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Thursday, 9 January 2025

Plasma Wayland Protocols 1.16.0 is now available for packaging. It is needed for the forthcoming Plasma 6.3.

URL: https://download.kde.org/stable/plasma-wayland-protocols/
SHA256: da3fbbe3fa5603f9dc9aabe948a6fc8c3b451edd1958138628e96c83649c1f16 Signed by: E0A3EB202F8E57528E13E72FD7574483BB57B18D Jonathan Riddell jr@jriddell.org

Full changelog:

  • external-brightness: Allow the client to specify observed brightness
  • output management: add a failure reason event
  • output device,-management: add a dimming multiplier
  • output device/management: add power/performance vs. color accuracy preference

Tuesday, 7 January 2025

Most operating systems nowadays provide a feature like night light: Colors are adjusted over the course of the day to remove blue light in the evening, to potentially help you sleep1 and make your eyes more comfortable.

Linux is no different; there’s Redshift to apply this on X11 desktops, and since many years ago desktop environments also ship it built in. However, there’s always been a rather annoying problem with these implementations: None of them were color managed!

What does it actually do

On a low level, these implementations set the video cards gamma curves to multiply the red, green and blue channels of the image that’s sent to the screen.

The actual intention behind the feature though is to change the white point of the image. The white point is, as the name implies, the color that we consider to be “white”. With displays, this usually means that red, green and blue are all at full intensity. By reducing the intensity of green and blue we can change that white point to some other color.

What’s wrong then?

The scenario I described only concerns itself with white, but there are more colors on the screen… If you multiply the color channels with some factors, then they get changed as well. To show how much and why it matters, I measured how this naive implementation behaves on my laptop.

These plots are using the ICtCp color space - the white point they’re relative to is in the center of the other points, the distance to it describes saturation, and the direction compared to the center the color.

Without night light, relative to 6504KPlasma 6.2 at 2000K, relative to 6504K
without night lightwith night light on 6.2

These are both relative to 6504K, but to see the result better, let’s look at it relative to their respective white points:

Without night light, relative to 6504KPlasma 6.2 at 2000K, relative to 2000K
without night lightwith night light on 6.2

To put it into words, relative to white, red looks less intense (as white has become more red). Similarly, green becomes less intensely green… but it also moves a lot towards blue! Blue meanwhile is nearly in the same spot as before. In practice, this is visible as blue staying nearly as intense as it was, and green colors on the screen get a blue tint, which is the opposite of what night light is supposed to achieve.

How to fix it

To correct this issue, we have to adapt colors to the new whitepoint during compositing. You can read up on the math here if you want, but the gist is that it estimates what color we need to show with the new whitepoint for human eyes to perceive it as similar to the original color with the original whitepoint.

If your compositor isn’t color managed, then applying this may be quite the challenge, but as KWin is already fully color managed, this didn’t take a lot of effort - we just change the colorspace of the output to use the new white point, and the renderer takes care of the rest. Let’s take a look at the results.

Without night light, relative to 6504KPlasma 6.2 at 2000K, relative to 6504KPlasma 6.3 at 2000K, relative to 6504K
without night lightwith night light on 6.2with night light on 6.3
Without night light, relative to 6504KPlasma 6.2 at 2000K, relative to 2000KPlasma 6.3 at 2000K, relative to 2000K
without night lightwith night light on 6.2with night light on 6.3

Relative to the white point, red, green and blue are now less saturated but not changed as much in color, and everything looks more like expected. To put the result in direct comparison with the naive implementation, I connected desktop PC and laptop to my monitor at the same time. On the left is Plasma 6.2, on the right Plasma 6.3:

wallpaper comparison 6.2 vs. 6.3

more specific comparison 6.2 vs. 6.3

This means that in Plasma 6.3 you can use night light without colors being wrongly shifted around, and even without sacrificing too much color accuracy2.

Caveats

Well, there’s only one caveat really: Unless your display’s native white point is 6504K, the color temperature you configure in the night light setting is a lie, even if you have an ICC profile that perfectly describes your display. This is because instead of actually moving the white point to the configured color temperature, KWin currently offsets the whole calculation by the whitepoint of the display - so that “6500K” in the settings means “no change”, independent of the display.

