KDE stuff and the Microsoft Store

Kate is in the Microsoft Store since 2019.

Since that time you can install it easily from here and the store will allow you to keep our application updated.

Kate is not the only KDE application there, other stuff uploaded under the KDE e.V. umbrella can be found here, this includes KDE Connect and Okular.

We have now better documentation and tooling for store submissions, the last update of Kate to 25.04 was, beside the local testing of the build if it is not broken in normal use, the press of one button.

Compared to my old guide from my first submission, that is really awesome, thanks a lot to all people that worked on that!

What if I don't like the Microsoft Store?

Naturally you don’t have to use the store (which implies some account you might not want and telemetry that you might want even less).

Alternate downloads are on our normal download page.

Or, if you want to be even more in control, and perhaps even willing to contribute, build it from source yourself, Craft makes that easy.

The Microsoft Store submissions are just a way to reach a larger audience. Some people might even not be able to install stuff from other sources, depending how locked down their Windows installation is.

Current Statistics

Below the current statistics of the published applications sorted by acquisitions, that means more or less means individual user installs.

Not that bad, over half a million installs for KDE Connect, close to half a million for Okular and a quarter million for Kate.

Current Ratings

The internal statistics of the store allow to see the ratings over the whole publishing time. They look good, too.

KDE Connect Ratings

Okular Ratings

Kate Ratings

The Future?

We will need to update the versions in the store, Kate is now on 25.04, more to follow hopefully.

We need help with fixing Windows only bugs, too. Just a random one for Kate can be found here.

Comments?

A matching thread for this can be found here on KDE Social or r/KDE.

The things I do for QA...

A few years ago, I was among those who found Wayland too painful to use every day. Over time, I gave Wayland a try now and then. It finally got usable enough for me to switch to as my default a couple of years ago.

Recently, during the soft freeze before the Plasma 6.4 Beta was released, I used mainly X11 on both my laptops - for science! And by science, I mean regression testing. I was curious what the experience was like compared to what I've become accustomed to with Wayland.

In short, Wayland supports multiple displays and color so much better. It was painful using X11 again.

My setup for daily work

I was using two laptops and two external monitors. Both were running Plasma built from git-master.

1. Main: Dell XPS laptop, plugged into a dock. This is connected to 2 ultrawide monitors - one via Displayport, the other via HDMI.
2. Secondary: Lenovo Flex laptop, usually just using its built-in screen. Sometimes I swap the right hand monitor over to it, for testing display shenanigans.

Initial impression - so limited

I fired up the XPS, did updates, and booted into an X11 session. Next, to Display Configuration to re-enable the right hand monitor (disabled the night before). Immediately, I was struck by how bare the settings window looks compared to Wayland. Here are screenshots of the settings for same HDR monitor on 6.3.5.

Wayland:

X11:

Second thoughts and hello, Dr Konqi

Time to enable the display. For reference, this takes moments in Wayland. It was just a wee bit longer and more fraught with X11.

After enabling the monitor and clicking Apply, all 3 screens went dark. After about 20s the laptop display came on. After about another minute, the right hand display finally got output before all 3 displays were dark again. I unplugged the laptop from the dock. It came up to the login screen. After logging in I saw the good Dr Konqi telling me there was a crash in plasmashell. We were off to a great start.

Like a good tester, I sent the crash report off. With some trepidation, I plugged the docking cable back in, as similar struggles from years past came back to haunt me. All three displays were black, although I could move the cursor around in them. It took a good couple of minutes for plasmashell to display everything, along with window decorations and panel contents. It was faster later, but wow, was this a noticeably worse experience than Wayland.

Other observations, or third thoughts

Wayland advantages

• Fractional scaling - the ability to have a screen at, say, 110% zoom. See that lovely screenshot, above.
  When paired with how easy it is to change font face and style, this is great for accessibility. Being able to read the text on any display at whatever resolution can't be overstated. When I have to use Windows, where you can't adjust text separately from resolution, I have sadness. I also have eyestrain trying to read tiny text in dialogs.
• Scaling per display - so my laptop's high resolution display can be at 150% and my external displays at 100% to make things readable on all of them. Another plus for accessibility.
• HDR and color profile (ICC) support. This is important for getting the mos out of my monitor with games and more. Also... preeeetty.
• Snappier overall performance (on my systems).
• The ability to send a window to multiple desktops, or just one. In X11, you can ....THNG

Wayland pain points

These are the things I ran into personally. There's also the list of Plasma/Wayland Known Significant Issues.

