FreeBSD ports update today:
[ade]delete mode 100644 x11/plasma5-plasma/
create mode 100644 x11/plasma6-plasma/
This is work landed by Tobias, with Max, Kenneth, Jason and Gleb doing a lot of heavy lifting in this update. I sat on the sidelines, but I’m here to congratulate the active part of the KDE FreeBSD team with an update long foreseen, long foretold, and long desired.
A new Craft cache has just been published. The update is already available for KDE's CD, CI (Windows/Android) will follow in the next days.
Please note that this only applies to the Qt6 cache. The Qt5 cache is in LTS mode since April 2024 and does not recieve major updates anymore. We highly recommend to port your Qt5 app packaged by Craft to Qt6 as soon as possible!
We added CI for flake8, isort and black with the help of tox (which makes it easy to run them locally too) to all Craft repositories. To be able to do so we did a lot of best pratice cleanup beforehand like eg. removing star imports.
@jlskuz:kde.orgCraftBool helper. This allows handy things like self.subinfo.options.dynamic.withMyLib.asOnOff instead of 'ON' if self.subinfo.options.dynamic.withMyLib else 'OFF'buildStatic option--enable-static --enable-shared in AutoToolsPackageBase instead of in every single blueprintKDE Craft is an open source meta-build system and package manager. It manages dependencies and builds libraries and applications from source on Windows, macOS, Linux, FreeBSD and Android.
Learn more on https://community.kde.org/Craft or join the Matrix room #kde-craft:kde.org
The Linux App Summit is a project we KDE created, together with GNOME and some other parties. We wanted a physical space where to discuss our platform to different stakeholders.
We have seen lots of progress since 2019. From a KDE perspective, we see our flatpaks and snaps. This adoption brings all sorts of users to our software that otherwise wouldn’t have been able to.
From the other side of the equation, linux distros have been evolving like ever. We have seen a myriad of distributions using technologies that we would have never dreamed of. And we can find them both on consumer and development devices. Even KDE Linux and GNOME OS are looking into tightening the other end of that software distribution loop.
Now, it’s time to take things even further.
This year we will have LAS 2025 in Tirana. Consider participating in LAS 2025! How you ask?
You can follow LAS updates on the Attendees chat or here @LAS@floss.social on Mastodon.
Welcome to a new issue of "This Week in Plasma"! Every week we cover as much as possible of what's happening in the world of KDE Plasma and its associated apps like Discover, System Monitor, and more.
This week we continued to polish up Plasma 6.3 in preparation for its final release in a week and a half, and I gotta say, it's looking pretty good! Most of the bug reports we've gotten from people running the beta have been minor and quickly fixed, which I'm choosing to interpret to mean that it's a good release. :)
In addition, we landed a bunch more Plasma 6.4 UI improvements! Check it all out:
Task Manager previews now only show one copy of the playback controls for grouped apps where only a single window is playing media, and they also try to match the controls to the window where the media is playing. This matching isn't 100% perfect due to a lack of necessary data from browsers, so we'll be working to refine it over time. (Christoph Wolk, link)
App screenshots in Discover are no longer blurry when the app's metadata includes a thumbnail that's smaller than the size it will be displayed at; instead, Discover now displays the full-size version as the thumbnail. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, link)
Fixed the mnemonics and buddy relationships for several complex UI elements on the Wallpaper page in System Settings and the desktop config window. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link 1, link 2, and link 3)
On System Settings' Users page, when you use the file picker to choose an avatar image from a file on disk, the file picker now remembers the location for next time too. (Nate Graham, link)
On System Settings' Display & Monitor page, the option to use a display's built-in color profile is now disabled when it would have no practical effect. (Xaver Hugl, link 1, link 2, link 3, and link 4)
Made the contents of the context menus for the desktop trash (if you have one there) and its contents more contextually-relevant. (Nate Graham, link)
All of those confusing and/or nonfunctional chord keyboard shortcuts throughout Plasma have been removed or replaced with standard-style shortcuts. (Nate Graham, link)
On System Settings' Region & Language page, the language chooser sheet now has a search field and responds appropriately to keyboard interactions. (Nate Graham, link)
The screen action chooser OSD you can open with Meta+P will now cycle through its options if you continue to hold down Meta and press P. (Sergey Katunin, link)
On Info Center's Energy page, the graph is now displayed better when information isn't available. (Ismael Asensio, link)
