Two-dimensional vector graphics has been quite prevalent in recent Qt release notes, and it is something we have plans to continue exploring in the releases to come. This blog takes a look at some of the options you have, as a Qt developer.
https://openuk.uk/openuk-september-2024-newsletter-1/
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7238138962253344769/
Our 5th annual Awards are open for nominations and our 2024 judges are waiting for your nominations! Hannah Foxwell, Jonathan Riddell, and Nicole Tandy will be selecting winners for 12 categories. ?
The OpenUK Awards 2024 are open for nominations until Sunday, September 15.. Our 5th Awards again celebrate the UK’s leadership and global collaboration in open technology!
Nominate now! https://openuk.uk/awards/openuk-awards-2024/
Up to 3 shortlisted nominees will be selected in each category by early October and each nominee will be given one place at the Oscars of Open Source, the black tie Awards Ceremony and Gala Dinner for our 5th Awards held at the House of Lords on 28 November, thanks to the sponsorship of Lord Wei.
Tuesday, 10 September 2024. Today KDE releases a bugfix update to KDE Plasma 6, versioned 6.1.5.
Plasma 6.1 was released in June 2024 with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience.
This release adds a month's worth of new translations and fixes from KDE's contributors. The bugfixes are typically small but important and include:
Today, we bring you a report on the brand-new release of the Maui Project.
We are excited to announce the latest release of MauiKit version 4.0.0, our comprehensive user interface toolkit specifically designed for convergent interfaces, the complying frameworks, and an in-house developed set of convergent applications.
Built on the solid foundations of Qt Quick Controls, QML, and the power and stability of C++, MauiKit empowers developers to create adaptable and seamless user interfaces across a range of devices, and with this release, we have finally migrated to Qt6 and made available the documentation for the frameworks.
Join us on this journey as we unveil the potential of MauiKit 4 for building convergent interfaces, and finally discover the possibilities offered by the enhanced Maui App stack.
To follow the Maui Project’s development or to just say hi, you can join us on our Telegram group @mauiproject
We are present on X and Mastodon:
Thanks to the KDE contributors who have helped to translate the Maui Apps and Frameworks!
You can get the stable release packages [APKs, AppImage, TARs] directly from the KDE downloads server at https://download.kde.org/stable/maui/
All of the Maui repositories have the newly released branches and tags. You can get the sources right from the Maui group: https://invent.kde.org/maui
With this version bump the Maui team has finalized the migration over to Qt6, which implies more stability and better performance coming from Qt upgraded QQC engine; but also means that some features have been removed or did not make the cut and still need more time to be brought back in posterior releases.
Currently, there are over 10 frameworks, with two new ones recently introduced. They all, for the most part, have been fully documented, and although, the KDE doxygen agent has some minor issues when publishing some parts, you can find the documentation online at https://api.kde.org/mauikit/ (and if you find missing parts, confusing bits, or overall sections to improve – you can open a ticket at any of the framework repos and it shall be fixed shortly after)
fav filemanager and music player. minimal modern & convergent @maui_project
— Camilo Higuita (@cmhiguita) May 6, 2024
Maui Apps 4.0 coming out soon. pic.twitter.com/OVLM2HWv6v
A script element has been removed to ensure Planet works properly. Please find it in the original post.
MauiKit Core controls also include the Mauikit Style, which along with the core controls has been revised and improved in the migration. New features have been introduced and some minor changes in the API have been made.
A good way to test the new changes made visually is via the MauiDemo application, when building MauiKit from the source, just add the -DBUILD_DEMO=ON flag and then launch it as MauiDemo4
All of the other frameworks have also been fully ported and reviewed, and some features are absent – for example, for ImageTools the image editor is missing for Android due to KQuickImageEditor problems.
Comic book support is missing in MauiKit-Documents, due to a big pending refactoring.
Finally, TextEditor new backend rendering engine migration is yet to be started.
Most of these pending issues will be tackled in the next releases bit by bit.
More details can be found in the previous blog posts:
Maui Release Briefing # 4
Maui Release Briefing #5
MauiKit-Archiver is a new framework, and it was created to share components and code between different applications that were duplicating the same code: Index, Arca, and Shelf.
