Smaller statusbar in Dolphin, CSS Font Variables in Krita, and SystemdGenie redesign

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 time again a bit delayed. If you are a non technical person and are looking at a way to contribute to KDE, you can help editing "This Week in KDE Apps" would be very much welcome. Just join our Matrix chat.

This week we have some big changes in Krita, a redesign in SystemDGenie and a new, more compact statusbar for Dolphin.

Amarok Rediscover your music

We dropped the Qt5 support and moved to Qt6 (Tuomas Nurmi, Link).

Dolphin Manage your files

Dolphin now uses a more compact statusbar by default (Akseli Lahtinen, 25.04.0. Link).

When in selection mode, Dolphin now has a special keyboard navigation mode. You can read all about this feature in detail in the merge request description (Felix Ernst, 25.04.0. Link).

Kasts Podcast application

We fixed various usability issues and recent regressions (Bart De Vries, 25.04.0. Link 1, link 2, link 3, ...).

Kate Advanced text editor

We improved support for DAP (the generic protocol for debuggers) (Waqar Ahmed, 25.04.0 Link), and sped up KWrite's startup time by not loading a MIME database when just querying the icon for text/plain file. (Kai Uwe Broulik, 25.04.0. Link)

Kleopatra Certificate manager and cryptography app

We removed the Decrypt/Verify all files in folder menu item in the Dolphin context menu as it was never implemented (Tobias Fella, 25.04.0. Link).

Konqueror KDE File Manager & Web Browser

The Save As dialog now remembers where a file was last downloaded and will open that directory. Note that the last location is only remembered for the duration of the Konqueror window (Stefano Crocco, 25.04.0. Link).

Krita Digital Painting, Creative Freedom

We added a glyph palette to choose between alternates or variation of a given glyph, as well as a character map of a given font (Wolthera van Hövell, Link).

And implemented the edition of the CSS Font Variants in the text properties docker (Wolthera van Hövell, Link).

Krita now compiles with Qt6 on Windows (Dmitry Kazakov, Link).

We added a new extension "Mutator". This new extension provides a docker which adds brush variations through action-invoked settings randomization (Emmet O'Neill, Link). We also added global pen tilt direction offset which is helpful to make brushes feel the same for right- and left-handed users (Maciej Jesionowski. Link). Another brush related improvement is that their smoothness is now also affected by the speed (killy |0veufOrever, Link).

Kup Backup scheduler for KDE's Plasma desktop

We improved the link text in the KCM user interface (Robert Kratky - first contribution 🚀, 0.11.0. Link).

NeoChat Chat on Matrix

Long pressing has been disabled on non-touchscreen devices (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link), and we improved the usability of the account menu by giving it a proper button (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link).

Okular View and annotate documents

We have improved the error handling entering a bad passphrase for a digital signature (Sune Vuorela, 25.04.0. Link) and made the overprint preview setting a combobox that gives you the option to choose between "Always", "never" and "Automatic", which is similar to Acrobat Reader. The "Automatic" value depends on the value of HasVisibleOverprint in the PDF metadata (Kevin Ottens, 25.04.0. Link).

SystemDGenie

SystemDGenie was ported to a more "frameless" interface and the statusbar was removed (Thomas Duckworth. Link 1 and link 2).

SystemDGenie shows unloaded and inactive units by default (Thomas Duckworth. Link) and the startup time was sped up by fetching the list of sessions and units asynchronously (Carl Schwan. 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.

Edit 2025-03-17: applications for this position are closed.

KDE e.V., the non-profit organization supporting the KDE community, is looking for a contractor to improve KDE’s Plasma desktop environment in ways that support user acquisition through growth into new hardware and software markets. The Plasma software engineer will address defects and missing features that are barriers to these objectives. Please see the full job listing for more details about this opportunity. We are looking forward to your application.

