Dear digiKam fans and users,
After four months of active maintenance and many weeks triaging bugs, the digiKam team is proud to present version 8.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager.
The digiKam team has continued to work the Artificial Intelligence integration in digiKam, and many parts have been improved with the 8.7.0 release.
Welcome to a new issue of "This Week in KDE Apps"! Every week (or so) we cover as much as possible of what's happening in the world of KDE apps.
As you might have noticed, the frequency of "This Week in KDE Apps" has not been very consistent lately. Particularly during the summer season, I (Carl) have a lot of social obligations and can't ensure regular updates with the small amount of time I have available. If you are a KDE developer, you can help by contributing your updates to the GitLab merge request on invent. In that respect, a huge thanks to Felix Ernst for doing that already for Dolphin.
Getting back to all that's new in the KDE App scene, let's dig in!
Akseli Lahtinen increased the click area of files and folders in the main view and overhauled their styling. It's (subjectively speaking) a lot prettier now! We are trying to make Dolphin more consistent with other list styles in KDE long-term (25.08.0 - link).
Méven Car added a colorful folder icon chooser to the context menu of folders (25.08.0 - link). The Dolphin context menu can be edited in Dolphin's settings window.
Aleksandr Borodetckii lowered the default scroll speed to follow the globally-configured scroll distance more closely. Scrolling one "tick" with the mouse wheel should now move the view by a similar distance in Dolphin as it does in KWrite. In details view mode we made sure that scrolling moves by full item height (25.08.0 - link).
Gleb Kasachou added a setting to optionally elide long file names at the end instead of in the middle, so when the Dolphin window is too narrow to display “a very long file name.txt”, you can now switch between showing “a very…file name.txt” or “a very long file….txt”. Both of these behaviors have been respectfully criticized in the past, so now everyone can set it to their liking (25.08.0 - link).
Bojidar Marinov fixed a visual bug in the default icons view mode in a livestream, as sometimes the file name would have one row of text outside and below the actual file geometry (25.08.0 - link).
Akseli Lahtinen fixed a long-standing issue that could cause Dolphin to crash while interacting with Samba shares (Frameworks 6.16 - link).
Kai Uwe Broulik fixed another long-standing issue where a random "Examining" popup would appear when connecting to a busy Samba share (25.04.3 - link).
Sune Vuorela made the list of certificates used to sign a PDF update when switching the active backend (GnuPG or NSS) (25.08.0 - link). If Kleopatra is installed and the GPG backend is selected, Okular will now propose to view the certificate details in Kleopatra (25.08.0 - link).
Abdus Sami made the number of items in the recent history configurable (25.08.0 - link).
Carl Schwan fixed a critical crash happening when using a secret service which is not KWallet (25.04.3 - link).
Carl removed the QtWidgets dependency from multiple small Akonadi tools (25.08.0 - link 1, link 2 and link 3) as part of one of the big milestones of KDE PIM.
Pablo Ariño ported the Etesync resource away from directly depending on QtWidgets. This decreases the RAM consumption by around 10MiB for each running Etesync instance (25.08.0 - link). Carl then ported the resource away from KWallet to the more multiplatform alternative QtKeychain (25.08.0 - link).
Pablo Ariño Muñoz wrote a blog post about the progress on his GSoC project which is also connected to the removing QtWidgets from the lower parts of the KDE PIM stack milestone.
Yuki Joou fixed the position of the menubar (Frameworks 6.16 - link).
Oliver Beard fixed various bugs in Photos. Sharing now works again (25.08.0 - link) and the bookmark functionality is now consistently called "bookmark" in the UI (25.08.0 - link). He also ported the thumbnailbar to a standard toolbar (link).
Carl Schwan made it possible to configure some shortcuts in Photos and added a command bar (25.08.0 - link). Additionally, he made it possible to configure which metadata details are available in the sidebar (25.08.0 - link).