The same goes for MauiKit-Git, which will help unify the code base for implementations made in Index, Bonsai, and Strike, so all of those apps can benefit from a single cohesive and curated code base in the form of a framework.
Archiver is pending to be documented, and Git is pending to be finished for its first stable release.
I have now finished porting all the Maui Apps and MauiKit frameworks to Qt6.
— Camilo Higuita (@cmhiguita) May 1, 2024
Vvave music player mini mode is back.@maui_project @Nitrux_NX pic.twitter.com/Mal3RU87O2
A script element has been removed to ensure Planet works properly. Please find it in the original post.
@maui_project looking good. after the port to qt6 the next goal is to put out a stable version of Maui Shell with a tight integration to the app ecosystem and the HIG #mauikit pic.twitter.com/BkR9ecTzMT
— Camilo Higuita (@cmhiguita) May 6, 2024
A script element has been removed to ensure Planet works properly. Please find it in the original post.
Although Maui Shell has been ported over to Qt6 and is working with the latest MauiKit4, a lot of pending issues are still present and being worked on. The next release will be dedicated fully on Maui Shell and all of its subprojects, such as Maui Settings, Maui Core, CaskServer, etc.
That’s it for now. Until the next blog post, that will be a bit closer to the 4.0.1 stable release.
The post Maui Release Briefing #6 appeared first on MauiKit — #UIFramework.
After years and years of working together on KPhotoAlbum, a considerable part of the devs team (Johannes and me ;-) finally met in-person, at Akademy in Würzburg!
It was a very nice and pleasurable meeting, with lots of information around KDE, e.g. community goals, where we stand with Qt 5 and 6 and where we want to go, programming, sustainability and so on. Thoroughly nice and friendly people (esp. the two of us of course ;-), with whom one could have nice and productive conversations. If you can, go to Akademy – it's worth it!
Also, we hopefully again could emphasize – in person – the importance a Qt6/KF6 port of Marble for KPhotoAlbum and also KGeoTag. We now actively work on porting KPA to Qt6/KF6, but we need Marble to be able to finally release it. But we're confident everything will work out.
Hopefully, this won't be the last time we meet!
This week I and many other major Plasma contributors are at Akademy, planning the future and having many fruitful in-person discussions! As a result, probably next week’s post will be a bit light. This week though, lots of pre-Akademy changes got merged, most of them bug-fixes and performance improvements scheduled for Plasma 6.2. We want 6.2 to be super duper stable, and are putting in the work to ensure this goal is reached!
In addition, we merged a few final late-breaking features that had been under development for months and were deemed stable enough — likely the last ones before the hard feature freeze in a few days. Check it out!
You can now rename audio devices! Additionally, you can now choose the technical data source used to generate default names for audio devices that you don’t choose to manually rename, which helps for hardware like mixer tables which show up as like 50 devices such that renaming each one individually would be a big pain in the butt (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
You can now click/double-click on .ovpn VPN profile files to configure a new VPN (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
You can now place files in ~/Templates and they will appear as templates in the “Create New…” menu that appears in various places, including Plasma’s Desktop and Dolphin (Antti Savolainen, Frameworks 6.7. Link)
When copying image data to the clipboard, the Clipboard widget now always shows a preview of the image, instead of sometimes, in a random-seeming manner, showing a symbolic icon instead (Noah Davis, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
In Discover’s rating preview carousel thingy that provides an overview of an app’s rating including top reviews, it will no longer show reviews that have been voted down more than up (Aleix Pol Gonzales, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
In Plasma’s Networks widget, the button to create a Wi-Fi hotspot now uses the correct icon (Darshan Phaldesai, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
Fixed an issue that could cause pop-ups for widgets on a Plasma panel to be resized to either their original size or else a much smaller size after the screen configuration changed (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.1.5. Link)
Searching for locations with umlauts in their names now works as expected in Plasma’s Weather Report widget (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 6.1.5. Link)
When using the “Toggle Touchpad” global shortcut to turn your touchpad on or off, if you restart the machine with the touchpad disabled, then the next time you start it up again, the state will be correctly reported such that you can press the shortcut only once to turn the touchpad on again (Akseli Lahtinen, Plasma 6.1.5. Link)
System Settings no longer crashes every time you close the “Login Screen (SDDM)” page while on its Behavior sub-page (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 6.1.5. Link)
Fixed two somewhat common ways that Plasma could crash with certain multi-screen setups on X11 (Méven Car, Plasma 6.2.0. Link 1 and link 2)
Fixed a case where Plasma could crash when you drag a widget from the Widget Explorer over an Activity Manager widget (David Redondo, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
