If you want to contribute to KDE in a significant way (beyond coding), here is your opportunity — help us organize Akademy 2025!

We are seeking hosts for Akademy 2025, which will occur in June, July, August, or September. This is your chance to bring KDE’s biggest event to your city! Download the Call for Hosts guide and submit your proposal to akademy-proposals@kde.org by December 1, 2024.

Feel free to reach out with any questions or concerns! We are here to help you organise a successful event and are here to offer you any advice, guidance, or help you need. Let’s work together to make Akademy 2025 an event to remember.

Kdenlive 24.08.2 is out with many fixes to a wide range of bugs and regressions.

Oxygen Icons 6.1.0 is a feature release of the Oxygen Icon set.

It features new SVG symbolic icons for use in Plasma Applets.

It also features improved icon theme compliance, fixed visability and added mimetype links.

URL: https://download.kde.org/stable/oxygen-icons/
Source: oxygen-icons-6.1.0.tar.xz
SHA256: 16ca971079c5067c4507cabf1b619dc87dd6b326fd5c2dd9f5d43810f2174d68
Signed by: E0A3EB202F8E57528E13E72FD7574483BB57B18D Jonathan Riddell jr@jriddell.org
https://jriddell.org/jriddell.pgp

Hey folks! Apologies for the long gap since my last post. A lot has happened both personally and professionally—I got a new job and relocated, which led to me extending my GSoC deadline to wrap up the remaining tasks. I’m happy to share that I’ve now completed everything, and all the pending MRs related to my GSoC work have been merged. Here’s a quick overview:

MRs merged:

• Reset form implementation in Okular : Okular now has form reset functionality, allowing you to clear fields or return them to their default values. !MR1007
• Support for MouseDown, MouseEnter and MouseExit events : The corresponding event object is now generated when these mouse events are triggered. !MR994
• Keystroke, Validate, Calculate and Format event support for Comboboxes : These essential events were previously not triggered for comboboxes. This MR adds support for them. !MR1027
• Fix order of execution of events for text form fields : Keystroke, Validate, Calculate, and Format actions weren’t always executed in the correct order, especially during undo/redo or when modified via JavaScript. This MR fixes that and ensures KVCF actions are only triggered when a field value is committed, improving keyboard usability. !MR1002
• Support for modifying the appearance stream text in form field choice (Poppler) : Added functionality to modify appearance stream text in form fields without altering their actual values. !MR1590
• SubmitForm functionality (Poppler) : Support for reading the SubmitForm action was added to Poppler. While Okular doesn’t yet implement the actual submission process, this lays the groundwork for future integration. !MR1579

Future Scope:

Although much progress has been made during GSoC’24, there are still many areas where Okular’s PDF form functionality could be expanded:

• The actual submission of forms in Okular can be built on top of the SubmitForm action now supported by Poppler.
• Adding support for the SelectionChange event in ListBoxes would enhance their interactivity.
• Additional functions could be implemented for CheckBoxes, ComboBoxes, and ListBoxes, such as programmatically checking items, clearing, deleting, inserting, and setting items. Some of these changes would also require updates to Poppler.
• Improving keyboard navigation for form fields could further boost accessibility and ease of use.

Conclusion:

Participating in GSoC with KDE and contributing to Okular has been an incredible learning experience, and I’m proud of the contributions made. Huge thanks to my mentor, Albert Astals Cid, for his constant support, guidance, and patience through all my mistakes. Special thanks to Sune Vuorela for his reviews and insights which helped me learn a lot, and to the KDE Mentorship and GSoC teams for their indirect but invaluable help. I’m looking forward to continuing my journey with KDE.

See you next time. Cheers!

Hello again, sorry it’s been a while since the last post. In this case, I’m doing a never-before-seen multi-month post!

This may be the last post in this series, as the KDE Promo team has launched “This Week in KDE Apps” which covers my work here (and I also have plans to contribute to… 😅) Nate Graham typically reports on my Plasma changes in his “This Week in Plasma” series. All that would be left is the uninteresting changes, so I was thinking it might be more sensible to do an emersion-style “Status update” that’s isn’t strictly KDE related. We’ll see!