• The most annoying problem for me is with LibreOffice, since I use Calc almost daily. There's a bug (on their tracker) where, with multiple monitors with different scale factors, UI elements are too big.
• Lack of a robust, easy to use text expander with a GUI - that actually works out of the box. Autokey has been on my installs for many years, used for work and personal stuff. While it launches, and I have access to my phrases, there's no actual text expansion. There's an open issue for Wayland support (that pre-dates the Pandemic) but it hasn't gotten much traction. I've been keeping an eye out for years for a decent replacement, and have tried a few things but not found what I'm looking for, yet.
• Copy and paste to and from VMs I use VMs a lot for testing things on different Linux distros. My workaround for this is to have text files saved in a directory that's shared from host to guest.
• It took time and a few forks to get KVM software that was reliably developed and worked with Wayland.¹ I had been using barrier on X11. A few software forks and experiments later, I've settled on deskflow.

X11 Advantages

• Remembering window positions across reboots.
• Working text expansion.

X11 pain points

• Drawing the screen is slower after logging in or restarting plasmashell, for example, with the same hardware and open applications.
• Floating panels and adaptive opacity are known to cause performance issues with X11 with an NVIDIA GPU.
• Lack of scaling per-monitor.
  Text on my XPS's screen is too small to be readable if the external monitors are at a comfortable scale. I had to move any window I needed to read text on (most of them) to the external monitors.
• The HDMI monitor was set to the wrong resolution and refresh rate if I connected it to the second laptop. I had to manually correct it.
• After enabling HDR on that monitor with the Flex in Wayland, and switching to an X11 session, the monitor enabled HDR but the colors were over-saturated.
• After working with a few windows, fonts in Firefox became badly hinted. This made characters look weirdly colored instead of white / black, and made reading things difficult.

Final thoughts

Once upon a time, Wayland was too painful for me to use as a daily driver. It didn't support some of my utilities and it wasn't stable enough with my multi-monitor setup.

These days, Wayland is so much more usable and stable with multiple displays that it makes using X11 painful by comparison. While there are still those few issues I mentioned, I feel Wayland's advantages outweigh them.

In 1978, a commemorative souvenir was published to celebrate the milestone of acting in 400 films by Bahadoor, a celebrated Malayalam movie actor. Artist Namboodiri designed its cover caricature and the lettering.

Based on this lettering, KH Hussain designed a traditional script Malayalam Unicode font named ‘RIT Bahadur’. I did work on the engineering and production of the font to release it on the 25th death anniversary of Bahadoor, on 22-May-2025.

National daily ‘The Hindu’ has published an article about Bahadur font.

RIT Bahadur is a display typeface that comes in Bold and BoldItalic variants. It is licensed under Open Font License and can be freely downloaded from Rachana website.

The past two months since the last update have been busy again around KDE Itinerary, with additional train and bus trip editing capabilities, a new departures view, OpenRailwayMap integration and a ton of new features in Transitous.

New Features

Lengthening train and bus trips

Changing the departure and arrival of train or bus trips so far only allowed to shorten the trip, that is board later or alight earlier. That limitation was caused by not having information about the full run of a train or bus, so we didn’t know what possible stops existed before the original departure or after the original arrival.

That has changed now for some public transport backends at least, and it’s thus also possible to change to an earlier departure stop or a later arrival stop.

The journey details view for train and bus trips now also shows the full trip of the corresponding vehicle.

New departures view

The public transport departures view has been updated to match the Kirigami FormCard style used in most other places, and to align Itinerary with what KTrip is using.