I intend to fix this in future Plasma versions though, so that you can also set an absolute white point for all connected displays with a convenient setting.





  1. Despite the common claims about it, scientific evidence for night light improving sleep is still lacking afaik 

  2. Adapting colors to a different white point always loses some accuracy though; for best color management results you should still configure the whitepoint on your display instead of doing it in software 

Kwave Nightly Flatpak

If you want to keep up with the latest Kwave updates, you can now try out the nightly flatpak. It gets published each time code is pushed to the master branch, so it may sometimes have bugs, but also new features. To try it out, add the repository by running flatpak remote-add kwave-nightly https://cdn.kde.org/flatpak/kwave-nightly/kwave-nightly.flatpakrepo and install Kwave with flatpak install kwave-nightly org.kde.kwave. If you use Discover, go to Settings, click Add Source and paste https://cdn.kde.org/flatpak/kwave-nightly/kwave-nightly.flatpakrepo in to add the repo, and then search for Kwave.

The process for publishing stable versions to Flathub has also started. The current plan is to wait for the next stable version (25.04) to publish Kwave on Flathub.

Monday, 6 January 2025

This is an extremely important update to our recently released KF6/Qt6 port of KPhotoAlbum!

There’s a bug in version 6.0.0 which, under some circumstances, can lead to data loss! The problem is that, during porting, the algorithm we use to escape category names to be able to use them as XML attributes broke. And we didn’t notice. This can lead to data loss when opening a database and saving it using version 6.0.0, provided the following conditions are met:

  • The “compressed” or “fast” XML format is used (“Choose speed over readability for the XML database file” is checked in the “Database Backend” settings)
  • At least one category exists whose name contains characters other than “a-z”, “A-Z”, “0-9”, “:” or “_”

In this case, all tag associations for tags from the affected category can’t be mapped correctly and are discarded when reading the datase – and lost when saving it.

I personally found this after having tagged about 400 photos using my actual photo database and later on having wondered where my “Schlagwörter” tags for the other 15,000 have gone. Happily, we have that XML format. So, with an older backup (of course, I saved the database so often that the automated backups already exceeded the maximum number and the last unaffected database backup was already gone …) and some copying and pasting in KWrite, I could recover the old tags.

Anyway, This is actually the worst case. It can’t be recovered automatically. Big sorry to everybody affected! This should not have happened. And we sincerely hope such a bug doesn’t ever slip through our fingers ever again.

However, the 6.0.1 release fixes this. So: please update right now if you already used version 6.0.0! If not, skip 6.0.0 and go directly to 6.0.1! Dear distributors:

Please remove version 6.0.0 and replace it with 6.0.1!

Other fixes

Some other bugs have also been fixed in this release:

  • Fix application icon on Wayland
  • Fix crash when video thumbnail cache contains empty files (fixes Bug #497831)
  • The "Configure KPhotoAlbum" menu entry is now shown again (not where it was before, but it’s there again – this alone would have justified a bugfix release ;-)
  • Clicking on a tag in the Viewer’s info box shows the respective tag in the browser again
  • When the main window is closed and the viewer is opened, it is also closed now automatically. This is what one would expect, and it also fixes crashing e.g. when the user clicks on an info box link with the main window already closed. Additionally, if the annotation dialog is open, we now also try to close it. If this doesn’t succeed (e.g. because there are pending changes and the user didn't agree to discard them) the close query is aborted.

Technically, this is not a pure bugfix release, because support for database file names other than index.xml has also been added (cf. Bug #418647). But this does not interfere with anything and does not change current behavior. So let’s also declare this as a bugfix, for “The XML database name is hard-coded and should not be” ;-)

Sorry again for all inconveniences version 6.0.0 may have caused. We sincerely hope that everybody affected by data loss can restore everything so that none of the hard work put into your photo databases is actually permanently lost.

— Tobias

Monday, 6 January 2025. Today KDE releases a bugfix update to KDE Plasma 5, versioned 5.27.12.

Plasma 5.27 was released in February 2023 with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience.

The bugfixes are typically small but important and include:

  • Lookandfeel: Explicitly set theme to Breeze in defaults. Commit.
  • Applets/battery: Check actual battery for charge state workaround. Commit.
  • Weather/dwd: don't crash on empty json objects. Commit. Fixes bug #481596
View full changelog

Sunday, 5 January 2025

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 week we cover the two latest weeks as, due to the holidays, there wasn't a post last week.

