Make sure you commit anything you want to end up in the KDE Gear 24.02 releases to them
Next Dates:
https://community.kde.org/Schedules/February_2024_MegaRelease
This post is in part a response to an aspect of Nate’s post “Does Wayland really break everything?“, but also my reflection on discussing Wayland protocol additions, a unique pleasure that I have been involved with for the past months1.
Before I start I want to make a few things clear: The Linux desktop will be moving to Wayland2 – this is a fact at this point (and has been for a while), sticking to X11 makes no sense for future projects. From reading Wayland protocols and working with it at a much lower level than I ever wanted to, it is also very clear to me that Wayland is an exceptionally well-designed core protocol, and so are the additional extension protocols (xdg-shell & Co.). The modularity of Wayland is great, it gives it incredible flexibility and will for sure turn out to be good for the long-term viability of this project (and also provides a path to correct protocol issues in future, if one is found). In other words: Wayland is an amazing foundation to build on, and a lot of its design decisions make a lot of sense!
The shift towards people seeing “Linux” more as an application developer platform, and taking PipeWire and XDG Portals into account when designing for Wayland is also an amazing development and I love to see this – this holistic approach is something I always wanted!
Furthermore, I think Wayland removes a lot of functionality that shouldn’t exist in a modern compositor – and that’s a good thing too! Some of X11’s features and design decisions had clear drawbacks that we shouldn’t replicate. I highly recommend to read Nate’s blog post, it’s very good and goes into more detail. And due to all of this, I firmly believe that any advancement in the Wayland space must come from within the project.
But! Of course there was a “but” coming 
– I think while developing Wayland-as-an-ecosystem we are now entrenched into narrow concepts of how a desktop should work. While discussing Wayland protocol additions, a lot of concepts clash, people from different desktops with different design philosophies debate the merits of those over and over again never reaching any conclusion (just as you will never get an answer out of humans whether sushi or pizza is the clearly superior food, or whether CSD or SSD is better). Some people want to use Wayland as a vehicle to force applications to submit to their desktop’s design philosophies, others prefer the smallest and leanest protocol possible, other developers want the most elegant behavior possible. To be clear, I think those are all very valid approaches.
But this also creates problems: By switching to Wayland compositors, we are already forcing a lot of porting work onto toolkit developers and application developers. This is annoying, but just work that has to be done. It becomes frustrating though if Wayland provides toolkits with absolutely no way to reach their goal in any reasonable way. For Nate’s Photoshop analogy: Of course Linux does not break Photoshop, it is Adobe’s responsibility to port it. But what if Linux was missing a crucial syscall that Photoshop needed for proper functionality and Adobe couldn’t port it without that? In that case it becomes much less clear on who is to blame for Photoshop not being available.
A lot of Wayland protocol work is focused on the environment and design, while applications and work to port them often is considered less. I think this happens because the overlap between application developers and developers of the desktop environments is not necessarily large, and the overlap with people willing to engage with Wayland upstream is even smaller. The combination of Windows developers porting apps to Linux and having involvement with toolkits or Wayland is pretty much nonexistent. So they have less of a voice.
I have been involved with Freedesktop, GNOME and KDE for an incredibly long time now (more than a decade), but my actual job (besides consulting for Purism) is that of a PhD candidate in a neuroscience research lab (working on the morphology of biological neurons and its relation to behavior). I am mostly involved with three research groups in our institute, which is about 35 people. Most of us do all our data analysis on powerful servers which we connect to using RDP (with KDE Plasma as desktop). Since I joined, I have been pushing the envelope a bit to extend Linux usage to data acquisition and regular clients, and to have our data acquisition hardware interface well with it. Linux brings some unique advantages for use in research, besides the obvious one of having every step of your data management platform introspectable with no black boxes left, a goal I value very highly in research (but this would be its own blogpost).
In terms of operating system usage though, most systems are still Windows-based. Windows is what companies develop for, and what people use by default and are familiar with. The choice of operating system is very strongly driven by application availability, and WSL being really good makes this somewhat worse, as it removes the need for people to switch to a real Linux system entirely if there is the occasional software requiring it. Yet, we have a lot more Linux users than before, and use it in many places where it makes sense. I also developed a novel data acquisition software that even runs on Linux-only and uses the abilities of the platform to its fullest extent. All of this resulted in me asking existing software and hardware vendors for Linux support a lot more often. Vendor-customer relationship in science is usually pretty good, and vendors do usually want to help out. Same for open source projects, especially if you offer to do Linux porting work for them… But overall, the ease of use and availability of required applications and their usability rules supreme. Most people are not technically knowledgeable and just want to get their research done in the best way possible, getting the best results with the least amount of friction.
