The Fedora KDE SIG is pleased to announce that KDE Gear 24.12 RC (24.11.90) is available on Fedora 41 via our @kdesig/kde-beta COPR repository

Enjoy!

Kirigami Addons is a collection of additional components for Kirigami applications. This release brings mostly improvements to the FormCard module.

AboutPage

The about page provided by Kirigami Addons received many improvements. Joshua added icons to all the buttons.

I worked on the component section, which now contains more information about the default components as well as the underlying platform and now has a button to copy all this information to the clipboard. This is super helpful, when writing a bug report. There were also some small bug fixes with, for example, the license dialog being correctly sized.

RadioSelector

A new component is the RadioSelector, which is a simple component that allows one to choose an option between two or more choices in a horizontal layout. This is not a new component as it has already been used in Itinerary and Marknote for a long time.

There is also a FormCard version of this, called FormRadioSelectorDelegate.

FormPlaceholderMessageDelegate

Another new component is FormPlaceholderMessageDelegate, which is basically a Kirigami.PlaceholderMessage, but instead of putting it in a ListView, this one is to be put inside a FormCard.

Other

Volker fixed the Android integration of the date picker. He also added support for static builds (required for iOS and probably hopeful for other platforms).

Claudio fixed various issues with the DatePicker.

Joshua made the caption used in AlbumMaximizeComponent selectable with the mouse. He also fixed the separator for the IndicatorItemDelegate which only appeared after the first item.

I added icon support to FormSwitchDelegate, which is similar to what we already have in FormRadioDelegate and FormCheckDelegate.

Packager Section

Kirigami Addons 1.6.0 was tagged but the tarball are not yet available. I will update this post once it is available.

The first release of OptiImage is finally out! OptiImage is a useful image compressor that supports PNG, JPEG, WebP and SVG file types. It doesn’t do the compression itself but uses various tools like oxipng to do the compression.

Thanks to Mathis Brüchert for his work on the icon and to Soumyadeep Ghosh for a bunch of bug fixes and pushing me to do the release.

Packager Section

OptiImage 1.0.0 was tagged but the tarball are not yet available. I will update this post once it is available.

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-48.

Are Overemployed ‘Ghost Engineers’ Making Six Figures to Do Nothing?

Tags: tech, algorithm, productivity, business

Can you see this kind of models getting abused quickly? Clearly it says something about the tech industry wanting to reduce costs.

https://www.404media.co/are-overemployed-ghost-engineers-making-six-figures-to-do-nothing/

the tech utopia fantasy is over

Tags: tech, politics

Technology isn’t neutral. It’s impossible to ignore the ideologies of the moguls funding or leading big tech companies. We can’t afford to trust their promises.

https://blog.avas.space/tech-utopia-fantasy/

X’s Objection to the Onion Buying InfoWars Is a Reminder You Do Not Own Your Social Media Accounts

Tags: tech, social-media, twitter, law

Everything is in the title… if you thought you owned anything on those platforms, think twice.

https://www.404media.co/xs-objection-to-the-onion-buying-infowars-is-a-reminder-you-do-not-own-your-social-media-accounts/

OpenAI blamed NYT for tech problem erasing evidence of copyright abuse

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, law, copyright

More shady practices to try to save themselves. Let’s hope it won’t work.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/11/tech-problems-plague-openai-court-battles-judge-rejects-a-key-fair-use-defense/

‘Thirsty’ ChatGPT uses four times more water than previously thought

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, ecology, water

The water problem is obviously hard to ignore. This piece does a good job illustrating how large the impact is.

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/technology-uk/article/thirsty-chatgpt-uses-four-times-more-water-than-previously-thought-bc0pqswdr

Self-Hosting Isn’t a Solution; It’s A Patch

Tags: tech, self-hosting, privacy, gdpr, law, politics, decentralized

Definitely this. Sure we should seek for decentralization, but this is not going to happen or be effective without regulation. Ensuring privacy is a legislative and political problem as much as a technical one.

https://matduggan.com/self-hosting-isnt-a-solution-its-a-patch/

How decentralized is Bluesky really?

Tags: tech, social-media, fediverse, decentralized, bluesky

A long and comprehensive analysis of Bluesky. Also brings interesting critiques about both Bluesky and the Fediverse. Clearly Bluesky as of today is not effectively decentralized and shouldn’t be considered as such.

https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

Reply on Bluesky and Decentralization

Tags: tech, social-media, bluesky, fediverse, decentralized

The debate about how BlueSky and decentralisation or federation continues. It’s nice to see how civilized the people involved are. This is how we can make progress.

https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lbvbtqrg5t2t

So you want to write a KMail plugin?