Moving the pointer over tasks in Plasma’s Task Manager widget no longer causes their thumbnail previews to immediately disappear some of the time, depending on which direction you moved it in and your panel’s position on the screen (David Redondo, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
Clearing the search field in Plasma’s Kickoff Application Launcher widget no longer unexpectedly launches the top item shown in the last search (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
The “Charging Rate” sensor in the System Monitor app and its widgets of no longer shows a negative number while the battery is in fact charging — only while it’s discharging (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
Fixed a visual glitch in System Settings’ Region and Language page that caused the selected item on the Binary Dialect sub-page to have unreadable text when not using a custom accent color (Méven Car, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
Fixed a bug that caused animated cursors to only play their animation while the cursor was being moved when the system was falling back to or forced into using software cursors (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
Implemented a workaround for the issue that causes the Touchpad and other pages in System Settings to sometimes break when being navigated to after first accessing another page. The root cause is still under investigation, since it seems to be very tricky and complicated (Albert Astals Cid, Frameworks 6.6. Link)
Sharing a file to your device via KDE Connect no longer breaks after the first time you do it until the app you shared the file from is restarted (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 6.6. Link)
Fixed an issue that would make impossible to use the “Restore” functionality for trashed files or folders moved by an app to the trash using absolute file paths (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 6.6. Link)
When Discover is maximized, it now remembers the window size it was displayed at before, so when you un-maximize it, it returns to that size (Eamonn Rea and Joshua Goins, Plasma 6.2.0 with Frameworks 6.7. Link 1 and link 2)
Other bug information of note:
Fixed an issue in Discover that could, under certain circumstances, cause the app to freeze right after being launched (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
Optimized search performance in Discover so that it does less unnecessary work (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
Did some performance optimization for KFilePlacesItem which should improve startup speed for anything using the Places panel (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 6.7. Link)
This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! If you’re hungry for more, check out https://planet.kde.org, where you can find more news from other KDE contributors.
So yeah, like I said, please test Plasma from current git master and open bug reports about issues you find. Another path is to help triage bug reports that the first crowd will be opening. Ask for more information, make them actionable, move them where needed! And of course, help fix triaged and confirmed bug reports.
Otherwise, visit https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover other ways to be part of a project that really matters. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE; you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to already be a programmer, either. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite! Or consider donating instead! That helps too.
The KDE community has charted its course for the coming years, focusing on three interconnected paths that converge on a single point: community. These paths aim to improve user experience, support developers, and foster community growth.
This goal focuses on improving the application development process. By making it easier for developers to create applications, KDE hopes to attract more contributors and deliver better software for both first-party and third-party applications. A notable task within this goal is enhancing the experience of building KDE apps with languages beyond C++, such as Rust or Python.
Champions: Nicolas Fella and Nate Graham
KDE has a diverse users base with unique input needs: artists using complex monitor and drawing tablet setups; gamers with controllers, fancy mice, and handhelds; users requiring accessibility features or using a language optimally types with complex input methods; students with laptops, 2-in-1s, and tablets — and more! While KDE has made significant progress in supporting these diverse sources of input over the years, there are still gaps to be addressed. This goal aims to close those gaps and deliver a truly seamless input experience for everyone.
Champions: Gernot Schiller, Jakob Petsovits and Joshua Goins
KDE’s growth depends on new contributors, but a lack of fresh involvement in key projects like Plasma, Kdenlive, Krita, GCompris, and others is a concern. This goal focuses on formalizing and enhancing recruitment processes, not just for individuals but also for institutions. Ensuring that bringing in new talent becomes a continuous and community-wide priority, vital for KDE's long-term sustainability.
Champions: Aniqa Khokhar, Johnny Jazeix and Paul Brown
Your voice, your code, and your ideas are what will shape the KDE of tomorrow — whether you're a user, developer, or contributor. Let’s go on this journey together and make these goals a reality!
