This year I went to Würzburg, which is a nice small German city famous for its wine. But I didn’t only go there for the wine, but also to attend Qt Contributor Summit and Akademy.

Qt Contributor Summit

The travel to Würzburg didn’t go as planned as Deutsch Bahn had some technical issues with their train and couldn’t reboot our train. We still managed to get in Würzburg on time and even had the change to get a small touristic tour from some locals.

The event itself was great and was the first time I attended fully a Qt Contributor Summit. Last year, I only attended a few session since the event was 20 min away from home.

There was many breakout rooms focused on some spcial topics, for me the most interesting sessions were about Qt for Python, how to hate QML, qt-project.org, Vector Graphics in Qt.

It was great to see how the KDE community still plays a big role in Qt and the Qt developers really appreciated what KDE finally moved to Qt6. They reported that the flow of contributors and bug reports increased.

Qt Chief Maintainer Volker Hilsheimer even stressed out how important it was for some of their customers to see KDE ported to Qt6, as it shows what Qt6 is stable and mature enough. Qt6 is indeed a hugo improvement over Qt5 and I am very happy how good the transition was.

I think it was a great idea to have Qt Contributor Summit just before Akademy. This allowed to have many KDE Contributor to the Qt Contributor Summit and many Qt developers to Akademy. It would be great next year to do the same next if possible and encourage more people from the Open Source Qt ecosystem to join too.

Akademy

Once the Qt Contributor Summit ended, we started a few hours later with the Akademy welcome event for some KDE beers. But before that, I had some bubble tea and spent some time with some friends exploring the city.

The weekend was full with a lot of great presentations. I presented a small report about the Accessibility Goal and the Fundraising working group. I also gave a bigger talk about the KDE Application Ecosystem, which I am really passionate about. The whole slides ware made with Calligra.

I was also very happy to see the new elected goals.

Sunday was also my birthday, thanks to everyone for congratulating me. I also received a super fancy special birthday sticker and some amazing cake.

Day Trip

We had our yearly day trip too, this time at Rothenburg ob der Tauber. A charming small town in south Germany.

BoFs

The next few days were filled with BoFs and many informal discussions. During the Promo BoF, we decided to create a “This Week in KDE Apps” blog posts. Paul volunteered Tobias, Joshua, and me as the initial team for this.

I also hosted a BoF about a future replacement of KWallet. There were some discussions about the scope of this effort. Should we just focus on storing OAuth2 tokens as a background service what the normal users should never interact with or do a full-blow password manager like macOS Keychain. I presented my work toward the latter around based on KeePassXC and the KeePass format (see my old blogpost) as it would allow to use a standardized file format that also work on other platforms. The KeePassXC developers are working on providing a reusable library, so we don’t need to fork their code. There will likely be more discussion about this in a separate gitlab issue. The lack of a good story around passwords is not unique to KDE but to the whole Linux ecosystem. If you have some opinions about this, feel free to reach out.

I discussed with Ben, Lydia and Aniqua the infrastructure for newsletters for our supporting members. Ben managed to get an instance of Listmonk in a matter of minutes and this seems to be the right way for us to manage a newsletters or at least way better than using a mailing list for this.

Kieryn hosted the best BoF: the Sticker BoF where we shared stickers and had a competition to see who had the best decorated laptop. I won!!! and received another special sticker. Thanks Kieryn for organizing this BoF and generally making Akademy this year such an awesome event!

I also ended up finishing a lot of work. I finally ported the last Drupal 7 website to Hugo: dot.kde.org which was a quite massive website with more than 20 years of history. I migrated the Hugo version used by KDE from 0.110.0 (which was more than a year old) to 0.134.0 and I am happy to report that the Hugo folks care a lot about stability and there was only some very small breaking changes. If you are working on some KDE websites, don’t forget to download the latest version of Hugo and to run the following command to update the KDE Hugo theme.

hugo mod get invent.kde.org/websites/hugo-kde@master

With Volker, we finally merged the status bar integration for Android apps so that KDE apps running on Android and now use breeze colors in their status bar, which looks much more integrated and like on Plasma Mobile.

