Kasts polishing, progress on Krita Qt6 port and Kdenlive fundraising report

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 issue contains change from the last two weeks.

Much happened the past two weeks, we had a successful KDE presence at FOSDEM, we now have a location and date for this year's edition of Linux App Summit (April 25-26, 2025 in Tirana, Albania) and also continued to improve our apps. Let's dive in!

Releases

• KDE Gear 24.12.2 is out with some bugfixes.
• Glaxnimate 0.6.0 beta is out. Glaxnimate is a 2d animation software and 0.6.0 is the first version of Glaxnimate as part of KDE. Checkout Glaxnimate's website.
• KStars 3.7.5 is out with mostly bugfixes and performance improvements.
• GCompris 25.0 is out. This is a big release containing 5 new activities.
• Krita 5.2.9 is out. This is a bug fix release, containing all bugfixes of our bug hunt efforts back in November. Major bug-fixes include fixes to clone-layers, fixes to opacity handling, in particular for file formats like Exr, a number of crash fixes and much more!

Akonadi Background service for KDE PIM apps

We fixed an issue where loading tags was broken and would result in a constant 100% CPU usage. (Carl Schwan, 24.12.3. Link)

Elisa Play local music and listen to online radio

We now correctly re-open Elisa when it was minimized to the system tray. (Pedro Nishiyama, 24.12.2. Link)

Dolphin Manage your files

We made it possible to rename tabs in Dolphin. This action is available in each tab's context menu. This is useful for very long tab names or when it is difficult to identify a tab by a folder's name alone. (ambar chakravartty, 25.04.0. Link)

We also improved the keyboard based selection of items. Typing a letter on the keyboard usually selects the item in the view which starts with that letter. Diacritics are now ignored here, so you will for example be able to press the "U" key to select a file starting with an "Ü". (Thomas Moerschell, 24.12.3. Link)

We changed the three view buttons to a single menu button. (Akseli Lahtinen, 25.04.0. Link)

We made the "Empty Trash" icon red in conformance to our HIG as it is a destructive operation. (Nate Graham, 25.04.0. Link)

We improved getting the information from supported version control systems (e.g. Git). It is now faster and happens earlier. (Méven Car, 25.04.0. Link)

Falkon Web Browser

We added input methods hints to input fields. This is mostly helpful when using different input methods than a traditional keyboard (e.g. a virtual keyboard). (Juraj Oravec. Link)

KDE Itinerary Digital travel assistant

We continued to improve the coverage of Itinerary in Poland. This week we added support for the train operator Polregio, fixed and refactored the extractor for Koleo and rewrote the extractor for PKP-app to support the ticket layouts. (Grzegorz Mu, 24.12.3. Link 1, link 2, and link 3)

We also added support for CitizenM hotel bookings. (Joshua Goins, 24.12.3. Link)

We also started working on an online version of the ticket extractor. A preview is available on Carl's website.

Volker also published a recap of the past two months in Itinerary. This contains also some orthogonal topics like the free software routing service Transitous.

Kasts Podcast application

We fixed the vertical alignment of the queue header. (Joshua Goin, 25.04.0. Link)

We are now using Kirigami.UrlButton for links and Kirigami.SelectableLabel for the text description in the podcast details page to improve visual and behavior consistency with other Kirigami applications. (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link)

We also improved the look of the search bar in the discovery page. It's now properly separated from the rest of the content. (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link)

We added the ability to force the app to mobile/desktop mode. (Bart De Vries, 25.04.0. Link)

We fixed the sort order of the podcasts episodes. (Bart De Vries, 24.12.3. Link)

Finally we made various improvements to our usage of QML in Kasts to use newer QML constructs. This should improve slighly the performance while reducing the technical debt. (Tobias Fella, 25.04.0. Link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5, and link 6)

Kate Advanced text editor

We fixed some issues with the list of commits displayed in Kate. The highlight color is now correct and the margins consistent. (Leo Ruggeri, 25.04.0. Link)

We improved the diff widget of Kate. The toolbar icon sizes are now the same as other toolbars in Kate. (Leo Ruggeri, 25.04.0. Link)

Kdenlive Video editor

The Kdenlive team published a report about the result of their last fundraising. It contains a huge amount of great improvements, so go read it!

Added checkerboard option in clip monitor background (Julius Künzel, 25.04.0, Link)

Konqueror KDE File Manager & Web Browser

We fixed the handling of the cookie policy when no policy has been explicitly set. (Stefano Crocco, 24.12.3. Link)

Krita Digital Painting, Creative Freedom

The Krita team continued porting Krita to Qt6/KF6. The application now compiles and run with Qt6, but there are still some uni tests not working. Link to Mastodon thread

Ramon published a video about "Memileo Brushes" on YouTube.

