We got together with the PenPot team’s leader, Pablo Ruiz, to discuss our updates and changes to migrate to PenPot from Figma.
One are of focus for this discussion was in the “sharing” aspect of the libraries built in PenPot. We have use cases where developers and designers need to interact with the graphical assets in a way that makes sense to each group.
We talked about working together in building a sharing model that helps both groups. We are hoping we can have things like:
Selective library sharing
Automatic library publication (Without the need for a library export)
Automatic library updating
Easy code and graphical contributions, where users can have a copy of the library in their own PenPot instance and submit changes or updates to the original library.
Easier library management.
Current issues
We also received updates on the latest changes PenPot is doing around their Web Assembly + Skia library work. They hope to have a working beta version for the KDE team, and others, to test in 2-3 weeks. The team is still deciding how to propose this beta.
Ticket Review
The team also provided a graphical update on tickets we have submitted. Some are more important than others but still, these tickets are on their radar and they are processing them.
Plasma Settings gained the ability to show all settings modules (for all platforms, such as desktop) under a toggle. It now supports the ability to show an "Apply" button for settings modules that do not want settings to save automatically. The header being misaligned on category pages is now fixed.
This post is about how we met KITE‘s team and visited some schools during our family visit trip in Kerala. For those who don’t know, KITE stands for “Kerala Infrastructure and Technology for Education”; they are in charge among other things of the GNU/Linux distribution for Kerala schools and training teachers to use it. GCompris is used a lot there, as it is the main software used in their ICT curriculum textbooks for classes I to IV. The widespread and official use of Free Software in Kerala schools really is an awesome model.
Some names from left to right: 1st is Abdul Hakeem, 3rd is my wife Aiswarya, 4th is Anvar Sadath K., 5th is me.
The connection with KITE happened thanks to Aiswarya’s sister’s husband, Karunraj K. He recently got hired by KITE, so even before going we knew we would try to meet some of their team. During some discussions with him, I understood they did some small customization to their GCompris package to fit their specific needs, but most importantly they added translations and voices for Tamil and Kannada languages. They need those with Malayalam and English as the Kerala state shares borders with Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, so they have many pupils in border areas speaking those languages. Of course my first reaction was to look for their sources to upstream those translations and voice files missing from our GCompris package. Sadly, after searching through their distribution and online, the sources were nowhere to be found, the only way to get them was to ask for it. This was one more motivation to get in touch with their team.
From right to left: Karunraj, Aiswarya, me, Surendran, and two other KITE team members in Kannur
Karunraj invited us to visit KITE’s office of Kannur district, where we were warmly greeted by the local team. We met Surendran Aduthila (head of the local team), with whom we could start discussing several topics, including how to get their translation files. He made some calls to investigate the issue, and soon enough we got in contact with KITE’s CEO Anvar Sadath who invited us for a meeting at KITE’s headquarters in Trivandrum a few days later.
Everyone is listening…
For this meeting, they also invited several team members from various districts involved in their GNU/Linux distribution and software development projects. First, I explained how important it is to publish their sources, especially for customized Free Software packages, ideally using both some public git repositories and the standard way to publish source packages for debian-based distributions. Using public git repositories could also help them to organize their work, and allow some external contributions. It seems they understood it clearly, and decided to follow this path.
I showed them for reference the French education forge portal, which includes a dedicated gitlab instance for teachers to host and share their projects (mostly software and tutorials), and a dedicated instance of matrix chat server for internal communications. They looked very interested, and discussed about how they could do something similar and reuse some of the educational content available from this forge. I also showed them the work from Primtux, the French GNU/Linux distribution for primary schools, which has a lot in common with their own distribution.
We discussed about how we could collaborate, like how it would be better for their translation team to work directly with us, or how we could develop some new activities together. We also discussed especially about how GCompris is used for children with special needs, and how the coming “GCompris-teachers” (a new side application we are working on, allowing teachers to create customized datasets and analyze pupils results) could be useful for this use case. And I spent some time with the head of their GNU/Linux distribution project, Abdul Hakeem, giving various tips, especially to improve their customized packaging of GCompris. And of course I could get those wanted translation and voice files from his computer, with all the necessary info to add them to our repositories
Discussions…
Also, I gave them some tips about how to turn some of their in-house software into proper Free Software projects, as it is something they were interested to do but were missing some insights about how to proceed.
