I'm happy to have been able to attend my first in-person KDE event, the Automation & Systematization Sprint in Berlin. Previously, my contributions to KDE have consisted of submitting and triaging bug reports. During this weekend, I was able to meet some of the KDE team in person, and become more involved. I've started working with the Bugzilla Bot code, and plan to start digging into the automated test code.
The Bugzilla product list had fallen out of date, so first I updated that (yay, my first accepted MR!). I also started working on using the GitLab API to automate these updates. In the near future, I'll be tackling some requested improvements to the Bugzilla Bot. This will lessen the amount of boring manual bug chores and free people up to do more valuable work.
Thanks to the KDE team for being so friendly and willing to help me learn the development environment. I'm happy to have found more ways to contribute that I enjoy, and will be valuable to the project.
The Amarok Development Squad is happy to announce the immediate availability of Amarok 3.0 "Castaway"!
The new 3.0 is the first stable Qt5/KDE Frameworks 5 based version of Amarok, and first stable release since 2018,
when the final Qt4 based version 2.9.0 was released.
The road to 3.0 has not been a short one. Much of the Qt5/KF5 porting was done in 2015 already, but finishing and polishing everything up has been
a slow, sometimes ongoing and sometimes stalled process ever since.
3.0 Alpha was released in February 2021 and has been since used by many people, as have been nightly builds of git master available for various distributions.
Now in the past few months, an effort was made to get everything ready for a proper 3.0 release.
Common usecases should work quite well, and in addition to fixing KF5 port related regressions reported in pre-releases,
3.0 features many bugfixes and implemented features for longstanding issues, the oldest such documented being from 2009.
However, with more than 20 years of development history, it is likely that not every feature Amarok has been tested thoroughly in the new release, and specifically
some Internet services that have changed their API in recent years are not available, at least for now.
It might well be that getting them in better state wouldn't require huge effort, however, so if you know your way with Qt and KDE Frameworks and your favourite Internet music service does not work with Amarok 3.0,
you are extremely welcome to join in and help!
In the following months, minor releases containing small fixes and additions, based on both newly reported and longer-standing bug reports and feature requests, are to be expected.
Work on porting to Amarok to Qt6/KDE Frameworks 6 should start in the following months, the goal being to have a usable Qt6/KF6 based beta version in 2024 still.
One should observe that due to scripting framework port from QtScript to QJSEngine still being a work in progress,
previous Amarok 2.x scripts are often not compatible. The script API documentation at community wiki is also partially out of date.
Additionally, due to incompatibilities and other issues, KNewStuff downloading of scripts is disabled for the time being.
Having script support in more polished shape is something to work on after an initial Qt6/KF6 version starts to be usable.
It is also evident that the web site and community wiki pages largely originate from more than ten years ago,
and contain partially outdated information. Some work on refreshing them and pruning the documentation to make it more maintainable is likely to happen during the following months.
Now it's time to Rediscover Your Music in the 2020's!
Changes since 3.0 Beta (2.9.82)
FEATURES:
Added a visual hint that context view applets can be resized in edit mode.
Display missing metadata errors in Wikipedia applet UI.
Add a button to stop automatic Wikipedia page updating. (BR 485813)
CHANGES:
Replace defunct lyricwiki with lyrics.ovh as lyrics provider for now. (BR 455937)
Show only relevant items in wikipedia applet right click menu (BR 323941), use
monobook skin for opened links and silently ignore non-wikipedia links.
Don't show non-functional play mode controls in dynamic mode (BR 287055)
BUGFIXES:
Fix loading of some Flickr photos in the photos context view applet and show more relevant photos. (BR 317108)
Fix playlist inline play control slider knob & draw playlist delegate icons with
higher DPI.
Fix searching for composer and album info for local files in Wikipedia applet.
Don't remove wrong songs from collection when contents of a folder, whose name is
a substring of another collection folder, are changed (BR 475528)
Prefer symbolic systray icon to fix colours in Plasma6 systray (BR 485748)
The complete ChangeLog, which includes the pre-releases, is available
in the git repository.
