Better late than never! After quite a few requests, here’s the second part of my backpacking adventure through the Balkans from back in July. If you missed the first part, you can check it out here.

After leaving Croatia, I traveled to the central Balkan countries: Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia.

Mostar

Since there were no trains from Split to Mostar, I took the bus instead.

In Mostar, I stayed at another Hostel called Taso’s House. It was a small hostel but the host made us discover the whole Herzegovina region and explained us a lot of things about his country, the complex political situation there and how it was to grow up in Mostar during the war.

I only stayed there for two nights, and I regret not staying a bit longer or visiting the genocide museum, which I’d heard great things about.

Sarajevo

The next stop on my trip was Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. I booked a train ticket online, and this is what I got. It was slightly tricky to import into KDE Itinerary, but the train ride itself was very enjoyable. Interestingly, although the train has both first- and second-class coaches, all tickets are sold as second class, and passengers are free to sit in the first-class coaches — which I did. 😉

Sarajevo itself was beautiful, and I took the cable car up into the mountains to visit the old Winter Olympics park. I even ended up appearing on the city’s television YouTube channel as a sort of side quest, along with three Australians.

Belgrade

Afterward, I went to Serbia — more precisely, to the capital, Belgrade. I took a night bus, which turned out to be a bit stressful. I almost missed it because I didn’t have one euro in cash to pay a surprising platform fee to enter the bus station. Then, at the border around 2 a.m., I was the only one who had to go through a full luggage check.

In Belgrade itself, I didn’t do much. I spent a lot of time at the hostel talking with other travelers and petting the hostel cat. I was a bit shocked by the amount of military propaganda I saw everywhere in the city.

Niš

On my way to Bulgaria, I made a short stop in Niš, in southern Serbia. It’s one of the largest cities in the country and has a strong Turkish influence.

Sofia

My next stop was Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria. Since there are no longer any passenger trains running between Niš and Sofia, I took an old bus from Niš across the Serbian and Bulgarian countryside, but the ride was confortable.

I only stayed one day in Sofia and scrolled the city with some people I meet in my hostel.

I visited the ‘Red Flat’, which was a time capsule of how a flat looked during the end of the comunism time. This was quite a retro experience. I also ended up visiting more orthodox churches.

Istanbul

The last stop on my trip was Istanbul. I took the night train there, which turned out to be a bad experience — we ended up waiting four hours at the border, and the whole process was quite inefficient.

Istanbul itself was amazing. I had originally planned to stay only three days before heading back to Bucharest, but I found a cheap flight (€50 with luggage) back to Berlin, so I ended up staying a total of six days. I stayed at a hostel called Second Home Hostel, which turned out to be a really fun place. The staff were extremely friendly, I met a lot of amazing people there, and we went out partying almost every night.

I also meet Jon Worth who was working on his #CrossBorderRail project and was at the same time in Istanbul.

And now back to the reality but I am already looking forward to my next backpacking trip.

One of the key problems we identified with previous KDE neon releases was that only user edition was receiving any meaningful testing. This often lead to a situation where problems were identified only when user edition was being readied for public release and bug squashing was hurried and therefore less than ideal.

To try and fix this problem, a dev archive named stable was created (this happened in Novemeber 24) and the daily builds for the neon testing are now uploaded there. Various automated and manual tests are run and when we are happy (usually at least on a weekly basis), the archive is snapshot out to the public facing testing archive. This is the same process that is utilised for KDE neon user edition which is snapshot from the dev based release archive.

So hopefully users of KDE neon testing and user editions have seen improved stability and less critical bugs over the last year. Live ISO’s are available to try at https://neon.kde.org/download

We are back!

"This Week in KDE Apps" is back! It's been a long time since the last issue, but every week, we cover as much as possible of what's happening in the world of KDE apps.

Getting back to all that's new in the KDE App scene, let's dig in!

KDE PIM

Merkuro Mail Read and write emails

Yuki Joou improved the handling of sender information in the mail viewer header (25.12.0 - link). She also fixed the mail composer not showing the right sender address (25.12.0 - link).

