Kicking Off with EteSync and UI Decoupling

The first week of my Google Summer of Code journey with the KDE community has nearly come to an end, and it’s been an exciting start. As a quick reminder, my project — “Merkuro – Porting Away from QtWidgets” — focuses on making Akonadi components leaner by decoupling their UI from core logic and reducing dependencies on QtWidgets.

Choosing Where to Begin

Originally, I planned to begin with the KMail agents. However, after discussing it with one of my mentors, Claudio, we realized that these agents may benefit from more than just UI decoupling — they are prime candidates to be moved into the kdepim-runtime repository. This would help consolidate Akonadi agents and resources for better maintainability and cohesion.

Because this is a larger architectural change, we agreed it would be more effective to tackle it later in the project.

Refocusing on Resources Within kdepim-runtime

I shifted my focus to the agents and resources already in kdepim-runtime. I was pleased to see that some groundwork for decoupling had already been laid for resources like DAV, Google, and IMAP, giving me a solid reference to work from.

With a clear direction, I chose the EteSync resource as my first decoupling target.

Decoupling the EteSync Resource

This week, I carried out three main tasks:

1. Refactoring the Core Code
   I modified etesyncresource.cpp/.h and etesyncclientstate.cpp/.h to remove all UI-related logic previously embedded in the core functionality.

2. Updating the Build System
   I adjusted the CMakeLists.txt to ensure the resource no longer compiles or links against any QtWidgets-based code.

3. Creating the UI Plugin
   I created a dedicated configuration plugin consisting of etesyncconfig.cpp and its corresponding .json metadata file. All UI-related code now lives in this separate plugin.

Testing with Akonadi Console

To verify my changes, I’ve been using the Akonadi Console, a powerful tool that lets developers inspect and manage Akonadi agents and resources in real time. My goal is to ensure the refactored EteSync resource functions correctly in Merkuro, Kontact, and any other application that uses Akonadi.

What’s Next?

Before submitting a merge request, I plan to carry out thorough initial testing to ensure everything is stable and there are no regressions. Once the EteSync resource is confirmed to work cleanly with the plugin, I’ll move on to the next target in the decoupling process.

It’s been a productive first week, and I’m looking forward to building on this momentum in the weeks to come!

Intro

Hi all! My name is Ross Rosales. I am a self-taught Software Engineer and former Registered Nurse with a background in the Emergency Deparment. Through the great community of KDE and Open Source I gained so much valuable experience that I apply in my everyday career and life. As I continue learning everyday, I want to share what I'll be working on over the next 12 weeks.

About Krita

Krita is an amazing open source and free painting program with countless growing features. Although I may not paint or draw very well myself, I've always admired how artists are able to create anything they can put their mind to with the tools at their disposal. My goal is to contribute to Krita and support all artists by helping their ideas become reality.

Proposal

To make artists' workflow easier, this GSoC I plan to create a floating toolbar that will contain common selection actions artists frequently switch between. The idea is to improve accessibility to tools that may not be intuitive to new or experienced users. Link to my proposal

Plans

In addition to sharing my progress on the Selection Action Bar for GSoC, I also plan to write about how new contributors can join the KDE community and reduce the barrier to entry for Krita. I’ll do this through personal walkthroughs covering environment setup, writing code for the first time, engaging with the community, and providing quick links to helpful resources—all in one place.

Special Thanks

Thank you to the KDE and Krita communities for giving me the opportunity to join such an amazing group of individuals. Special thanks to Dmitry, Emmet, Halla, Tiar, Wolthera, and everyone I interact with in Krita Chat!

Contact

To anyone reading this, please feel free to reach out to me. I’m always open to suggestions and thoughts on how to improve as a developer and as a person.
Email: ross.erosales@gmail.com
Matrix: @rossr:matrix.org

Welcome to the May 2025 development and community update.

Community Report

May 2025 Monthly Art Challenge Results

24 forum members took on the challenge of the "Humongous Hats" theme. And the winner is… Mouse Sage 🐭 by @Mythmaker

The June Art Challenge is Open Now

For the June Art Challenge, @Mythmaker has passed the honor of choosing the topic to regular participant @Corentin, who has chosen "Wrath of the Sun" as the theme. Interpret this title however you want, optionally include some sort of decorative design, and have fun with the sun!

