Hey everyone!!

Welcome to my blog post. I am Roopa Dharshini, a mentee in Season of KDE 2025 for the KEcoLab project. In this blog, I will explain my work in the SoK mentorship program.

Getting Started With SoK

For my proposal I crafted a detailed timeline for each week. With this detailed plan and with the help of my wonderful fellow contributors and mentors, I was able to complete all the work before the end of the mentorship program.

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I started by first week working to understanding the project's codebase, studying KECoLab's handbook and existing documentation, setting up a GitLab wiki in the forked repository, and discussing the GitLab wiki's Merge Request (MR) feature. I explored and discussed various technical documentation tools with the mentors. Initially, we had planned to continue with GitLab, but later due to the flexibility of KDE's community wiki, we proceeded with that as our preferred documentation tool.

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I got to work creating an outline for the entire technical documentation. Usage scenarios scripts are essential for executing the automation pipeline in KEcolab. So, my fellow mentees and I started our documentation process with usage scenario scripting: we drafted a short page describing it's importance, provided some scripts, and detailed their structure. This documentation is structured in a way that even non-technical contributors are able to follow the guidelines and create their own scripts.

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After this, I wrote various texts for the technical documentation (CI/CD pipeline, Home Page) of the KEcoLab project. There was a change in the audience for our documentation: initially we focused on the users of KEcoLab, but later we decided to write documentation for both the people who wish to contribute and provide new changes to KEcoLab as well as those who use KEcoLab for their software measurements. This change had us writing in-depth technical documentation for developers who wish to change the code for better efficiency. The CI/CD pipeline is essential for the energy measurement automation in KEcoLab. Writing detailed CI/CD pipeline documentation that explains its use, structure, and job execution was challenging, yet rewarding.

Final Documentation Links

1. User Guide documentation for KEcoLab Users
2. Usage Scenario Script documentation
3. Accessing result documentation for users
4. CI/CD pipeline documentation for contributors
5. Contribution guidelines

How did I apply to Season of KDE?

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Season of KDE is a mentorship program that happens every year between January and March. It is a three-month mentorship where mentees will be guided through a project they propose. You start by writing a proposal and timeline to work on from the projects listed on the KDE Ideas page. You tag the mentors in the issue, and they will review your proposal and check whether you are suitable or not. You can checkout my proposal for the KEcoLab project. After review, mentors will hopefully mark your proposal as accepted. And that’s how I got into it!

Challenges I faced

Applying to SoK was not easy for me. I ran into my first challenge when I tried to create a new KDE Invent account. I thought there were some technical issues with the website, so I tried every day to create an account (you are limited to one account creation chance per 24-hour period). After a long wait, I reached out to SoK admin Johnny for help, and he assisted me in creating an account. I was really scared to submit my proposal because there was only one week before the submission deadline, but I trusted my skills and submitted it. So, keep in mind that “it is never too late to apply."

The second challenge was team collaboration. Similar to me, there were 2 other contributors selected for this project. I was brand new to KDE. At first it was hard to communicate with my other contributors, but later on we started to work really well together. Those are the main challenges I faced during my contributions to SoK. Challenges are never an end point; they are a stepping stone to move further.

Thank You Note!

Challenges make the journey worthwhile. Without any challenges, I wouldn’t have known the perks of contributing to KDE in SoK. I take a moment here to thank my wonderful mentors Kieryn, Aakarsh, Karanjot, and Joseph for guiding me throughout this journey. Also, I want to thank my fellow contributors to the project Shubhanshu and Utkarsh for collaborating with me to achieve what we proposed successfully. Finally, I am thankful to the KDE e.V. and the KDE community for supporting us new contributors to the amazing KDE project.

KEcoLab is hosted on Invent. Are you interested in contributing? You can join the Matrix channels Measurement Lab Development and KDE Eco and introduce yourself.

Thank you!