Task Manager tooltips from right-screen-edge panels now shift their close buttons over to the left side, to make them harder to click by accident like with left and bottom panels. People using top panels are expected to be so elite that this isn't a problem for them 😎 (Christoph Wolk, link)
The categories displayed in Discover's sidebar have been synced with the ones shown in Kickoff/Kicker/etc. (Ujjwal Shekhawat, link)
The Kirigami.LinkButton UI element has been given an appropriate color change when pressed, which will be visible in many apps making use of it, including quite a few Plasma apps like Discover and Welcome Center. (Nate Graham, link)
KWin no longer crashes when the system has been configured to use an ICC profile that's then later moved, renamed, deleted, or otherwise made unavailable at the place KWin expects to find it. Instead, it simply doesn't apply the profile. (Xaver Hugl, link)
Fixed two KWin crashes that could be caused by the kernel or graphics drivers providing unexpected data, and a third one caused by a bug in idleness detection. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link 1, link 2, and link 3)
Fixed a case where Plasma could crash on X11 when accessed over VNC without certain XRandr extensions present. (Fushan Wen, link)
Fixed a case where the app chooser dialog could sometimes crash when you tell it to always use the chosen app to open files of that type. (David Redondo, link)
Fixed a case where the ksystemstats daemon (that provides, well, system stats) could crash after you'd finished customizing a widget or the app to remove a sensor. (Arjen Hiemstra, link)
Sticky Note widgets on the desktop no longer block the Ctrl+V shortcut from working to paste files onto the desktop, even when the note widget isn't focused. (Marco Martin, link)
Fixed the spinboxes on System Settings' Accessibility page, which would become semi-broken when you typed numbers into them rather than interacting with them using the arrow buttons or up/down arrow keys. They were ironically not very accessible! But no longer. (David Edmundson, link)
Fixed two Plasma 6 regressions in the Kicker application menu: one that required two presses of the backspace key to delete characters entered into the search field; and another that made it impossible to navigate between groups of the multi-column search view. (Marco Martin, link 1 and link 2)
Fixed a bug in the System Monitor app and widgets that caused the number of CPUs to be mis-counted on some systems. (Arjen Hiemstra, link)
Filtering text on Info Center's Firmware Security page now works properly, displaying matches on separate lines as expected. (Harald Sitter and Nate Graham, link)
Discover is now more reliable at showing themed app icons on certain distros. (Harald Sitter, link)
Fixed the screen color display for games that use the scRGB color space in HDR mode. (Xaver Hugl, link)
Fixed the colors of the Night Light preview when using a dark color scheme, and when adjusting the color temperature while Night Light is currently active. (Thomas Moerschell, link 1 and link 2)
Discover now shows something more sensible when launched with no internet access. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, link)
Fixed a Task Manager bug that caused tooltips to inappropriately re-appear while their task's context menu was open and you hovered over the task again. (Nate Graham, link)
On System Settings' Window Switchers page, the apps in the preview visualization are now always the same ones, and no longer sometimes display thumbnails that don't match the text and icon. (Nate Graham, link)
Entering text in the Overview screen's search field now works. (David Edmundson, link)
Improved the accuracy of CPU usage measurements in the System Monitor app and widgets by filtering out iowait, which is not really real CPU usage. (Arjen Hiemstra, link)
For people who had enabled the "Disable touchpad while mouse is plugged in" setting on X11 in the past, that preference is now migrated to the new feature (which works on both X11 and Wayland) so you don't need to manually re-enable it, and the remain orphaned backend code for the old feature has been deleted. (Jakob Petsovits, link)
System Settings' Audio page now does a more thorough job of identifying audio devices that should be marked as inactive. (Harald Sitter, link)
Plasma's KRDP remote desktop server now only runs in Plasma itself, and won't start up accidentally in other environments you might also have running on the same system, where it might interfere with or block that environment's own RDP solution. (David Edmundson, link)
KRDP now supports FreeRDP version 3. (Jack Xu, link)
Deleting a Sticky Note widget also deletes the data file where its text was stored, plugging a data leak and preventing the ~/.local/share/plasma_notes/ folder from filling the system up with orphaned data taking up space. (Marco Martin, link)
KDE has become important in the world, and your time and contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we need your support to keep KDE sustainable.
You can help KDE by becoming an active community member and getting involved somehow. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE — you are not a number or a cog in a machine!
