Every year the KDE Community actively helps people to become active community members and contributors to Free Software through our Season of KDE mentorship programs.
We would like to warmly welcome this year's mentees Aviral Singh, Keshav Nanda, Vishesh Srivastava, Varun Sajith Dass, Aditya Sarna, Jaimukund Bhan, Navya Sai Sadu, Kumud Sagar, Arun Rawat, Tanish Kumar, Ajay Singh, Mohit Mishra, Rohith Vinod, Shivang K Raghuvanshi, Onat Ribar, Hrishikesh Gohain, Aryan Rai, Advaith SK, CJ Nguyen, Siddharth Chopra, Nitin Pandey, Pavan Kumar S G, Sayandeep Dutta, Sairam Bisoyi, and J Shiva Shankar. They will be working on 21 projects covering a wide range of apps, frameworks, utilities and software in general to improve KDE.
Translators work on PO files that contain the translation data, including the file path to the file that the specific translation comes from. To understand the purpose of a particular string, sometimes the translators need to view the translatable strings in the code itself. To allow KDE to build tooling around the paths, the PO files must be standardised so that all contain file path references relative to the project root rather than from an arbitrary directory.
This work has been started already but will be finished during this SOK project. Aviral Singh and Keshav Nanda will work under the guidance of Finley Watson on edge cases, testing and cleaning up the merge requests ready for merging. They will also improve the test script.
All Lokalize projects will be mentored by Finley Watson.
Vishesh Srivastava will be integrating Appium testing in Lokalize. Appium is already used by other KDE software, and could be very helpful for testing UI changes, including keyboard shortcuts. This task will include coordinating with other mentees as they modify parts of the UI, as well as writing other general tests.
Varun Sajith Dass will work on fixing reported bugs, and improving string processing in many parts of Lokalize. Varun's aim is to increase the robustness of Lokalize's existing features, improve the quality of the output, and make following the Human Interface Guidelines easier for translators. This work will require coordination with other mentees e.g. for writing tests. Varun also aims to make it possible to build Lokalize on MacOS by fixing bugs related to this.
The glossary tab in Lokalize is unintuitive and hard to use, and currently crashes Lokalize unless you manually add the file that saves the glossary data to disk. Aditya Sarna and Jaimukund Bhan will update the UI so that it is easier to use, improve the glossary's behaviour, fix bugs and better follow the Human Interface Guidelines. They will work with the translators and visual designers to ensure their work follow KDE best practices and creates meaningful improvements.
The editor tab contains a dock widget called "Translation Units" which has the ability to filter and sort entries in translation files with the search bar. Moving between entries while approving them by using the shortcut jumps about in the list, rather than working down the sorted list correctly, one after another. Navya Sai Sadu and Kumud Sagar will be working together to fix this so the keyboard shortcut behaves as expected.
The translation memory tab allows you to pick a TM (saved translation pairs from previous translation jobs / files) to search through, and shows the results in the list below. Arun Rawat will be redesigning the UI to enable searching multiple memories at once, with these settings saved per-project. Additionally, the Translation memories manager will be merged into the tab instead of existing separately e.g. by moving TM-specific entries into the right-click menu, and adding more general buttons into the TM tab page, or the toolbar that is specific to the TM tab.
Lokalize uses a KDE framework, KXMLGUI, to manage its menubar and status bar. In Lokalize, KXMLGUI allows you to define the contents of the menubar for each tab. Right now the tabs have different ordering of menus with some menus missing in certain tabs.
Tanish Kumar will re-design the menubar so all tabs to offer the same menubar. Where a tab does not use a menu, the menu will be added, with menu options disabled.
All Lokalize projects will be mentored by Finley Watson.
KDE’s documentation build pipeline currently relies on a legacy, copy-pasted fork of
dblatex embedded inside the docs-kde-org repository. While functional, this setup
obscures Git history, complicates upgrades, and makes KDE-specific customizations such as kdestyle
difficult to understand and maintain.
