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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, 18 May 2024

A few weeks ago, some of us discovered that KDE apps just looked terrible when run in GNOME. A lengthy discussion on icon theming ensued, with various improvements made on both sides. The KDE effort was spearheaded by Christoph Cullmann, as already described in his post on the subject. In a nutshell, KDE apps opting into the new system that are run outside of Plasma will always have the Breeze style and icons available, unless overridden by the system or the user. Apps opting in so far include Kate, Konsole, and Dolphin. Feel free to help opt more apps in by using those commits as inspiration!

Dolphin itself also received a lot of special attention this week, in addition to other cool stuff:

New Features

Dolphin now gives you the option to enable previews for folders on remote locations. Be aware that this can cause slowdowns, and the UI tells you that, too (Sergey Katunin, Dolphin 24.08. Link):

Discover now handles the case where one of your Flatpak apps has been marked as “end of life” and replaced with another one; it gives you the opportunity to switch to the new one, or cancel and keep using the old one anyway (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.1. Link):

Eagle-eyed readers have noticed this isn’t using the new dialog style. It hasn’t been ported yet. There are a lot of instances like this where Kirigami.OverlaySheet is inappropriately used as a confirmation dialog that need porting.

UI Improvements

Dolphin’s ability to let you change things as root when kio-admin is installed has received a big upgrade: now it shows you a warning telling you what bad things you can do if you’re not careful, and also keeps a banner visible while you’re in root mode (Felix Ernst, Dolphin 24.08. Link):

Dolphin has received a number of UI improvements and better handling for viewing read-only folders (Jin Liu, Dolphin 24.08. Link)

Switched Spectacle over to using the common style for immutable toolview tabs in Kirigami apps (me: Nate Graham, Spectacle 24.08. Link):

KMenuEdit no longer annoyingly prompts you for confirmation when you delete a group (Kenny Hui, Plasma 6.1. Link)

The icons shown in our dialogs no longer themselves depict dialogs for mega dialog-ception; now they’re just normal colored icons (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 6.3. Link):

Bug Fixes

Attempting to open multiple “New Folder” dialogs on a slow network location no longer causes Dolphin to crash (Akseli Lahtinen, Dolphin 24.08. Link)

Very small SVG images are now displayed properly in thumbnail previews (Méven Car, kio-extras 24.08. Link)

Fixed a case where our authentication system could crash and leave apps unable to request authentication (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.0.5. Link)

Turning on HDR mode no longer makes the screen colors wrong when using Night Color (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.0.5. Link)

Screens using fractional scale factors no longer get a weird row of pixels on the bottom edge that are held to the color of previously opened windows (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.0.5. Link)

Fixed several Plasma crashes that were introduced by porting some custom drag-and-drop code to the upstream Qt thing, but turns out to not be suitable for our purposes. Reverting to our custom code fixes the crashes (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 6.1, Link 1 and link 2)

When Chromium-based browsers are running in native Wayland mode, dragging and dropping files into websites no longer makes them freeze and crash. This was a complicated bug largely caused by Chromium doing something unusual, but KWin now handles it properly (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Visiting System Settings’ File Search page no longer sometimes causes a long hang when the file indexer is under heavy load (Janet Blackquill, Frameworks 6.3. Link)

If for some reason you want to use the Kickoff application launcher to search for a single character, close Kickoff, and then do the same thing again, the second search will now show results as expected (Alexander Lohnau, Frameworks 6.3. Link)

KSvg items and Kirigami.Icon used in Plasma now re-color re-colorable SVG images in the expected way when they’re displayed in Plasma irrespective of color scheme. This makes the CatWalk cat look correct while using a mixed light/dark global theme like Breeze Twilight (Marco Martin, Frameworks 6.3. Link):

Other bug information of note:

…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

The KDE organization has become important in the world, and your time and labor have helped to bring it there! But as we grow, it’s going to be equally important that this stream of labor be made sustainable, which primarily means paying for it. Right now the vast majority of KDE runs on labor not paid for by KDE e.V. (the nonprofit foundation behind KDE, of which I am a board member), and that’s a problem. We’ve taken steps to change this with paid technical contractors—but those steps are small due to growing but still limited financial resources. If you’d like to help change that, consider donating today!

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!