Carl also optimized the main view a bit (25.08.0 - link 1, link 2 and link 3), unified the breakpoint at which desktop and mobile mode are switched (25.08.0 - link), fixed the video player which was not completely ported away from Qt5 (25.08.0 - link), and made a large number of small cleanups and code modernizations (link).
Jack Hill fixed the keyboard navigation in the playlist (25.08.0 - link).
Tuomas Nurmi replaced Phonon with gstreamer as the multimedia framework (3.2.82 - link). This is included in the newly released Amarok 3.3 beta 2.
Bart De Vries fixed clicking on the player buttons on mobile (25.04.3 - link).
Aleix Pol Gonzalez ported Kamoso to Qt6 (25.08.0 - link).
Jean-Baptiste Mardelle added an action to extend and collapse items in the effects and folders view. This allows navigating these views with the keyboard (25.08.0 - link).
John Veness updated the links in the welcome page footer (link).
Carl Schwan added support for Deutsches Jugendherbergswerk (DJH) email confirmations (25.04.03 - link).
Stephan Olbrich added support for Deutscher Alpenverein (DAV) membership cards (25.04.03 - link).
David Pilarčík added support for extracting multiple tickets from one PDF for Leo Express (25.04.03 - link) and improved the extraction of the luma extractor (25.04.03 - link).
Volker Krause fixed a bug where the arrival time needed to be filled to display the departure queries (25.08.0 - link).
Marco Martin ported the resizable sidebar to the new standard way of doing it in Kirigami Apps (25.08.0 - link).
Joshua Goins fixed the user experience when loading videos in NeoChat. Now the the thumbnail won't be hidden while loading (25.08.0 - link).
Thiago Sueto added a confirmation prompt before resetting all configuration in NeoChat (25.08.0 - link).
Joshua Goins overhauled the server information page (25.08.0 - link). You can now view your server's extended description, terms of service and privacy policy (when applicable).
Raphael Rosch fixed multiple session restore bugs in Konqueror (25.08.0 - link).
Manuel Alcaraz added the possibility to export as PDF or print the players information (link).
Seshan Ravikumar moved his Qt-based libretro frontend to the KDE infrastructure in preparation to incubate the project as a proper KDE application.
Waqar Ahmed made the error message when trying to run a formatter while the binary is not found less intrusive (25.08.0 - link).
Efe Çiftci added a "Show Folders" action to Filelight that allows toggling the visibility of the folder list on the left-hand side of the window (25.08.0 - link).
Johannes Elgaard fixed some conversion when working on bit sets (25.08.0 - link).
Volker Krause ported Kookbook to Qt6 (link).
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.
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.
This week, the merge request for the EteSync resource has been reviewed and successfully merged! This marks a key milestone in the project: EteSync is the first resource to be fully refactored, with its UI logic cleanly separated into a standalone configuration plugin.
Based on feedback from my mentors, I made a few final revisions before the merge. One important addition was a .notifyrc file for the EteSync resource. This allows the headless EteSync resource to make use of KNotification for reporting errors or status updates, integrating with the user notification system in a way that doesn’t depend on a UI.
With the resource no longer depending on QtWidgets, and its configuration interface now dynamically loaded, this change contributes to our broader goal of making the Merkuro suite lighter and more adaptable for mobile environments.
After the merge, my mentor Carl checked the memory usage using System Monitor. The improvements were measurable: the EteSync resource now uses approximately 9.5 MiB of RAM, compared to the 22 MiB used prior to the refactor.
With Etesync out of the way, I turned my full attention back to the PIM Migration Agent. The next logical step was to resolve the KUiServerJobTracker problem I identified last week. My initial plan was to replace it entirely with the progress-reporting tools built directly into Akonadi’s AgentBase. But, while inspecting the Akonadi code, I realized this approach wouldn’t be viable for my use case.
Although AgentBase does provide D-Bus signals for job progress and status updates, these are low-level and do not integrate directly with the system tray or display persistent visual feedback to the user. In contrast, KUiServerV2JobTracker automatically presents progress as desktop notifications or tray-based UI elements.
