We finally made it: Kaidan’s next release with so many features that we cannot summarize them in one sentence!

Most of the work has been funded by NLnet via NGI Assure and NGI Zero Entrust with public money provided by the European Commission. If you want Kaidan’s progress to continue and keep more free software projects alive, please share and sign the open letter for further funding!

Now to the bunch of Kaidan’s new and great features:

Group chats with invitations, user listing, participant mentioning and private/public group chat filtering are supported now. In order to use it, you need an XMPP provider that supports MIX-Core, MIX-PAM and MIX-Admin. Unfortunately, there are not many providers supporting it yet since it is a comparatively recent group chat variant.

You do not need to quote messages just to reply to them any longer. The messages are referenced internally without bloating the conversation. After clicking on a referenced message, Kaidan even jumps to it. In addition, Kaidan allows you to remove unwanted messages locally.

We added an overview of all shared media to quickly find the image you received some time ago. You can define when to download media automatically. Furthermore, connecting to the server is now really fast - no need to wait multiple seconds just to see your latest offline messages anymore.

If you enter a chat address (e.g., to add a contact), its server part is now autocompleted if available. We added filter options for contacts and group chats. After adding labels to them, you can even search by those labels. And if you do not want to get any messages from someone, you can block them.

In case you need to move to a new account (e.g., if you are dissatisfied with your current XMPP provider), Kaidan helps you with that. For example, it transfers your contacts and informs them about the move. The redesigned onboarding user interface including many fixes assists with choosing a new provider and creating an account on it.

We updated Kaidan to the API v2 of XMPP Providers to stay up-to-date with the project’s data. If you are an operator of a public XMPP provider and would like Kaidan’s users to easily create accounts on it, simply ask to add it to the provider list.

The complete list of changes can be found in the changelog section. There is also a technical overview of all currently supported features.

Please note that we currently focus on new features instead of supporting more systems. Once Kaidan has a reasonable feature set, we will work on that topic again. Even if Kaidan is making good progress, keep in mind that it is not yet a stable app.

Changelog

Features:

