Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-04.

No billionaires at FOSDEM

Tags: tech, fosdem, foss, politics

I think this is a very welcome protest at FOSDEM. This keynote would be a shame on the conference. Unfortunately I already planned to not attend FOSDEM this year, but if you are: please participate to this sit-in.

https://drewdevault.com/2025/01/16/2025-01-16-No-Billionares-at-FOSDEM-please.html

Decentralized Social Media Is the Only Alternative to the Tech Oligarchy

Tags: tech, social-media, politics

This is indeed clear, the centralized web platforms are fragile by default. They are very prone to capture, this is what just happened.

https://www.404media.co/decentralized-social-media-is-the-only-alternative-to-the-tech-oligarchy/

I’ve been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

Tags: tech, rss

You like RSS feeds? Ask for them!

https://reedybear.bearblog.dev/ive-been-advocating-for-rss-support-and-you-should-too/

The PC is Dead: It’s Time to Make Computing Personal Again

Tags: tech, business, politics, DRM, surveillance, vendor-lockin

Very nice editorial. It’s clear that the level of trust in the technologies we depend on is low… but that’s not due to the technologies themselves it’s more about the business practices around them. In the end the solution will have to be political, in the meantime we ought to support the good players.

https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/3292/the-pc-is-dead-its-time-to-make-computing-personal-again

Block AI scrapers with Anubis

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt

There was a time when scraping bots were well behaved… Now apparently we have to add software to actively defend against AI scrapers.

https://xeiaso.net/blog/2025/anubis/

Introducing Versara

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt

Yet another attempt at protecting content from AI scrapers. A very different approach for this one.

https://versara.ai/about

PostgreSQL Anonymizer

Tags: tech, databases, postgresql, data, anonymity, gdpr

A nice extension for Postgres allowing to ease the protection of personal information.

https://postgresql-anonymizer.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

Oh Shit, Git!?!

Tags: tech, version-control, git

Stuck in a state you don’t like with Git? Here is a list of funny recipes.

https://ohshitgit.com/

Git Trailers | Alchemists

Tags: tech, version-control, git, tools

This article is feature packed, lots of great ideas to exploit git trailers. This can help automate some workflows easily.

https://alchemists.io/articles/git_trailers

Interrupting scripts without tracebacks

Tags: tech, programming, python

Nice trick for cleaner interruptible python scripts indeed.

https://mathspp.com/blog/til/interrupting-scripts-without-tracebacks

isd (interactive systemd) — a better way to work with systemd units

Tags: tech, systemd, tools

Looks like a really nice tool to work with systemd services. It also integrates with my trusty lnav for the journal handling. I’ll definitely give it a try going forward.

https://isd-project.github.io/isd/

Building a tiny Linux from scratch

Tags: tech, linux, system, minimalism

Nice experiment in minimalism. It’s nice to see we can still build tiny systems like that.

https://blinry.org/tiny-linux/

C stdlib isn’t threadsafe and even safe Rust didn’t save us

Tags: tech, system, c, rust, safety, multithreading

A harsh reminder that getenv is not thread safe…

https://www.edgedb.com/blog/c-stdlib-isn-t-threadsafe-and-even-safe-rust-didn-t-save-us

Prototyping in Rust

Tags: tech, programming, rust

A bit long and a bit too much framed in a “vs Python” fashion for my taste. That said it contains good advice on how to prototype or start simple with Rust. It’s aligned with some of the advice I give as well. People tend to turn to low level details too quickly forcing themselves into a corner. There are better ways to handle it.

https://corrode.dev/blog/prototyping/

How I think about Zig and Rust

Tags: tech, rust, zig, system

Interesting article. There’s clearly space for both languages indeed. They’ll end up having each their own ecological niches, probably with some overlap.

https://lewiscampbell.tech/blog/250117.html

Type Inference in Rust and C++

Tags: tech, type-systems, rust, c++

Very nice explorations of the different behaviours type systems can have around inference.

https://herecomesthemoon.net/2025/01/type-inference-in-rust-and-cpp/

The Essence of Successful Abstractions

Tags: tech, complexity, type-systems

Nice musing on how a type system can be a way to tame complexity or at least isolate it explicitly in one place.

https://v5.chriskrycho.com/journal/essence-of-successful-abstractions/

Generating an infinite world with the Wave Function Collapse algorithm

Tags: tech, 3d, mathematics

Really cool procedural environment generation.

