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 are continuing to prepare for the KDE Gear 24.12.0 release, with a focus on bugfixing now that we've entered the feature freeze period.
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 mdPlusPlus and txemaq for supporting Dolphin; mdPlusPlus, Greg Helding and Archie Lamb for Okular; Henning Lammert and Thibault Molleman for Filelight; Nithanim, Dominik Perfler, and Thibault Molleman for Spectacle; Vladimir Solomatin, Akseli Lahtinen, Haakon Johannes Tjelta Meihack, and Nithanim for Kate; Henning Lammert and Marco Ryll for Kasts; GhulDev, Anders Lund Tobias Junghans, and William Wojciechowski for Konsole; Piwix for KWrite; Gabriel Klavans for Tokodon; Matthew Lamont for Kontact; and Gabriel Karlsson for Itinerary.
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
The KIO implementation for SFTP used by many KDE applications like Dolphin, Gwenview, and many others, now correctly closes the network connection when if a fatal error occurs, which means it is now possible to reconnect immediately without having to wait a few minutes. (Harald Sitter, 24.12.0. Link)
Many apps received some small bug fixes to ensure they work correctly on Haiku OS. (Luc Schrijvers, Link 1, link 2 and many more)
Dolphin now sorts more naturally when comparing filenames by excluding extensions. So now "a.txt" appears before "a 2.txt". (Eren Karakas, 24.12.0. Link)
Karp is a new PDF arranger and editor by Tomasz Bojczuk which has just finished the incubation phase.
Tomasz was active this week and added an option to select the PDF version of the resulting PDF (Link) and made it possible to move multiple pages at the same time (Link).
The build plugin — which allows you to trigger a rebuild from Kate's interface — now supports multiple projects being open at the same time without having to constantly reload the list of targets every time you switch projects. (Waqar Ahmed, 25.04.0. Link)
The ctag indexing doesn't happen anymore on the root and home folder as it makes no sense and just wastes CPU cycles. (Waqar Ahmed, 24.12.0. Link)
Fix getting a PATH when launching Kate outside of the console on macOS. (Waqar Ahmed, 24.12.0. Link)
KMyMoney Personal finance manager based on double-entry bookkeeping
It is no longer possible to apply category filters on the "Net Worth report" of KMyMoney as this was resulting in erroneous results. (Thomas Baumgart, 5.2, Link)
Stefano fixed various issues with the Plasma Activities integration inside Konqueror. We now, for example, wait for the Plasma Activity service to be ready, before restoring activities when starting Konqueror. (Stefano Crocco, 24.12.0. Link)
Changed the default value of the "scroll overlap" feature from 0% to 10%, which means that when you scroll down in a document using Page Down or Space Bar, the bottom 10% of the previous page will remain visible at the top of the view. This helps you retain your spatial awareness when quickly navigating. (David Cerenius, 25.04.0. Link)
Merkuro Calendar Manage your tasks and events with speed and ease
Claudio fixed many issues with the day and month views. Now, clicking on a day in the month view will open the day view on the selected day and not just a random one, the current day will be correctly highlighted, some sizing issues are fixed, and the month view won't appear as disabled anymore in some situations. (Claudio Cambra, 24.12.0. Link 1, link 2 and link 3)
When double-clicking on an empty space in the month view, the incidence editor will use the selected date as its start date. (Claudio Cambra, 24.12.0. Link)
We fixed the sed-edit feature in NeoChat, which allows you to type a sed expression like s/foo/bar to edit your previous message. (James Graham, 24.12.0. Link)
On mobile devices, NeoChat won't open the space homepage when trying to just switch the selected space. (James Graham, 24.12.0. Link)
Implemented MSC4228: Search Redirection to harmlessly redirect searches for harmful and potentially illegal content.
OptiImage Image optimizer to reduce the size of images
It is now possible to remove an image from the list of images to optimize. (Soumyadeep Ghosh, Link)
Soumyadeep also fixed an issue where it was possible to add the same image multiple times (Soumyadeep Ghosh, Link)
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
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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
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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.
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.
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
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.
#this-week-kde-apps:kde.org
alex1701c
ervin
