LSP Support in KDevelop, systemDGenie rewrite and big UI changes in Dolphin

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 time we will cover the past two weeks as I was traveling last weekend.

Last week we released KDE Gear 24.12.3, which concludes the 24.12 series of KDE Gear. 25.04.0 is right around the corner, with only a few days left before the beta and feature freeze. Aside from the numerous bug fixes and polishing going on, we also had some pretty big changes in Krita regarding advanced text editing options, KDevelop with support for the LSP protocol, some big UI changes in Dolphin, and a complete rewrite of systemDGenie.

General Changes

Balló György added improvements to many Kirigami projects for when they run with the software rendering backend. Projects that have been improved include Kirigami and Kirigami Addons, but also many apps like Tokodon, Kaidan, Angelfish and more.

Volker wrote a small report about the recent improvements to KDE Apps on Android. You can find it on his blog.

We fixed an issue in KIO SFTP support where symlinks would be truncated (Kishore Gopalakrishnan, 25.04.0. Link), and another in KIO SMB support where shared resources from other computers on multiple LANs and virtual LANs were not displayed when using WSDD (Harald Sitter, 24.12.3. Link).

Another thing that got fixed was an issue where the report bug button would not open the report URL (Carl Schwan, KF 1.12.0. Link).

Graphics and Multimedia Apps

Elisa Play local music and listen to online radio

Balló György fixed restoring the hidden Elisa instance on file opening (Balló György, 25.04.0. Link), and Jack Hill fixed the spacebar play/pause action, as it was not being triggered when specific buttons had the focus (Jack Hill, 25.04.0. Link).

Gwenview Image Viewer

Pedro Hernández added an option to display hidden files (Pedro Hernandez, 25.04.0. Link), and we changed how image size integers were displayed to make them clearer in all languages. Previously, we displayed 1,024x1,024. Now it is 1024x1024.

Kasts Podcast application

Bart De Vries properly implemented single instance behavior (Bart De Vries, 25.04.0. Link).

Okular View and annotate documents

Okular now supports, in addition to S/MIME based signatures, PGP/GPG based signatures. PGP signatures have the advantages that it is a lot easier to get a PGP key than a S/MIME key. Note that this feature is not yet enabled by default and for the moment only works between Okular users (Sune Vuorela, 25.04.0. Link).

Creative Apps

Kdenlive Video editor

Darby Johnston added support for OpenTimelineIO export and import using the C++ library. This allows importing and exporting projects files to/from other video-editing applications that implement this open standard (Darby Johnston supported by KDenlive fundraiser, 25.04.0. Link).

Krita Digital Painting, Creative Freedom

Wolthera van Hövell implemented basic support for the font-feature-settings CSS property in Krita. This allows tweaking the rendering of text based on OpenType font features (Wolthera van Hövell, Link). Wolthera wrote an excellent blog post on this topic, as well as covering the support of font variants mentioned two weeks ago. You can find the post on her blog.

Maciej Jesionowski added a global pen tilt direction offset, which can be helpful to make the brushes feel the same for right- and left-handed users (Maciej Jesionowski, Link).

The process of porting Krita to Qt6 is making good progress: the macOS version now compiles (Freya Lupen. Link), and the implementation of the tablet switching API for Windows is now using Qt APIs instead of a custom implementation (Dmitry Kazakov, Link).

In other news, Carl Schwan fixed the menubar visibility state being saved as non visible if the global menu option is turned on. This become an issue when turning off the global menu, as Krita's menubar wouldn't appear again (Carl Schwan, Link).

Personal Information Management Apps

KOrganizer KOrganizer is a calendar and scheduling application

Allen Winter improved the agent selection dialog. Now the Ok button is only enabled when an item is selected and the search text field has a placeholder (Allen Winter, 25.04.0. Link).

Merkuro Calendar Manage your tasks and events with speed and ease

Shubham Shinde added support for displaying holidays in the week view and the month view. Note that it is possible to disable this feature (Shubham Shinde, 25.04.0. Link 1, link 2 and link 3).

Kleopatra Certificate manager and cryptography app

Tobias Fella fixed decrypting files with very long paths on Windows (Tobias Fella, 25.04.0. Link).

Akonadi Background service for KDE PIM apps

Milian Wolff optimized some code in Qt related to timezones to improve the performance of some serialization in Akonadi. (Milian Wolff, Qt 6.8. Link)

KDE Itinerary Digital travel assistant

Volker Krause unified the formatting of temperature ranges and dynamic depending on the home country. Similarly, imperial speed units are shown for countries that use them (Volker Krause, 25.04.0. Link 1 and link 2).

Again Itinerary has increased the number of ticket types it supports and now handles multi-page 12go PDF tickets and Ghotel reservation emails.