Plasma

[Feature] You can now tweak the pen pressure. This is useful if you prefer a specific style to your strokes, and you can’t change this directly in your preferred application. We plan to have add “soft” and “hard” presets to make using the curve easier. This is one of the last items paid for by our NLnet grant, so it’s exciting to see it finally come to fruition! [6.3]

[Feature] The stylus cursor is now hidden on the Calibration page but this will only work once your distribution switches to Qt 6.8. The credit belongs to Nicolas Fella as he’s the one who put in the work upstream in Qt! [6.2.1]

[Bugfix] The calibration accuracy is now improved slightly and refining your existing calibration further should work closer to how you expect. [6.2.1]

[Bugfix] Added more safety rails in the Calibration code to prevent possible crashes. [6.2.1]

[Bugfix] Made sure the calibration matrix is reset when you hit the “Defaults” button. [6.2.1]

[Bugfix] Now the Calibration window opens on the correct screen. [6.2.1]

[Bugfix] Now the action dialog doesn’t show up in the wrong place when your KCM scrolls a lot, like mine. [6.2.1]

Tokodon

[Feature] The welcome page when you first open Tokodon now looks much nicer and friendly. Hopefully it makes it clearer what Tokodon is, and also includes an even clearer badge to indicate what service it connects to. [24.12]

[Feature] Display public servers to ease registration for first-time Mastodon users. Right now there’s not any filtering options, but this is a huge improvement over an empty textbox and expecting users to know where to find a server. [24.12]

[Feature] My post tag display improvement was merged, which limits tags to one line. Note that this isn’t the final design we’ll go with, but they will no longer spill onto multiple lines. [24.12]

[Feature] It seems people want Cohost’s “Following” feed for Mastodon, and of course Tokodon could do it! So that’s what I did, and implemented Cohost’s “Following” feed. Albiet it’s currently limited due to the Mastodon API we have available, so it comes with two big caveats currently: You only see when people were last active by the day, and the pagination kinda sucks. [24.12]

[Feature] Added support for managing your social graph within Tokodon. For example if you don’t want someone to follow you anymore, or to quickly unfollow someone from your “Following” list. [24.12]

[Feature] Self-identified bots are now correctly identified on the profile page. [24.12]

[Feature] Due to limitations in the Mastodon API, we now put a button on the account page to denote there are more settings available online. [24.12]

[Feature] Changed the media tab to a grid view, making it easy to see a user’s media all at once. This works different compared to Mastodon Web as you can even filter by featured tag in this mode - but it’s not shown in this screenshot. [24.12]

[Feature] Laid the initial groundwork unread notifications. You now have a number indicator in the sidebar for unread notifications, and mark them as read. [24.12]

[Feature] Added list user management, so now you can use lists to their full advantage within Tokodon itself. [24.12]

[Feature] The warning iconography for “Content Warnings” are now removed, and replaced with “Content Notice” to denote it’s true and more generic purpose. [24.12]

[Feature] Added support for read markers, allowing you to continue reading where you last left off. [24.12]

[Feature] Now the authorship of links are displayed in link preview cards including a Mastodon account, if available. See this official Mastodon blog post for more details. [24.12]

[Feature] Added a way to view poll results before voting, finally. [24.12]

[Feature] Now it’s possible to see which poll options you voted for. [24.12]

[Feature] When clicking the “ALT” button, the media description pops up. This could be useful if you want to quickly view what the media is, before unhiding it. [24.12]

[Feature] Tokodon now supports displaying admin report, severed relationship and moderation warning notifications. These notifications can then be configured in the notifications settings as per usual. The details shown in the notifications can still use a bit of work, though. [24.12]

[Feature] The Notifications page is redesigned, to better suit non-English languages. I also added a button to go straight to Notification settings from here. [24.12]

[Feature] When you’re using Tokodon on a newer and emptier Mastodon account, the application is much friendlier with more helpful explanatory text everywhere. [24.12]

[Feature] Tokodon’s UI is now more responsive. The sidebar will appear on mobile devices if their screen is wide enough, like the Android tablet I use Tokodon on. [24.12]