Finally, Aiswarya shared her experience with Kerala’s Free Software based education and how it helped her to build her career. Also, she helped me a lot during the meeting when translating some things to and from Malayalam was needed.
Globally it was a very tight-scheduled session, but I think we could cover all the most important topics. I’m very happy of this meeting, and looking forward to future collaborations.
It was covered by the press, and an article was published in The Hindu newspaper the next day (original article behind a paywall).
Article in The Hindu newspaper
Two days later, I was invited to Kannur district’s “IT MELA” (IT Fair), a yearly school event with some competitions on IT topics. On this day was the digital painting contest, which I was very interested to attend: pupils had one hour to paint an image on a given subject, using either Krita or GIMP and a mouse(!). Digital painting without a graphic tablet is super difficult, so I was very impressed to see what those pupils could achieve this way. There was also a Malayalam typing contest (using a special in-house software to track typing), and a web design contest. Again I was super impressed to see what some pupils could produce in one hour with pure HTML+CSS (no frameworks allowed).
A laptop used for the digital painting contest, with the event’s wallpaper
This time again my visit was covered by the press, and the next day almost all local Malayalam newspapers had an article about it.
A Malayalam newspaperAnother Malayalam newspaper
Finally, I had the chance to visit Kuttiattoor’s primary school where I made a little speech to pupils about the importance of Free Software in education. The teachers showed me the ICT “PLAYBOX” textbooks, and gave me an English hard copy of the book for class I.
The ICT textbook for class I (1st Standard)
I’d like to thank again all those who were involved in the meeting organization, the IT MELA visit and the school visit. And thanks a lot to our family in India for the support!
I finally have a good desktop computer for streaming, and I have been testing streaming KDE documentation work on Twitch (with occasional Silksong speedrunning) while using a bunny avatar.
It's time to announce it: I now stream mondays to fridays at 8 PM UTC (5 PM UTC-3 / Brasilia time) on twitch.tv/herzenschein. Come and say hi, ask about KDE stuff there!
Today I'm going to teach you how to make a fully working 3D VTubing setup on Fedora KDE 42. Realistically, this guide applies to any modern Fedora, really.
Things you'll need:
A computer with a GPU that can handle 3D models
A webcam
A VRM avatar
SnekStudio or VSeeFace
OBS Studio
Codecs
rpmfusion (for OBS virtual camera)
Things you'll achieve:
Streaming to OwnCast/YouTube/Twitch
Optional: stream to all the above at the same time
After posting this blog post I was made aware of SnekStudio which runs natively on Linux.
Originally, I was going to just do an honorary mention of the project.
However, I did some battle testing and I've determined that SnekStudio is good enough to replace my previous VSeeFace instructions, but I'll keep the original instructions here for those who may happen to not have a good experience with SnekStudio for whatever reason (with VSeeFace, my model moved smoother for example).
Aside from the not-so-smooth movements, the only problems I had were actually preexisting issues in my model: twitchy hair and blinking issues when using wide eye mode. I didn't really get any noteworthy issues with SnekStudio despite the fact that it's alpha. It's pretty good.
VTubing means "virtual YouTubing", and a VTuber is a "virtual YouTuber", where you use a digital avatar as your online persona while making videos or streaming. There's three types of avatars you can use: static PNGs, 2D rigged, and 3D rigged avatars.
Digital 3D avatars are usually in VRM format. That's what I use.
PNGTubers actually use just still PNG images you can switch on the fly while streaming. 2D avatars usually come in Live2D format. I won't talk about them here, but I know of two VTubers in the Linux space who use a 2D avatar:
The place where I got my current VRM avatar was on Gumroad, namely Rabbit by vr-zab, although there are many other stores you can use to find one, like Etsy or VRoid Hub. Oftentimes you can also find VRM avatars as a bonus for Resonite / VRChat avatars and assets.
Once you have a VRM avatar, if you want to make it more "you", you can pay an artist to retexture your model (not too expensive) or to use it as a base for direct model modifications / rigging (expensive). A similar thing applies to Resonite / VRChat models, actually.
VRM avatars can contain metadata detailing the terms of use the author expects you to follow; a fairly common practice is for the model to not allow usage for commercial purposes for example.