General changes

The convergent context menu from NeoChat was made more generic and upstreamed to Kirigami Addons. It is now used by Tokodon and Merkuro with work underway to integrate it into more apps. (Carl Schwan and Joshua Goins, Kirigami Addons 1.7.0. Link)

NeoChat's message context menu
NeoChat's room context menu
NeoChat's space context menu
NeoChat's account context menu
Tokodon's context menu
Merkuro's context menu

And, don't worry, on desktop platforms, the context menu stays the same.

Help is very much welcome to port more applications to this new component. Here are some merge requests for inspiration:

Alligator RSS feed reader

Alligator now has a nice F-Droid banner. (Alois Spitzbart. Link)

Amarok Rediscover your music

Amarok 3.2 is out! This release brings experimental Qt6 support while keeping Qt5 support for now. Release announcement

Arianna EBook reader

Arianna allows users to use the wheel to turn pages. (Tomaz Canabrava, 25.04.0. Link), and once again correctly remembers the current reading progress of books. (Ryan Zeigler, 25.04.0. Link)

Dolphin Manage your files

When using languages which are typically written right-to-left, like Arabic or Hebrew, Dolphin's layout is mirrored to also go from right to left. Type dolphin --reverse in Konsole to try it out! It is an interesting experience. This week, Dolphin's details view mode finally received right-to-left support, which will show file icons on the right and folder names and details on the left. This change also includes some general improvements to resizing of columns in details view mode. (Felix Ernst, 25.04.0. Link 1, Link 2. Thanks to the European Commission and NLnet for funding this work.)

Dolphin's selection mode now also changes keyboard controls to allow easier selecting. Previously there was no reason for keyboard-only users to ever use selection mode because the controls were identical. Now, when you are selecting specific files among a list you will no longer have to fear that accidentally letting go of the Control key while moving will clear your selection! Simply go into selection mode instead, move focus with arrow keys, and press Enter to toggle the selection. (Felix Ernst, 25.04.0. Link)

Finally, Dolphin received a quick accessibility report as part of the NLNet funding, and, while some issues were found, the report noted that "overall the app is very accessible"!

Falkon Web Browser

The built-in ad blocker in Falkon can now also block websockets. (Juraj Oravec, 25.04.0. Link)

KDE Itinerary Digital travel assistant

We now displays platform information also for bus reservations. (Volker Krause, 25.04.0. Link)

Kaidan Modern chat app for every device

Laurent Montel and Melvin Keskin spent some times finishing the Qt6 port, enabling the generation of Windows builds, bringing the codebase to KDE standards, and more.

Kate Advanced text editor

You can now add paths to the PATH environment variable used by Kate, which is useful if you use LSP servers, formatters, or linters not present in your default PATH variable (Waqar Ahmed, 24.05.0. Link)

We fixed opening URLs ending with :x:y cursor information from remote URLs. (Christoph Cullmann, 24.12.1. Link), and added a file template plugin which allows you to generate files from existing templates (Kåre Särs, 25.04.0. Link)

Finally, Joshua posted a blog post on how to use Hugo with Kate on his blog.

Kasts Podcast application

Kasts' configuration dialog was ported to a newer component which works better on mobile devices. (Bart De Vries, 25.04.0. Link)

KDE Connect Seamless connection of your devices

It is now possible to manually enable and disable the network or the bluetooth backend for KDE Connect. (Rob Emery, 25.04.0. Link)

We also redesigned the welcome page of the Kirigami version of KDE Connect. (Carl Schwan, 25.04.0. Link)

On iOS, notifications for pairing a new device will be displayed in the app itself as a fallback if the app is not permitted to display notifications. (Ruixuan Tu. Link)

On Android, the application was made compatible with Android 15 (Mash Kyrielight. Link); more code was ported from Java to Kotlin (TPJ Schikhof. Link 1, link 2); we reworked the custom devices lists to show the connection status and display toast messages when trying to add a device that already exists (TPJ Schikhof. Link); and we fixed the icon colors when using a dark theme (Mash Kyrielight. Link).