I also got some improvements ideas during Akademy, and I already started implementing some of them: https://invent.kde.org/pim/itinerary/-/merge_requests/324

Finally I started rewritting the Calligra launcher to Kirigami based on the old Gemini UI. Still a bit far away from a being in a mergable state but it already looks quite good.

Conclusion

This was a great Akademy again. Thanks a lot for all the organizers for all their work. I hope to see some KDE contributors again soon at the Nextcloud Conference and Matrix Summit both in Berlin this month. And to the Linux Days in Dornbirn.

If you're using Plasma/KWin 6 i suggest you disable the Morphing Popups effect, it has been removed for Plasma 6.2 https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/commit/d6360cc4ce4e0d85862a4bb077b8b3dc55cd74a7 and on X11 at least it causes severe redraw issues with tooltips in Okular (and i would guess elsewhere).

This year’s Akademy (KDE’s annual conference) in Wurzburg, Germany was a success!

Yours truly had a chance to speak during the Akademy days and present our new design system to the community.

As previously reported in my youtube channel and in my posts, we provided a set of design system foundations to the community for their use in the future. This means, designers and developers will more closely work in the design process.

A few new faces also appeared at the venue. This was amazing! New contributors excited about our technologies is always welcomed.

In addition to the main session, our Visual Design Team put together an additional Birds of a Feather (BoF) session the following day. I have to say that I have never seen this many people interested in our presentation before and I am greatly appreciative of their desire to help.

We split our BoF in 3 sessions. The main session was an exploration of our export plugin for Figma and PenPot (Authored by Manuel de la Fuente), and also a review of the actions the VDG (Visual Design Group) needs to take to publish the work in the design system.

Our second hour was dedicated to reviewing our visual changes acceptance guidelines (led by Nate Graham). This session was intended to speed up the rate of response for visual design changes in Plasma and other areas. This should help us go faster and be more effective in our decision-making process.

The work is tracked here:
https://invent.kde.org/teams/vdg/issues/-/wikis/home

Our third hour was dedicated to Arjen Hiemstra’s new unified theme builder “Union”. Arjen showed us the source code and current capabilities of Union. It’s still early days but the progress is huge. There are a few new features that Arjen wants to add to the engine and we should see more of them in the near future.

Throughout the week, we dedicated time to testing and bettering the icons we produced. Our next objective is to address the latest round of feedback and then begin the process of editing our 16px icons to match our shapes in the 24px collection. Additional to that, we still need to find as many bugs as possible with the new icons.

During one of our sessions we noticed that some icons did not work properly in dark mode. This was a good test to do as some of the shapes didn’t recolor properly. Good thing that we were surrounded by Plasma devs and it was easy to spot the problem! This, however, does not mean the icons are free of issues. They still need a lot of work.

For now, I would like to invite all those who would like to provide feedback and/or test the icons. Please note that this is as alpha as it gets. There is a lot more to be done. Until all icons are finished, you can test the 24px collection.

Plasma Icons 24px collection:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/14oayQeHloyYJwL3WpjgoAQjR-Mnt-H8k/view?usp=drive_link

Figma link for icon feedback:

Soon enough, I will also edit a few of the images I took from the city and during Akademy. Needless to say, this one was by me!

Aren’t we cool?

See you all soon!

“Heather, Heather, Heather; what did you do now!” and both me & Fenris started laughing with Till, as we’re discussing about the thunderbird snap during the conference dinner.

Yup, this is from UbuCon Asia, my

• First conference
• First flight journey
• First travel out of my state
• First solo travel out of my state
• First solo stay at a hotel

Huhhh, a lot of first timers! I can’t think actually where to start with… I met so many people out there, got so many mentors! Thanks Till , for introducing me with so many mentors! I met Guruprasad sir (the launchpad guru 😄), Kierthana mam and Dimple didi (both are the documentation gurus). A lot of suggestions, tips, guides from them! Thanks a lot 🥹! BTW, How can I forget my OG Bhavani bhaiyaa!

Akademy 2024 in Würzburg - it was a blast

My second Akademy and has ended just yesterday. It was an amazing and productive time again! Apart from familiar faces I know from last year’s Akademy or the Plasma sprint last year in Augsburg, I met plenty of new faces. Some of which I of course had contact in KDE before, but only in the digital world.

