Akademy 2025 will be held at the Technische Universität Berlin (TU Berlin) in Berlin, Germany, from Saturday the 6th to Thursday the 11th of September.

Akademy 2025 will be a hybrid event, combining on-site and remote sessions, and will include talks, workshops, Birds of a Feather (BoF) meetups, training and coding sessions. The conference is expected to draw hundreds of attendees from the global KDE community to discuss and plan the community's future and its technologies. Many participants from the broad free and open source software community, as well as local organizations and software companies, will also attend. The call for papers will open soon, and the registrations shortly after. We will soon update Akademy's website; in the meantime, follow us on Mastodon, Lemmy and Twitter to keep up to date with Akademy’s news.

About Berlin

Berlin, the capital and largest city of Germany, has a population of about 3.7 million and is located in the country's northeastern part. With over 800 years of history, it has been a key center for politics, culture, and technology, serving as the capital of the Kingdom of Prussia and later the German Empire.

The city is known for its cultural landmarks like the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag, along with renowned museums on Museum Island, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Berlin is also a hub for innovation and art, hosting events such as the Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale) and tech conferences like re:publica. It offers various recreational activities for residents and visitors.

About the Technische Universität Berlin (TU Berlin)

Technische Universität Berlin (TU Berlin) is a public research university. is one of the 20 largest universities in Germany with around 35,000 students in over 100 degree programs. It is known for its strong engineering, computer science, and natural sciences programs.
The university fosters innovation and international collaboration across disciplines.

About Akademy

For most of the year, KDE, one of the largest free and open software communities in the world, works online communicating over email, instant messaging, video-conferencing, forums and mailing lists. Akademy provides all KDE contributors with the opportunity to meet in person to foster social bonds, work on concrete technology issues, discuss new ideas, and reinforce the innovative, dynamic culture of KDE. Akademy brings together artists, designers, developers, translators, users, writers, sponsors and many other types of KDE contributors to celebrate the achievements of the past year and help determine the direction for the next year. Hands-on sessions offer the opportunity for intense work, bringing those plans to reality. The KDE community also welcomes companies building on KDE technology to Akademy, as well as those who are looking for opportunities.

In the past two months since the last update localization of KDE Itinerary has been improved, more ticket formats are supported and work on public transport information infrastructure continued, among many other things.

New Features

Localized units

In locales using imperial units Itinerary now shows distance, speed and temperature values converted to the corresponding units.

If you are using one of those locales but still want to use metric units that of course remains possible, there’s a switch on the settings page for forcing the use of metric units.

Events

We are in the middle of conference season, so there were several opportunities to watch Itinerary-adjacent talks:

• Felix, Jonah and Marcus presented Transitous at the Railway and Open Transport track of FOSDEM.
• Also at FOSDEM, Itinerary had a cameo-appearance in Hans-Jörg Happel’s talk about Structured Email in the Modern Email track.
• I spoke at the Wikidata Data Reuse Days about Itinerary’s use of Wikidata. Wikimedia Germany also covered that in a blog post.
• We had two presentations at the FOSSGIS Konferenz, with me introducing Transitous and Felix covering the routing engine behind it in more detail (both in German).

Besides conference talks there were also a few related sprints and meetups:

• The bi-annual OSM Hack Weekend in Karlsruhe.
• Another iteration of the Carl’s Kitchen Sprint.

This continues with the Plasma (Mobile) Sprint in Graz three weeks from now.

Infrastructure Work

Transitous GBFS rollout

Transitous has started to test first/last mile routing with shared vehicles in a few areas. If things hold up this is will be gradually added in more areas where there necessary data is available.

Similar to the GTFS format for public transport schedule data, there’s GBFS as the open standard for positions of currently available shared vehicles. That’s covering anything from bikes over electric kick-scooters to cars.

Client-side we are prepared for this already, KPublicTransport support this as routing parameters e.g. with OpenTripPlanner backends already.

There’s however still more work needed to expose this properly in the UI, not just as ad-hoc options as it’s done now but also as part of a persisted personal routing profile.