The point of that story is this: GNOME, KDE, RHEL, Debian or Ubuntu: They all do not matter if the necessary applications are not available for them. And as soon as they are, the easiest-to-use solution wins. There are many facets of “easiest”: In many cases this is RHEL due to Red Hat support contracts being available, in many other cases it is Ubuntu due to its mindshare and ease of use. KDE Plasma is also frequently seen, as it is perceived a bit easier to onboard Windows users with it (among other benefits). Ultimately, it comes down to applications and 3rd-party support though.
Here’s a dirty secret: In many cases, porting an application to Linux is not that difficult. The thing that companies (and FLOSS projects too!) struggle with and will calculate the merits of carefully in advance is whether it is worth the support cost as well as continuous QA/testing. Their staff will have to do all of that work, and they could spend that time on other tasks after all.
So if they learn that “porting to Linux” not only means added testing and support, but also means to choose between the legacy X11 display server that allows for 1:1 porting from Windows or the “new” Wayland compositors that do not support the same features they need, they will quickly consider it not worth the effort at all. I have seen this happen.
Of course many apps use a cross-platform toolkit like Qt, which greatly simplifies porting. But this just moves the issue one layer down, as now the toolkit needs to abstract Windows, macOS and Wayland. And Wayland does not contain features to do certain things or does them very differently from e.g. Windows, so toolkits have no way to actually implement the existing functionality in a way that works on all platforms. So in Qt’s documentation you will often find texts like “works everywhere except for on Wayland compositors or mobile”4.
Many missing bits or altered behavior are just papercuts, but those add up. And if users will have a worse experience, this will translate to more support work, or people not wanting to use the software on the respective platform.
SDI applications with multiple windows are very popular in the scientific world. For data acquisition (for example with microscopes) we often have one monitor with control elements and one larger one with the recorded image. There is also other configurations where multiple signal modalities are acquired, and the experimenter aligns windows exactly in the way they want and expects the layout to be stored and to be loaded upon reopening the application. Even in the image from Adlershof Technology Park above you can see this style of UI design, at mega-scale. Being able to pop-out elements as windows from a single-window application to move them around freely is another frequently used paradigm, and immensely useful with these complex apps.
It is important to note that this is not a legacy design, but in many cases an intentional choice – these kinds of apps work incredibly well on larger screens or many screens and are very flexible (you can have any window configuration you want, and switch between them using the (usually) great window management abilities of your desktop).
Of course, these apps will work terribly on tablets and small form factors, but that is not the purpose they were designed for and nobody would use them that way.
I assumed for sure these features would be implemented at some point, but when it became clear that that would not happen, I created the ext-placement protocol which had some good discussion but was ultimately rejected from the xdg namespace. I then tried another solution based on feedback, which turned out not to work for most apps, and now proposed xdg-placement (v2) in an attempt to maybe still get some protocol done that we can agree on, exploring more options before pushing the existing protocol for inclusion into the ext Wayland protocol namespace. Meanwhile though, we can not port any application that needs this feature, while at the same time we are switching desktops and distributions to Wayland by default.
Similarly, a protocol to save & restore window positions was already proposed in 2018, 6 years ago now, but it has still not been agreed upon, and may not even help multiwindow apps in its current form. The absence of this protocol means that applications can not restore their former window positions, and the user has to move them to their previous place again and again.
Meanwhile, toolkits can not adopt these protocols and applications can not use them and can not be ported to Wayland without introducing papercuts.
Similarly, individual windows can not set their own icons, and not-installed applications can not have an icon at all because there is no desktop-entry file to load the icon from and no icon in the theme for them. You would think this is a niche issue, but for applications that create many windows, providing icons for them so the user can find them is fairly important. Of course it’s not the end of the world if every window has the same icon, but it’s one of those papercuts that make the software slightly less user-friendly. Even applications with fewer windows like LibrePCB are affected, so much so that they rather run their app through Xwayland for now.
I decided to address this after I was working on data analysis of image data in a Python virtualenv, where my code and the Python libraries used created lots of windows all with the default yellow “W” icon, making it impossible to distinguish them at a glance. This is xdg-toplevel-icon now, but of course it is an uphill battle where the very premise of needing this is questioned. So applications can not use it yet.
