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

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

Ruqola 2.4.1

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

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

Hey all

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

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

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

So this begs the question: Is Manjaro ARM dead?

Lets take a look at the current status.

No new images

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

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

ARM download are no longer prominent on the website

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

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

Now you can see and download the ARM images.

Very few package updates

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

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

Is it maintained?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So I looked at the screen again:

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

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

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

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

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

Arianna EBook reader

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

Dolphin Manage your files

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

Elisa Play local music and listen to online radio

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

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

Haruna Media player

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

Read the full announcement.

KDE Itinerary Digital travel assistant

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

KMail A feature-rich email application

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

Kdenlive Video editor

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

Before:

After:

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

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

Krita Digital Painting, Creative Freedom

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

Kurzschwardzenbuglen Nature Sanctuary by @Yaroslavus_Artem

Barcode Scanner Scan and create QR-Codes

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

Tokodon Browse the Fediverse

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kwave Sound editor

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

…And Everything Else

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

For a complete overview of what's going on, visit KDE's Planet, where you can find all KDE news unfiltered directly from our contributors.

Get Involved

The KDE organization has become important in the world, and your time and contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we're going to need your support for KDE to become sustainable.

You can help KDE by becoming an active community member and getting involved. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE — you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to be a programmer either. There are many things you can do: you can help hunt and confirm bugs, even maybe solve them; contribute designs for wallpapers, web pages, icons and app interfaces; translate messages and menu items into your own language; promote KDE in your local community; and a ton more things.

You can also help us by donating. Any monetary contribution, however small, will help us cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors and in general just keep KDE bringing Free Software to the world.

To get your application mentioned here, please ping us in invent or in Matrix.

Bending Will created by Robert Streeter using Krita. (Image: CC BY-SA 4.0)

This year there are 14 projects participating in Season of KDE.

The KDE Community warmly welcomes you, and looks forward to your contributions. We hope to have a mutually rewarding experience, where you learn about Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and we benefit from the projects you will build and/or improve.

Animated Transition Preview for Kdenlive

Kdenlive, the popular KDE video editor, will receive a usability boost. Swastik Patel will work on adding animated icon previews to the transition widget. Jean-Baptiste Mardelle will guide Swastik on this open source journey.

AudioTube: YouTube Music App

Chinmay Timwri will improve AudioTube, in particular enhancing ability to create playlists and augmenting data available for playlist creation. Chinmay will be guided by Jonah Brüchert.

Mankala Games

Add Kalah to Mankala Engine.

Kalah is a mancala game popular in North America which has benefitted from much research in creating computerized opponents. Rishav Ray Chaudhury will work on adding this to Mankala engine.

Add Pallanguzhi/Pallanguli to Mankala Engine

Pallanguzhi/Pallanguli is a mancala game popular in south India, and available in a number of variants. Shubam Shinde and Srisharan V S will add these to Mankala engine and explore different methods of creating computerized opponents.

Improve Mankala GUI

Ashutosh Singh will improve the prototype Mankala graphical user interface.

Remote Multiplayer Mode for Mankala

Nidhish Chauhan will work on using XMPP to allow for two people to play a mancala game over the internet by extending Mankala Engine.

These new contributors will be guided by João Gouveia and Benson Muite.

KEcoLab / KdeEcoTest

Documentation

KEcoLab enables developers to measure the energy efficiency of their applications. Shubhanshu Gupta, Roopa Dharshini and Utkarsh Umre will work on improving the documentation and producing video tutorials so that the tool is easier to use and the reports produced can be understood by a wider range of people.

PDF application comparison

Oreoluwa Oluwasina will compare the energy efficiency of Okular and Adobe Acrobat on both Linux and Windows using KdeEcoTest, while fixing remaining open issues with KDE's user emulation tool.

Emmanuel Charruau, Karanjot Singh, Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss, Aakarsh MJ , Pradyot Ranjan and Kieryn Darkwater will guide these new contributors on their open source journey.

Win2Linux-Chooser

This project will make it easier for people who use a Windows desktop to transition to a Linux desktop. The team of new contributors participating in this project is Lorenzo Ferrara, Onat Ribar and Anish Tak. Snehit Sah, Aakarsh MJ and Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss will guide these new contributors.

