Welcome to the November 2025 development and community update.

Development Report

5.2.14 Released

One last bugfix release in the 5.2 series, 5.2.14 is out. This version once again features many fixes for Android and touch input, but that's not all! The Color Sampler's preview has a new round default look, and macOS users can now view .kra thumbnails in Finder again. Read more in the dedicated blogpost and stay up up-to-date.

Text Rework Progress

Development of 5.3.0 is now in feature freeze, meaning no more features will be added before release. This includes the Text Tool, marking the end of a long phase of development for Wolthera, code reviewer Dmitry, and everyone else who contributed.

Texts can now be created to fit within a shape or along a path, just by clicking the vector with the Text Tool. (MR!2432)

Text properties have been split into into Paragraph and Character tabs, making it clearer which level the properties are taking effect at. (MR!2470)

Carsten has also made sure the Text Tool works properly with touch input. (MR!2563)

But this journey's not over; if you use 5.3 pre-release builds, make sure to report bugs and leave feedback in the Text Tool Thread!

New Comic Panel Editing Tool

There's a new tool in the Toolbox: the Comic Panel Editing Tool. Agata designed this for creating comic panel gutters by cutting gaps in vector shapes. (MR!2331)

It can be set to cut different gap widths depending on whether the cut is horizontal, vertical, or diagonal past a certain angle. A second mode in Tool Options removes the gaps for easy re-adjustment.

Liquify Transform Speedup

The Transform Tool's Liquify mode has had some optimizations done by Agata. It's especially faster on large canvases, because it now avoids calculating outside the affected area. (MR!4261)

Before:

After:

Python Updated to 3.13

Krita's unstable builds have been updated from Python 3.10 to Python 3.13 (MR!2466). This has the potential to break plugins and scripts, so users of Krita Next should report any such issues to the developers of those plugins before 5.3.0's release.

If you're a plugin developer, check out the release notes for Python 3.11, Python 3.12, and Python 3.13 for information on the changes.

Community Report

Plans for 5.3.0's Upcoming Release

Krita's developers have put out a call for banner and icon artwork to promote the upcoming 5.3 release. This artwork must fit certain sizes and be licensed appropriately, so please read the rules before contributing!

November 2025 Monthly Art Challenge Results

17 forum members took on the challenge of the "Civilization Engulfed by Nature" theme. And the winner is… @Elixiah's two entries:

Time Keeper by @Elixiah

The December Art Challenge is Open Now

For this month's theme, winner @Elixiah has chosen Chiaroscuro, the strong contrast of light and dark, with runner-up @edgarej adding the optional challenge of a Christmas/holiday theme. Check out the topic for more details, and make some art that stands out like holiday lights on a dark night!

Featured Artwork

Best of Krita-Artists - October/November 2025

This month's Best of Krita-Artists Nominations thread received 17 nominations of forum members' artwork. When the poll closed, these five wonderful works made their way onto the Krita-Artists featured artwork banner:

Weird meeting by @Sad_Tea

Melon Soda city by @800000000W

Winter in the village by @Yarikart

Flower by @yuheng_zhang

Female head study by @netizenses

Best of Krita-Artists - November/December 2025

Take a look at the nominations for next month.

Ways to Help Krita

Krita is Free and Open Source Software developed by an international team of sponsored developers and volunteer contributors. That means anyone can help make Krita better!

Support Krita financially by making a one-time or monthly monetary donation. Or donate your time and Get Involved with testing, development, translation, documentation, and more. Last but not least, you can spread the word! Share your Krita artworks, resources, and tips with others, and show the world what Krita can do.

Other Notable Changes

Other notable changes in Krita's development builds from November 11, 2025 - December 14, 2025.

Stable branch (5.2.14):

• Canvas Input: Add a One Finger Hold gesture and set it by default to Sample Foreground Color From Merged Image. (Change, by Carsten Hartenfels)
• Color Sampler: The Color Sampler preview now defaults to a circle to be more visible when using touch input. The size of the circle can be adjusted under Settings->General->Cursor, or changed back to rectangles. (bug report) (Change, by Carsten Hartenfels)
• Layers Docker: Dragging-and-dropping a layer onto its own canvas now pastes a copy only if Ctrl is held, to prevent duplicating it by accident. Dropping a layer onto a different canvas still copy-pastes it as before, without holding Ctrl. (bug report Change, by Carsten Hartenfels)
• Filter Layers: Fix empty histogram when adding a new Levels, Threshold, Color Adjustment, or Cross-channel Filter Layer. (bug report) (Change, by Stuffins)
• Scripting: Fix Node.setChildNodes function to remove existing child nodes. (Change, by Stuffins)
• Android: Lessen the chance for saving corrupt files, by using a temporary file. (bug report Change, by Carsten Hartenfels)
• Android: Fix modifier keys getting stuck when inputting new custom shortcuts with a hardware keyboard. (bug report Change, by Carsten Hartenfels)
• macOS: Add support for QuickLook and Preview thumbnails for .kra, .krz, and .ora files on macOS Sequoia and later. (bug report (Change, by Ivan Yossi)
• macOS: Update app icon to support macOS Tahoe appearance settings. (Change, by Ivan Yossi)

Unstable branch (5.3.0-prealpha):

• Export: Don't show an error when cancelling an export. (bug report) Change, by Joshua Goins)

Nightly Builds

Pre-release versions of Krita are built every day for testing new changes.

Get the latest bugfixes in Stable "Krita Plus" (5.2.15-prealpha): Linux - Windows - macOS (unsigned) - Android arm64-v8a - Android arm32-v7a - Android x86_64

Or test out the latest Experimental features in "Krita Next" (5.3.0-prealpha). Feedback and bug reports are appreciated!: Linux - Windows - macOS - Android arm64-v8a - Android arm32-v7a - Android x86_64

This weekend, I attended the KDE PIM 2025 Sprint (AKA meeting) in Paris.

First, what does PIM mean? Personal information management.

Second, what does Personal information management mean? It's the software for managing email, calendar, address book, etc.

Third, this is going to be long, so let me thank https://haute-couture.enioka.com/en/ for hosting us (their office  is in Rue du Mail which seems very fitting for a meeting improving e-mail software) and thanks to KDE e.V. for sponsoring travel and hotel for the meeting. If you can, please donate so that more meetings like this can happen. 

This was my first time attending a PIM sprint even though I have been a KDE developer for a long time and a KMail/KOrganizer user for possibly even longer. 

It is true that these softwares are not in the most polished state, but honestly I would not know how to handle my email without KMail.

Anyhow here's a list of things I did: 

We talked a bit about bugs handling and it turns out not a lot of people are having a look at bugs, so I volunteered to watch the pim-bugs-null@kde.org address in Bugzilla (where most/all related bugs are assigned to) so I can help a bit. Note that I only committed to quickly read over them to try to make sure "really bad things" don't get overlooked. "Normal" bugs will always exist in every software and those will be fixed when they are fixed :)

If you also want to help you can set yourself to watch that pim-bugs-null@kde.org address in https://bugs.kde.org/userprefs.cgi?tab=email. 

On the topic of bugs, I managed to fix "left-click does not work on links with target="_blank" in HTML e-mails" with an impressive 1-liner change. It should be available with KDE Gear 25.12.1.

On Friday night, I experienced "sending emails does not work". After a few hours of debugging and thanks to our sysadmins, we found out it was due to "Your SMTP configuration was wrong". It seems older KMail versions were a bit more gracious when your configuration was wrong, but now it fails (fair enoug, although ideally it could give a better error). Incidentally I was not the only one with this problem since a few hours later we got this bug https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=513284 that was basically the same. (My watching of pim-bugs-null@kde.org was already fruitful!)

On Saturday morning, I continued scratching my own itch and fixed a rather obscure bug where some context menu actions when right clicking on emails in KMail were not properly updated when expanding/collapsing threads.

KMime is undergoing API modernization and is slated to become a KDE Framework soon (TM). I helped a bit adapting code that uses KMime to the new API. 

On Sunday, I worked a bit on polishing address suggestion blacklisting on KMail (i.e. when I search for Foo, I don't want to get a suggestion to send an email to their old employer's email address). You can do that right now by right clicking on the "To" text field and selecting Completion Configuration and then going to the third tab. But that is a bit cumbersome (to the degree I had no idea that feature existed until the very same day). To make it a bit easier to discover, i have proposed adding a right click menu on the suggestions themselves that let's you blacklist that particular email address.

And now, a short list of things we did: (many more were done and will be explained in detail by other folks)

• Talk about switching the default backend to SQLite instead of mysql MariaDB. In general dropping servers (MariaDB/postgres) support would help making the code more maintainable. There are some people using it without problems, but Nico volunteered to do a test run during the sprint and he ended up with some problems, so there's still some things to debug there.
• Talk about doing a survey/adding more KUserFeedback data. We kind of agreed that first we need to know what question we really want to know the answer to and what would be the consequences of a given answer before spending time in designing a survey. But anyway if you use the KDE PIM software, please enable User Feedback in the settings, we promise we won't spy on you.
• New online accounts system. It should replace the not very useful accounts system that we now have (that also has a quite complicated dependency chain). It showed quite some promise in making things much more user friendly.

All in all it was a very productive meeting and I am happy to have attended.

On a closing note, one day we will have to speak about potentially sponsoring food for sprint attendees. We got travel and hotel sponsored, but I spent around 100 € on breakfast/lunch/dinner for that sprint (not going to any fancy place at all). Yes, I can spare that amount of money, but maybe some others in the community can not, and for sure we want them to also attend. One could even argue that having to spend money on top of spending a weekend and 2 work-holidays for the travel is a bit too much, it won't be me because I ❤️ KDE but someone could argue it 😁

KDE Gear 25.12 got just released.

This includes my fixes (or workarounds) for Konsole & Kate window activation on Wayland.

If you now start Kate or Konsole inside Konsole, the new processes will properly activate their windows to come on top of Konsole.

This works both for just starting new instances and for re-using already running ones.

For more details, see my older post about the implementation.

At the moment that only works for Konsole & Kate.

If that works nicely for our users, perhaps somebody will come up with a more generic way for that or we can move that workaround to some lower level of the stack.

:) For me that is already a nice Christmas present, I disliked that this was broken for years :)

Btw., thanks again for the amazing end of the year fundraiser results! €280k and counting :)

Feedback

You can provide feedback on the matching Reddit post.

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week the team made significant progress on KWin’s Wayland screen support. Specifically, better mirroring and custom modes — both items on the “Known Significant Issues” page — have been implemented for Plasma 6.6! The remaining items on that page are areas of active focus, too, as we race towards the Wayland finish line.

…But wait, there’s more!

Notable New Features

Plasma 6.6.0

The Window List widget lets you filter out windows not on the current screen, virtual desktop, or activity — just like the Task Manager widgets do. (Shubham Arora, plasma-desktop MR #3341)

Discover now lets you install and remove fonts on distros with package managers that use the PackageKit library. (Joey Riches, discover MR #1113)

Notable UI Improvements

Plasma 6.6.0

The “Minimize All” KWin script (which is included by default but not enabled) now also lets you minimize all windows besides the active one using the Meta+Shift+O keyboard shortcut. (Luis Bocanegra, bug #197952)

KWin now sets reasonable default scale factors for newly-connected TVs. (Xaver Hugl, kwin MR #8537)

Several related menu items in the context menus of the Kicker/Kickoff/Application Dashboard widgets have been grouped together. (Kisaragi Hiu, plasma-desktop MR #3381)

The kscreen-doctor tool now lets you know that it’s possible to mirror your screens. (Nicolas Fella, libkscreen MR #267)

Notable Bug Fixes

Plasma 6.5.4

Fixed a recent regression with desktop icons not staying on the right screen with some multi-screen arrangements. (Błażej Szczygieł, plasma-desktop MR #3330)

The Meta+P shortcut to open the screen chooser OSD now works on immutable-style distros. (Nate Graham, kscreen MR #440)

Plasma 6.5.5

Fixed a recent regression that caused screen freezes on some hardware right before power management kicked in. We’ve asked distros to backport the fix as ASAP as possible so everyone gets it as quickly. (Xaver Hugl, bug #513151)

Fixed a case where KWin could crash in the X11 session when using an older Valve Index headset. (David Edmundson, bug #507677)

Fixed an issue that could make stray modifier key events get sent to XWayland-using apps, especially when switching to them using keyboard shortcuts involving modifier keys. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Fixed a case where KWin was handling drag-and-dropped text incorrectly, which could make drops fail in some apps. (Vlad Zahorodnii, bug #512235)

Fixed two screen locker issues that could make it slower to unlock via KDE Connect, and make it erroneously flash some text about a fingerprint or smart card reader when they’re not relevant. (Fushan Wen, kscreenlocker MR #296)

Fixed the back button in Folder View widgets’ list view display style. (Christoph Wolk, plasma-desktop MR #3387)

Fixed an issue in System Monitor that made it possible to end critical processes using the keyboard. (Oliver Schramm, bug #510464)

Other bug information of note:

• 5 very high priority Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
• 55 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 37 last week). Current list of bugs

You might note a large increase in the number of HI priority bugs this week. This is because we’re beginning a quality initiative and using the HI priority level to track bugs to fix quickly. We want to make sure Plasma is getting extra large amounts of polish and stability work these days!

Other Notable Things in Performance & Technical

Plasma 6.5.4

Plugged a GPU memory leak in KDE’s portal implementation. (David Edmundson, bug #494138)

Plasma 6.5.5

Fixed a case where .desktop files with spec-violating names could cause massive amounts of log spam. (David Redondo, bug #512562)

Plasma 6.6.0

Massively improved support for screen mirroring in the Wayland session. Now it works really well! (Xaver Hugl, bug #481222 and kscreen MR #439)

You can now use the kscreen-doctor tool to add custom screen modes, useful for supporting exotic or misbehaving screens in the Wayland session. (Xaver Hugl, bug #456697)

Made the KWin rule to force a titlebar and frame also work for windows of native-Wayland apps. (Xaver Hugl, bug #452240)

You can now move windows with Meta+drag when using a drawing tablet stylus. (Vlad Zahorodnii, bug #509949)

How You Can Help

Donate to KDE’s 2025 fundraiser! It really makes a big difference. In total, KDE has raised over €280,000 during this fundraiser! The average donation is about €25. KDE truly is funded by you!

This money will help keep KDE strong and independent for years to come, and I’m just in awe of the generosity of the KDE community and userbase. Thank you all for helping KDE to grow and prosper!

If money is tight, you can help KDE by directly getting involved. Donating time is actually more impactful than donating money. 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.

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 2025-50.

Commoning open-source versus growth-hacking open-source

Tags: tech, foss, licensing, community, commons

Nice little post, indeed the license is not enough to base a decision on. You need to look at the business, presence of CLA or not, etc.

https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/blog/2025-commoning-opensource/

choosing friction

Tags: tech, ai, gpt, politics, philosophy, life, knowledge

I think I prefer friction as well. It’s not about choosing discomfort all the time, but there’s clearly a threshold not to cross. If things get too convenient there’s a point where we get disconnected from the human condition indeed. I prefer a fuller and imperfect life.

https://phirephoenix.com/blog/2025-10-11/friction

The Web Runs On Tolerance

Tags: tech, web, politics

Remember, the web is for everyone. It’s meant to weird and diverse.

https://werd.io/the-web-runs-on-tolerance/

Discovering the indieweb with calm tech

Tags: tech, web, browser, social-media, fediverse, blog, rss, tools

These extensions look really neat for discovering Mastodon and RSS feed. I think I’ll check them out.

https://alexsci.com/blog/calm-tech-discover/

Bruce Sterling - Fantasy prototypes and real disruption

Tags: tech, design, economics, politics

Very powerful talk from Bruce Sterling about design and the startup culture. The most impactful part starts somewhere in the middle (where the URL leads you).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7KErICTSHU&t=418s

Why is the Internet Becoming TV?

Tags: tech, social-media, attention-economy

I think the title should say “social media” rather than “the Internet”. That said, the trend is indeed clear… those big tech companies look more and more like TV broadcaster. So remember you turned off the TV for a reason.

https://calnewport.com/why-is-the-internet-becoming-tv/

Valve: HDMI Forum Continues to Block HDMI 2.1 for Linux

Tags: tech, hdmi, standard, vendor-lockin, foss

The HDMI Forum is still a bad actor for Free Software… They just don’t want open source drivers to exist.

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Valve-HDMI-Forum-Continues-to-Block-HDMI-2-1-for-Linux-11107440.html

The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copilot, business, politics, economics, criticism

Long but excellent opinion piece about everything which is wrong with the current AI-mania.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington

Over 10,000 Docker Hub images found leaking credentials, auth keys

Tags: tech, containers, security, docker

I keep being surprised at how common this kind of mistakes are. I probably shouldn’t, it’s actually kind of easy to fall into such traps.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/over-10-000-docker-hub-images-found-leaking-credentials-auth-keys/

10 Years of Let’s Encrypt Certificates

Tags: tech, security, infrastructure

This is now critical infrastructure in my opinion. It’s nice to see how much progress was made.

https://letsencrypt.org/2025/12/09/10-years

Stop Breaking TLS

Tags: tech, security, criticism

TLS inspection software is indeed a very bad idea. You’d better not have them in your organisation.

https://www.markround.com/blog/2025/12/09/stop-breaking-tls/

Do Not Optimize Away

Tags: tech, benchmarking

Care must be taken while benchmarking indeed. Compilers are sometimes too smart and that can skew the numbers.

https://matklad.github.io/2025/12/09/do-not-optimize-away.html

One of C++ most underrated features: Namespace aliases

Tags: tech, c++, library

It’s indeed fairly underrated but very useful, especially if you’re making libraries.

https://www.foonathan.net/2016/01/namespace-alias/

Fighting the Client Spaghetti Monster with Rust Traits

Tags: tech, architecture, rust, pattern

There are indeed options for managing dependencies in more complex Rust codebases. It needs to be planned properly when doing the software architecture of your components though.

https://gnunicorn.org/writings/spaghetti-monster-clients-rust-traits-final-boss/

Is It Worth It To Optimize Images For Your Site?

Tags: tech, self-hosting, graphics, optimization, web

This can go a long way without much changes. It’s definitely worth it.

https://brainbaking.com/post/2025/10/is-it-worth-it-to-optimize-images-for-your-site/

Notes on Gamma

Tags: tech, graphics, colors

Wondering why gamma correction is needed? Here is a good explanation of gamma and sRGB.

https://poniesandlight.co.uk/reflect/gamma/

Test Desiderata 2.0

Tags: tech, tdd, tests

This is a nice update on the criteria you want to have in mind for good test suites.

https://coding-is-like-cooking.info/2025/12/test-desiderata-2-0/

Build it right to build the right thing

Tags: tech, xp, agile, quality, product-management

There’s a balance to strike on quality. Too much or too little and you won’t be able to progress towards the user needs.

https://ronjeffries.com/xprog/articles/build-it-right-to-build-the-right-thing/

Why Waterfall was a big misunderstanding from the beginning – reading the original paper

Tags: tech, agile, project-management

A good reminder than the supposedly seminal paper about waterfall process was likely identifying it as an anti-pattern.

https://pragtob.wordpress.com/2012/03/02/why-waterfall-was-a-big-misunderstanding-from-the-beginning-reading-the-original-paper/

Practices, Principles, Values

Tags: tech, agile, values, organisation, culture

Or why focusing on the practices will likely lead to cargo cult and you might never reach the real benefits. Don’t mimic other organisations, think about the underlying philosophy.

https://brodzinski.com/2014/08/practices-principles-values.html

Most Technical Problems Are Really People Problems

Tags: tech, technical-debt, organization, culture

Definitely this! All systems are produced in a given context. The organisation and the people producing it are what matters most to get something of quality (or not).

https://blog.joeschrag.com/2023/11/most-technical-problems-are-really.html?m=1

Transparent Leadership Beats Servant Leadership

Tags: tech, leadership, management

In other words, remember you’re a manager and not a nanny. Of course, it doesn’t mean you can freely ignore the human factor or empathy. Just don’t get overwhelmed by this.

https://entropicthoughts.com/transparent-leadership-beats-servant-leadership

Speaking Up

Tags: management, problem-solving

It’s important to get to the bottom of problems indeed. The context in your organisation will matter for this.

https://estherderby.com/speaking-up-2/

Revisiting Manager READMEs

Tags: tech, management, organisation, processes

Indeed, I think I prefer what’s proposed here rather than READMEs. Having lightweight templates and processes to collect the information you need or steer the direction puts the burden of designing those in the right place (on the manager end). You should also know when things have to be more free form.

https://skamille.medium.com/revisiting-manager-readmes-b9a59167c226

11 Best Practices for Working Remotely

Tags: tech, remote-working

I wouldn’t apply everything in there, but there’s good ideas as well. I guess YMMV, so if you’re remote working, I’d say pick and choose what works best for you.

https://nira.com/remote-work-best-practices/

Video conferencing at scale - A practical guide

Tags: tech, remote-working

Simple tips to make calls more enjoyable for everyone.

https://www.creative-destruction.org/post/2020-03-15-how-to-video-conference/

Bye for now!

At this year’s Akademy (the yearly conference and gathering of KDE), there were several talks about immutable Linux distributions born inside KDE. The first, and more covered in the news was KDE Linux, the distro with an officially sounding name. And the second one was KDE Neon Core, which sounds like a continuation of KDE Neon, but is quite independent of it.

Things shouldn’t come in twos. There needs to be another immutable KDE distro, so I’m announcing the …

Now, this is a bit of a joke.

This is not really going to be a new distribution (for real, not like KDE Neon claimed not to be a distribution back in the day :) ). I don’t have the expertise nor the time to make a distribution from scratch.

But, while listening to the presentations about KDE Linux and KDE Neon Core, I had the idea to see how many of the planned features for those distributions I could implement based on an already existing and quite popular distribution called … if you have a keen eye, you might have guessed based on the image above … NixOS.

Step 1: Immutability

At the crux of it, immutability (along with other related buzzwords) means that you can not have an update break your system. There are no half-updates, no mixing incompatible versions of packages, etc. And if something gets broken with the new version, you can always roll back your system to a previous version.

This comes out of the box with NixOS. It just does it in a different way to other distributions. Its package manager allows installation of as many versions of a single package as needed, and the user or a running application “sees” only the versions they are compatible with.

When you update your system, the old packages are still installed, and you can reboot the computer into the pre-update state (previous versions are called generations).

Booting into an old state doesn’t really do anything special, it just makes you “see” the versions of the packages that were active in that version of your system. You don’t even need to reboot most of the time – if you see that a new version of LibreOffice doesn’t open your file correctly, and you want to try with the previous version, just ask Nix to launch the old version for you. The old version of LibreOffice is still on your system even if you’ve not booted into the system version (generation) it was installed on.

Steps 2..n

My main computer is (and always will be) Debian, but I’ve been using NixOS on my laptop for months now. And it works quite well.

As NixOS can be installed or replicated from a single configuration file, I plan to create a repository that will hold the definition of the system on my laptop (aka, the reference installation of KDE Ni! OS :) ) and to keep it updated while I go through each of the steps of simulating other distributions’ features.

This way, anyone who wants to have KDE Ni! OS on their computer will be able to install it by installing NixOS and using this file for system definition.

The next step will mainly be for developers – it will be about replacing a system package with a version you (or somebody else) developed. For example, if you want the Plasma Vault to behave a bit differently, or to test a fix for a bug you found, any sane distribution should allow you to do that easily, and without endangering the system integrity (no sudo make install). So, KDE Ni! OS will have to be able to do it as well.

I hate waiting for compilations. For day-to-day it may only be a minute or two, but once you start doing another task, the context switching distracts from what you were doing before and breaks everything up. Life is too short to be waiting for computers.

Obviously the first answer is to have a faster machine, but having a super fast laptop and a super fast PC all the time contributes to e-waste which I also hate. Some of my test devices for touch and tablet work are 5 year old Intel atom devices that I still sometimes need to compile on to fix things.

The solution is distributed compiling, using multiple computers to share the work.

Icecream or distcc used to be the tools back in the day, but they're both quite dated and have other issues.

There's a relatively new kid on the block, sccache. sccache primarily serves as a way of keeping your cached compiled assets around (think ccache), but also sharing them across users. Sharing cached assets requires exactly matching paths and dependencies and compilers so it's not that great for my needs; but it seems it would be perfect for flatpak and immutable cases.

But sccache also has another trick up it's sleeve; distributed compilation.

The documentation for sccache is a bit overwhelming packed with enterprise level features https://github.com/mozilla/sccache/blob/main/docs/Distributed.md.
It wasn't that clear how to do something simple, so I thought it might be useful to share how I got things working nicely for me.

Installation

Sccache is probably available in your distribution, note that not all distros include the shared compiler part.

If not you can download a version from https://github.com/mozilla/sccache/releases/download

The nice part is it's statically linked with no external dependencies so you can throw it on anything, even if it's immutable like KDE Linux or even a Steamdeck or two.

The parts

Scheduler

The scheduler is the key part of the operation; the client sends requests to the scheduler which in return replies with a list of schedulers that can recieve payloads distributing them accordingly.

Simple

Create a file as follows:

scheduler.conf

public_addr = "0.0.0.0:10600"
client_auth = { type = "token", token = "dave_is_great" }
server_auth = { type = "token", token = "dave_is_great" }

sccache-dist scheduler --config scheduler.conf

Docker

As I want the scheduler always on, I run it on a small home-server, where I prefer to docker-ise everything.

docker-compose:

version: '3.8'

services:
  sccache-scheduler:
    build:
      context: .
      dockerfile: Dockerfile
      args:
        VERSION: "v0.10.0"
        SHASUM: bbf2e67d5e030967f31283236ea57f68892f0c7b56681ae7bfe80cd7f47e1acc
    image: sccache:latest
    container_name: sccache-scheduler
    ports:
      - "10600:10600"
    volumes:
      - ./scheduler.conf:/scheduler.conf:ro
    entrypoint: ["/usr/local/bin/sccache-dist", "scheduler", "--config", "/scheduler.conf"]
    restart: unless-stopped
    environment:
      - SCCACHE_NO_DAEMON=1

Dockerfile

FROM alpine:3.9.2

ARG VERSION
ARG SHASUM

RUN apk add clang
RUN apk add curl
RUN apk add --no-cache bubblewrap

RUN curl -L https://github.com/mozilla/sccache/releases/download/$VERSION/sccache-dist-$VERSION-x86_64-unknown-linux-musl.tar.gz > sccache-dist.tar.gz \
    && tar xf sccache-dist.tar.gz \
    && mv sccache-dist-$VERSION-x86_64-unknown-linux-musl/sccache-dist /usr/local/bin/sccache-dist \
    && rm -r sccache-dist.tar.gz sccache-dist-$VERSION-x86_64-unknown-linux-musl

RUN apk del curl

ENTRYPOINT ["/usr/local/bin/sccache"]

and the scheduler.conf as above.

Servers (build machines)

This is the part that does the building.
The config takes the address of the scheduler, but also the server's own IP address as a sort of "callback" address.

It needs to run as root in order to have capabilities to set up sandboxing and restrict it back down to something lower than where we started. The sitaution is a bit silly, but it is what it is.

server.conf

public_addr = "192.168.1.YOURIPADDRESS:10501"
scheduler_url = "http://192.168.1.SCHEDULERIPADDRESS:10600"
cache_dir = "/tmp/toolchains"
scheduler_auth = { type = "DANGEROUSLY_INSECURE" }

[builder]
type = "overlay"
# The directory under which a sandboxed filesystem will be created for builds.
build_dir = "/tmp/build"
# The path to the bubblewrap version 0.3.0+ `bwrap` binary.
bwrap_path = "/usr/bin/bwrap"

Then you can run sudo sccache-dist server --config server.conf

Systemd

As I want this running constantly on my desktop and laptop I use a systemd service.

/etc/systemd/system/sccache.service
[Unit]
Description=sccache scheduler
After=network-online.target
Wants=network-online.target

[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/bin/sccache-dist server --config /etc/sccache/server.conf
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=5s

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Clients

The final part is relatively simple, making local builds use the other build servers.

First we need to set up a config as follows:

.config/sccache/config

[dist]
scheduler_url = "http://192.168.1.SCHEDULERIPADDRESS:10600"
toolchains = []
toolchain_cache_size = 5368709120
auth = { type = "token", token = "dave_is_great" }

Cmake

Enabling requires just telling cmake to use the relevant wrapper with -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER_LAUNCHER=sccache -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER_LAUNCHER=sccache

kde-builder

And/or it to your kde-builder as follows:

.config/kde-builder.yaml

global:
  cmake-options: -GNinja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug -DCMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS=ON  -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=clang++ \
    -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER_LAUNCHER=sccache -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER_LAUNCHER=sccache 

and reconfigure the project(s)

Quirks and workarounds

The most annoying quirk is servers need a consistent IP address within your network. Servers register to the scheduler with a fixed IP address. When clients queue jobs they are given the IP addresses back from the scheduler and are expected to then talk to the build server(s) directly. Using hostnames doesn't work.

Note also if you change your local .config/sccache you may need to run sccache --stop-server on the client to relaunch. Confusingly in this case 'server' refers to a process on the client that compile jobs are thrown at.

Debugging

sccache --dist-status will show the connected schedulers and how many total active jobs

Managing job count

By default ninja schedules the same number of jobs as you have local cores for. It's unaware of the many other cores you have.
I have this in my zshrc to set the number of jobs to the total number on the scheduler at that time.

function getSccacheCPUs() {
        sccache --dist-status  | jq '."SchedulerStatus"[1].num_cpus'
}
alias ks='MAKEFLAGS=-j${getSccacheCPUs} kde-builder'

Comparison to icecream

Cons:

• The setup process is a lot more laborious than icecream's magic turn-up-and-compile structure
• No cool UI to see how many tasks are being compiled.

Pros:

• It's very robust to network issues. If the scheduler is down or no servers are available things build locally extremely transparently
• It also has it's own equivalent of a local 'ccache' which means you don't need to worry about daisy-chaing compilers wrappers to still have cached output.
• It's actively maintained, the last meaningful commit in icecream is years ago

We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 18.0.1!

For remote build devices this release fixes a crash when auto-detecting tools on disconnected devices, a temporary freeze during startup when a remote CMake tool is not accessible because the device is disconnected, and issues if the temporary directory on the remote device is mounted without executable permission. The release comes with various other fixes and performance improvements across various areas. Please check our change log for details.

Today we're releasing Krita 5.2.14. This is going to be the last bug fix release for 5.2. This release in particular contains many bug and usability fixes for Android.

Touch-and-Hold Color Picker

The color picker has been improved to make it look, feel and function better. The most important change is for touchscreens: you can now press the screen with one finger and hold it in the same spot to bring up the color picker. This is enabled by default in all input profiles. If it doesn't happen for you, either reset your canvas input settings to the defaults or manually assign the One Finger Hold gesture like this:

New Color Picker Preview

Aside from that, the preview has also been changed from the rectangles side by side to a circle around the cursor. This gives better visibility to the colors you are picking and also means that your right hand won't obscure the preview if you're drawing on a screen tablet. If you don't like the way this looks, you can change the appearance of the circle in the settings or go back to a two-rectangles style preview instead. Except now you can choose whether you want them on the right like before, on the left or on top of the cursor. Additionally, the long-standing issue of the preview getting rotated and mirrored along with the canvas has been fixed. It will now show up in the same spot no matter how you spin it.

Changelog:

Beyond that, we have a ton of smaller usability fixes for touch, a new icon on MacOS and much more.

Special thanks to Freya Lupen, Stuffins, Joshua Goins in addition to the sponsored developers.

• Fix brush preview outlines being aligned based on incorrect bounding box. (Bug 477164)
• Don't require restart for touch painting change and Automatically detect touch painting
• [android] Fix main window not showing document (Bug 488606)
• Fix off-by-1 in BrushHud Deform Modes combobox (Bug 509741)
• Double-click slider spin boxes to edit
• [android] Disable long-press right-click emulation
• Allow long-pressing to open context menus
• Various error handling fixes on android so it tries to recover instead of asserting.
• [android] Make IAP and supporter badge work again
• Make curve autosmooth work with touch drawing (Bug 510363)
• Make multi-clicking work with touch painting
• Disable left-click kinetic scrolling on timeline (CCBug 474975)
• Enable double and triple click with stylus when using vector tools.
• Check whether the splash is valid (Bug 491279)
• [android] Make main window fullscreen by default
• [android] Don't exit fullscreen when pressing back
• [android] Remove fullscreen toggle in status bar
• Fix hidden brush editor titlebar (Windows + Android) (Bug 452804)
• Add toggle eraser preset touch canvas input
• Make sliders not show selection handles on Android
• Properly calculate long-press slop distance
• Make long-press context menus behave more cleanly
• Make kinetic scrolling not delay long presses
• Disable long-press on widgets they interfere with
• Make popup menus appear at touch position
• Make edit shapes tool work with touch drawing (Bug 511594)
• [android] Enter fullscreen early to avoid flicker
• fix Node::setChildNodes
• fix histograms when adding a new filter layer
• Fix various touch shortcuts with wrong actions (Bug 485161)
• Make sampler preview not rotate/mirror with canvas (Bug 347799)
• Implement one-finger touch and hold gesture
• PythonPluginManager: Fix crash on Python 3.14
• macos: update krita app icon to display in respect to system appearance
• macos : make thumbnails of kra, krz and ora (Bug 493474)
• Don't allow dragging layers onto their own canvas (Bug 512771)
• Allow holding Ctrl to override drag on canvas
• [android] Write to temporary file when saving (Bug 498257)
• [android] Make shortcut input work properly
• Fix crash when using a smudge brush (Bug 512243)

Download

Windows

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.

• 64 bits Windows Installer: krita-5.2.14-setup.exe
• Portable 64 bits Windows: krita-5.2.14.zip
• Debug symbols. (Unpack in the Krita installation folder)

Linux

Note: starting with 5.2.11, the minimum supported version of Ubuntu is 22.04.

[!WARNING] Starting with 5.2.11 has updated the AppImage runtime, which is known to be incompatible with the old versions of AppImageLauncher. Developers of the AppImage runtime suggest to remove or update AppImageLauncher. See this report: Issue 121 More AppImage troubleshooting info is available here: FUSE

• 64 bits Linux: krita-5.2.14-x86_64.AppImage

MacOS

Note: We're not supporting MacOS 10.13 anymore, 10.14 is the minimum supported version.

• MacOS disk image: krita-5.2.14.dmg

Android

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.

• 64 bits Intel CPU APK
• 64 bits Arm CPU APK
• 32 bits Arm CPU APK

Source code

• krita-5.2.14.tar.gz
• krita-5.2.14.tar.xz

md5sum

For all downloads, visit https://download.kde.org/stable/krita/5.2.14/ and click on "Details" to get the hashes.

Key

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).

KDE’s 30th birthday is coming up next year. For this year’s holiday season I therefore decided to compile a list of 30 reasons why I love KDE Plasma. It makes me so much more productive and work a lot more fun. While some of the items listed below aren’t unique to Plasma, it’s the combination of all of those things that truly makes it the best desktop environment out there. Tell me, what are your top reasons?

1. When I suspend my laptop, any video or music stops playing
2. I can use three fingers on my touch pad to switch virtual desktops
3. I get a notification when my wireless mouse is about to run out of juice
4. I can middle-click a window on the task bar to close it
5. I can have a sticky note in my panel for use as a scratchpad
6. I can middle-click the notification icon to engage “do not disturb” mode
7. There’s a handy little color picker widget for my panel
8. I can throw my cursor into the corner of the screen to peek at my desktop
9. I can keep any window always on top when I need to
10. I can create a QR code of anything I copy to my clipboard
11. When I take a screenshot, I can then just drag it to where I need it
12. I can change the screen brightness by mouse wheeling the brightness icon
13. I can drag a window to the top of the screen to maximize it
14. I can send a window to different virtual desktops by using a global shortcut
15. There’s a little live volume meter in each slider in the volume popup
16. I can bring up a little magnifier window around my mouse cursor
17. I can draw red lines on the screen using a desktop effect
18. I can use the back/forward mouse buttons on the task bar to change music tracks
19. When I wiggle the mouse, the cursor gets bigger and bigger, and there’s no limit!
20. Night light comforts my eyes in the evening hours
21. KRunner finds browser tabs in the mess of hundreds of tabs I have
22. I can raise the speaker volume above 100% when needed
23. I can wheel a window’s title bar to change its opacity to quickly compare stuff
24. I can make the Copilot key on my keyboard actually do something useful
25. I can use window rules to force apps to open exactly how I want
26. I can add custom global shortcuts for almost anything
27. System Monitor displays a tonne of info, including from my solar installation
28. I can speed up playback of pretty much any video from Plasma’s Media Controller
29. I can use Meta left click to move and Meta right click to resize a window anytime
30. I can quickly access recent files opened in an app by right clicking its task bar entry

… and that is just Plasma, not even mentioning fantastic apps like the Dolphin file manager, Konsole, Kate editor, and of course KDE Connect. Another way to show your love for KDE is by donating to our Year End Fundraiser and maybe even adopt an app!