[Feature] Timeline streaming and read markers can be turned off, if you prefer. [24.12]

[Feature] When viewing someone’s profile, a list of people you follow that you have in common is now shown. Hopefully this will make it easier to find new friends on Mastodon! [24.12]

[Feature] You can now edit your profile fields within Tokodon, without having to do it through Mastodon Web. [24.12]

[Feature] You can now see trending links (or “news”) on the Explore page, and also suggested users. I’m intentionally not showing a screenshot since it doesn’t look very good yet. [24.12]

[Bugfix] The font size in the post composer now follows your preferred font setting. [24.12]

[Bugfix] Tapping a post only works by tapping on the content itself, not the margins. [24.12]

NeoChat

[Feature] You can open location links in your preferred map application. This is the same Map application under the Applications KCM, so you can choose something like OpenStreetMap or even Marble. [24.12]

[Feature] The location chooser is now better in general. There’s a toolbar button to re-center the map, and if your device supports positioning then it can use that to center itself. [24.12]

[Feature] The security page is overhauled and now contains more relevant settings from other pages. [24.12]

[Feature] NeoChat’s welcome page when you first open it now looks a bit nicer. [24.12]

[Bugfix] Now when you only have friend invites and no messages a better icon is displayed, instead of none at all. [24.12]

[Bugfix] The buggy look of the date section header is finally fixed. [24.08.1]

Itinerary

[Feature] I added support for United Airlines reservations, so they can be imported to Itinerary and show up in KMail. Paired with Kalendar, this makes it really easy to keep track of my travel plans! I hope to add support for more North American airlines as I fly them, it’s surprisingly easy to write extractors. [24.08.1]

Frameworks

[Feature] Added support for separator actions in ToolBarLayout in Kirigami. [6.7]

[Feature] Added command names for “Remove Spaces” and “Keep Extra Spaces” in KTextEditor, for a secret future project. [6.7]

[Feature] You can now disable the scrollbar interactivity on ScrollablePages in Kirigami. [6.8]

[Feature] Initial support for QML bindings to the KTextAddons emoticons API. This means that eventually our applications will no longer need to have their own special emoji picker, and our Unicode data will be unified! [1.6]

Libraries

[Bugfix] The caption text in applications that use the Kirigami add-ons fullscreen image viewer is now copyable. I usually write alternative text for my artwork in Tokodon first, and then copy it elsewhere. So it’s really cool to be able to do this within Tokodon itself and not have to go through Mastodon Web. [1.6]

KDE Goals

The goal I championed for, “We care about your Input” was selected! You can check it out on the goals page on the KDE website, which also includes links to our public workboard, chat and the original proposal. Let’s make KDE Plasma the perfect desktop environment for artists! (And everyone else too, I guess 😜)

Akademy

I also attended Akademy this year! You can read more about it in it’s dedicated blog post if you missed it.

It’s been almost a year since I started this series, and I can’t believe I’ve done almost a dozen of these. People seem to really like them, and I’m really appreciative of that! Like I said in the beginning, there will most likely not be a next part as it will be rolled into someone else’s blog posts now.

If you want a hint as to what I’ll be about blogging next, you might want to remember where this all began.

I’m pretty interested in tablet stuff . Not because I think it makes senseo type long chunks of text using an on-screen keyboard, but they should make for a good drawing and painting experience. I’ve already written about the largest tablet I ever had, a 24″ Cintiq Pro and the Remarkable 2.

Today I’m going to run the gamut of the other tablets I’ve used…

Let’s start at eleven o’clock. That’s an iPad pro, first generation. I got it to see whether painting applications would work on it, and maybe port Krita to it. In the end, I pretty much only used it to read comics on. It’s top-heavy, the pen is top-heavy and I just didn’t like the painting applications I could get for it, like Procreate. I did create a little mock-up Qt-based painting application for testing purposes. But… I really, really hated the Apple Pencil. Like, really.  I also dislike iPadOS quite a bit.