Merkuro Calendar Manage your tasks and events with speed and ease

Yuki also worked on Merkuro Calendar and fixed adding sub-items to tasks (25.12.0 - link), added a menu button to show/hide all calendars from an account (25.12.0 - link), and made sure we are only showing one refresh button in the account context menu (25.12.0 - link)

Supporting PIM libraries

Volker Krause made some more parts of the KMime API const correct and adapted various parts of the PIM codebase to that.

Allen Winter made Akonadi prefer MariaDB to MySQL when both are available (25.12.0 - link).

Multimedia Applications

Okular View and annotate documents

Volker Krause added some of the missing icons on Android (25.12.0 - link).

Koko Image Gallery

Marco Martin optimized starting Photos when opening it with a specific image (25.12.0 - link).

Games Applications

KRetro Libretro emulation frontend for Plasma

Seshan Ravikumar released a first alpha release for KRetro, a new game emulator based on libretro. You can read his announcement here

Chat Applications

NeoChat Chat on Matrix

Joshua Goins fixed room succession not actually working (25.08.4 - link).

Arno Rehn fixed the handling of encrypted polls and pinned messages (25.12.0 - link).

Browsers

Falkon Web Browser

Juraj Oravec added a "Dis/Enable Adblock" button to the adblock context menu (25.12.0 - link).

Konqueror KDE File Manager & Web Browser

Stefano Crocco fixed some issues with the searchbar (25.12.0 - link)

System Applications

Dolphin Manage your files

Kostiantyn Korchuhanov added the ability to hide files and folders from the Dolphin content menu. (25.12.0 - link)

Akseli Lahtinen added a separator to the navigator when it's used outside of the menubar. (25.12.0 - link)

Jean-Baptiste Mardelle fixed a bug where the video preview panel was crashing Dolphin when a video file was selected in some cases. (25.08.3 - link)

Journald Browser Browser for journald databases

Andreas Cord-Landwehr fixed case-sensitive search not being applied when navigating between highlighted matches. (link)

Help Center Browse and search documentation

Carl Schwan (me) changed the name used in Discover and apps.kde.org to Help Center instead of the old internal name: KHelpCenter. (25.12.0 - link)

Travel Applications

KDE Itinerary Digital travel assistant

Jonah Brüchert fixed some performance issues when showing the search results for a train/bus connection. (link 1, link 2 and link 3)

Carl Schwan (me) moved the licensing information about the components used in Itinerary to use standard KAboutComponent infrastructure. (link)

I’m delighted to announce the new 6.1.0 release of KPhotoAlbum, the photo management software for KDE/Linux!

This is the first new release of our new KF6/Qt6 port, and it brings some fine-tuning, but we could also bring forward the code apart from bugfixes. here's the ChangeLog:

Added

• Add command line option --config
• Add command line option --save-and-quit
• Add home and end key shortcuts to date bar
• Add option to append description text when changing multiple image descriptions (#470433)
• Show visual feedback when setting a rating in the viewer (#509964)

Changed

• index.xml file format version bumped to “11”: The new file format version improves the “compressed” file format and handles arbitrary category names correctly. Positionable tags are also now stored natively in the “compressed” file format with far less overhead.
• Disable “View” actions when not appropriate (#505185)

Fixed

• Fix purpose plugin support (#501885)
• Fix database corruption when using category names starting with numbers (#477533)
• Improve responsiveness of date bar
• Fix spurious entries in “Search for images and videos with incomplete dates” (#505023)
• Fix crash when interacting with a category after deleting it (#478015)

Thanks everbody!

According to git log, the following individuals contributed commits to the new version (in alphabetical order):

• Albert Astals Cid
• Yuri Chornoivan
• Carlos De Maine
• Nicolas Fella
• Balló György
• Willem Hobers
• Tobias Leupold
• Randall Rude
• Yaron Shahrabani
• Johannes Zarl-Zierl
• Justin Zobel

Thank you very much for putting your time and energy in our beloved project :-)

— Tobias

KWin GameController Plugin: Weeks 5-6

It's been another few weeks of progress on the KWin GameController Plugin and I've got a lot to share! After spending the previous weeks setting up the foundation, I've progressed things forward by improving the logic a bit more, creating a few integration tests, integrating it into System Settings, and making sure it runs well on real hardware like the steamdeck.

