The KDE community will again participate in the Open Source Promotion Plan (OSPP), a program in which students can contribute to open source projects. Burgess Chang, is the KDE community contact.

As part of OSPP 2024, Hànyáng Zhāng (张汉阳) added Android support to Blinken. The work done is described in a series of blog posts, available in both English and Mandarin. The Android version is available from the KDE F-Droid nightly repository.

Unlike the Google Summer of Code, where stipends are funded by a company, stipends are primarily funded by the Chinese government with options for open source communities to contribute additional stipends if they wish to have more students participate in their projects than they get allocated. It is good that there is recognition that contributing to open source software is a skill that students should acquire.

The range of contributions that can be made in OSPP is not just limited to programming, contributions to other aspects that improve the open source software ecosystem such as translation and documentation are welcome. As it is a government funded program, there is a little more oversight to ensure tax payer funds are well spent. In particular, for most projects, contributions should be made to a publicly available repository associated with the project and that student participants are selected primarily based on their project application.

The plan aims to increase the programming and software engineering skills of students by encouraging them to participate in real world projects during their vacation period. While it is funded by the Chinese people, open source projects with contributors from all over the world apply to participate, and students from any part of the world can also apply to participate.

Mandarin and English are the official communication languages for the program, knowledge of one of these is sufficient to participate in the program.

The OSPP website lists the dates for each phase of the program. Important dates for this year are:

• 04 April - 04 May: Project submission period for approved open source communities
• 09 May - 09 June: Student project application period
• 01 July - 30 September: Coding and development period for accepted projects

Kaidan 0.12.1 fixes some bugs. Have a look at the changelog for more details.

Changelog

Bugfixes:

• Do not highlight unpinned chats when pinned chat is moved (melvo)
• Fix deleting/sending voice messages (melvo)
• Fix crash during login (melvo)
• Fix opening chat again after going back to chat list on narrow window (melvo)
• Increase tool bar height to fix avatar not being recognizable (melvo)
• Fix width of search bar above chat list to take available space while showing all buttons (melvo)
• Fix storing changed password (melvo)
• Fix setting custom host/port for account registration (melvo)
• Fix crash on chat removal (fazevedo)
• Move device switching options into account details to fix long credentials not being shown and login QR code being temporarily visible on opening dialog (melvo)
• Allow setting new password on error to fix not being able to log in after changing password via other device (melvo)

Download

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

Or install Kaidan for your distribution:

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-13.

OpenAI’s Studio Ghibli meme factory is an insult to art itself

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, politics, culture, art, copyright

Sure, a filter which turns pictures into something with the Ghibli style looks cute. But make no mistake, it has utter political motives. They need a distraction from their problems and it’s yet another way to breach a boundary. Unfortunately I expect people will comply and use the feature with enthusiasm…

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/openais-studio-ghibli-meme-factory

Trapping misbehaving bots in an AI Labyrinth

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, security

When a big player has to prepare a labyrinth of AI generated content to trap bots used to feed generative AI learning pipelines… something feels wrong.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/ai-labyrinth/

Improved ways to operate a rude crawler

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copilot, satire

Don’t underestimate how much of a skill making a stupid crawler can be…

https://www.marginalia.nu/log/a_115_rude_crawler/

Proof of work reverse proxy to protect against scrapers

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copilot, security

And yet another reverse proxy to use as a scraper deterrent… It looks like several are popping every week lately.

https://git.sr.ht/~runxiyu/powxy

Exploring Generative AI - The role of developer skills in agentic coding

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, copilot, ide, tools, programming

Again that confirms that all the hype and grand announcements are not deserved. It also gives a good idea of the skills which are required to use those tools, clearly the setup process is involved if you want to don’t want to be overwhelmed and drowning in bad code.

https://martinfowler.com/articles/exploring-gen-ai.html#memo-13

Scallop, a Language for Neurosymbolic Programming

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, neural-networks, logic, prolog

This is definitely an interesting declarative language. Looking forward to more such neurosymbolic approaches.

https://www.scallop-lang.org/

Servo vs Ladybird

Tags: tech, web, browser, foss

A good look at both incumbents in the web browser engine space. Still quite some way to go but the results are interesting already.

https://thelibre.news/servo-vs-ladybird/

REST in Peace? Django’s Framework Problem

Tags: tech, python, django, rest, sustainability, community

There’s a sustainability issue for the REST support with Django. Hopefully this will resolve.

https://danlamanna.com/posts/rest-in-peace-djangos-framework-problem/

git-who: Git blame for file trees

Tags: tech, version-control, git, tools

Looks like a neat little tool to explore git repositories.