Ajay Singh, under Johnny Jazeix guidance, will investigate the possibility of using other tools than dblatex (such as pandoc) to create the pdf from docbook. The aim is to see if it fixes the current issues we have with non-supported non-ascii languages. And if there is a working alternative, he will work on trying to have a similar style to what we currently have in the kdestyle.
we are currently reworking the documentation website. The first task was to generate the documentation of each repo in a specific job.
Mohit Mishra will work on extracting the dblatex from the code into its own repo (keeping the history) and finding out if we can directly clone the original repository instead of having a fork.
Mentored by Johnny Jazeix, the overall goal is to try to use the upstream dblatex (shipped in distributions) to generate the pdf, experiment with XeTeX PDF generation engine instead of pdfTeX to create PDF for non supported non-ascii languages (Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean...). If we can't improve it, extract dblatex fork on a specific repo to ease the maintenance`
Okular supports PDF annotations and form-filling. When a user adds text to a document, Okular must ensure that the text remains readable on any system irrespective of whether the font is installed locally or not. Hence the font data is directly embedded into the document using the PDF rendering library Poppler.
The problem arises due to the lack of proper font subsetting (as Poppler does not support this). Modern OpenType and TrueType fonts contain thousands of glyphs for various languages and symbols.
Okular approaches this by embedding the entire font file into the document. This causes an undesirably large file size due to all the extra unused glyphs/symbols being embedded.
Rohith Vinod and Shivang K. Raghuvanshi, under Albert Astals' supervision, will work on
solving this problem using the hb-subset-input-glyph-set API.
Plasma Setup is KDE's first run setup wizard, providing a friendly way to create the first user account and configure basic system settings. Unfortunately it only works on desktop form factors
Under Kristen McWilliam's guidance,Onat Ribar will work on supporting Plasma Setup for Plasma Mobile as well.
Recent updates in the lab mean that X11-based emulation tools like xdotool are obsolete. Guided by Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss, Karanjot Singh, and Aakarsh MJ, Hrishikesh Gohain will be tasked with porting existing scripts to a Wayland-based tool. Once Wayland support is ready, Hrishikesh will prepare test scripts to measure the KDE Plasma Desktop Environment itself.
mentorship.kde.org currently looks like a website, but does not behave like an onboarding system. Aryan Rai and Advaith SK will be required to convert the site into a guided entry point for KDE mentorship.
Anish Tak and Paul Brown will be guiding Aryan and Advaith throughout the project.
Promo collects data from different sources that measure how our followship grows, how many outlets are talking about us, what is our level engagement, etc. This information is currently collected by hand and is a massive time drain. CJ Nguyen, mentored by Paul Brown, will create systems to automate the collection, storage and analysis of this data.
Siddharth Chopra will be adding two editors to MarkNote, an app that lets you create rich text notes and easily organise them into notebooks. The first editor is a raw markdown editor for .md files and a plain text editor for .txt files.
Siddharth also plans to work on making some improvements to the current markdown editor.
Carl Schwan will be Siddharth's mentor in this project.
In this project, Avyakt Jain aims to activate Cantor’s existing testing infrastructure in a low-risk, incremental, maintainer-friendly way by (1) producing a clear, factual overview of current test coverage and gaps, (2) enabling a minimal, MR-scoped CI test job that provides visible JUnit-based feedback, and (3) improving reproducibility and documentation for running tests locally. The expected outcome is faster, more reliable feedback for maintainers and contributors, without enforcing new quality gates or changing Cantor’s runtime behavior.
Alexander Semke and Stefan Gerlach will be supervising Avyakt's work.
Nitin Pandey will be working on improving telephony integration in KDE Connect by implementing call log synchronization and backup from Android devices to the desktop. Instead of creating a separate desktop client for call history, the project will integrate call logs directly into the existing KDE Connect SMS client on the desktop, providing a unified communication view.
Albert Vaca will be mentoring this project.
Pavan Kumar S G will speed up MankalaEngine by enabling it to use threads, Pavan Kumar SG will also create artwork to be used in the Mankala NextGen GUI.
This project will receive guidance from Benson Muite and Srisharan VS.
Sayandeep Dutta will improve the visual appeal of Mankala NextGen GUI and contribute towards it going through KDE Review. In addition, Tamil translations will be created for MankalaEngine and Mankala NextGen.