One of the best parts was again the day trip with the KDE Community. While it was a bit rainy, we for sure made the best of it and saw the beautiful city of “Rothenburg ob der Tauber”. The view from the town hall tower was very beautiful:

The talks were also quite interesting and highlighted how many facades the KDE Community has. Apart from the lightning talks being great again, the “QML in Qt6” talk was quite valuable, because I did not manage to follow up closely on the latest improvements.
The talks and BOFs related to the KDE goals were also quite beneficial in getting a good impression in what direction we want to go.

Since we had so many interesting talks, it was not possible to join all of them. What I will follow up on later are the talks “Pythonizing Qt” and “C++, Rust and Qt: Easier than you think”.

Albert Astals Cid and I gave a lightning talk together about JSON linting (my part) and QML linting (his part). We were only able to touch the surface in the given time, but had some productive discussions and follow-up questions afterward. I will create a post about the JSON validation/JSON schema topic in the future, since I am still working on some aspects of this.

It has been great again to also do some hacking together and discuss ideas in-person. I will miss being able to say “Let’s discuss this at Akademy?” on merge requests ;).
I did quite a bit of hacking on KRunner, linting/formatting related tooling and also Clazy.
This can also be seen on my GitLab history that has turned a bit more blue and thus active:

What was a great improvement over the last Akademy were the chicken noises to make sure people stay within the time of their talk! To better improve on that, we should maybe get some real chicken next year 🥚🐣🐔. The talks on how to apply for funding in KDE might contain useful info when working towards this ;) PS: My life-long profile picture on GitHub/GitLab is of the super cute chicken I had 🥰.

Part of the Kdenlive team attended this year’s Akademy – KDE’s annual conference in Würzburg, Germany. Since we don’t have so many occasions to meet in real life, we also used the event to make a Kdenlive team sprint.

So here is a report of what happened during these busy 4 days !

Documentation

We first discussed how to better integrate our great documentation inside the Kdenlive app. We already have a kind of hidden link in the effect list that redirects the user to the documentation website, but decided to make the feature more visible and you will now (to be released in 24.12.0) find a small info button redirecting to our doc. In the process, we fixed and improved many links so that you now directly access the correct page.

Roadmap

We discussed our roadmap, moved the tasks that were completed in a dedicated column. We also reviewed the remaining tasks and reorganized them to better align with our priorities.

Fundraising

We reviewed the tasks planned in our fundraising, what has been done and what is left, more on this will be announced in an upcoming post soon.

Kdenlive Café

We decided to go for one online user Café every 2 months. This is a great way to stay in touch with the community, and we plan to have themes for these events, for example creating content with Kdenlive, Development news and coding introduction, How to contribute (documentation, testing, etc). Next one will be in November, focused on the next December release. Stay tuned for the date.

Render Test Suite

Last year, we worked on a rendering test suite that is aimed at automating rendering and comparing the result with a reference video file. The goal being to detect and prevent regressions in our pipeline. Unfortunately, since it still requires a local install and manual triggering, we are not really making use of it. During the sprint, we worked on making it run on our current CI infrastructure for full automation. Some good progress was made, there are still a few things to debug. Website

We discussed possible changes regarding our website, more to be announced later this year.

LV2 Audio Effects

With the recent introduction of an LV2 module in our video backend MLT, we made tests with some LV2 audio effects. Some effects that don’t require a specific UI work but session state (saving and restoring the effect data, for example with the noise repellent plugin) is not yet implemented in the MLT module, so its usability is currently very limited.

AI Effects

We discussed and tested a few models providing AI effects. Some work has to be done to make the way we integrate python scripts more modular, we will soon start working on this.

Bugs

We didn’t have enough time unfortunately to do much work on the bugtracker but still managed to tackle a few issues. Among them, we found the reason for missing notifications on Windows, found 2 regressions in our video backend causing affecting playback smoothness, and various smaller bugs.

Akademy

Between our Sprint sessions, we also attended several of the Akademy talks, and met great people there. Julius made a talk about his work on the CI regarding packaging and notarization. Some of us also attended a translation workshop so that we can better guide interested contributors.

Busy week-end, and you will hear again from us soon!

I reverted my name back to Jonathan Riddell and have now made a new uid for my PGP key, you can get the updated one on keyserver.ubuntu.com or my contact page or my Launchpad page.