To provide some insight on the road from 2.9.0 to 3.0.0,
statistics collected from git repository are presented:
Commits and added/removed lines of code between 2.9.0 and 3.0 alpha (2.9.71)
l10n daemon script: 117 commits, +898, -192 Heiko Becker: 72 commits, +5641, -2112 Laurent Montel: 69 commits, +9478, -9697 Aroonav Mishra: 65 commits, +15474, -6808 Pino Toscano: 31 commits, +6892, -1637 Malte Veerman: 30 commits, +19466, -29990 Olivier CHURLAUD: 27 commits, +1106, -474 Yuri Chornoivan: 19 commits, +966, -806 Pedro de Carvalho Gomes: 8 commits, +145, -407 Pedro Gomes: 7 commits, +7222, -805 Luigi Toscano: 7 commits, +15, -14 Mark Kretschmann: 6 commits, +27, -17 Wolfgang Bauer: 5 commits, +31, -7 Tuomas Nurmi: 4 commits, +39, -23 Stefan Derkits: 4 commits, +20, -19 Andreas Sturmlechner: 3 commits, +189, -75 Aditya Dev Sharma: 3 commits, +47, -46 Stephan Wezel: 2 commits, +12, -7 Andreas Sturmlechner: 2 commits, +8, -6 Andreas Hartmetz: 2 commits, +2, -2 Victor Mataré: 1 commits, +7, -3 Tobias C. Berner: 1 commits, +5, -1 Thiago Sueto: 1 commits, +1, -1 Sven Eckelmann: 1 commits, +5, -3 Somsubhra Bairi: 1 commits, +1, -1 Simon Depiets: 1 commits, +2, -2 Rishabh Gupta: 1 commits, +1, -4 Nicolas Lécureuil: 1 commits, +4, -2 Nate Graham: 1 commits, +7, -7 Johnny Jazeix: 1 commits, +2, -2 Elbin Pallimalil: 1 commits, +11, -5 Christophe Giboudeaux: 1 commits, +1, -2 Antonio Rojas: 1 commits, +1, -0 Alexandr Akulich: 1 commits, +1, -1 Albert Astals Cid: 1 commits, +1, -0
Commits and added/removed lines of code between 3.0 alpha 2.9.71 and 3.0.0
l10n daemon script: 317 commits, +1597783, -75585 Tuomas Nurmi: 147 commits, +3813, -1550 Friedrich W. H. Kossebau: 9 commits, +1075, -1044 Jürgen Thomann: 8 commits, +130, -101 Heiko Becker: 8 commits, +187, -19 Pino Toscano: 6 commits, +3361, -24 Toni Asensi Esteve: 4 commits, +100, -13 Pedro de Carvalho Gomes: 4 commits, +51, -9 Mihkel Tõnnov: 4 commits, +4486, -800 Zixing Liu: 2 commits, +140, -8 Fabian Vogt: 2 commits, +9, -0 David Faure: 2 commits, +4047, -15 Damir Islamov: 2 commits, +401, -420 Yuri Chornoivan: 1 commits, +1, -1 Sebastian Engel: 1 commits, +21, -21 Nicolas Fella: 1 commits, +1, -1 Nicolás Alvarez: 1 commits, +7, -7 Nate Graham: 1 commits, +1, -0 Matthias Mailänder: 1 commits, +5, -0 Jonathan Esk-Riddell: 1 commits, +2, -6 Jakob Meng: 1 commits, +1, -1 Heiko Becker: 1 commits, +17, -17 Christophe Giboudeaux: 1 commits, +3, -4 Carl Schwan: 1 commits, +7, -2 Boris Pek: 1 commits, +1, -1 Andreas Sturmlechner: 1 commits, +2, -0
The goal of KDE neon is to build all KDE’s software on a stable Ubuntu LTS base, we do it in an automated way and for the User edition have automated QA to deploy rapidly but safely. For the KDE 6 Megarelease there was a lot of updates and the system didn’t work as well as it ought, not all the update issues could be tested and this broke some the operating system on some people’s computer which is a horrible experience that should not happen.