Friday, 17 May 2024

MarkNote 1.2 🔗

Carl Schwan CarlSchwan 16:15 +00:00
RSS

The MarkNote team is happy to announce the 1.2 release of MarkNote, KDE’s WYSIWYG note-taking application. Marknote lets you create rich text notes and easily organise them into notebooks. You can personalise your notebooks by choosing an icon and accent color for each one, making it easy to distinguish between them and keep your notes at your fingertips. Your notes are saved as Markdown files in your Documents folder, making it easy to use your notes outside of Marknote as well as inside the app.

Notes management

This releases brings highly wanted features like the ability to choose a custom folder where to store your notes. Mathis Brüchert also added the ability to change the sorting of notes from alphabetically to by date.

Mathis made the sidebar collapsable and added a focus mode where everything but the editing page is displayed.

Finally if you prefer to just use Marknote as a Markdown editor, we made it possible to just open any markdown files directly from the file browser or the console. Additionally Marknote supports markdown files with a so called front matter, which is a common way to inject metadata to markdown in static website generators like Hugo and Jekyll.

Editing

In term of edition support, the subset of markdown supported increased again. Now it is possible to add and edit tables.

 

Additionally we started transforming inline markdown directly to rich text as you type. Support is limited to a few markdown constructs but is likely to grow over time.

You can now customize the font used by editor.

 

Aside from being able to edit text, it’s now possible to also create sketches directly from MarkNote.

 

Mobile Support

Mathis took care of ensuring MarkNote was fully usable when used with Plasma Mobile.

Windows and macOS support

Marknote now provides nightly builds for Windows and macOS. While the Windows builds should be fully usable, the macOS build still has an issue where most icons are not displayed. This should be fixed as soon as we can make use of the new KIconTheme version.

As part of the work to improve the macOS support, Marknote also gained global menu support for Linux.

Others

  • The command bar will show translated shortcuts. (Laurent Montel)
  • Unify spelling of MarkNote and fix typos in the README.md (Jonah Brüchert)

Get Involved

Mathis created a Matrix channel for MarkNote: #marknote:kde.org. There is also still a lot of small improvements that can be done everywhere and which don’t require a lot of programming experience. Take a look at these two tasks !31 and !27 for some inspiration on what you could work on.

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-20.


Password cracking: past, present, future

Tags: tech, security

Ever wondered about the state of the art in password cracking? This is not an easy read but a good reference.

https://www.openwall.com/presentations/OffensiveCon2024-Password-Cracking/


Beyond public key encryption – A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering

Tags: tech, cryptography

There are other cryptography schemes out there with interesting properties. Too bad they’re not very much used.

https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2017/07/02/beyond-public-key-encryption/


SSD death, tricky read-only filesystems, and systemd magic?

Tags: tech, system, hardware, failure

Strange things do happen when the hardware fails… indeed the systemd open question at the end is mysterious.

https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2024/05/15/ro/


The new APT 3.0 solver | Blog of Julian Andres Klode

Tags: tech, debian, packaging

Interesting work. This is nice to see improvements and experiments in dependency solvers for package managers.

https://blog.jak-linux.org/2024/05/14/solver3/


Extensions for GNU Make

Tags: tech, tools, make

Looks like nice extensions to use GNU Make to run simple tasks.

https://github.com/mitjafelicijan/makext


Which filepath-join behavior is implemented for relative and absolute paths as arguments?

Tags: tech, system, filesystem

You expect joining file paths to be a simple operation? Think again, it’s definitely error prone and can change between stacks.

https://lukas-prokop.at/articles/2024-05-03-filepath-join-behavior


What even is a pidfd anyway?

Tags: tech, processes, system, linux

Definitely a recent and lesser known to interact with other processes. Could be useful in some cases.

https://www.corsix.org/content/what-is-a-pidfd


An informal comparison of the three major implementations of std::string - The Old New Thing

Tags: tech, c++, performance, memory

Interesting quick comparison, this shows the design tradeoffs quite well.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20240510-00/?p=109742


GPUs Go Brrr · Hazy Research

Tags: tech, gpu, hardware, ai, machine-learning, neural-networks, performance

Interesting how much extra performance you can shave off the GPU by going back to how the hardware works.

https://hazyresearch.stanford.edu/blog/2024-05-12-tk


Sir, there’s a cat in your mirror dimension

Tags: tech, graphics, mathematics, funny

Funny experiment playing with the frequency domain and the spatial domain of an image. This gives unintuitive results for sure.

https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/sir-theres-a-cat-in-your-mirror-dimension


Snapshot Testing For the Masses

Tags: tech, tests, snapshots

This is a technique which is definitely underestimated. There are plenty of libraries out there allowing to use them.

https://tigerbeetle.com/blog/2024-05-14-snapshot-testing-for-the-masses


Laurence Tratt: What Factors Explain the Nature of Software?

