One of the much requested feature for Kdenlive was a modern background removal tool.

Among the many features and enhancements that will come in 2025, we are excited to announce a preview version with a background removal tool using object masks. The feature is based on SAM2‘s object segmentation. You can download the Kdenlive test alpha version from the links at the bottom of this page.

Since this is a testing preview version, the binaries are not signed and you might need to manually allow the install on Windows.

Here is a quick demo of how the feature works in screenshots:

1. Add a clip to your project
2. Select a zone to apply the background removal
3. Click on the Mask button
4. Select Configure to setup the tool (to be done only the first time)

1. Click on Install in the Object detection setup

Go drink a coffee while the module is being downloaded and installed (between 5 and 15 minutes depending on your internet connection). Currently there is not much feedback from the install, we will improve this so just be patient.

Kdenlive downloads the smallest model by default. Once it shows up, you can close the dialog and start using the feature.

1. Click on the Create new mask button
2. Click on the object you want to keep (foreground)
3. When the white mask appears, click on Generate Mask
4. The video mask task starts, drink another coffee

When the video mask is created, it will appear in the mask manager dialog (2).

1. Drag your clip zone from the clip monitor to timeline
2. Select the newly created mask
3. Click on Apply Mask

Success, you can now enjoy your video without the background.

Of course, this feature can also be used for other exciting things like applying an effect or a color correction to a specific object only.

Keep in mind that this is an alpha version, we will enhance and polish it for the upcoming 25.04 version. Happy editing!

Linux AppImage download:

https://files.kde.org/kdenlive/unstable/kdenlive-25.04.0-alpha-x86_64.AppImage.mirrorlist

Windows download:

https://files.kde.org/kdenlive/unstable/kdenlive-25.04-alpha-x86_64.exe.mirrorlist

Flatpak:

Check our experimental nightly version (see instructions at the bottom of our download page)

Screen magnification is an accessibility feature that enlarges the screen to make text, images, and other user interface components easier to see or read. It is not something that requires constant developer attention, however, in Plasma 6.3, the zoom plugin received some improvements that I’d like to go over quickly.

Pixel grid

Arguably, it will be too hard to read text if the screen is “too” zoomed in. There are several ways how this case can be handled. For example, the magnification factor can be capped (e.g. to x8 or x10), or do nothing and just display blurry upscaled screen contents… or display something else.

With the old behavior, the zoom plugin used not to do anything special when the magnification factor reaches a high value, but with the new behavior, it is going to display the individual pixels on the screen. This can be very useful to developers, designers, etc.

System settings

In addition to the new pixel grid mode, the system settings for the zoom plugin received minor polishing to look more consistent with other config modules.

Future improvements

Keyboard shortcuts are not the only way how the zoom plugin can be triggered. For example, it can be also triggered by pressing Meta and Control keys and scrolling the mouse wheel to zoom. However, it is not exposed anywhere in the user interface and some people may prefer zooming with just the Meta key pressed. In order to address the discoverability issue of the mouse wheel gesture and allow using a different combination of modifier keys, there is already a patch to add the corresponding system setting, but it’s 6.4 material. It would be also nice to move screen magnifier settings from the desktop effects config module to the accessibility config module.

Last but not least, the zoom effect currently uses the bi-linear magnification filter, which produces okay-ish visual results, but it’s worth looking for alternative upscaling algorithms that handle edges better so zoomed in text looks less blurry.

Hello,

I need your help. I’ve created a first version of Skrooge that can be built on KF6 and Qt6 (Its temporary number version is 2.33.8).

I use it daily for managing my own accounts. However, before releasing an official version, I’d like some of you to test it and provide feedback by reporting any issues you encounter.

I’m counting on you! To get started, check out the download section and the README.md.

Thanks in advance!

After almost a year, I finally found some time to dive back into Krita. I stumbled upon the Memileo Impasto Brushes bundle, which mimics the texture and thickness of real paint—perfect for adding depth and dimension. Inspired to try them out, I created this quick one-hour painting.

I started this blog back in 2010. Back then I used Wordpress and it worked reasonably well. In 2018 I decided to switch to a static generated site, mostly because the Wordpress blog felt slow to load and it was hassle to maintain. Back then the go-to static site generator was Jekyll, so I went with that. Lately I’ve been struggling with it though, because in order to keep all the plugins working, I needed to use older versions or Ruby, which meant I had to use Docker to build the blog locally. Overall, it felt like too much work and for the past few years I’ve been eyeing Hugo - more so since Carl and others migrated most of KDE websites to it. I mean, if it’s good enough for KDE, it’s good enough for me, right?