KRDC Connect with RDP or VNC to another computer

We implemented the dynamic resolution mode from the remote desktop protocol (RDP). This means we now resize the remote desktop to fit the current KRDC window. This works for Windows >= 8.1. (Fabio Bas, 25.04.0. Link)

We added support for the domain field in the authentication process. (Fabio Fas, 25.04.0. Link)

We adapted the code to work with FreeRDP 3.11. (Fabio Bas, 25.04.0. Link)

Marknote Write down your thoughts

We fixed the list of "Sort Notes List" option not being set by default. (Joshua Goins. Link)

We now properly capitalize the "undo" and "redo" actions. (Joshua Goins. Link)

We removed internal copies of some Kirigami Addons components in Marknote. (Joshua Goins. Link)

Okular View and annotate documents

We added a way to filter the list of certificate to only show certificates for "Qualified Signatures" in the certificate selection. (Sune Vuorela, 25.04.0. Link)

PlasmaTube Watch YouTube videos

We improved the placeholder messages for empty views. (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link 1 and link 2)

We fixed displaying thumbnails and avatars when using the Peertube backend. (Joshua Goins, 24.12.3. Link, link 2, and link 3)

Barcode Scanner Scan and create QR-Codes

Qrca can now scan a QR code directly from an image instead of just from the camera. (Onuralp Sezer, 25.04.0. Link)

Tokodon Browse the Fediverse

We are now using more fitting icons for the "Embed" and "Open in Browser" actions in Tokodon's context menu. We also removed the duplicated "Copy to Clipboard" action from that context menu. (Joshua Goins, 24.12.3. Link and link 2)

Following the improvements from two weeks ago, we did even even more accessibility/screen reader improvements to Tokodon. (Joshua Goins, 24.12.3. 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 monetarnky 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.

If you don’t know what Fast Sketch Cleanup plugin is, here’s a blog post describing it in detail: https://krita.org/en/posts/2024/fast_sketch_background/. In short, it’s a neural network-based filter similar to Edge Detection or Engrave that is supposed to clean up a sketch and create lines that can be used as a base for a lineart or help with coloring.

Download

Windows

• Plugin: FastSketchPlugin1.1.0.zip
• Portable zip file: krita-x64-5.3.0-prealpha-68346790.zip

Linux

• 64 bits Linux: krita-5.3.0-prealpha-68346790dc-x86_64.AppImage

New GUI

The old GUI was relatively difficult to use and quite limited. For example, there was no way to use a custom model outside of the main directory, you’d have to manually put the model files into the main directory of the plugin. There was also no pre- or post-processing, and the resolution of the input image was fixed, which didn’t allow for fine-tuning the result.

The new GUI looks like this:

Model

In this section you can select the model in the File combobox, or you can switch to another folder using either the button with the folder icon (for a custom folder) or the “Reset to default” button (which resets the path to the default path for the plugin). The combobox with models gets updated to show the models from the currently selected folder.

“Note about the model” presents some notes or hints about usage that were saved into the model information file.

Device to use

Here you can choose whether to use CPU, GPU or NPU. NPU is a new type of device that is only available on some computers, on Windows you should have all the drivers already installed, but if you’re on Linux, you would need to install them manually. CPU is typically the slowest, so if any other is available, use the other one. Unavailable devices should be greyed out.

Preview images

Those are small cutouts of the image on different stages of the processing. First image shows the original sample; the second one shows the result of the pre-processing; third shows the result of the inference (processing through the model) applied to the pre-processed image; and the last one shows the final result.

Preview size determines how big the preview is. The sample is cut out of the center of the image, with the width and height being equal to the Preview Size * Model Input Size (usually 256) / Scale. That means that a Preview Size of 8 would update roughly 16x slower than Preview Size of 1, no matter the Scale, and assuming the same model. That might make the dialog less responsive, so be careful with higher values. Sometimes it is useful though to see a bigger preview though.

If you click on one of the images, it will bring out a dialog showing the same image in a bigger size, and you can click on the buttons or use arrows to navigate to the other images. You can resize that dialog to see even more detail if needed.

Pre-processing

Defines the pre-processing. It’s performed in the order of the widgets in the dialog.

Levels widget: it’s a quick way to increase contrast in the input image.

Scale: every model has a specific size of its context window, which means it’s sensitive to resolution. Using Scale you can quickly decrease or increase the resolution of the input image, changing the result in a very significant way. Be careful, it’s a scale for one dimension, meaning that the processing time will increase or decrease exponentially.

Post-processing

Scale: it’s just a widget showing the reversal of the scaling in pre-processing. You can’t change it. It ensures that the result has the same size as the input image.

Levels widget: it works just like in the pre-processing.

Sharpen filter: it sharpens the result, with the strength equal to the number from the slider. Zero means input = output, every higher value sharpens the result. One means the exact result you’d get from Krita’s normal Sharpen filter.

Advanced options

Invert: usually you don’t need to change this option, because whether it needs to be checked or not is embedded in the model information file (the same one that contains the note). Most models do require this checkbox checked.

Run

Press the button to start processing. It takes the projection (think: “New Layer From Visible”) of the canvas, puts it through all the processing, and then creates a new layer with the result.