DOSIPAS ticket barcode container support

The travel document extractor can now decode UIC’s “DOSIPAS” ticket barcode container. That stands for “Double Signed Package Structure” and is the designated replacement for the UIC 918.3 container format. It uses the very compact but nasty to parse ASN.1 unaligned packed encoding rules (uPER) instead of zlib-compressed ASCII-ish content, and allows for more modern cryptographic signatures.

Similar to UIC 918.3 it can contain multiple payloads, both standardized and vendor-specific ones. The predominant one we found so far is “FCB” (Flexible Content Barcode), an also ASN.1 uPER encoded common superset of all European ticket data models with several hundred (mostly optional) properties. We had two of the three FCB versions already implemented fortunately.

DOSIPAS tickets are in use in some areas of France for regional trains, e.g. Grand Est and Normandie.

While this generally should improve Itinerary’s ability to detect tickets correctly, to the point of importing by just scanning the barcode even, there’s a darker side to this as well, the “Double Signed” part in DOSIPAS. That’s (optional) infrastructure for shortlived ticket barcodes that the vendor app continuously regenerates, not unlike what 2FA apps do.

The mechanism for this is documented, so we could also implement this of course. The challenging part here however is getting to the necessary secret key used to generate the dynamic signature.

For now most of the DOSIPAS samples found in the wild are fortunately still static, e.g. in PDFs. Should the dynamic ones become mandatory at some point that would basically imply a mandatory use of the vendor app.

KPublicTransport journey subsection API

Continuing the work around trip queries mentioned last time, KPublicTransport’s journey API received to few changes to make selecting sub-sections of a journey easier and to make reassembling journeys from sub-sections possible.

The main technical limitation for this so far was that the departure and arrival stops were treated specially and couldn’t hold the same information as intermediate stops. That’s a historical leftover from before we even had support for intermediate stops and meant that shortening/extending a journey would lose information.

While maybe a seemingly small implementation detail this nevertheless required quite some effort, and will allow removing some limitations in e.g. how train trips can be edited in Itinerary.

Fixes & Improvements

Travel document extractor

• Added or improved travel document extractors for 12go, Amtrak, Color Lines, Eventyay, Flixbus, Ghotel, SBB, SNCF, UK national railways, Universe and VR.
• Fixed validity end date parsing in FCB customer card barcodes.
• Fixed a crash on VDV tickets without a basic ticket data block.

All of this has been made possible thanks to your travel document donations!

Public transport data

• Read operator and occupancy information from DB Zugportal onboard API.
• Fixed OJP journey queries using stop identifiers (used e.g. in Switzerland).
• Correctly merge journey sections with partial intermediate stop data.

Itinerary app

• Correctly display coach/seat numbers when having a separate seat reservation or multiple travelers with different seat reservations.
• Don’t show delay information for walking legs.
• Fixed showing intermediate stops for bus trips.
• Don’t hide essential trip group map elements on low zoom levels.
• Fixed trip group map bounding box computations for trips without elements that change locations.
• Fixed data loss when realtime information would change the type of a reservation.
• Changed importing data from OSM to use Nominatim, as described here.
• Allow transfers to favorite location independent of the next reservation.
• Correctly handle nested events when determining transfers.
• Disabled Deutsche Bahn online ticket import as the corresponding API is no longer available.
• Don’t show city name in location search results if that matches the station name.
• Update statistics automatically when removing trips.
• Fixed misrendered labels in wallet passes created by the vdv-pkpass converter.

Itinerary also benefited from work on improving the Android platform integration of KDE apps as well as various fixes in the QtQuick Controls Breeze Style.

How you can help

Feedback and travel document samples are very much welcome, as are all other forms of contributions. Feel free to join us in the KDE Itinerary Matrix channel.

Kaidan 0.12.2 fixes some bugs. Have a look at the changelog for more details.

Changelog

Bugfixes:

• Fix removing corrected message (melvo)
• Fix showing message bubble tail only for first message of sender (melvo)

Download

• Source code (.tar.xz) (sig signed with 04EFAD0F7A4D9724)
• Linux (Flatpak on Flathub)

Or install Kaidan for your distribution:

Welcome to a new issue of "This Week in Plasma"! Every week we cover the highlights of what's happening in the world of KDE Plasma and its associated apps like Discover, System Monitor, and more.

