A new Craft cache has just been published. The update is already available for KDE's CD, CI (Windows/Android) will follow in the next days.

Please note that this only applies to the Qt6 cache. The Qt5 cache is in LTS mode since April 2024 and does not recieve major updates anymore. We highly recommend to port your Qt5 app packaged by Craft to Qt6 as soon as possible!

Changes (highlights)

General

We added CI for flake8, isort and black with the help of tox (which makes it easy to run them locally too) to all Craft repositories. To be able to do so we did a lot of best pratice cleanup beforehand like eg. removing star imports.

Craft Core

• Drop support for MSVC 2017
• Introduced a CraftBool helper. This allows handy things like self.subinfo.options.dynamic.withMyLib.asOnOff instead of 'ON' if self.subinfo.options.dynamic.withMyLib else 'OFF'
• Fix: let the Meson build system respect the buildStatic option
• Handle --enable-static --enable-shared in AutoToolsPackageBase instead of in every single blueprint
• Python packages (Linux and Windows MSVC; macOS is work in progress):
  • Build them ourself instead of using the pre-build binaries from pypi.org
  • Use proper staging
  • Allow to deploy/package them
• Properly set Craft env when branch is switched (eg. with Craft Master in CI)

Blueprints

• libjpeg-turbo 3.0.3
• Multiple fixes for build of shared vs. static libs
• libvpx 1.15.0
• Add minGW 14.2 (not the default yet!)
• 7z 24.09
• KShimgen 0.6.1
• linuxdeploy-plugin-qt 2.0.0-alpha-1-20250119
• qtkeychain 0.15.0

About KDE Craft

KDE Craft is an open source meta-build system and package manager. It manages dependencies and builds libraries and applications from source on Windows, macOS, Linux, FreeBSD and Android.

Learn more on https://community.kde.org/Craft or join the Matrix room #kde-craft:kde.org

The Linux App Summit is a project we KDE created, together with GNOME and some other parties. We wanted a physical space where to discuss our platform to different stakeholders.

We have seen lots of progress since 2019. From a KDE perspective, we see our flatpaks and snaps. This adoption brings all sorts of users to our software that otherwise wouldn’t have been able to.

From the other side of the equation, linux distros have been evolving like ever. We have seen a myriad of distributions using technologies that we would have never dreamed of. And we can find them both on consumer and development devices. Even KDE Linux and GNOME OS are looking into tightening the other end of that software distribution loop.

Now, it’s time to take things even further.

This year we will have LAS 2025 in Tirana. Consider participating in LAS 2025! How you ask?

• Join us! It’s free to attend and, dare I say, we are lovely people.
• Send a talk! You can come and talk us about how you are helping linux apps be a reality or what kind of problems you found with your app and how you solved them. Here you can find some more ideas.
• Sponsor! Does your organisation take part in the linux ecosystem? Take part in it!

You can follow LAS updates on the Attendees chat or here @LAS@floss.social on Mastodon.

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-05.

Supporting the Fediverse, one small act at a time

Tags: tech, fediverse, community

Indeed, the Fediverse needs to be better known. Any small actions towards this goal helps.

https://blog.elenarossini.com/supporting-the-fediverse-one-small-act-at-a-time/

Open source alternatives to Instagram, TikTok, and WhatsApp raise funds on Kickstarter

Tags: tech, foss, fediverse

This is good to see funds being raised for those projects. Lets hope they get madly successful.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/24/open-source-alternatives-to-instagram-tiktok-and-whatsapp-raise-funds-on-kickstarter/

AI haters build tarpits to trap and trick AI scrapers that ignore robots.txt - Ars Technica

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

Maybe at some point the big providers will get the message and their scrapers will finally respect robots.txt? Let’s hope so.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/ai-haters-build-tarpits-to-trap-and-trick-ai-scrapers-that-ignore-robots-txt/