Tags: tech, kde, documentation

Since the documentation is severely lacking in this area, this ends up being a nice how to. I wish we’d have more like this in the official documentation.

https://datagirl.xyz/posts/kontact_plugin_writing.html

The two factions of C++

Tags: tech, c++, safety, community

It’s clear that a split is forming in the C++ community on how to evolve the language. Could it lead to a full fledged divorce?

https://herecomesthemoon.net/2024/11/two-factions-of-cpp/#fnref:4

if constexpr requires requires { requires }

Tags: tech, c++, metaprogramming, type-systems

Are you confused with the use of requires in C++20? This post might help.

https://www.think-cell.com/en/career/devblog/if-constexpr-requires-requires-requires

Unsafe for work

Tags: tech, rust, safety

Good explanation of what Rust’s unsafe really does.

https://oida.dev/unsafe-for-work/

Mark–Scavenge: Waiting for Trash to Take Itself Out – Inside.java

Tags: tech, java, memory, garbage-collector

Looks like there is a new venue to improve garbage collectors performance. This should be interesting down the line.

https://inside.java/2024/11/22/mark-scavenge-gc/

SLAX: an alternative syntax for XSLT which is tailored for readability and familiarity

Tags: tech, xslt

Tempted to do some XSLT? Did you notice it’s almost 2025? So yeah, just don’t. At least there’s a proper alternative if you still need to process that XML input.

https://github.com/Juniper/libslax/wiki

Petnames: A humane approach to secure, decentralized naming

Tags: tech, security, dns

Interesting approach to have secure and decentralized naming while keeping it human readable.

https://files.spritely.institute/papers/petnames.html

Naming things

Tags: tech, programming, design, craftsmanship

This is a good point. Idiosyncrasies are not necessarily a bad thing for naming things. Natural languages are fickle friends, you might need to rely to specific metaphors in order to disambiguate.

https://wiki.dpk.land/Naming_things

Codin’ Dirty

Tags: tech, programming, complexity, design, tests

Another rebuttal of Clean Code. Most of it makes sense if not overdone. There’s the usual confusion around the “unit tests” term though, so take that section with a pinch of salt.

https://htmx.org/essays/codin-dirty/

Bye for now!

The next Kdenlive Café will be on the 3rd of December at 8 PM UTC.

Come chat with the team!

Join us at: https://meet.kde.org/b/far-twm-ebr

Did you know about a small but very useful feature from KDE?

Open krunner via Alt+Space and type qw:KDE to search Qwant for KDE:

Pressing Enter will open up your browser with the specified KDE search on Qwant!

There are a lot of other Web Search Keywords like:

Wikipedia:

Invent:

Translate from English to German on dict.cc

You can find all of them by opening Web Search Keywords on krunner:

Extra: Create your own!

I use often a Fedora tool called COPR, so let’s use it as an example to create our own web search keyword.

Do your search in the webpage:

And now the important part you need:

Now back to the Web Search Keyword settings:

Fill in the data needed taking care of the placeholder for our input!:

Now we have our own Web Search Keyword:

NOTE: for some reason I had to click on Apply and OK until all the different setting windows were closed before the new custom Web Search Keyword worked

And the result:

I hope it’s useful to somebody!

In order to prepare for the Akademy I started some days before to give my Librem 5 ( an Open Hardware Phone) another try and ended up with a non starting Plasma 6. Actually this issue was known already, but hasn't been addressed. In the end I reached the Akademy with my Librem 5 having phosh installed (which is Gnome based), in order to have something working.

I met Bushan and Bart who took care and the issue was fixed two days later I could finally install Plasma 6 on it. The last time I tested my Librem 5 with Plasma 5 it felt sluggish and not well working. But this time I was impressed how well the system reacts. Sure there are some things here and there, but in the bigger picture it is quite useable. One annoying issue is that the camera is only working with one app and the other issue is the battery capacity, you have to charge it once a day. Because of missing a QR reader that can use the camera, getting data to the phone was quite challenging. Unfortunately the conference Wifi separated the devices and I couldn't use KDE Connect to transfer data. In the end the only way to import data was taking five photos from the QR Code to import my D-Ticket to Itinerary.

