Here is another video recap of what happened in the last few weeks with the design system for Plasma. I review icon work and some considerations to take when designing icons.
There is a review of our current state or affairs, a proposal for a sprint and working with PenPot.
Some of you might have noticed. Updates to Manjaro ARM packages are far between these days. Actually it has been far between updates since I left the project in March 2023.
So this begs the question: Is Manjaro ARM dead?
Lets take a look at the current status.
No new images
The last round of release images for all the major platforms Manjaro ARM supports was done in February 2023, release version 23.02. And I have heard that most of them break the installation after the first update.
The only images I have seen that has had any kind of new release since I left, are the Pinephone based ones. But they are still considered Beta (after 4 years!).
ARM download are no longer prominent on the website
Manjaro.org got a new fancy website a little while ago. This website hides the ARM images, so you have to really look for them to find them. Here's how you find them on the new website:
manjaro.org -> Download button -> Go back a step in the submenu that says Products > Download > x86 by pressing the Download entry -> Press the Download button in the second section called For Phones And Embedded.
Now you can see and download the ARM images.
Very few package updates
The Raspberry Pi specific packages have been updates steadily by Ray Sherman, the maintainer. But all the other Manjaro specific packages are only updated rarely or not at all.
Even the package updates from Arch Linux ARM is not done very often anymore. So the package repository in general is in a very bad out-of-date state.
Is it maintained?
With all these points, I would conclude that it is not really maintained anymore. Ray asked the Manjaro project management about this and was told that the ARM branch no longer has a manager and therefore it was no longer a priority by the Manjaro team.
To me, that sounds like it has died a slow and quiet death.
I would not recommend Manjaro ARM to anyone anymore, because of the state it is in. It's a sad conclusion, as I started the project with Josh Crowder back in 2016 and we loved working on it.
One of my leisure time activities is to develop KMyMoney, a personal finance management application. Most of my time is spent on development, testing, bug reproduction and fixing, user support and sometimes I even write some documentation for this application. And of course, I use it myself on a more or less daily basis.
One of the nice KMyMoney features that helps me a lot is the online transaction download. It’s cool, if you simply fire up your computer in the morning, start KMyMoney, select the “Account/Update all” function, fill in the passwords to your bank and Paypal accounts when asked (though also that is mostly automated using a local GPG protected password store) and see the data coming in. After about a minute I have an overview what happened in the last 24 hours on my accounts. No paper statement needed, so one could say, heavily digitalized. At this point, many thanks go out to the author of AqBanking which does all the heavy work dealing with bank’s protocols under the hood. But a picture is worth a thousand words. See for yourself how this looks like:
A recording of my daily download procedure
The process is working for a long time and I have not touched any of the software parts lately. Today, I noticed a strange thing happening because one of my accounts showed me a difference between the account balance on file and the amount provided by the bank after a download. This may happen, if you enter transactions manually but since I only download them from the bank, there should not be any difference at all. Plus, today is Sunday while on the day before everything was just fine. First thought: which corner case did I hit that KMyMoney is behaving this way and where is the bug?
First thing I usually do in this case is to just close the application and start afresh. No way: same result. Then I remembered, that I added a feature the day before to the QIF importer which also included a small change in the general statement reader code. Of course, I tested things with the QIF importer but not with AqBanking. Maybe, some error creeped into the code and causes this problem. I double checked the code and since it dealt with tags – which are certainly not provided by my bank – it could not be the cause of it.
So I looked at the screen again:
The ledger on the left shows the state before and the one on the right after the download.
New data must have been received because the date in the left column changed and also the amount of the colored row changed but not the one in the row above which still shows the previous state. The color is determined by comparing the balance information with the one in the row above. So where is/where are the missing transaction(s)?
Long story short: looking at the logs I noticed, that the online balance was transmitted but there was no transaction at all submitted by the bank. And if I simply take the difference between the two balances it comes down to a reimbursement payment which I expect to receive.
Conclusion: no bug in KMyMoney, but the bank simply provided inconsistent data. Arrrrgh.
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 also published a new web page in our "KDE For You" series, this time about "KDE For Digital Sovereignty". These pages give you tons of recommendations about KDE and other FOSS apps you can use in different situations, be it for education, creativity, travel and more.
When manually adding items to the Places panel, the current location's custom icon is pre-populated in the icon field, and the item will now be created globally by default, so it appears in other apps' Places panels as well (Nate Graham, Frameworks 6.11. Link and link 2).
We added an entry at the top of the grid/list to open a track view for the current artist or genre. Tracks from artists opened from genre view will be filtered by genre (Pedro Nishiyama, 25.04.0. Link).