Social Apps

NeoChat Chat on Matrix

Joshua Goins moved the "Explore rooms" button from the hamburger to the space drawer (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link), added a dialog explaining what to do next when tapping "Verify this device" (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link), and made joining remote rooms more reliable (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link). Joshua also fixed a bug where emoji autocompletion would destroy the current message draft (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link).

Meanwhile, James Graham improved the handling of switching link previews on and off (James Graham, 25.04.0. Link).

Developer Apps

Kate Advanced text editor

Niels Thykier added built-in support for the debputy language server. This is used when writing Debian package (Niels Thykier, 25.04.0. Link).

Meanwhile, Joshua Goins improved the titles of terminal tabs and assigning an icon to them (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link). Joshua also improved the UI of the compiler explorer integration. This includes polishing some strings, adding tooltips and fixing some padding issues (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link).

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

KDevelop now support the Language Server Protocol (LSP) in addition to the native support for C++, PHP and Python. This reuses Kate's plugin, so, at the moment, it is only available when Kate is also installed (Igor Kushnir and Sven Brauch, 25.04.0. Link).

Konsole Use the command line interface

Jonathan Marten fixed a crash when double clicking on a terminal scroll bar (Jonathan Marten, 25.04.0. Link).

System Apps

Ark Archiving Tool

Natsumi Higa fixed the extraction of timestamps from 7-Zip archives, which now includes nanoseconds (Natsumi Higa, 25.04.0. Link).

Dolphin Manage your files

Dolphin is having its looks tweaked and has a new icon with an actual picture of a dolphin inside it! (Darshan Phaldesai, 25.04.0. Link).

In the same vein, Akseli Lahtinen added a background to the navigation bar of Dolphin and Gwenview (Akseli Lahtinen, KF 6.12.0. Link).

And Nate Graham added a nicer split icon to the toolbar (Nate Graham, 25.04.0. Link).

In other Dolphin news, Akseli Lahtinen fixed a crash when opening a new tab with search (Akseli Lahtinen, 24.12.3. Link).

systemdGenie System service manager

systemDGenie was completely rewritten using QML. The new version also relies a lot less on blocking DBus calls (Carl Schwan, 1.0.0. Link).

KWalletManager Store and manage your passwords

Xuetian Weng sorted a security issue and passwords copied from the KWallet Manager are no longer visible in the clipboard history of Plasma (Xuetian Weng, 25.04.0. Link).

Education Apps

Kiten Japanese Reference and Study Tool

Balló György fixed the font size of the result view. The font size was stored as point size, but passed as pixel size, causing that the actual font size is smaller than it should be (Balló György, 25.04.0. Link). Balló also fixed the background color of some views when switching to a dark theme (Balló György, 25.04.0. Link).

KHangMan Hangman Game

Max Brazhnikov Added support for non-latin alphabets (Max Brazhnikov, 25.04.0. Link).

KStars Desktop Planetarium

Hy Murveit added an altitude graph to the scheduler table (Hy Murveit, Link)

Utilities

Alligator RSS feed reader

Mark Penner made the text elide in the RSS entry list so that the buttons are always visible (Mark Penner, 25.04.0. Link), and Balló György set the default format to import and export feeds as OPML (Balló György, 25.04.0. Link).

KDE Connect Seamless connection of your devices

José Rebelo added the possibility of filtering out notifications from the Android work profile (José Rebelo, Link).

KDiskFree View Disk Usage

Kai Uwe Broulik added an option to explore in Filelight (Kai Uwe Broulik, 25.12.0. Link), and icons to the context menu entries (Kai Uwe Broulik, 25.12.0. Link).

KGet Download manager

Balló György fixed the windows activation when the current window is in the system tray (Balló György, 25.04.0. Link).

KRDC Connect with RDP or VNC to another computer

Fabio Bas added a setting for desktop scale and device scale (Fabio Bas, 25.04.0. Link), while Fabian Lesniakd disabled Kerberos support completely, since it turned out that having a broken support for it was worse than no support at all (Fabian Lesniak, 25.04.0. Link).

OptiImage Image optimizer to reduce the size of images

Balló György fixed the name of the generated optimized images, and now the suffix is appended before the file extension (Balló György, 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.

Make sure you commit anything you want to end up in the KDE Gear 25.04
releases to them

Next Dates  
    March 13 2025: 25.04 Freeze and Beta (25.03.80) tag & release
    March 27, 2025: 25.04 RC (25.03.90) Tagging and Release
    April 10, 2025: 25.04 Tagging
    April 17, 2025: 25.04 Release

https://community.kde.org/Schedules/KDE_Gear_25.04_Schedule

So, after my last blog post, I ended up taking another few months to get the fonts branch just right, but now we have font resource that can be tagged, filtered and searched upon.