With a device with Plasma Mobile, it directly was used for a experiment: How well does Dolphin works on a Plasma Mobile device. Together with Felix Ernst we tried it out and were quite impressed, that Dolphin does work very well on Plasma Mobile, after some simple modifications on the UI. That resulted in a patch to add a mobile UI for Dolphin !826.

With more time to play with my Librem 5 I also found an bug in KWeather, that is missing a Refresh option, when used in a Plasma Mobile environment #493656.

Akademy is a good place to identify and solve some issues. It is always like that, you chat with someone and they can tell you who to ask to answer the concrete question and in the end you can solve things, that seems unsolvable in the beginning.

There was also time to look into the travelling app Itinerary. A lot people are faced with a lot of real world issues, when not in their home town. Itinerary is the best traveling apps I know about. It can import nearly every ticket you have and can get location information from restaurant websites and allow routing to that place. It does add many useful information, while traveling like current delays, platform changes, live updates for elevator, weather information at the destination, a station map and all those features with strong focus on privacy.

In detail I found some small things to improve:

• If you search for a bus ride and enter the correct name for the bus stop, it will still add some walk from and to the station. The issue here is that we use different backends and not all backends share the same geo coordinate. That's why Itinerary needs to add some heuristics to delete those paths.

• Instead of displaying just a small station map of one bus stop in the inner city, it showed complete Würzburg inner city, as there is one big park around the inner city (named "Ringpark").

• Würzburg has a quite big bus station but the platform information were missing in the map, so we tweaked the CSS to display the platform. To be sure, that we don't fix only Würzburg, we also looked at Greifswald and Aix-en-Provence if they are following the same name scheme.

I additionally learned that it has a lot of details that helps people who have special needs. That is the reason why Daniel Kraut wants to get Itinerary available for iOS. As spoken out, that Daniel wants to reach this goal, others already started to implement the first steps to build apps for iOS.

This year I was volunteering in helping out at Akademy. For me it was a lot of fun to meet everyone at the infodesk or help the speakers setup the beamer and microphone. It is also a good opportunity to meet many new faces and get in contact with them. I see also room for improvement. As we were quite busy at the Welcome Event to get out the badges to everyone, I couldn't answer the questions from newcomers, as the queue was too long. I propose that some people volunteer to be available for questions from newcomers. Often it is hard for newcomers to get their first contact(s) in a new community. There is a lot of space for improvement to make it easier for newcomers to join. Some ideas in my head are: Make an event for the newcomers to get them some links into the community and show that everyone is friendly. The tables at the BoFs should make a circle, so everyone can see each other. It was also hard for me to understand everyone as they mostly spoken towards the front. And then BoFs are sometimes full of very specific words and if you are not already deep in the topic you are lost. I can see the problem, on the one side BoFs are also the place where the person that knows the topic already wants to get things done. On the other side new comers join BoFs, are overwhelmed by to many new words get frustrated and think, that they are not welcome. Maybe at least everyone should present itself with name and ask new faces, why they joined the BoF to help them joining.

I'm happy, that the food provided for the attendees was very delicious and that I'm not the only one mostly vegetarian with a big amount to be vegan.

At the conference the KDE Eco initiation really caught me, as I see a lot of new possibilities in giving more reasons to switch to an Open Source system. The talk from Natalie was great to see how pupils get excited about Open Source and also help their grandparents to move to a Linux system. As I also will start to work as a teacher, I really got ideas what I can do at school. Together with Joseph and Nicole, we finally started to think about how to drive an exploration on what kind of old hardware is still KDE software running. The ones with the oldest hardware will get an old KDE shirt. For more information see #40.

The conference was very motivating for me, I also had still energy at the evening to do some Debian packaging and finally pushed kweathercore to Debian and started to work on KWeather. Now I'm even more interested in the KDE apps focusing the mobile world, as I now have some hardware that can actually use those apps.

I really enjoyed the workshop how to contribute to Qt by Volker Hilsheimer, especially the way how Volker explained things in a very friendly way, answered every question, sometime postponed some questions but came back to them later. All in all I now have a good overview how Qt is doing development and how I can fix bugs.

