive development.
€3000 has already been used to help fund the first achievement (see below).

The first achievements

Thanks to these donations, the Kdenlive maintainer started to work a bit more on Kdenlive and we delivered the first goal of the fundraiser: support for nested timelines!

Next steps

When our testing has improved, we will start working on improving the effects workflow and increasing the global performance of the application.

Join us

Kdenlive is an open source project, you can help us in many ways. You can join our Matrix development channel, help with documentation or send us your (hopefully) success stories with Kdenlive!

The post Kdenlive news and fundraising report appeared first on Kdenlive.

I’m happy to announce the 1.1 release of Arianna. Arianna is a small ePub reader application I started with Niccolo some time ago. Like most of my open source applications, it is built on top of Qt and Kirigami.

Arianna is both an ePub viewer and a library management app. Internally, Arianna uses Baloo to find your existing ePub files in your device and categorize them.

New features

Arianna can now display the table of content of a book. This supports complex hierarchies of headings.

A table of content displayed as a right sidebar with a tree structure
A table of content displayed as a right sidebar with a tree structure

Arianna now provides you with the metadata about your books.

Dialog showing the title, author, description, license information about a book
Dialog showing the title, author, description, license information about a book

Additionally, you can now disable the reading progress on the library page if it distracts you.

Bug fixes

You can now read books without requiring an internet connection. We also fixed various crashes happening when indexing your books.

Get Involved

If you are interested in helping, don’t hesitate to reach out in the Arianna matrix channel (#arianna:kde.org) and I will be happy to guide you.

I also regularly post about my progress on Arianna (and other KDE apps) on my Mastodon account, so don’t hesitate to follow me there ;) We also now have an official Mastodon account for Arianna @arianna@kde.social.

And in case you missed it, as a member of KDE’s fundraising working group, I need to remind you that KDE e.V., the non-profit behind the KDE community accepts donations.

Packager section

You can find the package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with my GPG key.

While most of the effort around the transition to Qt 6 and KDE Frameworks 6 (KF6) is probably going into Plasma currently, there are still a number of lose ends to tie up in Frameworks itself as well. The below is far from a comprehensive overview of that though, it’s merely a few things I have been involved with recently.

KTextTemplate

During the 5 era we relied on the text-template engine Grantlee in several places (e.g. KHelpCenter, KDevelop, KDE PIM). In the 6 era this will now live on as KTextTemplate as part of KDE Frameworks.

The final bits for this, the formal review process and the actual move of the repository, have now been done as well.

Going forward this will mean one dependency release cycle less to deal with for consumers, and a faster and more predictable way to get upstream fixes rolled out.

Barcode generator API

The barcode generation API in Prison used to have a factory method returning an abstract base class pointer. That requires manual memory management for consumers, and it leaks implementation details which limit us in evolving the API without ABI breaks.

As the base class isn’t really useful for inheriting externally we can just as well move that part to the private class and only expose a value-type like object to the outside.

The corresponding change has landed, an API improvement on top of that is still awaiting review. Once that is in we can port consumers and remove the old API.

Unit conversion online updates

The KUnitConversion framework provides - hardly surprising - ways to convert values of different units. In most cases those are fixed conversion rates, but there is also support for currency conversions, and not all of those are static.

KUnitConversion therefore downloads current conversions rates, when needed and at most once a day. The problem here however is that this happens behind a seemingly synchronous API. That’s not only bad for being potentially blocking, it’s also prone to nasty reentrancy problems which we have recently seen in form of deadlocks in QML code calling into KUnitConversion.

To address this, there now is a proposed change moving this to an explicit and asynchronous API. This requires consumers to trigger the currency conversion table update themselves. That’s a bit more work, but it makes the actual conversion API much more predictable.

KIO HTTP

KIO has its own HTTP implementation, dating back to the early 2000s where this was mainly intended for browser use and the security and privacy threat level wasn’t quite what it is today. Since then the world has changed, KIO’s HTTP is nowadays no longer used by web browsers but rather for API calls. At the same time the HTTP standard has evolved considerably, from new security features such as HSTS to entirely new protocol versions.