• Add server address completion (fazevedo)
• Allow to edit account’s profile (jbb)
• Store and display delivery states of message reactions (melvo)
• Send pending message reactions after going online (melvo)
• Enable user to resend a message reaction if it previously failed (melvo)
• Open contact addition as page (mobile) or dialog (desktop) (melvo)
• Add option to open chat if contact exists on adding contact (melvo)
• Use consistent page with search bar for searching its content (melvo)
• Add local message removal (taibsu)
• Allow reacting to own messages (melvo)
• Add login option to chat (melvo)
• Display day of the week or “yesterday” for last messages (taibsu, melvo)
• Add media overview (fazevedo, melvo)
• Add contact list filtering by account and labels (i.e., roster groups) (incl. addition/removal) (melvo, tech-bash)
• Add message date sections to chat (melvo)
• Add support for automatic media downloads (fazevedo)
• Add filtering contacts by availability (melvo)
• Add item to contact list on first received direct message (melvo)
• Add support for blocking chat addresses (lnj)
• Improve notes chat (chat with oneself) usage (melvo)
• Place avatar above chat address and name in account/contact details on narrow window (melvo)
• Reload camera device for QR code scanning as soon as it is plugged in / enabled (melvo)
• Provide slider for QR code scanning to adjust camera zoom (melvo)
• Add contact to contact list on receiving presence subscription request (melvo)
• Add encryption key authentication via entering key IDs (melvo)
• Improve connecting to server and authentication (XEP-0388: Extensible SASL Profile (SASL 2), XEP-0386: Bind 2, XEP-0484: Fast Authentication Streamlining Tokens, XEP-0368: SRV records for XMPP over TLS) (lnj)
• Support media sharing with more clients even for sharing multiple files at once (XEP-0447: Stateless file sharing v0.3) (lnj)
• Display and check media upload size limit (fazevedo)
• Redesign message input field to use rounded corners and resized/symbolic buttons (melvo)
• Add support for moving account data to another account, informing contacts and restoring settings for moved contacts (XEP-0283: Moved) (fazevedo)
• Add group chat support with invitations, user listing, participant mentioning and private/public group chat filtering (XEP-0369: Mediated Information eXchange (MIX), XEP-0405: Mediated Information eXchange (MIX): Participant Server Requirements, XEP-0406: Mediated Information eXchange (MIX): MIX Administration, XEP-0407: Mediated Information eXchange (MIX): Miscellaneous Capabilities) (melvo)
• Add button to cancel message correction (melvo)
• Display marker for new messages (melvo)
• Add enhanced account-wide and per contact notification settings depending on group chat mentions and presence (melvo)
• Focus input fields appropriately (melvo)
• Add support for replying to messages (XEP-0461: Message Replies) (melvo)
• Indicate that Kaidan is busy during account deletion and group chat actions (melvo)
• Hide account deletion button if In-Band Registration is not supported (melvo)
• Embed login area in page for QR code scanning and page for web registration instead of opening start page (melvo)
• Redesign onboarding user interface including new page for choosing provider to create account on (melvo)
• Handle various corner cases that can occur during account creation (melvo)
• Update to XMPP Providers v2 (melvo)
• Hide voice message button if uploading is not supported (melvo)
• Replace custom images for message delivery states with regular theme icons (melvo)
• Free up message content space by hiding unneeded avatars and increasing maximum message bubble width (melvo)
• Highlight draft message text to easily see what is not sent yet (melvo)
• Store sent media in suitable directories with appropriate file extensions (melvo)
• Allow sending media with less steps from recording to sending (melvo)
• Add media to be sent in scrollable area above message input field (melvo)
• Display original images (if available) as previews instead of their thumbnails (melvo)
• Display high resolution thumbnails for locally stored videos as previews instead of their thumbnails (melvo)
• Send smaller thumbnails (melvo)
• Show camera status and reload camera once plugged in for taking pictures or recording videos (melvo)
• Add zoom slider for taking pictures or recording videos (melvo)
• Show overlay with description when files are dragged to be dropped on chats for being shared (melvo)
• Show location previews on a map (melvo)
• Open locations in user-defined way (system default, in-app, web) (melvo)
• Delete media that is only captured for sending but not sent (melvo)
• Add voice message recorder to message input field (melvo)
• Add inline audio player (melvo)
• Add context menu entry for opening directory of media files (melvo)
• Show collapsible buttons to send media/locations inside of message input field (melvo)
• Move button for adding hidden message part to new collapsible button area (melvo)

Bugfixes:

• Fix index out of range error in message search (taibsu)
• Fix updating last message information in contact list (melvo)
• Fix multiple corrections of the same message (melvo, taibsu)
• Request delivery receipts for pending messages (melvo)
• Fix sorting roster items (melvo)
• Fix displaying spoiler messages (melvo)
• Fix displaying errors and encryption warnings for messages (melvo)
• Fix fetching messages from server’s archive (melvo)
• Fix various encryption problems (melvo)
• Send delivery receipts for catched up messages (melvo)
• Do not hide last message date if contact name is too long (melvo)
• Fix displaying emojis (melvo)
• Fix several OMEMO bugs (melvo)
• Remove all locally stored data related to removed accounts (melvo)
• Fix displaying media preview file names/sizes (melvo)
• Fix disconnecting from server when application window is closed including timeout on connection problems (melvo)
• Fix media/location sharing (melvo)
• Fix handling emoji message reactions (melvo)
• Fix moving pinned chats (fazevedo)
• Fix drag and drop for files and pasting them (melvo)
• Fix sending/displaying media in selected order (lnj, melvo)

Notes:

• Kaidan is REUSE-compliant now
• Kaidan requires Qt 5.15 and QXmpp 1.9 now

Download

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

Or install Kaidan for your distribution:

This time, it’s a short one: We ported KPhotoAlbum to Qt6/KF6. That’s it ;-)

The port itself has been done by Johannes and me, additional commits have been contributed by Randall Rude and Fabian Würfl. Thanks for working on KPA with us!