Introduction -

Over the last 10 weeks, I had the opportunity to contribute to MankalaEngine by exploring and integrating new algorithms for gameplay, as well as working on adding the Pallanguli variant to the engine. My journey involved researching about various algorithms like Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), implementing Q-learning, an ML-based approach, and evaluating their performance against the existing algorithms of MankalaEngine. Also assisted in reviewing the implementation of the Pallanguli variant.

Implementing and Testing MCTS

I first explored Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) and implemented it in MankalaEngine. To assess its effectiveness, I tested it against the existing algorithms, such as Minimax and MTDF, which operate at depth 7 before each move.

MCTS Performance Results -

The results was not good enough. This was expected because existing Minimax and MTDF algorithms are strong and operate at depth 7 before each move.

Moving to Machine Learning: Implementing Q-Learning.

Given MCTS's poor performance against strong agents, I explored Machine Learning (ML) techniques, specifically Q-Learning, a reinforcement learning algorithm. After learning its mechanics, I implemented and trained a Q-learning agent in MankalaEngine, testing it against existing algorithms.

Q-Learning Performance Results -

Q-learning showed significant improvement, defeating existing algorithms in most cases. However, it still had weaknesses.

Techniques Explored to Improve Q-Learning Results:

To improve performance, I experimented with the following techniques:

• Using Epsilon decay to balance exploration (random moves) and exploitation (using learned strategies).

• Increased rewards for wins to reinforce successful strategies.

• Training Q-learning against Minimax and MTDF rather than only against itself.

Despite these improvements, Q-learning still could not consistently outperform all existing algorithms.

After these experiments and research, I believe more advanced algorithms like DQN or Double DQN are needed to outperform all existing algorithms. This would also an exciting project for this summer.

Work related to Integration of Pallanguli Variant

Apart from exploring ML algorithms, I also worked on integrating the Pallanguli variant of the Mancala game into MankalaEngine. My contributions included:

• Reviewing Srisharan’s code, suggesting fixes and discussions.

• Creating Merge Request (MR) that allows users to input custom initial counters for Pallanguli.

Conclusion -

This journey has been an incredible learning experience, and I am grateful for the guidance of my mentors, Benson Muite and João Gouveia, who were always there to help.

I look forward to continuing my contributions to the KDE Community, as I truly love the work being done here.

Thank you to the KDE Community for this amazing opportunity!

Many people are, understandably, confused about brightness levels in content creation and consumption - both for SDR and for HDR content. Even people that do content creation as their job sometimes get it really wrong.

Why is there so much bad information about it out there?

Before jumping into the actual topic, I want to emphasize that most people that have gaps in their knowledge about HDR and SDR are not to blame for it. The standards that define colorspaces are usually confusingly written, many don’t paint the full picture, finding the one you actually need can be difficult, some you need to pay for to even read, and generally there is not a lot of well organized and free information about this out there.

When you have basically no information, you just go with what you do know - you see how Microsoft Windows does HDR for example, maybe you take a look at a draft for the sRGB specification or simply the Wikipedia pages, and do the best with what you have. The result is often less than ideal.

Having worked on this stuff for a while now, and having read lots about it from people that actually know what they’re doing, I think I know the topic well enough to clear up some misconceptions, but do keep in mind that my knowledge is limited too, and I may still make mistakes. If you’re sure I got anything wrong, tell me about it!

If you want an entry point for way more information than this blog post provides, check out color-and-hdr.

How brightness works with sRGB

sRGB is the colorspace most content uses today. Despite that, very annoyingly, its specification is not openly available… but there’s a draft version that you can download freely here, which is good enough for this topic.

The (draft) specification defines two things that are important when it comes to brightness:

• a set of reference display conditions
• a set of reference viewing conditions (I’ll call that “viewing environment” from here on)

The reference display conditions are seemingly quite straight forward. The display luminance is 80cd/m², we have a whitepoint of D65, and a transfer function. Transfer functions describe how to calculate the output luminance from the encoded values of an image, and with sRGB that’s

Y = X ^ 2.2

where Y is the relative luminance on the display, and X is the relative luminance on the input.