The Run button changes into a Progress Bar to show you progress. When the image is processed, the dialog closes automatically.

Note that it’s not possible to cancel the processing, unfortunately.

Best workflow

The ultimate best workflow I found to get the best result is to first use SketchyModel.xml with low scale (either 1.0 or often even below that), then either decrease the opacity of the result or put a white semi-opaque layer on top, and then use InkModel.xml. The first model removes unnecessary lines and smoothes the lines out, and the second model creates nice, crisp lines. The only problem with using them one after another is that SketchyModel produces pretty dark lines, while InkModel is sensitive to values and requires the input to be light grey, otherwise it doesn’t work properly, hence the additional white layer.

You can also use InkModel.xml directly, if the sketch is clean enough already.

Example 1.

The following examples are derivatives of David Revoy’s sketch “Pepper Sketch”, with the only editing being the FSC plugin or Engrave G’MIC filter (used for comparison).

Workflow:

1. Use SketchyModel, Levels: (0.3, 1.0)
2. Add a white layer, opacity = 40%
3. Use the mentioned model or G’MIC filter.

Results:

1. Original sketch:

2. Result of SketchyModel, with Preprocessing: Levels (0.30, 1.00), and then with a white 40% transparent layer on top:

3. Results of the workflow with, in order of appearance: a) SoftInkModel, scale 4.0, b) InkModel, scale 4.0, c) InkModel, scale 6.0:

4. Result of G’MIC’s filter Engrave, in order of appearance: a) over the original sketch, b) over the version smoothed out by SketchyModel:

Example 2.

The following example is a derivative of “Pepper and Carrot in traditional clothing” by David Revoy.

Workflow:

1. Use SketchyModel, with standard options, Scale = 1.0.
2. Add a white layer with 40% opacity.
3. Use InkModel, Scale = 4.0.

Example 3.

The following example is a derivative of “Huge machine to maintain” by David Revoy.

Workflow:

1. Use SketchyModel, Levels in preprocessing: (0.0., 0.82) (to whiten the background), Scale either 1.0 or 2.0.
2. Add a white layer with 40% opacity.
3. Use InkModel, Scale - 4.0.

Original:

Using SketchyModel at Scale 1.0 (resulting in less details):

Using SketchyModel at Scale 2.0 (more details):

Workflow 2.

1. Just using InkModel, with Levels (0.0, 0.9) and Scale = 4.0.

Result:

by Alexander Bokovoy and Andreas Schneider

FOSDEM 2025 is just behind us and it was a great event as always. Alexander and I had a chance to talk
about the local authentication hub project. Our FOSDEM talk was “localkdc – a general local authentication hub”. You can watch it and come back here for more details.

But before going into details, let us provide a bit of a background. It is 2025 now and we should go almost three decades back (ugh!).

History dive

Authentication on Linux systems is interwoven with the identity of the users. Once a user logged in, a process is running under a certain POSIX account identity. Many applications validate the presence of the account prior to the authentication itself. For example, the OpenSSH server does check the POSIX account and its properties and if the user was not found, will intentionally corrupt the password passed to the PAM authentication stack request. An authentication request will fail but the attempt will be recorded in the system journal.

This joint operation between authentication and identification sources in Linux makes it important to maintain a coherent information state. No wonder that in corporate environments it is often handled centrally: user and group identities stored at a central server and sourced from that one by a local software, such as SSSD. In order to consume these POSIX users and groups, SSSD needs to be registered with the centralized authority or, in other words, enrolled into the domain. Domain enrollment allows not only identity and authentication of users: both the central server and the enrolled client machine can mutually authenticate each other and be sure they talk to the right authority when authenticating the user.

FreeIPA provides a stable mechanism for building a centralized domain management system. Each user account has POSIX attributes associated with it and each user account is represented by the Kerberos principal. Kerberos authentication can be used to transfer the authentication state across multiple services and provides a chance for services to discover user identity information beyond POSIX. It also makes strong linking between the POSIX level identity and authentication structure possible: for example, a Kerberos service may introspect a Kerberos ticket presented by a user’s client application to see how this user was authenticated originally: with a password or some specific passwordless mechanism. Or, perhaps, that a client application performs operations on behalf of the user after claiming it was authenticated using a different (non-Kerberos) authentication.

Local user accounts’ use lacks this experience. Each individual service needs to reauthenticate a user again and again. Local system login: authenticate. Elevating privileges through SUDO? Authenticate again, if not explicitly configured otherwise. Details of the user session state, like how long this particular session is active, is not checked by the applications, making it also harder to limit access. There is no information on how this user was authenticated. Finally, overall user experience between local (standalone) authentication and domain-enrolled one differs, making it harder to adjust and educate users.