The daytrip to Rothenburg ob der Tauber was very interesting for me. It was the first time I visited the village. But in my memory it feels like I know the village already. I grew up with reading a lot of comic albums including the good SiFi comic album series "Yoku Tsuno" created by the Belgian writer Roger Leloup. Yoku Tsuno is an electronics engineer, raised in Japan but now living in Belgium. In "On the edge of life" she helps her friend Ingard, who actually lives in Rothenburg. Leloup invested a lot of time to travel to make the make his drawings as accurate as possible.

In order to not have a hard cut from Akademy to normal life, I had a lunch with Carlos, to discuss KDE Neon and how we can improve the interaction with Debian. In the future this should have less friction and make both communities work together more smoothly. Additionally as I used to develop on KDEPIM with the help of Docker images based on Neon I ask for a meta kf6 dev meta package. That should help to get rid of most hand written lists of dev packages in the Docker file in order to make it more simple for new contributors to start hacking on KDEPIM.

The rest of the day I finally found time to do the normal tourist stuff: Going to the Wine bridge and having a walk to the castle of Würzburg. Unfortunately you hear a lot of car noises up there, but I could finally relaxe in a Japanese designed garden.

Finally at Saturday I started my trip back. The trains towards Eberswalde are broken and I needed to find alternative routing. I got a little bit nervous, as it was the first time I travelled with my Librem 5 and Itinerary only and needed to reach the next train in less than two mins. With the indoor maps provided, I could prepare my run through the train station so I reached successfully my next train.

By the way, also if you only only use KDE software, I would recommend everyone to join Akademy ;)

Ruqola 2.3.2 is a feature and bugfix release of the Rocket.chat app.

It includes many fixes for RocketChat 7.0.

New features:

• Fix administrator refresh user list
• Fix menu when we select video conference message
• Fix RocketChat 7.0 server support
• Fix create video message
• Fix update cache when we change video/attachment description
• Fix export message job
• Fix show userOffline when we have a group
• Fix enable/disable ok button when search room in team dialog
• Fix crash when we remove room in team dialog
• Fix update channel selection when we reconnect server

URL: https://download.kde.org/stable/ruqola/
Source: ruqola-2.3.2.tar.xz
SHA256: 57c8ff6fdeb4aba286425a1bc915db98ff786544a3ada9dec39056ca4b587837
Signed by: E0A3EB202F8E57528E13E72FD7574483BB57B18D Jonathan Riddell jr@jriddell.org
https://jriddell.org/jriddell.pgp

After the criticism in the last post about the limitations of KUserFeedback (KUF) for doing data-driven UX work — let’s get more detailed and constructive:

What insights do we as KDE UX people need to do even better than we are currently doing?

Let us start with what we already get from KUF. We get usage data, like how many people are using Wayland vs. X11. But we only get usage data according to our telemetry policy. So we do not get any deeper insight into how users configure their sessions when using Wayland compared to X11. But this is the kind of information we would need to do proper data-driven UX. What settings are users changing? How many users have icons on their desktop, and which ones? Are people manually mounting network drives? Which System Tray icons are interacted with the most? And so on.

But while this information is already impossible to gather with our current approach, we’re only scratching the surface. We need even deeper UX insights, like understanding where people click. And where they click next (in terms of Markov chains). That way we can understand if people are using Plasma the way we intended when we designed it. Or, how long does it take them to get from point A to point B? Are they taking detours because we’ve laid out paths that users don’t understand in the way we intended?

None of these questions can be answered with our current approach to telemetry.

The basic problem is that we currently send all the raw data to the KDE servers to get the answers we need. And the data we need to collect in order to get the above described desired user insights could of course be used to “identify a specific user” – which is not allowed by our telemetry policy for good reason.

And yet we need even more data. We want to target all users, or only users who exhibit certain behaviors. We want them to fill out questionnaires to better understand why they behave the way they do, to understand their goals and intentions. This would be extremely helpful in understanding bug reports. Or to support our design discussions with relevant data from real users.

All of this can only be achieved with a fundamental change in the way we do telemetry.

Existing alternatives, such as the opt-out Endless OS metrics system, also do not allow enough user insights and share the problem that the data leaves the property of the data owners, the users. That is why we have been working on the privact ecosystem, which allows all the insights described above, while fully preserving users’ privacy. And because of that, we can not only ask for more intimate data, but we can also make participation opt-out and so get data from substantially more people. And why is that? Because with the privact ecosystem, there is no technical possibility that any individual’s personal data can ever be shared remotely. Never. But it would finally enable good user-data-driven UX work. For the sake of KDE and our users.

Please also join the discussion about this issue on invent.kde.org.