Srisharan VS and Benson Muite will support this project.
Sairam Bisoyi will create a Falkon extension to allow it to be used for chat using the XMPP protocol and its WebXDC extension..
The project advisors are Schimon Jehudah, Juraj Oravec and Benson Muite.
J Shiva Shankar will add the Vamana Guntalu mancala game to MankalaEngine. J Shiva Shankar will also create a Falkon extension to allow synchronization of website bookmarks across different devices using the XMPP protocol in a WebXDC application.
The project advisors are Schimon Jehudah, Juraj Oravec and Benson Muite.
You will be able to follow the progress of all mentees through their blog posts on KDE's planet, and by joining the relevant project communication channels.
Welcome to a new issue of "This Week in KDE Apps"! Every week (or so) we cover as much as possible of what's happening in the world of KDE apps.
With January well under way, the news regarding KDE apps is coming thick and fast. Let's dig in!
Tobias Fella added an option for remembering the signing/encryption configuration from the last operation (26.04.0 - pim/kleopatra MR #427).
Florian Richer fixed some issues with the identity configuration dialog (26.04.0 - pim/kidentitymanagement MR #40).
Mickael Sergent released Calligra Plan 4.0.0 — the first version of Calligra Plan built with Qt 6! Also thanks to all packagers who fixed and modernized some of the CMake code after the release.
Siddharth Chopra fixed the the font selection dialog (1.4.0 - office/marknote MR #82).
Laurent Montel added support for drawing filled rectangles (graphics/drawy MR #216) and arrows (graphics/drawy MR #199), as well as changing the opacity of elements (graphics/drawy MR #205).
Abdias J Moya Perez implemented a fixed centered playhead mode for the timeline. When enabled, the playhead remains locked at the center of the timeline view while the timeline content scrolls smoothly beneath it during playback, scrubbing, and seeking (multimedia/kdenlive MR #785).
Noah Davis added a floating zoom bar (26.04.0 - graphics/koko MR #253).
Nate Graham removed two unnecessary buttons that appeared when hovering over songs in the playlist (26.04.0 - multimedia/elisa MR #737).
Sahil Verma added support for importing user templates from local folders, which can then be used to generate files from specific templates (26.04.0 - utilities/kate MR #1969).
Joshua Goins split up the Permissions settings for rooms, because the members list (with lots of moderators) tended to dominate the page. He also moved the search bar for members to the top, and re-organized various permissions into more suitable groups.
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Joshua also added a "Seen By" dialog to allow you to view the read markers in something that isn't extremely small!
Another new and useful feature introduced by Joshua is private notes. Someone has a confusing username and you can't remember who they are? Need to jot down their birthday or keep track of the bad jokes they keep telling you? 😛 Since this isn't standardized between clients, it's only available in NeoChat. But on the flipside, it will sync between NeoChat on different computers.
And regarding safety-related changes, there were a few small additions too. Joshua added a new helpful dialog where you can view your server's support information in-app if available. It also wasn't clear where reports are sent to, which has caused confusion.
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Finally, Joshua also fixed a lot of small bugs all over the place. You can read his Mastodon thread to learn more!
Darshan Phaldesai made some nice visual changes to the reaction buttons: now they use rounded rectangles instead of circles, and their text is more legible.
The Kaidan team released Kaidan 0.14.0. This release introduces advanced media sharing, filtering of XMPP providers when creating an account, support for XMPP URIs, and more.
You can see more details at the announcement post.
Additionally, Melvin Keskin added support for audio/video calls (network/kaidan MR #1472).
Stephan Seitz made sure that the sample commands provided by KDE Connect for the "Run Commands" plugin are OS-specific (26.04.0 - network/kdeconnect-kde MR #897).
Thomas Friedrichsmeier made some progress in adding support for Quarto files (education/rkward MR #73).
Sandro Andrade ported Minuet to Kirigami (26.04.0 - education/minuet MR #54).