Featured Artwork

Best of Krita-Artists - April/May 2025

This month's Best of Krita-Artists Nominations thread received 20 nominations of forum members' artwork. When the poll closed, these five wonderful works made their way onto the Krita-Artists featured artwork banner: King-under-Leaves by @canedo

Illustration by @JoaoGGarin

Tree Sparrow by @kacart

Splattery trees by @SebSepia

New Life Zone by @Yaroslavus_Artem

Best of Krita-Artists - May/June 2025

Take a look at the nominations for next month, and suggest your favorite latest artworks to be featured. Don't forget to vote when the poll opens on June 11th!

Ways to Help Krita

Krita is Free and Open Source Software developed by an international team of sponsored developers and volunteer contributors. That means anyone can help make Krita better!

Support Krita financially by making a one-time or monthly monetary donation. Or donate your time and Get Involved with testing, development, translation, documentation, and more. Last but not least, you can spread the word! Share your Krita artworks, resources, and tips with others, and show the world what Krita can do.

Other Notable Changes

Other notable changes in Krita's development builds from May 8 - June 6, 2025.

Stable branch (5.2.10-prealpha):

• General: Fix a crash when autosaving heavy images with lots of compositions and an adjustment layer with vector selection. (Change, by Dmitry Kazakov)
• File Formats: TIFF: Fix TIFF file size bloating after each overwrite. (Change, by Igor Danilets)
• General: Change Resize Canvas's 'Constrain proportions' toggle to not reset the canvas size. (bug report) (Change, by Halla Rempt)
• Linux: Upgrade AppImage base to Ubuntu 2204. (Change, by Dmitry Kazakov)

Unstable branch (5.3.0-prealpha):

Bug fixes:

• Android: Fix the Text Properties Docker being blank. (bug report) (Change, by Dmitry Kazakov)
• General: Fix floating toolbars disappearing on restart. (bug 504463) (Change, by Freya Lupen)
• Python Plugins: Workflow Buttons Docker: Fix Pan and Text Tool buttons. (bug report) (Change, by Freya Lupen)

Features:

• Text Properties Docker: Allow configuring when each property should be shown in the list; always, never, when set, or when relevant (inherited or set). (Change, by Wolthera van Hövell)
• Text Properties Docker: Add Text Rendering property, for antialiasing/hinting options. (Change, by Wolthera van Hövell)
• SVG: Handle SVG title and desc metadata. (Change, by Wolthera van Hövell)
• Shortcuts/Toolbars: Add Force Palette Colors action to limit color selection to colors in the palette. (Change, by Halla Rempt)
• Python Plugins/Scripting: Add and use FileDialog class, which uses Krita's wrapper around QFileDialog in order to respect Krita's "Don't use native file dialogs" setting. (bug report, bug report) (Change, by Freya Lupen)

Nightly Builds

Pre-release versions of Krita are built every day for testing new changes.

Get the latest bugfixes in Stable "Krita Plus" (5.2.10-prealpha): Linux - Windows - macOS (unsigned) - Android arm64-v8a - Android arm32-v7a - Android x86_64

Or test out the latest Experimental features in "Krita Next" (5.3.0-prealpha). Feedback and bug reports are appreciated!: Linux - Windows - macOS (unsigned) - Android arm64-v8a - Android arm32-v7a - Android x86_64

I’ve written a small Neovim plugin which might be useful to people who often work on several projects in parallel.

It activates a specific theme based on the project you are working on (the current directory you start Neovim from).

It allows you to define which themes should be used for which projects. The configuration is simple and allows specifying patterns for matching project names (not full regex, but what Lua supports).

My configuration looks something like this (this is in Fennel, for the Lua version, check out the readme):

:opts {
    :themes [
        { :matcher "radio" :theme "nordic" }
        { :matcher "^/kde" :theme "hybrid" }
        { :matcher "qt$"   :theme "moonfly" }
    ]
    :defaultTheme "habamax"
    :postExec {
        :moonfly [ ":hi TabLineSel guibg=#508050 guifg=#f0f0f0" ]
        :nordic  [ ":hi TabLineSel guibg=#5070f0 guifg=#f0f0f0" ]
        :hybrid  [ ":hi TabLineSel guibg=#80a020 guifg=#f0f0f0" ]
    }
}

The source code, and the instructions how to use it are available on GitLab.

KDE stuff and the Microsoft Store

Kate is in the Microsoft Store since 2019.

Since that time you can install it easily from here and the store will allow you to keep our application updated.

Kate is not the only KDE application there, other stuff uploaded under the KDE e.V. umbrella can be found here, this includes KDE Connect and Okular.

We have now better documentation and tooling for store submissions, the last update of Kate to 25.04 was, beside the local testing of the build if it is not broken in normal use, the press of one button.