The viewing environment has a few more parameters, but it’s conceptually not difficult to understand: It describes how bright your environment is, what color temperature the lights in your room have, and how much your display reflects the environment at you.

How to create sRGB content “correctly”?

The assumption that many people take from the specification is that you should calibrate your display to 80cd/m². On its own, that information is completely wrong!

It’s obvious when you think about how end users actually view content: They set the brightness level of the display to what they’re comfortable with in the current environment. You make the display really bright when you’re outside, less bright when in a normally lit room, and even darker than that when the lights are off.

The part that’s missing with just calibrating the display to some luminance level is that you must take the viewing environment into account. Either you set up the sRGB reference viewing environment (with measurements!)… or you just don’t. When you create content, in most cases you should do exactly the same thing as the person that will consume the content does: Just set the brightness to what’s comfortable in the environment you’re in. It still helps to keep your viewing environment mostly fixed of course, lots of brightness changes mean you’re constantly readjusting and that’s not good.

There’s another big thing to take into account for sRGB, which is its confusing transfer function.

The sRGB transfer function

The sRGB specification doesn’t just define a transfer function for the display, but it also defines a second transfer function. This sRGB piece-wise transfer function is

if X < 0.04045: Y = X / 12.92
else: Y = ((X + 0.055) / 1.055)^2.4

and it’s slightly different from gamma 2.2 in that it has that linear bit for the very dark area.

The purpose of this transfer function is to optimize encoding of dark parts of the image - with 8 bits per color, gamma 2.2 becomes really small in the lowest few values. 1/255 for example results in roughly 0.0000051 with gamma 2.2, and 0.0003035 with the sRGB piece-wise transfer function.

This difference might sound insignificant, but it is noticeable. The most well known place of where the wrong transfer function is used is Microsoft Windows: When you enable HDR in Windows, it uses the piece-wise transfer function for sRGB content, instead of the gamma 2.2 transfer function that which your display uses in SDR mode. The result is that dark areas of SDR games and videos are brighter than they should be, and look “washed out”.

So when should you use the sRGB piece-wise transfer function? So far, I don’t know of any case where you should, outside of working around that Windows problem in your application… I’m also only concerned with displaying images though, and not editing or creating them, so take that with a grain of salt.

How brightness works with HDR

Most HDR content uses the SMPTE ST 2084 transfer function. The specification for this is freely available here.

SMPTE ST 2084 is a bit different from the sRGB spec, in that it only defines a transfer function but no complete colorspace or viewing environment. That transfer function is the Perceptual Quantizer (PQ): It tries to compress luminance levels in a way that matches how sensitive human eyes are in specific luminance ranges, and it’s defined in absolute luminance - a PQ value of 0.0 means <= 0.005cd/m², and 1.0 maps to 10000 cd/m².

The missing parts are defined by different specifications, rec.2100 and BT.2408. More specifically, rec.2100 uses the BT.2020 primaries with the PQ transfer function (or the HLG transfer function, but we’ll ignore that here) and a recommended viewing environment for such HDR content:

BT.2408 expands on that with an HDR reference white and graphics white, at 203cd/m². This is mostly meant for the context of broadcasts, referring with “graphics” to logos or subtitles in the video stream.

Despite the transfer function being “absolute”, just like with sRGB, the luminance numbers don’t mean anything in isolation. When displaying HDR content, just like with SDR, we need to take the viewing environment into account, and adjust luminance levels accordingly.

How is this handled in Wayland?

