This week I’d like to highlight a very cool development: the automatic crash reporting facility in the Plasma 6 version of our venerable DrKonqi crash report wizard. Automatic reporting is opt-in, but so far lots of people are opting in, and we’re using this data to get a much better picture of the crashes that our users are actually experiencing than we ever could using Bugzilla! Using this system, at least three such important crashes were fixed this week, two by Fushan Wen (link 1 and link 2) and one by Vlad Zahorodnii (link)–and possibly even more than I missed!

These reports make a difference; they’re not a black hole. So if something crashes, please do use the automatic crash reporting feature in DrKonqi!

In addition, quite a lot of technical and performance work was merged, especially for Discover and the Baloo file indexer. Finally, features and UI polishing are starting to land in Plasma 6.1. In addition to everything listed here, there’s something big that I can’t mention yet since it’s not 100% merged yet, but only 95%! Hopefully next week. So stay tuned for that!

New Features

The Power and Battery widget now responds to middle-clicks and scrolls: middle-click will block or re-enable automatic sleep and screen locking, and scrolling will change the active power profile (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 6.1. Link)

UI Improvements

The Power and Battery widget now shows an appropriate icon when you manually block sleep and screen locking (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 6.1. Link 1 and link 2):

Some of the menu items and toolbar buttons in the desktop context menu and global Edit Mode toolbar are now more concise (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.1. Link):

The opening and closing animations for expandable List Items in Plasma system tray widgets now respect the global animation speed, and are also a bit faster and more responsive-feeling in general (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.1. Link)

“Get new [thing]” dialogs throughout KDE software are now sorted by highest number of downloads first (Ismael Asensio, Frameworks 6.1. Link)

Bug Fixes

Fixed a common crash in Discover related to refreshing KNewStuff content (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.0.3. Link)

The bug where clicking on certain panel widgets would inappropriately transfer focus to the panel is now actually fixed. It turns out that it was in fact fixed before as well for people living on git master, but I forgot to backport half of it to the stable branch, so it didn’t take effect. Sorry about that. But even if I had, it would have broken other things as it turned out to not be the right fix. This week we have a much better fix that fixes everything and breaks nothing! (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 6.0.3. Link 1 and link 2)

Power and session actions once again work for people not using the systemd-enabled boot process (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.0.3. Link)

Fixed multiple related issues that would cause panels to switch to a different screen on wake-up or login when using a multi-screen setup with an AMD GPU (David Redondo, Plasma 6.0.3. Link 1, link 2, and link 3)

It’s once again possible to disable Presentation Mode via the same way you enabled it, in the Display Configuration widget (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 6.0.3. Link)

Syncing your settings to SDDM now also syncs the scale factor and screen arrangement correctly on systems where SDDM is running on KWin as a Wayland server rather than Xorg as an X server (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.0.3. Link)

Fixed multiple minor glitches with Task Manager window thumbnails related to them being sometimes cut off, displaced, or never showing up at all (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.0.3. Link)

Fixed an issue that could cause Discover to crash at launch under certain circumstances (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.0.4. Link)

In the Plasma X11 session, the Desktop Grid page on the Overview effect can now be closed using the same keyboard shortcut (Meta+G by default) that was used to open it (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 6.0.4. Link)

Fixed a case where Plasma could crash after changing the panel position on certain setups (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Fixed a case where the Baloo file indexer could crash after you created or renamed files or folders (Méven Car, Frameworks 6.1. Link)

Other bug information of note:

• 4 Very high priority Plasma bugs (up from 3 last week). Current list of bugs
• 35 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 34 last week). Current list of bugs
• 209 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed over the last week! Full list of bugs

Performance & Technical

Discover is now much faster about showing reviews for apps, especially when doing so immediately after the app is launched (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.0.3. Link)

Discover is now also faster about displaying information about large offline updates (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.0.4. Link)

The Baloo file indexer no longer tries to index content on temporarily mounted file systems, such as network shares and overlayfs mounts (Adam Fontenot, Frameworks 6.1. Link)

The list of recently-accessed files that gets saved to disk by open/save dialogs and other consumers of KFileWidget now gets written to the config file for volatile state data, not user-directed config data (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 6.1. Link)

…And Everything Else

This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! If you’re hungry for more, check out https://planet.kde.org, where you can find more news from other KDE contributors.