Join the Matrix room and keep an eye on the website for the latest KDE Goals updates.
On my way to Akademy, looking forward to meeting people there. Even though I’m traveling with spotty Internet access for now, let’s not loose good habits. Here is my web review for the week 2024-36.
Tags: tech, copyright, law, library
This is really bad news… Clearly the publishers cartel would try to outlaw libraries if they were invented today.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/4/24235958/internet-archive-loses-appeal-ebook-lending
Tags: tech, privacy, surveillance, advertisement
There, now this seems like a real thing… your phone recording you while you’re not aware for advertisement purposes. Nice surveillance apparatus. Thanks but no thanks.
https://futurism.com/the-byte/facebook-partner-phones-listening-microphone
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, art, learning, cognition
An excellent essay about generative AI and art. Goes deep in the topic and explains very well how you can hardly make art with those tools. It’s just too remote from how they work. I also particularly like the distinction between skill and intelligence. Indeed, we can make highly skilled but not intelligent systems using this technology.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/why-ai-isnt-going-to-make-art
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, criticism
Does a good job listing the main myths the marketing around generative AI is built on. Don’t fall for the marketing, exert critical thinking and rely on real properties of those systems.
https://www.techpolicy.press/challenging-the-myths-of-generative-ai/
Tags: tech, linux, rust, kernel, foss, politics
Interesting analysis. For sure the Rust for Linux drama tells something about the Linux kernel community and its complicated social norms.
https://sporks.space/2024/09/05/is-linux-collapsing-under-its-own-weight-on-rust-for-linux/
Tags: tech, linux, rust, kernel, politics, foss
Politics in the Linux kernel can indeed be tough. The alternative path proposed to the Rust-for-Linux team is indeed an interesting one, it could bear interesting results quickly.
https://drewdevault.com/2024/08/30/2024-08-30-Rust-in-Linux-revisited.html
Tags: tech, semantic, programming, protocols, language
Interesting view about the LSP specification, where it shines, and where it falls short.
https://www.michaelpj.com/blog/2024/09/03/lsp-good-bad-ugly.html
Tags: tech, python, community, data-visualization
Indeed this is a much better visualization. It shows quite well how the Python programmers pool is growing.
https://two-wrongs.com/python-programmers-experience
Tags: tech, oauth, security
Nice post explaining the basics of OAuth. If you wonder why the flow seems so convoluted, this article is for you.
https://stack-auth.com/blog/oauth-from-first-principles
Tags: tech, databases
Lots of things to keep in mind when dealing with databases. This is a nice list of “must know” for developers, false assumptions are widespread (and I fall in some of those traps myself from time to time).
https://rakyll.medium.com/things-i-wished-more-developers-knew-about-databases-2d0178464f78
Tags: tech, performance, latency
An old article but a good reminder: you have to choose between latency and throughput, you can’t have both in the same system.
Tags: tech, security, safety, memory, sandbox
Interesting point. As the memory safety of our APIs will increase, can we reduce the amount of sandboxing we need? This will never remove completely the need if only for logic bugs, but surely we could become more strategic about it.
https://alexgaynor.net/2024/aug/30/impact-of-memory-safety-on-sandboxing/
Tags: tech, tests, storage
That sounds like a very interesting tool to simulate and test potential data loss scenarios. This is generally a bit difficult to do, should make it easier.
https://github.com/dsrhaslab/lazyfs
Tags: tech, programming, craftsmanship
Good set of advices on naming variables, types, etc. Indeed this makes things easier to find in code bases.
https://morizbuesing.com/blog/greppability-code-metric/
Tags: tech, architecture, design, documentation, communication
Very good article. I wish I’d see more organisations writing such design documents. They help a lot, and that allows to have a way to track changes in the design. To me it’s part of the minimal set of documentation you’d want on any non trivial project.
https://ntietz.com/blog/reasons-to-write-design-docs/
Tags: tech, values, organization, team, management
Aligning people with differing core values in a team is indeed necessary but difficult. It can kill your project for small teams, for larger teams you will likely need to think your organization keeping the misalignment in mind.
https://rtpg.co/2024/08/31/cost-of-a-values-gap/
Tags: tech, hiring, interviews
Good set of advices. I wish more people applying for a job would follow them.
https://vurt.org/articles/twelve-rules/
Tags: colors, cognition, funny
One of those essentials questions in life now has some form of answer. Where is the blue/green boundary for you?
