After having participated to both Qt Contributor Summit and Akademy, I ended up going to a few more conferences in September.
I went to Nextcloud Conference just after going back from Akademy. Unfortunately I was quite tired from Akademy and Qt Contributor Summit and I only stayed Saturday morning. Still it was great to meet some old colleagues there.
The Matrix Conference happened the weekend after the Nextcloud conference. This was the first Matrix Conference and a gathering of all types of actors involved in Matrix. From the grassroots community to companies deploying Matrix based solutions to their customers. The NeoChat team was there and we were super productive into bringing back the Android version, thanks to the help of Volker Krause. This resulted in many patches in NeoChat itself but also one patch in Kirigami.
Special mention to the food and coffee offered at the conference, which was always excellent and either vegan or vegetarian. Outside of the venue, food was also execellent with a lot of middle eastern food choice.
Here some photos of the event and the food:
It was my second time going to the Linux Days in Dornbirn and while the weather wasn’t as welcoming as last time, the local Linux community was again super welcoming!
During the event, I did a talk in German about Plasma 6. This was my first time doing a talk in German and I hope I did okay. I also hosted a KDE stand with Simon Österle, who offered his help with the stand. His help has been invaluable to me, so huge thanks to him.
Like last year, after the conference, all helpers, presenters and stand holders went to a local restaurent to enjoy Käsespätzle. It was again delicious.
Here some photos of the event and the food:
This release focuses on SiteSettings feature, so I will try to introduce it here.
This feature tries to enable per site configuration / settings of multiple options per website host / domain. It consist of having global / default options and site / local settings.
These options can be changed for the given site in the “Site Info” dialog.
The default options for HTML5 can be changed in “Preferences > Privacy”
The default QtWebEngine / site options can be changed in the Browsing tab or in place where they where configured until now.
In the preferences it is only possible to change existing modified permissions for given sites. At the moment it is not possible to manually add sites to the list, this can only be done from within “Site Info” dialog.
These features will be done at a later unspecified date.
The Amarok Development Squad is happy to announce the immediate availability of Amarok 3.1.1, the first bugfix release for Amarok 3.1 "Tricks of the Light"!
3.1.1 features a number of small improvements and bug fixes, including miscellaneous fixes for toolbars and the return of tag dialog autocompletions, a functionality that initially got lost during the Qt5/KF5 port. However, most of the work has again happened under the hood to improve the codebase's Qt6/KF6 compatibility. For the 3.2 version coming up later this year, the KDE frameworks dependency will be raised to 5.108. This should allow replacing the remaining deprecated KF5 functionalities; one of the final barriers preventing Qt6/KF6 based builds from succeeding.
In addition to source code, Amarok is available for installation from many distributions' package repositories, which are likely to get updated to 3.1.1 soon, as well as the flatpak available on flathub.
You can find the tarball package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with Tuomas Nurmi's GPG key.
Three weeks ago, I attended KDE Akademy 2024 in Würzburg, Germany. It was pretty exciting to meet my KDE friends after one year since last Akademy 2023!
Ideally whole trip should’ve taken just ~18 hours door-to-door but thanks to Lufthansa whole travel turned out to be of 48 hours in total including layovers. Flight cancellation and rebooking caused by travel to start way earlier than planned (Thursday 5:00 AM instead of planned 07:00 PM) and had to spend insane amount of time in layover.
The beta of Kubuntu Oracular Oriole (to become 24.10 in October) has now been released, and is available for download.
This milestone features images for Kubuntu and other Ubuntu flavours.
Pre-releases of Kubuntu Mantic Minotaur are not recommended for:
They are, however, recommended for:
The Beta includes some software updates that are ready for broader testing. However, it is an early set of images, so you should expect some bugs.
We STRONGLY advise testers to read the Kubuntu 24.10 Beta release notes before installing, and in particular the section on ‘Known issues‘.
You can also find more information about the entire 24.10 release (base, kernel, graphics etc) in the main Ubuntu Beta release notes and announcement.
To enable Flatpaks in KDE’s Discover in Kubuntu 24.10, run this command:
sudo apt install flatpak plasma-discover-backend-flatpak
To enable the largest Flatpak repository, run this command:
flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
Log out and log back in (or restart) to re-initialize the XDG_DATA_DIRS variable, otherwise, newly installed Flatpak apps will not run or appear in the startup menu.
This blog post provides the heads-up about planned tablet input changes that are brewing for Plasma 6.3. KWin provides support for the tablet input protocol, but things are different on the client side. Some apps support it, some do not. If an application supports the tablet input protocol, great, it will receive tablet input events as is. On the other hand, if the application does not support the tablet input protocol, then KWin will fake tablet input as pointer input. In Plasma 6.3, KWin will stop doing that and I think that we should briefly talk what led us to such a decision and what impact it will have.