Every transfer function in the color management protocol has reference display conditions and a viewing environment attached to it, defined by a few parameters. Most relevant for this topic are

• a reference luminance, also known as HDR reference white, graphics white or SDR white
• minimum and maximum mastering luminances, basically how dark and bright the display the content was made for can go

When content is displayed on the screen, the compositor translates between the viewing environment of the content, and the viewing environment of the user. While we don’t usually have full knowledge of what exactly that viewing environment is like, the brightness slider in KDE Plasma provides a very good approximation by configuring the reference luminance to be used for content on the display. The calculation for this brightness adjustment is rather simple, in linear space you just do

output = input * output_reference / input_reference

You can configure the maximum reference luminance (brightness slider at 100%) with the “Maximum SDR Brightness” in the display settings of Plasma 6.3. The minimum and maximum luminance your display can achieve can only be configured with the kscreen-doctor command line tool right now, but an easy to use calibration utility for this is nearly finished (and the default values are usually fine too).

In general, this system is working really well… with one rather big exception.

HDR in Windows games

As mentioned before, Windows in HDR mode does sRGB wrong, but the story with HDR content is kind of worse.

When you use Windows 11 on a desktop monitor and enable HDR, you get an “SDR content brightness” slider in the settings - treating HDR content as something completely separate that’s somehow independent of the viewing environment, and that you cannot adjust the brightness of. With laptop displays however, you get a normal brightness slider, which applies to both SDR and HDR content.

The vast majority of Windows games expect the desktop monitor case: Static, never changing luminance levels, which are displayed on the screen without any adjustments whatsoever. Windows also didn’t have a built-in HDR calibration tool until Windows 11, so nearly every Windows game ships with its own HDR calibration settings and completely ignores system settings. This doesn’t just cause issues for Windows 11 laptops of course, but also for playing these same games with HDR on Linux.

Until Plasma 6.2, we worked around that, also mostly not doing brightness adjustments, and the result was that those HDR calibration settings in games worked basically like on Windows. However, these workarounds broke Linux native applications that want to mix HDR and SDR in their own windows, made tone mapping worse, and blocked features like HDR on “SDR” laptop displays, so in Plasma 6.3 we had to drop them.

This doesn’t mean you can’t play Windows games with HDR in 6.3 anymore, you just have to adjust their configuration to match the changed brightness levels. In most cases, this means you set the HDR paper white in games to 203cd/m², and then set the maximum luminance with the game’s configuration screen, like this one from Baldur’s Gate 3:

How to implement good HDR

After ranting about how Windows games do it wrong, I should end this blog post by also explaining how to do it right. I will skip most of the implementation details, but on a high level if you’re implementing HDR in a Wayland native application or toolkit, you should

• use the Wayland color management protocol
• get the capabilities of the compositor and/or graphics driver, specifically the transfer functions they support
• get the preferred image description from the compositor, and the luminances you’re supposed to target from that. When using these luminance values, keep in mind that reference luminance adjustment the compositor will do!
• every time the preferred image description changes, get the new one and adjust your application to it
• now render for these parameters, and set the image description you actually ended up targeting on the surface, either through Vulkan or with the Wayland protocol (not both at the same time!)
• SDR things, like user interfaces in games, should use the reference luminance too
• if your application has some need to differentiate between “SDR” and “HDR” displays (to change the buffer format for example), you can do so by checking if the maximum mastering luminance is greater than the reference luminance
• now you can, and really should drop all HDR settings from your application. If HDR has a performance penalty in your application, a toggle to limit the app to SDR could still be useful, but everything else should be completely automatic and the user should not be bothered with calibration screens or similar annoyances

Qt Group is pleased to announce Qt for MCUs 2.10, a release packed with exciting new features designed to broaden GUI capabilities across IoT, consumer, and automotive segments. This update is filled with enhancements that will empower developers to create even more dynamic and efficient applications.

This blog lists some of the standout highlights from the 2.10 release.

Akademy 2025 will be held at the Technische Universität Berlin (TU Berlin) in Berlin, Germany, from Saturday the 6th to Thursday the 11th of September.

Akademy 2025 will be a hybrid event, combining on-site and remote sessions, and will include talks, workshops, Birds of a Feather (BoF) meetups, training and coding sessions. The conference is expected to draw hundreds of attendees from the global KDE community to discuss and plan the community's future and its technologies. Many participants from the broad free and open source software community, as well as local organizations and software companies, will also attend. The call for papers will open soon, and the registrations shortly after. We will soon update Akademy's website; in the meantime, follow us on Mastodon, Lemmy and Twitter to keep up to date with Akademy’s news.