OpenRailwayMap integration

The live status map showing the position, speed and heading of the train, bus or plane you are currently on now offers additional map styles from OpenRailwayMap. That’s an OSM-based map that has dedicated views for railway infrastructure, signaling, track gauge, electrification and track speed rating. All of those can be selected in Itinerary’s live map as well now when on a train.

While a rather special interest feature on first sight, the track speed rating view has already proven to be rather useful for assessing the reliability of delay estimates, as you’ll easily see if the current speed is matching the currently possible maximum or whether you’ll likely be falling behind schedule further.

Events

There’s two upcoming events very relevant for Itinerary:

• On July 11th-13th we’ll have the first Transitous Hack Weekend in Berlin, Germany.
• On October 17th/18th there’s the first Open Transport Community Conference in Vienna, Austria.

Infrastructure Work

Transitous and MOTIS

MOTIS, the routing engine used by Transitous, has been rapidly gaining features:

• Support for GTFS-Fares v2, that is information about costs and ticket options for trips.
• Support for GTFS-RT service alerts, that is (textual) information describing disruptions or other service changes.
• Support for GTFS-RT cancelled and additional services.
• Support for GTFS-Flex, that is information about on-demand mobility services.
• Considering terrain elevation in bike and foot routing.
• Considering car carriage services such as ferries and car transport trains in car routing.

Some of these features are already benefiting Itinerary users, some will need work on the Transitous side to extend the import pipeline or to add additionally needed data feeds, and some still need client-side work to properly retrieve and display the new information.

Shared UI between Itinerary and KTrip

There’s renewed effort to share more of the public transport UI components between Itinerary and KTrip, mostly in the KPublicTransport library.

So far this covered:

• The stop picker page.
• The backend configuration page.
• Parts of the vehicle layout and departure/arrival board views.

Some of the custom date/time formatting functions used here are also upstreamed into KCoreAddons’s KFormat API.

Fixes & Improvements

Travel document extractor

• Add or improved travel document extractors for American Airlines, a&o hostels, booking.com, Deutsche Bahn, Eventbrite, Eventlook, Flixbus, Gastronovi, IHG, Kolumbus ferries, ÖBB, SNCF, Stena Line, Tallink, Tootoot.fm and Viking Line.
• Improved generic extractor for FCB and DOSIPAS ticket barcodes.
• Significantly expanded documentation for writing extractor scripts, thanks to Grzegorz Mu.

All of this has been made possible thanks to your travel document donations!

Public transport data

• New or improved onboard API support for ÖBB and Ouigo ES.
• Fixed path plausibility check erroneously purging circular paths.
• Fixed mode of transport filters on EFA backends.
• Added support for service alerts and canceled trips/stops on MOTIS backends.
• Added support for occupancy information on OpenTripPlanner backends.
• Added support for localized headsign information on OpenTripPlanner backends.
• Improved automatic backend selection when start and destination are part of different coverage regions.
• Fixed parsing of geocoding replies from MOTIS missing some address information.
• Fixed misleading error messages when no results could be found.
• Fixed coverage metadata for Estonia.
• Improved trip matching when having to fall back from trip queries to journey routing.
• Improved parsing of night train coaches from ÖBB’s vehicle layout API.

Itinerary app

• Improved geo coding and address editing, including a fix for QtLocation not forwarding Nominatim house numbers correctly.
• Improved applying live updates to multi-ticket trips.
• Warn when trying to import data exported by a newer version of Itinerary.
• Fixed barcode scan mode button overlapping other page elements even when fully scrolled down.
• Fixed statistics display if no country has been visited yet.
• Also check for updates for newly imported reservations in the far future.
• Fixed display of arrival stop notes.
• Improved trip group action state handling for about to end trips.
• Show ticket validity times when available.
• Fixed display of train destinations in the coach layout view.
• Improved display of closed coaches in the vehicle layout view.
• Fixed creating ferry trips without an arrival time.

How you can help

Feedback and travel document samples are very much welcome, as are all other forms of contributions. Feel free to join us in the KDE Itinerary Matrix channel.

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma! Every week we cover the highlights of what’s happening in the world of KDE Plasma and its associated apps like Discover, System Monitor, and more.