How You Can Help

Please help with bug triage! The Bugzilla volumes are still pretty high right now and help is appreciated. If you’re interested, read this.

Otherwise, visit https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover other ways to be part of a project that really matters. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE; you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to already be a programmer, either. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

As a final reminder, 99.9% of KDE runs on labor that KDE e.V. didn’t pay for. If you’d like to help change that, consider donating today!

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-13.

Google Ordered To Identify Who Watched Certain YouTube Videos

Tags: tech, google, law, surveillance

This is a worrying trend we see in law enforcement a bit everywhere. It’s a bit too convenient to make such requests even though it is unconstitutional.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2024/03/22/feds-ordered-google-to-unmask-certain-youtube-users-critics-say-its-terrifying/

Redis Renamed to Redict - Andrew Kelley

Tags: tech, redis, foss, licensing, community

Indeed, time to leave Redis behind in favor of Redict. It’s not like one can expect new things to come out to such a project.

https://andrewkelley.me/post/redis-renamed-to-redict.html

A Return to Blu-ray as Streaming Value Evaporates | Audioholics

Tags: tech, streaming, movie, copyright, economics

Interesting, with the price hikes and bundles to come, we might indeed see a resurgence in physical media. It will stay niche for sure, but looks like demand is about to grow.

https://www.audioholics.com/news/a-return-to-blu-ray-as-streaming-value-evaporates

How People Create and Destroy Value with Generative AI | BCG

Tags: tech, ai, gpt, creativity, quality

Interesting study on the impact generative AI can have on people performances in business settings. There are a few nuggets in there. In particular anything related to problem solving people do worse with generative AI tools than without. And even worse than that when they’ve been trained (probably due to overconfidence). The place where it seems to help is for more creativity related tasks… at the individual level, but at the collective level creativity decreases due to homogenization. Definitely things to keep in mind.

https://www.bcg.com/publications/2023/how-people-create-and-destroy-value-with-gen-ai?ref=wheresyoured.at

Have We Reached Peak AI?

Tags: tech, ai, gpt, criticism, communication, copyright, law

Very interesting piece. The chances that it is another bubble are high. It’s currently surviving on a lot of wishful thinking and hypothetical. This really feels like borrowed time… I wonder what useful will remain once it all collapses. Coding assistants are very likely to survive. Clearly there could be interesting uses in a more sober approach.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/peakai/

Models All The Way Down

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, statistics, bias

Wondering where some of the biases of AI models generating images come from? This is an excellent deep dive into one of the most successful data sets used to train said models. And they’ve been curated by… statistical models, not humans. This unsurprisingly amplifies biases all the way to the final models.

This is an excellent piece, I highly recommend reading it.

https://knowingmachines.org/models-all-the-way#section5

Mozilla fixes two Firefox zero-day bugs exploited at Pwn2Own

Tags: tech, mozilla, browser, security

Those were nasty, good they’ve been patched already.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/mozilla-fixes-two-firefox-zero-day-bugs-exploited-at-pwn2own/

Hotel hotspot hijinks - P.T.C.

Tags: tech, web, automation, wifi

Some captive portals are indeed stupid. Why not automating going through them?

https://peateasea.de/hotel-hotspot-hijinks/

Why x86 Doesn’t Need to Die – Chips and Cheese

Tags: tech, cpu, hardware

Good exploration of the CPU architectures we have nowadays, and why the RISC vs CISC debate doesn’t make sense anymore.

https://chipsandcheese.com/2024/03/27/why-x86-doesnt-need-to-die/

Bump Allocation: Up or Down? • Core Dumped

Tags: tech, memory

Making your own allocator? This is definitely something to consider and measure.