About Berlin

Berlin, the capital and largest city of Germany, has a population of about 3.7 million and is located in the country's northeastern part. With over 800 years of history, it has been a key center for politics, culture, and technology, serving as the capital of the Kingdom of Prussia and later the German Empire.

The city is known for its cultural landmarks like the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag, along with renowned museums on Museum Island, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Berlin is also a hub for innovation and art, hosting events such as the Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale) and tech conferences like re:publica. It offers various recreational activities for residents and visitors.

About the Technische Universität Berlin (TU Berlin)

Technische Universität Berlin (TU Berlin) is a public research university. is one of the 20 largest universities in Germany with around 35,000 students in over 100 degree programs. It is known for its strong engineering, computer science, and natural sciences programs.
The university fosters innovation and international collaboration across disciplines.

About Akademy

For most of the year, KDE, one of the largest free and open software communities in the world, works online communicating over email, instant messaging, video-conferencing, forums and mailing lists. Akademy provides all KDE contributors with the opportunity to meet in person to foster social bonds, work on concrete technology issues, discuss new ideas, and reinforce the innovative, dynamic culture of KDE. Akademy brings together artists, designers, developers, translators, users, writers, sponsors and many other types of KDE contributors to celebrate the achievements of the past year and help determine the direction for the next year. Hands-on sessions offer the opportunity for intense work, bringing those plans to reality. The KDE community also welcomes companies building on KDE technology to Akademy, as well as those who are looking for opportunities.

In the past two months since the last update localization of KDE Itinerary has been improved, more ticket formats are supported and work on public transport information infrastructure continued, among many other things.

New Features

Localized units

In locales using imperial units Itinerary now shows distance, speed and temperature values converted to the corresponding units.

If you are using one of those locales but still want to use metric units that of course remains possible, there’s a switch on the settings page for forcing the use of metric units.

Events

We are in the middle of conference season, so there were several opportunities to watch Itinerary-adjacent talks:

• Felix, Jonah and Marcus presented Transitous at the Railway and Open Transport track of FOSDEM.
• Also at FOSDEM, Itinerary had a cameo-appearance in Hans-Jörg Happel’s talk about Structured Email in the Modern Email track.
• I spoke at the Wikidata Data Reuse Days about Itinerary’s use of Wikidata. Wikimedia Germany also covered that in a blog post.
• We had two presentations at the FOSSGIS Konferenz, with me introducing Transitous and Felix covering the routing engine behind it in more detail (both in German).

Besides conference talks there were also a few related sprints and meetups:

• The bi-annual OSM Hack Weekend in Karlsruhe.
• Another iteration of the Carl’s Kitchen Sprint.

This continues with the Plasma (Mobile) Sprint in Graz three weeks from now.

Infrastructure Work

Transitous GBFS rollout

Transitous has started to test first/last mile routing with shared vehicles in a few areas. If things hold up this is will be gradually added in more areas where there necessary data is available.

Similar to the GTFS format for public transport schedule data, there’s GBFS as the open standard for positions of currently available shared vehicles. That’s covering anything from bikes over electric kick-scooters to cars.

Client-side we are prepared for this already, KPublicTransport support this as routing parameters e.g. with OpenTripPlanner backends already.

There’s however still more work needed to expose this properly in the UI, not just as ad-hoc options as it’s done now but also as part of a persisted personal routing profile.

DOSIPAS ticket barcode container support

The travel document extractor can now decode UIC’s “DOSIPAS” ticket barcode container. That stands for “Double Signed Package Structure” and is the designated replacement for the UIC 918.3 container format. It uses the very compact but nasty to parse ASN.1 unaligned packed encoding rules (uPER) instead of zlib-compressed ASCII-ish content, and allows for more modern cryptographic signatures.