What happened?
We were testing KF6, Plasma 6 and KDE Gear 24.04 in our unstable and testing repos for some time before the release. A week ahead of release we were building it in our User repo and testing upgrades. Jonathan, as release manager for both the MegaRelease and neon, travelled to Malaga to do an in person joint release with Paul from promo, this helped the coordinated release but lost some testing time. Some package transitions happened during the pre-release week which made the updates more complex than they had to be and meant extra work (for better end result in theory). Once the MegaRelease sources were published on Thursday the testing of Neon was ongoing and many later fixes were made to make for a successful upgrade on the tests. Neon’s KF6/Plasma6/KDE Gear 24.02 packages were published later on Thursday and Jonathan drove home, alas due to bad weather there was no internet available on the ferry limiting later fixes.
Although the semi automated upgrade tests passed this didn’t cover all cases and some people had incomplete upgrades due to packaging transitions being incomplete. This was fixed over the next day or two and also an update to the installer Calamares was brought in which turned out to have a bug with the final install setup so although upgrades now worked the ISO installs were broken. Quite horrible.
On the Monday Jonathan fixed some more upgrade issues and Calamares so the neon end of things was fixed but there remain other problems with KF6 and Plasma 6 which affect all distros and many of these have since been fixed and some are ongoing, many caused by the switch to Wayland or Akonadi switching to sqlite.
Issues?
There wasn’t one big problem that caught everyone. There was lots of small but significant problems which caught many people.
KMyMoney package issues – needed a rebuild which we did after release
Ocean sound theme not installed – new package which was added after release
Palapeli packages in wrong location – an incomplete change that was made during the transition
Video and pdf thumbnailers broken – these packages needed added to the main install
KOrganizer had invalid dependency – that needed removed
xwaylandvideobridge error on shared library – needed a rebuild
libzxing needs soname bump – that transition needed completed
akonadi not working on upgrade – for some reason some users had to manually reinstall the mysql akonadi backend
Calamares install fails to happen – a bug from Calamares that was initially avoided but later included in our ISO
OEM mode no longer worked – this affects Slimbook systems and some parts just needed ported to Plasma 6, ideally it would be code which was in Calamares and not in Neon
NVidia users had a number of issues often caused by the switch to Wayland. Most users can switch back to X11 to get it working but that is hardly a user friendly setup.
This is just a small sample, there were more similar issues.
Review
Neon is a small team, Jonathan working on it (alongside release duties for Plasma and Frameworks) from Blue Systems and top volunteer helper Carlos with occasionally Harald and others helping out.
We had a review with KDE’s QA star Nate of what happened and why and mitigations and we also had two open calls with neon community members where they gave their feedback.
Ponderings
The Plasma 6 and KF6 upgrades in neon were too fragile and caused too much pain for many of our users.
There wasn’t one single problem and many people had a perfectly good experience doing the upgrade but too many people were caught with problems which will be painful when you are just wanting to have a useful Linux system.
Conclusions
Our constantly rolling release model and small team means we can’t guarantee total stability so we will stop using terms like “rock solid base” on our website and emphasise the new-ness factor.
When doing big updates test and if travelling bring in other people to do testing and fixes.
We can’t support NVidia hardware as we don’t have the skills, time, hardware or access to source to fix it.
Switching to Wayland was a choice of Plasma and after a decade in development a necessary choice but we should be aware of issues there and communicate those.
Get more QA on ISO images, currently we don’t have any prior to release which is going to lead to problems.
Consider if we can to upgrade QA on older snapshots as well as the current one.
Consider how to do more QA on KDE PIM apps.
Thanks to all our lovely users for staying with us, sorry to those who we let down and those who have left us. Thanks to our community for staying supporting of each other and us as developers. Of course there’s plenty of alternatives if you want a slower release cycle (Kubuntu have just made a new LTS with Plasma 5) but if you want the freshest software from KDE then neon continues to be a great place to get it.
Fedora 40 has been released!