The primary change was splitting up GameController into two classes. The new one being GenericInputDevice which lives in emulatedInputDevice.{cpp/h}. This allowed me to separate the GameController logic responsible for emulating keyboard and mouse into it's own separate class. Now GameController wrapper class is just responsible for monitoring controller input, resetting idle timer on user activity, and logging.

GenericInputDevice

GenericInputDevice is a class that inherits from InputDevice and is used to emulated Keyboard/Mouse in order to send those inputs through KWins input pipeline. The input_events come from GameController and get processed exactly like they were previously. Each GameController has access to an instance of GenericInputDevice to make its own calls. In the near future I plan on creating a static instance of this class for all GameController to access.

// Inside Gamecontroller construct
 m_inputdevice = std::make_unique<EmulatedInputDevice>();
 KWin::input()->addInputDevice(m_inputdevice.get());

..

// GameController Event Handling Function
void GameController::handleEvdevEvent()
{
 input_event ev;
 for (;;) {
 const int rc = libevdev_next_event(m_evdev.get(), LIBEVDEV_READ_FLAG_NORMAL, &ev);
 if (rc == 0) {
 logEvent(&ev);

 input()->simulateUserActivity();

 if (m_usageCount == 0 || isTestEnvironment)
 m_inputdevice->emulateInputDevice(ev);

.. 

// EmulatedInputDevice
void EmulatedInputDevice::emulateInputDevice(const input_event &ev)
{
 m_ev = ev;
 if (ev.type == EV_KEY) {
 qCDebug(KWIN_GAMECONTROLLER) << "Face button pressed: Simulating User Activity";
 evkeyMapping();
 } else if (m_ev.type == EV_ABS) {
 qCDebug(KWIN_GAMECONTROLLER) << "Analog buttons pressed: Simulating User Activity";
 evabsMapping();
 }
}

void EmulatedInputDevice::evkeyMapping()
{
 bool state = m_ev.value ? true : false;
 std::chrono::microseconds time = std::chrono::seconds(m_ev.time.tv_sec) + std::chrono::microseconds(m_ev.time.tv_usec);

 switch (m_ev.code) {
 case BTN_SOUTH: // A button → Enter
 sendKeySequence(QKeySequence(Qt::Key_Return), state, time);
 break;
 case BTN_EAST: // B button → Escape
 sendKeySequence(QKeySequence(Qt::Key_Escape), state, time);
 break;
 case BTN_NORTH: // X button → Virtual Keyboard
 // TO-DO toggle Virtual Keyboard not working on my distro ( Kubuntu )
 EmulatedInputDevice::toggleVirtualKeyboard(QStringLiteral("forceActivate"));
 case BTN_WEST: // Y button → Space
 sendKeySequence(QKeySequence(Qt::Key_Space), state, time);
 break;
 case BTN_TL: // L button → Ctrl
 sendKeySequence(QKeySequence(Qt::Key_Control), state, time);
 break;
 case BTN_TR: // R button → Alt
 sendKeySequence(QKeySequence(Qt::Key_Alt), state, time);
 break;
 case BTN_START: // START button → Meta
 sendKeySequence(QKeySequence(Qt::Key_Meta), state, time);
 break;
 case BTN_SELECT: // SELECT
 break;
 // Add more button mappings here as needed
 default:
 break;
 }
}

..

Integration Test: Qt Test

Part of the requirements for proposing significant contributions to KWin is creating integration test. This provides some assurance that things, like core functionality of the plugin, won't break so easily in the future as new code gets added. For testing KWin, uses the Qt Test Framework. Learning how to use the framework to create my own tests has been fairly simple and straightforward. Still, what exactly to test, and how to test it, was not so straightforward.

I learned along the way that I'd be creating integration tests, instead of unit tests. The tests don't reference the plugins directly; instead, they test the effect of the plugins on the system overall. That meant that things which required an instance of the plugin to test were not possible in this case. That included testing hotplug capability, or the number of applications that the plugin thinks have opened an input device. Thankfully there were few very important functionalities that could be tested!