You can stream in two ways:
Directly from something like OBS Studio to some platform like YouTube or Twitch by using the RTMPS protocol
By replacing your webcam output with a virtual camera
If you've just installed Fedora, the first thing you should always do is update your system:
sudo dnf update
This is non-obvious, but the first update always triggers DNF to install the necessary free codecs. The free codecs are actually sufficient for streaming and work well, so you can just install obs-studio and skip rpmfusion if you want:
sudo dnf install obs-studio
However, if you plan on using the OBS virtual camera, you will need the v4l2loopback kernel module which is only available in rpmfusion.
Upon installing and running SnekStudio, you will need to do a few things:
Click on Modules -> Mod list... -> MediaPipe Controller to select your webcam
In Eye Adjustments, enable Link eyes blinking
In Poselk, set Chest Yaw Rotation Scale to either -0.3 or 0.3, whichever you prefer
This makes looking sideways more natural as the chest moves towards or against the blick gaze!
In BlendShapeScalingAndOffset you'll find all of the settings for modifying your character model (depends on what the model creator made available)
The model shapes available will be shown in MediaPipe, the facial expressions in VRM
You'll most likely want to alter the second slider of each shape, namely the offset
You'll then want to use the third slider of each shape, the smoothing, which changes the transition animation between movements (you probably want it all the way to the max)
Lastly, you'll want to play with the lighting in SceneBasic, specifically Ambient Light Energy and Directional Light Energy
Directional Light Pitch and Directional Light Yaw let you control where the lighting comes from
There's also a few useful controls you'll want to get used to:
Whenever you open a dialog inside the program, by clicking the upper right p you'll pop it out into a separate window
Use middle click drag or right click drag to rotate around the scene / your character
Use Shift + Middle click drag or Right click drag to move your "in-camera" position
Lastly, you can go to Settings -> Window and enable Transparent background.
Now, KDE Plasma (the default desktop environment on Fedora KDE) has a nice feature we can use for convenient window placement: tiling.
You can toggle the tile editor with Windows key (otherwise known as Meta or Super) + T. If you've never played with this feature before, you will probably have a default tiling with a lean left tile, a large center tile, and a lean right tile.
On your adjacent monitor, expand the left tile a bit and delete the right tile.
If you don't have an adjacent monitor where to hide your SnekStudio and OBS windows from stream, that's fine. You can use a virtual desktop for this later.
Now, drag the SnekStudio window to the place where the left tile would be while also holding Shift. The SnekStudio window will have resized to that space and will always have the same window geometry when you move the window there. You can then click the weird X button to hide the UI and then hide the button with Space.
The SnekStudio setup is now complete.
Open OBS Studio, click on the plus ➕ button and select Screen Capture (Pipewire). Create a new screen capture and in the Screen Sharing: Choose what to share with OBS Studio window, select the Windows tab and find the SnekStudio window.
Right click your screen capture source and select Transform -> Edit Transform (or press Ctrl+E). You can then use the Crop left/right/top/bottom spinboxes to cut the window borders from your screen capture. The titlebar usually takes around 40 px to be removed, the left border around 6 px.
You might want to readjust your character in SnekStudio while in this mode.
If you're using an ultra wide monitor, use your ultra wide Base (Canvas) Resolution output resolution. While 16:9 is a more standard and accessible resolution for streaming, the recommendation you find online (using the Scaling/Aspect Ratio filter) is for the most part outdated; platforms like Twitch do letterboxing (add black bars below and above the screen) on the ultra wide output so it looks ok on 16:9 screens.
Lastly, move the OBS window to the large right tile using Shift, as before.
By default, SnekStudio does lip sync using your webcam. While that may suffice for you, it can often malfunction and cause your avatar's mouth and jaw to open excessively or not at all, especially if you are under bad lighting conditions or have a bad webcam.
To address this, use microphone lip sync instead. This is currently only available as an experimental feature, which means you will need to install the SnekStudio nightly instead of the stable release.
Then, in SnekStudio, go to Modules -> Mod list... and click the Add button at the bottom of the dialog. Add the LipSync module and, with it selected, click the arrow buttons to move it to after SceneBasic and before AnimationApplier.
By default the lip sync will use every sound that comes out of your microphone that sounds voice-like, which will be a lot, so your avatar will look like it's talking on its own! To get more accurate lip sync, you will need noise reduction so that only your voice is detected. And you need that for SnekStudio, so you can't set this in OBS.
You can easily do that by installing EasyEffects from Flathub:
flatpak install com.github.wwmm.easyeffects
In EasyEffects, click on Input at the top of the window, Effects at the bottom of the window, and then on Add Effect at the left of the window.