🎉 So let’s see what comes in this new release for the Fedora Atomic Desktops
variants (Silverblue, Kinoite, Sway Atomic and Budgie Atomic).
As you might have guessed from the title, we are now called Fedora Atomic
Desktops! See the
Introducing Fedora Atomic Desktops
Fedora Magazine article for all the details.
The summary is that the Fedora Atomic Desktops are made up of four atomic
spins:
Status update on bootloader updates (bootupd integration)
Unfortunately, we could not land
bootupd support
in this release due to an issue found late in Anaconda’s handling of bootupd
installations which relied on incomplete functionality in bootupd.
We will attempt to add bootupd again after the release, via an update.
If you encounter Secure Boot errors or need to update your bootloader in the
meantime, you can try the instructions from
fedora-silverblue#543.
Make sure to have a Live USB ready in case you encounter an issue. Please make
backups beforehand.
We are hoping to land improvements to bootupd that should simplify this process.
No longer overlay language packages (langpacks) by default
GNOME Software will no longer overlay the langpack packages for your locale on
the first update. This should make updates much faster as they won’t need to
overlay packages anymore (unless you explicitly decide to overlay some
packages).
If you are updating from a previous release, you will have to remove this
overlayed package manually. For example:
Find the overlayed package using rpm-ostree status:
Note that this will remove the dictionaries for the corresponding language
from your system and thus for applications included in the image.
For Flatpaks, the dictionaries are downloaded according to the languages set
in the Flatpak config. If you have set your preferred languages in GNOME
Settings, this configuration should have been set already. For example:
# Get the current config$ flatpak config --list
languages: en;fr;de (default: en)
extra-languages: *unset*# Set the languages to use$ flatpak config --set languages "en;fr"
This will also remove the translated man pages for system commands. To get the
man pages back, you can install them in a container using toolbox for example:
If you have a NVIDIA GPU and encounter issues, I recommend looking at Universal
Blue images, waiting for an upcoming NVIDIA driver update that will hopefully
improve Wayland support or trying out the updated Nouveau / NVK stack for
supported cards.
KDE Apps as Fedora Flatpaks
A subset of KDE Apps are now installed by default as Fedora Flatpaks by
Ananconda for new installations. The Flatpaks are
not installed on updates but
you can install them from the Fedora Flatpak remote or from Flathub.
KDE Flatpak on Flathub
Most KDE Apps are directly published and maintained on Flathub by the KDE
community and we have mostly completed the transition to the Qt 6.6 / KDE
Framework 6 Runtime.
Fedora Budgie Atomic ships with the latest release of the
Budgie Desktop 10.9
“release series”. Budgie 10.9 features some initial porting work to
libxfce4windowing as it progresses towards its move to Wayland and redesigns
its Bluetooth applet with new direct (dis-)connect functionality.
Additionally, Fedora Budgie Atomic ships with the latest Budgie Control Center
and takes into use budgie-session. As Buddies of Budgie officially supports
Fedora, Budgie Desktop has also received numerous backported bug fixes to
provide Fedora users an even better experience.
This year’s foss-north was the tenth incarnation. I’ve been organizing foss-gbg since 2013, and foss-north since 2016 (two events in 2020 makes it ten in total). It’s been quite a journey – moving between three venues, working with amazing speakers and sponsors, finding a way through the pandemic, while getting to know so many people.
The conference continued when fscons moved from town. Henrik, who helped start fscons has been invaluable during the foss-north years.
Over the years, there has been multiple people helping out with things like announcing speakers, manning the registration booth, finding speakers and creating a program. One of the people who has been around the whole time is Tobias, who is ran a large portion of the show this year and is taking over the lead organizer role.
Private life has been rough over the past two years, so the decision to step back from foss-north has been more or less inevitable. So it’s a great feeling to be able to sit down and enjoy the show and know that the event is in good hands with Tobias.