Thanks to Akseli Lahtinen, binary files and scripts are now executable from the context menu (KDE Frameworks 6.23 – frameworks/kio MR #2113).
xi ota has added the option to always show the tab bar (24.04.0 – system/dolphin MR #1152).
Klaas Freitag presented version 2.0 of Kraft this week. Kraft is a business tool that helps you keep track of payments as well as creating quotes, invoices, and other business-related documents.
Version 2.0 is easier to install, implements a legal document life cycle from draft to finalized, comes with better PDF output, makes it easier to migrate from your earlier versions, and continues to protect your privacy as it integrates well with your own Nextcloud or OpenCloud instances.
Manuel Alcaraz Zambrano added a bye editor to Chessament (games/chessament MR #39). What's a "bye editor"? Learn about Bye on this Wikipedia page.
This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! If you’re hungry for more, check out This Week in Plasma, which covers all the work being put into KDE's Plasma desktop environment every Saturday.
For a complete overview of what's going on, visit KDE's Planet, where you can find all KDE news unfiltered directly from our contributors.
The KDE organization has become important in the world, and your time and contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we're going to need your support for KDE to become sustainable.
You can help KDE by becoming an active community member and getting involved. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE — you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to be a programmer either. There are many things you can do: you can help hunt and confirm bugs, even maybe solve them; contribute designs for wallpapers, web pages, icons and app interfaces; translate messages and menu items into your own language; promote KDE in your local community; and a ton more things.
You can also help us by donating. Any monetary contribution, however small, will help us cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors and in general just keep KDE bringing Free Software to the world.
To get your application mentioned here, please ping us in invent or in Matrix.
Extended Security Maintenance Is Now Available
In the Qt Company's R&D organization we have made it a tradition to start the year with a Hackathon where anyone can work on anything they find interesting. It's a great opportunity to work on or with something else than usual, to try out new technologies, or to generally scratch whatever might have been itching. We started with a pitching session the week before so that people that are looking for inspiration or projects to join know what's on the buffet. And then on Wednesday morning we kicked off the hacking, giving everyone two full days to work on their project before the presentations on Friday noon.
The Amarok Development Squad is happy to announce the immediate availability of Amarok 3.3.2, the second bugfix release for Amarok 3.3 "Far Above the Clouds"!
3.3.2 features a number of small improvements, including various small behaviour changes and bugfixes in e.g. user interface, audio backend and saving of playlist files. Additionally, 'added to collection' date, which previously was available in collection search only, is now displayed in track's details in tag dialog. KDE Framework depedency is now set at version 6.5, which was released in mid-2024. All in all, Amarok 3.3.2 should bring improved usability and stability, ensuring you can keep enjoying your music in 2026.
In addition to source code, Amarok is available for installation from many distributions' package repositories, which are likely to get updated to 3.3.2 soon, as well as the flatpak available on flathub.
You can find the tarball package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with Tuomas Nurmi's GPG key.
Last weekend I attended a rather spontaneous Transitous Hack Weekend in Berlin, again hosted at Wikimedia’s WikiBär.
Data about current and planned future elevator outages is becoming available in a standardized format (SIRI SX and SIRI FM), in Germany and Switzerland at least. That’s crucial information especially for wheelchair routing, and MOTIS, the routing engine used by Transitous, can take this into consideration. However, it doesn’t support the SIRI format yet.
The main challenge here is identifying the affected elevator:
So far all static schedule data used by Transitous is using the GTFS format. That’s a relatively simple set of CSV files in a ZIP. There’s a another format for this though, NeTEx. It’s a vastly more complex and rather verbose XML, but it can also model a number of things that cannot be represented in GTFS so far, such as vehicle attributes.
MOTIS v2.8 added initial support for NeTEx, but due to the complexity of the format and its tendency to offer multiple different ways to model the same thing it remains a case-by-case investigation whether a specific NeTEx feed is working sufficiently well.
We looked at three feeds that seem particularly promising at this point. While using NeTEx there would give us clear benefits, all of them would also introduce regressions over the status quo that need to be addressed first.