This week we released a second beta version of Plasma 6.4 and worked a ton on polishing it up in preparation for general release in about two weeks. We’re getting a good response from beta testers who are submitting lots of bug reports — please keep it up! These are hugely valuable, and we’re prioritizing them.

Notable UI Improvements

Plasma 6.4.0

Handled more device types in the Bluetooth widget so that it’s more accurate about identifying the device type. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

The Bluetooth pairing wizard now displays devices with real names on top so you can find them more easily. (Albert Astals Cid, link)

Improved keyboard navigation across search result columns in the Kicker Application Menu. (Christoph Wolk, link)

The Dictionary and Web Browser widgets now both use symbolic panel icons, to match what other widgets do now. (Christoph Wolk, link 1, link 2)

Made numerous functional and visual improvements to the Fifteen Puzzle widget. (Christoph Wolk, link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5, link 6)

Plasma 6.5.0

You can now advance to the next wallpaper in a wallpaper slideshow using a keyboard shortcut, if you assign one to the new global action we created for this purpose. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

KWin’s Magnifier and Zoom effects now share their initial zoom level and zoom factor settings. (Ritchie Frodomar, link)

The Digital Clock widget’s calendar add-ons page has been given a visual overhaul and looks much nicer now. (Christoph Wolk, link 1, link 2, and link 3)

Plasma now warns you that keeping the “Raise maximum volume” setting active for prolonged periods will damage the device’s speakers, and lets you know it’s designed only for temporary use to boost the volume of quiet media. (Nate Graham, link)

System Settings’ Legacy X11 App Support page is now clearer about what you would use its settings for, and what the security consequences of doing so are. (Nate Graham, link)

The menu that appears when you click on the little app icon in a window’s titlebar is now consistently called the “Window Menu” everywhere. (John Veness, link 1 and link 2)

Notable Bug Fixes

Plasma 6.3.6

Fixed a random-seeming KWin crash. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Fixed a common crash in the Powerdevil power management subsystem. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

The Legacy X11 App Support settings now apply accurately no matter what keyboard layout you’re using. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

The keyboard shortcut in the desktop context menu for the ”Launch KRunner” menu item (if you’ve manually enabled it) is once again shown correctly. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

Fixed a very subtle visual glitch in the radio button switching animation. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

The Power And Battery widget no longer bugs you to install power-profiles-daemon when it’s already installed but your hardware simply doesn’t support it. (Nate Graham, link)

Plasma 6.4.0

Fixed multiple bugs where dragging-and-dropping widgets onto panels or the desktop would only work once until Plasma was restarted, or could make Plasma crash, or where widgets dropped on a panel could overlap. (Marco Martin, link 1, link 2, link 3, and link 4)

Fixed a case where Plasma or System Settings could crash when you removed certain locations from the locations list for the Slideshow wallpaper plugin. (Marco Martin, link)

Fixed an extremely strange and subtle issue in Spectacle that would cause content on the wrong screen to get captured when using certain multi-screen arrangements with certain fractional scale factors. (Noah Davis, link)

Fixed a case where a newly-configured System Monitor Sensor widget wouldn’t save its state after the system was restarted. (Arjen Hiemstra, link)

The Bluetooth widget no longer briefly shows the status as “Disconnecting” for a moment while actually connecting to a device. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

Clicking on the active Global Theme on System Settings’ Global themes page no longer shows a dialog saying the theme is broken. (David Edmundson, link)

Installing or uninstalling an app while the Kickoff Application Launcher is open no longer makes it clear the visible page until you navigate away from it and then back again. This is useful for when you’ve got it pinned open and are uninstalling unnecessary apps you find there one-by-one. (Christoph Wolk, link)

Fixed the width of the main column in the Kicker Application Menu so that it returns to its normal width after clearing the search field text, and ridiculously long text now elides rather than being cut off. (Christoph Wolk, link 1 and link 2)

Fixed a bug in the Kicker Application Menu that would cause sub-menus to be displayed at the wrong size when switching to them immediately after viewing a smaller sub-menu with its own sub-menus. (Christoph Wolk, link)