We have solved the problem of creating infinitely nested views when browsing artist > album > artist (Pedro Nishiyama, 25.04.0. Link).
Haruna 1.3 is out with lots of code refactoring. Additionally, the default
actions for left and right mouse buttons have changed: left click is now
Play/Pause and right click opens the context menu. These actions can be changed in
Settings on the mouse page.
Volker restored public transport data access to Digitransit in Finland and to Rolph in Germany (Volker Krause, 24.12.2, also affects KTrip) and Joshua and Gregorz wrote and improved travel document extractors for American Airlines, Brightline and Southwest (Joshua Goins, 24.12.2, Link 1, link 2, and link 3) and Koleo (Grzegorz Mu, 24.12.2, Link).
Joshua fixed various issues with the markdown rendering in KMail, enabling markdown footnotes, highlighting and removing some dead code (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link 1 and link 2); and, to facilitate the use of KMail's security features, KMail will now query a key server when clicking on an unknown OpenPGP certificate (Tobias Fella, 25.04.0 Link).
The audio waveform of Kdenlive was completely rewritten. It is now around twice as fast to generate and is more accurate (Étienne André and funded by the Kdenlive Fundraiser, 25.04.0 Link).
Before:
After:
KDevelop Featureful, plugin-extensible IDE for C/C++ and other programming languages
We added and improved the debugger pretty printer for QJSon*, QCbor*, QDateTime, QTimeZone (David Faure, 25.04.0 Link 1 and link 2).
The latest Krita Monthly Update is out. If you want to learn what's going on in Krita as well as see some amazing artwork made with Krita, check it out.
Qrca now forces the rendering of QR code content to be plain text (Kai Uwe Broulik. Link) and only shows the flashlight button on devices with a flashlight (e.g. not on your laptop) (Kai Uwe Broulik. Link).
Tokodon will now remind you to add an alt text to your images (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link).
We also added an option for a confirmation dialog before boosting a post. This is particularly relevant for people managing multiple accounts to prevent them from boosting posts from the wrong account (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link).
In the department of trust and safety improvements, you can now filter some posts from your timeline (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link).
And show a banner when an account has moved to another server (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link).
You can now browse posts that are about a news link (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link) and see the post associated with an image in the media grid of a profile (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link).
We also fixed a bug where, when failing to authenticate one of your accounts, Tokodon would be stuck indefinitely on the loading screen (Carl Schwan, 24.12.2. Link).
For a complete overview of what's going on, visit KDE's Planet, where you can find all KDE news unfiltered directly from our contributors.
Get Involved
The KDE organization has become important in the world, and your time and
contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we're going to need
your support for KDE to become sustainable.
You can help KDE by becoming an active community member and getting involved.
Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE — you are not a number or a cog
in a machine! You don’t have to be a programmer either. There are many things
you can do: you can help hunt and confirm bugs, even maybe solve them;
contribute designs for wallpapers, web pages, icons and app interfaces;
translate messages and menu items into your own language; promote KDE in your
local community; and a ton more things.
You can also help us by donating. Any monetary
contribution, however small, will help us cover operational costs, salaries,
travel expenses for contributors and in general just keep KDE bringing Free
Software to the world.
To get your application mentioned here, please ping us in invent or in Matrix.
This year there are 14 projects participating in Season of KDE.
The KDE Community warmly welcomes you, and looks forward to your contributions. We hope to have a mutually
rewarding experience, where you learn about Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and we benefit from the projects
you will build and/or improve.
Animated Transition Preview for Kdenlive
Kdenlive, the popular KDE video editor, will receive a usability boost.
Swastik Patel will work on adding animated icon previews to the
transition widget. Jean-Baptiste Mardelle will guide Swastik on this
open source journey.
AudioTube: YouTube Music App
Chinmay Timwri will improve AudioTube,
in particular enhancing ability to create playlists and augmenting data
available for playlist creation. Chinmay will be guided by Jonah Brüchert.
Mankala Games
Add Kalah to Mankala Engine.
Kalah is a mancala game popular in North America which has benefitted from much
research in creating computerized opponents. Rishav Ray Chaudhury will work on adding
this to Mankala engine.
KEcoLab enables developers to measure the energy efficiency of their applications.
Shubhanshu Gupta, Roopa Dharshini and Utkarsh Umre
will work on improving the documentation and producing video tutorials so that the tool is easier to use and the
reports produced can be understood by a wider range of people.
PDF application comparison
Oreoluwa Oluwasina will compare the energy efficiency of Okular
and Adobe Acrobat on both Linux and Windows using KdeEcoTest, while fixing remaining open issues with KDE's user emulation tool.