Local authentication is also typically password-based. This is not a bad thing in itself but depending on applications and protocols, worse choices could be made, security-wise. For example, contemporary SMB 3.11 protocol is quite secure if authenticated using Kerberos. For non-Kerberos usage, however, it is left to rely on NTLM authentication protocol which requires use of RC4 stream cipher. There are multiple attacks known to break RC4-based encryption, yet it is still used in majority of non-domain joined communications using SMB protocol simply because there was no (so far) alternative. To be correct, there was always an alternative, use of Kerberos protocol, but setting it up for individual isolated systems wasn’t practical.

The Kerberos protocol assumes the use of three different parties: a client, a service, and a key distribution center (KDC). In corporate environments a KDC is part of the domain controller system, a client and a service are both domain members, computers are enrolled in the domain. The client authenticates to KDC and obtains a Kerberos ticket granting ticket (TGT). It then requests a service ticket from the KDC by presenting its TGT and then presents this service ticket to the service. The service application, on its side, is able to decrypt the service ticket presented by the client and authenticate the request.

In the late 2000s Apple realised that for individual computers a number of user accounts is typically small and a KDC can be run as a service on the individual computer itself. When both the client and server are on the same computer, this works beautifully. The only problem is that when a user needs to authenticate to a different computer’s service, the client cannot reach the KDC hosted on the other computer because it is not exposed to the network directly. Luckily, MIT Kerberos folks already thought about this problem a decade prior to that: in 1997 a first idea was published for a Kerberos extension that allowed to tunnel Kerberos requests over a different application protocol. This specification became later known as “Initial and Pass Through Authentication Using Kerberos V5 and the GSS-API” (IAKerb). An initial implementation for MIT Kerberos was done in 2009/2010 while Apple introduced it in 2007 to enable remote access to your own Mac across the internet. It came in MacOS X 10.5 as a “Back to My Mac” feature and even got specified in RFC 6281, only to be retired from MacOS in 2019.

Modern days

In the 2020s Microsoft continued to work on NTLM removal. In 2023 they announced that all Windows systems will have a local KDC as their local authentication source, accessible externally via selected applications through the IAKerb mechanism. By the end of 2024, we have only seen demos published by Microsoft engineers at various events but this is a promising path forward. Presence of the local KDC in Windows raises an interoperability requirement: Linux systems will have to handle access to Windows machines in a standalone environment over SMB protocol. Authentication is currently done with NTLM, it will eventually be removed, thus we need to support the IAKerb protocol extension.

The NTLM removal for Linux systems requires several changes. First, the Samba server will need to learn how to accept authentication with the IAKerb protocol extension. Then, Samba client code needs to be able to establish a client connection and advertise IAKerb protocol extension. For kernel level access, the SMB filesystem driver needs to learn how to use IAKerb as well, this will also need to be implemented in the user space cifs-utils package. Finally, to be able to use the same feature in a pure Linux environment, we need to be able to deploy Kerberos KDC locally and do it in an easy manner on each machine.

This is where we had an idea. If we are going to have a local KDC running on each system, maybe we should use it to handle all authentication and not just for the NTLM removal? This way we can make both the local and domain-enrolled user experience the same and provide access locally to a whole set of authentication methods we support for FreeIPA: passwords, smartcards, one-time passwords and remote RADIUS server authentication, use of FIDO2 tokens, and authentication against an external OAuth2 Identity Provider using a device authorization grant flow.

How “local” a local KDC should be?

On standalone systems it is often not desirable to run daemons continuously. Also, it is not desirable to expose these services to the connected network if they really don’t need to be exposed. A common approach to solve this problem is by providing a local inter-process communication (IPC) mechanism to communicate with the server components. We chose to expose a local KDC via UNIX domain sockets. A UNIX domain socket is a well-known mechanism and has known security properties. With the help of a systemd feature called socket activation, we also can start local KDC on demand, when a Kerberos client connects over the UNIX domain socket. Since on local systems actual authentication requests don’t happen often, this helps to reduce memory and CPU usage in the long run.

If a local KDC is only accessible over a UNIX domain socket, remote applications could not get access to it directly. This means they would need to have help from a server application that can utilize the IAKerb mechanism to pass-through the communication between a client and the KDC. It would enable us to authenticate as a local user remotely from a different machine. Due to how the IAKerb mechanism is designed and integrated into GSS-API, this only allows password-based authentication. Anything that requires passwordless methods cannot obtain initial Kerberos authentication over IAKerb, at least at this point.

Here is a small demo on Fedora, using our localkdc tool to start a local KDC, obtain a Kerberos ticket upon login. The tickets can then be used effortlessly to authenticate to local services such as SUDO or Samba. For remote access we rely on Samba support for IAKerb and authenticate with GSSAPI but local smbclient uses a password first to obtain the initial ticket over IAKerb. This is purely a limitation of the current patches we have to Samba.

Make a pause here and think about the implications. We have an initial Kerberos ticket from the local system. The Kerberos ticket embeds details of how this authentication happened. We might have used a password to authenticate, or a smartcard. Or any other supported pre-authentication methods. We could reuse the same methods FreeIPA already provides in the centralized environment.