Still, I implemented the changes, compiled the code, and launched akonadiconsole to test. The good news: the refactored agent started and the configuration plugin loaded. The bad news: they weren’t talking to each other. The D-Bus communication I had set up last week was failing.
This sent me down a debugging rabbit hole. My first hypothesis was that the agent needed its own .service file to properly register on the D-Bus session bus. I spent a good chunk of time creating and tweaking one, but the D-Bus connection simply refused to work as intended. The plugin and the agent remained strangers.
After much investigation I discovered the root cause, and it was a typical environment problem.
akonadiconsolewas using the system D-Bus, while my development build of the agent was trying to register on the user session D-Bus managed by my Plasma desktop.
They were on two completely different communication networks! This immediately explained why my custom dbus interface had no effect—akonadiconsole was never even looking for it in the user session. To solve this I ran:
kde-builder - -run akonadictl restart
After this I ran the akonadiconsole once again and this time the D-Bus connection worked as intended.
For next week, the priorities are:
The refactor of EteSync and the progress made with D-Bus integration in the Migration Agent continue to move the project toward a more modular and future-proof codebase.
If you are a developer and your KDE project is still based on Qt5 you should really really start porting to Qt6 now.
https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-devel/2025-June/003742.html
Dear fans of music & open source music players,
in preparation of the upcoming Amarok 3.3 release, a second beta release (3.2.82) has been prepared.
This time, the most important change is the new GStreamer-based audio backend. This enables a number of features that weren't available on Qt6 Phonon backends, and likely also provides a more reliable audio experience in general. In addition to audio system work, e.g. more safeguards have been set up around collection scanning code to prevent some potential database issues. More details on changes are listed in the ChangeLog.
These come in addition to the previous beta 1 changes (Qt6 only, database update). Please note that due to the database update in beta 1, downgrading from 3.3 betas is not directly possible, and returning to pre-3.3 versions requires the database (at ~/.local/share/amarok/mysqle/) to be manually backed up beforehand.
Additionally, there isn't an official release with Qt6 support of liblastfm available yet (needed for last.fm support). To enable last.fm functionalities, one needs to use a library version built from e.g. sources at https://github.com/Mazhoon/liblastfm/tree/81e8f9dc16a0a18fe9a066d51c2071086326670b
The Amarok 3.3 beta 2 source tarball is available on download.kde.org and it has been signed with Tuomas Nurmi's GPG key. In addition to the source code, it is likely that some distributions will provide beta packages. The various nightly git builds provided by various splendid packagers should also provide a way of using the beta changes and participating in the testing.
Happy listening!
Plasma's upcoming first-run experience is coming along nicely.
After a bunch of research and discussions we settled on continuing / fixing up the KISS project (KDE Initial System Setup) for the new First Run Experience (FRE) / Out-Of-Box Experience (OOBE). It was in a sort of half finished state.
Since then has been a bunch of work on it such as:
That last one was more difficult than expected.. turns out keyboard layouts can be quite complex!
First came some refactoring of the keyboard layouts KCM from plasma-desktop so
we could reuse some of the existing, complex functionality. Then adapting a
UI/UX appropriate for the FRE. Investigating things like keyboard models,
detecting defaults, mapping language to keyboard layout, etc..
Then taking the results of the user choice and figuring out how to apply that
both to the system as a default (systemd-localed dbus call) as well as to the
running Plasma session (setting the value manually in the kxkbrc keyboard
settings file).
As is often the case with software development, that succinct summary belies the massive amount of work it took to get there! 😅 💪
With that work completed, we have most of what is needed for a minimum viable product!
Next up:
#this-week-kde-apps:kde.org
TSDgeos
sysusers.d and a polkit rulesystemd unit seems promising, but more research is neededkde-builderKISS acronym personally 🤷♀️There is also obviously a lot of improvements and polish that can be made, but for now here is a preview of the FRE:
These past few week’s my focus was on exploring input device detection and event handling mechanisms in Linux, with a particular emphasis on game controllers and their potential integration into KWin.