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

This week, we've been rapidly fixing the bugs that people found in Plasma 6.3, as well as some older bugs as well. In addition to that, some smaller UI improvements have started to trickle in! There's some larger work in progress too, but not merged yet. Have a look at what did merge this week:

Notable UI Improvements

Plasma 6.3.1

Improved the weather widget's display of search results from the BBC weather service to reduce unhelpful visual noise. (Ismael Asensio, link)

Eliminated the visual difference between how Night Light looks on Wayland compared to on X11. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Plasma 6.4.0

The Digital Clock widget's context menu is now less cluttered with things you're not likely to use. (Nate Graham, link)

Rephrased some settings on System Settings' General Behavior page to be clearer about what it is that they actually do. (Nate Graham, link)

Improved the accessibility of the Widget Explorer sidebar. (Christoph Wolk, link)

Notable Bug Fixes

Plasma 6.3.1

Fixed the issue mentioned last week where KWin built with LTO on GCC 15 could show a black screen on login when using an ICC profile; we found a way to restructure the code that avoids the issue. (Vlad Zahorodnii and Xaver Hugl, link)

Fixed a case where Plasma could crash when you tried to access the Properties dialog for a file in the Recently or Frequently Used file lists in the Kickoff Application Launcher. (Nicolas Fella, link)

Fixed a regression that caused the volume change OSD to fail to appear when adjusting the volume with the integrated volume buttons of a Bluetooth headset. (David Redondo, link)

Fixed a regression that caused the Meta+V clipboard popup to lose its visual highlights when navigated by keyboard. (Christoph Wolk, link)

Fixed an issue in KWin that caused the new "Prefer efficiency" option when using an ICC profile to not actually be very efficient on some hardware, and another one that broke Night Light while using the "Prefer color accuracy" setting. (Xaver Hugl, link 1 and link 2)

Taking screenshots on Wayland in FreeBSD now works. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Fixed a few bugs in the Color Picker widget, such as the shortcut option not working, and the tooltip not looking correct in certain circumstances. (Christoph Wolk, link 1 and link 2)

Fixed a bug with the Task Manager widgets that broke the ability to move the pointer diagonally to a tooltip without dismissing it by accident while using a right-to-left language like Arabic or Hebrew. (Christoph Wolk, link)

Made several improvements and fixes for keyboard navigation in the Kicker Application Menu widget. (Christoph Wolk, link 1, link 2, and link 3)

Plasma 6.3.2

Fixed a regression that caused desktop icons selected by dragging a box around them to become inappropriately deselected if the pointer ended right over one of the icons when releasing the mouse button. (David Edmundson, link)

Fixed a regression that caused the automatic tablet mode feature to accidentally get blocked on certain types of devices, but only when using the feature to re-bind mouse buttons. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Fixed a bug that caused the desktop and panels to go missing when applying a new Global Theme and using the option to replace the existing layout. This also fixed a bug that caused deleted widgets to not be deleted from the plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc config file. (Marco Martin, link 1 and link 2)

Fixed a set of subtle bugs in the implementation of the new "prefer symbolic icons" behavior of the System Tray that caused it to actually do the opposite, showing you colorful icons instead! (Nate Graham and David Redondo, link 1 and link 2)

Extremely long weather station names no longer overflow and break the widget popup's layout. (Ismael Asensio, link)

The inline file renaming text field on the desktop is now colored correctly when using a mixed light/dark setup, as with Breeze Twilight. (Evgeniy Harchenko, link)

Limited the Power Management setting "Change screen brightness" to only take effect for built-in screens on battery-powered systems (e.g. laptops), which avoids certain timing-related brightness bugs for external monitors and makes the settings page less confusing. (Jakob Petsovits, link)

Plasma 6.4.0

Fixed an issue that could cause user switching from KRunner to behave strangely and eventually cause a crash. (David Edmundson, link)

Frameworks 6.12

Fixed an older regression that broke the "highlight non-default settings" features for pages in System Settings written using QtWidgets. The fact that this was overlooked for so long goes to show how few are left these days! (David Redondo, link)

Other bug information of note:

• 1 very high priority Plasma bug (same as last week). Current list of bugs
• 30 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 27 last week). Current list of bugs
• 129 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed over the past week. Full list of bugs

Notable in Performance & Technical

Plasma 6.4.0

Switched KWin's render loop initialization code to use a more precise type of timer that should reduce frame drops. (Apostolos Dimitromanolakis, link)

Frameworks 6.12

When the kded6 daemon crashes, now it automatically restarts itself in the background. (Bryan Liang, link)

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.