Fixed a bug that caused the header backgrounds for the few remaining System Settings pages written in QtWidgets to not change properly after you switch color schemes until System Settings was restarted. (Marco Martin, link)

Fixed the window stacking order being sometimes scrambled when using the “Slide Back” effect. (David Edmundson, link)

Fixed a bug preventing the items in Firefox’s popup showing recently downloaded files from being draggable as intended. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Frameworks 6.15

Fixed a bug that caused KWin to crash when the screen arrangement is changed while the Overview effect was open. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Fixed a bug that caused apps to hang when they try to access passwords if somehow your default KWallet wallet has gotten its name set to an empty string. (Marco Martin, link)

Fixed a bug that caused the KWalletManager app to freeze if you start creating a new wallet, then change your mind in the middle of the process and close the new wallet creation dialog. (Marco Martin, link)

Worked around a GTK bug a bug that caused some Breeze icons to appear as white rectangles in GTK 3 apps. (Mors Mortium, link)

In the “Get New [thing]” windows, the button to open the comments page is now an actual button, not an underlined link, which was misleading. (John Veness, link)

Qt 6.8.4

Fixed one of the most common random crashes in any and all QtQuick-based KDE software. (Ulf Hermann, link)

Qt 6.10

Fixed a bug that caused context menus in some apps to be offset and displayed in the wrong location when using a multi-screen setup. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Other bug information of note:

• 3 very high priority Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
• 25 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 27 last week). Current list of bugs

Notable in Performance & Technical

Plasma 6.5.0

Reduced memory usage of Plasma by keeping fewer unnecessary copies of each screen’s wallpaper in memory. (David Edmundson, link)

Changing the icon theme no longer triggers an unnecessary refresh of the application metadata cache. (Nicolas Fella, link)

Qt 6.10.0

Implemented the ability to have companion items in QtQuick-based user interfaces label one another for the purpose of screen readers saying more sensible things when they’re focused. Once this is released, we’ll be able to start adopting it throughout KDE software! (Nicolas Fella, link)

How You Can Help

KDE has become important in the world, and your time and contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we need your support to keep KDE sustainable.

You can help KDE by becoming an active community member and getting involved somehow. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE — you are not a number or a cog in a machine!

You don’t have to be a programmer, either. Many other opportunities exist:

• Triage and confirm bug reports, maybe even identify their root cause
• Contribute designs for wallpapers, icons, and app interfaces
• Design and maintain websites
• Translate user interface text items into your own language
• Promote KDE in your local community
• …And a ton more things!

You can also help us by making a donation! Any monetary contribution — however small — will help us cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors, and in general just keep KDE bringing Free Software to the world.

To get a new Plasma feature or a bugfix mentioned here, feel free to push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.

In September 2024, the annual KDE conference Akademy was held in Würzburg. I've been to all Akademies from 2004-2020 (except 2005). Then came Covid, private life, etc. So it was kind of special that I finally made it to Würzburg again, which was just a ~2h ride away by train. And it was a good decision: Since many KDE contributors (also those who stayed with KDE a for a log time) came to this Akademy. It was a good opportunity to meet old friends again.

And that remided me of a blog post I wrote 15 years ago: The Power of Developer Meetings. In that post I was highlighting the importance of face-to-face meetings. What I wrote back then is still relevant today, so I'll just repeat:

• Social aspect: You get to know the other developers involved in the project in real life, which is a great motivation factor and simplifies communication a lot.
• Productivity: Since you are sitting next to each other discussions about what to do and how to do what are very focused. It’s amazing how quickly a project can evolve this way. (I still haven’t seen such focused work in companies yet, even 15 years later).
• Knowledge Transfer: Since participants are experts in different areas, discussions lead to knowledge transfer. This is essential, as sometimes developers have very few free time to contributes to a project. Spreading the knowledge helps a lot to keep the project alive.
• Steady Contributions: New contributors always pop up, which is in particular very nice. Everyone is welcome to set a patch, get commit access and join development. Experience shows that participants joining developer meetings / conferences usually contribute for years to come.