https://coredumped.dev/2024/03/25/bump-allocation-up-or-down/

Why choose async/await over threads? – notgull – The world’s number one source of notgull

Tags: tech, rust, multithreading, coroutine

In which case you want one or the other? This is illustrated in the Rust case which has its own struggles, but the question applies more largely in my opinion.

https://notgull.net/why-not-threads/

Linux Crisis Tools

Tags: tech, production, linux, tools

Good reminder that you want the diagnosis tools in place and working before you get an actual problem in production.

https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2024-03-24/linux-crisis-tools.html

shelmet 0.6.0

Tags: tech, python, processes, filesystem

Interesting API for running subprocesses and interact with files.

https://shelmet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

ASON AltScript – Write Data Not Code

Tags: tech, data, json

Might be a good alternative to JSON in some cases.

https://altscript.com/

3D DOM viewer, copy-paste this into your console to visualise the DOM topographically

Tags: tech, web, browser, debugging, frontend

Interesting debug tool for web frontend code. It’d be nice as a browser extension.

https://gist.github.com/OrionReed/4c3778ebc2b5026d2354359ca49077ca

TDD: You’re Probably Doing It Just Fine - The Code Whisperer

Tags: tech, tdd, craftsmanship

All good points. Can we improve? Sure. Does it means we do it bad? No. Just do it more when it makes sense.

https://blog.thecodewhisperer.com/permalink/tdd-youre-probably-doing-it-just-fine

On Tech Debt: My Rust Library is now a CDO

Tags: tech, supply-chain, maintenance, complexity

This is about a Rust library but equally applies to any ecosystem which allows to easily pull a dependency. As soon as you pull them, you need to monitor their health for the sake of your own project.

https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2024/3/26/rust-cdo/

Two open source projects with great documentation

Tags: tech, documentation, architecture

Of course documentation, especially one presenting the architecture, shouldn’t be neglected. It takes time and skills of course.

https://johnjago.com/great-docs/

Bye for now!

Last week I attended this year’s FOSSGIS Konferenz in Hamburg, Germany, focusing especially on topics around indoor navigation and public transport.

Indoor Navigation

Tobias Knerr and I hosted an Indoor OSM user meeting which was mainly intended for connecting people working on various aspects of that subject. We ended up overrunning our timeslot by 40 minutes until we were kicked out of the room, I count that as a success.

For continuing this, there’s the quarterly OSM indoor online meetup on June 5th at 18:00 CEST.

Particularly interesting topics for me:

• The multi-floor route visualization and routing profile configuration approaches from the OPENER next team. Their focus is also train stations, so there is a lot of inspiration for KDE Itinerary there.
• Getting the latest update from indoor localization research. Besides Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, UWP, Lidar and IMU-based approaches there’s now also a project using optical SLAM (which is interesting as it doesn’t need special hardware), but much of this isn’t available as FOSS (yet) unfortunately.
• Seeing the progress on the BIM to OSM conversion work and subsequent discussions with train station operators on what it would take to provide/publish (partial) BIM data.

And just because this is called “indoor” data doesn’t mean there is no field work involved. With Hamburg being by far not as flat as one might think, both the venue itself and the nearby city provided some nice examples for tricky to model and visualize vertical structures, which helps a lot with the otherwise often very abstract discussions on how to best represent this in OSM.

• The TUHH campus is built into a hillside, with ground-level entrance on one side being several floors below those on the other side, which makes visualizing the surroundings tricky.
• Hamburg Harburg station is seamlessly connected to a two-story outside pedestrian area, which challenges the current definition of OSM’s level tag.
• The southerns concourse of Hamburg central station is a slightly inclined area starting on the ground floor on the eastern side but connecting to an underground area on the western side. Both our visualization and our router get utterly confused by this at the moment, having seen this myself in person I now at least understand why.
• And if that wouldn’t be enough already, the Landungsbrücken subway/rapid transit station basically combines all of the above.

Public Transport

The other set of topics I was especially interested in was anything regarding public transport and routing, as that could be relevant for Transitous.