https://github.com/sinclairtarget/git-who

Quadlet: Running Podman containers under systemd

Tags: tech, tools, containers, podman, systemd

Looks like a nice way to orchestrate rootless podman containers.

https://mo8it.com/blog/quadlet/

Closing the chapter on OpenH264 – Pixels

Tags: tech, video, codec, patents, foss

Or why software patents can get in the way… You can work around them somehow, but that quickly leads to shipping binaries you can’t properly check.

https://bbhtt.space/posts/closing-the-chapter-on-openh264/

Things that go wrong with disk IO

Tags: tech, io, storage, filesystem, databases

A reminder that writing on disks is a longer process than you could suspect. Many things can go wrong on that chain.

https://notes.eatonphil.com/2025-03-27-things-that-go-wrong-with-disk-io.html

C++/Rust Interoperability Problem Statement

Tags: tech, rust, c++, interoperability

Looks like there’s movement at the Rust Foundation level to have better C++ and Rust interoperability. We’ll see what comes to fruition, this could be interesting. It’s needed for sure.

https://github.com/rustfoundation/interop-initiative

Use the rr debugger without HW performance counters !

Tags: tech, debugging, tools

Interesting fork of rr to have time travel debugging with software counters. Hopefully will allow using rr in environments where it’s limited by lack of access to hardware performance counters.

https://github.com/sidkshatriya/rr.soft

Postel’s Law and the Three Ring Circus

Tags: tech, foss, protocols, design, standard

Nice post about the practical impacts of Postel’s law. It’s especially problematic in the case of Open Source software. Companies producing proprietary software even use that to their advantage.

https://alexgaynor.net/2025/mar/25/postels-law-and-the-three-ring-circus/

War story: the hardest bug I ever debugged

Tags: tech, debugging, web, browser, google

Interesting story… when you end up turning to v8 having a bug in the field, you’re really in trouble.

https://www.clientserver.dev/p/war-story-the-hardest-bug-i-ever

Why developers question everything - Tim Hårek

Tags: tech, craftsmanship, programming, estimates, risk, complexity

Or why analogies with physical work don’t work…

https://timharek.no/blog/why-developers-question-everything/

Sun Tzu wouldn’t like the cybersecurity industry

Tags: tech, security

It’s better if you prepare your security policies properly…

https://kellyshortridge.com/blog/posts/sun-tzu-wouldnt-like-the-cybersecurity-industry/

The Worst Programmer I Know

Tags: tech, team, productivity

Trying to measure individual productivity is definitely a trap. You’d better not try, otherwise you’ll have wrong behaviors or you’ll punish the wrong persons.

https://dannorth.net/the-worst-programmer/

How to Write Blog Posts that Developers Read

Tags: tech, blog, writing

A bit cynical at times, but shows tricks to improve the writing and style of blog posts. If I ever find the time to write something sizeable again I guess I’ll try some of them.

https://refactoringenglish.com/chapters/write-blog-posts-developers-read/

Teach to Learn: Why Sharing What You Know Makes You Smarter

Tags: teaching, learning

I like this attitude obviously… Go out and teach! Share what you learn!

https://hardmodefirst.xyz/teach-to-learn-why-sharing-what-you-know-makes-you-smarter

Post Apocalyptic Computing

Tags: tech, low-tech, history, reliability

Interesting rambling and exploration. What would a computer built to last a century look like?

https://thomashunter.name/posts/2025-03-23-post-apocalyptic-computing

Bye for now!

Help us Beta test Kubuntu Plucky Puffin!

Kubuntu work:

Fixed an issue in apparmor preventing QT6 webengine applications from starting.

Beta testing!

KDE Snaps:

Updated Qt6 to 6.8.2

Updated Kf6 6.11.0

Rolling out 25.04 RC applications! You can find them in the –candidate channel!

Life:

I have decided to strike out on my own. I can’t take any more rejections! Honestly, I don’t blame them, I wouldn’t want a one armed engineer either. However, I have persevered and accomplished quite a bit with my one arm! So I have decided to take a leap of faith and with your support for open source work and a resurrected side gig of web development I will survive. If you can help sponsor my work, anything at all, even a dollar! I would be eternally grateful. I have several methods to do so:

• GoFundMe
• Patreon
• Github
• Donorbox

If you want your cool application packaged in a variety of formats please contact me!

If you want focused help with an annoying bug, please contact me!

Contact me for any and all kinds of help, if I can’t do it, I will say so.

Do you need web work? Someone to maintain your website? I can do that too!