Here’s some pics from Akademy

KDE Akademy is meeting this week in Würzburg.

We just had a BoF session where we discussed..

• The current progress to rebasing on Ubuntu 24.04
• The current state of KDE neon Core our amazing forthcoming Snap based distro
• Fixing up broken and bitrotting infrastructure
• Moving to KDE invent
• Issues with Plasma 6 upgrades and looking at integrating more QA tests
• How the proposed KDE Linux^TM distro fits into the mix

Welcome back! This monthly ‘zine is curated for you by the @Krita-promo team. This edition covers two months' worth of updates.

Development Report

Grum999 is working on Grids with Unit Management MR 2201 which will allow users to select a grid measurement other than pixels (i.e., inches, mm. pt.). Grum is asking for help with testing in Windows and Linux.

Wolthera introduced Font Selection Properties in the text tool thread on Krita-Artists.

Demo:

You can assist by reading the newest post from Wolthera and commenting.

latest update (latest blog post) (updated post on K-A)

Other Development Highlights

Google Summer of Code student Ken Lo's project for a pixel-art line stabilizer was finished successfully.

There’s a new default Python plugin, the Workflow Buttons docker, with customizable buttons that can select a tool, brush, color, or run a script.

The team plans to make a 5.2.5 release in late September, containing various bug-fixes from the past few months. These fixes include issues with no layer being selected, bugs when triggering touch gestures and stylus actions at the same time, broken support for Deflate-using TIFF files on Windows, crashes importing audio on macOS, and many more.

After the release, the developers will lead a community bug hunt effort to reduce the number of open bug reports and fix bugs. Tune in next month for details.

Part 2 of Krita’s 25-year history video released

Krita 25th ANNIVERSARY! 🎉 Journey to the past. Part 2

Community Report

July 2024 Monthly Art Challenge

The theme for July was Still Life from Another World designed by Brinck. We had so many wonderful submissions, it was difficult to choose only two when it was time to vote.

The winner of the July Art Challenge is Alchemy Still Life by @Elixiah.

August 2024 Monthly Art Challenge

Elixiah passed the honour of designing the next challenge to our first runner up, DavidMahl. For the August Art Challenge, DavidMahl has chosen “I am 5-year-old Kiki and I’m scared of …”

https://krita-artists.org/t/monthly-art-challenge-august-2024-i-am-5-year-old-kiki-and-im-scared-of/98020.

And the winner is… 5-year-old Kiki is scared of…the upgrade! by Lynx3d

The September Art Challenge is Open Now

For the September Art Challenge, Lynx3d has chosen Traditional Refreshments and Snacks. And as an additional, optional challenge, something with a seasonal or local relation. See the full brief for more details.

Featured Artwork

Eleven images were submitted to the Best of Krita-Artists Nominations thread which was open for nominations from June 14th to July 11th. When voting closed on the 14th, these five had the most votes and were added to the Krita-Artists featured artwork banner. These images will be entered into the Best of Krita Artists 2024 competition next January.

The Golden Chamber by @Yaroslavus_Artem

Barn Owl on Faucet by @kacart

Daal by @Neobscura

Pixel Art Waterfall by @Katamaheen

Indiana Jones by @AliceArt

Best of Krita-Artists – July/August 2024

Six images were submitted to the Best of Krita-Artists Nominations thread which was open from July 15th to August 11th. When voting closed on August 14th, these five had the most votes and were added to the Krita-Artists featured artwork banner.

The last supper by @ahmet_tabak

Piel de mango - Mango skin + process by @Caliche_Miguel

Somewhere in Alaska ~ Finished by @Elixiah

Melody.. using Impression brushes by @RoyKannthali

Fish Tank Sea Monster by @Katamaheen

Best of Krita-Artists – August/September 2024

The poll is open from September 11th to September 14th. Cast your vote for the best of Krita-Artists!

Noteworthy Plugin

New Alignment Tool

Arrange 2: Universal alignment tools for all types of layers by @Celes works on vector layers and raster (paint) layers as well as groups. Elements may be aligned to the active layer, the canvas or all selected layers.

To quote the author:

I’m also still pretty new to Krita and might have overlooked some layer usage situations. Don’t hesitate to let me know!

