After the criticism in the last post about the limitations of KUserFeedback (KUF) for doing data-driven UX work — let’s get more detailed and constructive:
What insights do we as KDE UX people needto do even better than we are currently doing?
Let us start with what we already get from KUF. We get usage data, like how many people are using Wayland vs. X11. But we only get usage data according to our telemetry policy. So we do not get any deeper insight into how users configure their sessions when using Wayland compared to X11. But this is the kind of information we would need to do proper data-driven UX. What settings are users changing? How many users have icons on their desktop, and which ones? Are people manually mounting network drives? Which System Tray icons are interacted with the most? And so on.
But while this information is already impossible to gather with our current approach, we’re only scratching the surface. We need even deeper UX insights, like understanding where people click. And where they click next (in terms of Markov chains). That way we can understand if people are using Plasma the way we intended when we designed it. Or, how long does it take them to get from point A to point B? Are they taking detours because we’ve laid out paths that users don’t understand in the way we intended?
None of these questions can be answered with our current approach to telemetry.
The basic problem is that we currently send all the raw data to the KDE servers to get the answers we need. And the data we need to collect in order to get the above described desired user insights could of course be used to “identify a specific user” – which is not allowed by our telemetry policy for good reason.
And yet we need even more data. We want to target all users, or only users who exhibit certain behaviors. We want them to fill out questionnaires to better understand why they behave the way they do, to understand their goals and intentions. This would be extremely helpful in understanding bug reports. Or to support our design discussions with relevant data from real users.
All of this can only be achieved with a fundamental change in the way we do telemetry.
Existing alternatives, such as the opt-out Endless OS metrics system, also do not allow enough user insights and share the problem that the data leaves the property of the data owners, the users. That is why we have been working on the privact ecosystem, which allows all the insights described above, while fully preserving users’ privacy. And because of that, we can not only ask for more intimate data, but we can also make participation opt-out and so get data from substantially more people. And why is that? Because with the privact ecosystem, there is no technical possibility that any individual’s personal data can ever be shared remotely. Never. But it would finally enable good user-data-driven UX work. For the sake of KDE and our users.
I am from now on writing my posts on GitHub pages. Apart from it being useful to keep my posts versioned using git, I had some issues with my previous blog.
The idea was to simply use write.as and publish a post from time to time. This worked well except for more than a month ago me wanting to do a post about my KRunner plugins.
It naturally contained a lot of links and thus the publishing was prevented and even the account blocked due to apparent spam. There was no response via mail for over a month.
So here we are not on another blog where I hopefully write more often and also be able to spent more time on KDE!
You’re on the fediverse and you want to reach out bluesky users? This might be the right tool for you (unclear if it’ll scale yet though). At least if and when Bluesky turns bad, people will know where to reach friends next.
Excellent post showing reasons to be skeptical about Bluesky’s future. Despite all their likely sincere claims I don’t see how they’ll escape enclosure and enshittification when their sketchy VCs will want to see money back.
Elon Musk’s X is hemorrhaging users to Threads and Bluesky
Tags: tech, social-media, politics, twitter
Sad to see people predominantly jumping from Twitter to other tech moguls walled gardens. This feels more and more like a missed opportunity for the fediverse. That said I’m amazed at how efficient Musk has been at killing the network effect of his platform. This proves it’s actually doable.
A computational analysis of potential algorithmic bias on platform X during the 2024 US election
Tags: tech, social-media, politics, twitter
This is what we get for refusing to regulate social media and for not auditing their algorithms. Their owners can game and bias the platforms as they see fit for their own gains. They became massive forces of manipulation in the process.
Good reminder that models shouldn’t be used as a service except maybe for prototyping. This has felt obvious to me since the beginning of this hype cycle… but here we are people are falling in the trap today.
This can change from organization to organization. This post proposes a career ladder which will work in some contexts. What’s clear is that it’s all about scope and impact.