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-08.

How Google turned ‘I’m not a robot’ into a massive surveillance system - Boing Boing

Tags: tech, google, surveillance

A good reminder that everything they buy they turn it into a surveillance system indeed… This time under the pretense of security.

https://boingboing.net/2025/02/07/recaptcha-819-million-hours-of-wasted-human-time-and-billions-of-dollars-google-profit.html

Stalkerware apps Cocospy and Spyic are exposing phone data of millions of people

Tags: tech, privacy, security

That’s a lot of stalkerware in the wild. And this exploit is only about two such apps. What’s wrong with people that they install this kind of crap on their loved ones smarphones?

https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/20/stalkerware-apps-cocospy-spyic-exposing-phone-data-of-millions-of-people/

How to Backdoor Large Language Models

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

The security implications of using LLMs are real. With the high complexity and low explainability of such models it opens the door to hiding attacks in plain sight.

https://blog.sshh.io/p/how-to-backdoor-large-language-models

Groundbreaking BBC research shows issues with over half the answers from Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistants

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, reliability, research

Interesting research, looking forward to the follow ups to see how it evolves over time. For sure the number of issues is way to high still to make trustworthy systems around search and news.

https://www.bbc.com/mediacentre/2025/bbc-research-shows-issues-with-answers-from-artificial-intelligence-assistants

ChatGPT’s Political Views Are Shifting Right, a New Analysis Finds

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

This might be accidental but this highlights the lack of transparency on how those models are produced. It also means we should get ready for future generation of such models to turn into very subtle propaganda machines. Indeed even if for now it’s accidental I doubt it’ll be the case much longer.

https://gizmodo.com/chatgpts-political-views-are-shifting-right-a-new-analysis-finds-2000562328

AI is Stifling Tech Adoption

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copilot, programming, innovation

This is definitely a problem. It’s doomed to influence how tech are chosen on software projects.

https://vale.rocks/posts/ai-is-stifling-tech-adoption

Notes: AI Copilot Code Quality

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, copilot, productivity, maintenance

People really need to be careful about the short term productivity boost… If it kills maintainability in the process you’re trading that short term productivity for a crashing long term productivity.

https://kracekumar.com/post/ai_copilot_code_quality_paper/

Can I ethically use LLMs?

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

I like this paper, it’s well balanced. The conclusion says is all: if you’re not actively working on reducing the harms then you might be doing something unethical. It’s not just a toy to play with, you have to think about the impacts and actively reduce them.

https://ntietz.com/blog/can-i-ethically-use-llms/

exo: Run your own AI cluster at home with everyday devices 📱💻 🖥️⌚

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

Early days but this looks like an interesting solution to democratize the inference of large models.

https://github.com/exo-explore/exo

Meshtastic

Tags: tech, networking, radio

This is definitely a fun and interesting project. Such decentralized mesh network are tempting to play with.

https://meshtastic.org/

The IPv6 transition | APNIC Blog

Tags: tech, networking, internet, ip

Very interesting paper on the IPv6 transition. It shows quite well the stagnation we’re in and provides good arguments about why it is so slow to transition.

https://blog.apnic.net/2024/10/22/the-ipv6-transition/

Taichi Lang: High-performance Parallel Programming in Python

Tags: tech, python, performance, gpu

Looks like an interesting DSL to write high performance Python code.

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

A year of uv: pros, cons, and should you migrate

Tags: tech, python

More feedback about uv use in the wild. This is getting really close to becoming the de facto solution for new projects.

https://www.bitecode.dev/p/a-year-of-uv-pros-cons-and-should

Programming with Math | The Lambda Calculus

Tags: tech, mathematics, logic, science

A neat little introduction to an important field in computer science. Lambda calculus is often too little known but it has very important ramifications in several fields.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViPNHMSUcog

Your company needs Junior devs

Tags: tech, teaching, learning

Definitely this. It’s important for an organization to create knowledge… and this requires both people willing to learn and to teach.

https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2024/09/07/your-team-needs-juniors

Don’t call yourself a senior until you’ve worked on a legacy project

Tags: tech, problem-solving, learning

I’m not sure I would phrase it like this but there’s quite some truth to it. It’s important to figure out what we take for granted and to open the black boxes. This is where one finds mastery.

https://www.infobip.com/developers/blog/seniors-working-on-a-legacy-project

Introducing Test-Last Development (TLD)

Tags: tech, tdd, satire

This is a good satire which shows well the excuses people use to not test first.

https://bitfieldconsulting.com/posts/test-last-development

Bye for now!