For KIO this means we’d like to get rid of our own implementation of HTTP, replacing it with something that already supports HSTS, HTTP/2, etc. QNetworkAccessManager would be the first choice there, as we already use that in many other places anyway.

On the way towards that we have meanwhile removed support for implicit cookie handling, the QNAM to KIO bridge and obsolete SSL settings.

Co-installability

Co-installability with KF5, ie. the ability to install both KF5 and KF6 in the same prefix at the same time is one of the few hard release blockers, and something that’s being worked on since the beginning. In most cases it’s unfortunately more complicated than just renaming an install location, all consumers need to be adjusted as well and sometimes it simply makes no sense to duplicate a file or program.

Runtime components add even more complexity to that, here we also need look at what should only exist once (and thus needs to retain compatibility of e.g. D-Bus interfaces) and what should be duplicated (and thus must not conflict on D-Bus service names etc).

Sometimes we get lucky and things can be dropped entirely, the above mentioned KIO changes should also help with removing remaining conflicts around cookie storage.

Every week some of those issues get resolved, but there’s still some work remaining. We unfortunately lost the Neon-based install conflict checker tool, on its last run it still showed about 500 conflicting files. Many of those have the same root cause though, so there’s a lot fewer actual issues.

Okular

Not strictly a Frameworks topic, but nevertheless somewhat related is porting Okular away from KJS and KHTML. Those are gone in KF6, and Okular is one of their remaining users, and a particular complex and important one.

KJS is used for scripting in PDF files. The official specification for the PDF JS API has a whopping 700+ pages, even with Okular only implementing parts of that not a small task. The security implications of this and a limited amount of test documents don’t help either, but fortunately Okular has a decent unit test coverage for this. So we now have a pending merge request replacing the use of KJS with QJSEngine.

I also looked into replacing KHTML with Qt WebEngine, despite Albert telling me it’s not possible. Turns out he was right. Unlike most other KHTML users we have, Okular doesn’t use KHTML to render content directly to the screen, but to render tiles into an image. Technically that can be done with Qt WebEngine as well, however with two limitations:

  • The QWebEngineView needs to be visible for this to work.
  • We don’t know for sure when the content is ready to be rendered.

Either one of those could be worked around with some nasty hacks probably, but I haven’t found a way to overcome both at the same time.

So how do we proceed here? There’s two options:

  • It was mentioned that there is some ongoing work in Qt in support of compile-time SVG rendering using Qt WebEngine that might face the same problem, and thus might result in a viable solution for Okular as well.
  • KHTML is used in Okular for rendering CHM files. Given that is a somewhat rare format nowadays, it might be possible to move that functionality to a standalone app instead. There we can then use Qt WebEngine to render the output directly, bypassing this problem entirely. Albert has started such an app already even.

How you can help

The above are just a few examples of things being done and still needing to be done.

If you want to participate, here are the most important coordination and communication channels:

This week Plasma 6 underwent some major refactoring to the fundamental Plasma widget APIs to modernize them and make it harder to introduce errors when developing new widgets. Since almost everything in Plasma is a widget, this necessitated a lot of changes and QA. After a month of work, it’s now done! The user-facing side is nil (ideally nobody will notice anything), but there are some changes that developers will need to be aware of to port their widgets. Most widgets already needed to be ported anyway due to Qt changes, but hopefully this won’t add much else. A porting guide has already been written and can be found here. This work was done by Marco Martin, with me providing QA support.

On that subject, we got a lot more organized about Plasma 6 this week. We now centrally track status on a new wiki page that shows the outstanding issues and notable changes. I’m starting to feel like I see a light at the end of the tunnel! While I’ve had to use the X11 Plasma 6 session because the Wayland one is still a bit too unstable for me to feel productive, the X11 session now feels barely buggier than the Plasma 5 X11 session. It’s really quite nice at this point.

This came up in the comment threads of last week’s post, but the more people test and contribute to Plasma 6, the better the final release will be. Neon Unstable now offers Plasma 6 by default, making it a good testing platform for the adventurous. Especially if you have a heavily customized setup or use exotic hardware, please try it out and submit bug reports! Make sure to apply the “qt6” keyword to them.