DELFI NeTEx feed for Germany:
SNCF NeTEx feed for France:
Swiss national NeTEx feed:
While it will still take a bit of time before any of those feeds will enter production on Transitous, we have started to prepare Transitous’ import pipeline and documentation to not exclusively assume GTFS as the input format anymore.
There were plenty more topics discussed beyond those two:
For more details, also see the meeting notes.
And to end this with a screenshot, we also fixed the font rendering on the Transitous map which was missing labels in e.g. Egypt, Georgia and Thailand.
There’s several more opportunities in the upcoming weeks to meet members of the Transitous community:
There’s of course also the Transitous Matrix channel to get involved.
Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!
This week we closed the door on features for Plasma 6.6, which opened another one for those features to land in 6.7. As a result, several features were merged for Plasma 6.7, including some particularly juicy ones!
As for Plasma 6.6, this starts the one-month period where the core Plasma team focuses almost entirely on fixing bugs. As you’ll see below, we already fixed quite a few this week! So there’s a huge amount of stuff to go over, and let’s get right to it:
System Monitor now lets you set the priority of processes graphically, just like the older KSysGuard app did. (Matthieu Carteron, plasma-systemmonitor MR #381 and libksysguard MR #455)
(The lack of a darkened underlay is unintentional; we’ll get that fixed up soon.)
Added a switch to the Brightness and Color widget that lets you instantly go from light mode to dark mode (or vice versa)! (Kai Uwe Broulik, powerdevil MR #576)
(At some point we’ll add a nice cross-fade transition here, too.)
Added a global push-to-talk feature: if you set a push-to-talk key, all microphones will be muted until the specified key is held down. (Kai Uwe Broulik, Aleix Pol Gonzalez, and Shubham Arora, plasma-pa MR #394, kglobalaccel MR #41, and plasma-workspace MR #6126)
The HDR calibration wizard now temporarily disables Night Light while calibrating, to ensure that you get an accurate result. (Xaver Hugl, kscreen MR #448)
Mounting a removable disk no longer performs a file system scan by default; now this is a manual action you initiate from the expanded actions list. (Akseli Lahtinen, KDE Bug #505852)
The screen chooser dialog now includes a search/filter field so you can easily find a screen by name even when there are a zillion windows open. (Harald Sitter, xdg-desktop-portal-kde MR #506)
Kicker’s search results no longer flicker or resize while typing, keeping columns stable during searches for a smoother and snappier experience. (Christoph Wolk, plasma-desktop MR #3439)
HDR Calibrator now offers a summary page with a setting to better support Windows HDR applications and games. (Xaver Hugl, kscreen MR #443)
Replaced some technical gobbledygook in the titles of Bluetooth status and error notifications with more relevant and user-friendly text. (Nate Graham, bluedevil MR #238)
(The body text isn’t great either, but that’s also being worked on!)
If you happen to have a keyboard or other input device with “Seek Forwards” and “Seek Backwards” buttons, pressing them now works as expected out of the box. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bug #514680)
System Settings’ Game Controller, Mouse, and Touchpad pages now only appear when the devices they configure are present. (Alexander Wilms, plasma-desktop MR #3436)
Discover now shows sub-categories in its “Games” group for game launchers and game tools. (Jakob Dev, discover MR #1224)
Improved how the global edit mode works with a touchscreen. (Shubham Arora, plasma-workspace MR #6161 and plasma-desktop MR #3442)
On System Settings’ Accessibility page, the Mouse Navigation tooltip now explains how to switch mouse click modes with the numeric keypad. (Jaimukund Bhan, KDE Bug #505687)
Searching for “memory” now turns up the System Monitor app in search results. (Nicolas Fella, plasma-workspace MR #6194)
Improved the touch-friendliness of open/save dialogs. (Méven Car, KDE Bug #513606)
Improved the icon selection algorithm for missing icons so that it no longer returns downscaled versions of much larger icons, which may have a completely different style. (Alexander Wilms, KDE Bug #466678)
By default, sidebars and left edge drawers in Kirigami-using apps now have exactly the width needed to avoid being too wide or too narrow. Some apps still override the default width, and that will need to be un-done now, so expect the weirdly-sized sidebars to get fixed over time, rather than all at once when you upgrade to Frameworks 6.23. (Marco Martin, KDE Bug #505693)