Tags: tech, programming, software, craftsmanship, engineering

Good food for thought. Explains quite well the factors which impact software development.

https://tratt.net/laurie/blog/2024/what_factors_explain_the_nature_of_software.html



Bye for now!

Tuesday, 14 May 2024

KDE e.V., the non-profit organisation supporting the KDE community, is looking for a graphic designer to implement materials (print design, logo design, infographics, etc.) for a new environmental sustainability campaign within KDE Eco. Please see the job ad for more details about this employment opportunity.

We are looking forward to your application.

Monday, 13 May 2024

So this is not quite an introduction since the plugin has been around for almost a year now, having been released in the 23.04 release but since I never got around to writing a blog about it, here I am.

In simple words, the formatting plugin allows one to format code easily and quickly. Well the "quickness" depends on the underlying code formatter but we try to be as quick as possible. So far if you wanted to do code formatting from within Kate, the only way to do that was to configure a tool in the External Tools plugin and then invoke it whenever you wanted to format the code. While this works it wasn't great for a few reasons. Firstly, you would loose undo history. Secondly, the buffer would jump and you would most likely loose your current position in the document. Thirdly, for every language you get a different tool and you need to remember the right tool to invoke on the right document type.

To simplify this, I decided to write a plugin that would expose a minimal UI but still provide a lot of features.

There are basically two ways to use this plugin:

  • Manually using the "Format Document" action.
  • Automatically on save

The correct formatter is invoked based on the document type in all cases. Additionally the plugin will preserve the document's undo history and user's cursor position when formatting the code so that the formatting of code doesn't disrupt user's workflow. This is especially important for automatic formatting on save.

Supported languages:

The current list of supported languages and formatters are as follows:

  • C/C++/ObjectiveC/ObjectiveC++/Protobuf
    • clang-format
  • Javascript/Typescript/JSX/TSX
    • Prettier
  • Json
    • clang-format
    • Prettier
    • jq
  • Dart
    • dartfmt
  • Rust
    • rustfmt
  • XML
    • xmllint
  • Go
    • gofmt
  • Zig
    • zigfmt
  • CMake
    • cmake-format
  • Pythong
    • autopep8
    • ruff

Configuring

The plugin can be configured in two ways:

  • Globally, from the Configure dialog
  • On a per project basis using the .kateproject file

When reading the config, the plugin will first try to read the config from .kateproject file and then read the global config.

Example:

{
 "formatOnSave": true,
 "formatterForJson": "jq",
 "cmake-format": {
 "formatOnSave": false
 },
 "autopep8": {
 "formatOnSave": false
 }
}

The above

  • enables "format on save" globally
  • specifies "jq" as the formatter for JSON
  • disables "format on save" for cmake-format and autopep8

To configure formatting for a project, first create a .kateproject file and then add a "formatting" object to it. In the "formatting" object you can specify your settings as shown in the previous example. Example:

{
 "name": "My Cool Project",
 "files": [
 {
 "git": 1
 }
 ],
 "formatting": {
 "formatterForJson": "clang-format",
 "autopep8": {
 "formatOnSave": false
 }
 }
}

A few weeks ago I attended the KDE Goals April 2024 sprint

I was there as part of the Automation & Systematization sprint given my involvement in the release process, the "not very automatized" weekly emails about the status of CI about KDE Gear and KDE Frameworks, etc. but I think that maybe I was there more as "person that has been around a long time, ask me if you have questions about things that are documented through oral tradition"

I didn't end up doing lots of work on sprint topics themselves (though I participated in various discussions, did a bit of pair-programming with Aleix on QML accessibility issues, inspired DavidR to do the QML-text-missing-i18n check that he describes in his blog); instead I cheated a bit and used the sprint to focus on some of the KDE stuff I had a bit on my backlog, creating the KDE Gear release/24.05 branches and lots of MR reviewing and more!