https://marian42.de/article/infinite-wfc/

Issues with Color Spaces and Perceptual Brightness — John Austin

Tags: tech, colors, vision

Color perception keeps being a fascinating and difficult topic.

https://johnaustin.io/articles/2025/issues-with-cielab-and-perceptual-brightness

Moving on from React, a Year Later

Tags: tech, web, frontend, react, backend, performance, complexity

It becomes clear that there are more and more reasons to move back to simpler times regarding the handling of web frontends.

https://kellysutton.com/2025/01/18/moving-on-from-react-a-year-later.html

Additional Testing After Refactoring - by Kent Beck

Tags: tech, tdd, tests

Pointing out an important dilemma indeed. Which tests to keep over time? What to do with redundancies?

https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/additional-testing-after-refactoring

The Documentation System

Tags: tech, documentation, writing

Interesting proposal of structure for technical documentation.

https://docs.divio.com/documentation-system/

Sidebar #3: Two Flavors of Medium Risk - Jacob Kaplan-Moss

Tags: tech, project-management, risk

Or why it can be dangerous to label medium the high likelihood low impact risks and the low likelihood high impact ones. One category is to be completely avoided while the other brings learning opportunities.

https://jacobian.org/2025/jan/17/two-flavors-of-medium-risk/

Master the Art of the Product Manager ‘No’

Tags: tech, product-management, funny

Nice tricks to say no when people push to get something in a product. 😉

https://letsnotdothat.com/

Training or Learning? - Congruent Change

Tags: learning, teaching

OK, this is advertisement to their PSL workshops. That being said the quote from Hoverstadt is important, this and the feedback of one of their attendees: “I can honestly say I learned at least as much from other participants”. This is exactly what I’m trying to foster when I design learning experiences.

https://www.congruentchange.com/training-or-learning/

Bye for now!

Qt in 2024
2024 was another outstanding year for Qt, filled with exciting milestones and achievements! Highlights of the year include the Qt 6.7 and Qt 6.8 releases, Qt Creator 15 release, and the Qt Contributor Summit.

The third International Calligraphy Festival of Kerala (ICFK) took place in October 2024, and I was invited to run a session. I had the fortune to see many exemplary calligraphers all over the world come together and demonstrate their work over three days of the festival.

Renowned Malayalam calligrapher Narayana Bhattathiri organizes the conference every year, and it was amazing to witness that many of the speakers and calligraphers were sharing the responsibilities and taking active role in the organization and execution of the sessions. The audience and speaker participation and interactions were warmly welcoming. The demographics was very distributed — students, professionals, calligraphers; and of all ages and genders.

An epiphany

During the session by Prof. G.V. Sreekumar when he asked the participants to write the word ‘സൂര്യൻ’ (the Sun); I took a survey of the writings. What I found was that the older generation all wrote the word in traditional Malayalam orthography; and a large number of younger generation also wrote it in traditional orthography. The latter group were not taught in schools to read or write in traditional script (the text books are all in broken/reformed script). Intrigued how they were familiarized with the traditional orthography, I had questioned how they knew to write in this fashion. The answers were categorized into:

1. They saw their parents write in traditional orthography.
2. They saw their grandparents write in traditional orthography (but their parents write in reformed script).
3. Most strikingly, some youngsters were sure this was the ‘correct’ way of writing and yet they could not explain how or from where they learnt it.

The response from the third category is very interesting: because they learnt the script ‘organically’ and it is imbibed in their identity — which is what the definition of ‘culture’ is. The revelation is that; the script belongs to its people and no matter what the government decrees about (ref: Kerala govt orders about script reform in 1971 and 2022).

The session

Together with type designer Athul Jayaraman, I had a joint session on typography. Athul focused more on the type design and I had elaborated more on Malayalam script (traditional orthography), and font engineering & techniques.

The Mathrubhumi news team also interviewed both of us and published a two-part series of the interview on their new site:

• Part 1 of the interview.
• Part 2 of the interview.

The experience

Of the many conferences I have been to, ICFK 2024 was one the best un-conferences in my experience. I met a lot of exemplary, yet humble & approachable, calligraphers (some of them gave me their autographed booklets, thank you!), learnt a lot and enjoyed thoroughly.

Ruqola 2.4.1 is a feature and bugfix release of the Rocket.chat messenger app.