We have updated Krita for Android and ChromeOS in the Google Play Store to 5.2.8, an Android/ChromeOS-only emergency release.
This release fixes startup problems that happened on some devices with 5.2.6. Krita 5.2.8 for Android
is now available both for beta-track users as well as in the "stable" release track. Note, however,
that we still recommend treating Krita on Android as a beta release that might have bugs that impair
your work, as well as a user interface that is not optimized for touch devices.
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 release the first beta of what will become KDE Gear 24.12.0. If your distro provides testing package, please help with testing. Meanwhile, and as part of the 2024 end-of-year fundraiser, you can "Adopt an App" in a symbolic effort to support your favorite KDE app.
This week, we are particularly grateful to George Fakidis, tmpod, Paxriel for showing their support for Okular; Ian Lohmann, Anthony Perrett, Linus Seelinger and Nils Martens for Dolphin, Erik Bernoth for Arianna and Daniel Lloyd-Miller and mdPlusPlus for KDE Connect.
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. So consider donating today!
Getting back to all that's new in the KDE App scene, let's dig in!
Global Changes
KWidgetsAddons, a collection of add-on widgets for QtWidgets, and KUnitConversion now have Python bindings. (Manuel Alcaraz Zambrano, KDE Frameworks 6.9.0. Link 1 and link 2)
Call to Action
KDE has over 70 frameworks, we need your help to add Python bindings to the relevant remaining frameworks. See metatask.
The "About" page of Kirigami applications now provides helpful "Copy" button that lets you copy system information, which can be useful when filling a bug report. The same feature was also implemented for QtWidgets-based applications. (Carl Schwan, Kirigami Addons 1.6.0 and KDE Frameworks 6.9. Link for Kirigami apps and link for QtWidget apps)
Additionally Joshua added icons to the "Getting involved", "Donate", and other actions for the Kirigami version. (Joshua Goins, Kirigami Addons 1.6.0. Link)
The "share" context menu of many applications can now copy the data to clipboard. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Frameworks 6.9.0. Link)
Alligator now lets you bookmark your favorite posts. (Soumyadeep Ghosh, 25.04.0. Link)
The selected feed will also now be highlighted correctly and the text of an article can now be selected and copied. (Soumyadeep Ghosh, 24.12.0. Link and link 2)
Digikam 8.5.0 is out! This releases improves the Face Management system, adds colored labels to identify important items, increases its list of supported languages to 61, and fixes over 160 bugs.
When Dolphin is started on a location which does not report a storage size (for example "remote", or "bluetooth") the status bar will no longer pointlessly show a empty storage size indicator for a split second before hiding it again. (Felix Ernst, 25.04.0. Link)
We fixed a bug where indexed-color or monochrome-palette images (e.g. from pngquant) would render with garbled colors or black and white noise when zoomed. (Tabby Kitten, 24.12.0. Link)
Itinerary's Matrix integration now uses encrypted Matrix rooms by default and Itinerary can now do session verification, which is going to be mandatory in the future. (Volker Krause, 25.04.0. Link 1 and link 2). Volker also fixed various small issues with the Matrix integration (too many to list them all) and backported these fixes for the 24.12.0 release.