Similar to UIC 918.3 it can contain multiple payloads, both standardized and vendor-specific ones. The predominant one we found so far is “FCB” (Flexible Content Barcode), an also ASN.1 uPER encoded common superset of all European ticket data models with several hundred (mostly optional) properties. We had two of the three FCB versions already implemented fortunately.

DOSIPAS tickets are in use in some areas of France for regional trains, e.g. Grand Est and Normandie.

While this generally should improve Itinerary’s ability to detect tickets correctly, to the point of importing by just scanning the barcode even, there’s a darker side to this as well, the “Double Signed” part in DOSIPAS. That’s (optional) infrastructure for shortlived ticket barcodes that the vendor app continuously regenerates, not unlike what 2FA apps do.

The mechanism for this is documented, so we could also implement this of course. The challenging part here however is getting to the necessary secret key used to generate the dynamic signature.

For now most of the DOSIPAS samples found in the wild are fortunately still static, e.g. in PDFs. Should the dynamic ones become mandatory at some point that would basically imply a mandatory use of the vendor app.

KPublicTransport journey subsection API

Continuing the work around trip queries mentioned last time, KPublicTransport’s journey API received to few changes to make selecting sub-sections of a journey easier and to make reassembling journeys from sub-sections possible.

The main technical limitation for this so far was that the departure and arrival stops were treated specially and couldn’t hold the same information as intermediate stops. That’s a historical leftover from before we even had support for intermediate stops and meant that shortening/extending a journey would lose information.

While maybe a seemingly small implementation detail this nevertheless required quite some effort, and will allow removing some limitations in e.g. how train trips can be edited in Itinerary.

Fixes & Improvements

Travel document extractor

• Added or improved travel document extractors for 12go, Amtrak, Color Lines, Eventyay, Flixbus, Ghotel, SBB, SNCF, UK national railways, Universe and VR.
• Fixed validity end date parsing in FCB customer card barcodes.
• Fixed a crash on VDV tickets without a basic ticket data block.

All of this has been made possible thanks to your travel document donations!

Public transport data

• Read operator and occupancy information from DB Zugportal onboard API.
• Fixed OJP journey queries using stop identifiers (used e.g. in Switzerland).
• Correctly merge journey sections with partial intermediate stop data.

Itinerary app

• Correctly display coach/seat numbers when having a separate seat reservation or multiple travelers with different seat reservations.
• Don’t show delay information for walking legs.
• Fixed showing intermediate stops for bus trips.
• Don’t hide essential trip group map elements on low zoom levels.
• Fixed trip group map bounding box computations for trips without elements that change locations.
• Fixed data loss when realtime information would change the type of a reservation.
• Changed importing data from OSM to use Nominatim, as described here.
• Allow transfers to favorite location independent of the next reservation.
• Correctly handle nested events when determining transfers.
• Disabled Deutsche Bahn online ticket import as the corresponding API is no longer available.
• Don’t show city name in location search results if that matches the station name.
• Update statistics automatically when removing trips.
• Fixed misrendered labels in wallet passes created by the vdv-pkpass converter.

Itinerary also benefited from work on improving the Android platform integration of KDE apps as well as various fixes in the QtQuick Controls Breeze Style.

How you can help

Feedback and travel document samples are very much welcome, as are all other forms of contributions. Feel free to join us in the KDE Itinerary Matrix channel.

Kaidan 0.12.2 fixes some bugs. Have a look at the changelog for more details.

Changelog

Bugfixes:

• Fix removing corrected message (melvo)
• Fix showing message bubble tail only for first message of sender (melvo)

Download

• Source code (.tar.xz) (sig signed with 04EFAD0F7A4D9724)
• Linux (Flatpak on Flathub)

Or install Kaidan for your distribution:

Welcome to a new issue of "This Week in Plasma"! Every week we cover the highlights of what's happening in the world of KDE Plasma and its associated apps like Discover, System Monitor, and more.