You don’t have to be a programmer, either. Many other opportunities exist:
You can also help us by making a donation! Any monetary contribution — however small — will help us cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors, and in general just keep KDE bringing Free Software to the world.
To get a new Plasma feature or a bugfix mentioned here, feel free to push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-05.
Tags: tech, fediverse, community
Indeed, the Fediverse needs to be better known. Any small actions towards this goal helps.
https://blog.elenarossini.com/supporting-the-fediverse-one-small-act-at-a-time/
Tags: tech, foss, fediverse
This is good to see funds being raised for those projects. Lets hope they get madly successful.
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, criticism
Maybe at some point the big providers will get the message and their scrapers will finally respect robots.txt? Let’s hope so.
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, business, politics
I guess this was just a matter of time, the obsession of “just make it bigger” was making most player myopic. Now this obviously collides with geopolitics since this time it’s about a Chinese company being ahead.
https://www.404media.co/deepseek-mania-shakes-ai-industry-to-its-core/
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, business, politics
Looks like the monopolists are vexed and are looking for arguments to discredit the competition… of all the arguments, this one is likely the most ridiculous seeing their own behavior.
https://www.404media.co/openai-furious-deepseek-might-have-stolen-all-the-data-openai-stole-from-us/
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, business, satire, funny
Excellent satire, it summaries the situation quite well.
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, neural-networks, gpt, science, energy
I mostly agree with this piece. There’s lots of room for optimization still so we might see a temporary drop in the energy consumption of those systems. That said, longer term energy consumption is indeed the main leverage to improve performance of those systems. It can only get us so far, so new techniques will be needed. Hence why my position is that we’ll come back to symbolic approaches at some point, there’s a clear challenge at interfacing both worlds.
https://algonaute.fr/en/thinking-after-chatgpt.html
Tags: tech, tools, portability, wayland
Looks like a neat tool to have available to remap keys.
https://github.com/houmain/keymapper
Tags: tech, cpu, performance, programming
Nice primer on the impact of too many branches in your code on the CPU. This is sometimes a good way to boost performance when you’re mindful about that.
https://cedardb.com/blog/reducing_branches/
Tags: tech, safety, regex
Always be careful with regular expressions indeed. It can badly backfire.
https://lemire.me/blog/2025/01/25/regular-expressions-can-blow-up/
Tags: tech, javascript, date, time
Finally some sane API to deal with date and time in JavaScript? Maybe, we’ll see…
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/blog/javascript-temporal-is-coming/
Tags: tech, science, culture
Of course I agree with this piece. You need enough culture in your field to know about a breadth of topics. It will definitely help pick up the next one you don’t know about yet or help you build parallels for the tougher problems you encounter.
https://blog.waleedkhan.name/will-i-ever-use-this/
Tags: tech, dependencies, supply-chain, security, complexity, maintenance
This is a worthy questioning… We try to reuse, but maybe we do it too much? For sure some ecosystems quickly lead to hundreds of dependencies even for small features.
https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/1/24/build-it-yourself/
Tags: psychology
It’s widespread, especially in our field. You’re not alone. Find your coping strategy.
https://www.cultivatedmanagement.com/dealing-with-impostor-syndrome/
Bye for now!
Since the last update two month ago KDE Itinerary got UI redesigns in a few areas and a number of important improvements for accessing public transport information.
The most visible change this time is the redesign of the timeline and public transport search result views done by Carl. This improves having all relevant information available in the limited screen space. And it looks a lot better too.
The compact horizontal bar display for getting a quick overview over public transport search results was also updated to match the same style and now features bar sizes proportional to travel time (as long as there’s enough screen space for that).
Another very visible change is the new “My Data” page that replaces the old “Passes & Programs” page on the prominent third bottom bar tab.
The My Data page gives you quick access to several of the “secondary” functionalities in Itinerary:
There’s a number of upcoming conferences featuring Itinerary-adjacent talks and the opportunity to meet people working on Itinerary, Transitous and other related topics:
Transitous has completed the migration to MOTIS v2 and along with it to new hardware. Besides better performance and higher quality first/last mile routing this also allows us to benefit from all the improvements and newly added features in MOTIS again, which in the past couple of months had only gone into the new version.