I also spent time reading through KWin’s input-related source code to understand how it currently manages devices, and began reviewing documentation for various Linux input subsystems—including evdev, HID, and /dev/input/jsX in order to evaluate which layer would provide the most reliable and straight forward support for integrating controller recognition.
The time was mostly spent learning how to use different libraries, tools and creating virtual controller prototype.
libevdev is a library for handling evdev devices.
It provides a higher-level interface over /dev/input/event* and abstracts much of the complexity of input event parsing.
evdevis the generic input event interface. This is the preferred interface for userspace to consume user input, and all clients are encouraged to use it.-The kernel development community.
libevdev can be used to:
libevdev_new(), libevdev_set_fd(int fd, struct libevdev **dev): for opening physical devices.libevdev_next_event(struct libevdev *dev, unsigned int flags, struct input_event *ev): for polling events.libevdev_get_id_*(const struct libevdev *dev): to query device meta data.I used the Linux uinput subsystem to create a virtual input device that mirrors a physical controller input. uinput is what allows us to make a virtual controller out of any evdev device by:
evdev interface device to /dev/uinput (or /dev/input/uinput).evdev interface device in /dev/input/event*From here the idea is that KWin or any other system component can treat the virtual controller as if it were an ordinary HID device.
uinput is a kernel module that makes it possible to emulate input devices from userspace. By writing to /dev/uinput (or /dev/input/uinput) device, a process can create a virtual input device with specific capabilities. Once this virtual device is created, the process can send events through it, that will be delivered to userspace and in-kernel consumers.
-The kernel development community.
libevdev_uinput_create_from_device(const struct libevdev *dev, int uinput_fd, struct libevdev_uinput **uinput_dev):libevdev_uinput_get_devnode (struct libevdev_uinput *uinput_dev):libevdev_uinput_write_event (const struct libevdev_uinput *uinput_dev, unsigned int type, unsigned int code, int value):
Post an event through the uinput device.Tools used:
libevdev-uinput.h for management of uinput devices via libevdev./dev/uinput opened with correct permissions.input group.uinput kernel module is loaded (using modprobe uinput). Some distros (Ubuntu/Kubuntu) have it built in, not loaded as module, thus modprobe uinput command won't log anything./dev/uinput with O_WRONLY | O_NONBLOCK flags using open(), and ensuring no EPERM or EACCES errors were returned.Using ioctl(fd, EVIOCGBIT(EV_FF, ...)) and tools like fftest, I examined:
To enable force feedback, you have to:
have your kernel configured with evdev and a driver that supports your device.
make sure evdev module is loaded and /dev/input/event* device files are created.
evtest and fftestto test evdev devices and understand their capabilities -
sudo evtest /dev/input/eventX.sudo fftest dev/input/eventX. uinput creates a node device in dev/input/eventX for the virtual input.libevdev.libevdev and libevdev-uinput we can access physical controllers, create virtual controller and read/write low-level input events./dev/input/* and /dev/uinput (use udev rules or run as root).evtest and fftest (from input-utils)udevadm info --name=/dev/input/eventX --attribute-walkEINVAL during upload.libevdev does not handle FF upload directly — this remains kernel-level and typically involves ioctl().You might have noticed that Plasma keyboard shortcuts have been
changing recently with the aim to have everything KWin/Plasma be
Meta+Something.
Now, I tend to redefine most of the default shortcuts, so this didn’t affect my workspace directly, but I liked the idea to have different modifiers used depending on the category of /thing/ for which I’m creating a shortcut.
An additional aim I had is to have a common shortcut ‘body’ for equivalent actions in different categories, in order to more easily build muscle memory with my new shortcuts.