Please follow their progress by reading their blog posts on KDE's planet, and by joining
the relevant project communication channels if you would like details more frequently.
You might have seen the awesome Klassy theme by Paul McAuley for Qt
applications and window decorations for KWin.
Klassy
It has some issues compiling against the latest Plasma since the
KDecoration API break.
Until it is fixed in the main repository, I’ve created a temporary
fork that includes the port to KDecoration3 done by Eliza Mason, with a
tiny additional fix I added on top of it. The fork is available at github.com/ivan-cukic/wip-klassy
Kirigami Addons is a collection of additional components for Kirigami
applications. 1.7.0 is a relatively big release bringing a new convergent
component for context menus as well as various quality of life APIs to existing
components.
ConvergentContextMenu
This release bring a new component which wraps the tradional context menu
Controls.Menu provided by Qt and on mobile will instead displays a BottomDrawer
with the list of actions.
Using it, is really easy:
importQtQuick.ControlsasControlsimportorg.kde.kirigamiasKirigamiimportorg.kde.kirigamiaddons.componentsasComponentsimportorg.kde.kirigamiaddons.formcardasFormCardComponents.ConvergentContextMenu{id: root// Only visible on mobile to show a bit of information about the selected element
headerContentItem:RowLayout{spacing:Kirigami.Units.smallSpacingKirigami.Avatar{...}Kirigami.Heading{level:2text:"Room Name"}}Controls.Action{text:i18nc("@action:inmenu","Simple Action")}Kirigami.Action{text:i18nc("@action:inmenu","Nested Action")Controls.Action{...}Controls.Action{...}Controls.Action{...}}Kirigami.Action{text:i18nc("@action:inmenu","Nested Action with Multiple Choices")Kirigami.Action{text:i18nc("@action:inmenu","Follow Global Settings")checkable:trueautoExclusive:true// Since KF 6.10
}Kirigami.Action{text:i18nc("@action:inmenu","Enabled")checkable:trueautoExclusive:true// Since KF 6.10
}Kirigami.Action{text:i18nc("@action:inmenu","Disabled")checkable:trueautoExclusive:true// Since KF 6.10
}}// custom FormCard delegate only supported on mobile
Kirigami.Action{visible:Kirigami.Settings.isMobiledisplayComponent:FormCard.FormButtonDelegate{...}}}
Icons on Android
Kirigami Addons components are using some breeze icons which needs to be packaged
manually on android by calling kirigami_package_breeze_icons with the icons used.
Now Kirigami Addons, provides a Cmake variable KIRIGAMI_ADDONS_ICONS listing all
the icons used by Kirigami Addons, simplifying the maintainance work of applications
to keep the list of icons used up-to-date.
The FormCardPage now uses a slighly less grey to get more contrasts with the sidebar.
We cleaned up FormComboBoxDelegate to not relly on the applicationWindow()
hack from Kirigami anymore. This fixes using FormComboBoxDelegate in Plasma
Settings. Unfortunately some areas of Kirigami Addons still implicitely rely on
applicationWindow() to set the parent of popups (Kirigami has a similar
issue). If you are using dialogs or popup in your code, make sure to
explicitely pass a valid Controls.Overlay.overlay as parent to them instead
of rellying on applicationWindow() being valid all the time.
The FormCard.AboutPage now show the KDE Frameworks version in use rather than
the one we built against. We are also using in the AboutKDEPage component,
the same bug address as in the AboutPage component. And we fixed various other small
issues with the about pages. Thanks Volker and Joshua!
Other
We now use clang-format automatically and various clang-tidy warnings were fixed. Thanks Alex!
Avatar are now loaded asynchronously which should make NeoChat, Tokodon and Merkuro list views smoother. Thank Kai! Addionally the text fallback is now only rendered as plain text, which should also be sligly faster.
The RadioSelector now uses the style from Marknote.
We updated the templates provided by Kirigami Addons to the latest version of the flatpak
runtimes and some other minor improvements like using the new KLocalizedQmlContext.
AlbumMaximizeComponent now expose not only the currentItem from the internal
view, but also the currentIndex.
The IndicatorItemDelegate and RoundedItemDelegate components are now easier to
use with drag and drop interaction. You can see that in effect in last week update
of Merkuro Mail.
There have been lots of code refactoring, so make sure to report any bugs you encounter. There's a "Report bug" menu entry under the "Help" menu or in settings in the about page.
The default actions for left and right mouse buttons have changed: left click is now play/pause and right click opens the context menu. Actions can be changed in settings in the Mouse page.