Bye for now!
In April we had the combined goals sprint, where a fine group of KDE people working on things around Automation & Systematization, Sustainable Software, and Accessibility got together. It was a nice cross-over of the KDE goals, taking advantage of having people in one room for a weekend to directly discuss topics of the goals and interactions between them. David, Albert, Nate, Nico, and Volker wrote about their impressions from the sprint.
So what happened regarding the Sustainable Software goal at the sprint and where are we today with these topics? There are some more detailed notes of the sprint. Here is a summary of some key topics with an update on current progress.
The Opt-Green project is the second funded project of the KDE Eco team. The first one was the Blue Angel for Free Software project, where we worked on creating material helping Free Software projects to assess and meet the criteria for the Blue Angel certification for resource and energy-efficient software products.
The Opt Green project is about promotion of extending the operating life of hardware with Free Software to reduce electronic waste. It's funded for two years by the German Federal Environment Agency and the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection and is running from April 2024 to March 2026.
Joseph introduced the project, why it's important, how the environment is suffering from software-induced hardware obsolescence, and how Free Software in general and KDE specifically can help with fighting it. The approach of the project is to go beyond our typical audience and introduce people who are environmentally aware but not necessary very technical to the idea of running sustainable, up-to-date Free Software on their computers, even devices they may think are no longer usable due to lack of vendor support. In many cases this is a perfectly fine solution, and it's surprisingly attractive to a number of people who care about sustainability but haven't really been introduced to Free Software yet.
The project is in full swing. The project has already been present at quite a number of events to motivate people to install Free Software on their (old) devices and support them in how to do it. See for example the report about the Academy of Games for upcoming 9th graders in Hannover, Germany.
We had a great session putting together ideas and concepts about how we could improve the KDE Eco website. From brainstorming ideas to sketching a wireframe as a group, we discussed and agreed on a direction of how to present what we are doing in the KDE Eco team.
The key idea is to focus on three main audiences (end users, advocates, and developers) and present specific material targeted at these groups. This nicely matches what we already have, e.g., the KDE Eco handbook for how to fulfill the Blue Angel criteria for developers, or the material being produced for events reaching out to end users, and while giving it a much more focused presentation.
The first iteration of the new design is now live on eco.kde.org. There is more to come, but it already gives an impression where this is going. Anita created a wonderful set of design elements which will help to shape the visual identity of KDE Eco going forward.
Making use of old hardware by installing sustainable free software on it is a wide field. There are many different variations of devices and what users do with them also varies a lot. What are the factors that might encourage users to reuse old hardware, what is holding them back?
To get a bit more reliable answers to these questions we came up with a concept for a user survey which can be used at events where we present the Opt Green project. This includes questions about what hardware people have and what is holding them back from installing new software on it.
The concept has been implemented with an online survey on KDE's survey service. It's available in English and German and is being used at the events where the Opt Green project is present.
One of the big hype topics of the last two years has been Generative AI and the Large Language Models which are behind this technology. They promise to bring revolutionary new features, much closer to how humans interact in natural language, but they also come with new challenges and concerns.
One of the big questions is how this new technology affects our digital freedoms. How does it relate to Free Software? How does licensing and openness work? How does it fit KDE's values? Where does it make sense to use its technology? What are the ethical implications? What are the implications in terms of sustainability?
We had a discussion around the possible idea of adopting something like Nextcloud's Ethical AI rating in KDE as well. This would make it more transparent to users how use of AI features affects their freedoms and gives them a choice to use what they consider to be satisfactory.
This is still pretty much an open question. The field is moving fast, there are legal questions around copyright and other aspects still to be answered. Local models are becoming more and more an option. But what openness means in AI has become very blurry. KDE still has to find a position here.
Everything you wanted to know about the things we did last year is in this report: the funds we raised, how we spent them, the sprints and events we attended, the projects we took on, the milestones we hit, and much, much more.
@jriddell:kde.org
ngraham