DeepSeek Mania Shakes AI Industry to Its Core

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

I guess this was just a matter of time, the obsession of “just make it bigger” was making most player myopic. Now this obviously collides with geopolitics since this time it’s about a Chinese company being ahead.

https://www.404media.co/deepseek-mania-shakes-ai-industry-to-its-core/

OpenAI Furious DeepSeek Might Have Stolen All the Data OpenAI Stole From Us

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

Looks like the monopolists are vexed and are looking for arguments to discredit the competition… of all the arguments, this one is likely the most ridiculous seeing their own behavior.

https://www.404media.co/openai-furious-deepseek-might-have-stolen-all-the-data-openai-stole-from-us/

China’s new and cheaper magic beans shock America’s unprepared magic bean salesmen - The Beaverton

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, business, satire, funny

Excellent satire, it summaries the situation quite well.

https://www.thebeaverton.com/2025/01/chinas-new-and-cheaper-magic-beans-shock-americas-unprepared-magic-bean-salesmen/

ChatGPT : how to think after the hapax

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, neural-networks, gpt, science, energy

I mostly agree with this piece. There’s lots of room for optimization still so we might see a temporary drop in the energy consumption of those systems. That said, longer term energy consumption is indeed the main leverage to improve performance of those systems. It can only get us so far, so new techniques will be needed. Hence why my position is that we’ll come back to symbolic approaches at some point, there’s a clear challenge at interfacing both worlds.

https://algonaute.fr/en/thinking-after-chatgpt.html

A cross-platform context-aware key remapper

Tags: tech, tools, portability, wayland

Looks like a neat tool to have available to remap keys.

https://github.com/houmain/keymapper

Why Trees Without Branches Grow Faster: The Case for Reducing Branches in Code

Tags: tech, cpu, performance, programming

Nice primer on the impact of too many branches in your code on the CPU. This is sometimes a good way to boost performance when you’re mindful about that.

https://cedardb.com/blog/reducing_branches/

Regular expressions can blow up! – Daniel Lemire’s blog

Tags: tech, safety, regex

Always be careful with regular expressions indeed. It can badly backfire.

https://lemire.me/blog/2025/01/25/regular-expressions-can-blow-up/

JavaScript Temporal is coming | MDN Blog

Tags: tech, javascript, date, time

Finally some sane API to deal with date and time in JavaScript? Maybe, we’ll see…

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/blog/javascript-temporal-is-coming/

“Will I ever use this in the real world?”

Tags: tech, science, culture

Of course I agree with this piece. You need enough culture in your field to know about a breadth of topics. It will definitely help pick up the next one you don’t know about yet or help you build parallels for the tougher problems you encounter.

https://blog.waleedkhan.name/will-i-ever-use-this/

Build It Yourself

Tags: tech, dependencies, supply-chain, security, complexity, maintenance

This is a worthy questioning… We try to reuse, but maybe we do it too much? For sure some ecosystems quickly lead to hundreds of dependencies even for small features.

https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/1/24/build-it-yourself/

Dealing with Impostor Syndrome

Tags: psychology

It’s widespread, especially in our field. You’re not alone. Find your coping strategy.

https://www.cultivatedmanagement.com/dealing-with-impostor-syndrome/

Bye for now!

Hey Qt!

Today we're releasing Krita 5.2.9! This is a bug fix release, containing all bugfixes of our bug hunt efforts back in November. Major bug-fixes include fixes to clone-layers, fixes to opacity handling, in particular for file formats like Exr, a number of crash fixes and much more!

Special thanks to Doreene Kang, Ralek Kolemios, Pedro Reis, Guillaume Marrec, Aqaao, Grum999, Maciej Jesionowski, Freya Lupen, Dov Grobgeld, Rasyuqa A. H.