Select Noise Reduction. Voilà! It should apply immediately. You can then go to the application's Preferences and set it to Autostart on login.
You can skip this if you're using SnekStudio! If you really want VSeeFace, click this text.Enable the Flathub flatpak repository if you haven't already:
You can use F3 for split view or Ctrl+T for a new tab in Dolphin to make it easier to move files around.
Now you get back to Bottles, open the Bottle you made, click on Add Shortcuts... and select drive_c/Program Files/VSeeFace/VSeeFace.exe in there.
After that, you should see a play button ▶️ to the right. Upon clicking it, VSeeFace should show up! Just select the right webcam to get started, you can use the default VRM avatar for testing.
Back to Bottles real quick, you can click the hamburger menu (three dots) next to the play button ▶️ and click on "Add Desktop Entry". You'll get an entry in your menu for running VSeeFace directly, very handy.
You can skip this if you're using SnekStudio! If you really want VSeeFace, click this text.I have a few recommendations for your VSeeFace settings:
Use Reset position after positioning yourself mostly neutral to the webcam with the mouth slightly open, lip detection works better this way
Enable Mirror motion
Keep Movement Smoothing and Movement Range at 0.30
If your VRM avatar came with faulty eye tracking, enable Auto blink
Set Default Camera Position to Custom, choose a desirable angle for your character, then save
There's also a few useful controls you'll want to get used to:
You can rotate your character with Alt + left mouse drag
You can zoom in/out with Alt + right mouse drag
You can move the character around with Alt + middle mouse drag
You can control the lighting with Ctrl + left mouse drag
up moves the light source to above and/or behind the character
down moves the light source to below and/or the front of the character
left/right rotates relative to the up/down axis
I recommend putting the light source to the front and to the right of the character (your left), as this works well when in the bottom left corner of the screen while streaming
You can hide the interface with the weird X button on the bottom right
You can then hide the weird X button by pressing Space
Remember to save your camera position. The other settings should be saved upon close.
Now, KDE Plasma (the default desktop environment on Fedora KDE) has a nice feature we can use for convenient window placement: tiling.
You can toggle the tile editor with Windows key (otherwise known as Meta or Super) + T. If you've never played with this feature before, you will probably have a default tiling with a lean left tile, a large center tile, and a lean right tile.
On your adjacent monitor, expand the left tile a bit and delete the right tile.
If you don't have an adjacent monitor where to hide your VSeeFace and OBS windows from stream, that's fine. You can use a virtual desktop for this later.
Now, drag the VSeeFace window to the place where the left tile would be while also holding Shift. The VSeeFace window will have resized to that space and will always have the same window geometry when you move the window there. You can then click the weird X button to hide the UI and then hide the button with Space.
The VSeeFace setup is now complete.
Open OBS Studio, click on the plus ➕ button and select Screen Capture (Pipewire). Create a new screen capture and in the Screen Sharing: Choose what to share with OBS Studio window, select the Windows tab and find the VSeeFace window. Simple enough. You should see your VSeeFace avatar with a horrid gray background.
Left click on the screen capture Source you just created and then on Filters. Click on the plus ➕ button, add Color Key, then use Select Color -> Pick Screen Color to select the gray color from VSeeFace. Done! You should see a transparent background behind your character.
If your monitor is HDR capable, it will probably not work, though. That's a known and expected issue in OBS. You'll need to add another filter called Apply LUT and tick Passthrough Alpha to get it to work.
Now, if for some reason you prefer to capture the actual monitor output instead of the individual window, or if you can see your window borders, right click your screen capture source and select Transform -> Edit Transform (or press Ctrl+E). You can then use the Crop left/right/top/bottom spinboxes to cut the window borders from your screen capture. The titlebar usually takes around 40 px to be removed, the left border around 6 px.
You might want to readjust your character in VSeeFace while in this mode.
If you're using an ultra wide monitor, use your ultra wide Base (Canvas) Resolution output resolution. While 16:9 is a more standard and accessible resolution for streaming, the recommendation you find online (using the Scaling/Aspect Ratio filter) is for the most part outdated; platforms like Twitch do letterboxing (add black bars below and above the screen) on the ultra wide output so it looks ok on 16:9 screens.
Lastly, move the OBS window to the large right tile using Shift, as before.