So this year I finally got around to do the switch. I migrated all the content from Jekyll. This time I actually went through every single post, converted it to proper Markdown, fixed formatting, images etc. It was a nice trip down the memory lane, reading all the old posts, remembering all the sprints and Akademies… I also took the opportunity to clean up the tags and categories, so that they are more consistent and useful.

Finally, I have rewritten the theme - I originally ported the template from Wordpress to Jekyll, but it was a bit of a mess, responsivity was “hacked” in via JavaScript. Web development (and my skills) has come a long way since then, so I was able to leverage more modern CSS and HTML features to make the site look the same, but be more responsive and accessible.

Comments

When I switched from Wordpress to Jekyll, I was looking for a way to preserve comments. I found Isso, which is basically a small CGI server backed with SQLite that you can run on the server and embed it into your static website through JavaScript. It could also natively import comments from Wordpress, so that’s the main reason why I went with it, I think. Isso was not perfect (although the development has picked up again in the past few years) and it kept breaking for me. I think it haven’t worked for the past few years on my blog and I just couldn’t be bothered to fix it. So, I decided to ditch it in favor of another solution…

I wanted to keep the comments for old posts by generating them as static HTML from the Isso’s SQLite database, alas the database file was empty. Looks like I lost all comments at some point in 2022. It sucks, but I guess it’s not the end of the world. Due to the nature of how Isso worked, not even the Wayback Machine was able to archive the comments, so I guess they are lost forever…

For this new blog, I decided to use Carl’s approach with embedding replies to a Mastodon. I think it’s a neat idea and it’s probably the most reliable solution for comments on a static blog (that I don’t have to pay for, host myself or deal with privacy concerns or advertising).

I have some more ideas regarding the comments system, but that’s for another post ;-) Hopefully I’ll get to blog more often now that I have a shiny new blog!

Happy Holidays 🎄

Enjoy the holidays and see you in 2025 🥳!

In recent weeks we have been working on transferring LabPlot’s documentation to a new format.

We decided to move the documentation from the DocBook and MediaWiki format to the Sphinx/reStrcutredText framework. In our perception Sphinx offers a user-friendly and flexible way to create and manage documentation. Easy math typing and code formatting also come along. Additionally, Sphinx supports basic syntax checks, and modern documentation practices, such as versioning and integration with various output formats like HTML, PDF and ePub.

The new user’s manual is available on a dedicated page: https://docs.labplot.org. Please check it out and let us know what you think.

The manual still needs to be supplemented with new content, so we encourage you to contribute to the documentation, e.g. by fixing and adding new sections, updating images, as collaborative efforts can lead to a more comprehensive resource for everyone. Please check the Git repository dedicated to the documentation to find more details on how to help make it better.

Today, we bring you a report on the brand-new release of the Maui Project.

MauiKit 4 Frameworks & Apps

With the previous version released, MauiKit Frameworks and Maui Apps were ported over to Qt6, however, some regressions were introduced and those bugs have now been fixed with this new revision version.

Currently, there are over 10 frameworks, with two new ones recently introduced. They all, for the most part, have been fully documented, and although, the KDE doxygen agent has some minor issues when publishing some parts, you can find the documentation online at https://api.kde.org/mauikit/ (and if you find missing parts, confusing bits, or overall sections to improve – you can open a ticket at any of the framework repos and it shall be fixed shortly after)

A brief list of changes and fixes introduced to the frameworks are the following:

For MauiKit Controls

• MauiKit is now no longer dependent on MauiKit-Style, so any other QQC2 style can be used with Maui Apps (other styles are not supported).
• MauiKit documentation has been updated with notes on the new attached controls properties – https://api.kde.org/mauikit/mauikit/html/classControls.html
• MauiKit fixes the toast area notifications. The toast notifications can now take multiple contextual actions.
• MauiKit Demo app has been updated to showcase all the new control properties
• New controls: TextField, Popup, DropDownIndicator,
• MauiKit fixes the template delegates and the IconItem control
• MauiKit fixes to the Page autohide toolbars
• Update style and custom controls to use MauiKit Controls’ attached properties for level, status, title, etc.
• Display keyboard shortcut info in the MenuItems
• Update MauiKit Handy properties for isMobile, isTouch, and hasTransientTouchInput and fixes to the lasso selection on touch displays
• Added more resize areas to the BaseWindow type
• Check for system color scheme style changes and update accordingly. This works on other systems besides Plasma or Maui, such as Gnome or Android
• The type AppsView has been renamed to SwipeView, and AppViewLoader to SwipeViewLoader
• Update MauiKit-Style to support MauiKit Controls attached properties and respect the flat properties in buttons
• Fixes to the MauiKit bug in the GridBrowser scrollbars policy
• Fixes to the action buttons layout in Dialog and PopupPage controls
• Refresh the icon when a system icon-theme change is detected – a workaround for Plasma is used and for other systems the default Qt API

For the MauiKit Frameworks

• FileBrowsing fixes bugs with the Tagging components
• Fixes to the models using dates. Due to a bug in Qt getting a file date time is too slow unless the UTC timezone is specified
• Update FileBrowsing controls to use the latest Mauikit changes
• Added a new control: FavButton, to mark files as favorites using the Tagging component quickly
• Update and fixes to the regressions in the other frameworks
• ImageTools fixes the OCR page
• TextEditor fixes the line numbers implementation.