Please follow their progress by reading their blog posts on KDE's planet, and by joining the relevant project communication channels if you would like details more frequently.

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-03.

How This “Basic” Robot Solves REAL Life Problems (without AI) - YouTube

Tags: tech, robots, disability, empathy

This is definitely an excellent use of robotics. Probably one of the best I’ve seen. The things we can do when we’re not just focusing on increasing productivity. These people get a shared sense of belonging they’d have a hard time to have without those robots.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iLcOLvNfz0

Common misconceptions about the complexity in robotics vs AI

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, robots

Nice reminder that the tasks necessary to robotics are clearly much harder to develop through machine learning than language.

https://harimus.github.io//2024/05/31/motortask.html

The cod-Marxism of personalized pricing

Tags: tech, surveillance, politics, economics, privacy

The wonderful world of personalised pricing in the age of widespread surveillance… Also becoming personalised wage fixing in the case of gig workers. Shameful.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/11/socialism-for-the-wealthy/#rugged-individualism-for-the-poor

I was just censored by Meta

Tags: tech, social-media, facebook, politics, censorship

I think the trend is clear: don’t criticise the powerful or else…

https://boehs.org/node/meta-censorship

Mastodon’s founder cedes control, refuses to become next Musk or Zuckerberg

Tags: tech, social-media, fediverse, foss, politics

Definitely a good move, especially when we see the behavior of the tech moguls…

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/mastodon-becomes-nonprofit-to-make-sure-its-never-ruined-by-billionaire-ceo/

WordPress is in trouble

Tags: tech, foss, community, wordpress

The WordPress is still unfolding… I wouldn’t be surprised if it ends with a fork.

https://anderegg.ca/2025/01/11/wordpress-is-in-trouble

Speech and Language Processing

Tags: tech, language, nlp

Looks like a good resource if you’re interested in natural language processing.

https://web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/slp3/

an autoflusher

Tags: tech, system, programming

This is definitely a neat trick. This way you can flush stdout regularly without modifying the code of a command.

https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/an-autoflusher

Rewrite it in Rust: A Computational Physics Case Study

Tags: tech, rust, computation, performance

More studies needed to confirm this, it is a single data point. Still it looks like Rust could take the HPC world by storm once it gets a better GPGPU story (still early days there).

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.19146

Django vs. FastAPI, An Honest Comparison

Tags: tech, python, backend, django, fastapi

Nice comparison of both approaches. Some of the criteria used I would have left out but otherwise it seems fair.

https://www.david-dahan.com/blog/comparing-fastapi-and-django

Open source and its power demonstrated in PostgreSQL

Tags: tech, foss

Very good demonstration of why you want open source code on your projects. I often end up doing this kind of forensics myself, this is truly powerful.

https://www.cybertec-postgresql.com/en/the-power-of-open-source-in-postgresql/

Thinking About Risk - Sidebar #1: “Exposure” - Jacob Kaplan-Moss

Tags: tech, project-management, risk

Interesting extra dimension to think about risks. I don’t think I ever encountered it in the wild but that can make sense to use it.

https://jacobian.org/2025/jan/15/risk-exposure/

Thinking About Risk - Sidebar #2: The Swiss Cheese Model - Jacob Kaplan-Moss

Tags: tech, project-management, risk

Or why you can’t consider risks in isolation. It’s too often forgotten.

https://jacobian.org/2025/jan/16/swiss-cheese-model/

The illustrated guide to a Ph.D.

Tags: science, research

Wondering what a Ph.D. is about? This is a good illustrated summary.

https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

Bye for now!

You might have seen the awesome Klassy theme by Paul McAuley for Qt applications and window decorations for KWin.

It has some issues compiling against the latest Plasma since the KDecoration API break.

Until it is fixed in the main repository, I’ve created a temporary fork that includes the port to KDecoration3 done by Eliza Mason, with a tiny additional fix I added on top of it. The fork is available at github.com/ivan-cukic/wip-klassy

The kdesrc-build recipe for it is:

module klassy
    repository https://github.com/ivan-cukic/wip-klassy
    cmake-options \
        -DBUILD_QT5=OFF \
        -DBUILD_QT6=ON
    branch plasma6.3
end module