This week we drilled into the outstanding bug lists, and drove the number of HI and VHI priority bugs down to their lowest ever numbers! In addition, we boosted performance, made high-visibility improvements to notification history and screen locking, implemented support for multiple cross-desktop standards, and way more! So, quite a big week.

Notable UI Improvements

Plasma 6.4.0

Notifications in the history popup now retain their interactive buttons, if they have any. If they don't but clicking on their background normally does something when they're in pop-up form, then they'll show an "Activate" button when in the history. (Dominique Hummel and Kai Uwe Broulik, link 1 and link 2)

On the lock and login screens, The clock and interactive UI elements are now only shown on one screen at a time when using a multi-screen setup; they fade out on screens without the pointer or keyboard focus, leaving those screens free to display pretty wallpapers. (Yifan Zhu, link 1 and link 2)

System Settings' Display Configuration page gained some UI Improvements; now the screen arrangement view is hidden when there's only one screen, and with more that one, there's a big obvious screen chooser at the top of the page to make it clear which screen is selected, and when there are any disabled but connected screens. (Oliver Beard, link)

Improved the appearance of the Comics widget when it hasn't been set up with any comics yet, or when there's been an error of some kind. (Christoph Wolk, link 1 and link 2)

You can now also use Meta+Tab and Meta+Shift+Tab to switch between windows, in addition to the current shortcuts. This supports our push to have all global actions include the Meta key for at least one of their shortcuts. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

KWin's "Fade Desktop" virtual desktop switching effect now has a customizable duration. (Konstantin Kharlamov, link)

Plasma's Notifications now respect requests to play sounds using "sound hints". (Ruslan Khabibullin, link)

The Breeze cursor theme with dark cursors is now named "Breeze Dark", and vice versa for the ones with light cursors. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)

Notable Bug Fixes

Plasma 6.3.4

Fixed the most common Plasma crash! This one could happen when unplugging screens, especially with a dock involved in the process somewhere. This was the final VHI priority bug! (David Edmundson, link)

Fixed the remaining causes of two common KWin crashes. (Xaver Hugl, link 1 and link 2)

Fixed a severe crash in Breeze-themed apps that we accidentally introduced in Plasma 6.3.3 alongside a change to fix a bug with color scheme support for creative color schemes. The change itself was fine, but it exposed a pre-existing issue that was also benign on its own. When the two combined… kaboom. But no more, now that it's fixed! (Albert Astals Cid, link)

Fixed a clipboard bug that caused non-ASCII text from items re-ordered in the history to become mangled when pasted. (Fushan Wen, link)

Fixed a bug that made it impossible to remove previously-added languages on System Settings' Region and Language page. (Christoph Wolk, link)

Fixed a bug that made Discover sometimes fail to show the current version of an app or package being updated to a newer one. (Ismael Asensio, link)

Fixed a visual glitch affecting auto-hiding top-positioned fit-content panels. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)

Plasma 6.4.0

Fixed several issues in the desktop & wallpaper settings window that prevented certain pages from being scrollable when the content was long. (Christoph Wolk, link 1 and link 2)

Notifications created by apps using the Notifications portal that specify something to happen when clicked now actually perform that action. (Kylie CT, link)

Fixed the System Tray's adherence to the part of the StatusNotifierItem spec that allows tray icons to ask to display a context menu on left-click. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

Flatpak apps from non-standard user-defined repositories are now shown on System Settings' Flatpak Permissions page. (Harald Sitter, link)

Fixed a bug that broke scrolling on certain scrollable views in the Application Dashboard widget. (Tomislav Pap, link)

When using the "Choose Player Automatically" feature of the Media Player widget, the actual name of the player is now shown on the lock screen (when using the feature to show media information on the lock screen) instead of the text "Choose Player Automatically". (Fushan Wen, link)

Fixed a bug that prevented the Media Frame widget from pausing the slideshow when hovered with the pointer, as it was originally intended to do. (Christoph Wolk, link)