Kdenlive Video editor

Jean-Baptiste Mardelle, from the Kdenlive team, posted an update about the much-requested feature of a modern background removal tool. Good news, there are testing binaries available. For more details, consult his blog post.

Kwave Sound editor

KWave's file dialog now works in Flatpak and Snaps. (Mark Penner, 24.05.0. Link)

Okular View and annotate documents

We fixed scrolling down/up at the last/first page in single page, non-continuous mode. (Kai Shen, 24.12.1. Link)

PowerPlant Keep your plants alive

Powerplant now shows the weather forecast in the home page. (Mathis Brüchert, 1.0.0. Link)

Merkuro Mail Read and write emails

There is now a confirmation dialog when deleting an email. (Carl Schwan, 25.04.0. Link)

NeoChat Chat on Matrix

Kai Uwe Broulik made avatars load asynchronously, which speeds up scrolling through the list of rooms and the timeline. (25.04.0. Link). A similar change was also done to Tokodon.

Telly Skout A convergent Kirigami TV guide

We fixed fetching some TV channels for the TV Spielfilm backend (Plata Hill, 24.12.1. Link) and it's now possible to see what is hapening on your favorite TV channels for more than the current day. (Plata Hill, 25.04.0. Link)

Plata also made numerous behind the scene changes to Telly Skout.

Third Party Apps

Supersonik

Adam Pigg released the first tagged release of Supersonik, a Subsonic client written using Kirigami for SailfishOS and other mobile Linux operating systems.

Organic Maps

Organic Maps, one of the best map applications for Android, got their NlNet grant request accepted to work on a convergent UI for Linux based on Kirigami.

Packaging

Scarlett posted two updates about the state of Snaps in 24.12.0. You can read them on her blog.

…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 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.

Saturday, 4 January 2025

Learning experiences all around

Uh. Has it really been almost half a year already? Whoops.

Unfortunately even with this many months I didn't get quite as much done in KDE-land as I hoped, for two main reasons:

  • I've been bouncing back and forth between quite big tasks (for my current level of experience in the KDE stack), leading to a lot of time spent with few results. I've learned a lot, but there's not much to show for it yet.
  • A good amount of time was taken by preparations for the 2024 European Rocketry Challenge (EuRoC) in Portugal - this was my second time there with the TU Wien Space Team and while it was an absolute blast, prepping a student-build bi-liquid propelled rocket for launch is on the more time consuming side of things. Who'd have thought! Maybe I'll write a dedicated post for this some time in the future, we'll see.

Back to KDE though: It wasn't all just learning - my phone also broke! Well. Kind of. Probably a loose contact in the SIM reader leading to it dropping connection to my SIM card a bit more often than I'd like. However this did push me to put said SIM into my old OnePlus 6T which just so happened to be running postmarketOS edge making me an official Linux Mobile daily-driver.

And I'm happy to report it mostly just worked. Sure, there's a few apps I'd like to have that aren't available on Linux Mobile (yet?), but what's there works and it's enough for me to use it.

Though there are certainly a number of more-than-a-bit-annoying bugs to be ironed out - so iron them out I will. For now my SIM card is back in my spotty Android phone until I fix a bug which sometimes duplicates incoming calls making them continue ringing while you've already picked up (less than ideal), but after that I think I'll stay on my 6T with Plasma Mobile for a longer while.

Now before I write another novel, let's get to the stuff I did actually finish in the last few months.

Merged Changes

Mobile Taskswitcher

  • Fixed an issue with the animation opening the taskswitcher from homescreen
  • Fixed the icon list during task scrub mode sometimes being off center
  • Reintroduced maximizing the selected window when not in docked mode. Technically it shouldn't be necessary since our KWin configuration should force windows to be fullscreen already, but some apps managed to break out of that (mostly GTK based apps), so back in it goes.
  • Disable blue border on touch gestures in mobile environment - it's nice as an indicator for mouse based gestures, but unnecessary here.
  • Add double tap on navbar task switcher button to switch between the 2 most recent apps.

Misc

  • Disabled session restore on mobile (at least until a bug with dialer launching ontop of login screen soft-locking the phone is fixed)
  • This is not a change by me, but I wanted to mention it because it's great and I mentioned in my last post that I tried (and failed) working on that before: Micah Stanley did a marvelous job at new mobile friendly notifications!
  • I've also done my first MR reviews which was exciting and a lot more work than I anticipated. At this point I want to thank all the people who have spent time on my MRs already!

