This week some of the in-progress work on touch gestures was merged, and now the edge swipe gesture to trigger KWin’s Overview and Desktop Grid effects will follow your fingers, just like you’d expect!

Big thanks to Marco Martin for implementing this improvement, which will be in Plasma 5.25. More is in the pipeline too, including finger-following touchpad gestures for the Overview effect and virtual desktop Slide effect. Hopefully I’ll be able to announce them as finished next week.

15-Minute Bugs Resolved

Current number of bugs: 76, down from 79. Current list of bugs

When you have a vertical panel and a horizontal panel, the horizontal panel no longer overlaps and hides buttons on the edit mode toolbar for the vertical panel (Oleg Solovyov, Plasma 5.24.3; this actually went in two weeks ago but I didn’t notice it!)

Logging into Plasma no longer becomes slower the more images you’ve added to your wallpaper settings (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.25)

Dragging a panel from one screen edge to another no longer sometimes causes it to disturbingly get stuck in the middle of the screen (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.25)

New Features

When sharing a folder using Samba, there is now a folder permission helper window to help you get the permissions right (Slava Aseev, kdenetwork-filesharing 22.08)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

KRunner-powered searches are now case-insensitive when matching text for System Settings pages, so you can find them more easily (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.24.4)

When running the Plasma Wayland session in a VM, clicking on something now causes the click to actually go to the correct place, rather than being slightly offset (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.24.4)

Applying various boot splash screens in System Settings now works (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.24.4)

“Get New [thing]” dialogs once again work when you’re using your system in a language other than English (Alexander Lohnau, Frameworks 5.93)

Menus for text fields in QtQuick apps no longer show a separator as the first item or have incorrect spacing at the top (Gabriel Knarlsson, Frameworks 5.93)

The arrows in shortcuts windows in QtWidgets-based apps are now high-dpi compatible (Someone going by the pseudonym “snooxx ” Frameworks 5.93)

User Interface Improvements

The menu items in Dolphin’s Back/Forward menu now show icons (Kai Uwe Broulik, Dolphin 22.08):

The bar that shows a disk’s usage level in Dolphin is now always visible, rather than only appearing on hover (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 5.93)

The Battery and Brightness applet’s power profiles slider now shows its two extreme states with icons, and indicates the current mode with text above the slider like other sliders do. This prevents text from ever getting cut off in languages that use very long words for “Power Save,” “Balanced,” and “Performance.” (Ivan Tkachenko and Manuel Jesús de la Fuente, Plasma 5.25):

Lists of recent documents now implement a FreeDesktop standard that governs this, which means they are now synced with GTK/GNOME apps. So for example you can open a file in Gwenview and it will appear as a recent document in the “Open File” dialog in GIMP! (Méven Car and Martin Tobias Holmedahl Sandsmark, Frameworks 5.93

…And everything else

This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! Tons of KDE apps whose development I don’t have time to follow aren’t represented here, and I also don’t mention backend refactoring, improved test coverage, and other changes that are generally not user-facing. 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, check out our 15-Minute Bug Initiative. Working on these issues makes a big difference quickly!

Otherwise, have a look at 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!

Finally, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

Over the past two weeks I attended a number of sessions of the Wikidata Data Reuse Days 2022 and presented KDE’s use of Wikidata in our travel apps there. Here are some of the things I found particularly interesting from a KDE perspective.

Data

With Wikidata modeling the whole world and then some, several sessions focused on available datasets in specific domains and their use cases.

Language Models

Wikidata’s lexeme database allows creating language models that we simply did not have available for FOSS software a couple of years ago. This can be useful for text input and text correction, but also for education software around language learning.

Scribe is an example for using that to build a virtual keyboard specifically for second language users helping you to use the right plural form, conjunctives, prepositions or gender forms (talk details).

Could be worth looking into for Sonnet, Plasma Mobile’s virtual keyboard and/or KDE Edu.

Consumer Advice

A very different but no less interesting dataset is Open Food Facts (talk details). That contains information about food related products and their ingredients, healthiness and environmental impact.

This allows building apps that based on a product barcode help you check whether a specific product is compatible with allergies or other food intolerances (particularly useful when the packing is labeled in a language you don’t understand), or to help you pick healthier or more sustainable alternatives while shopping.

Plasma Mobile’s barcode scanning app Qrca already offers to open the corresponding Open Food Facts entry when encountering an EAN code, but there is quite likely room for a deeper integration.

Open Food Facts also has two similar sister projects, Open Beauty Facts for cosmetics, and the even more general Open Product Facts.

Tooling

Besides datasets, tools or techniques to work with Wikidata were equally important topics.

One new tool that could be interesting for us is the Mismatch Finder which allows to report potential data quality issues found by automatic checks against other sources (talk details). That’s something we do for example when bringing Wikidata and OSM data together for generating the public transport line meta data in KPublicTransport.

Adapting the debug output of our data processing tools to produce a machine readable format consumable by the Mismatch Finder shouldn’t be a big deal, and certainly promises more quality improvements than posting issues in blog posts.

Wikidata use in KDE Itinerary and KTrip

While there is no recording of my talk, at least the slides are available here.

The normal weekly post will be delayed a day. Consider it extra time to merge your changes.