Firefox has a picture-in-picture feature, allowing it to pop out media from a mediaplayer as separate floating window so the user can watch the media while doing other things. On X11 this is easily realized, but on Wayland the restrictions posed on windows necessitate a different solution. The xdg-pip protocol was proposed for this specialized usecase, but it is also not merged yet. So this feature does not work as well on Wayland.
Automation of GUI tasks is a powerful feature, so is the ability to auto-test GUIs. This is being worked on, with libei and wlheadless-run (and stuff like ydotool exists too), but we’re not fully there yet.
As you see, there is valid applications and valid usecases that can not be ported yet to Wayland with the same feature range they enjoyed on X11, Windows or macOS. So, from an application author’s perspective, Wayland does break things quite significantly, because things that worked before can no longer work and Wayland (the whole stack) does not provide any avenue to achieve the same result.
Wayland does “break” screen sharing, global hotkeys, gaming latency (via “no tearing”) etc, however for all of these there are solutions available that application authors can port to. And most developers will gladly do that work, especially since the newer APIs are usually a lot better and more robust. But if you give application authors no path forward except “use Xwayland and be on emulation as second-class citizen forever”, it just results in very frustrated application developers.
For some application developers, switching to a Wayland compositor is like buying a canvas from the Linux shop that forces your brush to only draw triangles. But maybe for your avant-garde art, you need to draw a circle. You can approximate one with triangles, but it will never be as good as the artwork of your friends who got their canvases from the Windows or macOS art supply shop and have more freedom to create their art.
Wayland, via its protocol limitations, forces a certain way to build application UX – often for the better, but also sometimes to the detriment of users and applications. The protocols are often fairly opinionated, a result of the lessons learned from X11. In any case though, it is the odd one out – Windows and macOS do not pose the same limitations (for better or worse!), and the effort to port to Wayland is orders of magnitude bigger, or sometimes in case of the multiwindow UI paradigm impossible to achieve to the same level of polish. Desktop environments of course have a design philosophy that they want to push, and want applications to integrate as much as possible (same as macOS and Windows!). However, there are many applications out there, and pushing a design via protocol limitations will likely just result in fewer apps.
I spent probably way too much time looking into how to get applications cross-platform and running on Linux, often talking to vendors (FLOSS and proprietary) as well. Wayland limitations aren’t the biggest issue by far, but they do start to come come up now, especially in the scientific space with Ubuntu having switched to Wayland by default. For application authors there is often no way to address these issues. Many scientists do not even understand why their Python script that creates some GUIs suddenly behaves weirdly because Qt is now using the Wayland backend on Ubuntu instead of X11. They do not know the difference and also do not want to deal with these details – even though they may be programmers as well, the real goal is not to fiddle with the display server, but to get to a scientific result somehow.
Another issue is portability layers like Wine which need to run Windows applications as-is on Wayland. Apparently Wine’s Wayland driver has some heuristics to make window positioning work (and I am amazed by the work done on this!), but that can only go so far.
So, how would we actually solve this? Fundamentally, this excessively long blog post boils down to just one essential question:
Do we want to force applications to submit to a UX paradigm unconditionally, potentially loosing out on application ports or keeping apps on X11 eternally, or do we want to throw them some rope to get as many applications ported over to Wayland, even through we might sacrifice some protocol purity?
I think we really have to answer that to make the discussions on wayland-protocols a lot less grueling. This question can be answered at the wayland-protocols level, but even more so it must be answered by the individual desktops and compositors.
If the answer for your environment turns out to be “Yes, we want the Wayland protocol to be more opinionated and will not make any compromises for application portability”, then your desktop/compositor should just immediately NACK protocols that add something like this and you simply shouldn’t engage in the discussion, as you reject the very premise of the new protocol: That it has any merit to exist and is needed in the first place. In this case contributors to Wayland and application authors also know where you stand, and a lot of debate is skipped. Of course, if application authors want to support your environment, you are basically asking them now to rewrite their UI, which they may or may not do. But at least they know what to expect and how to target your environment.
If the answer turns out to be “We do want some portability”, the next question obviously becomes where the line should be drawn and which changes are acceptable and which aren’t. We can’t blindly copy all X11 behavior, some porting work to Wayland is simply inevitable. Some written rules for that might be nice, but probably more importantly, if you agree fundamentally that there is an issue to be fixed, please engage in the discussions for the respective MRs! We for sure do not want to repeat X11 mistakes, and I am certain that we can implement protocols which provide the required functionality in a way that is a nice compromise in allowing applications a path forward into the Wayland future, while also being as good as possible and improving upon X11. For example, the toplevel-icon proposal is already a lot better than anything X11 ever had. Relaxing ACK requirements for the ext namespace is also a good proposed administrative change, as it allows some compositors to add features they want to support to the shared repository easier, while also not mandating them for others. In my opinion, it would allow for a lot less friction between the two different ideas of how Wayland protocol development should work. Some compositors could move forward and support more protocol extensions, while more restrictive compositors could support less things. Applications can detect supported protocols at launch and change their behavior accordingly (ideally even abstracted by toolkits).