The Kerberos ticket also can contain details about the user session, including current group membership. It does not current have that in the local KDC case but we aim to fix that. This ticket can be used to authenticate to any GSS-API or Kerberos-aware service on this machine. If a remote machine accepts Kerberos, it theoretically could accept a ticket presented by a client application running on the local machine as well. Only, to do that it needs to be able to communicate with our local KDC and it couldn’t access it.

Trust management

Luckily, a local KDC deployment is a full-featured Kerberos realm and thus can establish cross-realm agreements with other Kerberos realms. If two “local” KDC realms have trust agreements between each other, they can issue cross-realm Kerberos tickets which applications can present over IAKerb to the remote “local” KDC. Then a Kerberos ticket to a service running on the target system can be requested and issued by the system’s local KDC.

Thus, we can achieve passwordless authentication locally on Linux systems and have the ability to establish peer to peer agreements across multiple systems, to allow authentication requests to flow and operate on commonly agreed credentials. A problem now moves to the management area: how to manage these peer to peer agreements and permissions in an easy way?

Systemd User/Group API support

MIT Kerberos KDC implementation provides a flexible way to handle Kerberos principals’ information. A database backend (KDB) implementation can be dynamically loaded and replaced. This is already used by both FreeIPA and Samba AD to integrate MIT Kerberos KDC with their own database backends based on different LDAP server implementations. For a local KDC use case running a full-featured LDAP server is not required nor intended. However, it would be great if different applications could expose parts of the data needed by the KDB interfaces and cooperate together. Then a single KDB driver implementation could be used to streamline and provide uniform implementation of Kerberos-specific details in a local KDC.

One of the promising interfaces to achieve that is the User/Group record lookup API via varlink from systemd. Varlink allows applications to register themselves and listen on UNIX domain sockets for communication similar to D-Bus but with much less implementation overhead. The User/Group API technically also allows to merge data coming from different sources when an application inquires the information. “Technically”, because io.systemd.Multiplexer API endpoint currently does not support merging non-overlapping data representing the same account from multiple sources. Once it would become possible, we could combine the data dynamically and may interact with users on demand when corresponding requsts come in. Or we can implement our own blending service.

Blending data requests from multiple sources within MIT KDC needs a specialized KDB driver. We certainly don’t want this driver to duplicate the code from other drivers, so making these drivers stackable would be a good option. Support for one level of stacking has been merged to MIT Kerberos through a quickly processed pull request and will be available in the next MIT Kerberos release. This allows us to have a single KDB driver that loads other drivers specialized in storing Kerberos principals and processing additional information like MS-PAC structure or applying additional authorization details.

Establishing trusts

If Alice and Bob are in the same network and want to exchange some files, they could do this using SMB and Samba. But that Alice can authenticate on Bob’s machine, they would need to establish a Kerberos cross realm trust. With the current tooling this is a complex task. For users we need to make this more accessible. We want to allow users to request trust on demand and validate these requests interactively. We also want to allow trust to be present for a limited timeframe, automatically expiring or manually removed.

If we have a Kerberos principal lookup on demand through a curated varlink API endpoint, we also can have a user-facing service to initiate establishing the trust between two machines on demand. Imagine a user trying to access SMB share on one desktop system that triggers a pop-up to establish trust relationship with a corresponding local KDC on the remote desktop system. Both owners of the systems would be able to communicate out of band that provided information is correct and can be trusted. Once it is done, we can return back the details of the specific Kerberos principal that represents this trust relationship. We can limit lifetime of this agreement so that it would disappear automatically in one hour or a day, or a week.

Current state of local authentication hub

We started with two individual implementation paths early in 2024:

• Support IAKerb in MIT Kerberos and Samba
• Enable MIT Kerberos to be used locally without network exposure

MIT Kerberos did have support for IAKerb protocol extension for more than a decade but since Microsoft introduced some changes to the protocol, those changes needed to be integrated as well. This was completed during summer 2024, though no upstream release is available yet. MIT Kerberos typically releases new versions yearly in January so we hope to get some updates early 2025.

Samba integration with IAKerb is currently under implementation. Originally, Microsoft was planning to release Windows 11 and Windows Server 2025 with IAKerb support enabled during autumn 2024. However, the Windows engineering team faced some issues and IAKerb is still not enabled in the Windows Server 2025 and Windows 11 releases. We are looking forward to getting access to Windows builds that enable IAKerb support to ensure interoperability before merging Samba changes upstream. We also need to complete the Samba implementation to properly support locally-issued Kerberos tickets and not only do acquisition of the ticket based on the password.

Meanwhile, our cooperation with MIT Kerberos development team led to advancements in the local KDC support. The MIT Kerberos KDC can now be run over a UNIX domain socket. Also on systemd-enabled systems we allow socket activation, transforming local KDC into an on-demand service. We will continue our work on a dynamic database for a local KDC, to allow on-demand combination of resources from multiple authoritative local sources (Samba, FreeIPA, SSSD, local KDC, future dynamic trust application).