Thank you all for speaking, visiting, helping out at, and sponsoring foss-north. See you at next year’s event. I’ll have more time to mingle than ever before! ;-)
It is an interesting essay. It leans on the side of “assistants are useful for simple coding tasks” and it’s a bit more critical when it’s about writing. The stance is original I find, yes it can help with some writing tasks, but if you look at the writing tasks you can expedite this way… if you wish to expedite them isn’t it a sign that they were providing little value in the first place? Is the solution the assistant or changing the way you work? Indeed this might hide some busy work otherwise.
HTML attributes vs DOM properties - JakeArchibald.com
Tags: tech, html, web, frontend
There are differences between attributes on the HTML side and properties on the DOM side. This can quickly get confusing, here is a good reference for it.
3 important things I overlooked during code reviews | Piglei
Tags: tech, codereview, programming
Indeed, naming, comments and communication styles are three aspects often overlooked during reviews. They are very important though and shouldn’t be neglected.
First Come First Served: The Impact of File Position on Code Review
Tags: tech, codereview, cognition
I guess we kind of suspected it, this studies tends to prove it. Defects are more easily found in the first files of a code review rather than in the last ones.
I didn’t know this book. It is written in a surprising style, but it’s very much down to earth and to the point. For sure a good way to learn calculus.
From last Friday to Wednesday I was in Berlin to attend the combined 2024 KDE Goals
sprint that was graciously hosted by MBition. Compared to previous goals sprints
where there were separate sprints Goal this year was different as all three happened
at once in the same area. This allowed attendees to freely switch around the different
topics and enables more collaboration opportunities. Lets see how that worked out for
me.
Most of my time I actually spent in the context of the accessibility goal. I became
part of a discussion of how QML comboboxes in general and the Kirigami Add-ons date
picker is lacking in the accessibility departement. As the discussion went to how
the default representation of a standard combobox could be improved, the question
was raised if it would still be possible to do something special for customized
comboboxes. This lead to prototyping on the date picker with the first approach
being to forego the built in support in QtQuick and implement the relevant interfaces
manually like one would do for QtWidgets. This was a lot of boring boilerplate code
but it proved that this option is available for very specialized use cases.
The solution we came up with in the end for our use cases was to provide the required
properties and roles in a proxy Item that exposes the actual controls to the accessibility tools.
On the automatization front I was involved in creating two new CI checks. The first
one is a reuse lint check that only checks new files for compliance which enables
older projects to enforce coverage at least for new files. The second was an idea
that came up during sprint that we could detect untranslated strings in QML files
as these are usually to text properties. While it will never catch all cases during
testing we found already some problematic cases in Plasma repositories. We discussed also
some other points from the idea list such as a cherry-pick bot like the Qt Project
uses and automatic updating the fix version field on bugzilla but these innocuous
looking problems have some corner cases which require some more thought.
To the Sustainable Software goal I contributed the least. But together with Aleix
and Joseph we debugged why the VNC setup of the KDE Eco Lab machine did not work
anymore and fixed it. So in the end I interacted with all three goals.
The combined sprint was a nice experience and facilitated many discussion about
the Goals but as always also about other KDE topics as is unavoidable when KDE
community members are put together in a room. However I feel while it enabled
people to jump around the different goals I am wary that in my opinion this setup removes a bit
of focus from each goal compared to dedicated sprints.
Thanks to Mbition for hosting us and as a reminder your donations to KDE e.V
make sprints such as these possible.
Qt 5.15 introduced “Automatic Type Registration”. With it, a C++ class can be marked as “QML_ELEMENT” to be automatically registered to the QML engine. Qt 6 takes this to the next level and builds all of its tooling around the so-called QML Modules. Let’s talk about what this new infrastructure means to your application in practice and how to benefit from it in an existing project.
The Kubuntu Team is happy to announce that Kubuntu 24.04 has been released, featuring the ‘beautiful’ KDE Plasma 5.27 simple by default, powerful when needed.
Codenamed “Noble Numbat”, Kubuntu 24.04 continues our tradition of giving you Friendly Computing by integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution.
Note: For upgrades from 23.10, there may a delay of a few hours to days between the official release announcements and the Ubuntu Release Team enabling upgrades.