Categories that I have are:
And these are the modifiers I’m trying out:
Meta+Anything and
Alt+Special keysCtrl+Shift+AnythingCtrl+d as the leaderCtrl+AnythingAlt+Normal keysSo, for example, the ; and ' as the shared
shortcut /bodies/ mean the following in different categories:
Meta+; and Meta+' – switch to next and
previous window (I’m using Krohnkite for tiling, so this is not like
Alt+Tab, but moving through the visible tiled windows);Ctrl+Shift+; and Ctrl+Shift+' – would mean
switch to next and previous panes in the terminal application (I’m not
using this yet, as I don’t tend to use split views in terminal except in
TMux);Ctrl+d ; and Ctrl+d ' – move to next and
previous panes in TMux;Alt+; and Alt+' – move to next and
previous panes in an application (currently only in Vim and
Neovim).So far, the approach seems to work Ok. I’ve quickly got accustomed to the new window/pane navigation shortcuts.
The main problem are the programs that don’t allow changing shortcuts
(Firefox for example) or don’t allow creating shortcuts with some key
combinations (using Ctrl+; in Vim or Neovim does not work,
while it works with Alt).
Because of those limitations, the modifiers are not as clear cut as
they ideally would be. Ideally, each category would have its own single
modifier, instead of, for example, having a mix of Alt and
Ctrl in the /specific application/ category, and using a
modifier combination like Ctrl+Shift for the /terminal
application/.
I’ve also redefined all my Plasma and KWin shortcuts to be location-on-keyboard-based, but more on that later.
PySide6 is easy to use and powerful but there’s a few pitfalls to look out for. We’ll investigate a performance issue in a large data model, find out that function calls are expensive, and that some of Qt’s C++ APIs had to be adapted to work in a Python environment.
A very long awaited milestone has been reached: Today the KMyMoney team announces the availability of the latest stable version of its Personal Finance Manager together with its companion library Alkimia..
Since the last stable release almost 3 years ago, the developers made 3440 changes to the main code base and 800+ changes to the Alkimia library.
Here’s an overview of some major functionality changes and improvements made among all the little bug fixes along the way (with more details on a separate page):
Multi account ledger view
KMyMoney now allows to open the ledger of multiple accounts in tabs side by side in the ledger view.
New and improved transaction editors
The transaction editors have completely rewritten. They now open a widget directly in the ledger area and there is no distinction between form based and register based method anymore. The sometimes confusing tabs showing Deposit/Transfer/Withdrawal have been removed and the amount entry now provides two mutually exclusive widgets for debit and credit. These changes also found their way into the split editor.
And for transfers you now simply type/select the account name in the category widget.
Customize tab order for transaction editors
Another feature of the transaction entry is to customize the tab order for data entry. Pressing Ctrl+Alt+T opens the tab order editor and the user can select the order of the widgets that are visited when pressing the TAB key.
Open categories in ledger view
With the new version, it is now possible to open categories in the ledger and enter transactions. This has been a long standing user request.
Customize order of columns in tabular views via drag and drop
The order of the columns of e.g. the ledger, accounts or categories view can now be modified by the user by simply dragging the header column to its new location.
Move accounts in hierarchy via drag and drop
Moving accounts in the hierarchy is now possible using drag and drop.
Load passwords from gpg encrypted password store
Passwords for e.g. the KBanking backend can now be loaded from the standard Unix password store pass with a simple mouse click. Pass uses strong GPG based encryption to store its information. A Qt based GUI frontend for pass is also available.
Improved handling of tags
The support for tags has been overhauled. Especially the reporting section for tags received many improvements.
Link documents to transactions
KMyMoney now provides a feature to link documents stored in the filesystem to transactions. This can be automated to support recurring transactions (e.g. your phone bill) by simple configuration using regular expressions per payee.
Online exchange rate download available for other finance apps
Online currency exchange rate and stock price download has been moved over to the Alkimia library and then re-integrated into KMyMoney. This makes it available for other applications by simply linking to Alkimia.
Updated handbook
The KMyMoney handbook has received many changes to reflect the new functionality.
A big thank you goes out to those who supported us by reporting problems and helping to identify their root cause. In case you have a question about the usage of some new features or even old ones, please post your question on the KDE user forum. If you are sure you found real problem or want to ask for a new feature, please do so on our bugtracker.