Given the great work others did already on the Qt 6 porting of KDE Frameworks, let’s take a look at Kate & KWrite on Qt 6.

With only minor patches, both applications now run on the current master state of KDE Frameworks and Qt 6.2.

Close to all functionality is available, I think the only stripped out part is the hot new stuff upload for snippets and I didn’t test the Konsole part.

I would not consider this to be already usable, during trying to type this blog with Qt 6 Kate I got random hangups during completion on Wayland. That will need debugging. But for people wanting to improve the Qt 6 experience it is a good enough starting point.

The CI on our GitLab instance will now compile the Qt 6 variant, too, that means we will see compilation regressions.

Kate on Qt 6.2

KWrite on Qt 6.2

Help wanted!

You want to help us with making the Qt 6 version a thing you can actually use?

Show up and contribute.

Comments?

A matching thread for this can be found here on r/KDE.

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2022-12.

Amazon intentionally made it difficult to cancel Prime subscription in secret project | The Independent

Tags: amazon, gafam, design

Prime example of dark patterns in the wild (pun intended).

https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/amazon-prime-subscription-cancel-secret-project-b2038207.html

Web3 is centralized (and inefficient!)

Tags: tech, blockchain, web3, scam

Yet another (well deserved) rant aiming at web3. The decentralized claim is indeed preposterous. I hope no one is being fooled.

https://www.neelc.org/posts/web3-centralized/

All The Music: the Megamix

Tags: tech, legal, commons, culture, music

Very interesting initiatives… I wonder what they will lead to legal wise.

https://www.royvanrijn.com/blog/2022/03/all-the-music-megamix/

Support open source that you use by paying the maintainers to talk to your team

Tags: tech, foss, sustainability

Now that’s an interesting idea to give back money to maintainers… can be sustainable only if enough company do this on a regular basis though.

https://simonwillison.net/2022/Feb/23/support-open-source/

Why Don’t You Use …

Tags: tech, supply-chain, architecture, complexity, community

Interesting list of criteria about why you might not use some piece of tech. Also delves into why this is often not public knowledge.

https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2022-03-19/why-dont-you-use.html

Decrypting your own HTTPS traffic with Wireshark – Trickster Dev

Tags: tech, tcp, debugging

Interesting tip to ease the pain of dealing with HTTPs when using Wireshark.

https://www.trickster.dev/post/decrypting-your-own-https-traffic-with-wireshark/

6 Universal Readable Code Tricks To Improve Your Coding Skills • Python Land Blog

Tags: tech, programming, craftsmanship, static-analyzer

Bunch of good advice. In a way it boils down to: name things properly and use static analysis tools extensively. Still, couple of nice operational guidelines which work in most languages.

https://python.land/readable-code

Watch Enemies – State-of-the-art digital humans | Unity Demo

Tags: tech, 3d

Real-time rendering is catching up fast… Even humans are being very realistic now, we’re almost out of the uncanny valley now.

https://unity.com/demos/enemies

Dimensions of Power

Tags: team, sociology, politics, power

You think you don’t use power on others? Think again, this can be more subtle than you think. Keep it in mind, be mindful and try to use your advantages fairly.

https://medium.com/@kentbeck_7670/dimensions-of-power-15ac9fa0c590

First photos from James Webb telescope better than expected.

Tags: science, physics

Exciting times ahead. I’m eager to know what it’ll help us find out.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/exploration/first-photos-james-webb-telescope/

Bye for now!

We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 7!

After a long silence from us, we are happy to announce the start of the beta phase for the upcoming LabPlot 2.9 release.

Over the past weeks, we have spent a significant amount of time fixing the outstanding issues and polishing new features. Some of the major new features were introduced in our recent blog posts, and many other new features are mentioned in our ChangeLog file.

Take a look at what is coming up here:

• Info element
• Column statistics in the spreadsheet
• Hilbert Transform
• Color maps and conditional formatting
• Import of MATLAB, SAS, Stata and SPSS files
• BoxPlot
• Multi-axes
• ChangeLog

In the next days, we will be spending more time improving the release. The plan is to do the final announcement after 1-2 weeks if no big blockers are encountered. People interested in helping out are invited to test the beta and provide us with feedback.

You can download the current the beta version of LabPlot as source code, a Windows installer, or a macOS image. Linux users who do not want to compile from source can grab the nightly builds from the “Development Versions” section on the Download page. These builds are available for openSUSE, KDE Neon and Ubuntu and as a Flatpack package, and are very close to the beta release and can be safely used for testing and providing feedback.

Stay tuned for more news regarding LabPlot 2.9!

Hello everyone,

this is a heads up for designers to update their KDE decorations if they want to support Blur for any of their decorations since Plasma 5.25. Let me explain you what has changed and what you need to update.

• Blur for ALL decorations is disabled in KWin 5.25 and that fixes korners bug for all solid decorations without requiring any further actions from them.
  
• C++ decorations that would like to enable blur for them they need to use KDecoration2::Decoration::blurRegions API that has been introduced.
• Aurorae decorations that are solid they do not need to update anything in their regard.
  
• Aurorae decorations that would like to enable blur they need to add a "mask" element inside their decoration.svg file. The "mask" element should have the same padding used for active and inactive decorations. Following screenshot demonstrates such "mask" element and you can also use a demonstration theme.