You may now say that a lot of apps are ported, so surely this issue can not be that bad. And yes, what Wayland provides today may be enough for 80-90% of all apps. But what I hope the detour into the research lab has done is convince you that this smaller percentage of apps matters. A lot. And that it may be worthwhile to support them.
To end on a positive note: When it came to porting concrete apps over to Wayland, the only real showstoppers so far5 were the missing window-positioning and window-position-restore features. I encountered them when porting my own software, and I got the issue as feedback from colleagues and fellow engineers. In second place was UI testing and automation support, the window-icon issue was mentioned twice, but being a cosmetic issue it likely simply hurts people less and they can ignore it easier.
What this means is that the majority of apps are already fine, and many others are very, very close! A Wayland future for everyone is within our grasp! 
I will also bring my two protocol MRs to their conclusion for sure, because as application developers we need clarity on what the platform (either all desktops or even just a few) supports and will or will not support in future. And the only way to get something good done is by contribution and friendly discussion.
︎︎︎︎︎KTextAddons is a library with Various text handling addons used by Ruqola and Kontact apps. It can be compiles for both Qt 5 and 6 and distros are advised to compile two builds for each until Ruqola is ported to Qt 6.
URL: https://download.kde.org/stable/ktextaddons/
SHA256: 8a52db8abfa8a9d68d2d291fb0f8be20659fd7899987b4dcafdf2468db0917dc
Changelog
KDiagram 3.0.1 is an update to our charting libraries which fixes a bug in the cmake path configuration. It also updates translations and removes some unused Qt 5 code.
URL: https://download.kde.org/stable/kdiagram/3.0.1/
sha256: 4659b0c2cd9db18143f5abd9c806091c3aab6abc1a956bbf82815ab3d3189c6d
Signed by E0A3EB202F8E57528E13E72FD7574483BB57B18D Jonathan Esk-Riddell jr@jriddell.org
https://jriddell.org/esk-riddell.gpg
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-01. First one of 2024, Happy New Year to all!
Tags: tech, mozilla, foss, web
Alright, it’s 2024… Looking for a New Year Resolution? This is definitely the one you should contemplate! Maybe also prepare your switch to Plasma 6, but different story. 😉
https://roytanck.com/2023/12/23/in-2024-please-switch-to-firefox/
Tags: tech, web, culture, social-media
Very inspiring article. I really wish we’ll indeed see more and more weird and creative websites. People apparently feels uneasy in their current social media jails, the time is ripe to leap in the unknown again.
Tags: tech, foss, law
The current compromise might not be as bad as anticipated. Some things could be improved still. The community needs to be involved in the process.
https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/eu-cra-what-does-it-mean-for-open-source/
Tags: tech, fediverse, rss, ai, nlp
Indeed there are a few trends at play right now which lead to RSS being in use again. I can only hope it’ll keep growing.
https://timkellogg.me/blog/2024/01/03/birb
Tags: tech, search, web
This looks like now is the time for smaller search engines to shine. Clearly the dominant ones are not doing a really good job anymore.
Tags: tech, tesla, automotive, safety
The results of this investigation are actually super scary… Even if you don’t own one, those are in our streets. In any case it is a clear statement that you can’t and shall not run an automotive company like a startup…
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-musk-steering-suspension/
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, security
When bug bounty programs meet LLM hallucinations… developer time is wasted.
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/01/02/the-i-in-llm-stands-for-intelligence/
Tags: tech, valve, foss, linux, system
Funny reverse engineering of the latest SteamOS to use it in a different context. Give some information on their system design.
https://iliana.fyi/blog/build-your-own-steamos-updates/
Tags: tech, low-code
Proper word of caution. Those tools ain’t necessarily bad… but know what the limits will be.
https://nick.scialli.me/blog/why-im-skeptical-of-low-code/
Tags: tech, complexity, craftsmanship, dependencies, php, web
Nice ode to simplifying web projects, to great effects. You can go a long way serving millions of requests if you choose your tools properly.
https://alexcabal.com/posts/standard-ebooks-and-classic-web-tech
Tags: tech, system, design, architecture, databases
Very interesting exploration of the design choices behind the creation of a key value storage engine.
https://silhding.github.io/2021/08/20/A-Closer-Look-to-a-Key-Value-Storage-Engine/
Tags: tech, databases, python, orm, django
Overview of the differences in behavior between the two most popular ORMs in the Python ecosystem. This shows interesting different design options for such things.
https://st4lk.github.io/en/blog/2023/12/09/sqlalchemy-vs-django-orm/
Tags: tech, tools, command-line
Looks like another nice grep alternative. This one keeps its command line interface compatible with grep which is nice, not the case for other alternatives and that turns out to be my main gripe with them.
Tags: tech, docker, webassembly
This makes for quite a few emulation layers stacked on each other. Still this is an interesting experiment.
https://github.com/ktock/container2wasm
Tags: tech, profiling
Nice reference for the tools available to profile software.
https://profilerpedia.markhansen.co.nz/
Tags: tech, amd, gpu, shader, performance
A very precise and thorough article about GPU occupancy. What it is, how it relates to perceived performances, it’s potentisl relationship with cache thrashing and the tools you can use to measure it on AMD GPUs.
https://gpuopen.com/learn/occupancy-explained/
Tags: tech, c++, assembly, performance
Not necessarily a practical advice in most of our daily code. Still this exhibits interesting low level details about argument passing. Might come in handy in a few cases, to be kept in mind.
https://gist.github.com/FeepingCreature/5dff669aad380a123b15659e195fb96c
Tags: tech, web, design
Good food for thought regarding shared presence on the web. A few good ideas in the design space. Obviously very web centric, I wonder what we could do on the desktop with shared documents for instance.
https://maggieappleton.com/ambient-copresence
Tags: tech, engineering, management, developer-experience
Nice writeup about the benefits of homogeneity in an engineering organization. It also shows how it is a balancing act though, since you need experiments to happen in a controlled way for evolution to still happen.
https://building.nubank.com.br/the-value-of-canonicity/
Bye for now!
I have now been playing games only on Linux for a year, and it has been great.
With the GPU shortage, I had been waiting for prices to come back to reasonable levels before buying a new GPU. So far, I had always bought NVIDIA GPUs as I was using Windows to run games and the NVIDIA drivers had a better “reputation” than the AMD/Radeon ones.
With Valve’s Proton seriously taking off thanks to the Steam Deck, I wanted to get rid of the last computer in the house that was running Microsoft Windows, that I had kept only for gaming.
But the NVIDIA drivers story on Linux had never been great, especially on distributions that move kernel versions quickly to follow upstream releases like Fedora. I had tried using the NVIDIA binary drivers on Fedora Kinoite but quickly ran into some of the issues that we have listed in the docs.
At the time, the Universal Blue project did not exist yet (Jorge Castro started it a bit later in the year), otherwise I would have probably used that instead. If you need NVIDIA support today on Fedora Atomic Desktops (Silverblue, Kinoite, etc.), I heavily recommend using the Universal Blue images.
Hopefully this will be better in the future for NVIDIA users with the work on NVK
So, at the beginning of last year (January 2023), I finally decided to buy an AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT GPU card.
What a delight. Nothing to setup, fully supported out of the box, works perfectly on Wayland. Valve’s Proton does wonders. I can now play on my Linux box all the games that I used to play on Windows and they run perfectly. Just from last year, I played Age of Wonders 4 and Baldur’s Gate 3 without any major issue, and did it pretty close to the launch dates. Older titles usually work fairly well too.
Sure, some games require some little tweaks, but it is nothing compared to the horrors of managing a Windows machine. And some games require tweaks on Windows as well (looking at you Cyberpunk 2077). The best experience is definitely with games bought on Steam which usually work out of the box. For those where it is not the case, protondb is usually a good source to find the tweaks needed to make the games work. I try to keep the list of tweaks I use for the games that I play updated on my profile there.
I am running all of this on Fedora Kinoite with the Steam Flatpak. If you want a more console-like or Steam Deck-like experience on your existing computers, I recommend checking out the great work from the Bazzite team.
Besides Steam, I use Bottles, Cartridge and Heroic Games Launcher as needed (all as Flatpaks). I have not looked at Origins or Uplay/Ubisoft Connect games yet.
According to protondb, the only games from my entire Steam library that are not supported are mostly multiplayer games that require some specific anti-cheat that is only compatible with Windows.