Then, at two o’clock, the latest addition to the stable. The Remarkable Paper Pro. It’s bigger than the Remarkable 2, which isn’t necessarily a good thing. It’s supposedly the most advanced color e-ink panel there is, and there’s a front light. That makes it better than my Remarkable 2, which I now handed over to Irina, because without the front light, it’s unusable in anything but the brightest sunlight. That might just be my eyes, of course. The color, though… It’s fine for reading comics or pdf’s, if you like that seventies cheaply printed comic book look. Since the Remarkable runs its own OS, you cannot install Android apps, and since the OS changes quite a bit from version to version, third party apps ten not to work, or even brink the device, despite the device being remarkably open. (Sorry, pun intended.) The device does ooze quality, though! And the pen is great, really great.

Then, at four o’clock, there’s an Onyx Boox. It does run Android, and I wanted to see how well it would run Krita. Well, Krita runs, but the device is a bit slow. The pen is pretty nice, too, even if the cap is dinky. The color is worse than the remarkable’s one, but, again, if you’re reading counterfeit seventies Uncle Scrooge PDF’s, it’s fine. I mostly use this device to learn Hangul and read right-to-left manga. It’s too slow, and the display is too slow, for vertical scrolling manhwa.

Next, at six o’clock, the Samsung Tab S4 Android tablet that we got when we first ported Krita to Android. Despite being really old and not getting any OS updates anymore, it’s still doing fine. I mostly use it to read manga and manhwa using Nihom, and still for testing Krita. The pen is too small to be comfortable, but I only use it for testing. What’s really annoying is that every Saturday morning, I get a notification that Samsung’s legal stuff has changed — even though I don’t get any security updates.

Finally, at eight o’clock, the Frunsi Rubenstab. It’s a bit heavy, a bit small, a bit slow, but on the whole, it’s amazing. It runs Android. It’s mostly designed to be used in landscape mode. The pen is great, the display is good, the large bezels make it easy to hold and it comes with just about too much extra stuff, ranging from ant-static gloves to a brush-like implement.

KUnifiedPush provides push notifications for KDE applications. Push notifications are a mechanism to support applications that occasionally need to receive some kind of information from their server-side part, and where receiving in a timely manner matters. Chat applications or weather and emergency alerts would be examples for that. More technical details about KUnifiedPush are available on Volker's introduction post about KUnifiedPush.

KUnifiedPush provides three possible provider backends for push notifications:

• Ntfy
• Nextpush
• Gotify

The default provider of KUnifiedPush is Ntfy with unifiedpush.kde.org but you can change it to your own server in the System Settings.

Currently both NeoChat and Tokodon integrates with KUnifiedPush as both Matrix and Mastodon support UnifiedPush. There is also ongoing work for weather and emergency alerts.

Packager Section

You can find the package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with Carl Schwan's GPG key.

Update 1

Great news, everyone! We now have all the necessary components to start creating our 16px icon collection. I believe that we can work on the design and creation of these icons simultaneously.

Here are some general guidelines to consider when designing the 16px icons:

• Our objective is to correlate the designs from the 24px collection to the 16px as closely as possible.
• When in doubt, create an icon that resembles or simplifies the 24px shape.
• Use 1px lines for the icons.
• Utilize the IconGrid16 component to guide your design.
• Once the icon is complete, change the icon color to the “ColorScheme-Text” color.
• To export the icon, use the Icon Jetpack plugin.

I am excited to begin working on this project and would be grateful for any designer assistance that is available. If you need help learning Figma, please don’t hesitate to reach out, and we will gladly provide our support.

If you require edit access to the Figma file for the 16px icon collection, please let me know. I believe that collaboration and teamwork will lead to the creation of an amazing set of 16px icons.

Update 2

Additionally, I wanted to let you all know that I have made some edits to the color scheme of the graphic. I would appreciate any feedback you may have on the changes, and whether I might have missed anything. Let’s work together to create a cohesive and visually stunning icon collection!

Once our colors are aligned to what we need in the system, we will update the issue recently created for this purpose. This issue is under heavy development and things are changing rapidly. Read with caution and expect updates.

https://invent.kde.org/teams/vdg/issues/-/issues/82

Colors in the design system have changed. I need to correlate the colors to the color labels below. It will look a little off for some time. However, the color variables in Figma are updated to the latest feedback. Just this graphic needs the updates as well. Only the color box is correct, not the color names

Update 3

This week we took previously-created Ocean window shadows created by Manuel de la Fuente and integrated them in the design system. The shadow variables in Figma now use Ocean-inspired shadow levels to make them more visible. This is to address feedback on shadows previously being too faint. Hopefully these make a difference.