Portfolio

Thank you all for your support in this new adventure!

The beta of Kubuntu Plucky Puffin (to become 25.04 in April) has now been released, and is available for download.

This milestone features images for Kubuntu and other Ubuntu flavours.

Pre-releases of Kubuntu Plucky Puffin are not recommended for:

• Anyone needing a stable system
• Regular users who are not aware of pre-release issues
• Anyone in a production environment with data or workflows that need to be reliable

They are, however, recommended for:

• Regular users who want to help us test by finding, reporting, and/or fixing bugs
• Kubuntu, KDE, and Qt developers
• Other Ubuntu flavour developers

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.

Highlights include an update to KDE Plasma 6.3.

We STRONGLY advise testers to read the Kubuntu 25.04 Beta release notes before installing, and in particular the section on ‘Known issues’.

You can also find more information about the entire 25.04 release (base, kernel, graphics etc) in the main Ubuntu Beta release notes and announcement.

Twinimation Studios have released a new Krita workshop, and we wanted to give them a chance to introduce their new offering to Krita's users:

Greetings everyone! Entering the art world is sometimes seen as an expensive endeavor. From art schools to subscription based software, artists across different fields tend to have notable expenses. But have you ever wondered if you can become an artist without spending a fortune? Twinimtion Studios is back to answer the question with our very first full workshop! Becoming an Artist on a Budget is a specialty made guide guide to help aspiring artists begin their artistic journey WITHOUT breaking the bank. This workshop consists of 9 main videos bundled into one easy to digest package, along with some special bonus showcase videos as well. Included is also a bonus freebie list of numerous artistic products ideas to begin a paid art hobby or career.

Within this workshop, we provide tips and tricks on how one can begin their art journey for completely free. After reviewing a list of affordable resources to learn art skills, we recommend numerous free art programs with a special spotlight on Krita! We explain how versatile Krita is, and how it can be used across numerous different art fields, such as animation, comics, and painting! Following some other drawing tutorials, the workshop concludes with a special lesson on entrepreneurship, where we explain how aspiring artists can create a paid hobby or full business through their artwork while remaining on a budget.

With so many people wanting to enter the art scene and build a career from it, we hope this workshop will be a helpful guide for all of those who wish to create their own artistic brand. Additionally, we have many other Krita focused animation courses on our website!

Twinimation Studios was founded by instructors Andria and Arneisha Jackson; MFA graduates who've studied animation for 9 years and want to share their professional knowledge with the world. We provide tutorials on different styles of animation, character design, illustration, film creation and so much more! Look forward to our future tutorials and workshops where we will continue to expand our repertoire to fit several different art fields.

Here is a link to the workshop:

Become an Artist on a Budget

Plasma's login experience is an area that we know requires some improvement — it works OK in the basic case, but it's very barebones and doesn't handle anything beyond that.

As a complete desktop experience, it's our job to provide support for the edge cases too.

What we want

• Great out-of-box experience in multi-monitor and high DPI and HDR
• Keyboard layout switching
• Virtual keyboards
• Easy Chinese/Japanese/Korean/Vietnamese (CJK) input
• Display and keyboard brightness control
• Full power management
• Screen readers for blind people (which then means volume control)
• Pairing trusted bluetooth devices
• Login to known Wi-Fi for remote LDAP
• Remote (VNC/RDP) support from startup

A brief history

In Plasma 5, we retired our own bespoke display manager KDM, in favour of SDDM. A display manager started for multiple lightweight Qt Desktops. It was modern at the time making use of new QML for the front and as a big selling point at a time when Plasma was also making use of it.

SDDM's Big Architecture Problem

We ran into a problem, though. SDDM is designed to show a single greeter window, loading arbitrary QML from the specified theme.

Whilst this all sounded great for Plasma, the abstraction is at the wrong level — for our wishlist we need a lot more tight integration from our login screen than just a window showing sessions and users.

With SDDM, power management is reinvented from scratch with bespoke configuration. We can't integrate with Plasma's network management, power management, volume controls, or brightness controls without reinventing them in the desktop-agnostic backend.

SDDM was already having to duplicate too much functionality we have in KDE, which was very frustrating when we're left maintaining it.

The Competition

GNOME's GDM is the gold-standard of display managers, and it achieves this higher level of quality by running half of a Gnome session.

SDDM got closer when it added Wayland support — it had to use a compositor such as KWin. But because the project tries to be agnostic between desktops, it has to support any compositor. There aren't compositor-agnostic ways to do even simple things like set the keyboard layout, so in the end this compositor agnosticism goal simply didn't work.