On your streaming service of preference you should see a stream settings page of sort. For example, on Twitch, you navigate to Settings -> Stream, while on YouTube you navigate to ➕ Create -> Livestreaming -> Stream Settings. There, you need to copy your private Stream Key.
If you heavily dislike relying on a third party, properietary service for this, you can use Owncast, a FOSS, selfhosted, federated, single user Twitch-like streaming platform. I have an extremely easy way to set it up on port 8080 as a Podman Quadlet container, and you can use your own Owncast instance on your own computer to test drive your own stream, privately and securely.
Go to the OBS Settings -> Stream -> Service, select the service, then paste the copied key. Make sure to always keep it hidden.
Clicking on Start Streaming should, unimpressively, start streaming to the platform!
Connecting to everything at the same time via RTMPS🔗
There is an interesting plugin for OBS called obs-multi-rtmp whose purpose is to allow you to stream to multiple platforms at the same time, so you can stream to Owncast, YouTube, Twitch with the same OBS stream (if your hardware is capable and you have the bandwidth).
If you experience any issues, feel free to report them on Codeberg herz-rpms.
If instead you'd like to build it manually and ensure things are done the way you want, you may click on the next collapsible:
You can skip this if you're using my self-packaged Fedora package! If you really want to build it manually, click this text.Unfortunately the process is convoluted to do as you'll need to compile the plugin using the instructions mentioned in one of the Github issues for the project.
The plugin files will be installed to an obs-plugin-here/ directory right in the source directory for convenience. But it does not have a directory structure that OBS Studio uses for its plugins, so we need to move files around.
Create the directory structure necessary for the plugin:
Finally, open OBS Studio, click on Docks -> Multiple Output, then attach it to whatever region of OBS Studio you prefer.
Note that you will need to add the correct RTMPS server for services like YouTube and Twitch. This is ordinarily handled by OBS, but the plugin doesn't have access to the list of servers that OBS has.
Fret not, because the list of streaming servers that OBS has are actually listed directly in the source code. Just find the best one for you and manually add new streaming targets to your Multiple Output plugin.
A virtual camera can be useful to stream to absolutely any webcam-using service or platform using your digital avatar. This includes things like Jitsi, Slack, BigBlueButton, and Discord. Anything that can use your webcam, really. You can be a cute bunny instead of a cute human with your friend, or you may just be really privacy conscious.
To use the virtual camera, as mentioned before, you'll need to install v4l2loopback which is only available in rpmfusion, so if you haven't skipped anything in Setting the system up, including rebooting after installing it, you should have the Start Virtual Camera button in your OBS.
Thankfully, there's a simple workaround: go to about:config, set media.webrtc.camera.allow-pipewire to false (both instances of the config), then restart pipewire and wireplumber as per the blog post:
systemctl restart --user pipewire wireplumber
Make sure to restart Firefox and OBS after that.
I made a bug report about this recently, but I had already been somewhat in contact with the Fedora Firefox maintainer for a while about this and I've been helping investigate to my limited capacity. Eventually we should see this fixed upstream and no modification should be required in Firefox in the future.
I had to figure out many pieces to get this working. Some things were not obvious at all, some things were much more complicated even months ago:
There are two main ways to install software with Bottles; either running the installer, or by having the files inside the prefix (the case here)
What was silently causing Firefox to not see the virtual camera
The OBS Studio plugin directory structure
The build failures that obs-multi-rtmp would get unless you used the CI preset
I originally used the OpenSeeFace script to make VSeeFace use face tracking until I figured things out with VSeeFace
The fact that VSeeFace only supports VRM0 instead of VRM1, so editing VRM models with Blender doesn't quite work even with the correct plugins
The rabbit hole I went down to edit my own VRM file (not mentioned here), not knowing the only functional way is to use a hella old Unity version
Not knowing how camera devices are managed on Linux
The HDR workaround was so cryptic
I had to test Twitch letterboxing myself to even be sure it was a thing to begin with
Among other things. Some of these are not even Linux specific, they're just obscure in general.
All because I wanted to stream as a cute femboy bnnuy online.
Hopefully with my instructions it is now not too painful to set things up, even something complicated like compiling a plugin. This blog post should be generally replicable on other distributions too. It was originally written to celebrate Fedora KDE 42 becoming an official edition alongside GNOME, but alas, I took too long and we're already at Fedora KDE 43.