After that, I needed my next text editing project to be a bit more manageable. Given that I had already made some head start on it at the beginning of last year, I continued with UI for the OpenType features.

OpenType Features

Usually, OpenType features are explained away as “that’s for ligatures and stuff”, which, while not incorrect, is maybe a little simple. “It enables advanced typographic features” is a little more correct, but it makes OpenType feature support sound less rudimentary than it really is these days.

What might be more clear is to think of a font file as a mapping between input characters and their glyphs. This is fine for simple Latin. But what if you want to show Arabic connected? Well, then you need a second table to keep track of the glyphs for start, middle and end of a word, and substitute the correct glyph as necessary.

Or maybe you want to have kerning, so that A and V nest into each other nicely. Another table for that then, that keeps track of the position adjustment between two consecutive glyphs.

How about small caps? Substitution table. Dynamically placing diacritics? Positioning table. Cyrillic has different glyph traditions in Serbia and Bulgaria, similarly for Han script use in East-Asia: Substitution table. Han script is usually typeset in mono space, but when two brackets follow one another, they often have extraneous white space that should be removed: Positioning table. These are all OpenType features.

The more you look into it, the more it becomes clear that if you want your text layout to support more than plain English, you will need to allow these extra tables to be used and read through. This is in short what Harfbuzz does for us. You can enable and disable these features by taking their name (A 4 letter tag), and indicating to Harfbuzz you want them enabled for a given section by sending a number (0 for off, 1 for on… and 2, 3, 4, […] 256 for indicating which alternate you’d like if the font has multiple alternates available for that feature).

Some of these features are enabled by default, and the basic text layout will process them just fine. However, others are optional, and within CSS all of them can be turned off and on at the typesetters’ wish. Which brings us to the widgets.

CSS font variants

There’s two types of CSS opentype toggles. The first of these are the font-variants, which have a somewhat confusing name in this day and age of OpenType variable fonts, but at the time they were named font-variants were limited to Small Caps, and expected to be separate font files.

The font-variant features more of a guidance suggestion, meaning that you turn them on or off for a piece of text, unrelated to whether the current font actually supports the feature in question. The idea being that you could set a different font elsewhere in the text, and that if this font supports those features, they could be controlled this way.

This means that the UI for these features is somewhat straight forward and unopinionated, being a collection of drop-downs and check boxes. I renamed them “glyphs:” in the UI to avoid confusion with Variable fonts, which is also possible because the majority of them represented which glyphs are being used.

CSS Font Feature Settings and the Glyph Palette

font-variants only cover the most common features, and as of writing, there’s over 120 registered OpenType feature tags. CSS allows controlling this via the second type of properly “font-feature-settings”. A property that wants you to be very specific about which tag you want to enable, and whether you want to have it not just enabled, but also which sub index of the feature you would like to enable.

Now, there’s a bit of a problem here: 120 features is a bit much. Furthermore, two of those registered features, Character Variants and Stylistic Sets, are registered 99 and 20 times respectively, meaning the total is closer to over 230 features. And, further furthermore, fonts may have custom OpenType feature tags.

And that’s not the only problem: Access All Alternates, Stylistic Alternates and Stylistic Sets are very common features, but the way they are configured in CSS as a font-variant feature is somewhat complex, and to have each manually enabled inside the OpenType Features widget is going to feel very clunky for artists.

For these reasons, I ended up building two controls for this CSS property. A main widget for the text property docker that allows artists to enable and disable any OpenType feature that can be found inside the font, and the second being a glyph palette, that allows artists to select alternate glyphs.

The glyph palette was actually made first, so lets go over that. It is in effect a character selection map that allows artists to select alternates to the current glyph or to any glyph inside the font. Filtering can be done with Unicode blocks and search.

It uses KoFontGlyphModel, a QAbstractItemModel, that collects all the available characters inside the font, as well as their Unicode variations (Unicode variations are an extra code point added behind a character to indicate it needs to be a specific version of that glyph. It’s main use is to ensure people’s names are written with the correct glyph variant).

It then takes the locale of the text, and uses those to go over the OpenType tables with Harfbuzz. The locale of the text, or “text language” is necessary because some OpenType features are only available for certain locales. Furthermore, the aforementioned Character Variants and Stylistic Sets may have been named inside the font, meaning that it also takes the interface languages to get the correct name for the current localization of Krita.

Of course, using these alternate names means we need default names first. Which is why I also spend some time on creating a factory where each known OpenType tag is stored with its proper name from the official registry and a hand written summary of the feature for the tool tip. These can now be localized.

Then when we have the feature, we go over the glyphs marked by the table and if that glyph coheres with a Unicode code point, add the table as a potential sub glyph for that Unicode value.