• Add shortcuts to bezier curve and freehand path
• Fix original offsets not being accounted for when copying from another document (Bug 490998)
• Fix updates when copy-pasting multiple nodes into a new document
• Fix infinite loop when trying to update pass-through nodes (Bug 493774, Bug 493830, Bug 493837)
• Fix Photobash Crash
• Bug fix: Added A1 and A2 sizes when creating a document
• Fix a crash when trying to merge down a layer created after a reference image addition
• Possibly fix saving EXR files with extremely low alpha values
• Fix infinite loop when a clone layer is connected to a group with clones
• Dynamic brush tool shouldn't load the saved smoothing configuration (Bug 493249)
• Fix bogus offset when saving EXR with moved layers
• Try to keep color space profile when saving EXR of incompatible type
• Fix crash when re-importing the same resource, but changed (Bug 484796)
• Fix range of Saturation and Value brush options (Bug 487469)
• Check pointer before dereferencing. (Bug 479405)
• Fix loading .kpp files with embedded top-level resources (Bug 487866, Bug 456586, Bug 456197)
• Fix a crash when trying to clear scratchpad while it is busy (Bug 488800)
• Fix the current preset thumbnail to be present in the preset save dialog (Bug 488673, Bug 446792)
• JPEG XL: Fix potential lockup when loading multipage images
• Set the correct shortcut for zoom in in the action file (Bug 484365)
• Fixed: some tools is interrupted by recorder. (Bug 488472, Bug 477715, Bug 484783)
• Make sure that the text tool is not interrupted by the recorder (Bug 495768)
• Recover "Clean Up" button in the Krita's Recordings Manager (Bug 455207)
• Fix a possible saving lockout due to incorrect ownership of the saving mutex (Bug 496018)
• Fixes to the unit spinboxes, a new context menu has been added to change the unit.
• Make vector and raster selections to behave in the same way when creating tiny selections (Bug 445935)
• Fix unclosed paths when intersecting two rectangular selections (Bug 408369)
• Fix crash when closing Krita while Calligraphy Tool is active (Bug 496257)
• Fix following existing shape in the Calligraphy Tool (Bug 433288)
• Fix "Copy into new Layer" action when working with vector layers (Bug 418317)
• Make sure that eraser button is properly initialized on Krita start (Bug 408440)
• Fix focus issues in Canvas Size dialog (Bug 474809)
• Disable snapping to image center by default (Bug 466718)
• Change case of AppImage packages: .appimage -> .AppImage (Bug 447445)
• Make sure that point-based snap points have higher priority than line-based ones (Bug 492434)
• Implement canvas decorations for Snap-to-guides feature -Don't allow lowering/raising a mask into a locked layer
• Fix display profile conversion flags to be updated on settigns change (Bug 496388)
• Switch color history in the popup palette to use last-used sorting (Bug 441900)
• Add Unify Layers Color Space action
• Fix incorrect action text for "Paste Shape Style" (Bug 497035)
• Fix backward compatibility of Per-Channel filter (Bug 497336)
• Fix rendering of the warning icon in the composite op selector
• Simplify path point and control point move strategies.
• Fix an assert when modifying Mesh Gradient on a shape (Bug 496519)
• Fix aspect ratio of Resource Manager tooltips
• Improve rendering of pattern thumbnails
• Fix artifacts when painting under a gaussian blus layer in WA-mode (Bug 434938)
• Fix an assert when undoing merging of locked layers (Bug 497389)
• Remove ignoring of the mouse events in KoPathTool (Bug 411855)
• Use traceback instead of cgitb (Bug 497859)
• Fix ambiguous "break path" shortcut in Shape Edit Tool (Bug 429503)
• Add position indepndent property to libraqm
• Fix python Py_SetPath() deprecation by always using qputenv()
• JPEG XL export: Fix unable to set EPF value to -1 (encoder chooses)
• G'Mic has been updated to 3.5.0 stable.