Hi, I'm Jakob and this is my new KDE blog. Let's see how this goes
as I haven't blogged for literally decades.
I started working on Plasma code sometime last year and hope to play a tiny part in
setting the stage for world domination improving user experiences like
so many other awesome and dedicated contributors do every week.
My Plasma contributions started out with a few rounds of build improvements and bug fixes
initially. Before long though, I decided to realize my lifelong dream of a friendly and usable
Energy Saving settings page. Thus started a journey into the code of Plasma's power management
service, internally known as PowerDevil.
Quick recap: As a service, PowerDevil is mainly responsible for two rough areas.
It will suspend Plasma sessions when the time is right, and also,
It adjusts backlight brightness levels of your display and monitors, including the ability to
turn them off altogether.
In terms of user interfaces, the Energy Saving module in System Settings allows you to set
different suspend/shutdown behaviors and brightness adjustments for different power states:
on AC power, on battery, and on low battery. Ad-hoc adjustments to the same settings can also
be made with two applets in your system tray: Power and Battery, as well as Brightness and Color.
Let's have a look at some of the work that went into Plasma 6.0 in this area. I'm about two months
late for a 6.0 news blog, but Fedora 40 KDE Spin is just
out as the first major Linux distro on a semi-annual release cycle to feature Plasma 6. So maybe
not terrible timing. We'll also have a look at some of what's been brewing for 6.1 so far.
You may have seen some of this across a number of different "This Week in KDE" blog posts,
but then again maybe you haven't!
System Settings & Config Data
I'm quite happy with the way the new settings worked out. It also took a while to get there.
A year earlier, I posted an outlandish proposal
to radically change the Energy Saving page. It's too long and boring and unworkable to cover here.
However, it made me think long and hard about all the different ways that the settings page could
look like, what its controls must be able to represent. It also made me aware that
another UI rework
had already been in the works previously, which didn't get merged.
Nothing is ever as easy as one hopes it to be. A substantial redesign of the settings page would
require rewriting the UI with modern Qt Quick / QML code, as opposed to the rather unwieldy
Qt Widgets that the old UI was using at the time. As I learned, a settings module based on
Qt Quick also wants more knowledge about its underlying configuration data. Things such as:
"what's the default value for this setting", or "if you click this checkbox a second time
can we disable the Reset button again".
PowerDevil had lots of config data and was using old infrastructure in non-standard ways to access
it. The service would generate a new config file on first run, with all of its default values
written to ~/.config/powermanagementprofilesrc. After creating this config file, it had no clue
which of the values were defaults and which were your own customized settings. In Plasma 5.x,
pressing the "Defaults" button would open a dialog to warn you that all of your changes will be
thrown away immediately and can't be recovered if you proceed. Compare that to other modules,
which let you press "Defaults" and "Reset" as much as you want until you decide finally "Apply".
Before even attempting to improve the UI itself, a series of changes was necessary in the code
that reads and interprets config files. I got there by extracting and improving one small
bite after another from the extensive but ultimately unmerged earlier attempt. A steady stream of
small, easy-to-review patches will win the race eventually.
The result is this. Power management settings are now only written if you change away from the
default values. If you checked the "Highlight Changed Settings" option, System Settings will be
able to show which of your Energy Saving settings have been modified compared to the defaults.
You can transfer your SSD from a laptop to a PC and the suspend/shutdown defaults will now reflect
the new system's capabilities. Extra config files for the various power states and activities have
been migrated to ~/.config/powerdevilrc.
Building on these changes, the UI rework got merged just in time for Plasma 6.0. I think it's
significantly cleaner than it used to be, while at the same time there are still things I'd like
to change about it. Eventually I'd like to configure my "laptop lid closed" action only once,
instead of applying the same change across all three power states. The "custom script" controls
make more sense for laptops with different power states than for desktop PCs, where the current
design can be a little confusing. Screen and keyboard brightness should ideally move to the
Display Configuration and Keyboard settings modules. We'll get there eventually.