Those include:

// Test system idle time reset. Prevents suspend
void testResetIdleTime();

// Test Controller To Keyboard Input Emulation
void testKeyboardMapping();

// Test Controller To Pointer/Mouse Input Emulation
void testPointerMapping();

I took a lot of inspiration from the buttonrebind_test.cpp.

System Settings KCM

It was agreed upon early on that this plugin would be opt-in, giving the user to enable and disable it when they choose. For that I created a KDE Control Module or KCM. Or better put, I built on the existing Game Controller KCM :) I added a new UI element, a toggle, for users to enable and disable the plugin. On the backend, I added a Q_PROPERTY, pluginEnabled, which is responsible for checking the kwinrc Plugin configs, and writing to them, in order to manage the state of this plugin. This is what it currently looks like (subject to change):

Handling Lizard Mode

This was probably one of the most daunting parts of the project for me when I first started. I knew that steamOS had its own way of handling input coming from the Steam Deck controller which has nothing to do with KDE or Steam app. This is what allows the controller to work for navigating the device in game and desktop mode. It's what is refered to as "Lizard Mode". The controller -> keyboard/pointer rebinds that I implemented was based off of the rebinds of this Lizard mode. Ideally using a controller to navigate desktop feels/works the same across all devices on KDE.

It's important that this new plugin not disrupt the current input system for the steamdeck. Originally I was warned that opening the fd for this device would cause Lizard mode to be disabled, which would mean I would have to either:

A: Find a way to disable Lizard mode and implement it from scratch...

B: Figure out what disabled Lizard mode on FD open and how to prevent / enable it as needed.

or C: Just change the flag for opening the controller fd and everything works just fine :)

Yup. After some testing and the smallest change I've had to make all project the Steam Deck controller was able to be detected by the plugin as well as its input detected! Even better than that, and not sure why I did not put this together before, Steam Deck already maps its input to keyboard/mouse. Duh. So this gamepad plugin doesn't need to worry about mapping and of Steam Deck input to just use it prevent system sleep when activity from that controller is detected.

During my testing, I discovered that Steam Deck shows up on the system as 5 different controllers. Each having their own purpose, one to handle analog input (triggers, trackpads, sticks) another to handle face buttons & D-pad, another for keyboard, etc.. These are used by the system depending on the users needs. Again, this made life a lot easier. This are logs from evtest and gamecontroller plugin:

At the start of this project I had adopted a child. Some of you reading this post might have met my child. It's named

As some put it:

Wow this is an ELEVEN (!) year old bug.

This issue is so old it can go to middle school.

and my favorite

Is there any hope that this bug will be fixed before the heat death of the universe?

By the time I met Bug328987, it had been around for ≈12 years. But still! In the eyes of KDE, it was a young, bright eyed, workflow-breaking bug, like all the bugs out there, and it had potential to be fixed! After months of back and forth with mentors, living in KDE matrix server like it were my personal Discord server, and learning how to not do things in the code base - I'm proud to say gamecontroller plugin properly addresses Bug328987. Bringing to an end its more than a decade long journey. They grow up so fast.

What’s next from here

• Integration into Kwin Proper: "Draft" label has been removed from MR and is ready for review.
• Final Fixes and Touch-up: Get Virtual Keyboard working, KCM toggle hot-plug, improve analog -> pointer emulation.

Reference documentation

• buttonrebind_test: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/blob/master/autotests/integration/buttonrebind_test.cpp
• GameController KCM: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-desktop/-/tree/master/kcms/gamecontroller
• Qt Test: https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qtest-overview.html
• Steam Controller Input: https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamController/wiki/index/

Other useful links

KWin Gamepad Plugin: https://invent.kde.org/yorisoft/kwin/-/tree/work/yorisoft/gamepad-plugin/src/plugins/gamepad

Haruna version 1.5.0 is released.

The highlight of this release is the playlist, which got a lot of features:

• multiple playlists through tabs (Muhammet Sadık Uğursoy)
• drag and drop reordering (Muhammet Sadık Uğursoy)
• add files and folders through drag and drop (Muhammet Sadık Uğursoy)
• filtering (Muhammet Sadık Uğursoy)
• option to control playback behavior when a file ends: repeat playlist, repeat file, stop after last file in playlist, stop after current fille and play a random item

Another big change is to the Mouse settings, now you can use a mouse button + modifier key combo (ctrl + left click, shift + scroll up/down etc.).