Group photo

Thanks KDE e.V. for sponsoring the trip, if you would like such events to continue please we need your continued donations

And remember Akademy talk submission period ends in 10 days, send your talk now!

A new revision of digiKam Recipes is available for your reading pleasure. The new version covers the auto tagging feature introduced in digiKam 8.3 and explains how to run digiKam in a container. If you bought the book through Gumroad, you’ll find the new revision in the Library section. The book purchased through Google Play should be updated automatically to the latest version. If you have problems getting the latest revision of the book, contact the author at dmpop@cameracode.

Sunday, 12 May 2024

The Kubuntu Team are thrilled to announce significant updates to KubuQA, our streamlined ISO testing tool that has now expanded its capabilities beyond Kubuntu to support Ubuntu and all its other flavors. With these enhancements, KubuQA becomes a versatile resource that ensures a smoother, more intuitive testing process for upcoming releases, including the 24.04 Noble Numbat and the 24.10 Oracular Oriole.

What is KubuQA?

KubuQA is a specialized tool developed by the Kubuntu Team to simplify the process of ISO testing. Utilizing the power of Kdialog for user-friendly graphical interfaces and VirtualBox for creating and managing virtual environments, KubuQA allows testers to efficiently evaluate ISO images. Its design focuses on accessibility, making it easy for testers of all skill levels to participate in the development process by providing clear, guided steps for testing ISOs.

New Features and Extensions

The latest update to KubuQA marks a significant expansion in its utility:

  • Broader Coverage: Initially tailored for Kubuntu, KubuQA now supports testing ISO images for Ubuntu and all other Ubuntu flavors. This broadened coverage ensures that any Ubuntu-based community can benefit from the robust testing framework that KubuQA offers.
  • Support for Latest Releases: KubuQA has been updated to include support for the newest Ubuntu release cycles, including the 24.04 Noble Numbat and the upcoming 24.10 Oracular Oriole. This ensures that communities can start testing early and often, leading to more stable and polished releases.
  • Enhanced User Experience: With improvements to the Kdialog interactions, testers will find the interface more intuitive and responsive, which enhances the overall testing experience.

Call to Action for Ubuntu Flavor Leads

The Kubuntu Team is keen to collaborate closely with leaders and testers from all Ubuntu flavors to adopt and adapt KubuQA for their testing needs. We believe that by sharing this tool, we can foster a stronger, more cohesive testing community across the Ubuntu ecosystem.

We encourage flavor leads to try out KubuQA, integrate it into their testing processes, and share feedback with us. This collaboration will not only improve the tool but also ensure that all Ubuntu flavors can achieve higher quality and stability in their releases.

Getting Involved

For those interested in getting involved with ISO testing using KubuQA:

  • Download the Tool: You can find KubuQA on the Kubuntu Team Github.
  • Join the Community: Engage with the Kubuntu community for support and to connect with other testers. Your contributions and feedback are invaluable to the continuous improvement of KubuQA.

Conclusion

The enhancements to KubuQA signify our commitment to improving the quality and reliability of Ubuntu and its derivatives. By extending its coverage and simplifying the testing process, we aim to empower more contributors to participate in the development cycle. Whether you’re a seasoned tester or new to the community, your efforts are crucial to the success of Ubuntu.

We look forward to seeing how different communities will utilise KubuQA to enhance their testing practices. And by the way, have you thought about becoming a member of the Kubuntu Community? Join us today to make a difference in the world of open-source software!

Saturday, 11 May 2024

In this rather lengthy post I talk a bit about the current issues with icons for the KDE applications I work on or use.

Let’s start with looking at what I mean with KDE applications and what the current state is, up to KDE Frameworks 6.2 and current KDE Gear 24.02. Then let’s see what will be improved in future releases.

What do I mean with ‘KDE Applications’
#

If I speak about ‘KDE Applications’ here I talk about applications like Kate, Dolphin, Okular and others like that.

This means applications developed with Qt and KDE Frameworks that integrate well with the KDE Plasma desktop but are not restricted to it.

Many of this applications not just aim to work well on Linux & BSD or other open source operating systems but are ported and working well on the rather different Windows and macOS desktop. Some even are successful since years in the official Windows Store.

The above applications are part of the KDE Gear releases, but the described issues and solutions naturally are not restricted to stuff released with that.