I enjoyed meeting KWin developers (new and old ones), plasma developers, and Kate developers again (of course!). All in all I am very happy to see the lively community that KDE managed to be for over 25 years - well done!

Having said that, I am looking forward to Akademy 2025, that will be hosted in Berlin again. In case you are unsure to go there, I suggest to just do it! It's certainly going to be a very good experience, so go ahead and register now.

PS: Würzburg has one touristic spot, the "Alte Mainbrücke". Pretty much every tourist goes to this bridge and drinks a wine - I did so, too :-)

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-22.

The two types of open source

Tags: tech, foss, community, supply-chain, marketing, business

I’m not sure this dichotomy is enough for building a taxonomy of FOSS projects. But I guess it’s a start and captures something often missing in other such attempts.

https://filiph.net/text/two-types-of-open-source.html

SteamOS massively beats Windows on the Legion Go S

Tags: tech, linux, gaming, kde, power, performance

Looks like Linux is now the best operating system for gaming on the go.

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/05/steamos-massively-beats-windows-on-the-legion-go-s/

Why old games never die (but new ones do)

Tags: tech, gaming, vendor-lockin, culture

It’s funny how old games can still have a cult following. It’s unlikely to stop too… That’s the good thing about limited lock in. Self hostable private servers, ability to play offline, tools to produce mods… They all contribute to such very long term successes.

https://pleromanonx86.wordpress.com/2025/05/06/why-old-games-never-die-but-new-ones-do/

Own Your Email Domain

Tags: tech, email, self-hosting, dns

You don’t need to self-host the mail itself, but you definitely should control the domain.

https://matthewsanabria.dev/posts/own-your-email-domain/

How to fix email encryption

Tags: tech, email, security, cryptography, ux

Worth trying indeed. I’d love to see at least some of that widely adopted.

https://weddige.eu/en/articles/lets-encrypt-emails/

A Company Reminder for Everyone to Talk Nicely About the Giant Plagiarism Machine

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

Nice little satire, we could easily imagine some CEOs writing this kind of memo.

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/a-company-reminder-for-everyone-to-talk-nicely-about-the-giant-plagiarism-machine

At Amazon, Some Coders Say Their Jobs Have Begun to Resemble Warehouse Work

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copilot, productivity, management, business, quality

If you expected another outcome on the average developer job from the LLM craze… you likely didn’t pay attention enough.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/25/business/amazon-ai-coders.html

Google has a big AI advantage: it already knows everything about you

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, google, surveillance

Are we surprised they’ll keep processing personal information as much as possible? Not really no…

https://www.theverge.com/tech/671201/google-personal-context-ai-advantage-data

The Who Cares Era

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, quality, culture

Nice piece. In an age where we’re drowning in bad quality content, those who make something with care will shine. They need to be supported.

https://dansinker.com/posts/2025-05-23-who-cares/

Large Language Models Reflect the Ideology of their Creators

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, politics, research

Interesting research, this gives a few hints at building tools to ensure some more transparency at the ideologies pushed by models. They’re not unbiased, that much we know, characterising the biases are thus important.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.18417

Tools

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copyright, ethics

LLMs are indeed not neutral. There’s a bunch of ethical concerns on which you don’t have control when you use them.

https://adactio.com/journal/21926

The magic developer wand…

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, ethics, ecology, copyright

Not only the tools have ethical issues, but the producers just pretend “we’ll solve it later”. A bunch of empty promises.

https://gomakethings.com/the-magic-developer-wand…/

A Vibe‐Coding Experience

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, copilot, programming, complexity

An honest attempt at “vibe coding”… but once again the conclusion is “when it grows to non-trivial size, I’m glad my experience allowed me to finish the thing myself”.

https://github.com/clauderouxster/kriegspiel/wiki/A-Vibe%E2%80%90Coding-Experience

On “Vibe Coding”

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

It definitely has a point. The code output isn’t really what matters. It is necessary at the end, but without the whole process it’s worthless and don’t empower anyone… It embodies many risks instead. I think my preferred quote in this article is this: “We are teaching people that they are not worth to have decent, well-made things.”

https://tante.cc/2025/05/23/on-vibe-coding/

Net-Negative Cursor

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copilot, productivity, quality