Now here another problem rears its head: We need to know which glyph coheres with which Unicode code point, and while for basic values that isn’t a problem, it is when decomposition comes into play.

Decomposition in this case, is a feature that allows for replacing a given glyph with two other glyphs. A reverse ligature, if you will. It is frequently used to match Unicode decomposition: Ä according to Unicode can be decomposed into A (U+0041) and ◌̈ (U+0308, combining diaeresis). So then, the glyph for Ä can be decomposed into those two glyphs. Afterwards, OpenType allows positioning that diaeresis accurately with the mark positioning feature. This is useful, because we can then take that A glyph, and use things like the Small Caps feature, or a Stylistic Set to turn it into a small A or a decorative A, and as long as these alternate glyphs have been configured for mark positioning, they’ll by themselves support Ä.

So that’s pretty neat. But the problem is that Harfbuzz doesn’t provide enough information for me to discover how a glyph gets decomposed. Meaning that for fonts that are structured this way, I can’t tell whether style sets or the like can be applied to these glyphs, so these don’t show up in the character map. I have a similar problem with ligatures, but that is also compounded by having trouble with the user interface.

For the glyph palette, the way you use it is either by using the glyph alternates, where double clicking one will replace the current grapheme (that’s a set of Unicode values that is often treated as the smallest editable chunk of text) with one that either has the appropriate Unicode variation selectors attached, or one that has the appropriate OpenType features enabled.

The other option is to use the character map, which is much like character maps in other software, allowing you to scroll over all available Unicode values in a font, and sorting them by Unicode block, or searching them. Clicking on a glyph with variants ops out a context menu with the glyph alternates.

The glyph palette itself is written with QML, but because the rest of Krita is not in QML, it is embedded into a QQuickWidget, that is inside a QDialog, which in turn means the context menu needed to be inside a QQuickWidget inside a QPopup, because QQuickWidget will clip any QML pop-up items. QML side, we use DelegateModel to show the child indices of a given character map index.

I’m not sure yet how ligatures would be handled here, maybe list them for each glyph, or maybe have a separate model that shows up underneath the glyph alternates and only shows for the current text. There’s also the fact that stylistic alts and the like can apply to ligatures, so that’s another thing to consider. A similar issue is with emoji zero-width-joiner sequences. This is stuff like “fireman + woman + Fitzpatrick skin tone modifier 5” = . This is typically implemented as a kind of ligature as well, and while Unicode keeps a list of these, I’d prefer to get them from the font.

For the “OpenType features” control in the text properties docker, we reuse the glyph model, but this time its only to figure out which features are available in the font. Because CSS allows for font fallback, we only do this for the first font, but also allow setting any other officially registered OpenType feature on or off. It also shows a sample for the given feature. This widget is mostly useful for the stylistic sets and the positioning features.

Speed-ups

Now, setting up the glyph model can get quite slow, so some trade-offs were established:

• The glyph palette right now only shows a handful of substitution features, to avoid slowing down initialization. These also decide the sample depicted in the OpenType features drop down.
• When a sample is retrieved, it is limited to the first 6 entries. This should be good enough, because the main purpose is to indicate something is going to happen when selecting this feature.
• The QQuickPaintedItem that draws the glyph uses our text layout under the hood, which on one hand is good: this means we always draw something we can show in our text layout. But at the other end, we had to disable some conveniences, like the dynamic fallback (possible because we always know if an input text can be rendered), as well as disabling automatic relayout.

Final Thoughts

One of the things that struck me when writing the original svg text layout post a few years back is that a decade ago, you’d really boast about your OpenType support, but nowadays, OpenType support is so rudimentary, it didn’t make sense to dwell on it in that post. This might also be a consequence by how easy Harfbuzz makes using OpenType these days.

That meant I really wanted to get the UI for this feature nice. There was a big post over a decade ago by a UI designer doing UI for free software, where he went into extensive detail about how most software implementing controls for OpenType features is really bad at communicating whether the feature does anything. I think I managed to somewhat get that part working right.

Still, the glyph palette could use more love, and I really need to sit down for the whole ligature UI issue. I’m pretty happy with it none the less, and it is very hackable, meaning that it doesn’t necessarily need to be me personally improving it.

I do need to really get going on that language selector though…

Appendix

About the font scanning code

The code for retrieving the OpenType tables was largely based on Inkscape’s, and then extended. Inkscape doesn’t test on language, and only tests for substitution features, while we test on both substitution and positioning features. Similarly, Inkscape’s was written in a time when Harfbuzz could only give information about whether a feature could be turned only on or off, but not whether it had multiple alternates, so it is not yet able to do that.