Unfinished

I still haven't managed to get back to my touch corner gesture MR for KWin due to all the stuff that came in between like:

  • Fixing that the navigation gestures are still active while the navbar is enabled. Unfortunately this requires a change in how our setting system works and... CMake broke me here. I got pretty close to fixing this but had to leave it be for now for my own sanity's sake. I hope to get back to this soon since this is quite annoying.
  • Improving plasma-dialer's lockscreen behavior. Right now with session restore it restores above the initial login screen on mobile essentially soft-locking the phone if it happened to be running when the phone was shut down. A similar thing happens when a call is received during the lockscreen - I'm currently figuring out how to best fix that.

Well, that's all from me now. Hopefully I manage to do the next post in a more timely manner, but we'll see for how long my current bigger ticket items will keep me occupied for

Fixed okular pdf printing https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=498065

Fixed kwave recording https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=442085 please run sudo snap connect kwave:audio-record :audio-record until auto-connect gets approved here: https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/kde-auto-connect-our-two-recording-apps/44419

New qt6 snaps in –edge until 24.12.1 release

  • minuet
  • ksystemlog
  • kwordquiz
  • lokalize
  • ksirk
  • ksnakeduel
  • kturtle

I have begun the process of moving to core24 currently in –edge until 24.12.1 release.

Some major improvements come with core24!

Tokodon is our wonderful Mastadon client

I hate asking but I am unemployable with this broken arm fiasco and 6 hours a day hospital runs for treatment. If you could spare anything it would be appreciated! https://gofund.me/573cc38e

Last week I attended the 38th Chaos Communication Congress (38C3) in Hamburg, Germany as part of the KDE presence there.

38C3 Illegal Instructions

KDE Assembly

After 37C3 this was the second time we had a KDE assembly there, this time as part of the Bits & Bäume Habitat. Besides putting us near to some of our friends and partners this made us much easier to see and find.

Small table with a KDE-branded table cloth, covered with LED lights, stickers, sweets, a laptop and a steam deck gaming console.
38C3 KDE Assembly (photo by Carl Schwan)

The new location meant we no longer had soldering irons and 3D printers at arms length, but instead a chemistry lab across the aisle, but also more immediately useful things like a workshop area and some couches and tables for smaller meetings and discussions.

More people than last time came by, and had overwhelmingly positive feedback about KDE’s work.

Open Transport Community

Most of my time at 38C3 I spent (unsurprisingly) around public transport topics:

  • Jonah presented Transitous, our free and open community-run public transport routing service. Great talk, fully packed room with people standing in multiple rows in the back, and lots of discussion afterwards.
  • With Transitous existing now some formerly rather theoretical topics became much more relevant, such as synthesizing GTFS-RT realtime information feeds in places where we lack official sources. This could potentially be done using data collected for statistical analysis like bahnvorhersage.de or GPS vehicle position (e.g. as found in position-only GTFS-RT feeds or obtained via crowd sourcing).
  • There’s ideas for a dedicated multi-day Europe-wide Open Transport conference floating around.

Somewhat related is the aspect of decoding ticket barcodes and extracting travel information from booking documents in any shape or form, something KDE Itinerary makes heavy use of.

  • The talk What’s inside my train ticket? provided a nice overview of some of the things we also have implemented and highlights many of the absurdities encountered along the way. Lots of overlap and thus room for collaboration here, the author is already in the Itinerary Matrix channel and just the exchange so far already allowed for some progress towards decoding Trenitalia FCB ticket barcodes.
  • Discussed with the K-9/Thunderbird Android team how we could potentially solve the problem that you currently can’t share the full unmodified email from a mail app to apps like Itinerary. There are ideas, we have yet to see whether they hold up against Android’s limitations though.

And as usual, just chatting with the many attendees working on related projects and/or at public transport operators always provides some new and interesting insights.

Emergency and Weather Alerts

Another topic I was involved with was emergency and weather alerts. Nucleus and I presented the work on FOSS infrastructure for receiving emergency alerts towards the end of the final day.