Fahrenheit, new releases and bugfixes

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 time again a bit delayed due to some personal travel.

Releases

• Kaidan 0.11.0 is out. This new version of KDE's XMPP client brings Qt6 support as well as a few new features.
• Tellico 4.1.1 is out with a few minor fixes.
• Amarok 3.2.2 is out with some minor bugfixes, and improvements for building Amarok on non-UNIX systems and without X11 support.

KDE Itinerary Digital travel assistant

Temperature displayed in Itinerary will now use Fahrenheit units when you set your home country to the USA. (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link)

Kasts Podcast application

Improved the volume button to use an adaptive icon depending on the volume level. (Bart De Vries, 25.04.0. Link)

Kate Advanced text editor

Added a button to clear the debug output in the debug plugin. (Waqar Ahmed, 25.04.0. Link)

Added a button to switch between a normal diff (with only a few lines of context) and a full diff with all the context. (Leo Ruggeri, 25.04.0. Link)

KOrganizer KOrganizer is a calendar and scheduling application

Fixed showing the details of a recurrent event. (Allen Winter, 25.04.0. Link)

Konsole Use the command line interface

Fixed some freezing issues when starting Konsole and any applications using Konsole KPart like Kate. (Waqar Ahmed, 24.12.3. Link)

Merkuro Calendar Manage your tasks and events with speed and ease

Added an option to filter the tasks to only displays the ones due today. (Shubham Shinde, 25.04.0. Link)

SystemDGenie

Ported the editor to KTextEditor. (Thomas Duckworth. 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 monetarnky 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.

The Amarok Development Squad is happy to announce the immediate availability of Amarok 3.2.2, the second bugfix release for Amarok 3.2 "Punkadiddle"!

3.2.2 features some minor bugfixes, and improvements for building Amarok on non-UNIX systems and without X11 support. Additionally, a 16-year-old feature request has been fulfilled. Concluding years of Qt5 porting and polishing work, Amarok 3.2.2 is likely to be the last version with Qt5/KF5 support, and it should provide a nice and stable music player experience for users on various systems and distributions. The development in git, on the other hand, will soon switch the default configuration to Qt6/KF6, and focus for the next 3.3 series will be to ensure that everything functions nicely with the new Qt version.

Changes since 3.2.1

FEATURES:

• Try to preserve collection browser order when adding tracks to playlist (BR 180404)

CHANGES:

• Allow building without X11 support
• Various build fixes for non-UNIX systems

BUGFIXES:

• Fix DAAP collection connections, browsing and playing (BR 498654)
• Fix first line of lyrics.ovh lyrics missing (BR 493882)

Getting Amarok

In addition to source code, Amarok is available for installation from many distributions' package repositories, which are likely to get updated to 3.2.2 soon, as well as the flatpak available on flathub.

Packager section

You can find the tarball package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with Tuomas Nurmi's GPG key.

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

Plasma 6.3 is out! So far the response has been very good, but of course a few issues were found once it was in the wild.

Maybe the worst issue is something that KWin devs have actually tracked down to a bug in the GCC compiler, of all things! It only manifests with the kind of release build configurations that many distros use, and also only with GCC 15 and an ICC profile set up. We've informed distros how to work around it until the root cause is understood and GCC gets patched, or KWin devs are able to guard against it internally.

Unfortunately this is a sign that we did not in fact get enough beta testers, since the issue should have been obvious to people in affected environments. Another sign is that most of the regressions are hardware-related. We've got them fixed now, but we need people to be testing the betas with their personal hardware setups! There's simply no way for a small pool of KDE developers to test all of these hardware setups themselves.

Anyway, with those caveats aside, it looks like it's been a pretty smooth release! Building on it, there have been a number of positive changes to the Media Player widget, Weather Report Widget, Info Center Energy page, and touchscreen support.

