Hey all
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.
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!).
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.
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 So the package repository in general is in a very bad out-of-date state.
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:
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:
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.
It's now possible to change the app's color scheme independently of the system's color scheme (Onuralp SEZER, 25.04.0. Link).
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:
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.
Kurzschwardzenbuglen Nature Sanctuary by @Yaroslavus_Artem
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).
We improved the performance of the playback using QtMultimedia significantly (Thomas Eschenbacher, 25.04.0. Link).
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.
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.
Bending Will created by Robert Streeter using Krita. (Image: CC BY-SA 4.0)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pallanguzhi/Pallanguli is a mancala game popular in south India, and available in a number of variants. Shubam Shinde and Srisharan V S will add these to Mankala engine and explore different methods of creating computerized opponents.
Ashutosh Singh will improve the prototype Mankala graphical user interface.
Nidhish Chauhan will work on using XMPP to allow for two people to play a mancala game over the internet by extending Mankala Engine.
These new contributors will be guided by João Gouveia and Benson Muite.
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.
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.
Emmanuel Charruau, Karanjot Singh, Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss, Aakarsh MJ , Pradyot Ranjan and Kieryn Darkwater will guide these new contributors on their open source journey.
This project will make it easier for people who use a Windows desktop to transition to a Linux desktop. The team of new contributors participating in this project is Lorenzo Ferrara, Onat Ribar and Anish Tak. Snehit Sah, Aakarsh MJ and Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss will guide these new contributors.
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.
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
The kdesrc-build recipe for it is:
anditosan
@strit:matrix.org
module klassy
repository https://github.com/ivan-cukic/wip-klassy
cmake-options \
-DBUILD_QT5=OFF \
-DBUILD_QT6=ON
branch plasma6.3
end moduleKirigami 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.
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:
import QtQuick.Controls as Controls
import org.kde.kirigami as Kirigami
import org.kde.kirigamiaddons.components as Components
import org.kde.kirigamiaddons.formcard as FormCard
Components.ConvergentContextMenu {
id: root
// Only visible on mobile to show a bit of information about the selected element
headerContentItem: RowLayout {
spacing: Kirigami.Units.smallSpacing
Kirigami.Avatar { ... }
Kirigami.Heading {
level: 2
text: "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: true
autoExclusive: true // Since KF 6.10
}
Kirigami.Action {
text: i18nc("@action:inmenu", "Enabled")
checkable: true
autoExclusive: true // Since KF 6.10
}
Kirigami.Action {
text: i18nc("@action:inmenu", "Disabled")
checkable: true
autoExclusive: true // Since KF 6.10
}
}
// custom FormCard delegate only supported on mobile
Kirigami.Action {
visible: Kirigami.Settings.isMobile
displayComponent: FormCard.FormButtonDelegate { ... }
}
}
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.
kirigami_package_breeze_icons(ICONS
${KIRIGAMI_ADDONS_ICONS}
// own icons
...
)
Kirigami Addons’ shortcut editor can now be embedded in normal ConfigurationView via a new ConfigurationModule: ShortcutsConfigurationModule.
import org.kde.kirigamiaddons.settings as KirigamiSettings
KirigamiSettings.ConfigurationView {
id: root
required property TokodonApplication application
modules: [
...
KirigamiSettings.ShortcutsConfigurationModule {
application: root.application
},
]
}
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!
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.
MessageDialog now behaves better on mobile.
You can find the package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with my GPG key.
Haruna version 1.3.3 is out.
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.
Windows version:
Availability of other package formats depends on your distro and the people who package Haruna.
If you like Haruna then support its development: GitHub Sponsors | Liberapay | PayPal
Feature requests and bugs should be posted on bugs.kde.org, ignoring the bug report template can result in your report being ignored.
Welcome to the @Krita-promo team's December 2024 development and community update.
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!
For the "Tropical" theme, 16 members submitted 23 original artworks. And the winner is… Tropical vibes by @steve.improvthis, with three entries.
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.
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:
Kurzschwardzenbuglen Nature Sanctuary by @Yaroslavus_Artem
Speedpainting 01122024 by @SylviaRitter
Princess Mipha by @ynr_nohara and @zeki
[otsoa] Finished illustrations by @onde_hurlante
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 in Krita's development builds from Dec. 12, 2024 - Jan. 16, 2025.
Bug fixes:
Features:
Pre-release versions of Krita are built every day for testing new changes.
Get the latest bugfixes in Stable "Krita Plus" (5.2.9-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 run Home Assistant Core on a Raspberry Pi. I installed it in a Python venv and now and then I feel a need to upgrade. Today was such a day.
So, having backed everything up, I went for the plunge. Let’s install version 2025.1.2.
The usual dance goes a bit like this:
sudo systemctl stop homeassistant
sudo su homeassistant
cd /opt/homeassistant
source bin/activate
pip install --upgrade homeassistant
exit
sudo systemctl start homeassistantThen all the dependencies are installed, so I usually go for a coffee, and once things have settled down (I use top to check that the system is idle), I usually restart homeassistance, just to make sure that it stops and starts nicely.
This time, I had no such luck. Lots of little issues. The major one seemed to be that import av in one of the core modules suffered from some sort of ValueError exception.
Having duckducked the issue for a while, I realized this meant that I had to do the upgrade from Python 3.12 to 3.13. Upgrading va to version 14.x using pip does not help. Since I always forget how to do this, I’m now writing this blog post.
Recollecting the steps, the moves are, more or less these:
sudo apt-get install python3.13 python3.13-venv python3.13-dev
sudo systemctl stop homeassistant
sudo su homeassistant
cd /opt/homeassistant
mkdir old
mv bin/ cache/ include/ lib/ lib64 LICENSE pyvenv.cfg share/ old
python3.13 -m venv .
source bin/activate
pip install homeassistant
exit
sudo systemctl start homeassistantAgain, restarting Home Assistant takes a while and a bit more since all the dependencies are built. Go grab a snack or just a quiet coffee and, viola, you will end up with a fresh install of Home Assistant version 2025.1.2
