KDE Stopmotion release 0.9.0 ported to Qt6

Sunday, 25 May 2025  |  Gruenich

Being the workhorse for more than a decade, it took me by surprise that Qt 5 is going to run out of support tomorrow. Honestly, Qt 6 was released in late 2020 and I prefer using modern code bases that use features from the C++17 and C++20 standards. So, no reason to hold me back.

I am pleased to announce the release of KDE Stopmotion 0.9.0. It consist of the Qt 6 port and has no additional features or bug fixes. Quite boring, it does not even look nicer or different at all. Many thanks to Florian Satzger and Mark Penner for helping with the port when I got stuck.

Behind the curtain, we use KDE CI templates for the build pipeline, increased the minimum required version numbers for Qt, CMake and C++, and some minor warnings got fixed. We are back using semantic versioning. New features are added with an increased minor version number. Increased patch numbers are for bug fixes only.

Adding sound does not work properly, this is a known bug.

You can create the tar ball using the 0.9.0 Git tag.

Get involved!

I was super happy to receive help with the Qt 6 port. It is so cool to work with strangers and achieve so much. Being united by the desire to create powerful software, is a strong motivation.

I am desperately looking for more people to get involved in KDE Stopmotion. If you are looking for a place to make a contribution, consider it! Some areas for contributors come to my mind:

  • Use more modern libraries to grab the images from cameras. We have several options and some of these are unmaintained for years. Adding more recent options would be great.
  • Starting with integration into KDE's software stack. Stopmotion is still in the incubation phase. The software uses Qt but not KDE frameworks or other things from the ecosystem like handling the translations or a neat integration of the documentation.
  • Improving our test automation would be great.
  • The code base is 20 years old. Some C++ patterns used in the code might no longer be the best choice and a replacement with C++20 code might improve the quality.