Special thanks to Nicolas Fella and Nate Graham
for their repeated, kind & thoughtful code reviews. Throughout this project and really everywhere
else in KDE. Getting (or giving!) that kind of feedback makes a huge difference.
Moved & Removed Functionality
The UI rework would have been harder if Nicolas hadn't also simplified PowerDevil in other areas.
One is that WiFi, WWAN and Bluetooth are gone from Energy Saving, they were more confusing there
than they were helpful. Switching wireless devices on or off can still be done through the system
tray applets, or the WiFi/Bluetooth modules in System Settings.
Plasma 5.27 and earlier allowed you to set a full power management settings profile if a given
Activity is currently active. It's still possible in Plasma 6.0 to block automatic sleep or
screen turn-off. Those settings have moved to the Activities settings module, where they can be
configured as part of each individual Activity. Entire pages of power management settings cannot be
controlled through Activities anymore in 6.0 though. If these capabilities ever end up returning,
it will be with a different code architecture and a different UI.
Natalie Clarius has invested lots of time into system tray applets. Instead of a single
"Battery and Brightness" applet and a separate "Night Light" applet, the brightness settings in
Plasma 6.0 are now colocated with Night Light as "Brightness and Color" applet. This leaves the
"Power and Battery" applet by itself, which displays battery status (including peripheral battery,
if your mouse or keyboard supports this) and can configure power profiles on the fly
(if power-profile-daemon is installed).
New & Improved Functionality
In Plasma 5.x, you were able to configure how long the system should be idle before the display
gets turned off. For Plasma 6.0, Jonathan Haney added a setting to configure a shorter turn-off
duration on the lock screen. You won't be reading long web pages and PDFs on the lock screen so
you might as well avoid distractions and save some power. This setting can be reduced all the way
to zero seconds so that the screen turns off immediately when locking the session.
I spent some time to make this work reliably on both Wayland and X11.
We still need to streamline the settings UI a bit, in line with the "simple by default, powerful
when needed" mantra.
Brightness can be increased or decreased in 5% steps by pressing brightness up/down keys, which are
usually found on laptop keyboards. In Plasma 6.0, brightness steps can also be controlled in
1% steps by pressing Shift in addition to the brightness key.
We merged a number of bug fixes to improve reliability of automatic brightness adjustments.
Restoring keyboard backlights works better now after waking up from system sleep, dimming after a
period of inactivity is less fragile, fading to black before the screen is turned off won't flicker
when a mouse move interrupts the fade at the wrong time. If (lib)ddcutil or PowerDevil's use of it
makes trouble with controlling external monitor brightness via DDC/CI, it can be disabled by
setting a POWERDEVIL_NO_DDCUTIL=1 environment variable for the PowerDevil service on startup.
There is now an OSD switcher for power profiles (i.e. Power Save, Balanced, Performance) that will
pop up when the battery function key on some laptop keyboards is pressed, or Meta+B.
In Plasma 5.27, you could configure a custom script to run when entering or exiting a power state
(AC, battery, low battery) or after a period of inactivity in this current power state.
In Plasma 6.0, you can configure a custom script for each of these "run conditions" in each
power state. So you can run a script to activate something when you plug in the laptop, and disable
it again when removing the power plug.
Auto-suspend after inactivity, laptop lid closure and power button presses now each allow you to
select "Sleep" vs. "Hibernate" as their respective suspend actions. The "Hybrid sleep" option and
the confusingly placed "Sleep, then hibernate after a period of inactivity" checkbox are now part
of a separate drop-down that lets you choose alternative sleep modes. Less confusing than before,
although there's more work needed now to make this updated categorization consistent across the
entire desktop, like on the logout screen.
Functionality that just keeps working!
For years, the UPower daemon had marked its laptop lid detection functionality as deprecated, to be
removed in a future release. Plasma's power management service relies on UPower, and Plasma would have
soon lost the ability to react to lid closure events. UPower had already removed this code from
their unreleased development codebase, it was only a matter of time until the next official version
would be released to break lid handling everywhere. So I started working on a replacement,
but getting full coverage across different platforms (X11 vs. Wayland, systemd vs. not-systemd)
is quite a bit of effort and there were lots more kinks to figure out.