Indeed feels bad when there are so many problems in the example of LLM based completion you put on the front page of your website…

https://lukasatkinson.de/2025/net-negative-cursor/

The Recurring Cycle of ‘Developer Replacement’ Hype

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copilot, nocode, hype, business

Just another hype cycle… The developer profession being in danger is greatly exaggerated.

https://alonso.network/the-recurring-cycle-of-developer-replacement-hype/

CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

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

Or why CAPTCHA might become something of the past. I guess they’ll live a bit longer as they become more and more privacy invasive.

https://behind.pretix.eu/2025/05/23/captchas-are-over/

Remote Prompt Injection in GitLab Duo Leads to Source Code Theft

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

As LLM assistants get more and more embedded in the development process, it gets harder to ensure they behave safely. Quite a few interesting attack vectors in that one.

https://www.legitsecurity.com/blog/remote-prompt-injection-in-gitlab-duo

GitHub MCP Exploited: Accessing private repositories via MCP

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

Another example of attack vectors emerging with adding more and more LLM agents in the development process.

https://invariantlabs.ai/blog/mcp-github-vulnerability

How I used o3 to find CVE-2025-37899, a remote zeroday vulnerability in the Linux kernel’s SMB implementation

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

Looks like it’s getting there as a good help for auditing code, especially to find security vulnerabilities.

https://sean.heelan.io/2025/05/22/how-i-used-o3-to-find-cve-2025-37899-a-remote-zeroday-vulnerability-in-the-linux-kernels-smb-implementation/

Pain in the dots

Tags: tech, version-control, git, tools

I often tumble on this. The two and three dots notations means different things between git log and git diff. It is a tad annoying.

https://matthew-brett.github.io/pydagogue/pain_in_dots.html

Writing your own CUPS printer driver in 100 lines of Python

Tags: tech, linux, printing, cups

A good reminder that writing CUPS printer drivers doesn’t have to be complicated.

https://behind.pretix.eu/2018/01/20/cups-driver/

The future of Flatpak

Tags: tech, linux, flatpak, community

Flatpak is at a crossroad I’d say. The project really needs to find a way to move forward.

https://lwn.net/Articles/1020571/

Memory Access Patterns Are Important

Tags: tech, programming, cpu, memory, caching, performance, multithreading

A bit dated perhaps, and yet most of the lessons in here are still valid. If performance and parallelism matter, you better keep an eye on how the cache is used.

https://mechanical-sympathy.blogspot.com/2012/08/memory-access-patterns-are-important.html?m=1

Isolates and Compressed References: More Flexible and Efficient Memory Management via GraalVM

Tags: tech, java, memory

Interesting advanced features of GraalVM to better manage the memory of complex Java programs.

https://medium.com/graalvm/isolates-and-compressed-references-more-flexible-and-efficient-memory-management-for-graalvm-a044cc50b67e

Revisiting Loop Recognition in C++… in Rust

Tags: tech, rust, c++, programming, memory, performance, benchmarking

Interesting comparison between C++ and Rust for a given algorithm. The differences are mostly what you would expect, it’s nice to confirm them.

https://blomqu.ist/posts/2025/loop-recognition/

Threads Beat Async/Await

Tags: tech, programming, multithreading, asynchronous, python, dotnet, javascript, java, rust

Or why I’m still on the fence regarding async/await. It’s rarely the panacea we pretend it to be.

https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2024/11/18/threads-beat-async-await/

Rust streams and timeouts gotcha

Tags: tech, programming, rust, asynchronous

Indeed, bugs with async/await can be subtle in Rust.

https://laplab.me/posts/rust-streams-gotcha/

parking_lot: ffffffffffffffff…

Tags: tech, debugging, multithreading, rust

Nice deep dive into a bug lurking inside a lock implementation.

https://fly.io/blog/parking-lot-ffffffffffffffff/

Concepts vs type traits

Tags: tech, c++, type-systems

Good comparison between concepts and type traits in C++. Clearly at this point concepts should be favoured as they convey more intent to compilers and humans alike.