• Contact with the openrouteservice team, as we are still missing an OSM router for Transitous to enable full intermodal routing in MOTIS.
• Multiple talks and sessions about improving bike routing, covering OSM-based cycleway quality data analysis and ways on how such data could be used in routing. While we don’t have any (bike) routing in Transitous at all yet, this shows what future expectations for this might look like.
• Research on public transport connectivity, needing higher quality GTFS data as well.

There were also a few opportunities to promote the Open Transport Meetup, to connect more people working in that area as well.

Public administration and Open Data

There increasing regulation requiring public administration to publish data unless there’s a valid reason against that. That’s great of course, but it’s not enough. Data needs to be available in standardized formats and automatically discoverable as well.

A city publishing the location of their street lamps as a spreadsheet is just the first step. It’s of little help as such if for example your usecase is taking lighting into account when doing nighttime pedestrian routing. City- or region-specific apps are not the solution for this, that doesn’t scale and isn’t sustainable.

Instead such information would ideally be jointly maintained in globally unified database, such as OSM or Wikidata. That would also help with the data quality issues often found in official datasets, as lacking a way to upstream fixes also limits their value.

Public administration and Free Software

One of the ideas behind the eco-certifying KDE software was that eco-certification is an established procurement criteria in the public sector for many other products already. Therefore I was happy to see KDE’s Okular mentioned in a panel discussion on public procurement as the first Blue Angel certified application (without anyone from KDE being on that panel).

Another noteworthy aspect for me here was for the first time seeing someone from the public administration questioning the Github monopoly and the risks involved with that. For organisations like KDE and GNOME who run their own infrastructure for exactly that reason this isn’t news, but outside of that bubble this is rarely something people are even aware of.

Conference

And of course I can’t attend a conference without looking for ideas to “steal” for KDE’s Akademy:

• As part of signing up for the event attendees got two 20% discount vouchers for Deutsche Bahn for travel to/from the event (and unlike similar offers at other events those actually applied on top of all other discounts). I yet have to figure out how to obtain that as an event organizer, with Akademy in Germany this year that is of course particularly interesting.
• Lanyards and name badge holders were collected at the end for reuse at the next event.
• Talks were streamed and chat input was considered during the Q&A part as it’s common at many events by now. For BoFs/meetings there was new equipment though which seemed to fare much better in the typical university seminar rooms, “Meeting Owl”. Those seem significantly more expensive than the Jabra conference microphones we used previously though.

Cross-community collaboration

In a session about marketing/promotion of OSM Maik said something along the lines of “we are seen every day in Germany’s prime time news broadcast, yet hardly anyone knows who we are”, which is not much different from the situation for KDE. Our code is in the majority of web browsers, yet hardly anyone using those knows about us. Similarly, the discussion about sustainable funding and moving towards hiring people seemed very familiar.

And there’s likely even more subjects that affect OSM, KDE and any other FOSS/Open Data organisation of that scale, where all of us might benefit from more knowledge exchange and collaboration. Probably also something to discuss after congratulating our friends at GNOME for their new release at next week’s release event in Berlin :)

Personal:

As many of you know, I lost my beloved son March 9th. This has hit me really hard, but I am staying strong and holding on to all the wonderful memories I have. He grew up to be an amazing man, devoted christian and wonderful father. He was loved by everyone who knew him and will be truly missed by us all. I have had folks ask me how they can help. He left behind his 7 year old son Mason. Mason was Billy’s world and I would like to make sure Mason is taken care of. I have set up a gofundme for Mason and all proceeds will go to the future care of him.

https://gofund.me/25dbff0c

Work report

Kubuntu:

Bug bashing! I am triaging allthebugs for Plasma which can be seen here:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/plasma-5.27/+bug/2053125

I am happy to report many of the remaining bugs have been fixed in the latest bug fix release 5.27.11.