Tutorial of the Month

Parallax Scrolling Animation

https://youtu.be/gsmcNqDpGJE?si=m8ITgkc-xBen-ypy

Ways to Help Krita

Krita is a Free and Open Source application, mostly developed by an international team of enthusiastic volunteers. Donations from Krita users to support maintenance and development is appreciated.

Visit Krita’s funding page to see how donations are used and explore a one-time or monthly contribution.

The Krita-promo team has put out a call for volunteers, come join us and help keep these monthly updates going.

Notable Code Changes

This section has been compiled by freyalupen.

(July 21 - Sept 6, 2024)

Stable branch (5.2.3+): Bugfixes:

• [Layer Stack] Fix no layer being activated on opening Krita directly into a document, or opening a new view on a document, also when opening multiple documents and switching between them. And prevent a crash when pasting into a document with no layer active. (BUG:490375, BUG:490843, BUG:490636) (commit 1, commit 2, commit 3, Dmitry Kazakov)
• [Layer Stack] Make sure that older files with simple transform masks load fine and fix endless updates with clone layer + transform mask. (BUG:492320, BUG:443766) (merge request, Dmitry Kazakov)
• [Animation Audio] Fix a freeze when playing audio while scrubbing the timeline. (BUG:489146) (commit 1, commit 2, Dmitry Kazakov)
• [Input] Fix an input bug when triggering touch gestures and stylus at the same time. (merge request, Dmitry Kazakov)
• [Brush Engines] Fix a crash in the Filter Brush when changing the filter type. (BUG:478419) (commit, Dmitry Kazakov)
• [Animation] Fix black canvas appearing in animation when "Limit cached frame size" is active and canvas filtering mode is Bilinear or Nearest Neighbor. (BUG:486417) (commit, Dmitry Kazakov)
• [File Formats: WebP] Fix issue in WebP colorspace export when dithering is enabled. (BUG:491231) (merge request, Rasyuqa A H)
• [File Formats: PSD] Don't let Show Guides prevent saving as PSD in a non-default colorspace. (BUG:492236) (commit, Halla Rempt)
• [Windows: File Formats: TIFF] Fix opening and saving TIFF files using Deflate compression on Windows, a regression in 5.2.3. (BUG:489596) (commit, Dmitry Kazakov)
• [macOS: Animation Audio] Fix crash on importing audio on macOS, a regression in 5.2.3. (BUG:490181) (commit, Ivan Yossi)
• [Non-Windows: Display Settings] Enable HDR settings only on Windows, as Krita does not support HDR on other platforms and enabling it there will cause a crash. (BUG:490301) (commit, Halla Rempt)
• [Compositions Docker] Fix crash when attempting to delete a composition after the last one has already been deleted. (merge request, Ralek Kolemios)
• [Popup Palette] Fix the On-Canvas Brush Editor's decimal sliders to not round external changes. (BUG:447800, BUG:457744) (commit, Freya Lupen)
• [File Formats: TIFF] Ignore resolution in TIFF if set to 0. Also don't allow setting an image's resolution to 0. (BUG:473090) (merge request, Freya Lupen)
• [Grids and Guides Docker] Fix scaling down an image to less than 50% size with 1px grid spacing enabled to not crash or have the grid disappear. (BUG:490898) (merge request, Freya Lupen)
• [Preferences Dialog] Make sure restoring default Canvas Input profile shows Krita Default. (BUG:488478) (commit, Halla Rempt)
• [Welcome Page] Fix loading translated News and add missing languages. (BUG:489477) (CCBUG:489477) (commit 1, commit 2, Halla Rempt)

Unstable branch (5.3.0-prealpha): Features:

• [Text Tool] Add Text Properties Docker for styling text. (merge request, Wolthera van Hövell)
• [Python Plugins] Add Workflow Buttons docker Python plugin. This docker consists of customizable buttons that can select a tool, brush, color, or even run a script. (merge request, Timothée Giet)
• [Brush Engines] Add the ability to set brush sensor curve points as corners, by holding Ctrl while clicking a point, or pressing "s" while a point is selected. (merge request, Deif Lou)
• [Freehand Brush Tool] Add Pixel stabilizer setting for drawing 1px-width pixel art lines. (merge request, Ken Lo)
• [Touch Input] Implement an option to disable touch pressure reading, in case it is being reported incorrectly: Settings->General->Tools->Enable Touch Pressure Sensitivity. (BUG:474523) (merge request, Dmitry Kazakov)
• [Color Selectors] Save global color history, and add option to save color history per document in Settings->Color Selector Settings->Color History. (WISHBUG:357493) (merge request, Bourumir Wyngs)
• [Reference Images Tool] Add tool options to create a reference image from the current layer or visible canvas. (WISHBUG:399058, WISHBUG:403111) (merge request, Tom Wu, Agata Cacko)
• [Usability] Add ability to change unit of decimal spinboxes in their right-click context menu, and fix some rounding issues when changing units. (merge request, Grum 999)
• [Usability] Reduce delay of Overview Docker, Histogram Docker and Layer Thumbnails updates. (merge request, Dmitry Kazakov, Zhiqi Yao)
• [Usability] Change text to clarify "Merge selected layers" being different from "Merge with layer below". (merge request, Ralek Kolemios)
• [Export Layers Plugin] Improve Export Layers dialog to select the current document, allow selecting exporting multiple documents at once, and show the full path only in the tooltip. (merge request, stib bork)
• [Scripting] Add Python API for painting brushstrokes on a Node with the current brush: paintLine, paintRectangle, paintEllipse, paintPolygon, paintPath. (merge request, Freya Lupen, Samuel Simplicio, Scott Petrovic)
• [Scripting] Expose stroke and fill styles to the painting API. (merge request, Freya Lupen)
• [Scripting] Add pressure setting to the Node.paintLine() function. (merge request, Anna Pavlyuk)

Bugfixes:

• [Export] Fix Advanced Export of the image with filter masks or layer styles to scale those as expected.(BUG:476980) (commit, Dmitry Kazakov)
• [File Layers] Make sure File Layers are scaled when the image is scaled. (BUG:467257, BUG:470110) (commit, Dmitry Kazakov)
• [Transform Tool] Fix layers below a transformed layer appearing blurred when using Accurate Instant Preview mode. (BUG:480973) (commit, Dmitry Kazakov)
• [Animation] Fix using Fill Tool on color-labeled layers of animation being very slow due to unnecessary checking of all frames. (BUG:438607) (commit, Dmitry Kazakov)
• [Usability] Make sure the Layer Properties dialog can only be opened once, instead of allowing the same dialog to be opened multiple times. (merge request, Maciej Jesionowski)
• [Python Plugins] Fix Ten Scripts to keep script position when there are empty slots, and add ability to clear a slot. (merge request, Robert Moerland)
• [Python Plugins] Comics Manager: In the language chooser, list all regional variations and automatically select the best variation based on locale. (merge request, Alvin Wong)
• [General] Fix wrong thumbnail in "Save New Brush Preset" after "Switch to Previous Preset" shortcut. (BUG:475020) (merge request, Doreene Kang)

These changes are made available for testing in the following Nightly builds:

• Stable "Krita Plus" (5.2.3+): Linux - Windows - macOS (unsigned) - Android arm64-v8a - Android arm32-v7a - Android x86_64
• Unstable "Krita Next" (5.3.0-prealpha): Linux - Windows - macOS (unsigned) - Android arm64-v8a - Android arm32-v7a - Android x86_64

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Krita is a free and open source project. Please consider supporting the project with donations or by buying training videos or the artbook! With your support, we can keep the core team working on Krita full-time.

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Plasma Wayland Protocols 1.14.0 is now available for packaging.

This adds features needed for the Plasma 6.2 beta.

URL: https://download.kde.org/stable/plasma-wayland-protocols/
SHA256: 1a4385ecfc79f7589f07381cab11c3ff51f6e2fa4b73b78600d6ad096394bf81 Signed by: E0A3EB202F8E57528E13E72FD7574483BB57B18D Jonathan Riddell jr@jriddell.org

Full changelog:

• add a protocol for externally controlled display brightness
• output device: add support for brightness in SDR mode
• plasma-window: add client geometry + bump to v18
• Add warnings discouraging third party clients using internal desktop environment protocols