System Settings’ pages related to audio CDs (if you have them installed) now only appear when the computer has any optical drives. (Nate Graham, KDE Bug #513661 and KDE Bug #513664)
Fixed a case where KWin could crash on launch when the GPU did something weird when trying to render screencasts or window thumbnails. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bug #513710)
Fixed an issue that made the fingerprint enrollment dialog’s “Add” button go missing if you canceled enrollment and then immediately re-opened the dialog. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bug #514088)
Fixed an issue that sometimes made Weather Report widget’s tooltip use the wrong unit and display numbers with excessive decimal places. (Ismael Asensio, KDE Bug #514419)
Fixed an issue that made System Settings’ search field sometimes not show the proper language-specific placeholder text. (Albert Astals Cid, KDE Bug #512187)
Fixed one of the top Plasma crashes that could happen when turning off certain screens. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bug #511757)
Fixed a crash in System Settings’ Game Controller page when using certain devices and versions of the SDL library. (David Edmundson, KDE Bug #511859)
If you have multiple Plasma panels, clicking on different ones over and over again while in edit mode no longer makes multiple panel edit dialogs appear. (Marco Martin, KDE Bug #513135)
Fixed a KWin crash that could happen when waking up a laptop connected to an external screen. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bug #514229)
Fixed an issue relating to focus on the lock screen with multi-monitor setups. (Oliver Beard, KDE Bug #512028)
Discover’s window no longer becomes un-maximized when any popup dialogs appear. (Akseli Lahtinen, KDE Bug #503801)
Having an exotic network setup or a lot of Docker containers no longer breaks the layout of System Settings’ Remote Desktop page while the feature is turned on. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bug #513504)
If you’ve turned on the login sound, it now plays at the right time. (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Bug #510923)
Fixed a regression that made KDE Connect crash due to clipboard shenanigans. (Nicolas Fella, KDE Bug #514512)
Fixed two issues with tooltips that could sometimes cause them to be offset or rapidly appear and disappear in the Kickoff Application Launcher widget. (Alexey Rochev, KDE Bug #510860 and KDE Bug #511875)
Fixed some bugs and visual glitches with certain sidebars and list items in Kirigami-based apps when using an RTL language like Arabic or Hebrew. (Marco Martin and Christoph Wolk, kirigami MR #2027 and kirigami MR #2026)
Fixed a strange issue that could cause notifications from the Quod Libet music player specifically to stop appearing. (Alexander Wilms, KDE Bug #489910)
Symbolic icons for KDE Connect now re-color themselves properly when using a non-default color scheme. (Ángel Navarro, breeze-icons MR #522)
Fixed two of the most common Plasma crashes that were caused by Qt’s QML Compiler doing something weird under the hood. (Ulf Hermann, KDE Bug #513527 and KDE Bug #513012)
Implemented version 2 of the Wayland color management protocol. (Xaver Hugl, kwin MR #8033)
Reduced some visual glitches in Firefox when turning on its off-by-default HDR mode. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bug #514599)
Implemented support for network activity monitoring on FreeBSD in the System Monitor app and widgets. (Jesper Schmitz Mouridsen, ksystemstats MR #41)
Since the Plasma 6.6 beta period has commenced, this is a great time to submit bug reports for all the niggling issues you’ve been suffering with but haven’t formally reported yet. We’re focusing more than usual on bug triage too, so your reports will be seen.
There’s a new Troubleshooting help page that can help narrow down issues, too. Check it out! And helping to triage other people’s reported issues is a big help, too.
In addition, “This Week in Plasma” needs your help! Publishing these posts is time-consuming and needs community assistance to be sustainable. Right now there are two ways to help:
Work can be coordinated in the relevant Matrix room.
Beyond that, you can help KDE by directly getting involved in any other projects. Donating time is actually more impactful than donating money. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE — you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to be a programmer, either; many other opportunities exist.
You can also help out by making a donation! This helps cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors, and in general just keep KDE bringing Free Software to the world.
Push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.
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