For experiments and ease of deployments, a new configuration tool was developed, localkdc. The tool is available at localkdc and COPR repository can be used to try the whole solution on Fedora.

If you want to get that test tried in a simple setup, you might be interested in a tool that we developed initially for FreeIPA: FreeIPA local tests. This tool allows to provision and run a complex test environment in podman containers. The video of the local KDC usage was actually generated automatically by the scripts from here.

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-06.

Chatbot Software Begins to Face Fundamental Limitations | Quanta Magazine

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, mathematics, logic

When you put the marketing claims aside, the limitations of those models become obvious. This is important, only finding the root cause of those limitations can give a chance to find a solution to then.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/chatbot-software-begins-to-face-fundamental-limitations-20250131/

LLMs: harmful to technical innovation?

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copilot, innovation, learning, vendor-lockin

This will definitely push even more conservatism around the existing platforms. More articles mean more training data… The underdogs will then suffer.

https://evanhahn.com/llms-and-technical-innovation/

Bad idea: “Artificial Intelligence” automatically improves productivity

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copilot, programming, productivity

Be wary of the unproven claims that using LLMs necessarily leads to productivity gains. The impacts might be negative.

https://jchyip.medium.com/bad-idea-artificial-intelligence-automatically-improves-productivity-0829fcf2146c

The LLM Curve of Impact on Software Engineers

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copilot, productivity, learning

Again it’s definitely not useful for everyone… it might even be dangerous for learning.

https://serce.me/posts/2025-02-07-the-llm-curve-of-impact-on-software-engineers

SQLite or PostgreSQL? It’s Complicated!

Tags: tech, databases, performance, postgresql, sqlite

It shows unexpected results in its measurements. It also highlights the importance of proper settings for your database system.

https://www.twilio.com/en-us/blog/sqlite-postgresql-complicated

Falsehoods programmers believe about null pointers | purplesyringa’s blog

Tags: tech, memory

If you didn’t realise that null pointers open a maze of different traps, this is a good summary of widespread misconceptions.

https://purplesyringa.moe/blog/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-null-pointers/

String vs &str

Tags: tech, rust, memory

Another reminder that you don’t want reference to primitive types everywhere in Rust code. There’s actually ways to handle this properly. This post gives a couple of simple guidelines to apply.

https://blog.sulami.xyz/posts/string-vs-str/

py-free-threading

Tags: tech, python, multithreading

Looks like a nice resource to handle the coming move to free threaded Python.

https://py-free-threading.github.io/

Decorator JITs - Python as a DSL

Tags: tech, python, performance, jit

Nice exploration of JIT based techniques in Python.

https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2025/decorator-jits-python-as-a-dsl/

Big Packages or Many Dependencies

Tags: tech, supply-chain, dependencies, complexity

Indeed there is a tension between both approaches in package ecosystems.

https://v5.chriskrycho.com/notes/big-packages-or-many-dependencies/

Developer philosophy

Tags: tech, programming, learning

Definitely a good list of lessons to learn when you’re a junior developer.

https://qntm.org/devphilo

Bye for now!

Model/View Drag and Drop in Qt - Part 1

Moving a row in a tableview, step 1

Moving a row in a tableview, step 2

Moving a row in a tableview, step 3

Reorderable ListView

Reorderable TableView

class CountryModel : public QAbstractTableModel
{
    ~~~
    Qt::ItemFlags flags(const QModelIndex &index) const override
    {
        if (!index.isValid())
            return Qt::ItemIsDropEnabled; // allow dropping between items
        return Qt::ItemIsEnabled | Qt::ItemIsSelectable | Qt::ItemIsDragEnabled;
    }

    // the default is "copy only", change it
    Qt::DropActions supportedDropActions() const override { return Qt::MoveAction; }

    // the default is "return supportedDropActions()", let's be explicit
    Qt::DropActions supportedDragActions() const override { return Qt::MoveAction; }

    QStringList mimeTypes() const override { return {QString::fromLatin1(s_mimeType)}; }

    bool moveRows(const QModelIndex &sourceParent, int sourceRow, int count, const QModelIndex &destinationParent, int destinationChild) override; // see below
};

bool CountryModel::moveRows(const QModelIndex &sourceParent, int sourceRow, int count, const QModelIndex &destinationParent, int destinationChild)
{
    if (!beginMoveRows(sourceParent, sourceRow, sourceRow + count - 1, destinationParent, destinationChild))
        return false; // invalid move, e.g. no-op (move row 2 to row 2 or to row 3)

    for (int i = 0; i < count; ++i) {
        m_data.move(sourceRow + i, destinationChild + (sourceRow > destinationChild ? 0 : -1));
    }

    endMoveRows();
    return true;
}

Reorderable treeview

Reorderable treeview with a tree model

Reorderable QListWidget

Reorderable QTableWidget

Reorderable QTreeWidget

The post Model/View Drag and Drop in Qt - Part 1 appeared first on KDAB.

Glaxnimate 0.6.0 Beta has finally been released for testing!