Ruqola 2.4.1

• Fix typing support (new API)
• Exclude string starting with /* or // as Rocket chat command (avoid error)
• Don't copy text when preview is hidden
• Fix Market apps support
• Fix search user (Allow to use '@') when inviting users in Room
• Inform when we don't have database history for a specific Room
• Fix clicking in url in text in preview url
• Don't allow to create two tokens with same name
• Don't show clear button in lineedit when it's readonly

URL: https://download.kde.org/stable/ruqola/
Source: ruqola-2.4.1.tar.xz
SHA256: e5adb0806e12b4ce44b55434256139656546db9f5b8d78ccafae07db0ce70570
Signed by: E0A3EB202F8E57528E13E72FD7574483BB57B18D Jonathan Riddell jr@jriddell.org
https://jriddell.org/jriddell.pgp

Hey all

Here is another video recap of what happened in the last few weeks with the design system for Plasma. I review icon work and some considerations to take when designing icons.

There is a review of our current state or affairs, a proposal for a sprint and working with PenPot.

Some of you might have noticed. Updates to Manjaro ARM packages are far between these days. Actually it has been far between updates since I left the project in March 2023.

So this begs the question: Is Manjaro ARM dead?

Lets take a look at the current status.

No new images

The last round of release images for all the major platforms Manjaro ARM supports was done in February 2023, release version 23.02. And I have heard that most of them break the installation after the first update.

The only images I have seen that has had any kind of new release since I left, are the Pinephone based ones. But they are still considered Beta (after 4 years!).

ARM download are no longer prominent on the website

Manjaro.org got a new fancy website a little while ago. This website hides the ARM images, so you have to really look for them to find them. Here's how you find them on the new website:

manjaro.org -> Download button -> Go back a step in the submenu that says Products > Download > x86 by pressing the Download entry -> Press the Download button in the second section called For Phones And Embedded.

Now you can see and download the ARM images.

Very few package updates

The Raspberry Pi specific packages have been updates steadily by Ray Sherman, the maintainer. But all the other Manjaro specific packages are only updated rarely or not at all.

Even the package updates from Arch Linux ARM is not done very often anymore. So the package repository in general is in a very bad out-of-date state.

Is it maintained?

With all these points, I would conclude that it is not really maintained anymore. Ray asked the Manjaro project management about this and was told that the ARM branch no longer has a manager and therefore it was no longer a priority by the Manjaro team.

To me, that sounds like it has died a slow and quiet death.

I would not recommend Manjaro ARM to anyone anymore, because of the state it is in. It's a sad conclusion, as I started the project with Josh Crowder back in 2016 and we loved working on it.

One of my leisure time activities is to develop KMyMoney, a personal finance management application. Most of my time is spent on development, testing, bug reproduction and fixing, user support and sometimes I even write some documentation for this application. And of course, I use it myself on a more or less daily basis.

One of the nice KMyMoney features that helps me a lot is the online transaction download. It’s cool, if you simply fire up your computer in the morning, start KMyMoney, select the “Account/Update all” function, fill in the passwords to your bank and Paypal accounts when asked (though also that is mostly automated using a local GPG protected password store) and see the data coming in. After about a minute I have an overview what happened in the last 24 hours on my accounts. No paper statement needed, so one could say, heavily digitalized. At this point, many thanks go out to the author of AqBanking which does all the heavy work dealing with bank’s protocols under the hood. But a picture is worth a thousand words. See for yourself how this looks like:

The process is working for a long time and I have not touched any of the software parts lately. Today, I noticed a strange thing happening because one of my accounts showed me a difference between the account balance on file and the amount provided by the bank after a download. This may happen, if you enter transactions manually but since I only download them from the bank, there should not be any difference at all. Plus, today is Sunday while on the day before everything was just fine. First thought: which corner case did I hit that KMyMoney is behaving this way and where is the bug?

First thing I usually do in this case is to just close the application and start afresh. No way: same result. Then I remembered, that I added a feature the day before to the QIF importer which also included a small change in the general statement reader code. Of course, I tested things with the QIF importer but not with AqBanking. Maybe, some error creeped into the code and causes this problem. I double checked the code and since it dealt with tags – which are certainly not provided by my bank – it could not be the cause of it.

So I looked at the screen again:

New data must have been received because the date in the left column changed and also the amount of the colored row changed but not the one in the row above which still shows the previous state. The color is determined by comparing the balance information with the one in the row above. So where is/where are the missing transaction(s)?