Compared to my old guide from my first submission, that is really awesome, thanks a lot to all people that worked on that!

What if I don't like the Microsoft Store?

Naturally you don’t have to use the store (which implies some account you might not want and telemetry that you might want even less).

Alternate downloads are on our normal download page.

Or, if you want to be even more in control, and perhaps even willing to contribute, build it from source yourself, Craft makes that easy.

The Microsoft Store submissions are just a way to reach a larger audience. Some people might even not be able to install stuff from other sources, depending how locked down their Windows installation is.

Current Statistics

Below the current statistics of the published applications sorted by acquisitions, that means more or less means individual user installs.

Not that bad, over half a million installs for KDE Connect, close to half a million for Okular and a quarter million for Kate.

Current Ratings

The internal statistics of the store allow to see the ratings over the whole publishing time. They look good, too.

KDE Connect Ratings

Okular Ratings

Kate Ratings

The Future?

We will need to update the versions in the store, Kate is now on 25.04, more to follow hopefully.

We need help with fixing Windows only bugs, too. Just a random one for Kate can be found here.

Comments?

A matching thread for this can be found here on KDE Social or r/KDE.

The things I do for QA...

A few years ago, I was among those who found Wayland too painful to use every day. Over time, I gave Wayland a try now and then. It finally got usable enough for me to switch to as my default a couple of years ago.

Recently, during the soft freeze before the Plasma 6.4 Beta was released, I used mainly X11 on both my laptops - for science! And by science, I mean regression testing. I was curious what the experience was like compared to what I've become accustomed to with Wayland.

In short, Wayland supports multiple displays and color so much better. It was painful using X11 again.

My setup for daily work

I was using two laptops and two external monitors. Both were running Plasma built from git-master.

1. Main: Dell XPS laptop, plugged into a dock. This is connected to 2 ultrawide monitors - one via Displayport, the other via HDMI.
2. Secondary: Lenovo Flex laptop, usually just using its built-in screen. Sometimes I swap the right hand monitor over to it, for testing display shenanigans.

Initial impression - so limited

I fired up the XPS, did updates, and booted into an X11 session. Next, to Display Configuration to re-enable the right hand monitor (disabled the night before). Immediately, I was struck by how bare the settings window looks compared to Wayland. Here are screenshots of the settings for same HDR monitor on 6.3.5.

Wayland:

X11:

Second thoughts and hello, Dr Konqi

Time to enable the display. For reference, this takes moments in Wayland. It was just a wee bit longer and more fraught with X11.

After enabling the monitor and clicking Apply, all 3 screens went dark. After about 20s the laptop display came on. After about another minute, the right hand display finally got output before all 3 displays were dark again. I unplugged the laptop from the dock. It came up to the login screen. After logging in I saw the good Dr Konqi telling me there was a crash in plasmashell. We were off to a great start.

Like a good tester, I sent the crash report off. With some trepidation, I plugged the docking cable back in, as similar struggles from years past came back to haunt me. All three displays were black, although I could move the cursor around in them. It took a good couple of minutes for plasmashell to display everything, along with window decorations and panel contents. It was faster later, but wow, was this a noticeably worse experience than Wayland.

Other observations, or third thoughts

Wayland advantages

• Fractional scaling - the ability to have a screen at, say, 110% zoom. See that lovely screenshot, above.
  When paired with how easy it is to change font face and style, this is great for accessibility. Being able to read the text on any display at whatever resolution can't be overstated. When I have to use Windows, where you can't adjust text separately from resolution, I have sadness. I also have eyestrain trying to read tiny text in dialogs.
• Scaling per display - so my laptop's high resolution display can be at 150% and my external displays at 100% to make things readable on all of them. Another plus for accessibility.
• HDR and color profile (ICC) support. This is important for getting the mos out of my monitor with games and more. Also... preeeetty.
• Snappier overall performance (on my systems).
• The ability to send a window to multiple desktops, or just one. In X11, you can ....THNG

Wayland pain points

These are the things I ran into personally. There's also the list of Plasma/Wayland Known Significant Issues.

• The most annoying problem for me is with LibreOffice, since I use Calc almost daily. There's a bug (on their tracker) where, with multiple monitors with different scale factors, UI elements are too big.
• Lack of a robust, easy to use text expander with a GUI - that actually works out of the box. Autokey has been on my installs for many years, used for work and personal stuff. While it launches, and I have access to my phrases, there's no actual text expansion. There's an open issue for Wayland support (that pre-dates the Pandemic) but it hasn't gotten much traction. I've been keeping an eye out for years for a decent replacement, and have tried a few things but not found what I'm looking for, yet.
• Copy and paste to and from VMs I use VMs a lot for testing things on different Linux distros. My workaround for this is to have text files saved in a directory that's shared from host to guest.
• It took time and a few forks to get KVM software that was reliably developed and worked with Wayland.¹ I had been using barrier on X11. A few software forks and experiments later, I've settled on deskflow.