It has been a while since the last release of Glaxnimate, but in the background we worked hard to make this first release under the KDE umbrella happen!

Please help us testing and report any issue you may encounter on https://bugs.kde.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=glaxnimate

Glaxnimate joins KDE

The Glaxnimate team is proud to announce Glaxnimate is now part of KDE. Glaxnimate benefits from the shared KDE build and distribution infrastructure, the collective knowledge of the community and libraries such as KDE Frameworks. This way the developers can spend more time on the code to fix bugs and develop new features for you!

Changes

Editing

• The rotation handle now preserves rotation direction and multiple full rotations
• Alt + click on keyframes cycles between built-in easing curves
• Alt + click on bezier points cycles between tangent symmetry modes (Ctrl+click still works)
• Changing a bezier point from corner to smooth will add tangents if they are missing
• The import image dialog now allows importing multiple images at once

I/O

• Added support for SVG text-anchor

User Interface

• Middle mouse drag now pans the timeline
• There is an icon on the timeline to quickly toggle keyframes
• Buttons to jump to the next/previous keyframe in the timeline
• Improved LottieFiles import dialog
• Improved autosave recovery process
• Script console now supports basic autocompletion

Scripting

• Exposed method to add new compositions

Misc

• Switched to an even/odd version numbering scheme
• Integration with KDE Frameworks

Bug Fixes

• Fixed keyframe context menu showing the wrong "after" transition
• When drawing bezier points that don't have tangents are correctly marked as corner
• The play button now resumes from the current frame rather than resetting to the start
• Fixed saving custom templates
• Toggling visibility / lock of a layer by clicking on its icon now adds an undo/redo action
• Fixed LottieFiles import
• Fixed dropping file as object
• Fixed closing compositions from the tab bar
• Fixed loading colors from older lotties
• Shape modifiers marked as not visible are now correctly ignored
• Fixed rendering of round corners modifier
• Fixed "New Composition" action creating an invisible layer
• Fixed repeater opacity not being applied correctly
• Improved handling of repeater with stroke
• Fixed SVG animation export
• Fixed animated raster plugin I/O

How to get it

Note that this is a beta release. Most Linux distributions do not package unstable releases.

We recommend to test this release with one of the binaries we provide:

• Linux AppImage: glaxnimate-0.5.80-x86_64.AppImage
• Windows Installer: glaxnimate-0.5.80-x86_64.exe
• macOS DMG
  • ARM: glaxnimate-0.5.80-arm64.dmg
  • Intel: glaxnimate-0.5.80-x86_64.dmg

Packager Section

The source code tarball are available from the KDE servers:

URL: https://download.kde.org/unstable/glaxnimate/0.5.80

Source: glaxnimate-0.5.80.tar.xz

Signed by: 97B71AA02D63EA6C5C44C23B962AC48EF0501F0B Julius Künzel julius.kuenzel@kde.org

Ramon Miranda has published a new video on the Krita channel: Memilio Impasto Brushes! Who doesn't love a nice impasto effect!

From 6th to 10th of September 2024, part of the Kdenlive Team was in Germany to attend the annual KDE convention Akademy and used that opportunity of being together at the same location to have a sprint. It was good to meet face to face and to sit down and tackle some issues together. One of the topic discussed was improving our communication towards users, so here is a much needed update on the status of our fundraiser! This post should have been published a few months earlier but there were so much things happening around Kdenlive that it was hard to follow, so sorry for the delay!

It’s been a bit more than 2 years since we launched our very successful fundraiser. This allowed us to fund some much wanted features, and as a side goal, allowed me to spend more time on Kdenlive. Thanks to your donations, I will be able to dedicate two days per week to Kdenlive instead of one. Note that this only sponsors part of my work as I spend much more time to Kdenlive, but hopefully this will relieve some stress and I will have a healthier weekly rhythm.

During this time, there were around 1,900 commits to the Kdenlive repository, meaning about 3.8 commits per day! We didn’t take that much vacation, did we? Also worth noting is that we handled the port to Qt6 during that time, which was a big task and took a lot of effort.

So now for the status of the fundraiser, here is what has been done so far and what is left. All major things were implemented in the 24.12 release so that we can move on to our next goals soon.

Timeline Nesting

merged in 23.04

This was by far the biggest update since 2019, and can now be enjoyed by all (we recommend using the upcoming 24.12.2 version for the best experience). What remains for this task is to do some code cleanup that will be done in the 24.12 cycle. On a side note, the feature was merged too early and caused some annoying instabilities that are now solved. And I promise we are working to improve our development processes.

Improving the effects workflow

Several changes were made to improve the user experience and make our effects more powerful.

Group effects

merged in 24.05

Ability to control the parameters affecting all effects within the group.

Built-in effects

merged in 24.12

The effects panel gives direct access to effect parameters, allowing to quickly and easily adjust them.

More Easing Modes

merged in 24.02

In addition to the existing easing modes (linear, smooth, and constant), we’ve added several new options like: Cubic In/Out, Exponential In/Out, Circular In/Out, Elastic In/Out, and Bounce In/Out for transitions and effects.

