Kaidan 0.12.0 looks and behaves better than ever before!
Chats can now quickly be pinned and moved.
In addition, the list of group chat participants to mention them is placed above the cursor if enough space is available.
With this release, OMEMO can be used right after migrating an account and migrated contacts are correctly verified.
My home contains multiple FreeBSD machines – laptops, desktops, single-board-computers –
which can benefit from sharing storage. In particular, I really only need one copy
of the FreeBSD source tree (plus some work-trees for different branches) and
one copy of the ports tree and distfiles. This blog post is my notes on
setting that up.
These notes are for my home infrastructure, where I trust the machines
that are plugged into the wired network, simply because I can see the switch
from my desk and know where all the wires go. I’m not taking notes for security.
All of these notes build on the FreeBSD Handbook chapters on ZFS
and Network Servers.
Server Side NFS Setup
Configure the server for NFS with sysrc rpcbind_enable=YES nfs_server_enable=YES mountd_enable=YES and then start NFS services service nfsd start . This enables NFS services also after a reboot.
To turn them off again, use sysrc and swap NO for YES.
Client Side NFS Setup
Enable NFS client with sysrc nfs_client_enable=YES and then start NFS services with service nfsclient start .
This enables NFS services also after a reboot.
To turn them off again, use sysrc and swap NO for YES.
Per-Filesystem Setup
For each filesystem that needs to be shared, go through these steps.
It is easiest to do this with one filesystem per mountpoint (mountpoint on
the client side, so possibly /usr/ports, /usr/src and /usr/obj which
want three filesystems on the server side’ however, this does not work well
with git work-trees).
Filling the filesystems that need sharing is outside of the scope of these notes, but
The ports tree lives in git and can be anonymously cloned. There is a nice guide (PDF) as well.
The source tree contains the whole operating system, lives in git and can be anonymously cloned.
Server Side
Create a ZFS filesystem, say zdata/export/ports. It doesn’t really matter where it is mounted.
Turn on NFS sharing on this ZFS filesystem (this step might be redundant), zfs set sharenfs=on zdata/export/ports .
Set options for NFS sharing with no attention to security at all, zfs set sharenfs="-network=192.168.56.0/24 -maproot=root" zdata/export/ports .
Don’t bother with /etc/exports, since we’re using ZFS. Turn on sharing for the filesystem with zfs share zdata/export/ports .
Client Side
Just mount the remote filesystem (read-only here) with mount -o ro 192.168.56.1:zdata/export/ports /usr/ports .
When troubleshooting (permission denied), check the IP address of the client is in the network specified by the NFS share on the server.
Mounting a subdirectory of an export isn’t possible.
In that case, mount the exported filesystem somewhere temporary (e.g. /mnt/export)
and then use mount -t nullfs -o ro /mnt/export/subdir /some/path .
System Updates Over NFS
For me the main reason to set this up is that I can git clone src,
build the FreeBSD operating system once, and then share the build results across
multiple machines by mounting /usr/src and /usr/obj from the machine that
did the build. It saves considerable compile time, even if the resulting
installation over the network is a lot slower than from a local md(8) to
an NVMe drive.
One minor gotcha is that make installkernel complains a lot about read-only filesystems.
But that’s only a complaint, and everything installs normally.
Subsequent mergemaster is normal and make installworld complains in the same way.
The developer teams continued to improve the Qt6 port of Krita. Dmitry fixed the HDR support on Windows (Dmitry Kazakov, link). Freya fixed an OpenGL crash on macOS (Freya Lupen, link).
Carl Schwan reduced the memory usage of various Akonadi resources by around 75% each. The optimized resources, which take advantage of this new API, are the following: Birthday, VCard files and directories, Ical, Mbox, Open-Xchange, cardDAV and calDAV. There is already significant progress done in that direction also for the IMAP and POP3 resources. The technical background behind this is that these resources running as independent processes are now using non-visual QCoreApplication instead of the more powerful QApplication, which is more appropriate resource wise for background services. This is part of the Don't depend on QtWidgets in lower parts of the stack milestones. (Carl Schwan, 25.08.0. Link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5, link 6, link 7, link 8, link 9, link 10, link 11, ...)