Of interest is that Inkscape does show a few ligatures, but the only reason those are visible is that there’s a handful of ligatures that are encoded into Unicode in the “Alphabetic Presentation Forms” block. Fonts that implement ligatures tend to also setup these Unicode values, but this is not self-evident, which is why I’d prefer not doing this.

(As a random factoid: Adobe’s Smart Quote feature will use these Unicode encoded ligatures when the font isn’t able to provide them via OpenType.)

I did manage to get ligature samples by simply testing every combination of glyphs that Harfbuzz could tell me were probably relevant to a given table, but this was slow, leading to a 5~ second initialization time on a feature heavy font like Junicode. Maybe the glyph model code can be at some point modified to allow incremental loading, though that wouldn’t provide me a quick sample text in the text properties docker…

Shaping Technology

I feel I should probably mention that OpenType isn’t the only technology that provides shaping. Apple’s Advanced Typography Tables (ATT) and the Graphite shaping language are existing alternatives, but OpenType is far more popular than either, and the CSS working group doesn’t give much guidance on how to use anything but OpenType.

Widgets and Items

Qt currently has two UI toolkits: QML and QWidget. The former uses the terminology “Item” instead of “Widget” to refer to UI controls. I find this somewhat difficult to get used to, so when I don’t prepend a widget name with Q, assume that I mean a generic UI control. I think most people never even consider what the different UI bits are called, so usually it isn’t a problem.

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-10… somehow this one is really packed with content. Brace yourselves!

The Digital Packrat Manifesto

Tags: tech, culture, streaming, vendor-lockin

Looks like I’m a digital packrat of some sort! There are reasons behind it and it’s well explained.

https://www.404media.co/the-digital-packrat-manifesto/

‘Flow’ wins best animated feature film Oscar

Tags: tech, blender, foss, movie

Behind the movie this is a big win for Blender. It proves Blender is viable for full length movies at this point. The movie was nice too. :-)

https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/flow-wins-best-animated-feature-film-oscar-2025-03-03/

Who is Free Software for?

Tags: tech, foss, politics, culture

Interesting piece, we indeed need to move beyond from the “for hackers by hackers” mindset. I don’t even think it was really the whole extent of the political goals when the Free Software movement started. Somehow we got stuck there though.

https://tante.cc/2025/03/03/who-is-free-software-for/

Kagi review - Tim Hårek

Tags: tech, web, search, attention-economy

I admit I’m more and more tempted to pay for my search service as well. It’s unfortunately not FOSS… But it’s not like the alternatives are better there either anyway.

https://timharek.no/blog/kagi-review/

Why Techdirt Is Now A Democracy Blog (Whether We Like It Or Not)

Tags: tech, journalism, politics

In case it wasn’t clear yet that the tech industry was eminently political, this editorial drives the point home. It’s also a good reminder that it’s been the case for a long while.

https://www.techdirt.com/2025/03/04/why-techdirt-is-now-a-democracy-blog-whether-we-like-it-or-not/

Infrastructural problems and instabilities caused by cloud services

Tags: tech, self-hosting, infrastructure, cloud

Or why you need to own at least some part of your infrastructure.

https://mental-reverb.com/blog.php?id=15

Microsoft begins turning off uBlock Origin and other extensions in Edge - Neowin

Tags: tech, browser, attention-economy, privacy, microsoft

The writing was on the wall. This is an unsurprising development but Edge users should know where it’s going…

https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-begins-turning-off-ublock-origin-and-other-extensions-in-edge/

WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

Tags: tech, web, browser, webassembly

Is it the future of web browsers? Maybe… I’m not sure this would be a good thing though.

https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/WASM_Wayland_Web_WWW/

The Empty Promise of AI-Generated Creativity

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

Sure it makes generating content faster… but it’s indeed so bland and uniform.

https://hey.paris/posts/genai/

AI versus the brain and the race for general intelligence

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, cognition, neuroscience, science, research

Friendly reminder that AI was also supposed to be a field about studying cognition… There’s so many things we still don’t understand that the whole “make it bigger and it’ll be smart” obsession looks like it’s creating missed opportunities to understand ourselves better.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/03/ai-versus-the-brain-and-the-race-for-general-intelligence/

Structured data extraction from unstructured content using LLM schemas

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, nlp, data

This is one of the handful of uses where I’d expect LLMs to shine. It’s nice to see some tooling to make it easier.