Theme Problems

A major mistake we made throughout Plasma 5 was conflating "writing UI in a high level scripting language" with "it's themable" as the same thing — they are not. QML does make it easy to modify and iterate without programming skills, but it still contains business logic. It should not be the primary method of customisation that we expose to users.

Ultimately, this was poor for end users. We pushed back on adding support for configurable theme options, because building a theme engine within a theme was wasteful! But often people want to just change a few things. Choosing a theme meant finding a combination that had everything. The store filled up with themes that are 99.9% identical code-wise; most are just wallpaper mods.

It was also poor for theme developers. Not only do they have to modify the visuals, but also re-implement focus handling, accessibility, and the same boring logic again. They can't benefit from widespread testing so regressing these functionalities is common. Reddit is full of screenshots of broken SDDM themes.

Finally, it's poor for us Plasma developers: theme support holds us back from adding new features or tidying code; if we want to add a new feature that in any way affects existing UIs, the situation get very messy very fast. The end result is that features just don't land, and the end user is the one that misses out.

So, what's the plan?

It's worth stressing nothing is official or set in stone yet, whilst it has come up in previous Plasma online meetings and in the 2023 Akademy. I'm posting this whilst starting a more official discussion on the plasma-devel mailing list.

Oliver Beard and I have made a new mutli-process greeter, that uses the same startup mechanism as the desktop session. It doesn't have all the features that we propose at the start of the blog, but an architecture where features and services can be slowly and safely added.

For customisation we intend to expose the same familiar settings that exist in Plasma and bring the design more in-line with the existing screenlocker where we also dropped arbitrary QML years ago. We'll make the wallpaper configurable with any existing wallpaper plugins, and expose the existing plasma theme and colour settings. Syncing will be a case of copying files, not re-inventing things.

The backend

When starting work on this, I tried to explore all alternative backends out there even with fully working implementations, however in practice nothing was maintained that matched our requirements. SDDM has been proven in the real world, so we have taken that and stripped it down to cover what we want moving forwards. I also aim to incubate it into the KDE ecosystem to have full autonomy over the project and merging stuck patches.

Current State

All of this has been implemented as two new repositories. Plasma Login Manager a continuation of SDDM and Plasma Login for front end and KCM (settings) code. These might be merged at some point.

The new code all works, and is at roughly feature parity with what we're replacing. A screenshot looks roughly the same as a stock Plasma SDDM setup. Whilst this is at a state where developers can opt-in, I would not want distros to be packaging things at this point.

Please do reach out if this sounds interesting, either directly or in the Plasma Matrix room - or with merge requests!

It’s been several years since I announced Plasma’s 15-minute bug initiative, and you can see the weekly numbers in every week’s “This Week in Plasma” post. Today I thought I’d share a high-level recap of where we’re at as of the first quarter of 2025.

In short: really good. We dipped below 20 bugs for the first time today, with the number currently standing at 19! This is good progress; it was at 32 during last year’s update.

But wait a minute… 13 bugs in a year? That actually sounds pretty pathetic.

Well here’s the thing: we’re adding more bugs to the list all the time. So it’s basically a “oh wow, we’d better fix this soon before people notice it” list, and newly-discovered significant issues in git master are commonly marked as HI priority and fixed before they reach users — otherwise known as “QA”.

Last year, the total number of lifetime fixed 15-minute bugs was 231. Today, it’s 413. So actually, we fixed 182 15-minute bugs in the past year or so, and reduced the total number of outstanding 15-minute bugs by 13. With only 19 left, that means we’ve fixed over 95% of all 15-minute bugs ever!

If you look at the remaining bugs, some patterns emerge:

• Hardware-specific issues (e.g. only certain ASUS laptops, or only certain screens)
• Use of common though non-default settings (e.g. changing the scroll speed, hiding tray icons of Electron-based apps)
• Intensive use of the system (e.g. filling the entire panel up with icons-only Task Manager icons, docking and un-docking a laptop to an external screen with carefully-curated window arrangements)
• Random and unreproducible crashes (if they were reproducible, they’d have been fixed ages ago!)
• And some egregious bugs that just need to be fixed! (we’re working on them)

How you can help

As always, help work on the existing 15-minute bugs if you can! If not, it’s always useful to work on bug triaging, so that more of those issues that will eventually become 15-minute bugs can get discovered earlier. Another impactful way is to donate to KDE e.V., the nonprofit that supports KDE on a ridiculously small budget. Prior donations have allowed KDE e.V. to recently start the process of hiring a Plasma developer, so it’s not a black hole!