One thing that’s worth mentioning is: For the map/geodata functionality, we need Marble. The Qt5/KF5 version of Marble can’t be co-installed with the Qt6/KF6 version, and this one is not released yet. But Marble 24.12.0 (which will be the first official Qt6/KF6 release) will be released in a few days. So just wait until it's out before upgrading to KPA 6, to not lose the map parts.

Maybe, the Qt6/KF6 version contains some regressions. The codebase is quite well advanced in years in some parts, and we had to mess with quite some legacy issues to make the whole thing fit for Qt6/KF6. So if you notice anything, please file a respective bug report and/or contact us via our mailing list or Matrix channel (cf. User support → Communication). Thanks for your participation (hopefully, it won’t be necessary too much).

Have a lot of fun with KPhotoAlbum 6 :-)

— Tobias

Plasma Wayland Protocols 1.15.0 is now available for packaging. It is needed for the forthcoming KDE Frameworks.

URL: https://download.kde.org/stable/plasma-wayland-protocols/
SHA256: e5aedfe7c0b2443aa67882b4792d08814570e00dd82f719a35c922a0993f621e Signed by: E0A3EB202F8E57528E13E72FD7574483BB57B18D Jonathan Riddell jr@jriddell.org

Full changelog:

• Add a request to create a virtual output stream with description
• Add alpine CI
• Add modifier information to keystate
• gitignore: use same as KWin
• Add a destructor to appmenu manager
• Add protocol tests
• Add CI for static builds on Linux

Lots of KDE hacking these days, and that comes with compiling large amounts of code. Right now, I am installing, well building from source Plasma Mobile on an “old” laptop so I can test some patches natively on a touchscreen device. The machine has just two cores (hyperthreaded), so builds take rather long, especially if you build Qt and all that 80+ packages that are needed for a fully working Plasma system.
One of the tools that do an incredible job while being super flexible to use is icecream. Icecream (or “icecc“) allows you to distribute your build over multiple machines, it basically ships compile-jobs with all that’s needed to other machines on a local network, meaning you can parallelize your builds.

Icecream has this nice visualization tool, called icecream-monitor which you can stare at while your builds are running (in case you don’t have anyone handy for a sword-fight). In the screenshot you can see manta, the underpowered laptop doing a 32 parallel job build over the network. miro is my heavy workstation, 8 cores and 128GB of RAM, it duely gets the bulk of the work assigned, frame is my (Framework) laptop, which is also quite beefy, gets something to do too, but not taxed as heavily as that build monster in my basement office.
Icecream can be used with most environments that have you run your compiler locally. Different distros are no problem! Just a matching CPU architecture is needed. Icecream does its job by providing its own g++ and gcc binaries, which will relay the build jobs transparently to either your local machine or across the network. So you basically install it, adjust your PATH variable to make sure icecc’s g++ is found before your system’s compiler and start your build. Other machines you want to join in for the fun just need to run icecc-scheduler and they will be automatically discovered as build slaves on your network. If you want to further speed up builds, it works with ccache as well.

Please note that you only want to do this in a trusted environment, we’re shipping executables around the network without authorization!

KStars v3.7.4 is released on 2024.12.05 for Windows, MacOS & Linux. It's a bi-monthly bug-fix release with a couple of exciting features.

Tracking library dependencies work in Debian to resolve from symbols usage to a library and add this to the list of dependencies. That is working for years now. The KDE community nowadays create more and more QML based applications. Unfortunately QML is a interpreted language, this means missing QML dependencies will only be an issue at runtime.

To fix this I created dh_qmldeps, that searches for QML dependencies at build time and will fail if it can't resolve the QML dependency.

Me didn't create an own QML interpreter, just using qmlimportscanner behind the scenes and process the output further to resolve the QML modules to Debian packages.