Long story short: looking at the logs I noticed, that the online balance was transmitted but there was no transaction at all submitted by the bank. And if I simply take the difference between the two balances it comes down to a reimbursement payment which I expect to receive.

Conclusion: no bug in KMyMoney, but the bank simply provided inconsistent data. Arrrrgh.

Welcome to a new issue of "This Week in KDE Apps"! Every week we cover as much as possible of what's happening in the world of KDE apps.

This week we also published a new web page in our "KDE For You" series, this time about "KDE For Digital Sovereignty". These pages give you tons of recommendations about KDE and other FOSS apps you can use in different situations, be it for education, creativity, travel and more.

Arianna EBook reader

It's now possible to change the app's color scheme independently of the system's color scheme (Onuralp SEZER, 25.04.0. Link).

Dolphin Manage your files

When manually adding items to the Places panel, the current location's custom icon is pre-populated in the icon field, and the item will now be created globally by default, so it appears in other apps' Places panels as well (Nate Graham, Frameworks 6.11. Link and link 2).

Elisa Play local music and listen to online radio

We added an entry at the top of the grid/list to open a track view for the current artist or genre. Tracks from artists opened from genre view will be filtered by genre (Pedro Nishiyama, 25.04.0. Link).

We have solved the problem of creating infinitely nested views when browsing artist > album > artist (Pedro Nishiyama, 25.04.0. Link).

Haruna Media player

Haruna 1.3 is out with lots of code refactoring. Additionally, the default actions for left and right mouse buttons have changed: left click is now Play/Pause and right click opens the context menu. These actions can be changed in Settings on the mouse page.

Read the full announcement.

KDE Itinerary Digital travel assistant

Volker restored public transport data access to Digitransit in Finland and to Rolph in Germany (Volker Krause, 24.12.2, also affects KTrip) and Joshua and Gregorz wrote and improved travel document extractors for American Airlines, Brightline and Southwest (Joshua Goins, 24.12.2, Link 1, link 2, and link 3) and Koleo (Grzegorz Mu, 24.12.2, Link).

KMail A feature-rich email application

Joshua fixed various issues with the markdown rendering in KMail, enabling markdown footnotes, highlighting and removing some dead code (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link 1 and link 2); and, to facilitate the use of KMail's security features, KMail will now query a key server when clicking on an unknown OpenPGP certificate (Tobias Fella, 25.04.0 Link).

Kdenlive Video editor

The audio waveform of Kdenlive was completely rewritten. It is now around twice as fast to generate and is more accurate (Étienne André and funded by the Kdenlive Fundraiser, 25.04.0 Link).

Before:

After:

KDevelop Featureful, plugin-extensible IDE for C/C++ and other programming languages

We added and improved the debugger pretty printer for QJSon*, QCbor*, QDateTime, QTimeZone (David Faure, 25.04.0 Link 1 and link 2).

Krita Digital Painting, Creative Freedom

The latest Krita Monthly Update is out. If you want to learn what's going on in Krita as well as see some amazing artwork made with Krita, check it out.

Kurzschwardzenbuglen Nature Sanctuary by @Yaroslavus_Artem

Barcode Scanner Scan and create QR-Codes

Qrca now forces the rendering of QR code content to be plain text (Kai Uwe Broulik. Link) and only shows the flashlight button on devices with a flashlight (e.g. not on your laptop) (Kai Uwe Broulik. Link).

Tokodon Browse the Fediverse

Tokodon will now remind you to add an alt text to your images (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link).

We also added an option for a confirmation dialog before boosting a post. This is particularly relevant for people managing multiple accounts to prevent them from boosting posts from the wrong account (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link).

In the department of trust and safety improvements, you can now filter some posts from your timeline (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link).

And show a banner when an account has moved to another server (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link).

You can now browse posts that are about a news link (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link) and see the post associated with an image in the media grid of a profile (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link).

We also fixed a bug where, when failing to authenticate one of your accounts, Tokodon would be stuck indefinitely on the loading screen (Carl Schwan, 24.12.2. Link).

Kwave Sound editor

We improved the performance of the playback using QtMultimedia significantly (Thomas Eschenbacher, 25.04.0. Link).

…And Everything Else

This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! If you’re hungry for more, check out Nate's blog about Plasma and be sure not to miss his This Week in Plasma series, where every Saturday he covers all the work being put into KDE's Plasma desktop environment.

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.

Get Involved

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.