What most of these applications have in common is that they rely on rather large parts of our Frameworks. With that they depend at least indirectly on an icon set that covers large parts of what our default icon set Breeze provides. Even if you use no icons from that icon set yourself in your application, just using the standard actions or many widgets/dialogs from Frameworks will rely on some subset of Breeze.

Current State of Icons per Desktop or Platform
#

When talking about the current situation of icons that depends largely on the desktop or platform you are running the KDE application on.

Let’s take a look at some (I for sure miss some that are common or loved, that doesn’t mean I disregard them, I just want to limit the scope).

KDE Plasma on Linux/BSD with Wayland/X11
#

If you just aim to run on the KDE Plasma desktop with your Qt and KDE Frameworks based application, all is fine with icons, there is no problem.

The KDE project did their job, at least for Kate I never did have any issues with icons on Plasma.

Below a screenshot of Kate 24.02 running on Plasma 6. All icons are there, they are properly re-colored for the dark theme, too, including not just the used Breeze icons but for example the small Git icons in the left sidebar that Kate has bundled.

This is the vanilla state each user will get if Kate is installed on Plasma (and the dark theme is used). There are no patches done during building to achieve that nor is there any extra user configuration necessary.

Microsoft Windows
#

If you run Kate on Windows, the icon situation is good, too, if you use our Windows Store variant or get at build done via Craft.

See below what the current nightly of Kate looks like in some Windows 11 VM (I just started it from the unpacked ZIP, no setup needed).

In the Craft build descriptions we do some patches to ensure the Breeze icons are bundled as library and the application links with that. In addition we ensure with some more patching that our own icon engine is used to allow for the proper recoloring.

If you don’t do that patching you will end up with close to no icons or for dark theme black on black icons.

Apple’s macOS
#

The situation on macOS is the same as on Windows.

If you go with a Craft build of Kate, you will end up with something like below.

All icons are there and even application provided icons like our Git one are properly recolored.

Without the Craft patches Kate has more or less no icons like on Windows.

Haiku
#

After covering Plasma and the two large closed-source desktop operating systems, as a small excursion, look how Kate (the KF5 based version) looks if installed on Haiku with the package they provide.

Kate looks ok, system icons intermixed with Breeze as fallback icons.

GNOME
#

For testing this, I installed the latest Fedora Workstation in a VM. I have done no user configuration beside what the installer and initial setup wizard asked and then just installed the Kate package. The shell was even helpful to ask to do that after you just tried to start the not installed Kate.

Most icons not there, not that nice. For details about that read this post, we don’t need to re-iterate this again.

If you think: that is just Kate, let us just try Okular.

One thing that can be at least solved easily is that the icons are gone, we just install the Breeze icon set as package.

Looks ok, system icons intermixed with Breeze as fallback icons just like on Haiku. Not stylish but usable.

I was unable to trigger Kate or Okular to adjust to the dark mode GNOME provides, therefore I can not test if we end up with black on black icons there, but it is likely, as the fallback is just Breeze.

MATE
#

Kate and Dolphin 24.02 on MATE with dark mode on NixOS, normal system packages, Breeze icons is installed.

System icons intermixed with Breeze as fallback icons, looks not that nice. Breeze icons not readable, as recoloring is not working.

Xfce
#

Kate and Dolphin 24.02 on Xfce with dark mode on NixOS, normal system packages, Breeze icons is installed.

Same mix and unreadable state as on MATE.

Enlightenment
#

Kate 24.02 on Enlightenment with dark mode on NixOS, normal system packages, Breeze icons is installed.

Just unreadable icons, beside out own Git icon and the few colored ones.

Summary: What’s up with Icons today
#

The icons in KDE applications do look perfect on KDE Plasma. That should be no real surprise as many people working on these applications will test them there and KDE Frameworks and Qt are well tested on Plasma, too.

The icons look fine on Windows and macOS, too, at least for applications that got properly ported, but only thanks to patches we do in Craft. If you just grab e.g. Kate’s and the needed frameworks sources from our normal repositories, you don’t get that.

If the maintainers of the port for some OS do care, like the Haiku people, KDE applications can look fine there.

On other desktop environments it doesn’t look that great out of the box.

Unlike for the other operating systems, there the same packages without extra patches are running.