Daniel made a change to ensure that operations in Akonadi that operate on a large number of items are processed as multiple smaller batches which the SQL engine can then handle (Daniel Vratil, 25.08.0. Link).
Merkuro Calendar Manage your tasks and events with speed and ease
Tobias ported Merkuro Calendar to the new QML declaration which slightly improves the performance but more importantly enables us to take advantage of the QML tooling (Tobias Fella, 25.04.0. Link).
Carl made the region used to display holidays configurable. You can also select more than one region now (Carl Schwan, 25.04.0. Link)
Kleopatra Certificate manager and cryptography app
Tobias moved the notepad feature to a separate window, which means it's now possible to have multiple notepads open at the same time (Tobias Fella, 25.08.0. Link).
Tobias also ensured the GPG password prompt (pinentry) in Kleopatra is properly parented to the correct parent window on Wayland (Tobias Fella, 25.04.0. Link). Other apps using GPG were also fixed.
KOrganizer KOrganizer is a calendar and scheduling application
Allen made a series of small improvements and bugfixes to Korganizer. He improved the configure view menu action description (link), added more information to the delete folder dialog (link), and added a search option to consider the current view filters. (Link).
The digiKam team released version 8.6.0. of the powerful photo classifying and editing tool. Among many other things, digiKam now comes with a smarter face management tool, an improved auto-tagging system that identifies elements in your images, fully automatic red-eye removal, and a new image quality feature that classifies images according to their aesthetic quality. The digiKam developers also fixed 140 bugs.
Volker improved the history of past searches in KTrip by reusing some code from Itinerary. The biggest improvements are that the list is now de-duplicated, and the model supports more features not yet exposed to the UI. (Volker Kruase, 25.08.0. Link)
For a complete overview of what's going on, visit KDE's Planet, where you can find all KDE news unfiltered directly from our contributors.
Get Involved
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.
A Glyph Palette has been added to Text Tool Options, which allows selecting glyph alternates as well as showing a font character map (MR!2080). The Text Properties Docker now shows CSS Font Variants glyph properties (MR!2325) and OpenType features property (MR!2343).
Qt6 Port Progress
Krita now has Qt6 CI builds for Linux, Windows (MR!2328), and macOS (MR!2334). Android has yet to be built, as the platform has more complications and fewer developers working on it.
Most of Krita's custom Qt patches have now been ported by Dmitry, and ANGLE and HDR support are revived on Windows (deps commit).
For the March Art Challenge, @Elixiah has chosen "Virtual Plein Air Painting" using MapCrunch or Google Maps street view, as the theme. The optional challenge is doing paired entries; one urban, one rural. See the full brief for more details, and see the sights without stepping outside your door.
Featured Artwork
Best of Krita-Artists - January/February 2025
Nine images were submitted to the Best of Krita-Artists Nominations thread, which was open from January 14th to February 11th. When the poll closed on February 14th, these five wonderful works made their way onto the Krita-Artists featured artwork banner:
Krita is Free and Open Source Software developed by an international team of sponsored developers and volunteer contributors.
Visit Krita's funding page to see how user donations keep development going, and explore a one-time or monthly contribution. Or check out more ways to Get Involved, from testing, coding, translating, and documentation writing, to just sharing your artwork made with Krita.
Other Notable Changes
Other notable changes in Krita's development builds from Feb. 12 - Mar. 17, 2025, that were not covered by the Development Report.