Originally, when the tablet input protocol support had landed in KWin, there were still pretty few applications and toolkits that supported it. Emulating tablet input was a fairly reasonable decision, otherwise you would have likely not been able to use tablet in the Plasma Wayland session at all. As time went by, more and more clients gained native support for the tablet protocol. Unfortunately, in meanwhile, we had also started noticing various issues with tablet emulation.
So, what’s the reasonable thing to do about it? Fix the bugs of course. And we did. But there is still a set of issues that cannot be addressed without bringing more complexity in already too complex code that we are struggling to keep afloat. Enough is enough.
A: Starting since 6.3, tablet input emulation will be deprecated and disabled by default. Note that you can enable it back by setting the KWIN_WAYLAND_EMULATE_TABLET=1 environment variable.
A: There is no concrete milestone at the moment.
A: Hopefully, nothing. The major toolkits such as GTK, Qt, and SDL already provide support for the tablet protocol, so does Xwayland. So, you should be able to use tablet without any issues in X11 applications or Wayland native applications that use the aforementioned toolkits. Chromium/Electron still does not provide native support for tablet input on Wayland, but it’s also worth noting that most of those applications run through Xwayland by default unless the user sets some command-line arguments.
If your favorite application does not work with tablets, please tell it to the developers of that application so they know that there’s demand for such an operation mode.
A: Please add support for tablets! If your toolkit already supports the tablet input protocol, wonderful, no work to do. \o/
A: No, it is not. Mutter (the Wayland compositor in GNOME Shell) doesn’t emulate tablet input either.
Deprecating tablet emulation is disappointing but the options that we have are not great either. It’s either bring in more complexity in order to fix the existing issues (plus even more code to ensure that the pointer focus is managed correctly when using both pointer and tablet) into an already too complex codebase or just do nothing special about applications that don’t opt in into tablet input. Hopefully, the remaining applications and toolkits that still miss tablet support add it in the near future. If you have more thoughts about it, please reach out to us at our matrix room.
This year Akademy was in Würzburg (shock! horror!). I think its not too far fetched to say that we pulled it successfully.
During last years Akademy in Thessaloniki the idea came up given the high density of KDE people in the area to hold Akademy in Würzburg. On top we had the perfect venue in mind: two lecture halls for talks, BoF rooms and a ample common area for people to hack and socialize. I had such thoughts in the back of my mind for a while but did not share or go through with them.
However what Akademy does is it makes you talk to people and Tobias convinced it me that we should do it and more people even agreed that Akademy in Würzburg would be a good idea! (Of course some of these encouragers this does not mean work organizing Akademy like it would mean for us…) So on the second-to-last day of Akademy I sat down and wrote an email to my former university professor to enquire about the possibility of doing Akademy in the building that we envisioned.
And just like that, after some informal talks during Akademy and a meeting at the University and sending in a proposal after the Call for Hosts later you end up having weekly meetings to talk about and plan the next installment of Akademy.
There were some problems but I think all in all this year Akademy went very well. I heard so much praise and positive feedback it felt a bit surreal at first (as did Sunday evening when all the talks were done). The most stressful situation for me happened on Sunday afternoon when I retrieved my charging phone from the team room to discover that the social event could not go ahead as planned and trying to manage that with the rest of the team. I think the resulting evening was very nice and chill and you could feel my relieve. I heard there was even an afterparty afterwards at the bar where we had held the welcome event.
Of course during the event there are always minor issues that need dealing with and looking out for those, dealing with them and trying to make sure everything is running smoothly (and the stress coming these things) meant that I couldn’t (and was not in the right state of mind) to focus much on the talks. When the BoF days started this was bit better but only on Thursday after the day trip I felt in a ‘conference mood’ and was able to focus fully on the BoFs that I was attending and sit down and hack a bit. If you want to learn more about the actual conference many people have blogged about it on the planet or read the report on the Akademy website.
In the end I think it’s fair to say that Akademy was a success. Made possible by KDE e.V. (go donate!), the sponsors, all the people of the Akademy team local and non-local, all the Volunteers on short and on long notice an last but not least all the awesome attendees - there would be no Akademy without any people. Thank you to you all! I am excited to learn about where next years Akademy will be (you can do it as well - it’s not hard and you get an awesome award on top) and looking forward to attending it as ‘normal Attendee’ and meeting everyone again there (if not earlier).
Today we are releasing GCompris version 4.2.
It contains bug fixes and graphics improvements on multiple activities.
This version adds translation for Latvian.
It is fully translated in the following languages:
It is also partially translated in the following languages:
You can find packages of this new version for GNU/Linux, Windows, Android, Raspberry Pi and macOS on the download page. This update will also be available soon in the Android Play store, the F-Droid repository and the Windows store.
Thank you all,
Timothée & Johnny
CarlSchwan
@davidre:kde.org