Several Kdenlive effects got the capacity to animate their parameters with keyframes. (Bernd Jordan, Julius Künzel, and Massimo Stella, 25.04.0. Link 1, link 2, link 3 and link 4)
Keysmith Two-factor code generator for Plasma Mobile and Desktop
Keysmith can now import OTPs from andOTP's backup files. (Martin Reboredo, 25.04.0, Link)
Fixed a crash when migrating old iCal entries in Akonadi to be properly tagged. (Daniel Vrátil, 24.12.0. Link)
Fix style of configuration dialogs for Akonadi agents on platforms other than Plasma. (Laurent Montel, 24.12.0. Link)
Port away IMAP resource from KWallet and use QtKeychain instead. This ensures your email's credentials are correctly stored and retrieved on other platforms like Windows. (Carl Schwan, 24.12.0. Link)
Reduce temporary memory allocation by 25% when starting KMail. If you are curious how, the merge requests are super interesting. (Volker Krause, 24.12.0. Link 1, link 2, and link 3)
We added various options related to security of the RDP connection and the redirection of smartcards to the remote host. (Roman Katichev, 25.04.0. Link)
When receiving stickers with NeoChat, they will be displayed with a more appropriate size (256x256px). Same with custom emoticons, which are now displayed with the same height as the rest of the message. (Joshua Goins, 24.12.0. Link)
We don't show the filename underneath images anymore, and also make the download file dialog fill out the filename by default. (Joshua Goins, 24.12.0. Link 1 and link 2)
We redesigned the list of accounts in the welcome page. Now we show the display name and avatar of your accounts there, which makes it easier to recognize. (Joshua Goins, 24.12.0. Link)
We rearranged the room, file and message context menus. (Joshua Goins, 24.12.0. Link 1 and link 2)
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.
Thanks to Tobias Fella and Michael Mischurow for the proofreading.
After five months of active maintenance and many weeks triaging bugs, the digiKam team is proud to present version 8.5.0 of its open source digital photo manager.
Generalities
More than 160 bugs have been fixed
and we spent a lot of time contacting users to validate changes in pre-release versions to confirm
fixes before deploying the program to production.
Application internationalization has also been updated. digiKam and Showfoto are released with 61
different languages for the graphical interface. Go to the Settings/Configure Languages dialog and change
the localization as you want. digiKam needs to be restarted to apply the changes. If you want to
contribute to the internationalization of digiKam, please contact the
translator teams, following the translation
how-to. The statistics about
translation states are available here.
Tags: tech, cpu, hardware, security, privacy, research
Fascinating research about side-channel attacks. Learned a lot about them and website fingerprinting here. Also interesting the explanations of how the use of machine learning models can actually get in the way of proper understanding of the side-channel really used by an attack which can prevent developing actually useful counter-measures.
This is a nice view into how a query planner roughly works and a nice algorithm which can be used internally to properly estimate the number of distinct values in a column.
Definitely a good post. No you don’t have to go all in with cloud providers and signing with your blood. It’s often much more expensive for little gain but much more complexity and vendor lock in.
Avoiding boolean parameters in library APIs should be a well known advice by now. Still they should probably be avoided when modeling domain types as well.
Good musing about complexity. Very often we need to move it around, the important question is where should it appear. For sure you don’t want it scattered everywhere.
Interesting reasoning about what is hard in systems with concurrency. It’s definitely about the state space of the system and the structure of that space.
KDE Gear is our release service for many apps such as mail and calendaring supremo Kontact, geographers dream Marble, social media influencing Kdenlive and dozens of others. KDE needs you to test that your favourite feature has been added and your worst bug has been squished.
You can do this with KDE neon Testing edition, built from the Git branches which get used to make releases from. You can download the ISO and try it on spare hardware or on a virtual machine to test them out.
But maybe you don’t want the faff of installing a distro. Containers give an easier way to test thanks to Distrobox.
Install Distrobox on your normal computer. Make sure Docker or podman are working.
Then start it with distrobox enter all-testing And voila it will mount the necessary bits to get Wayland connections working and keep your home directory available and you can run say
The main aim of ShellWen Chen's project was to update
Apache Mina SSHD from 0.14.0 to 2.12.1. The older version has a few listed
vulnerabilities.
The newer library required additional code to enable it to work on older Android phones,
up to Android API 21.
João Gouveia created
Mankala engine, a library
to enable easy creation of Mancala games. The engine contains implementations for
two Mancala games, Bohnenspiel and Oware. Both games contain computerized opponents,
João also started on a QtQuick graphical user interface. The games are functional,
but additional investigation on computerized opponents may help improve their
effectiveness.