This week we drilled into the outstanding bug lists, and drove the number of HI and VHI priority bugs down to their lowest ever numbers! In addition, we boosted performance, made high-visibility improvements to notification history and screen locking, implemented support for multiple cross-desktop standards, and way more! So, quite a big week.

Notable UI Improvements

Plasma 6.4.0

Notifications in the history popup now retain their interactive buttons, if they have any. If they don't but clicking on their background normally does something when they're in pop-up form, then they'll show an "Activate" button when in the history. (Dominique Hummel and Kai Uwe Broulik, link 1 and link 2)

On the lock and login screens, The clock and interactive UI elements are now only shown on one screen at a time when using a multi-screen setup; they fade out on screens without the pointer or keyboard focus, leaving those screens free to display pretty wallpapers. (Yifan Zhu, link 1 and link 2)

System Settings' Display Configuration page gained some UI Improvements; now the screen arrangement view is hidden when there's only one screen, and with more that one, there's a big obvious screen chooser at the top of the page to make it clear which screen is selected, and when there are any disabled but connected screens. (Oliver Beard, link)

Improved the appearance of the Comics widget when it hasn't been set up with any comics yet, or when there's been an error of some kind. (Christoph Wolk, link 1 and link 2)

You can now also use Meta+Tab and Meta+Shift+Tab to switch between windows, in addition to the current shortcuts. This supports our push to have all global actions include the Meta key for at least one of their shortcuts. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

KWin's "Fade Desktop" virtual desktop switching effect now has a customizable duration. (Konstantin Kharlamov, link)

Plasma's Notifications now respect requests to play sounds using "sound hints". (Ruslan Khabibullin, link)

The Breeze cursor theme with dark cursors is now named "Breeze Dark", and vice versa for the ones with light cursors. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)

Notable Bug Fixes

Plasma 6.3.4

Fixed the most common Plasma crash! This one could happen when unplugging screens, especially with a dock involved in the process somewhere. This was the final VHI priority bug! (David Edmundson, link)

Fixed the remaining causes of two common KWin crashes. (Xaver Hugl, link 1 and link 2)

Fixed a severe crash in Breeze-themed apps that we accidentally introduced in Plasma 6.3.3 alongside a change to fix a bug with color scheme support for creative color schemes. The change itself was fine, but it exposed a pre-existing issue that was also benign on its own. When the two combined… kaboom. But no more, now that it's fixed! (Albert Astals Cid, link)

Fixed a clipboard bug that caused non-ASCII text from items re-ordered in the history to become mangled when pasted. (Fushan Wen, link)

Fixed a bug that made it impossible to remove previously-added languages on System Settings' Region and Language page. (Christoph Wolk, link)

Fixed a bug that made Discover sometimes fail to show the current version of an app or package being updated to a newer one. (Ismael Asensio, link)

Fixed a visual glitch affecting auto-hiding top-positioned fit-content panels. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)

Plasma 6.4.0

Fixed several issues in the desktop & wallpaper settings window that prevented certain pages from being scrollable when the content was long. (Christoph Wolk, link 1 and link 2)

Notifications created by apps using the Notifications portal that specify something to happen when clicked now actually perform that action. (Kylie CT, link)

Fixed the System Tray's adherence to the part of the StatusNotifierItem spec that allows tray icons to ask to display a context menu on left-click. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

Flatpak apps from non-standard user-defined repositories are now shown on System Settings' Flatpak Permissions page. (Harald Sitter, link)

Fixed a bug that broke scrolling on certain scrollable views in the Application Dashboard widget. (Tomislav Pap, link)

When using the "Choose Player Automatically" feature of the Media Player widget, the actual name of the player is now shown on the lock screen (when using the feature to show media information on the lock screen) instead of the text "Choose Player Automatically". (Fushan Wen, link)

Fixed a bug that prevented the Media Frame widget from pausing the slideshow when hovered with the pointer, as it was originally intended to do. (Christoph Wolk, link)

Other bug information of note:

• Zero very high priority Plasma bugs! (3 last week). Current list of bugs
• 18 15-minute Plasma bugs (21 last week). Current list of bugs

Notable in Performance & Technical

Plasma 6.4.0

Massively improved performance when making screen recordings in Spectacle using the VP9 video format, which is used by default. (Arjen Hiemstra, link)

Implemented support for the wp_fifo_v1 Wayland protocol. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Implemented support for the Clipboard Portal. (David Redondo, link)

Made KWin more resilient against the issue of windows moving to strange positions when changing the screen arrangement or number of screens. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Plasma's log output is pretty quiet now thanks to Christoph's hard work. Nonetheless, he continued that work to help get us to zero! (Christoph Wolk, link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5, link 6, link 7, link 8, link 9, and link 10)

How You Can Help

KDE has become important in the world, and your time and contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we need your support to keep KDE sustainable.

You can help KDE by becoming an active community member and getting involved somehow. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE — you are not a number or a cog in a machine!

You don’t have to be a programmer, either. Many other opportunities exist:

• Triage and confirm bug reports, maybe even identify their root cause
• Contribute designs for wallpapers, icons, and app interfaces
• Design and maintain websites
• Translate user interface text items into your own language
• Promote KDE in your local community
• …And a ton more things!

You can also help us by making a donation! Any monetary contribution — however small — will help us cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors, and in general just keep KDE bringing Free Software to the world.

To get a new Plasma feature or a bugfix mentioned here, feel free to push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.

The KDE community will again participate in the Open Source Promotion Plan (OSPP), a program in which students can contribute to open source projects. Burgess Chang, is the KDE community contact.

As part of OSPP 2024, Hànyáng Zhāng (张汉阳) added Android support to Blinken. The work done is described in a series of blog posts, available in both English and Mandarin. The Android version is available from the KDE F-Droid nightly repository.

Unlike the Google Summer of Code, where stipends are funded by a company, stipends are primarily funded by the Chinese government with options for open source communities to contribute additional stipends if they wish to have more students participate in their projects than they get allocated. It is good that there is recognition that contributing to open source software is a skill that students should acquire.

The range of contributions that can be made in OSPP is not just limited to programming, contributions to other aspects that improve the open source software ecosystem such as translation and documentation are welcome. As it is a government funded program, there is a little more oversight to ensure tax payer funds are well spent. In particular, for most projects, contributions should be made to a publicly available repository associated with the project and that student participants are selected primarily based on their project application.

The plan aims to increase the programming and software engineering skills of students by encouraging them to participate in real world projects during their vacation period. While it is funded by the Chinese people, open source projects with contributors from all over the world apply to participate, and students from any part of the world can also apply to participate.

Mandarin and English are the official communication languages for the program, knowledge of one of these is sufficient to participate in the program.

The OSPP website lists the dates for each phase of the program. Important dates for this year are:

• 04 April - 04 May: Project submission period for approved open source communities
• 09 May - 09 June: Student project application period
• 01 July - 30 September: Coding and development period for accepted projects

Kaidan 0.12.1 fixes some bugs. Have a look at the changelog for more details.

Changelog

Bugfixes:

• Do not highlight unpinned chats when pinned chat is moved (melvo)
• Fix deleting/sending voice messages (melvo)
• Fix crash during login (melvo)
• Fix opening chat again after going back to chat list on narrow window (melvo)
• Increase tool bar height to fix avatar not being recognizable (melvo)
• Fix width of search bar above chat list to take available space while showing all buttons (melvo)
• Fix storing changed password (melvo)
• Fix setting custom host/port for account registration (melvo)
• Fix crash on chat removal (fazevedo)
• Move device switching options into account details to fix long credentials not being shown and login QR code being temporarily visible on opening dialog (melvo)
• Allow setting new password on error to fix not being able to log in after changing password via other device (melvo)

Download

• Source code (.tar.xz) (sig signed with 04EFAD0F7A4D9724)
• Linux (Flatpak on Flathub)

Or install Kaidan for your distribution: