If you have used a moderately complex application there are chances that you have interacted with what is called a “modal” dialog. A modal dialog is a dialog that requires you to close/address it before you can continue interacting with the main application window. This can be implemented by the application in a straightforward manner but compositor didn’t know if a dialog was modal or not.

That is until now the new xdg-dialog-v1 protocol allows applications to mark their dialogs as modal or not modal. This allows the compositor to adapt its behavior according to this hint. For example when trying to activate the main window it can activate the modal dialog instead. It also enables KWin to use the darkening effect on the parent window on Wayland.

I implemented support for the protocol into KWin and Qt which will be part of the Plasma 6.1 and Qt 6.8 releases respectively. The protocol was created from functionality in GTK and Mutter by Carlos Garnacho and I am happy seeing the overall Wayland eco-system now being able to benefit from it.

With this blog post, we introduce the QtQuickComputeItem - a Qt Quick item that allows you to easily integrate compute shader into your Qt Quick Code.
Compute
Shader are used to perform arbitrary computations on the GPU. For
example, the screenshot below shows a Qt Quick application that
generates Gray Scott Reaction Diffusion patterns.  The simulation is executed by a compute shader that is configured directly in QML.

Continue reading Use Compute Shader in Qt Quick at basysKom GmbH.

Marknote 1.1.0 is out! Marknote is the new WYSIWYG note-taking application from KDE. Despite the latest release being just a few days ago, we have been hard at work and added a few new features and, more importantly, fixed some bugs.

Marknote now boasts broader Markdown support, and can now display images and task lists in the editor. And once you are done editing your notes, you can export them to various formats, including PDF, HTML and ODT.

Marknote’s interface now seamlessly integrates the colors assigned to your notebooks, enhancing its visual coherence and making it easier to distinguish one notebook from another. Additionally, your notebooks remember the last opened note, automatically reopening it upon selection.

We’ve also introduced a convenient command bar similar to the one in Merkuro. This provides quick access to essential actions within Marknote. Currently it only creates a new notebook and note, but we plan to make more actions available in the future. Finally we have reworked all the dialogs in Markdown to use the newly introduced FormCardDialog from KirigamiAddons.

We have created a small feature roadmap with features we would like to add in the future. Contributions are welcome!

Packager section

You can find the package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with my GPG key.

Note that this release introduce a new recommanded dependencies: md4c and require the latest Kirigami Addons release (published a few hours ago).

It’s again time for a new Kirigami Addons release. Kirigami Addons is a collection of helpful components for your QML and Kirigami applications.

FormCard

I added a new FormCard delegate: FormColorDelegate which allow to select a color and a new delegate container: FormCardDialog which is a new type of dialog.

Aside from these new components, Joshua fixed a newline bug in the AboutKDE component and I updated the code examples in the API documentation.

TableView

This new component is intended to provide a powerful table view on top of the barebone one provided by QtQuick and similar to the one we have in our QtWidgets application.

This was contributed by Evgeny Chesnokov. Thanks!

Other components

The default size of MessageDialog was decreased and is now more appropriate.

James Graham fixed the autoplay of the video delegate for the maximized album component.

Packager section

You can find the package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with my GPG key.

While everyone is busy analyzing the highly complex technical details of the recently discovered xz-utils compromise that is currently rocking the internet, it is worth looking at the underlying non-technical problems that make such a compromise possible. A very good write-up can be found on the blog of Rob Mensching...

"A Microcosm of the interactions in Open Source projects"

Ιστορία του Fedora

Αξιοσημείωτα χαρακτηριστικά του Fedora

1. Κυκλοφορεί με το αυθεντικό GNOME ως προεπιλογή

2. Φιλικό προς το χρήστη

3. Προσφέρει λογισμικό αιχμής

4. Το Fedora είναι αξιόπιστο

Εκδόσεις Fedora

1. Workstation

2. Silverblue

3. Kinoite

4. Sericea

Fedora Spins

1. KDE Plasma Desktop

2. XFCE Desktop

3. Cinnamon Desktop

4. MATE-Compiz Desktop

5. i3 Tiling Window Manager

6. Sway Tiling Window Manager

7. LXQt Desktop

8. Budgie Desktop

9. SOAS (Sugar on a Stick)

10. Phosh

Σε ποιον απευθύνεται το Fedora;

I didn’t work much on KDE for the first half of March, but still managed to squeeze out some good features and bugfixes. I’m also starting on the Wayland grant work I teased soon, so look forward to news on that next month.

Plasma

[Bugfix] The text and buttons are now centered in KCMs that launch external applications, such as the System Monitor in KInfoCenter. [6.1]

[Bugfix] Fix numerous spacing and layout issues in the Date & Time KCM. [6.1]

[Bugfix] Actually disable the calendar in the Date & Time KCM when NTP is enabled. Basically fixing the bug you see in the above screenshot where the date picker is still enabled. [6.1]

[Bugfix] (Haven’t been able to continue it yet) but disable the searchbox and filter actions when there’s no command output. If you don’t have the “aha” installed you shouldn’t be able to search for non-existent text under “Firmware Security”. [6.1]

[Bugfix] In the Bluetooth KCM, “game controllers” are now called as such where it was previously “joypads”. [6.1]

[Bugfix] The same device type names used in the Bluetooth KCM, are now used in it’s applet.