Download

Windows

If you're using the portable zip files, just open the zip file in Explorer and drag the folder somewhere convenient, then double-click on the Krita icon in the folder. This will not impact an installed version of Krita, though it will share your settings and custom resources with your regular installed version of Krita. For reporting crashes, also get the debug symbols folder.

Note: We are no longer making 32-bit Windows builds.

• 64 bits Windows Installer: krita-5.2.9-setup.exe
• Portable 64 bits Windows: krita-5.2.9.zip
• Debug symbols. (Unpack in the Krita installation folder)

Linux

• 64 bits Linux: krita-5.2.9-x86_64.AppImage

The separate gmic-qt AppImage is no longer needed.

(If, for some reason, Firefox thinks it needs to load this as text: right-click on the link to download.)

MacOS

Note: We're not supporting MacOS 10.13 anymore, 10.14 is the minimum supported version.

• MacOS disk image: krita-5.2.9.dmg

Android

We consider Krita on ChromeOS as ready for production. Krita on Android is still beta. Krita is not available for Android phones, only for tablets, because the user interface requires a large screen.

• 64 bits Intel CPU APK
• 64 bits Arm CPU APK
• 32 bits Arm CPU APK

Source code

• krita-5.2.9.tar.gz
• krita-5.2.9.tar.xz

md5sum

For all downloads, visit https://download.kde.org/stable/krita/5.2.9/ and click on "Details" to get the hashes.

Key

The Linux AppImage and the source .tar.gz and .tar.xz tarballs are signed. You can retrieve the public key here. The signatures are here (filenames ending in .sig).

tldr; save the date for our QtCS25, May 7-8 in Munich.
Stay tuned for more information.

Qrca WiFi mode, Trust and Safety in Tokodon, and more

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.

Due to FOSDEM happening next weekend, there won't be any "This Week in KDE Apps" post next week. If you are in Brussels during the event, the KDE team will be in building AW, next to our friends from GNOME. Come say hi, we will have some stickers and demo devices!

General Changes

The About page used in many Kirigami apps now uses a new FormLinkDelegate for entries that will open a link. (Carl Schwan, Kirigami Addons 1.8.0. Link)

Amarok Rediscover your music

Support for Digital Audio Access Protocol (DAAP) was fixed. (Tuomas Nurmi, 3.2.2. Link)

Akonadi Background service for KDE PIM apps

Loading IMAP tags was optimized. (Carl Schwan, 24.12.2. Link)

Some SQL queries were fixed so that they don't exceed the limits imposed by the SQL engines (e.g. when reindexing a big email folders). (David Faure, 24.12.2. Link)

Elisa Play local music and listen to online radio

Files will play automatically when opened from a different app (e.g. Dolphin). (Pedro Nishiyama, 25.04.0. Link)

KDE Itinerary Digital travel assistant

We improved the ticket extractor for PKP (Grzegorz Mu, 24.12.2, Link)

We fixed public transport data access from Entur in Norway (24.12.2, also affects KTrip).

Kaidan Modern chat app for every device

The onboarding workflow of Kaidan was completely overhauled. (Melvin Keskin. Link)

The QR-code scanner and generator of Kaidan now uses Prison, KDE's standard QR-Code library (Jonah Brüchert and Melvin Keskin. Link)

Calculator A feature rich calculator

The history feature was fixed. (François Guerraz, 24.12.2. Link)

Okular View and annotate documents

We fixed Okular freezing when opening a PDF file with a lot of entries in a choice field. (Albert Astals Cid, 25.04.0. Link)

Barcode Scanner Scan and create QR-Codes

Qrca gained a mode to only scan for Wifi QR-codes. Currently this can be triggered with the --wifi flag, but in the future this will be triggered directly from Plasma Network Management to scan for Wifi codes. Additionally when scaning the QR-code for an existing connection, instead of creating a new connection, Qrca will update the credentials of the existing connection. (Kai Uwe Broulik. Link)

We removed the option to share a QR-code and replace it with a button to copy the QR-code. (Jonah Brüchert. Link)