Whereas that works perfect on Plasma, we rely too much that the desktop environment running provides an icon set that has a similar coverage and naming as Breeze. As we don’t hard depend on the Breeze icons for our applications, it can even happen that just no fitting icons are there per default.

Even if that can be solved with some better package dependencies, you still end up with a patchwork look and without a Qt platform theme plugin that handles the needed recoloring to make dark mode feasible.

Getting it fixed
#

Fortunately, just because the status quo is not that nice, it must not stay that way.

We have more or less all needed parts to fix the situation, we did already fix it during the porting to Windows and macOS.

We just never pushed to get this stuff done on Linux and Co.

How did we solve it there?

  • We have the Breeze icon set as Qt resource inside a library and link with that. That makes them a hard build and runtime dependency and easy to deploy.
  • We ensure the icon engine we have in our KIconThemes framework is there and used.
  • We enforce the Breeze Qt style. (this is not really icon related, but ensures an usable look’n’feel, too)

The first and the last thing are easy to do on Linux and Co., too, even with still allowing the user to override the icon set and style, but still defaulting to Breeze.

The second point is harder, as that requires at the moment a few hacks and is not 100% as good as going the Qt platform theme plugin route we use inside Plasma.

For KDE Frameworks 6.3 we worked to get that done.

See our meta issue on our GitLab instance covering that topic.

All is not perfect, we will need to get some Qt API to fully do that, but the current state is already usable.

Here a comparison with the state as we have it now in our released software compared to with the state in the current master branch on an Cinnamon desktop.

The left side is the current Kate 24.02, the right side the current master build of Kate with master Frameworks.

The hard dependency to the Breeze icon library is done in KIconThemes, if you link to that, you are guaranteed that you have Breeze icons. You can naturally just link to only the Breeze icon library on your own.

The ensuring that the proper icon engine is done with some new API in KIconThemes that application developers must opt-in for. The same for the Qt style setup, there we have API in KConfigWidgets.

For Kate the concrete changes can be found here. They are minimal and even remove some platform specific code for the style setup.

Including fallback code for pre 6.3 Frameworks compatibility of the style setting, the basic idea is:

#include <KIconTheme>

#define HAVE_STYLE_MANAGER __has_include(<KStyleManager>)
#if HAVE_STYLE_MANAGER
#include <KStyleManager>
#endif

int main(...)
{
    /**
     * trigger initialisation of proper icon theme
     */
#if KICONTHEMES_VERSION >= QT_VERSION_CHECK(6, 3, 0)
    KIconTheme::initTheme();
#endif

    QApplication yourAppInstance(...);

#if HAVE_STYLE_MANAGER
    /**
     * trigger initialisation of proper application style
     */
    KStyleManager::initStyle();
#else
    /**
     * For Windows and macOS: use Breeze if available
     * Of all tested styles that works the best for us
     */
#if defined(Q_OS_MACOS) || defined(Q_OS_WIN)
    QApplication::setStyle(QStringLiteral("breeze"));
#endif
#endif

    ...
}

In the long run, once 6.3 is the minimal version the application depends on, this is just:

#include <KIconTheme>
#include <KStyleManager>

int main(...)
{
    /**
     * trigger initialisation of proper icon theme
     */
    KIconTheme::initTheme();

    QApplication yourAppInstance(...);

    /**
     * trigger initialisation of proper application style
     */
    KStyleManager::initStyle();

    ...
}

At the moment KIconTheme::initTheme() is still a bit hacky until we have proper Qt API, but that is not visible for the API user.

If we get this properly done in our applications, that will not just solve the current issue for running them in other desktop environments.

With that API in use and the now already upstreamed patches, one can build vanilla Frameworks and Kate on Windows and macOS and the icons will just work in the resulting application bundles and you get an usable style out of the box if Breeze is there.

Help Wanted!
#

We have now some API to help our applications to be more usable on non-Plasma installations and Windows and macOS.

We still need to make use of it and we need to improve the implementation and upstream to Qt the needed extra API to make it a real 100% replacement to what we do with the Plasma integration plugin.

If you have time to help us, show up on our meta issue.

Not just coding is needed, we for example have still a few icons that don’t recolor well, help to fix that is wanted, too.

Feedback
#

You can provide feedback on the matching KDE Social or reddit post.

Hello Planet KDE! I will be participating in Google Summer of Code this year adding Python support to a subset of the KDE Frameworks. You can follow my progress on this blog.