Besides increasing the data coverage there’s also a lot of effort going into improving the data quality. Where that’s not possible at the source additional processing steps or safeguards are added. Examples include:
Deutsche Bahn’s Hafas API has been shut down earlier this year. That has been the backbone for many FOSS public transport tools due to its very wide coverage in Europe, Itinerary and KTrip also heavily relied on it.
As there had been rumors of this happening in December already it didn’t hit us entirely unprepared fortunately, and within less than 48h we had updated APKs in KDE’s F-Droid repositories that use DB’s new custom replacement API instead.
The new API doesn’t have all the details we used to get previously and our client code is still brand new and not benefiting from many other operators using the same API, so some disruptions caused by this are still to be expected.
Once more this shows why Transitous is so important, we don’t want to be dependent on semi-official proprietary APIs that can disappear at any time without notice.
KPublicTransport so far provided three basic operations: Searching for locations, querying arrivals or departures at a given stop and querying connections between two locations. We now added a fourth one, querying trips. That is, one specific run of a vehicle along a route/line.
Besides generally showing more information this has one main use-case in Itinerary, efficiently querying delays for booked trains/busses. That is currently done with a mix of routing (full level of detail, but very expensive) and departure/arrival queries at the start/destination (cheap, but only gives us information about delays at that one location). Trip queries combine the best of both approaches, giving us the full level of detail while avoiding expensive routing.
Native support for trip queries currently exist in the MOTIS, OpenTripPlanner, Hafas and Deutsche Bahn backends, for all other backends trip queries are transparently emulated using routing.
All of this has been made possible thanks to your travel document donations!
The indoor map renderer got a few new features for use in MapCSS styles:
The work on textured lines also uncovered a bug in the OSM raw data tile server where cliff lines where erroneously treated as closed lines.
The new per-trip timeline view introduced with 24.12 received a number of improvements:
That’s not all though:
Feedback and travel document samples are very much welcome, as are all other forms of contributions. Feel free to join us in the KDE Itinerary Matrix channel.
Today we are releasing GCompris version 25.0.
As you can see, we are now basing the major version number on the release year. This makes sense as we are doing one major version per year. It is also a good occasion to do it now to celebrate the 25 years of GCompris.
This version adds translation for one more language: Sanskrit.
This new version contains 195 activities, including 5 new ones:
It contains bug fixes and graphics improvements on multiple activities.
With the help of teachers, we rewrote a big part of the activities description to be clearer.
When we switch language in the menu, the new language is now applied directly, without having to restart GCompris.
On the technical side, it is also the first release using Qt6.
We have also set the graphical renderer to direct3d11 by default on Windows.
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 and Raspberry Pi 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
Today we're releasing Krita 5.2.9! This is a bug fix release, containing all bugfixes of our bug hunt efforts back in November. Major bug-fixes include fixes to clone-layers, fixes to opacity handling, in particular for file formats like Exr, a number of crash fixes and much more!
Special thanks to Doreene Kang, Ralek Kolemios, Pedro Reis, Guillaume Marrec, Aqaao, Grum999, Maciej Jesionowski, Freya Lupen, Dov Grobgeld, Rasyuqa A. H.
If you're using the portable zip files, just open the zip file in Explorer and drag the folder somewhere convenient, then double-click on the Krita icon in the folder. This will not impact an installed version of Krita, though it will share your settings and custom resources with your regular installed version of Krita. For reporting crashes, also get the debug symbols folder.
Note: We are no longer making 32-bit Windows builds.
The separate gmic-qt AppImage is no longer needed.
(If, for some reason, Firefox thinks it needs to load this as text: right-click on the link to download.)
Note: We're not supporting MacOS 10.13 anymore, 10.14 is the minimum supported version.
We consider Krita on ChromeOS as ready for production. Krita on Android is still beta. Krita is not available for Android phones, only for tablets, because the user interface requires a large screen.
For all downloads, visit https://download.kde.org/stable/krita/5.2.9/ and click on "Details" to get the hashes.
The Linux AppImage and the source .tar.gz and .tar.xz tarballs are signed. You can retrieve the public key here. The signatures are here (filenames ending in .sig).
Welcome to a new issue of "This Week in KDE Apps"! Every week we cover as much as possible of what's happening in the world of KDE apps.
Due to FOSDEM happening next weekend, there won't be any "This Week in KDE Apps" post next week. If you are in Brussels during the event, the KDE team will be in building AW, next to our friends from GNOME. Come say hi, we will have some stickers and demo devices!