Transform effect improvements

The Transform effect now has a monitor grid to easily align clips – merged in 24.12

Added ability to directly select clips from the monitor overlay – merged in 24.08

Redesigned effects interface

merged in 24.12

The Effect Stack redesign enhances usability with clearer organization of keyframeable and non-keyframeable parameters, improved layout consistency, more compact and clean.

Help button

merged in 24.12

Added a contextual help button in the effect / transition stack which redirects to the effect’s documentation on our fantastic documentation website.

Performance boost

Performance improvements is an always running task, but among some of the recent changes you will find:

• Spacer tool boost – merged in 24.05, the Spacer tool that was previously very laggy when moving more than 10 clips was optimized to allow almost instant move
• Improve speed for audio or video only rendering – merged in 24.08, a small improvement in the way the rendering is passed to MLT means slightly faster render times for the timeline preview
• Improve support for hardware encoders – cleanup and improve the detection of the GPU used for timeline preview and proxy clips – merged in 23.08
• Optimize parts of the timeline qml code – merged in 24.05, we now better handle out of view items

But wait, there’s more!

Thanks to your support we managed to achieve more than planned. We worked in improving our automated testing as well as hired third party developers for extra features.

Regression Testing

One thing we wanted for a long time was a way to automatically check for rendering regressions. We are now entering the final phase of this automated tests and it will soon be run automatically. Hopefully this will make future releases more stable and avoid some of the issues we had in the last years!

Audio Waveform Upgrade

merged for 25.04

The next major release of Kdenlive brings a 300% performance boost for generating audio thumbnails, along with higher-resolution waveforms for greater precision and a refactored sampling method that accurately renders the audio signal. This work was done by Étienne Paul André, check out the in depth details about thew work done here.

OpenTimelineIO Integration

expected in 25.08

Darby Jonhston is working on implementing a native C++ OpenTimelineIO integration to allow importing and exporting project files to/from other applications implementing this open standard. This has many advantages over the currently existing but very broken Python adapter based OTIO integration.

Export features:

• Export a timeline with multiple tracks and clips. (working)
• Support for markers and guides. (working)
• Support for transitions. (not started)

Import features:

• Import a timeline with multiple tracks and clips. (working)
• Support for markers and guides. (working)
• Support for transitions. (not started)

What’s next

During our sprint in Germany, we also updated our roadmap so that it better reflects the current status of our development and goals. We have something big planned for this year so stay tuned.

On behalf of the team, we would like to thank you all for your support that helps make Kdenlive better every day!

Jasem Mutlaq

• Added dome slit visualization on sky map. Specify the Dome Measurement parameters in the INDI Dome driver to see a live dome slit overlay in the Sky Map.

• Implemented generic DBus methods for KStars options
• Added SchedulerSleeping event
• Added mutex protection for multi-threaded resources
• Enhanced scheduler loading and settings management
• Improved filter manager operations
• Fixed video subframing. Up to 50x improvement in subframed video feeds.
• Fixed multiple profile editor issues
• Added VSCode development setup support

Hy Murveit

• Fixed DMS delta angle calculation
• Added mandatory settle to PAA
• Improved imaging planner stability

• Fixed pierside placeholder directory usage
• Added START_AT scheduler test
• Fixed Abell planetary nebula lookup
• Enhanced PAA adjustment estimation

Wolfgang Reissenberger

• Implemented video sequence capture. Preliminary support for capturing Video files as regular sequences in the Capture module. Great news for EAA.

• Fixed focus options
• Improved remote directory handling
• Fixed flats with wall position
• Enhanced filter wheel integration

John Evans

• Enabled focuser controls when camera disconnected
• Improved focus measure framing
• Fixed focus advisor code warnings
• Updated aberration inspector functionality

Toni Schriber

• Fixed overshooting cosine in CachingDms calculation
• Implemented calibration reuse after rotation. Guide calibration data can now be re-used between sessions after rotation.

Ben Cooksley

• Removed CMake trace/debug logs from CI runs

György Balló

• Set window icon

Oliver Kellogg

• Fixed typo in FITS Viewer configuration

Akarsh Simha

• Fixed right-click popup menu on deep stars

Technical Highlights

• Improved capture sequence stability: Set 5-minute timeout for transient operations (dome motion, mount parking/unparking, dust cap operations, focusing, filter wheel changes) to prevent indefinite sequence stalling.
• Improved mount rotation processing
• Enhanced scheduler loading mechanism
• Added mutex protection for multi-threaded resources
• Improved capture operation timeout handling

FreeBSD ports update today:

delete mode 100644 x11/plasma5-plasma/
create mode 100644 x11/plasma6-plasma/

This is work landed by Tobias, with Max, Kenneth, Jason and Gleb doing a lot of heavy lifting in this update. I sat on the sidelines, but I’m here to congratulate the active part of the KDE FreeBSD team with an update long foreseen, long foretold, and long desired.