Tokodon

[Feature] Added an alert badge for pages in the sidebar. Currently only used for follow requests, but plan on adding it on other pages soon. [24.05]

[Feature] Allow popping out the status composer on desktop. This allows you to compose toots while doing something else in the application, like browsing or searching for the correct hashtag. [24.05]

[Bugfix] I implemented more key navigation fixes. This set of fixes are centered around interacting with media attachments. There’s still a long way to go before you can use Tokodon from a keyboard alone, but it’s getting there. [24.05]

[Bugfix] Ported from Qt5Compat.GraphicalEffects. I usually don’t mention boring refactors, this one is special. Volker found that this old GraphicalEffects module eats up 4 MB of storage on Android so this is a pretty big win! [24.05]

[Bugfix] Numerous UnifiedPush notification fixes. It’s not perfect yet, but much better than it was before. [24.02]

NeoChat

[Bugfix] Simple change, I made the tabs in the developer tools full-width. [24.05]

[Bugfix] Now lonely question marks are excluded from links as they should be. Websites that don’t handle this will throw up an error instead, so this eliminates lots of user error. [24.02]

[Bugfix] Fixed the quick format bar not working. [24.02]

PlasmaTube

Lots of small UX changes this month. Including moving more actions to the header, reducing video title duplication and more. I can’t make a good screenshot right now because Invidious is currently broken due to Google’s changes. [24.05]

Kirigami

[Bugfix] I did a little digging on where one of the color roles came from, and now noted where the disabled text color comes from (on KDE Plasma). Still needs approval though 🙂 [6.1]

[Bugfix] (Not approved yet) Stop the back button from appearing even when we explicitly requested it gone. [6.1]

Documentation

Note that Plasma Framework is now libplasma in the Breeze README. [6.1]

Clarify that the default alignment for Kirigami’s ActionToolbar is AlignLeft, not AlignRight. [6.1]

That’s all for this month!

I'm bit late to the train of Plasma 6 related posts... But anyway. I will go through some things I did.

For me working on Plasma 6 was pretty fun, I learned a lot of new things and fixed bunch of bugs and crashes.

The most resourceful ones can find my merge requests, but I am too lazy to link them all.

Things I did

Most of the things I did were a lot more in the background. I hunted down a lot of bugs and crashes, and tried to fix them myself or helped others fix them, in various projects, such as:

• Dolphin
• Plasmashell
• Kwin
• KNS
• And probably a lot of more I have already forgot... :D

But there was A LOT stuff: Around 100 merge requests in total! Pretty much all of them got in, thanks to all the reviews and education other KDE developers provided to me! :)

Again, thanks to everyone who has helped me to work on KDE projects! Thanks for your patience with me and all the knowledge you have parted to me. ❤️ I'll keep doing my best helping KDE projects, be it bug hunting or feature creation.

I have to say my software testing background has been very useful when it comes down to hunting down bugs, and I've learned a lot of things about Qt, C++ and QML. Still got much more to learn though, but that's what makes me so excited about programming!

I think one of the most useful things I've learned is how to use GDB. I can't provide anyone a crash course (at least in this blog post) but it is essential when hunting down weird bugs in plasmashell for example. I love debuggers integrated to editors like using LLDB-DAP in Kate, but sometimes GDB in terminal is all you can use, so it's good idea to learn to use it!

One big thing I worked on with others was fractional scaling related stuff: I didn't do any of the Kwin stuff around it, but I hunted down some weird bugs with window decorations having some weird gaps in them when windows are specific size. Hunting down all these bugs and weirdness took long time, and we're still looking into it, since it seems to be different in every system.. Floating point numbers and computers are very weird combo.

Another more visible thing I did was unifying separator colors and other items, you can find an issue about it here: Frame and outline color consistency and high-contrast setting changes. I have been bothered by the random differences between some elements, which can be especially noticeable in darker colorschemes, so I finally sat down and combed through related codebases. There's likely more to fix though, but there is now easy way for us to add high-contrast support for outlining elements! It just needs doing, and I haven't had the time.. Yet. :)

Things I learned

• GDB is a life saver
• Write down notes. All the time.
  • Journaling is a good idea!
• Working in open source is a lot about the social aspects!
  • Be nice to people! Duh!
  • But also don't let people walk over you!
  • Listen to others, and don't be afraid to share your opinion.
  • Ask many questions and write down the answers.
• Be patient
• Bug triaging is tough, but very important!
• Remember to rest (I'm bad at this)

Things I will do in future

I will continue hunting down various bugs and crashes and fixing them whenever I spot some, or something is raised to me as "hey this looks like something you could do."

I have also started working on couple things related to remote desktop:

• rdp: Proxy and Gateway settings
• Simple KCM for KRDP

Last but not least, I have looked into facelifting our dear Breeze theme, just a lil bit. Nothing drastic, some tell me they don't see any change and some do. But hopefully it would make Breeze look just a lil bit "softer" and "friendlier." :) You can see them here: Slightly rounder elements, slightly lighter outlines

All in all I am very happy with my current job working on KDE projects, fixing bugs and creating new cool things. I also kind of enjoy being a jack-of-all-trades (master of none), since I get to do a lot of different kinds of stuff, from something more "background" like KWin and plasmashell to something more visible like Breeze and Dolphin. Maybe eventually I will specialize around something, but for now I am bit all over the place which is fine by me lol.

I hope that some of my work has helped you as well. :)

I'll keep doing my best and learning more. (And hopefully write more blogposts.. lol.)

Thanks for reading!

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!

KTextAddons 1.5.4 is a bugfix release of our text display and handling library

It fixes two notable bugs and updates translations

• Fix bug 484328: Kmail config dialog takes about 40 seconds to show up
• Use QListView::clicked (in emoji popup menu)

URL: https://download.kde.org/stable/ktextaddons/
Source: ktextaddons-1.5.4.tar.xz
SHA256: 64b80602e84b25e9164620af3f6341fa865b85e826ab8f5e02061ae24a277b20
Signed by: E0A3EB202F8E57528E13E72FD7574483BB57B18D Jonathan Esk-Riddell jr@jriddell.org https://jriddell.org/esk-riddell.gpg