The workflow is like follows:

The package compiles normally and split to the binary packages. Than dh_qmldeps scans through the package content to find QML content ( .qml files, or qmldirfor QML modules). All founded files will be scanned by qmlimportscanner, the output is a list of depended QML modules. As QML modules have a standardized file path, we can ask the Debian system, which packages ship this file path. We end up with a list of Debian packages in the variable ${qml6:Depends}. This variable can be attached to the list of dependencies of the scanned package. A maintainer can also lower some dependencies to Recommends or Suggest, if needed.

You can find the source code on salsa and usage documentation you can find on https://qt-kde-team.pages.debian.net/dh_qmldeps.html.

The last weeks I now enabled dh_qmldeps for newly every package, that creates a QML6 module package. So the first bugs are solved and it should be usable for more packages.

By scanning with qmlimportscanner trough all code, I found several non-existing QML modules:

• import QtQuick3DPrivate qt6-multimedia - no Private QML module QTBUG-131753.
• import QtQuickPrivate qt6-graphs - no Private QML module QTBUG-131754.
• import QtQuickTimeline qt6-quicktimeline - the correct QML name is QtQuick.Timeline QTBUG-131755.
• import QtQuickControls2 qt6-webengine - looks like a porting bug as the QML6 modules name is QtQuick.Controls QTBUG-131756.
• import QtGraphicalEffects kquickimageeditor - the correct name is for QML6 is qt5compat.graphicaleffects, properly as it is an example nobody checks it kquickimageeditor!7.

YEAH - the first milestone is reached. We are able to simply handle QML modules.

But QML applications there is still room for improvement. In apps the QML files are inside the executable. Additionally applications create internal QML modules, that are shipped directly in the same executable. I still search for a good way to analyse an executable to get a list of internal QML modules and a list of included QML files. Any ideas are welcomed :)

As workaround dh_qmldeps scans currently all QML files inside the application source code.

The Fedora KDE SIG is pleased to announce that KDE Gear 24.12 RC (24.11.90) is available on Fedora 41 via our @kdesig/kde-beta COPR repository

Enjoy!

Kirigami Addons is a collection of additional components for Kirigami applications. This release brings mostly improvements to the FormCard module.

AboutPage

The about page provided by Kirigami Addons received many improvements. Joshua added icons to all the buttons.

I worked on the component section, which now contains more information about the default components as well as the underlying platform and now has a button to copy all this information to the clipboard. This is super helpful, when writing a bug report. There were also some small bug fixes with, for example, the license dialog being correctly sized.

RadioSelector

A new component is the RadioSelector, which is a simple component that allows one to choose an option between two or more choices in a horizontal layout. This is not a new component as it has already been used in Itinerary and Marknote for a long time.

There is also a FormCard version of this, called FormRadioSelectorDelegate.

FormPlaceholderMessageDelegate

Another new component is FormPlaceholderMessageDelegate, which is basically a Kirigami.PlaceholderMessage, but instead of putting it in a ListView, this one is to be put inside a FormCard.

Other

Volker fixed the Android integration of the date picker. He also added support for static builds (required for iOS and probably hopeful for other platforms).

Claudio fixed various issues with the DatePicker.

Joshua made the caption used in AlbumMaximizeComponent selectable with the mouse. He also fixed the separator for the IndicatorItemDelegate which only appeared after the first item.

I added icon support to FormSwitchDelegate, which is similar to what we already have in FormRadioDelegate and FormCheckDelegate.

Packager Section

Kirigami Addons 1.6.0 was tagged but the tarball are not yet available. I will update this post once it is available.

The first release of OptiImage is finally out! OptiImage is a useful image compressor that supports PNG, JPEG, WebP and SVG file types. It doesn’t do the compression itself but uses various tools like oxipng to do the compression.

Thanks to Mathis Brüchert for his work on the icon and to Soumyadeep Ghosh for a bunch of bug fixes and pushing me to do the release.

Packager Section

OptiImage 1.0.0 was tagged but the tarball are not yet available. I will update this post once it is available.