User Interface Improvements

Many significant UI improvements to Skanpage, including drag-and-drop page re-ordering, better keyboard shortcuts, and better error reporting (Someone going by the pseudonym “John Doe”, Skanpage 23.08. Link)

Okular no longer bugs you when you save a document that was deleted on disk; it simply re-saves it as instructed (me: Nate Graham, Okular 23.08. Link)

The context menu actions of the Dictionary Widget are now more relevant and have icons (Laurent Montel, Plasma 6.0. Link):

Significant Bugfixes

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

KRunner no longer sometime crashes when trying to calculate certain math expressions, or simply when typing numbers in general (Max Ramanouski, Plasma 5.27.6. Link)

The final change just went in for making sure that Discover always gets the version numbers right for updatable Flatpak apps (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.27.6. Link)

When using a fractional scale factor in the Plasma Wayland session, you should no longer see line glitches all over the place (Matthias Dahl, Plasma 5.27.6. Link)

Fixed the “Add New Page” dialog in System Monitor to not be visually broken when using a language with longer translated strings than English (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.27.6. Link)

In the Plasma Wayland session, when adding a second keyboard layout, the Keyboard layout System Tray icon now appears immediately (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.0. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

Automation & Systematization

Overhauled the documentation about Plasma styles to be more up-to-date and accurate (Thiago Sueto, link)

Web presence

KDE’s growing assortment of “KDE for” pages has gotten a snazzy new landing page, and now it’s a top-level link over at kde.org (Carl Schwan):

On top of that, there’s a new page: “KDE for Activists“, showcasing how KDE’s privacy-conscious communication can help you organize for what you believe in (Carl Schwan):

Note that this is a value-neutral statement; you can use KDE software to organize for whatever cause you believe in, no matter where on the political spectrum you consider yourself. If you’re about to complain that KDE is too woke or something (lol), keep in mind that the Russian ministry of defense uses Plasma, as well as the Ukrainians fighting against them. You can use our software for whatever you want! So let’s try to keep the political battles out of the comments section of this post. Thanks everyone.

…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

If you’re a developer, please please please start living on a Plasma 6 session (not just building Plasma 6 stuff on top of Plasma 5) and fixing the bugs that you encounter. Plasma 6 is usable for daily driving, and I’m doing so, but it’s still very much in an alpha state and in need of work to make it releaseable.

If you’re an adventurous user, you can also use Plasma 6 with Neon Unstable. If you do so, make sure to submit bug reports for any problems you encounter, and apply the “qt6” keyword to them.

Otherwise, visit https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover other 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! This stuff ain’t cheap and KDE e.V. has ambitious hiring goals. We can’t meet them without your generous donations!

Saturday, 10 June 2023

KDE today announces the release of KDE Frameworks 5.107.0.

KDE Frameworks are 83 addon libraries to Qt which provide a wide variety of commonly needed functionality in mature, peer reviewed and well tested libraries with friendly licensing terms. For an introduction see the KDE Frameworks release announcement.

This release is part of a series of planned monthly releases making improvements available to developers in a quick and predictable manner.

New in this version

Baloo

  • Use common helper for Property/JSON conversion
  • Don't install D-Bus interfaces without BUILD_INDEXER_SERVICE
  • [IdTreeDB] Consolidate put/del into common set
  • Cleanup some leftover stale code
  • [balooshow] Improve display of property and plaintext terms

KConfigWidgets

  • KColorSchemeMenu: Remove accelerator markers from scheme name
  • Give KColorSchemeMenu namespace a short description
  • Fixup: Pass scheme name - not path - to KColorSchemeManager::indexForScheme
  • Split menu creating functionality out of KColorSchemeManager

KCoreAddons

  • use fcntl to fix macOS compile

KDELibs 4 Support

  • kssl: Update for LibreSSL 3.7

KDocTools

  • Add Arabic Support

KFileMetaData

  • Cleanup property name/id mapping test
  • Add method to export list of all Property names
  • Reduce PropertyInfo construction overhead
  • Add benchmark for PropertyInfo instantiation

KHolidays

  • Significantly speed up HolidayRegion::defaultRegionCode()

KIconThemes

  • KIconTheme: allow to also fallback to Breeze-dark when set through QPA

KImageFormats

  • pcx: multiple fixes (2)
  • Avoid unnecessary conversions
  • RGB/SGI writer: fix alpha detection and image limit size
  • TGA writer: fix alpha detection and performance improvements
  • pcx: multiple fixes
  • PCX: Fix reading of the extended palette (bug 463951)

KIO

  • Deprecate KIO::AccessManager and related classes
  • Enable thumbnail caching if thumbnail directory is on an encrypted volume (bug 443806)
  • KdirLister: update symlink dir content on file removal (bug 469254)
  • Polish menu before creating platform window

Kirigami

  • ActionTextField: Disable shortcut for invisible and disabled text fields
  • BasicListItemTest: Guard against nullable background in ScrollView
  • Fix tst_basiclistitem_tooltip
  • Make it possible to disable BasicListItem tooltip
  • Fix almost all links in the KF5 Kirigami docs
  • Fix painting of non-symbolic icons which are fallbacks for symbolic (bug 451538)

KItemModels

  • Preserve numeric sort roles as well

KNewStuff

  • Remove KF5TextWidgets remnants

KParts

  • PartLoader::createPartInstanceForMimeType(): Avoid compiler detected null pointer access

KTextEditor

  • Fix incorrect lineHeight for drag pixmap (bug 468196)

Prison

  • Add EAN13 support
  • Factor out code for interfacing with ZXing for barcode generation

Security information

The released code has been GPG-signed using the following key: pub rsa2048/58D0EE648A48B3BB 2016-09-05 David Faure faure@kde.org Primary key fingerprint: 53E6 B47B 45CE A3E0 D5B7 4577 58D0 EE64 8A48 B3BB

Friday, 9 June 2023

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2023-23.


Our Right To Challenge Junk Patents Is Under Threat  | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Tags: tech, patents, law

This is bound to make the US patent system even worse than it already is…

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/our-right-challenge-junk-patents-under-threat


Vision Pro

Tags: tech, apple, ux, ar, vr, xr

Probably the best analysis of the new Apple device I’ve seen so far. Focuses more on the design of the user experience and compares with the strategy behind other similar devices. There are likely a lesson or two to be drawn from it.

https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Vision%20Pro


Developers are lazy, thus Flatpak

Tags: tech, linux, packaging, flatpak

A good reminder that Flatpak is no silver bullet. It’s a bit of a rant at times still it has some good points in particular the security implications are not always properly conveyed to the users. Some thinking might be required regarding what’s lost compared to “traditional” packaging approaches.

https://blog.brixit.nl/developers-are-lazy-thus-flatpak/


ugrep - A faster, user-friendly and compatible grep replacement.

Tags: tech, tools, command-line

There’s a new grep alternative in town. Looks really fast and has an interesting interactive mode. Definitely something to check out.

https://github.com/Genivia/ugrep


Debugging Outside Your Comfort Zone: Diving Beneath a Trusted Abstraction

Tags: tech, complexity, architecture, config, debugging, automation

Very interesting case full of lessons. Of course, increasing the complexity of the system overall can lead to such hard to find issues. It’s also a tale into how seemingly innocuous settings can interact in unexpected ways. I also like the lessons learn pointing to the fact that you can and should debug even the systems you use through abstractions, diving into the code is almost always a good thing (even if in this particular case it wasn’t strictly necessary in the end). And last but not least it shows the tension between mastery and automation… the more you automate the least you master the system, and at the same time this automation is necessary for building resilience in the system.

https://www.infoq.com/articles/debugging-beneath-trusted-abstraction/


graydon2 | The Rust I Wanted Had No Future

Tags: tech, rust, language, design, community

Interesting post, highlights why it’s better when languages are designed in a more community fashion (make sure to read until the conclusion). At least in term of popularity it seems to help.

https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/307291.html


PEP 695 – Type Parameter Syntax | peps.python.org

Tags: tech, python, pyright, type-systems

This will hopefully solve most of the oddities in the generic types syntax of Python. Will be available with CPython 3.12 and will need support from type checkers of course.

https://peps.python.org/pep-0695/


The Many Problems with Celery | Log Blog Kebab

Tags: tech, python, celery

Celery is a popular solution for job queues in the Python world… it’s far from perfect though. This list of fixes to make it safer to use is welcome if you’re stuck with it.

https://steve.dignam.xyz/2023/05/20/many-problems-with-celery/


ReactPy

Tags: tech, python, frontend

OK, that looks like an interesting idea for the frontend bits if your stack is mainly Python based. Still very young though.

https://reactpy.dev/docs/index.html


GitHub - bloomberg/pystack: 🔍 🐍 Like pstack but for Python!

Tags: tech, python, debugging

Looks like a very powerful tool for debugging and analyzing processes involving a Python interpreter.

https://github.com/bloomberg/pystack


My Approach to Building Large Technical Projects – Mitchell Hashimoto

Tags: tech, project-management, architecture, tests

Nothing really new but well written. This highlights fairly well the importance of decomposing projects, having at least the broad strokes of the architecture laid down and how automated tests help drive the progress. It’s nice to see it all put together.

https://mitchellh.com/writing/building-large-technical-projects



Bye for now!

We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 11 Beta!

Hello world,

This is my second blog post for Google Summer of Code 2023, where I will share what I accomplished during the GSoC-23 community bonding period.

Community Bonding period

During this time GSoC contributors spend 3 weeks learning about their organization’s community and preparing for their coding project. They get to know mentors, read documentation, get up to speed to begin working on their projects

During the community bonding period, the organizers took two introductory sessions kick starting our journey. The first Welcome Session was about the best practices and tips for a successful Google Summer of Code. Following that, GSoC Contributor Summit took place, during which previous participants and mentors shared their experiences of being part of GSoC.

During this time I also got to interact with fellow GSoC contributors and learned more about their interesting projects and their plans .

Furthermore, I utilized this time to get a head-start on my project by familiarizing myself with QT’s model-view programming with the help of official QT's documentation and Tokodon’s source code. Additionally, I implemented the User-Interface of the button to be used to open the moderation tool. The merge request for which can be found here.

An image showing the User Interface of Tokodon with implemented entry point of moderation Tool can be found below.

An image showing User Interface of Tokodon with mouse being hovered on Moderation Tools Icon

Next I am working on implementing the account Moderation tool :)

I will be writing regular blog posts on my website. You can read my previous blog-posts and follow my progress here

Hindsight preface: This was written in very tired state.

I have been chatting about this with people who know more than I ever will about Flatpak.

Soo I have added few edits here and there.

If I seem frustrated, most of my frustration is aimed at the unnecessary shit slinging over packaging formats.

We all want the good stuff, why the hell are we fighting?!


Might as well, since everyone else is doing this.

First off, I am just a dev, and mostly a user, not packager and...

I don't really care about the packaging format, as long as it works.

Anyhow, these are my current thoughts on them, both positive and negative.

I get the thing I want

I like Flatpaks when I am using an ancient system like Debian Stable, and still if it has Flatpak support, I can download actually usable versions of many applications. Even nightly versions!

This is good. I like this.

flatpak run blabla.org.bla.bla.bla.com.eu.biz.exe.yes

Flatpaks are clearly made GUI applications in mind, but still, typing that whole prose of commands and having to remember the org.com.package.eu lines hinders terminal UX.

Sometimes you just need to run things through terminal to debug things, or maybe you want to make a new shortcut of the app, or whatever. Maybe you want to even make a terminal application into a Flatpak app!

Typing that massive command really deters using flatpaks for terminal applications too, because every time you install apps, you have to make an alias or memorize the magic words.

Flatpak, when installing an application, should just create that for you.

Yes there's third party solutions. But the solution should be first party one.

But it is a minor nit in the end and I can live with it.. But I am gonna complain about it from time to time due to my bad memory lol.

Flatpaks can take sometimes too much space

The more packages you install through Flatpak, the more it "pays off."

This makes sense in systems that use mostly or always Flatpaks.

But when you mix and match, because, as a user you really don't care, you just want the app to work you may be frustrated to suddenly see your laptop with 256gb SSD losing big portion of it's space to the 5 apps you installed with dependencies, that do not match and can't be reused.

If you're starved for space, you may be better off just uninstalling Flatpaks in general and then using native packages, which (hopefully) your distro manages for you so that the dependencies are shared.