Other bug information of note:

• Zero very high priority Plasma bugs! (3 last week). Current list of bugs
• 18 15-minute Plasma bugs (21 last week). Current list of bugs

Notable in Performance & Technical

Plasma 6.4.0

Massively improved performance when making screen recordings in Spectacle using the VP9 video format, which is used by default. (Arjen Hiemstra, link)

Implemented support for the wp_fifo_v1 Wayland protocol. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Implemented support for the Clipboard Portal. (David Redondo, link)

Made KWin more resilient against the issue of windows moving to strange positions when changing the screen arrangement or number of screens. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Plasma's log output is pretty quiet now thanks to Christoph's hard work. Nonetheless, he continued that work to help get us to zero! (Christoph Wolk, link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5, link 6, link 7, link 8, link 9, and link 10)

How You Can Help

KDE has become important in the world, and your time and contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we need your support to keep KDE sustainable.

You can help KDE by becoming an active community member and getting involved somehow. 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:

• Triage and confirm bug reports, maybe even identify their root cause
• Contribute designs for wallpapers, icons, and app interfaces
• Design and maintain websites
• Translate user interface text items into your own language
• Promote KDE in your local community
• …And a ton more things!

You can also help us by making a donation! 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 a new Plasma feature or a bugfix mentioned here, feel free to push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.

The KDE community will again participate in the Open Source Promotion Plan (OSPP), a program in which students can contribute to open source projects. Burgess Chang, is the KDE community contact.

As part of OSPP 2024, Hànyáng Zhāng (张汉阳) added Android support to Blinken. The work done is described in a series of blog posts, available in both English and Mandarin. The Android version is available from the KDE F-Droid nightly repository.

Unlike the Google Summer of Code, where stipends are funded by a company, stipends are primarily funded by the Chinese government with options for open source communities to contribute additional stipends if they wish to have more students participate in their projects than they get allocated. It is good that there is recognition that contributing to open source software is a skill that students should acquire.

The range of contributions that can be made in OSPP is not just limited to programming, contributions to other aspects that improve the open source software ecosystem such as translation and documentation are welcome. As it is a government funded program, there is a little more oversight to ensure tax payer funds are well spent. In particular, for most projects, contributions should be made to a publicly available repository associated with the project and that student participants are selected primarily based on their project application.

The plan aims to increase the programming and software engineering skills of students by encouraging them to participate in real world projects during their vacation period. While it is funded by the Chinese people, open source projects with contributors from all over the world apply to participate, and students from any part of the world can also apply to participate.

Mandarin and English are the official communication languages for the program, knowledge of one of these is sufficient to participate in the program.

The OSPP website lists the dates for each phase of the program. Important dates for this year are:

• 04 April - 04 May: Project submission period for approved open source communities
• 09 May - 09 June: Student project application period
• 01 July - 30 September: Coding and development period for accepted projects

Kaidan 0.12.1 fixes some bugs. Have a look at the changelog for more details.

Changelog

Bugfixes:

• Do not highlight unpinned chats when pinned chat is moved (melvo)
• Fix deleting/sending voice messages (melvo)
• Fix crash during login (melvo)
• Fix opening chat again after going back to chat list on narrow window (melvo)
• Increase tool bar height to fix avatar not being recognizable (melvo)
• Fix width of search bar above chat list to take available space while showing all buttons (melvo)
• Fix storing changed password (melvo)
• Fix setting custom host/port for account registration (melvo)
• Fix crash on chat removal (fazevedo)
• Move device switching options into account details to fix long credentials not being shown and login QR code being temporarily visible on opening dialog (melvo)
• Allow setting new password on error to fix not being able to log in after changing password via other device (melvo)

Download

• Source code (.tar.xz) (sig signed with 04EFAD0F7A4D9724)
• Linux (Flatpak on Flathub)

Or install Kaidan for your distribution:

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-13.