Tokodon Browse the Fediverse

We added a menu item under the "Filters" timeline action to configure filters. (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link)

We improved the look of filtered posts significantly. (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link 1)

Tags and polls are hidden when the post has a content notice. (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link 1 and link 2)

As part of more trust and safety improvements, we added a button to mute a conversation, so that you don't get any notifications for conversations you are not interested too. (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link)

We fixed voting in polls that was not working reliably. (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link) and improved Tokodon when using a screen reader. (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link)

Third Party Apps

BlueJay

Evan Maddock released the 1.0.0 and 1.0.1 of BlueJay. BlueJay is a Bluetooth manager written in Qt with Kirigami.

…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.

Project Description

In SoK 2025, I will be working on adding Pallanguzhi, a traditional Indian Mancala variant, into the Mankala Engine. Collaborating with Srisharan V S, my focus includes two key goals:

1. Developing a computerized opponent to enhance player engagement and ensure a seamless gameplay experience.
2. Creating a Text-Based User Interface (TUI) for gameplay.

What I Did This Week

The first step in my journey was setting up the Mankala Engine repository. I forked the repository to my local system, successfully built it, and resolved some warnings during the build process. Afterward, I delved into the codebase, analyzing the existing algorithms and understanding how they work for other Mancala variants.

Research on Implementing a Computerized Opponent

To create a robust computerized opponent for Pallanguzhi, I began researching potential algorithms that could best fit the game mechanics. Here are the three techniques I explored.

1. Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is an exciting approach where an agent learns optimal strategies by interacting with the environment and improving over time. For Pallanguzhi, RL could enable the computerized opponent to adapt and improve its gameplay dynamically. However, as I am new to RL, implementing and training models for this variant will take some time and effort. Despite its challenges, RL remains a promising option for advanced gameplay enhancement.

2. Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS)

MCTS is a powerful algorithm widely used for decision-making in games. It works by simulating potential moves to build a decision tree and then selecting the best move based on statistical evaluation. For Pallanguzhi, MCTS could efficiently explore the vast game state space and make informed decisions. By carefully tuning the number of simulations and exploration parameters, this algorithm can provide a balanced and competitive computerized opponent.

3. Alpha-Beta Pruning with Iterative Deepening

Alpha-Beta Pruning with Iterative Deepening is a highly effective technique for optimizing decision trees by eliminating unnecessary branches. This method is already implemented in the Mancala Engine for other variants and has proven its efficiency. Leveraging this existing implementation for Pallanguzhi will allow us to quickly develop a working version of the game with a competent computerized opponent.

Conclusion for Now

The immediate plan is to integrate the Pallanguzhi variant into the existing Alpha-Beta Pruning implementation. This ensures we have a functional version of the game ready for any further work. Once the TUI implementation is complete, I plan to revisit Reinforcement Learning for Pallanguzhi. Working with RL models and training them is a learning-intensive process, and I am excited to gain experience in this area. Even if RL proves too challenging, we will still have a polished Pallanguzhi variant running on the existing algorithm.

What’s Next

Next week, I will work on adding the longer version of Pallanguzhi, which consists of multiple rounds, while Srisharan V S focuses on completing the shorter version. Together, we aim to make significant progress toward integrating and refining this traditional game within the Mankala Engine.

Stay tuned for updates!

The M is silent. In computing this stands for the underlined letters in menus that can be triggered using an Alt+Letter key combination, one that you can remember and apply later to navigate around more quickly.

Qt and other toolkits typically use an ampersand to denote a mnemonic when assigning a menu entry. For instance, “&Shutdown” will be displayed as “Shutdown” and trigger on Alt+S whereas “Slee&p” will be “Sleep” and trigger on Alt+P. Of course this isn’t limited to menus, pretty much any control, buttons and what not, can have mnemonics. Since they are part of the label, a translated string can and likely will have a different one.