X11 Advantages

• Remembering window positions across reboots.
• Working text expansion.

X11 pain points

• Drawing the screen is slower after logging in or restarting plasmashell, for example, with the same hardware and open applications.
• Floating panels and adaptive opacity are known to cause performance issues with X11 with an NVIDIA GPU.
• Lack of scaling per-monitor.
  Text on my XPS's screen is too small to be readable if the external monitors are at a comfortable scale. I had to move any window I needed to read text on (most of them) to the external monitors.
• The HDMI monitor was set to the wrong resolution and refresh rate if I connected it to the second laptop. I had to manually correct it.
• After enabling HDR on that monitor with the Flex in Wayland, and switching to an X11 session, the monitor enabled HDR but the colors were over-saturated.
• After working with a few windows, fonts in Firefox became badly hinted. This made characters look weirdly colored instead of white / black, and made reading things difficult.

Final thoughts

Once upon a time, Wayland was too painful for me to use as a daily driver. It didn't support some of my utilities and it wasn't stable enough with my multi-monitor setup.

These days, Wayland is so much more usable and stable with multiple displays that it makes using X11 painful by comparison. While there are still those few issues I mentioned, I feel Wayland's advantages outweigh them.

In September 2024, the annual KDE conference Akademy was held in Würzburg. I've been to all Akademies from 2004-2020 (except 2005). Then came Covid, private life, etc. So it was kind of special that I finally made it to Würzburg again, which was just a ~2h ride away by train. And it was a good decision: Since many KDE contributors (also those who stayed with KDE a for a log time) came to this Akademy. It was a good opportunity to meet old friends again.

And that remided me of a blog post I wrote 15 years ago: The Power of Developer Meetings. In that post I was highlighting the importance of face-to-face meetings. What I wrote back then is still relevant today, so I'll just repeat:

• Social aspect: You get to know the other developers involved in the project in real life, which is a great motivation factor and simplifies communication a lot.
• Productivity: Since you are sitting next to each other discussions about what to do and how to do what are very focused. It’s amazing how quickly a project can evolve this way. (I still haven’t seen such focused work in companies yet, even 15 years later).
• Knowledge Transfer: Since participants are experts in different areas, discussions lead to knowledge transfer. This is essential, as sometimes developers have very few free time to contributes to a project. Spreading the knowledge helps a lot to keep the project alive.
• Steady Contributions: New contributors always pop up, which is in particular very nice. Everyone is welcome to set a patch, get commit access and join development. Experience shows that participants joining developer meetings / conferences usually contribute for years to come.

I enjoyed meeting KWin developers (new and old ones), plasma developers, and Kate developers again (of course!). All in all I am very happy to see the lively community that KDE managed to be for over 25 years - well done!

Having said that, I am looking forward to Akademy 2025, that will be hosted in Berlin again. In case you are unsure to go there, I suggest to just do it! It's certainly going to be a very good experience, so go ahead and register now.

PS: Würzburg has one touristic spot, the "Alte Mainbrücke". Pretty much every tourist goes to this bridge and drinks a wine - I did so, too :-)

Techpaladin becomes an official KDE patron and contributes to our community's funding.

Techpaladin is a consultancy firm specialized in advancing the state of the art in KDE software.

Techpaladin was founded by experienced and prominent KDE contributors who develop KDE-based software for such high-profile companies such as Valve and Qt Group.

"KDE is the giant whose shoulders Techpaladin sits upon," says Nate Graham, CEO of Techpaladin, "so we're very happy to support the mission and the foundation that pushes it forward. KDE e.V. helps make what we do possible, so becoming a Patron is the logical next step!"

"We are glad to welcome Techpaladin as our Patron", says Aleix Pol, President of KDE e.V. "Although a young organisation, we are very familiar with much of the team and know they share a lot of the same values as KDE. I look forward to growing KDE and its products together with them — what better way to do so than as a Patron?"

Techpaladin joins KDE e.V.'s other patrons: Blue Systems, Canonical, g10 Code, Google, Kubuntu Focus, Mbition, Slimbook, SUSE, The Qt Company and TUXEDO Computers, who support free open source software and KDE development through KDE e.V.