Image of text user interface for Bohnenspiel (Courtesy of João Gouveia,
CC BY-SA 4.0)
Subtitling support has been improved for Kdenlive. Chengkun Chen
added support for using the
Advanced SubStation (ASS) file
format and for converting SubRip files to ASS files.
To support this format, Chengkun Chen also made subtitling editor improvements. The work has been
merged in the main repository. Documentation has been written, and will hopefully be merged soon.
The new Style Editor Widget (Courtesy of Chengkun Chen,
CC BY-SA 4.0)
Ken Lo worked on implementing Pixel Perfect lines in Krita. As
explained by
Ricky Han,
such algorithms remove corner pixels from L shaped blocks and ensure the thinnest possible line
is 1 pixel wide. Implementing such algorithms well is of use not only in Krita, but also in
rendering web graphics where user screen resolutions can vary significantly. The algorithm was
implemented to work in close to real time while lines are drawn, rather than as a post processing
step. Ken Lo's work has been merged into Krita.
An image showing that pixel perfect lines are obtained most of the time (Courtesy of Ken Lo,
CC BY 4.0)
Israel Galadima worked on improving Python support in LabPlot.
Shiboken was used for this and it is now possible to call some of LabPlot functions from Python and integrate these into other
applications.
An image of a plot produced using Python bindings to Labplot (Courtesy of Israel Galadima,
CC BY-SA 4.0)
Kuntal Bar added 3D graphing capabilities to LabPlot.
This was done using QtGraphs. The work has yet
to be merged, but there are many nice examples of 3D plots for bar charts, scatter and
surface plots.
A 3D bar chart (Courtesy of Kuntal Bar, MIT license)
Pratham Gandhi worked on improving the forms/Javascript support in Okular. Around 25 requests have been merged to improve various features, some in the backend and some directly visible, such as fixing the size of the radio buttons or check boxes, or the one pictured below to improve the handling of floating numbers in different locales.
An image of showing an incorrect total sum calculation fixed during GSoC (Courtesy of Pratham Gandhi,
CC BY-SA 4.0)
Snaps are self contained linux application packging formats.
Soumyadeep Ghosh worked
on improving the tooling necessary to make KDE applications
easily available in the Snap Store.
In addition, Soumyadeep improved packaging of a number of KDE
Snap packages, and packaged MarkNote.
Finally, Soumyadeep created Snap KCM,
a graphical user interface to manage permissions that Snaps
have when running.
The 2024 GSoC period is finally over for KDE.
A big thank you to all the mentors and contributors who have
participated in GSoC! We look forward to your
continuing participation in free and open source software communities
and in contributing to KDE.
Earlier this year I had the pleasure of visiting the KDE Akademy 2024 in Würzburg. It had been a few years since my last visit to Akademy and it was great to see old friends and meet new ones. Besides socializing, my main task was to talk to as many KDE people as possible about the privact project and its integration into KDE. Knowing the KDE community, not surprisingly this resulted in lots of interesting discussions.
Most importantly, I gave a talk about the current state of privact’s integration with KUserFeedback. If you missed it, here is the recording:
As a follow-up, we had 2 BoFs on Monday to discuss the next steps. Felix was kind enough to join me to provide more technical developer insights than I can give.
As a first teaser for you: In the short term, the privact approach will allow KDE to do proper user research, thereby enabling us to do data-driven UX without compromising user privacy. In the longer term, privact aims to restoredigitalprivacy for everyone, even outside of KDE, even outside of FLOSS. You can learn more in upcoming posts or on the privact homepage.
The individual feedback on the privact approach during Akademy was very good, which is why we now want to start communicating with the largerKDEcommunity. So this post is not only to report about my attendance at Akademy, but also to start blogging again on Planet KDE and to check if the aggregation works.
@bjoernbalazs:kde.org
alex1701c
ervin