KDE applications, both written in Qt Widgets and Qt Quick, automatically assign mnemonics for most controls that don’t have one explicitly set. This is done through KAcceleratorManager and Kirigami’s MnemonicData, respectively, using a set of rules based on the control’s type. For example, a toolbar button is less important than a regular button or check box but both are more important than a section label. It also tries to use the first letter of a word, if that letter is not already taken. If a control is hidden the shortcut is removed again. The end result in a German dialog is “&Abbrechen” (Cancel), “&OK”, and “A&nwenden“ (Apply, since the A was already taken) for its footer.

While our Qt Quick Controls 2 Desktop Style automatically assigned mnemonics for all of its controls, Plasma Components did not for CheckBoxes, Switches, and some others. That is now fixed and it’s now possible to use e.g. Alt+R to Raise maximum volume in the Volume applet or switch to the Applications tab using Alt+A. Likewise for the circular action button used on the lock and logout screens, you can now Alt+P to Sleep from the logout and lock screens! The “S” is taken for shutdown for consistency and unused on the lock screen.

I noticed that I couldn’t trigger the toolbar buttons in System Settings even though they clearly showed an underlined letter. Turns out the shortcut was registered twice for some reason! If this happens, neither action is executed and instead the “activated ambiguously” signal is emitted. Kirigami’s ActionToolBar is effectively two views: the regular strip of buttons and an overflow menu. The buttons are shown dynamically based on how much room there is available and the action’s priority. There was a bug in Kirigami’s mnemonic handler where hiding a control wouldn’t release its shortcut, effectively registering every toolbar shortcut twice.

Speaking of Kirigami, there’s a FormLayout similar to QFormLayout that we use for most of our settings pages. It has a label on the left, and control on the right. By default, the label generates a mnemonic to focus its buddy. However, we don’t just want to focus the control, we want to trigger it as if we had clicked it. Qt 6.8 introduced an animateClick method on buttons that briefly flashes the button as a reminder of what’s about to happen and then triggers it. For controls without this features, focus is set as before, albeit with ShortcutFocusReason to tell the control that it was focused as a result of a shortcut press. A ComboBox for instance reacts differently depending on how it got activated. I then also made sure no mnemonic is assigned to the label next to a control when the control itself already had one.

With those improvements done, I tested various Qt Quick applications and settings modules for their mnemonics. The “Display & Monitor” settings barely had any working ones. The thing is: FormLayout’s labels by default are attached to the Item to which the label was added. In case of KScreen, we often used a RowLayout to place a control an a “contextual help button” (the little (i) button with more information) next to it. Since RowLayout isn’t an interactive item, no mnemonic was assigned for the given row. Luckily, you can explicitly set buddyFor and tell it what the relevant control is. Doing that I made most of KScreen’s settings reachable by Alt key combinations. While at it, I explicitly set the letter H for the HDR check box.

Now that you’ve seen me improve our mnemonic machinery, what can you do to make an application more accessible this way? Press and hold Alt, see what shortcuts get assigned, try triggering the underlined letter using Alt+letter:

• If there’s a FormLayout and the control isn’t reachable, check that there’s a proper buddyFor set.
• For obvious abbreviation and words, consider to set a mnemonic explicitly so the letter used is consistent and predictable, like the “Enable &HDR” in Display settings
• For custom controls not based on Qt Quick Controls, you can use Kirigami.MnemonicData to register your control with our Mnemonic infrastructure and assign the shortcut it generated to a Shortcut item.
• Consider disabling mnemonics using Kirigami.MnemonicData.enabled where it doesn’t make much sense to have them. e.g. controls in lists. Each one would just get a subsequent letter in its word assigned, reducing the pool of available letters for the important ones
• If a control doesn’t show an underlined letter, try Alt+first letter in the label. Maybe it has one that doesn’t show up for a reason?
• Finally: Report or fix bugs you find!