Stable branch (5.2.10-prealpha):
Resources: Correctly load UTF-8 .pat pattern names. (bug report) (Change, by Nicholas LaPointe)
Unstable branch (5.3.0-prealpha):
Bug fixes:
Animation: Fix crash on closing secondary animated document during playback. (bug report) (Change, by Emmet O'Neill)
General: Fix menubar disappearing after toggling system global menubar feature. (Change, by Carl Schwan)
Features:
Freehand Brush Tool: Add Brush Smoothing options to adjust the smoothing based on brushstroke speed. (Change, by killy |0veufOrever)
Preferences: Add a global pen tilt direction offset in Tablet settings. This can be used to make tilt brushes work similarly for left- and right-handed users, or behave better without tilt support. (Change, by Maciej Jesionowski)
Scripting: Add Canvas.setPreferredCenter() and Canvas.pan() for panning the canvas. (Change, by Dov Grobgeld)
Python Plugins: Add Mutator plugin. This consists of an action to randomly modify brush preset settings such as color and size, and a docker to customize these mutations. (Change, by Emmet O'Neill)
I just got myself a brand new car: an ID.Buzz with seven seats so that I can fit the whole family at once. I’m very happy with the car this far, but since it has connectivity, I want to see if I can integrate it into HomeAssistant.
Having played with the software for a bit (and reported a bug that Till fixed asap – I’m impressed!) I decided to setup the whole thing on my little RaspberryPi that runs a few little services I use around the house.
Preparing this, I setup a new user and installed the software in a Python virtual environment:
sudo adduser carconnectivity
sudo su carconnectivity
cd
mkdir carconnectivity
cd carconnectivity/
python -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install carconnectivity-connector-volkswagen==0.5a1 carconnectivity-plugin-mqtt carconnectivity-plugin-mqtt_homeassistant
vim carconnectivity.json
Using the vim command, I created the CarConnectivity configuration file. Update usernames, passwords and IPs to your needs. I will experiment with the interval parameter, as I don’t want to discharge the 12v battery by querying the car too much.
Having configured the service (and having run it manually to fix my mistakes) I created the carconnectivity.service systemd service shown below (in /etc/systemd/system):
Friendly country, Friendly people, Reunions, New Experience, a bit of hustle and that’s LIFE!
So, this was my 4th conference and 3rd international trip! A lot of new experiences and new friends, but let’s talk about FOSSASIA Summit 2025 first.
FOSSASIA Summit 2025
This is the first conference where I was having a lot of different tasks, lightning talk, representing Ubuntu booth and KDE booth. So, a lot of different perspectives will be here. Sometimes I’ll be writing from KDE’s pov, sometimes Ubuntu’s and sometimes my own.
One of the biggest obstacles for users switching to Linux is choosing the right distribution.
With the end of support for Windows 10 on October 14, 2025, many users are looking for alternatives to continue using their devices. This project aims to help users migrate from Windows 10 to GNU/Linux by analyzing their system specifications, asking relevant questions, and recommending a ranked list of distributions with KDE Plasma based on their preferences.
This post will break down how we approached this problem in SoK25, focusing on two core challenges:
Designing a recommendation logic that ranks distributions based on user preferences.
Detecting hardware specifications and integrating them into the ranking logic.
Original Idea
Step 1: Initial Design for the Questionnaire
When we started the project, we considered including a range of distributions and desktop environments. Over the course of SoK, however, we decided to limit the recommendations to distributions offering KDE Plasma. I will first present the original idea.
To keep things simple, we decided to limit the number of questions we would ask Windows users. Instead of overwhelming users with technical details, we settled on a set of key questions. These cover parameters like:
Ease of installation
Support for older hardware
Quality of documentation
Community support
Frequency of updates (Rolling or Point)
Preferred UI style (Windows-like or Mac-like)
Each response contributes to a “parameter” of user preference vector, which helps in matching the needs of user with the best-fitting distributions.