Windows version:

• haruna-1.5.0-windows-gcc-x86_64.exe
• haruna-1.5.0-windows-gcc-x86_64.7z

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.

Changelog

1.5.0

Known issues

On Windows the Shortcuts and Custom Commands settings pages don't work.

Features

Settings

• General
  • added single instance setting to play new file when appending to the playlist
  • removed the "File dialog location setting"
• Playlist: added settings to control playback behavior
• Mouse
  • changed to allow modifier keys
  • added support for Mouse Forward and Back buttons
• Subtitles: if a relative folder name in the Load subtitle from list starts with an * (asterisk) then subtitles will be searched in all folders contaning the folder name. Example: If the Load subtitle from list contains an entry *sub and you have the following folders next to the video file subs, more subs and subtitles all of these folders will be searched.
• the settings window now has a minimum width and height

PlayList

• added support for multiple playlists
• items can be reordered manually through drag and dropdown
• items can be selected, ctrl+click to select multiple items, shift+click to select a range
• items can be filtered
• added setings to control playback behavior when a file ends
• when saving the playlist the file extension is set to m3u
• can add files and folders through drag and drop
• multiple files can be added through the option in the header
• hide playlist when mouse leaves window while maximized, prevents opening the playlist when moving mouse to another monitor

Playback

• if a file can't be played now an error is shown and playback stops instead of trying to play the next file (prevents a potential infinite loop when no file in the playlist can be played)
• can play files starting with a dot (hidden files)
• an error is shown when failing to get youtube playlist

Other

• mpris: add support for Shuffle and LoopStatus
• changed the action selection popup to use Kirigami.SearchDialog
• replaced the spinning icon with a progress bar and label
• the drop area of the video is split in 2 parts now
  • top part always appends to the default playlist
  • bottom part clears the default playlist and adds the dropped files and folders, when only one file is dropped it behaves as the open file action (clears the playlist and loads sibling files if enabled in settings)
• recent files are now stored in a sqlite database
• time positions used to restore videos are also stored in the database
• sleep is blocked on Windows too
• all strings should be translatable now

Bugfixes

• fixed the loop action, osd was not showing and progress bar was not highlighting the loop range
• before loading check that the file exists
• fixed loading wrong subtitles when using recursive subs
• fixed the progress bar getting taller when the chapters menu becomes visible
• fixed a bug where the video would pause after clicking the progress/seek bar

Beginning of 2025 I was searching through the version history of Qt OPC UA - trying to find out when a certain issue got introduced. At some point I was curious: How long does this thing go back?! Turns out that the first git commit is dated 25th of September 2015. Which means we have been doing this for over 10 years now!

Continue reading 10 Years of Qt OPC UA at basysKom GmbH.

Kirigami Addons is a collection of supplementary components for Kirigami applications. Version 1.10.0 is a relatively minor release, introducing KirigamiApp and some improvements on Android regarding the new edge-to-edge support introduced in Android 15.

New Features

Aleix Pol Gonzalez added a KirigamiApp component which removes quite a bit of boilerplate to setup a Kirigami applications.

It now looks like this and will setup theming, crash reporting and more automatically in one place:

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
 KirigamiApp::App app(argc, argv);
 KirigamiApp kapp;

 // Set up KAboutData

 // QCommandLineParser creation and processing

 if (!kapp.start("org.kde.myapp", u"Main", new QQmlApplicationEngine)) {
 return -1;
 }
 return app.exec();
}

Bug fixes

Volker Krause added edge-to-edge support to the BottomDrawer and the MaximizedComponents.

Packager Section

You can find the package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with my GPG key.

First maintenance release of the 25.08 series is out continuing the focus on stability and polish with many fixes for crashes and regressions as well as user interface and usability improvements.

Some packaging issues caused a small delay for this release announcement, sorry for the inconvenience. Thanks to all the people who help make Kdenlive more stable by reporting bugs, providing patches or sending constructive feedback.

For the full changelog continue reading on kdenlive.org.