Maybe we'll see more Linux VTubers now at least? :3c
The next couple paragraphs were the result of a revision.
Only multiple days after I published this blog post did I hear about this one repository containing their own guides on how to run multiple pieces of VTubing software on Linux (mostly on WINE). And then this other website that has more resources as well.
This blog post was specifically designed to give you a very battle tested functional way to do VTubing on Linux, hence why there's only one method highlighted (with an optional secondary method), I'm opinionated.
But it's always worth linking to other people's projects so they're easier to find and support.
Merkuro is a modern groupware solution and uses Akonadi as backend. This year we had two mentees working on Akonadi, and in particular on how the resources and their configuration dialogs interact with Merkuro on mobile.
Pablo Ariño worked on improving the memory usage of the Akonadi agents and resources. He did that by ensuring the configuration dialogs of the agents is moved to a separate plugin which is then loaded on demand by the application, instead of having the agents being GUI processes which handle their configuration dialogs directly.
Shubham Shinde worked on the UI side of things by writing the infrastructure for config dialogs to be written in QML. This is extremely important to get mobile optimized dialogs on mobile and is also a good occasion to clean the dialog code up. All the major code changes can be found on the following merge requests: Akonadi and KDE PIM Runtime.
Kdenlive brings you all you need to edit and put together your own movies. We had 1 project for KDE's full-featured video editor:
Ajay Chauhan improved the supported for timeline markers in Kdenlive. Previously, we only supported single point markers, which can be used to mark a specific point in time. Ajay added support for duration-based markers that define a clear start and end time.
Akki Singh worked on a port of ISO Image Writer from QtWidgets to Kirigami. Akki also added a bunch of features to the app such as allowing you to download ISO images for some of the more popular KDE distributions, or from an URL automatically.
OSS-Fuzz Integration
OSS-Fuzz is a program by Google were our code is fuzzed by them in search for vulnerabilities.
Azhar Momin focused his work on improving the OSS-Fuzz integration in the KDE libraries. Azhar moved our configuration to our repos, making them easier to maintain, and the fuzzer now scans many thumbnails formats (e.g. poppler, syntax highligted text, krita archives, mobipocket and many more). He also fixed some of the bugs detected by the fuzzer like a memory leak in the blender thumbnail extractor.
Derek Lin worked on the new virtual machine manager from KDE named Karton. He implemented, among other things, keyboard input support, basic SPICE viewer (non hardware accelerated) and audio support.
Since the end of GSoC, he has also added hardware acceleration to the playback and you can find more information about that on his blog.
GCompris is KDE's educational suite for children learning at home or school. It comes with around 200 activities to learn while having fun. The next iteration of the suite adds a teacher panel to follow the progress of children and provide customised exercises to focus on specific topics.
Ashutosh Singh worked on adding new dataset editor for an in-progress GCompris admin software for teachers. This feature will allow teachers to send customized exercises to children and Ashutosh has added multiple editors: Learn decimals activities, Graduated lines activities and Fractions activities. These activities have been chosen as they are the ones most used at schools.
The Mankala engine is a project that was started during last year's GSoC. The project is still in review and is pending integration into KDE.
Srisharan V S worked on a cross platform GUI for MankalaEngine. On the desktop, it is possible to play Mankala games against a remote opponent provided both players have XMPP accounts. The GUI uses QXmpp for networking. The GUI works on both desktop and mobile, though network play is not yet available on mobile as support for this needs to be re-enabled in the QXmpp library.
Krita is KDE's free and open source cross-platform application for creating digital art files from scratch.
Ross Rosales worked on improving Krita's usability by adding a UI to display common selection actions after selecting a layer. More details on Ross journey are available on his blog. The feature request was opened in 2022 and will be available in the upcoming 5.3 version of Krita.
Cantor is a powerful mathematical and statistical computing front-end within the KDE ecosystem. Two contributors worked on improving Cantor this year:
ZhengJiahong added features to improve Python support. Once the merge request is finished, users will be able to switch Python virtual environments to improve the user experience.
Lv Haonan worked on integrating KTextEditor in Cantor to replace the custom made spreadsheets. This has several advantages: the current spreadsheets lack some features (auto-indent, code completion, spell checks...), they require extra maintenance from developers where a better solution already exists within KDE, and it will bring consistency between the different backend editors.
KWin is an easy to use, but flexible, window manager and compositor for the KDE Plasma desktop.