For some reason that I don't know, the XL shadow looks fainter than the LG shadow, but it seems to be a visual bug in Figma. If you apply the XL shadow, it should appear correctly in your graphics.

Update 4

Transition to PenPot is on hold for now until we have the community instance created and path manipulation updates are applied. This would impede us from recreating icons the same way we have them right now.

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-42.

You Can’t Make Friends With The Rockstars

Tags: tech, capitalism, marketing, politics, criticism

People have to realize that tycoons like the ones from big tech companies can both be rich and mediocre. They were smart enough to seize opportunities at the right time but they are not exceptional. In fact, they’re even boring and spineless.

The best quote in this paper I think is: “There is nothing special about Elon Musk, Sam Altman, or Mark Zuckerberg. Accepting that requires you to also accept that the world itself is not one that rewards the remarkable, or the brilliant, or the truly incredible, but those who are able to take advantage of opportunities, which in turn leads to the horrible truth that those who often have the most opportunities are some of the most boring and privileged people alive.”

The real problem is that lots of journalists can’t come to term with the fairy tale and so fall prey to all their publicity stunts as if it had any hidden meaning. This is dangerous because of all the political power they try to seize for their own gains.

Meanwhile, “the most powerful companies enjoy a level of impunity, with their founders asked only the most superficial, softball of questions — and deflecting anything tougher by throwing out dead cats when the situation demands.”

Now you can go and read this long piece.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/rockstars/

What’s With All the Trumpy VCs?

Tags: tech, politics

It’s actually unsurprising, all those tech and crypto bros have assets in jeopardy if some regulation is applied to their industry. No wonder they’d support the one with the most libertarian agenda after the current administration which did look into antitrust cases and increased regulation (even though marginally).

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/10/silicon-valley-venture-capitalists-trump/680225/

Employees Describe an Environment of Paranoia and Fear Inside Automattic Over WordPress Chaos

Tags: tech, blog, wordpress

Wow, the atmosphere looks fairly toxic at Automattic right now. It felt like it was just about the trademark dispute but clearly the craziness is running much deeper. This is concerning for WordPress future I think.

https://www.404media.co/automattic-buyout-offer-wordpress-matt-mullenweg/

You should be using an RSS reader

Tags: tech, social-media, rss

Want to put an end to the social media platforms weight on our lives? For once there’s an individual solution which might work. This is a chance because as he rightfully points out individual solutions are generally too complicated to bring systemic change. Here this is actually doable.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/16/keep-it-really-simple-stupid/#read-receipts-are-you-kidding-me-seriously-fuck-that-noise

Using Cloudflare on your website could be blocking RSS users

Tags: tech, cloudflare, rss

Cloudflare indeed needs to do better to accommodate RSS readers. They’re not malicious bots and shouldn’t be flagged as such.

https://openrss.org/blog/using-cloudflare-on-your-website-could-be-blocking-rss-users

Stop using Brave Browser

Tags: tech, web, browser, google, privacy, politics

A good reminder that this is not the Google Chrome alternative you’re looking for. It’s the same privacy invading mindset with some bigotry on top.

https://www.spacebar.news/stop-using-brave-browser/

The Internet Archive and its 916 billion saved web pages are back online

Tags: tech, web, archive, security

It’s a very important project, it’s really concerning that this attack went through. The service is still partly disrupted but they’re showing signs of recovery. Let’s wish them luck and good health. This archival service is essential for knowledge and history preservation on the web.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/10/the-internet-archive-and-its-916-billion-saved-webpages-are-back-online/

Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, knowledge, criticism, research

Now the impact seems clear and this is mostly bad news. This reduces the production of public knowledge so everyone looses. Ironically it also means less public knowledge available to train new models. At some point their only venue to fine tune their models will be user profiling which will be private… I’ve a hard time seeing how we won’t end up stuck with another surveillance apparatus providing access to models running on outdated knowledge. This will lock so many behaviors and decisions in place.

https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/3/9/pgae400/7754871#483096365

LLMs don’t do formal reasoning - and that is a HUGE problem

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, neural-networks, gpt, logic, mathematics, research

Of course I recommend reading the actual research paper. This article is a good summary of the consequences though. LLMs definitely can’t be trusted with formal reasoning including basic maths. This is a flaw in the way they are built, the bath forward is likely merging symbolic and sub-symbolic approaches.

https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/llms-dont-do-formal-reasoning-and

Should you use uv’s managed Python in production?