Despite the slightly unfortunate time slot we got several contacts afterwards to people working at or with German alerting authorities, or having contacts that do. Any better understanding on how those organizations work and who to talk to for getting the issues we presented addressed should help. Let’s see where this leads us.

Other things discussed:

  • The applicability of CAP to maritime use/maritime hazards. Existing options are apparently not particularly accessible for hobbyists, cell broadcast has a limited reach out onto the sea while satellite-based Internet has become fairly wide-spread on ships.
  • The use-case of ship or aircraft crews who regularly visit many different countries, national solutions don’t scale sufficiently for that. So our work could also be interesting outside of the Google-free target audience we initially started with.
  • Setting up synthetic CAP feeds for infrastructure and software testing.
  • Adding an interface for alerting authorities to check whether their alerts were received and processed correctly, as suggested by someone working at such an agency.
  • The OSM team pointed me to some useful tools for boundary geometry extraction I wasn’t aware of yet (something that’s needed here for resolving geographic codes of affected area to actual geometry).

And just as I got back home an alert related to a burst 700mm water main line nicely demonstrated all the issues with German alerts we had highlighted in our talk again.

Accessibility

While the above topics consumed most of my time, I also managed to attend two sessions related to accessibility.

In the context of KDE we usually think of accessibility of our software there, or more specifically the AT-SPI interface for screen readers. That’s of course an important part, but it’s just one aspect to consider. The usability of a video conferencing software for people who cannot hear was shown as one such example.

There’s even more beyond our software that is even less in focus usually, such as the accessibility of the contribution process and or our events.

Another aspect is “real world” things whose accessibility can be impacted by our software. One example for this is allowing to customize a routing profile to your needs. With the MOTIS v2 update on Transitous things will improve there, but we are not exposing much of this in our client apps yet.

For emergency alerts this is similar, a cell broadcast warning makes so much noise that it’s hard to miss, as long as you can actually hear. If you can’t, e.g. making your connected room lights flash might be more effective to get your attention.

The nice thing of having free infrastructure to build upon is that such solutions become much easier to implement.

Distributions & Partners

We also had a few people approach us with distribution-related topics at the KDE assembly.

Examples:

  • Discussing update strategies, packaging and QA with Tuxedo.
  • Discussing integration issues with Plasma and QA approaches with Qubes OS.
  • Investigating startup performance issues on NixOS (caused by their XDG search paths containing hundreds of entries it seems).

While we could probably help in most cases, we were lacking someone deeply involved in Plasma development here.

Funding

Sustainable funding of FOSS work also came up at a few occasions:

  • We attended a short meeting with the Sovereign Tech Agency, who offer public funding for longer-term foundational/maintenance work rather than shorter prototype projects (GNOME and OSM e.g. got significant funding from them). Quite interesting for KDE, but currently out of money due to the collapse of the German government.
  • We discussed donation strategies with a couple of other FOSS projects, ie. when and how to best ask our users for help.
  • Members of the K-9/Thunderbird mobile team showed and interesting approach of using in-app purchases as a donation mechanism. That’s only viable on the proprietary Google and Apple platforms and comes with a heavy fee, but it does provide a very low threshold to donate for users on those platforms.

And more…

And all that’s just my perspective, I don’t even have the full overview of everything that happened around KDE, such as the workshops following Joseph’s talk on fighting the environmental impact of software or Robert Riemann’s work on lobbying the European public administration to use FOSS. More reports will hopefully appear on Planet KDE.

There’s unfortunately no way to catch up on the hallway track and self-organized sessions, but recordings of most of the presentations are available on media.ccc.de (many also with translations into other languages).

Conclusion

Overall these were four days with a refreshing redefiniton of “normality” again, so that neither stumbling over a self-driving couch table nor a 24/7 live DJ dance club in one of the rest rooms stuck out as particularly unusual. You could spend a lot of time on discovering and exploring the various projects, (art) installations, easter eggs and rabbit holes on display there, all while there’s criminal cases and national scandals you probably know from the evening news being discussed on the main stage, by the people who uncovered those.

And that is just the backdrop for a giant networking and collaboration meeting with people working on FOSS/Open Data/Open Hardware projects in any size or form, public administration and infrastructure, science and research, education/universities, funding organizations, politics and lobbying, civil/social initiatives, etc.