The About page used in many Kirigami apps now uses a new FormLinkDelegate for entries that will open a link. (Carl Schwan, Kirigami Addons 1.8.0. Link)
Support for Digital Audio Access Protocol (DAAP) was fixed. (Tuomas Nurmi, 3.2.2. Link)
Loading IMAP tags was optimized. (Carl Schwan, 24.12.2. Link)
Some SQL queries were fixed so that they don't exceed the limits imposed by the SQL engines (e.g. when reindexing a big email folders). (David Faure, 24.12.2. Link)
Files will play automatically when opened from a different app (e.g. Dolphin). (Pedro Nishiyama, 25.04.0. Link)
We improved the ticket extractor for PKP (Grzegorz Mu, 24.12.2, Link)
We fixed public transport data access from Entur in Norway (24.12.2, also affects KTrip).
The onboarding workflow of Kaidan was completely overhauled. (Melvin Keskin. Link)
The QR-code scanner and generator of Kaidan now uses Prison, KDE's standard QR-Code library (Jonah Brüchert and Melvin Keskin. Link)
The history feature was fixed. (François Guerraz, 24.12.2. Link)
We fixed Okular freezing when opening a PDF file with a lot of entries in a choice field. (Albert Astals Cid, 25.04.0. Link)
Qrca gained a mode to only scan for Wifi QR-codes. Currently this can be triggered with the --wifi flag, but in the future this will be triggered directly from Plasma Network Management to scan for Wifi codes. Additionally when scaning the QR-code for an existing connection, instead of creating a new connection, Qrca will update the credentials of the existing connection. (Kai Uwe Broulik. Link)
We removed the option to share a QR-code and replace it with a button to copy the QR-code. (Jonah Brüchert. Link)
We added a menu item under the "Filters" timeline action to configure filters. (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link)
We improved the look of filtered posts significantly. (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link 1)
Tags and polls are hidden when the post has a content notice. (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link 1 and link 2)
As part of more trust and safety improvements, we added a button to mute a conversation, so that you don't get any notifications for conversations you are not interested too. (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link)
We fixed voting in polls that was not working reliably. (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link) and improved Tokodon when using a screen reader. (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link)
Evan Maddock released the 1.0.0 and 1.0.1 of BlueJay. BlueJay is a Bluetooth manager written in Qt with Kirigami.
This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! If you’re hungry for more, check out Nate's blog about Plasma and be sure not to miss his This Week in Plasma series, where every Saturday he covers all the work being put into KDE's Plasma desktop environment.
For a complete overview of what's going on, visit KDE's Planet, where you can find all KDE news unfiltered directly from our contributors.
The KDE organization has become important in the world, and your time and contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we're going to need your support for KDE to become sustainable.
You can help KDE by becoming an active community member and getting involved. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE — you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to be a programmer either. There are many things you can do: you can help hunt and confirm bugs, even maybe solve them; contribute designs for wallpapers, web pages, icons and app interfaces; translate messages and menu items into your own language; promote KDE in your local community; and a ton more things.
You can also help us by donating. Any monetary contribution, however small, will help us cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors and in general just keep KDE bringing Free Software to the world.
To get your application mentioned here, please ping us in invent or in Matrix.
I have an Android phone. The phone is 5 years old, functions perfectly for me, and is now E-Waste.
I can tell by the pictures on the phone that I bought it just after conf.kde.in in 2020 because it’s full of pictures of my visit to Colombia (where I met Maui Toolkit developer Camilo). It’s a Motorola G7 Power. It came with Android 9. It was updated to Android 10. It’s been a fine phone for 5 years, the battery life is still measured in days, it makes calls and does Matrix and Mastodon and whatnot. I personally have no reason to replace it at all.
I do have a banking app on it, which is now telling me that I need Android 11 to keep using the banking app. I presume the bank has a good reason for requiring the newer version. There’s no question of “just don’t use the app” since, well, Dutch banks are nearly inaccessible except via their phone app.
Motorola has a lousy record of providing Android updates for its phones, if I recall, and so the phone is now E-Waste.
Exactly the same thing happened with my mom’s phone. Slightly newer, no updates, E-Waste. The only upside I can think of here is that postmarketOS has two more devices for testing available (there are instructions for the G7 Power which are just as inscrutible as how-to-configure-XOrg instructions used to be in the ’90s. Assuming non-zero energy and some pent-up annoyance in the future, I can improve on that situation.