I prepared https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/5/5.27.11/ and Rik uploaded to archive, thank you. Unfortunately, this and several other key fixes are stuck in transition do to the time_t64 transition, which you can read about here: https://wiki.debian.org/ReleaseGoals/64bit-time . It is the biggest transition in Debian/Ubuntu history and it couldn’t come at a worst time. We are aware our ISO installer is currently broken, calamares is one of those things stuck in this transition. There is a workaround in the comments of the bug report: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/calamares/+bug/2054795

Fixed an issue with plasma-welcome.

Found the fix for emojis and Aaron has kindly moved this forward with the fontconfig maintainer. Thanks!

I have received an https://kfocus.org/spec/spec-ir14.html laptop and it is truly a great machine and is now my daily driver. A big thank you to the Kfocus team! I can’t wait to show it off at https://linuxfestnorthwest.org/.

KDE Snaps:

You will see the activity in this ramp back up as the KDEneon Core project is finally a go! I will participate in the project with part time status and get everyone in the Enokia team up to speed with my snap knowledge, help prepare the qt6/kf6 transition, package plasma, and most importantly I will focus on documentation for future contributors.

I have created the ( now split ) qt6 with KDE patchset support and KDE frameworks 6 SDK and runtime snaps. I have made the kde-neon-6 extension and the PR is in: https://github.com/canonical/snapcraft/pull/4698 . Future work on the extension will include multiple versions track support and core24 support.

I have successfully created our first qt6/kf6 snap ark. They will show showing up in the store once all the required bits have been merged and published.

Thank you for stopping by.

~Scarlett

KEcoLab

Sustainability has been one of three goals at KDE over the past 2 years. One aspect of this goal is to measure the energy consumption of KDE software. To do this, it is necessary to access the lab in KDAB, Berlin, which can now be done remotely using KEcoLab.

KEcoLab (remote-eco-lab) is a KDE Eco project aimed at enabling remote energy consumption measurements for your software using Gitlab's CI/CD pipeline. By automating the measurement process and integrating with the OSCAR statistics tool, developers can make informed decisions about improving code efficiency and obtain software eco-certification with the Blue Angel. This project came to being as part of GSoC 2023 under the mentorship of Volker Krause, Benson Muite, Nicolas Fella and Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss. Karanjot Singh is its original developer.

One of the main aims of Season of KDE 2024 is to integrate KEcoLab into Okular's pipeline. Okular is KDE's popular multi-platform PDF reader and universal document viewer. In 2022, Okular was awarded the Blue Angel ecolabel, the first ever eco-certified computer program. You can learn more about KDE Eco here and the process of measuring energy consumption in the KDE Eco handbook.

Deliverables Of The SoK24 Project

1. Integrate KEcoLab into Okular's pipeline.
2. Integrate KEcoLab's pipeline with E2E tests or integration tests.
3. Usage scenario scripts with KdeEcoTest.
4. Bug squashing.

I have been working together with Sarthak Negi for this Season of KDE.

Integrating KEcoLab Into Okular's Pipeline

As mentioned, the main aim for this mentorship is to integrate KEcoLab into Okular's pipeline. Okular, being a Blue Angel certified project, will benefit from having its energy consumption measured either for every release automatically or for specific merge requests via a manual trigger. In this way it is possible to track Okular's energy consumption and make necessary changes to adhere to Blue Angel specifications.

I have had discussions with the Okular team regarding the integration of KEcoLab into their pipeline. This was necessary to make sure that the new addition won't change their existing workflow rules, i.e., there would be no manual work required on their end to trigger the pipeline on every release. At the same time, we wanted to make sure it is possible to manually trigger the measurement process on a case-by-case basis. I'll go into further details below. The email exchange can be accessed here.

I have been testing the pipeline on a test-repo for the past few weeks, which can be accessed here.

The pipeline was tested for the following contexts:

1. Triggering KEcoLab's pipeline for energy measurement:

   a) using Web UI.

   b) pushing the tag through Git.