Notable new Features

Plasma 6.4.0

The Media Player widget now features a playback rate selector when the source media makes this feature available using its MPRIS implementation. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

Notable UI Improvements

Plasma 6.3.1

Improved the presentation of search results for the new DWD weather provider in the Weather Report widget. (Ismael Asensio, link 1 and link 2)

The BBC Weather provider has recently improved the quality of their forecast data, so we've changed the weather widget to no longer hide search results from it if there are results from other providers as well. (Ismael Asensio, link)

The updates list in Discover is now sorted case-insensitively. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, link)

Welcome Center now remembers its window size (and on X11, position) across launches, like most of our other QML app windows these days. (Tracey Clark, link)

Plasma 6.4.0

Improved the graph view on Info Center's Energy page: Now it's in a card, like in System Monitor, and has more normal and visually pleasing margins. (Ismael Asensio, link 1 and link 2)

Spectacle has gained support for pinch-zooming in its screenshot viewer window, which can be especially useful when annotating using a touchscreen. (Noah Davis, link)

You can now actually scroll through the Widget Explorer with a single-finger touchscreen scroll gesture, because dragging widgets using touch now requires a tap-and-hold. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)

Notable Bug Fixes

Plasma 6.3.1

Fixed a regression that would cause KWin to crash in the X11 session when hotplugging or switching between HDMI screens. (Fushan Wen, link 1 and link 2). Consider it a reminder for everyone still on X11 to try the Wayland session again, because the X11 session receives almost no testing from developers anymore!

Fixed a regression that could cause KWin to sometimes crash hours after hotplugging a Thunderbolt dock. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Fixed a regression that would cause KWin to crash when you interact with the Alt+Tab task switcher while using software rendering. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Fixed a regression that could cause certain Qt-based apps to crash on launch when using the Breeze style. (Antonio Rojas, link)

Fixed a case where Plasma might sometimes crash when clicking on the Networks icon in the System Tray, especially when built using GCC 15. (David Edmundson, link)

Fixed a regression that caused the new "Prefer efficiency" ICC color mode setting to not actually improve efficiency on certain hardware. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Panels in auto-hide mode no longer inappropriately hide again when you start dragging Task Manager tasks to re-order them. (Tino Lorenz, link)

The new bar separator between the date and time in the Digital Clock widget no longer appears inappropriately when the date has been intentionally suppressed. (Christoph Wolk, link)

Fixed an issue that broke the layout of the device tiles on Info Center's Energy page when using a larger-than-default font size or loads of devices with batteries. (Ismael Asensio, link)

Fixed two keyboard navigation issues in the Power and Battery widget. (Ismael Asensio, link 1 and link 2)

Fixed an older issue that prevented the keyboard brightness controls on certain laptops from being visible immediately. (Nicolas Fella, link)

Fixed an older issue that caused Info Center's Energy page to vibrate disturbingly at certain window sizes. It was, heh heh heh… very high energy! (Ismael Asensio, link)

Qt 6.8.3

Committed a better Qt fix for the issue whereby the first click after dragging Task Manager tasks got ignored. (David Redondo, link)

Other bug information of note:

• 1 very high priority Plasma bug (same as last week). Current list of bugs
• 27 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 25 last week). Current list of bugs
• 86 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed over the past week. Full list of bugs

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.

About Me

I’m Rishav Ray Chaudhury, a third year Electrical Engineering undergrad from India. I have participated in Season of KDE this year. I am tasked with implementing a variant of the Mancala board game called Kalah under the guidance of João Gouveia and Benson Muite.

Why I chose this project

As with any aspiring developer, I too started out with game development. A couple of my friends and I started to make games using C# and the Unity framework in my first year of University. The feeling of making games that my friends enjoyed was exhilarating to say the least. This was also around the same time that I learned about open-source software. Apparently, a lot of software that developers frequently use, was developed by a group of passionate programmers. I tried contributing to some repos but was unsuccessful, mainly because I was completely unfamiliar with the projects. That all changed when I started using Arch Linux. For Arch, the desktop environment that I chose was KDE Plasma. After using it for some time, I came to know about Season of KDE and finally took the initiative to start contributing to software that I frequently used. Of the projects, the game development project was the one that caught my eye and now here I am developing a game for it.