Tags: tech, python, security, supply-chain, developer-experience

It’s tempting to use uv. It’s probably fine on the developer workstation at this point. It looks a bit early to use it in production though, it’s a bit young for that and carries questions regarding supply chain security still.

https://pythonspeed.com/articles/uv-python-production/

Use an External GPU on Raspberry Pi 5 for 4K Gaming

Tags: tech, raspberry-pi, gpu, gaming

Definitely a funny hack. Not usable for compute workloads though.

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/use-external-gpu-on-raspberry-pi-5-4k-gaming

Master Embedded Development with Rust and no_std

Tags: tech, rust, embedded

Nice article showing the steps to port Rust code to run on deeply embedded systems. It highlights the difficulties and caveats of such a task.

https://towardsdatascience.com/nine-rules-for-running-rust-on-embedded-systems-b0c247ee877e

Table lookups are efficient

Tags: tech, programming, optimization

This is too often overlooked, but table lookups can help with performance if done well.

https://lemire.me/blog/2024/10/14/table-lookups-are-efficient/

Graphics Tricks from Boomers

Tags: tech, graphics, 2d, hardware

Nice graphic tricks when the hardware was harder to work with. It’s amazing how much we could fit back then out of sheer motivation.

https://arnaud-carre.github.io/2024-09-08-4ktribute/

Why is everybody talking about sync engines?

Tags: tech, web, collaborative, crdt

Excellent introduction to sync engines and how they work. The concept is indeed coming from the gaming industry and we see it more in web applications nowadays due to the user demands for working offline and real time collaboration.

https://fika.bar/blogs/paoramen/why-is-everybody-talking-about-syncing-engines-01JAAEZTCMZA28DSESAJR3J30J

Can Logic Programming Be Liberated from Predicates and Backtracking?

Tags: tech, programming, logic, ai, prolog

Finally a path forward for logic programming? An opportunity to evolve beyond Prolog and its variants? Good food for thought.

https://www-ps.informatik.uni-kiel.de/~mh/papers/WLP24.pdf

Be Suspicious of Success

Tags: tech, reliability, tests, debugging

This is an important trait to have for a developer. If you’re content of things working without knowing why and how they work, you’re looking for a world of pain later.

https://buttondown.com/hillelwayne/archive/be-suspicious-of-success/

Boring Tech Is Stifling Improvement

Tags: tech, architecture, complexity, developer-experience, vendor-lockin

I tend to side on the “boring tech” side, but indeed this is a good reminder that what we want is finding the right balance.

https://yonkeltron.com/posts/boring-tech-is-stifling-improvement/

Cognitive load is what matters

Tags: tech, complexity, cognition, design, architecture

Definitely this. Our cognitive capacity is limited, we’d better not deplete it due to complexity before we even reach the core of the problem at hand.

https://minds.md/zakirullin/cognitive#full

Why make software?

Tags: tech, philosophy

Our craft is based on shifting sands. This brings interesting philosophical questions, like why do it at all? I think the answer proposed in this short article is spot on. It can help bring new ideas on how to be in the world. This is more important than the code itself.

https://sean.voisen.org/blog/why-make-software

Germany’s 49-euro ticket resulted in significant modal shift from road to rail

Tags: train, ecology, politics

This is definitely a good idea, I wish we had the same in France. This is too bad that they plan to raise the price, it’s going to limit the impact of the measure.

https://www.mcc-berlin.net/en/news/information/information-detail/article/49-euro-ticket-resulted-in-significant-modal-shift-from-road-to-rail.html

Bye for now!