2. Pipeline runs on triggering it manually through the Web UI.

3. Pipeline does not run on merge request.

4. Prevent pipeline from running on every commit push.

The above was achieved by making use of a combination of GitLab's workflow: rules and GitLab's predefined CI/CD variables. There were several difficulties I faced during this time, notably preventing the pipeline from running on every release and rather restricting it to only major releases. During one of the monthly meetings, however, Volker thought this would not be necessary since there is only one release per month, i.e, for the time being it is not important to cherry pick the release candidates. As it is now, the measurement process will therefore be triggered on every release of Okular. This may change at a later date, and so I will document here some thoughts I had on how to this.

I initially thought about making use of a global variable which would be updated in the .pre stage depending on a comparison between the last and second-to-last tag to determine whether it's a major or minor release. This would be achieved by making use of a regex rule to identify the difference. The way this would work is by adding a rule under every job to check for the value of the variable. However, since the value wasn't persistent, I took a different approach by making use of artefacts which would contain the value required to determine if it's a major or a minor release version. When a measurement should be triggered, and when not, looks something like this:

• v1.8.3 -> v2.0.8 # Pipeline should run

• v2.2.3 -> v2.6.8 # Pipeline should not run

The code looked something like this:

check-major-version:
 stage: .pre
 image: alpine
 tags:
 - EcoLabWorker
 before_script:
 - echo "Checking for major version"
 script:
 - export PREV_COMMIT_TAG=$(git tag --sort=-v:refname | grep -A1 '$COMMIT_TAG' | tail -n 1)
 - export MAJOR_VERSION_CURRENT=$(echo $COMMIT_TAG | sed 's/v\([0-9]*\).*/\1/')
 - export MAJOR_VERSION_PREVIOUS=$(echo $PREV_COMMIT_TAG | sed 's/v\([0-9]*\).*/\1/')
 - if [ "$MAJOR_VERSION_CURRENT" == "$MAJOR_VERSION_PREVIOUS" ]; then IS_MAJOR_RELEASE="false" > release_info.env; fi
 artifacts:
 reports:
 dotenv: release_info.env

Once I started testing it, I realised that the value of the updated global variable did not persist across jobs. Therefore, using the variable to determine whether the job should run or not was not viable. Additionally, I realized that this approach would still cause the pipeline to run and in any case it would result in a failed pipeline if all the jobs did not run. Since we decided the measurement process can run on every release, I abandoned trying to implement this.

Currently the pipeline is being tested on my fork of Okular here. It's almost ready, we just need to add the test scripts under 'remote-eco-lab/scripts/test-scripts/org.kde.okular' for which this patch has been made.

Bug Squashing

This includes the following:

Updating The Test Script To Comply With The Latest Kate Version (Issue !23)

Kate was one of the first application that KEcoLab had test scripts for. Even though we made use of as many shortcuts as possible, we were still using tabs to navigate around the user interface. This caused a problem: the previous script was made on Kate v21, and with Kate v24 being released the script needed to be updated accordingly. Also, testing the script across different distros highlighted a shortcoming of a bash-script approach: on Ubuntu the file was not being saved as intended, whereas on Fedora the file was being saved. In other words, small differences had potentially significant impacts which could make the script fail. In fact, it is one of the more fragile aspects of this approach to usage scenario scripting, which a semantics-based tool like Selenium doesn't have.

Helping Debug A Test Script On The Remote Lab PC (Issue !29)

There is a usage scenario script that is failing on the System Under Test. Worse yet, we do not know why and currently have no way to visually monitor the issue. This is a real pain point, mainly because we are unsure what may be the underlying problem. The script simulating user behavior doesn't seem to exit after completion, resulting in the lab being stuck in an endless loop. It is only exited when the GitLab runner times out. Since we don't yet have visual output of what is happening on the System Under Test, we are setting up a VNC to monitor what is happening. If anyone is interested in helping debug this, take a look at the remote eco lab job here. Also, check out the discussion at this issue regarding the visual monitoring of what is happening on the remote lab PC.