OpenAI’s Studio Ghibli meme factory is an insult to art itself

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, politics, culture, art, copyright

Sure, a filter which turns pictures into something with the Ghibli style looks cute. But make no mistake, it has utter political motives. They need a distraction from their problems and it’s yet another way to breach a boundary. Unfortunately I expect people will comply and use the feature with enthusiasm…

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/openais-studio-ghibli-meme-factory

Trapping misbehaving bots in an AI Labyrinth

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, security

When a big player has to prepare a labyrinth of AI generated content to trap bots used to feed generative AI learning pipelines… something feels wrong.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/ai-labyrinth/

Improved ways to operate a rude crawler

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copilot, satire

Don’t underestimate how much of a skill making a stupid crawler can be…

https://www.marginalia.nu/log/a_115_rude_crawler/

Proof of work reverse proxy to protect against scrapers

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copilot, security

And yet another reverse proxy to use as a scraper deterrent… It looks like several are popping every week lately.

https://git.sr.ht/~runxiyu/powxy

Exploring Generative AI - The role of developer skills in agentic coding

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, copilot, ide, tools, programming

Again that confirms that all the hype and grand announcements are not deserved. It also gives a good idea of the skills which are required to use those tools, clearly the setup process is involved if you want to don’t want to be overwhelmed and drowning in bad code.

https://martinfowler.com/articles/exploring-gen-ai.html#memo-13

Scallop, a Language for Neurosymbolic Programming

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, neural-networks, logic, prolog

This is definitely an interesting declarative language. Looking forward to more such neurosymbolic approaches.

https://www.scallop-lang.org/

Servo vs Ladybird

Tags: tech, web, browser, foss

A good look at both incumbents in the web browser engine space. Still quite some way to go but the results are interesting already.

https://thelibre.news/servo-vs-ladybird/

REST in Peace? Django’s Framework Problem

Tags: tech, python, django, rest, sustainability, community

There’s a sustainability issue for the REST support with Django. Hopefully this will resolve.

https://danlamanna.com/posts/rest-in-peace-djangos-framework-problem/

git-who: Git blame for file trees

Tags: tech, version-control, git, tools

Looks like a neat little tool to explore git repositories.

https://github.com/sinclairtarget/git-who

Quadlet: Running Podman containers under systemd

Tags: tech, tools, containers, podman, systemd

Looks like a nice way to orchestrate rootless podman containers.

https://mo8it.com/blog/quadlet/

Closing the chapter on OpenH264 – Pixels

Tags: tech, video, codec, patents, foss

Or why software patents can get in the way… You can work around them somehow, but that quickly leads to shipping binaries you can’t properly check.

https://bbhtt.space/posts/closing-the-chapter-on-openh264/

Things that go wrong with disk IO

Tags: tech, io, storage, filesystem, databases

A reminder that writing on disks is a longer process than you could suspect. Many things can go wrong on that chain.

https://notes.eatonphil.com/2025-03-27-things-that-go-wrong-with-disk-io.html

C++/Rust Interoperability Problem Statement

Tags: tech, rust, c++, interoperability

Looks like there’s movement at the Rust Foundation level to have better C++ and Rust interoperability. We’ll see what comes to fruition, this could be interesting. It’s needed for sure.

https://github.com/rustfoundation/interop-initiative

Use the rr debugger without HW performance counters !

Tags: tech, debugging, tools

Interesting fork of rr to have time travel debugging with software counters. Hopefully will allow using rr in environments where it’s limited by lack of access to hardware performance counters.

https://github.com/sidkshatriya/rr.soft

Postel’s Law and the Three Ring Circus

Tags: tech, foss, protocols, design, standard

Nice post about the practical impacts of Postel’s law. It’s especially problematic in the case of Open Source software. Companies producing proprietary software even use that to their advantage.

https://alexgaynor.net/2025/mar/25/postels-law-and-the-three-ring-circus/

War story: the hardest bug I ever debugged

Tags: tech, debugging, web, browser, google

Interesting story… when you end up turning to v8 having a bug in the field, you’re really in trouble.