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/28/llm-schemas/

Zen and the Art of Microcode Hacking

Tags: tech, cpu, amd, security, complexity

Nice exploration of the microcode patching flaw which was disclosed recently. This gives a glimpse at the high level of complexity the x86 family brings on the table.

https://bughunters.google.com/blog/5424842357473280/zen-and-the-art-of-microcode-hacking

Hardware discovery: ACPI & Device Tree

Tags: tech, system, hardware, kernel

Nice post explaining the need of ACPI or Device Tree and how they are leveraged by kernels.

https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/hardware-autoconfiguration

How fast can you open 1000 files? – Daniel Lemire’s blog

Tags: tech, filesystem, system, performance, multithreading, linux, apple

Nice performance comparison of file handling in multithreaded context. It’s surprising how slow MacOS seems to be there.

https://lemire.me/blog/2025/03/01/how-fast-can-you-open-1000-files/

3,200% CPU Utilization

Tags: tech, multithreading, safety

Another illustration that with race conditions all hell can break loose. It’s not only about data corruption or deadlocks. This case is explored in depth which is nice, also compared across several languages.

https://josephmate.github.io/2025-02-26-3200p-cpu-util/

Git without a forge

Tags: tech, git, tools, version-control

There are pros and cons to using a forge, same thing when not using a forge. Let’s not forget you don’t have to use one though. Also this piece mentions git bundles which I didn’t know about, it looks interesting.

https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/quasiblog/git-no-forge/

Globstar - The Open-Source Static Analysis Toolkit

Tags: tech, static-analyzer

Looks like an interesting toolkit to make your own code checkers.

https://globstar.dev/

Is Rust a good fit for business apps?

Tags: tech, programming, rust

A long piece which explore the reasons why Rust is likely not the best pick for enterprise software. It’s niche is clearly system programming but beyond that and because of its qualities in that space it quickly become a sharp and dangerous tool.

https://www.bartoszsypytkowski.com/is-rust-a-good-fit-for-business-apps/

Some things that make Rust lifetimes hard to learn

Tags: tech, rust, programming, memory

This is an important concept in Rust… but clearly it’s harder to grasp than you’d expect.

https://ntietz.com/blog/rust-lifetimes-learning/

Succinct data structures

Tags: tech, data, programming, science

Interesting class of data structures with funny properties. Looks like there’s a lot to do with them.

https://blog.startifact.com/posts/succinct/

Binary search as a bidirectional generator | mathspp

Tags: tech, python, programming

Nice little Python trick using bidirectional generators.

https://mathspp.com/blog/binary-search-as-a-bidirectional-generator

Falsehoods programmers believe about languages

Tags: tech, language, translation, complexity

Translation and localisation is a complex topic too often overlooked by developers. This is a modest list of widespread misconceptions. If you get in the details it get complex fairly quickly.

https://www.lexiconista.com/falsehoods-about-languages/

Troubleshooting: The Skill That Never Goes Obsolete

Tags: tech, problem-solving, debugging

An excellent article, that troubleshooting skill is really important in many fields… In particular software engineering. It’s hard to teach and learn but it makes all the difference.

https://www.autodidacts.io/troubleshooting/

Cleaner codebase, happier mind

Tags: tech, programming, craftsmanship, technical-debt

Makes sense, the “boyscout rule” has a psychology impact as well.

https://blog.danieljanus.pl/2025/03/02/cleaner-codebase/

Your Next Two Zeroes

Tags: tech, engineering

It like this parallel. The bigger the endeavour, the more complexity… And that will require thinking in very different ways for each order of magnitude.

https://taylor.town/next-two-zeroes

Should managers still code?

Tags: tech, engineering, management, leadership

There’s clearly a tension on that topic and the expectations from engineering managers tend to change over time. I like the proposed answer here and the distinction made between writing code and being in the code.

https://www.theengineeringmanager.com/growth/should-managers-still-code/

Age and cognitive skills: Use it or lose it

Tags: neuroscience, cognition, research

Interesting study even though it bears some important limitations. Still it seems to indicate that one shouldn’t rest on its laurels and keep practicing cognitive skills even when older (actually might have to get started in the 20s latest).

https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.ads1560?af=R

Bye for now!

Just a quick update: Recently, you might have heard that GTK 4 added support for the cursor-shape-v1 protocol on Wayland. The main advantage of the cursor-shape-v1 protocol is that it ensures consistent cursor look between apps. In Plasma, additional perks come with it, for example the cursor can look more crisp with fractional scale factors because SVG cursors are used. We (KDE) took a shot at backporting the cursor shape protocol support to the GTK 3 branch and, as of this moment, it’s already merged . This means that you should experience fewer cursor issues in applications running on Wayland that still use GTK 3, mainly Firefox.

I would like to express many thanks to Max Qian for starting the work on adding support for the cursor-shape-v1 protocol, and Matthias Clasen for pushing it over the finish line and reviewing our backport MR.

Qt’s 3D offering is changing, so we decided to look at different options for rendering 3D content in Qt.