Step 2: Selecting Initial Distributions
We initially started with a limited set of well-known beginner-friendly distributions:
Fedora KDE
Kubuntu
Lubuntu
Linux Mint XFCE
Linux Mint Cinnamon
Revised Idea
Over the course of SoK25 we decided to narrow the scope of the chooser app and rename it Win10-2-KDE-Chooser. After receiving some feedback from the community, we decided it made sense to focus on KDE-only solutions for a Season of KDE project, while others can adapt the idea at a later date. With this new scope, we think the app can be promoted by the KDE community in the context of the ‘End Of 10’ campaign. The new scope includes:
The app will target devices running Windows 10.
The app will recommend distros with KDE Plasma.
The recommended distros for first-time users include Fedora KDE, Kubuntu, and Debian KDE (specifically the live installer, which uses Calamares).
In the rest of this SoK25 post, I will describe the implementation of the original idea in more detail, and this can later be adapted before release. This has been the focus of my work for the first half of SoK25.
Step 3: The Recommendation Logic
The core logic behind ranking distributions is vector-based similarity measurement. Each distribution is represented as a vector, with dimensions corresponding to the parameters defined in our questionnaire.
The approach works as follows:
User Preference Vector: The answers provided by the user form a vector with numerical values assigned to each preference.
Predefined Distribution Vectors: Each distribution has a corresponding vector based on predefined scores.
Similarity Calculation: The similarity between the user vector and each distribution vector is computed using a mathematical function.
TL;DR : We are using dot product and a penalty criteria (multiplying by 0.5) for ranking the distros
Choosing the Right Similarity Function
Initially, we considered cosine similarity, but we found that dot product gave better results.
Cosine Similarity measures how closely two vectors align in terms of direction, but it ignores magnitude.
Dot Product considers both direction and magnitude, making it a better fit since we care about absolute scores.
Example:
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According to dot product:
A>B>C
Dot Product recommends Distro A as the best choice, which makes sense.
But according to cosine similarity:
C>B>A
Distro C appears as the best match because it follows the same ratio (even though its scores are much lower).
Since we care about absolute quality in preferred criteria rather than just proportional similarity, dot product is the better approach.
Here’s how we implemented the ranking in Python:
defrecommend(self):ifnotself.user_vectorornotself.distro_vectors:return"No sufficient data to generate recommendations."scores={}user_vector_np=np.array(self.user_vector)fordistro,vectorinself.distro_vectors.items():distro_vector_np=np.array(vector)score=np.dot(user_vector_np,distro_vector_np)scores[distro]=scoresorted_indices=np.argsort(list(scores.values()))[::-1]ranked_recommendations=[(list(scores.keys())[i],list(scores.values())[i])foriinsorted_indices]returnranked_recommendations
Step 4: Handling Categorical Questions
While numerical parameters like “Ease of Installation” are easy to quantify, categorical preferences (e.g., “Do you prefer a Windows-like UI?”) are more like binary or ternary preferences and are difficult to score.
To handle this, we introduced a penalty mechanism:
If a distribution does not match the user’s categorical preference, a penalty factor (e.g., 0.5) is applied to its score.
This ensures that distributions aligning with strong user preferences are ranked higher.
Here’s the modified code which ranks distros with penalties:
defrecommend(self,penalty_factor=0.5):ifnotself.user_vectorornotself.distro_vectors:return[]# Return an empty list instead of a string
scores={}user_vector_np=np.array(self.user_vector)binary_params={"updates","UI_Look"}fordistro,datainself.distro_vectors.items():distro_vector_np=np.array(data["scores"])final_score=np.dot(user_vector_np,distro_vector_np)forparaminbinary_params:ifparaminself.user_binary_preferencesandparamindata["raw_scores"]:ifself.user_binary_preferences[param]!=data["raw_scores"][param]:final_score*=penalty_factorscores[distro]=final_scorereturnsorted(scores.items(),key=lambdax:x[1],reverse=True)
Conclusion
This ranking system forms the backbone of the chooser app, helping users find the most suitable distribution based on their needs.
While our initial model looks good, we are still refining the parameters (questionnaire), expanding the dataset, and revising the app to fit the new scope
Next steps include:
Enhancing hardware detection to factor in compatibility scores. Given the limited time left in SoK25, I will only focus on Nvidia driver detection.
Improving penalty logic for better handling of categorical preferences.
This project has been an exciting challenge and I’m looking forward to refining it further. Stay tuned for more updates!
Acknowledgement
Thank you to the Season of KDE 2025 admin and mentorship team, in particular flyingcakes an Aakarsh MJ and Joseph, the KDE e.V., and the incredible KDE community for supporting this project.
Please feel free to contact me here: @drowsywings:matrix.org
The FreeBSD Foundation exists to support the
FreeBSD community and the FreeBSD project. Some of its projects are
aimed at improving the experience of FreeBSD on specific hardware.
There is an ongoing, and expanding, laptop experience project.
To expand that project further, the foundation has provided Framework
laptops to a bunch of developers working on the FreeBSD laptop and desktop
experience. I’m one of those developers, and here are some initial notes on the process.
The notes assume experience with FreeBSD.
Some disclaimers up front: the FreeBSD foundation is a lot like KDE e.V.,
which supports the KDE community and project. I wear a board hat for KDE e.V.,
but on the FreeBSD side I’m “just a ports developer”. Of course, the ports
I try to work on are the KDE ones, so there’s a happy synergy here.
An anonymous donor sponsored these machines. While I am part of the
FreeBSD donations@ team, I was not involved in the overall decision-making
around this donation.
The machine I got is a Framework 13 with an AMD 7000 series CPU.
That’s not the very-very latest one, which has a Ryzen 300 series in it,
but it is at least 3 CPU generations newer than any other machine I have.
For me in particular of interest is that it has
the same GPU series, AMD Polaris 12, as my FreeBSD 14-STABLE desktop machine, so I can
share experimentation with graphics drivers between them.
I picked the 2.8K display with rounded corners, because that’s potentially
an interesting edge-case for the KDE Plasma 6 desktop; if there’s any
funny-stuff needed for those corners, then we need to know about it.
Let’s Get Physical
Although it’s completely irrelevant for the long-term use of the laptop,
I’ve got to hand it to the Framework folks: the packaging is really nice.
Recyclable cardboard, well-laid-out, understandable boxes. I don’t often
get a “huh, that’s clever” reaction when unpacking consumer electronics.
There’s a screwdriver included, cunningly hidden beneath
the do-it-yourself-installation memory modules. That’s clever.
When it comes to putting the machine together, the installation guide with videos is both
comprehensive and easy-to-follow. “Put DDR5 SO-DIMM modules in corresponding sockets”
and “insert NVMe into socket” is straightforward, I do that all the time when (re)building desktop machines.
The bezel, on the other hand …
The bezel around the screen is just a thin bit of plastic. I got a red one,
because FreeBSD (there is no KDE Blue option). It is essential to
place it correctly, with all the screen-cables nicely aligned. I did not,
and just clicked the bezel in place, pushed down on it and then closed the laptop,
“per the instructions”. Except the bezel stuck out about 2mm, and on re-opening the
laptop, it just about tore the bezel in half.
After 20 tricky minutes I could get the laptop open again and removed the bezel,
repaired it, and tried again. I don’t really have a suggestion to improve the
bezel installation except “try very carefully to close the laptop a bit, re-open,
close a bit further, re-open, …” until it’s clear that the lid closes properly.
Take some time to (re)route the cables to the screen so that they are as flat
as possible.
Accessories
The little modules for the Framework laptop are pretty nifty. I’m already
thinking I should have gotten an additional USB-C one. I selected one unusual module,
RJ-45 wired ethernet, because my experience with FreeBSD and WiFi is
not a good one. However, that’s what this whole laptop project is for.
The FreeBSD Foundation has already funded work on laptop WiFi,
so it’s probably over-cautiousness on my part.
With all the physical bits in place, the big question…
Will it run Doom?
Framework 13 AMD DIY build with FreeBSD 14.2 boot screen. It sure looks like it could be Doom.
Of course. Don’t be silly.
Will it run FreeBSD?
Yes, but that takes a little bit of effort. Download a FreeBSD 14.2 image
and write it to a USB stick on some other machine. Leave it on your desk for now.
Boot the Framework laptop for the first time and let it do memory training and whatnot.
Do not connect any devices and let it complain that there’s nothing to boot.
Reboot, still with nothing attached, and spam F2 during boot. You have to
do this to get to the EFI shell / system configuration before it tries
to boot anything. Disable secure boot. Linuxes have a signed GRUB shim
nowadays, or other bits and pieces so they work with secure boot.
FreeBSD 14.2 does not, yet.
Now insert the USB stick, reboot, and go through the installer process.
It’s a text installer (still, as I still haven’t built FreeBSD support in Calamares)
and gets you to a working system in about 5 minutes. Having the wired ethernet
helps avoid any trouble here.
Reboot after installation and you can get a text console. All that
technology for a late-80s user experience.
Will it run X11?
Yes, but the 14.2-RELEASE Errata point
out that DRM kernel modules do not work if you grab the pre-built ones.
This was true on March 12th 2025, so:
Run pkg to install the package manager (initially it is a stub)
Run pkg install git to install git (this pulls in a surprising amount of other stuff)
Get the system sources (with git)
Rebuild the world and install it
Get the ports tree (with git)
Build graphics/drm-61-kmod from ports (just make ; make install, and the port itself is a real quick build)
Build graphics/gpu-firmware-amd-kmod from ports, remember FLAVOR=polaris12 for the GPU in this laptop (otherwise the default flavor is built)
After that, enable the amdgpu module in rc.conf, or load it by hand.
Any old X11 stuff will do, but I suggest installing x11/kde and x11/sddm.
Will it run KDE Plasma 6 Wayland?
Hahaha. No. But yes.
KDE Plasma 6 on Wayland in general works. But on this specific machine,
with this specific grapics card, Plasma starts, all the processes
of a KDE Plasma desktop are running, and the screen displays a single
white text-cursor in the upper-left corner.
It’s not this-specific-machine, either, since I have a desktop
with Intel CPU and an AMD RX550 video card that behaves the same.
Last time I dug into KWin internals in an attempt to figure this out
I ended up with “some part of the OpenGL stack is lying” and then
gave up. Now with a fresh laptop that just cries out for a modern
desktop, I’m going to try again.
After four months of active maintenance and many weeks triaging bugs, the digiKam team is proud to present version 8.6.0 of its open source digital photo manager.
The digiKam team has continued to work on a better Artificial Intelligence integration in digiKam, and many parts have been improved with the 8.6.0 release.
This is a recipe post. I loathe and despise recipe sites, but this is one I regularly need
to look up. In Canadian measures, which is what I still do my baking in even after 30 years in Europe.
Mix well and let stand while collecting the rest:
1½ cups rye bran
1 c. milk
½ tsp. salt
Ready:
⅓ c. oil
1 egg
Ready:
⅔ c. brown sugar
1 c. flour
2 tsp. baking powder
½ c. raisins
Mix the wets. Stir in the drys. Fill muffin pan. Bake 25 minutes at 180℃. Makes 11 muffins
because my muffin pan has one broken cup. Uses rye bran because the local windmill has
that “left over” as animal feed after milling rye – apparently very few people in
the Netherlands use bran anyway, and rye bran even less so. Instead of flour and
baking powder use zelfrijzend bakmeel.
Edit: reduce sugar to ½ cup and add 1 tbsp. of molasses to improve flavor and color and reduce sweetness.
[ade]
#this-week-kde-apps:kde.org
soumyatheman
GSoC
Friendly country, Friendly people, Reunions, New Experience, a bit of hustle and that’s LIFE!
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