https://www.clientserver.dev/p/war-story-the-hardest-bug-i-ever

Why developers question everything - Tim Hårek

Tags: tech, craftsmanship, programming, estimates, risk, complexity

Or why analogies with physical work don’t work…

https://timharek.no/blog/why-developers-question-everything/

Sun Tzu wouldn’t like the cybersecurity industry

Tags: tech, security

It’s better if you prepare your security policies properly…

https://kellyshortridge.com/blog/posts/sun-tzu-wouldnt-like-the-cybersecurity-industry/

The Worst Programmer I Know

Tags: tech, team, productivity

Trying to measure individual productivity is definitely a trap. You’d better not try, otherwise you’ll have wrong behaviors or you’ll punish the wrong persons.

https://dannorth.net/the-worst-programmer/

How to Write Blog Posts that Developers Read

Tags: tech, blog, writing

A bit cynical at times, but shows tricks to improve the writing and style of blog posts. If I ever find the time to write something sizeable again I guess I’ll try some of them.

https://refactoringenglish.com/chapters/write-blog-posts-developers-read/

Teach to Learn: Why Sharing What You Know Makes You Smarter

Tags: teaching, learning

I like this attitude obviously… Go out and teach! Share what you learn!

https://hardmodefirst.xyz/teach-to-learn-why-sharing-what-you-know-makes-you-smarter

Post Apocalyptic Computing

Tags: tech, low-tech, history, reliability

Interesting rambling and exploration. What would a computer built to last a century look like?

https://thomashunter.name/posts/2025-03-23-post-apocalyptic-computing

Bye for now!

The beta of Kubuntu Plucky Puffin (to become 25.04 in April) has now been released, and is available for download.

This milestone features images for Kubuntu and other Ubuntu flavours.

Pre-releases of Kubuntu Plucky Puffin are not recommended for:

• Anyone needing a stable system
• Regular users who are not aware of pre-release issues
• Anyone in a production environment with data or workflows that need to be reliable

They are, however, recommended for:

• Regular users who want to help us test by finding, reporting, and/or fixing bugs
• Kubuntu, KDE, and Qt developers
• Other Ubuntu flavour developers

The Beta includes some software updates that are ready for broader testing. However, it is an early set of images, so you should expect some bugs.

Highlights include an update to KDE Plasma 6.3.

We STRONGLY advise testers to read the Kubuntu 25.04 Beta release notes before installing, and in particular the section on ‘Known issues’.

You can also find more information about the entire 25.04 release (base, kernel, graphics etc) in the main Ubuntu Beta release notes and announcement.

Twinimation Studios have released a new Krita workshop, and we wanted to give them a chance to introduce their new offering to Krita's users:

Greetings everyone! Entering the art world is sometimes seen as an expensive endeavor. From art schools to subscription based software, artists across different fields tend to have notable expenses. But have you ever wondered if you can become an artist without spending a fortune? Twinimtion Studios is back to answer the question with our very first full workshop! Becoming an Artist on a Budget is a specialty made guide guide to help aspiring artists begin their artistic journey WITHOUT breaking the bank. This workshop consists of 9 main videos bundled into one easy to digest package, along with some special bonus showcase videos as well. Included is also a bonus freebie list of numerous artistic products ideas to begin a paid art hobby or career.

Within this workshop, we provide tips and tricks on how one can begin their art journey for completely free. After reviewing a list of affordable resources to learn art skills, we recommend numerous free art programs with a special spotlight on Krita! We explain how versatile Krita is, and how it can be used across numerous different art fields, such as animation, comics, and painting! Following some other drawing tutorials, the workshop concludes with a special lesson on entrepreneurship, where we explain how aspiring artists can create a paid hobby or full business through their artwork while remaining on a budget.

With so many people wanting to enter the art scene and build a career from it, we hope this workshop will be a helpful guide for all of those who wish to create their own artistic brand. Additionally, we have many other Krita focused animation courses on our website!

Twinimation Studios was founded by instructors Andria and Arneisha Jackson; MFA graduates who've studied animation for 9 years and want to share their professional knowledge with the world. We provide tutorials on different styles of animation, character design, illustration, film creation and so much more! Look forward to our future tutorials and workshops where we will continue to expand our repertoire to fit several different art fields.

Here is a link to the workshop:

Become an Artist on a Budget