Another setting whose default changed is the Start playing setting which is now on by default.
Start playing controls the playback state, playing or paused, when restoring the position of the file.
Feature requests and bugs should be posted on bugs.kde.org, ignoring the bug report template can result in your report being ignored.
Changelog
1.3.3
Bugfixes
Fixed app not getting focused when opening a file while single instance is enabled and player is open
Fixed overlapping the window title with the duration info in the footer
Implemented screen inhibition on Windows
1.3.2
Bugfixes
Fixed shortcuts not working with non english system language
Fixed restoring playback position
1.3.1
Bugfixes
Fixed screen inhibition not working
Fixed setting volume through mpris2
1.3.0
Features
Changed the settings related to restoring the playback position, if you changed the defaults you might have to redo them
Playlist: added context menu entries for non local urls to be opened in the browser and to be removed (from the playlist)
Added setting (in General) to start app in fullscreen
Added setting (in Subtitles) to control subtitle auto selection
Changed left and right mouse button default actions: left click is now play/pause and right click opens the context menu. Actions can be changed in settings Mouse page
Dragging the seek/progress bar will update the main view as well as the seekbar preview
Decreased the minimum window size
Replaced hardware decoding checkbox with an option in the hardware decoding combobox/drop-down
Bugfixes
Improved scrolling performance of playlist, shortcuts and seekbar's chapters menu
Fixed issue with setting shortcuts with modifier keys (ctrl, alt etc.)
Fixed active audio and subtitle tracks not being correctly checked
Removed empty header toolbar from settings window
Fixed a bug where the app would freeze when loading a file with lots of tracks
Improved menubar animation
The floating footer now hides when the mouse leaves the app
Welcome to the @Krita-promo team's December 2024 development and community update.
Development Report
Krita 5.2.9 Coming Soon
After taking some time off for the holidays, the team is getting ready to start the year with a new bugfix release. This will contain all the stable fixes from the community bug hunt and more, so stay tuned!
Be sure to check out the other two artworks in the link as well!
The January Art Challenge is Open Now
For the January Art Challenge, @steve.improvthis has chosen "Magical Adventure" as the theme, with the optional challenge of choosing a point of visual focus. See the full brief for more details, and embark on a fantastical new journey.
Featured Artwork
Best of Krita-Artists - November/December 2024
Six images were submitted to the Best of Krita-Artists Nominations thread, which was open from November 14th to December 11th. When the poll closed on December 14th, these five wonderful works made their way onto the Krita-Artists featured artwork banner:
Krita is Free and Open Source Software developed by an international team of sponsored developers and volunteer contributors.
Visit Krita's funding page to see how user donations keep development going, and explore a one-time or monthly contribution. Or check out more ways to Get Involved, from testing, coding, translating, and documentation writing, to just sharing your artwork made with Krita.
The Krita-promo team has put out a call for volunteers, come join us and help keep these monthly updates going.
Notable Changes
Notable changes in Krita's development builds from Dec. 12, 2024 - Jan. 16, 2025.
Stable branch (5.2.9-prealpha):
Filters: Fix compatibility of Per-Channel filter with files from before Krita 5.1. (bug report) (Change, by Dmitry Kazakov)
General: Improve pattern icon rendering. Fix pattern preview scale. Fix aspect ratio of resource tooltips. (Change, by Freya Lupen)
File Formats: JPEG XL: Fix unable to set EPF value to -1 (encoder chooses) on export. (Change, by Rasyuqa A H)
G'MIC Filters: Update to latest version of G'MIC, 3.5.0.1. (Change)
Unstable branch (5.3.0-prealpha):
Bug fixes:
Brush Engines: Fix a regression causing opacity to be multiplied twice in some brush engines (Curve, Clone, Deform, Hairy, Hatching, Sketch, and Spray) since 5.2.0. (bug report) (Change, by Dmitry Kazakov)
Color Management: When Softproofing, use Blackpoint Compensation if enabled. (Change, Wolthera van Hövell)
Edit Shapes Tool: Fix first click on node being ignored. (bug report) (Change, by Dmitry Kazakov)
Edit Shapes Tool: Change "break path" shortcut in Shape Edit Tool to Ctrl+B to avoid conflict with the default Brush Tool shortcut B.(bug report) (Change, by Dmitry Kazakov)
Features:
General: Fix regressions in Bundle Creator. Fix regressions of resource icons. (Change, by Freya Lupen)
General: Add setting in General->Miscellaneous to make 'Copy of' on duplicated layer name optional. (Change, by Freya Lupen)
Nightly Builds
Pre-release versions of Krita are built every day for testing new changes.