Continue reading 3D Rendering Solutions in Qt – an Overview at basysKom GmbH.

I have one desktop machine, my daily-driver, which runs FreeBSD 13 – the latest supported version is 13.5 – and which I want to keep on KDE Plasma 5 (and all the rest of the last-gen KDE things). I do also want a modern KDE Plasma 6 desktop, but I’ll do that on a slightly newer machine. Here’s some notes-for-myself.

The FreeBSD ports tree is branched every quarter, roughly with the idea that you can pick a stable(-ish) branch of ports to consume, or you can go with main and get the ports-du-jour. The branches also offer a way of sticking to older releases of some software.

KDE Plasma 6 (and most of KDE Gear, and all the supporting KDE Frameworks) have arrived in main, and the KDE Plasma 5 ports have been removed. That’s a decision of the kde@ group of maintainers of the KDE ports in FreeBSD, one which boils down to not having the time available to maintain both versions, and wanting to be able to upstream fixes.

But I want to stick with older KDE software, at least on my daily driver, a little longer. Oh, and I want a recent Telegram port. And a pony, too.

Previous-generation Stuff

KDE stuff is simple to do:

• Check out the ports tree, e.g. git clone https://git.freebsd.org/ports.git
• Switch to the last branch that has KDE Plasma 5-era software, e.g. git checkout 2025Q1
• Build KDE software, e.g. use poudriere(8) to build the port x11/kde5

Some additional things that I use also work from that ports branch:

• Firefox
• LibreOffice

Somewhat surprising (to myself, anyway) was that Telegram, a desktop instant-messaging client, was not a very-recent version in the branch, but also that the version available in the branch did not even compile. The problem looks like this:

tdesktop-5.10.0-full/Telegram/lib_base/base/qt/qt_compare.h:24:43:
   error: redefinition of 'operator<=>'
   24 | [[nodiscard]] inline std::strong_ordering operator<=>(
/usr/local/include/qt6/QtCore/qstring.h:777:5: note: previous definition is here
  777 |     Q_DECLARE_STRONGLY_ORDERED(QString)

That’s just a clash between the Qt6 bundled with Telegram and the one on the system, but it is rightly annoying. I ended up cherry-picking updates from Telegram 5.10.0 up to 5.10.7 from the main branch (it took a couple of rounds of conflict-resolving, though) which is recent-enough and also builds. Thanks Sergey for maintaining that port.

Next-generation Stuff

Over on FreeBSD 14.2, my “other” machine which I kind of hope to make my main desktop soon-ish, using the main branch from FreeBSD ports gives me fairly-recent KDE software. In this branch, we (as in kde@ in the FreeBSD ports tree) gave up again on KDE version numbers. KDE software is just KDE software – which is also what the KDE community would like us to call it.

Six years ago, I wrote about kde5 which kidded around a bit, but we had x11/kde4 and x11/kde5 side-by-side for a long time. No more. You (metaphorical “you, the person using KDE on a FreeBSD desktop”) get the latest stuff, and it’s just called KDE, and we’re not going to bother with those version labels anymore (which is what upstream has been saying for over ten years now).

Something of a yearly ritual, that of updating GPG (signing-)keys and pushing them to various places.

I use my GPG keys for three main purposes:

• signing email, so you know it comes from me,
• signing Calamares releases, so you know they come from me,
• signing FreeBSD things, so you know they come from me.

That means the keys need to be kept up-to-date, and expiry dates refreshed periodically, and then the keys published and updated and all. Which, if I had better calendar-discipline, would go without speaking. But I don’t, so here’s a couple of notes:

• you can find my pubkey published on my personal and business sites,
• Calamares in 2024 was signed by a confused mess of GPG keys. All of the signatures came from a key of mine, and all are good, but I used the keys inconsistently and sometimes used an expired one. I wrote about it on FOSStodon when I spotted it.
  • The release announcements for Calamares mention specific key-IDs, even though different key-IDs were used for the actual signature. The latest release, 3.3.14, matches the announced key-ID for signing with the actual signature.
  • I think 3.3.11 is signed with a key that was actually expired at the time. It does match the published key-ID with the signature, though.
  • In the first half of 2025, the expected signing key-ID is 6D98, which is published on my websites.
  • I have just updated the history-of-Calamares-signing list at the bottom of the about-Calamares page.
• FreeBSD signature information is used rarely, but is available in the FreeBSD developers OpenPGP keys list. It is the same pubkey as on my website, and which is used for Calamares.

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-09.