So I am very happy that UPower has indeed
released a new version,
one that puts the lid detection code back in for the benefit of upstream users such as Plasma,
GNOME and various window managers that have also relied on their lid detection functionality.
Better yet, it's meant to stay this time around. Things will just keep working as they do now!
It's great to have this kind of system-level functionality available in common infrastructure
such as UPower so we don't each have to implement substandard knock-offs individually.
On the monitor brightness front, recent versions of libddcutil have introduced a feature that
prevents two independent programs from talking to the same monitor simultaneously. Due to the way
that our background service has traditionally been using libddcutil, Plasma 6.0 sessions have been
hogging libddcutil's monitor handles. Users who like to perform other operations with DDC/CI,
for example through the ddcutil command-line program, would find it non-functional. Starting with
Plasma 6.0.4, our DDC/CI code was restructured so that a monitor is only hogged for the short time
it takes to change the brightness. ddcutil works again as intended in a Plasma session.
Beyond 6.0
The System Settings module will be renamed from "Energy Saving" to "Power Management". This used to
be the name of the entire category containing the "Energy Saving", "Advanced Power Settings" and
"Activity Power Settings" modules. After the redesign, there is only one module left and it can be
called by the arguably more appropriate name.
After the Plasma 6.0 feature freeze went into effect, Bogdan Onofriichuk significantly improved
the code for external monitor brightness handling via DDC/CI (using libddcutil).
Starting with 6.1, the power management service will recognize at runtime when monitors are
connected or disconnected. Previously, only a single monitor detection was done on startup and
if you changed your monitor configuration afterwards, brightness controls in Plasma would have
no effect on newly plugged-in monitors.
Brightness via DDC/CI will not be animated anymore in order to minimize the risk of shortened
monitor lifespans. The chance of this happening is hard to verify for someone not in the
monitor industry, but we'll follow the example of monitor manufacturers' own helper applets and
apply newly adjusted monitor brightness values only after a half-second delay.
Brightness animations of internal laptop backlights, on the other hand, are going to get more
responsive when dragging the brightness slider in the applet or holding down the brightness key.
We've done more work on cleaning up the display code, with the goal of allowing per-monitor
brightness controls as opposed to the single brightness slider of current Plasma releases.
After raising the minimum brightness value to "the lowest value that's higher than 0%" to stop
screens from inadvertently turning off, we'll lower it back down to an exact 0 where it's safe to
do so. We also want to move the core of screen brightness control into KWin, which will be able to
do more awesome things such as adjust brightness on OLED screens that don't even have a backlight
to control. No guarantees when any of this will be ready to ship, but it's a lot closer now than
just a few months ago.
How You Can Help
There are a lot of edge cases and system configurations that could still be handled in a better way.
Device interactions can be hairy, they will often differ from one system to another. What might
work well on my system can break on someone else's. You can use the power of having a
different setup to do things that a number of KDE developers cannot. If you're running into issues
with suspend, brightness and other things that PowerDevil may have a hand in, check out
the new README file.
Consider helping with bug triage! PowerDevil on KDE's bug tracker has a service component
with lots of reported bugs, as well as a component for the System Settings module
with fewer bugs and quite a few wishlist items. The service component includes some very old bug
reports which may or may not fully apply to Plasma 6.0 anymore.
Read this if you're interested in
helping us determine the amount of developer love still required for different bug reports.
Also if you rock at figuring out how to reproduce issues reliably, when the original reporter
wasn't able to find a conclusive pattern by themselves.
And of course, if you're a developer, feel free to fix a problem and submit a merge request.
Some issues aren't straightforward to resolve. We'll work through them eventually.
Probably. I'm a volunteer just like most of you, so no promises whatsoever.
You can also donate to KDE so they can continue to do
helpful things like paying Natalie to work on hardware integration, or (if the approval gods
are kind) hopefully subsizing my travel costs to Akademy 2024.
@siosm:matrix.org
ervin