All of the frameworks are now at version 4.0.1

All of the apps have been reviewed for the regressions previously introduced in the porting to Qt6; those issues have been solved and a few new features have been added, such as:

• Station, now allows opening selected links externally
• Index fixes to the file previewer and support for quickly tagging files from the previewer
• Vvave fixes to the minimode window closing
• Update the apps to remove usage of the Qt5Compat effects module
• Fix issues in Fiery, Strike, and Agenda
• Fix the issue of selecting multiple items in the apps not working
• Clip fixes to the video thumbnail previews and the opening file dialog
• Implement the floating viewer for Pix, Vvave, Shelf, and Clip for consistency
• Correctly open the Station terminal at the current working directory when invoked externally
• Among many few other details

** Index, Vvave, Pix, Nota, Buho, Station, Shelf, Clip, and Communicator versions have been bumped to 4.0.1

*** Strike and Fiery browser versions have been bumped to 2.0.1

**** Agenda and Arca versions have been bumped to 1.0.1

And as for Bonsai, Era, and other applications still under development, there is still not a ported version to Qt6 as of now

Maui Shell

Although Maui Shell has been ported over to Qt6 and is working with the latest MauiKit4, a lot of pending issues are still present and being worked on. The next release will be dedicated fully on Maui Shell and all of its subprojects, such as Maui Settings, Maui Core, CaskServer, etc.

That’s it for now. Until the next blog post, that will be a bit closer to the 4.0.1 stable release.

Release schedule

The post Maui Release Briefing #7 appeared first on MauiKit — #UIFramework.

Ruqola 2.4.0 is a feature and bugfix release of the Rocket.chat messenger app.

Some of the new features in this release of Ruqola include:

• Allow to clean up room history when room was not opened for a long time.
• Add restore button in administrator server settings dialog.
• Improve changing password (show validation info).
• Improve register new account (Add reason support).
• Implement mute/unmute user.
• Add color to the text in the account tab.
• Allow to show private installed applications.

Some bug fixing:

• Fix editing message.
• Show permissions in Rocket.Chat Marketplace.
• Fix reconnect server.
• Fix single application on Windows/MacOs
• Fix select created room/discussion/teams
• Fix filter discussion in administrator mode
• Fix message video support
• Fix highlight text in quoted message
• Fix open discussion channel
• Allow to show application market settings

URL: https://download.kde.org/stable/ruqola/
Source: ruqola-2.4.0.tar.xz
SHA256: f532e421ae731dfc2e88b78ab61de01e0e367a31a4fe34497664a66fc737225c
Signed by: E0A3EB202F8E57528E13E72FD7574483BB57B18D Jonathan Riddell jr@jriddell.org
https://jriddell.org/jriddell.pgp

I recently saw one of my old branded “stripes” wallpapers in a screenshot of FreeBSD by someone on X, and that triggered me to make a new wallpaper in a similar style.

There was a call for artwork for the next Debian release – Trixie, and I made a modified version of one of my old wallpapers for it. As it was not chosen to be the default in Trixie, I decided to post it here for people who might like it.

It is, like all my wallpapers, a calm non-distracting one. (it is much prettier full-4k-size than in the thumbnail below)

If you like it, you can download it from Debian’s Wiki – in 1920x1080 and 4k versions. There is also a version with the Debian logo there for inspiration if you want to create a custom distribution-branded one.

The open source project I work on for the longest time is KDE and there more specific Kate.

This means I look at user bug reports for over 20 years now.

The statistics tell me our team got more than 9000 bugs since around 2001 (just for Kate, this excludes the libraries like KTextEditor that we maintain, too).

That is a bit more than one bug per day for over two decades.

And as the statistics show, especially in the last years we were able to keep the open bug count down, that means we fixed a lot of them.

Given we are a small team, I think that is a nice achievement.

We not just survived over 20 years, we are still alive and kicking and not just a still compiling zombie project.

Thanks a lot to all people that are contributing to this success!

Let’s keep this up in the next year and the ones following.