It controls how windows are drawn, moved, and displayed, handles input (keyboard, mouse, touch, etc.).
Yelsin 'Yorisoft' Sepulveda worked on adding game controller input support to KWin. By using input libraries like libevdev he was able to add a option in Plasma System Settings that enables awareness of game controllers and detects their input.
This was essential for adding features, such as:
Mapping Game Controller inputs to Keyboard and Mouse
Navigating Plasma Desktop with Game Controllers
Preventing Sleep/Suspend when gaming with controller and leaving keyboard/mouse idle
Next Steps
The 2025 GSoC period is finally over for KDE. A big thank you to all the mentors and contributors who have participated in GSoC! We look forward to your continuing participation in free and open source software communities
and in contributing to KDE.
In this blog post, we’re having a look at how we added support for custom server certificates to Qt WebEngine. This way an application can talk to a server using a self-signed TLS certificate without adding it to the system-wide certificate store.
The $50,000 the Krita Foundation has received has been earmarked for improving Krita on Android. We've already started working on the project, in cooperation with Drawpile.
KWin, our fantastic and flexible window manager and Wayland compositor, can not just drive your session but also run in windowed mode for development purposes:
Et voila, a windowed KWin appears, running KWrite. The separate DBus session is important so it doesn’t mess with your running session, notably trying to take over your global shortcuts.
Speaking of shortcuts: when grabbing the mouse (press right Ctrl), it now blocks the session’s global shortcuts. This makes it behave more like a full “input grab” on X11. As a result, you can now use global shortcuts in your windowed KWin, for instance to more easily trigger the Overview effect (Meta+W), if you want to work on it without affecting your running session.
KWin also includes a debug console that lets you inspect open windows, see input devices and events, the state of the clipboard, load and unload desktop effects, and so on. We particularly moved developer-facing desktop effects (like the “Compositing” indicator or FPS effect that isn’t a benchmark) from System Settings to the debug console. You can access it by typing “kwin” in KRunner and selecting “KWin Debug Console”. Mind that it’s a developer tool, so function definitely outdoes form.
After a recent bug report about a blurry window icon in the Alt+Tab window switcher, I noticed that we didn’t include any information about the window’s icon. It would have been helpful to see the icon name used, if any, and what sizes were available. In fact, there were a couple of window properties using custom types that the debug console didn’t know how to visualize. I therefore added a couple of custom converters to the tree model:
QIcon, (e.g. window icon): Display the icon, its name, and list of available sizes. Generally, for properties of Window type, such as dialog parent (transient parent), also show the window icon
KWin::Output: the name of the output, its geometry, and scale factor
KWin::Tile (quick tile and custom tiles): its geometry, shape (e.g. floating) and/or quick tile mode (e.g. left/right)
KWin::VirtualDesktop: its name
QPalette (e.g. window color scheme): show a 2×2 grid of important theme colors, similar to the application color scheme selector we have in many apps
A lot more value in the debug console window list
With that, the list of windows becomes much more useful and nicer looking. For those who prefer a command-line tool, David Redondo added a little kwindowprop application similar to xwininfo that prints information about a given window.
For a while now, probably two years, I wanted to have support for high-contrast colorschemes in KDE Plasma.
Technically, this was already doable, by just modifying your colorscheme to such colors.
However one thing was lacking: Outlines were calculated automagically with hardcoded value.
Well, no more! Now you can set your own frame contrast value!
And you may ask "Why not change the color completely?" which is a good question and
I will answer that later.
This feature will be in Plasma 6.6. Hopefully. Or if you use KDE Linux you can
already try it out. :)
This setting used to be a slider.. And guess what, it did nothing in Breeze style.
It was leftover from Oxygen times. Do not worry though if you use Oxygen style, the
slider value is just percentage now and it will be converted to the value Oxygen uses.
Currently across all of our apps and styles, we do the following:
Take background color and foreground color
Mix them with previously hardcoded frameContrast value, which was 0.2
Use that as the color for all the frames
If we wanted this to be recolorable completely, we would have to go through every single occurence
of this color mixing. Most apps luckily rely on the styling, but some may have custom things,
for example custom QtQuick Controls that are doing this manually, using the Kirigami.Theme.frameContrast
value.
I think we most likely would have gotten away with it for most apps, but then rest of them would
look wrong, and some of them may not even be KDE apps but are using Kirigami.. So we would need
to tell everyone to do this update, or risk things look broken.
This was the compromise solution: Allow users to change the Kirigami.Theme.frameContrast value to
whatever they wish, even turn it off. :)
This was a lot of work. In total, it was 8 merge requests
that had to work together and be merged in correct order, etc..
And this is why modifying Breeze in our current stack is so difficult. You have to do many many changes
across the platform.. And make sure that nothing breaks in the process!
First step for me was trying to make this a global configuration value only in ~/.config/kdeglobals,
which every platform would watch for modifications for this particular value.
It worked fine, but it was quite messy, and I had to make sure all the default values across the
stack would be synced. That is annoying for anyone who wants to maybe modify the default value later.
On top of that, I felt like different platforms constantly watching the config file for changes just was
not a good idea..
After chatting with people, we decided it would be best to just add this as a new value into
our KColorScheme library. Instead of all the platforms looking for this configuration change,
only the KColorScheme library did it.
This allowed me to simplify the implementation significantly.
This is why Union is such an important project when it comes to styling,
and which is why we are most likely NOT going
to modify Breeze much further, aside maintenance: A lot of work for even small changes.
Union lets us have a "single source of truth." We can change things only in one place and (hopefully)
see the visuals update everywhere, be it QtQuick, QtWidgets or Plasma style or whatever we decide to support!
Which means easier to work on styling and iterate on it, designers have easier time collaborating because changes
do not take days.. Etc.
I felt this was important change due to accessibility reasons, so I did it. And I am happy that I did, even
if it was tons of work. (And there's more left with bugfixing lol.)
This will also help alleviate issues where people feel like our apps are too "framey." You can now
turn them off (well, you can make their color same as the background color) by setting the contrast to 0%.
I must warn you that setting the value to 0% will probably look broken at some places, so we will probably
have to add a warning to the color editor that "hey this is not optimal but you can do it lol."
In short-term future, I want this to be tied to the desktop portal interface for high-contrast accessibility preference:
When user has this enabled, be they on Plasma desktop or not, the applications will maximize
this frame contrast value automatically.
And then, there's bug hunting and finding out any weird inconsistencies. If you spot any, please
report them to https://bugs.kde.org!
In long-term, this whole color thing will be rewritten to something much more robust, shinier, fancier and
it will work with Union and everything is nice and beautiful. At least, that's what I hope.
I hope people will like this feature, especially those who need high-contrast colors.
Fedora 43 has been released!
🎉 So let’s see what is included in this new release for the Fedora Atomic Desktops variants
(Silverblue, Kinoite, Sway Atomic, Budgie Atomic and COSMIC Atomic).
Alongside the rest of Fedora, we are now compressing our initrds with the Zstandard (zstd) algorithm.
This should make the initrd a bit smaller and the boot a bit faster.
Alongside the rest of Fedora, systems will install with a 2GB /boot partition.
This should make things easier with the growing initrd sizes (mostly due to firmwares).
Existing systems will require a backup and re-install to benefit from this change.
We are adding the wireguard-tools to all variants.
Users can still use the graphical interface in their desktop environment to configure WireGuard connections.
However, it should now be easier to debug issues using the wg tool.
This change was decided too late to be included in the installation ISO but it will come via an update.
We temporarily removed the Third Party page shown during the first boot as it
was causing issues. Users will be asked if they want to enable Third Party
repositories when then open GNOME Software.
It will be re-enabled once we figure out where the bug is.
Updates are now automatically applied on a weekly basis, for Flatpaks and the
system. You can configure the frequency or disable auto-updates in the system
settings.
As always, I heavily recommend checking them out, especially if you feel like some things
are missing from the Fedora Atomic Desktops and you depend on them (NVIDIA drivers, extra
media codec, out of tree kernel drivers, etc.).
We have established a roadmap
(atomic-desktops-sig#26)
and we need your help to make this a smooth transition for all of our existing
users.
New home for the Fedora sysexts
We have moved the systemd system extensions (sysexts) to a new GitHub organization.
The sysexts are now split between those built exclusively from Fedora packages and those built from various community sources.
Make sure to update your systemd-sysupdate configs to point to the new URLs.
anditosan
@herzenschein:kde.org
) from System Settings to the debug console. You can access it by typing “kwin” in KRunner and selecting “KWin Debug Console”. Mind that it’s a developer tool, so function definitely outdoes form.