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-07.

Wikipedia Prepares for ‘Increase in Threats’ to US Editors From Musk and His Allies

Tags: tech, wikipedia, knowledge, politics, privacy

Some powerful bullies want to make the life of editors impossible. Looks like the foundation has the right tools in store to protect those contributors.

https://www.404media.co/wikipedia-prepares-for-increase-in-threats-to-us-editors-from-musk-and-his-allies/

The Future Is Too Easy

Tags: tech, business, marketing, criticism

Alright, this piece is full of vitriol… And I like it. The CES has clearly become a mirror of the absurdities our industry is going through. The vision proposed by a good chunk of the companies is not appealing and lazy.

https://defector.com/the-future-is-too-easy?ref=DenseDiscovery-325

Microsoft Study Finds AI Makes Human Cognition “Atrophied and Unprepared”

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, ux, cognition, research

This is clearly pointing in the direction of UX challenges around LLM uses. For some tasks the user’s critical thinking must be fostered otherwise bad decisions will ensue.

https://www.404media.co/microsoft-study-finds-ai-makes-human-cognition-atrophied-and-unprepared-3/

Poisoning for propaganda: rising authoritarianism makes LLMs more dangerous

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, politics, criticism

Of course it would be less of a problem if explainability was better with such models. It’s not the case though, so it means they can spew very subtle propaganda. This is bound to become even more of a political power tool.

https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2025/poisoning-for-propaganda/

The skill of the future is not ‘AI’, but ‘Focus’

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, copilot, programming, focus, learning, criticism

This is an interesting way to frame the problem. We can’t rely too much on LLMs for computer science problems without loosing important skills and hindering learning. This is to be kept in mind.

https://www.carette.xyz/posts/focus_will_be_the_skill_of_the_future/

How does a Linux machine connect to the internet, really?

Tags: tech, linux, networking

Due to NetworkManager you forgot how to setup an interface and the networking stack manually? Here is a good summary of the important steps.

https://pjg1.site/linux-internet-from-scratch

You Should Use /tmp/ More

Tags: tech, habits

Surprising idea… I guess I’ll mull this one over and maybe try. This is not a small change of habit though.

https://atthis.link/blog/2025/58671.html

Thread-safe memory copy – Daniel Lemire’s blog

Tags: tech, memory, multithreading

What do you want? Speed or safety? Ultimately you’ll have to choose one.

https://lemire.me/blog/2025/02/07/thread-safe-memory-copy/

Refined: simple refinement types for Rust

Tags: tech, type-systems, rust

A good example of what can be done when you have a rich type system.

https://jordankaye.dev/posts/refined/

How Does Ada’s Memory Safety Compare Against Rust?

Tags: tech, system, rust, ada, memory

Interesting comparison. Ada doesn’t fare as good as I’d have expected as soon as pointers are in the mix… but there is a twist, you can go a very long way without pointers in Ada.

https://ajxs.me/blog/How_Does_Adas_Memory_Safety_Compare_Against_Rust.html

About GPU Conditionals

Tags: tech, gpu, 3d, shader, optimization

This is indeed something easy to get wrong. Also this misconception is very widespread, so it’s good to debunk it.

https://iquilezles.org/articles/gpuconditionals/

Reassessing Wayland

Tags: tech, linux, wayland

This is obviously all good news on the Wayland front. Took time to get there, got lots of justified (and even more unjustified) complaints, but now things are looking bright.

https://dudemanguy.github.io/blog/posts/2025-02-03-wayland-xorg-2/wayland-xorg-2.html

Operational and Denotational Strategies for Understanding Code

Tags: tech, programming, teaching

A good reminder that you should always bring several perspectives when teaching something. This a a simple framework which can be used widely in our field.

https://noelwelsh.com/posts/operational-denotational-understanding/

Less-Than Estimation

Tags: tech, estimates

Nice and tiny estimation approach. I can see projects where this could work.

https://chrisdone.com/posts/less-than-estimation/

Managing Your Time as a Middle Manager

Tags: management, time

A couple of interesting ideas. This fluid focus concept definitely require communication around it when applied.

https://newsletter.canopy.is/p/managing-your-time-as-a-middle-manager

Bye for now!