Test Out And Update The SUS Scripts For Okular In The FEEP Repository (Issue !52)

This mainly involved testing the script and cross-checking everything works. In this case, the shortcuts defined at the very top weren't consistent with the shortcuts used by the script.

Looking To The Future Of KEcoLab

1. Usage scenario scripts with KdeEcoTest. Since KdeEcoTest now supports Wayland thanks to Athul Raj and runs on Windows thanks to Amartya Chakraborty, we can utilize this tool to further enhance the remote lab. The current bash scripts are based on xdotool, which only supports X11 and not Wayland and does not run on Windows. With Plasma 6 now supporting Wayland by default, and many KDE apps being available on Windows, including Okular, this seems to be the right next step for KEcoLab tooling.

2. Setting up a VNC to monitor scripts visually. The problems faced by us have put further emphasis on the need to be able to monitor what is or is not happening on the remote System Under Test. This was also previously considered. From Joseph's notes, based on work done by Nicolas Fella during one of the lab setup sprints, the following approach can be utilized:

# VNC/remote desktop access
## Server Install
- apt install tigervnc-standalone-server
- echo "kwin_x11 &" >> .vnc/xstartup
- echo "konsole" >> .vnc/xstartup
## Start Server
- tigervncserver -geometry 1920x1080
## Client
create SSH tunnel:
- ssh -N -L 5900:localhost:5901 kde@INSERT_IP_HERE
In VNC client, e.g. KRDC:
- connect to localhost:5900
It will start a single Konsole window. Use this to start other stuff

If this doesn't work, we may want to reference x11vnc. If anyone has successfully setup VNC before, feel free to reach out as we would appreciate your help!

Interested in Contributing?

If you are interested in contributing to KEcoLab, you can join the matrix channels Energy Measurement Lab and KDE Energy Efficiency and introduce yourself. KEcoLab is hosted here. Thank you to Karan and Joseph as well as the whole KDE e.V. and the wonderful KDE community for helping out with this project. You can also reach out to me via email or on Matrix

The post Kdenlive 24.02.1 released appeared first on Kdenlive.

Haruna version 1.0.2 is out.

There are not a lot of changes in this release as the focus was on porting to Qt6 and KF6 and code refactoring. Some hwdec options have been removed, if needed they can be set in the settings under "Custom commands" as set hwdec decoding_method_name and choose "Run at startup".

You can get it now on flathub:

Windows version can be found here. Availability of other package formats depends on your distro and the people who package Haruna.

If you like Haruna then support its development: GitHub Sponsors | Liberapay | PayPal

Feature requests and bugs should be posted on bugs.kde.org, but for bugs make sure to fill in the template and provide as much information as possible.

Changelog:

1.0.2

Features:

• Opening items from the playlist is faster
• If Maximum recent files setting is set to zero the recent files are removed from the config file

Bugfixes:

• Opening file through Open File action was not playing the file
• Opening playlist file from playlist header was not doing anything
• Hiding/showing Playlist toolbar setting was not working
• Track sub-menus in Audio and Subtiles global menus being empty
• Freeze when opening HamburgerMenu

Every week veteran KDE contributor Kevin Ottens posts a bunch of thought-provoking links on his blog, and last week’s post contained one that I found particularly enlightening:

40 years of programming

It’s a collection of wisdom written from someone named Lars Wirzenius who started his software development career decades ago and has seen it all. While I don’t have 40 years of programming under my belt, I do have 16 years in programming, QA, release engineering, and management, and everything Lars wrote rings true to me. I’d encourage everyone to give it a read!

Here are my favorite takeaways:

• Take care of yourself, or else you’re no good to others.
• Useful software is too big to create alone, so your most important skill is the ability to collaborate.
• Write caveman code anyone can understand, unless complexity can be justified by measurably and consistently better performance.
• Do work in small chunks, and repeat.
• Diversity of perspective is important, or else you’ll end up accidentally making something that only works for a narrow slice of people.
• Know who the intended user is, and try to see things from their point of view.
• Developing software is political. Deal with it.
• Learn to write, and write stuff down.

But do check out the whole thing!