More of this please :)

Plasma developers are returning from their holidays and have provided us all with loads of goodies! Yep, this is a big one, especially in terms of the juicy user-facing changes in the areas of accessibility and support for digital artists. There's lots more as well too!

Notable New Features

It's now (or, depending on how long your memory is, once again) possible to configure your touchpad to be automatically disabled while a mouse is plugged in. (Jakob Petsovits, 6.3.0. Link)

On System Settings' Graphics Tablet page, it's now possible to map an area of a drawing tablet's surface to the entire screen area; previously only the reverse was possible. (Joshua Goins, 6.3.0. Link)

On System Settings' Graphics Tablet page, it's now possible to customize the pressure range of a stylus to chop off the high and/or low parts, should this be desirable for your hardware or preferences. (Joshua Goins, 6.3.0. Link)

KRunner and KRunner-powered search fields can now convert between "rack units" and other units of length. (Lea McLean, Frameworks 6.10. Link)

Discover now highlights sandboxed apps whose permissions will change after being updated, so you can audit such changes for shady behavior. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, 6.3.0. Link)

Notable UI Improvements

Overhauled the UI of System Settings' Graphics Tablet page to split it into multiple tabs, which greatly improves the organization. You can see it in the other screenshots of this blog post! (Joshua Goins, 6.3.0. Link)

On System Settings' Graphics Tablet page, a custom tablet calibration matrix is now expressed in a more standard way: now it appears as highlighted when changed while the "highlight changed settings" feature is in use, and it can also be saved and reset like any other setting. (Joshua Goins, 6.3.0. Link)

On System Settings' Graphics Tablet page, the pen testing feature now also shows information about pen tilt and pressure, if supported by the tablet and pen. (Joshua Goins, 6.3.0. Link)

Discover now shows a maximum of two columns even with a very wide window, which results in a less awkward UI because there was rarely or never enough room for a third column to have enough space to make a positive difference. (Rahul Vadhyar, 6.3.0. Link)

Editing desktop files for apps from the "Edit Application…" menu item in Kickoff and other launcher menus now opens the KMenuEdit app to show the app you'd like to edit, rather than a properties dialog. This lets you easily edit others as well, should it strike your fancy. (Oliver Beard, 6.3.0. Link)

When an application takes control of your screen and input devices because you granted it permission to do so (either in that moment or in the past), a system notification is now shown that lets you know how you can immediately terminate this and return control to yourself. (David Redondo, 6.3.0. Link)

Improved the accessibility-related keyboard navigation functionality of multiple Kirigami-based UI components, as well as users of them in Discover and KDE's XDG desktop portal implementation. (Christoph Wolk, Frameworks 6.10 and Plasma 6.3.0. Link 1, link 2 link 3, link 4, and link 5)

Improved support for mnemonics (those little underlines that appear underneath letters of triggerable UI controls when you hold down the Alt key) in Kirigami and a number of Plasma components (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 6.10 and Plasma 6.3.0. Link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5, link 6, and link 7)

Notable Bug Fixes

Fixed a bug that caused the System Tray's battery icon to always be visible when the power-profiles-daemon package isn't installed. (Jakob Petsovits, 6.3.0. Link)

When you set the wallpaper by dragging an image to the desktop (try it, it works!), it's now actually remembered the next time you log in. (Tino Lorenz, 6.3.0. Link)

Fixed a bug that would unexpectedly require that you copy items twice to get them into the clipboard, but only while the clipboard is configured to not store history and also prevent itself from being empty. (Fushan Wen, 6.3.0. Link)

Other bug information of note:

Notable in Performance & Technical

Plasma now respects the system's configured URL for connectivity checks — which can be important especially when customized in an institutional or enterprise environment — rather than always consulting https://networkcheck.kde.org. (Ismael Asensio, 6.3.0. Link)

Further reduced the memory usage of Plasma's clipboard system, especially when set up to store a much larger than average number of history items. (Fushan Wen, 6.3.0. Link)

How You Can Help

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You can help KDE by becoming an active community member and getting involved somehow. 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. Many other opportunities exist:

You can also help us by making a donation! 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 a new Plasma feature or a bugfix mentioned here, feel free to push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.