And no, saying "bro, just buy more space, bro" is not an excuse. Not everyone has that luxury, especially if they live in poorer countries and such. It's time to stop this silly notion of making things bigger because "well we have so much space now."

So if you need to ooze everything out of your system space, you may want to avoid Flatpaks if you don't install everything from there.

But if you're using a distro that uses Flatpaks for everything, your file usage is going to be very similar like with native packages. Unless every app has different dependencies even if they're based on same framework.

There really is no good or bad here. Just different use cases.

Edit: I have heard very different opinions on this. My thoughts on this have not changed, but I do believe it works for some but not for all. I think we need more benchmarking and actual evidence to make further claims.

So take my point about this with the "source: me and my pals" level.

Permission management

This is where I tend lose my marbles with Flatpaks. (But it's not really Flatpaks fault)

There are times when the app is uploaded to Flathub by some random and they never really checked what permissions the Flatpak actually needs.

So the it can be either leaking like a sieve or not working at all.

Luckily, I see this less often, but only if the app is sent to Flathub by the people who know what permissions are actually needed.

Still, there are times when I have to install Flatseal (Luckily KDE has it's own permission manager now!) and fiddle with some switches until the app does what it was actually designed to do. This is especially noticeable by programming tools like text editors.

So I just usually end up giving all the permissions. I just want the app to work.

And if even then it doesn't do the thing I need it to do, I just use a native package.

Having Android style pop-up asking for permission when the app needs it could be good solution for this. Edit: Apparently this is a thing with portals. That is super neat. I just didn't know, possibly because I'm on KDE Plasma. Plasma can use portals for this too, but KDE priority is now to get Qt6 out and working.

On the flipside, when installing random apps, I do feel a bit more safer. But I do not know if it's a placebo, due to the fact that I am reaaally not a security expert. :P

Where are my files???

Sometimes when installing an application from Flatpak, one expects to get multiple applications. My best example for this is Xonotic: Xonotic comes with the game binaries and dedicated server binaries.

I tried to find those with the Flatpak I was using for Xonotic but I could never find them.

Backing up configs can be a mystery too. Flatpak could have some integrated configuration manager or something that helps users syncing their configs easily.

Edit: Seems to be out of scope, but personally I do believe Flatpak would just benefit from this.

Github

Why the hell is all Flathub related stuff on Github? Is it to save on hosting costs or something? If so, I hope Flathub can move on it's own system soon.

In general I am tired of everything being tied to Github, but that's a separate rant.

Learn from Twitter and Reddit: Do not build your thing around just one corporate owned service. It will end up badly. I've seen in the future with my tinfoil hat, and I know.

Trust me, bro.

To sum it all up..

I really don't care about your packaging method. I care that the app works as expected when I launch it.

So far native packages have been better in my experience when it comes to this.

But I am not a "Flatpak hater!"

I do want these to work!

Because when it works it's awesome. It makes distributing files much easier.

I think sandboxing is a cool feature (if it is not just a placebo, I am no security expert). I can use newest coolest shiny things on distros that get updated once in a decade.

I just don't think the current solution is The Solution yet. It needs refinement and the above negative points are the papercuts that put me off of using it.

But I root for you, Flatpak. I think you're onto something really good in here.

PS. And I am tired also of some people thinking that, like Rust, it's the Holy Solution To Everything Ever. There's no such thing when it comes to computers. I want to be wrong though.

PPS. I hope I didn't type too "angry" here. I blame my lacking english skills. And lacking social skills. And just lack of skills in general. Skill issue(s).

No dislike towards anyone who works on Flatpak, just absolute pure respect. This stuff must be difficult to work on especially when some part of internet seems to always be screaming when something is done to it.

This post was just me whining a bit, here in my tiny corner of the internets.

glhf.

Thursday, 8 June 2023

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:

  • konsole: Adjust selection point coords when scrollback shrinks (Commit, fixes bug #470346)
  • neochat: Focus message search window's search field by default (Commit, fixes bug #469879)
  • yakuake: Prevent unnecessary tab switching when closing a tab (Commit, fixes bug #392626)

Distro and app store packagers should update their application packages.