Open letter to browser and OS makers

Tags: tech, web, http, security

We’re indeed close to universal HTTPS adoption. One last push please?

https://medium.com/@boblord/open-letter-to-browser-and-os-makers-12d65aa314f7

France is about to pass the worst surveillance law in the EU

Tags: tech, privacy, surveillance, cryptography, politics

They really never learn… Whatever the country politician try to blindly fight against cryptography again and again. Let’s hope this one is stopped.

https://tuta.com/blog/france-surveillance-nacrotrafic-law

It is no longer safe to move our governments and societies to US clouds

Tags: tech, cloud, politics, law, privacy, vendor-lockin

Maybe it’ll at least be a wake up call for governments and businesses to let go of their US cloud addiction. There are reasons why you don’t want such vendor lock-in. The political drama unfolding in the United States makes obvious why you should think carefully at how dependent you are from your service and infrastructure providers.

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/you-can-no-longer-base-your-government-and-society-on-us-clouds/

Y Combinator Supports AI Startup Dehumanizing Factory Workers

Tags: tech, business, criticism

I’m still baffled people are coming with ideas like this for their businesses… The level of cynicism you must have to build such a startup.

https://www.404media.co/optifyeai-ycombinator-startup-ai-factory/

A new Android feature is scanning your photos for ‘sensitive content’ - how to stop it

Tags: tech, google, android, smartphone, security, criticism

Another example that on such ecosystems you’re not really owning your device. Seek alternatives!

https://www.zdnet.com/article/a-new-android-feature-is-scanning-your-photos-for-sensitive-content-how-to-stop-it/

Xcode constantly phones home

Tags: tech, apple, surveillance

Not all of this makes sense… Why are they collecting so much from an IDE?

https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2025/2/5.html

How Core Git Developers Configure Git

Tags: tech, git, version-control, tools, command-line

Or why even the core git developers don’t really use the defaults. This piece gives good knobs to play with in order to have a nicer experience.

https://blog.gitbutler.com/how-git-core-devs-configure-git/

Smart Pointers Can’t Solve Use-After-Free

Tags: tech, c++, memory, safety

They help with some issues… but they can’t solve all the memory safety issues of the language I’m afraid.

https://jacko.io/smart_pointers.html

Bookmarklets (and Custom URL Schemes) Are Criminally Underrated

Tags: tech, browser, desktop, linux

This is indeed forgotten features available in our desktop and browsers. It can be very convenient.

https://silly.business/blog/bookmarklets-and-custom-url-schemes-are-criminally-underrated/

The web on mobile

Tags: tech, web, mobile, ux, performance

It could be so much better indeed. Unfortunately in great part this is about UX design and carrying heavyweight frontend frameworks though…

https://adactio.com/journal/21728

Programming Really Is Simple Mathematics

Tags: tech, programming, mathematics, logic

Interesting endeavor… this is nice to have an attempt at a formal definition with no axiom introduced.

https://bertrandmeyer.com/2025/02/25/new-preprint-programming-really-is-simple-mathematics/

A discussion between John Ousterhout and Robert Martin

Tags: tech, craftsmanship, design, tdd, teaching, complexity

Very interesting discussion weighting the main differences and disagreements between a Philosophy of Software Design, and Clean Code. I read and own both books and those differences were crystal clear, it’s nice to see the authors debate them. I’m a bit disappointed at the section about TDD though, I think it could have been a bit more conclusive. It gives me food for thought about my TDD teaching though and confirms some of the messages I’m trying to push to reduce confusion.

https://github.com/johnousterhout/aposd-vs-clean-code

Testing Numbs Us to Our Loss of Intellectual Control

Tags: tech, architecture, design, tdd, complexity

Nice little paper I overlooked. I agree with it obviously. More tests are not a free pass to let complexity go wild. Architecture and design concerns are still very important even if you TDD properly.

https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/so/2020/03/09068304/1j30VMzNxLO

Leading while learning

Tags: management, leadership

The proposed three traits are definitely spot on. Too much confidence is a red flag, some balance needs to be found.

https://zendesk.engineering/leading-while-learning-why-great-managers-dont-have-all-the-answers-f297cc383d01

Bye for now!

Last week, part of the Kdenlive core team met in Amsterdam for a short sprint, the highlight of which was a visit to the Blender Foundation.

Francesco Siddi, COO at Blender, provided us with a rare insight into Blender’s history and precious advice about product management for Kdenlive – we hope to implement some of these advices soon.

As the meeting took place on a Friday afternoon, we also had the opportunity to attend their “Weekly”, which is an open session where artists and developers share their progress of the past week on various Blender related projects.

So thanks again to Francesco and everyone at the Blender Foundation for their hospitality.

On the next day, we discussed a few topics, including:

• Refining the audio workflow task
• Proof of concept on how we can improve clip timecode – define a start timecode when rendering
• Finalized an MLT patch to make rendering work without a display server (required to make Flatpak pass our render test suite)
• Scratched a few itches