https://akrzemi1.wordpress.com/2025/05/24/concepts-vs-type-traits/

dynamix: A new take on polymorphism

Tags: tech, c++, design, object-oriented

A library bringing the mixins concept to C++.

https://github.com/iboB/dynamix

Pyrefly vs. ty: Comparing Python’s Two New Rust-Based Type Checkers

Tags: tech, python, type-systems, rust

Early days but it looks like we got two interesting type checkers coming up for Python. Definitely worth keeping an eye on them.

https://blog.edward-li.com/tech/comparing-pyrefly-vs-ty/

Thousands separators

Tags: tech, programming, python

Nice trick for numbers formatting as strings in Python.

https://mathspp.com/blog/til/thousands-separators

Why are 2025/05/28 and 2025-05-28 different days in JavaScript?

Tags: tech, date, time, javascript

Date parsing is generally complicated… In JavaScript it is just insane.

https://brandondong.github.io/blog/javascript_dates/

Car Physics

Tags: tech, game, mathematics, simulation, physics

Nice explanation of everything you need to simulate to make a realistic car simulation in a game.

https://www.asawicki.info/Mirror/Car%20Physics%20for%20Games/Car%20Physics%20for%20Games.html

Test Isolation Is About Avoiding Mocks

Tags: tech, tests, tdd, design

Even if you do use mocks to isolate your tests, at least don’t nest them.

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/blog/2014/test-isolation-is-about-avoiding-mocks

Visualization Mnemonics for Software Principles

Tags: tech, design, object-oriented

A funny way to illustrate the principles behind the SOLID acronym.

https://daedtech.com/visualization-mnemonics-for-software-principles/

Design driven development

Tags: tech, architecture, tests, tdd, design

Both TDD and design docs complete each other well indeed. They just don’t focus on the same activities in the project. That said, both later provide important insights on all the decisions taken to produce some code.

https://underlap.org/design-driven-development

Reinvent the Wheel

Tags: tech, programming, supply-chain, learning

For studying it makes sense. But don’t shun other’s work away only because of trust or ego issues.

https://endler.dev/2025/reinvent-the-wheel/

On work processes and outcomes

Tags: tech, engineering, processes, quality, safety

Interesting ways to look at processes and their outcomes. Depending on the mental model you won’t ask the same questions when investigating incidents.

https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/05/10/on-work-processes-and-outcomes/

Managing strong personalities

Tags: management, team

I prefer aiming for egoless positions in teams… But if it doesn’t work, I guess this little trick can help turn someone around.

https://betterthanrandom.substack.com/p/managing-big-egos

How to make sure nothing gets done at work

Tags: organization, bureaucracy, management, communication

You’ve see a co-worker doing this, right? They’re unlikely to be spies, but still they’re inadvertently using sabotage tactics.

https://fortune.com/2015/09/30/workplace-bureaucracy-simple-sabotage/

Models and science

Tags: science

A nice little explanation of scientific work and enquiry.

https://lemire.me/blog/2025/05/23/models-and-science/

Bye for now!

Techpaladin becomes an official KDE patron and contributes to our community's funding.

Techpaladin is a consultancy firm specialized in advancing the state of the art in KDE software.

Techpaladin was founded by experienced and prominent KDE contributors who develop KDE-based software for such high-profile companies such as Valve and Qt Group.

"KDE is the giant whose shoulders Techpaladin sits upon," says Nate Graham, CEO of Techpaladin, "so we're very happy to support the mission and the foundation that pushes it forward. KDE e.V. helps make what we do possible, so becoming a Patron is the logical next step!"

"We are glad to welcome Techpaladin as our Patron", says Aleix Pol, President of KDE e.V. "Although a young organisation, we are very familiar with much of the team and know they share a lot of the same values as KDE. I look forward to growing KDE and its products together with them — what better way to do so than as a Patron?"

Techpaladin joins KDE e.V.'s other patrons: Blue Systems, Canonical, g10 Code, Google, Kubuntu Focus, Mbition, Slimbook, SUSE, The Qt Company and TUXEDO Computers, who support free open source software and KDE development through KDE e.V.