I would like to say a big THANK YOU to all the open source graphics and desktop developers out there and to (in alphabetical order) AMD, Collabora, Igalia, Red Hat, Valve, and other companies for employing people or funding the work that makes gaming on Linux a reality.
Happy new year and happy gaming on Linux!
Lots of my KDE contributions revolve around plugin code and their metadata, meaning I have a good overview of where and how metadata is used. In this post, I will highlight some recent changes and show you how to utilize them in your Plasma Applets and KRunner plugins!
Applets (or Widgets) are one of Plasma’s main selling points regarding customizability.
Next to user-visible information like the name, description and categories, there is a need for some technical metadata properties.
This includes X-Plasma-API-Minimum-Version for the compatible versions, the ID and the package structure, which should always be “Plasma/Applet”.
For integrating with the system tray, applets had to specify the X-Plasma-NotificationArea and X-Plasma-NotificationAreaCategory properties.
The first one says that it may be shown in the system tray and the second one says in which category it belongs. But since we don’t want any applets
without categories in there, the first value is redundant and may be omitted! Also, it was treated like a boolean value, but only "true" or "false" were expected.
I stumbled upon this when correcting the types in metadata files.
This was noticed due to preparations for improving the JSON linting we have in KDE. I will resume working on it and might also blog about it :).
What most applets in KDE specify is X-KDE-MainScript, which determines the entrypoint of the applet.
This is usually “ui/main.qml”, but in some cases the value differs. When working with applets, it is confusing to first have to look at the
metadata in order to find the correct file. This key was removed in Plasma6 and the file is always ui/main.qml.
Since this was the default value for the property, you may even omit it for Plasma5.
The same filename convention is also enforced for QML config modules (KCMs).
What all applets needed to specify was X-Plasma-API. This is typically set to "declarativeappletscript",
but we de facto never used its value, but enforced it being present. This was historically needed because in Plasma4, applets could
be written in other scripting languages. From Plasma6 onward, you may omit this key.
In the Plasma repositories, this allowed me to clean up over 200 lines of JSON data.
Just in case you were wondering: We have migrated from metadata.desktop files to only metadata.json files in Plasma6.
This makes providing metadata more consistent and efficient. In case your projects still use the old format, you can run desktoptojson -i pathto/metadata.desktop
and remove the file afterward.
See https://develop.kde.org/docs/plasma/widget/properties/#kpackagestructure for more detailed information. You can even do the conversion when targeting Plasma5 users!
Another nice addition is that “/runner” will now be the default object path. This means you can omit this one key. Check out the template to get started: https://invent.kde.org/frameworks/krunner/-/tree/master/templates/runner6python. DBus-Runners that worked without deprecations in Plasma5 will continue to do so in Plasma6! For C++ plugins, I will make a porting guide like blog post soonish, because I have started porting my own plugins to work with Plasma6.
Finally, I want to wish you all a happy and productive new year!
Tellico 3.5.3 is available, with a few minor clean-ups.
This is a lighter month due to holidays (and also I’m trying not to burn out), but I tried to fit in a bit of KDE anyway. It’s all bugfixes anyway because of the feature freeze!
Not mentioned is a bunch of really boring busywork like unbreaking the stable branches of Gear applications due to the CI format changing.
[Bugfix] Fixed a bunch of papercuts with the Android build, and the new nightlies should be appearing in the F-Droid repository soon! It’s mostly adding missing icons and making sure it looks good in qqc2-breeze-style (the style we use on Android and Plasma Mobile.) [24.02]
[Bugfix] Fixed Akkoma and Pleroma tags not being detected correctly, they should open in Tokodon instead of your web browser again! [24.02]
[Bugfix] KScreenLocker CI now runs supported tests, see the KillTest fixes and pamTest fix. Failing tests also make the pipeline visibly fail, as it should. (Unfortunately, the pipeline as of writing fails to due some unrelated regression?) [6.0]
[Bugfix] The lockscreen greeter now handles even the fallback theme failing, and display the “please unlock using loginctl” message instead of a black screen. [6.0]
[Bugfix] Improves the QtQuickControls style selection mechanism to work around a possible regression in Qt6. This should stop applications from mysteriously not opening in the rare (but unsupported) cases where our official styles aren’t installed/loading. [6.0]
[Bugfix] Fixed a bunch of TextArea bugs that affected mobile form factors, such as Plasma Mobile and Android. This is mostly for Tokodon (because we abuse TextAreas a lot in scrolling content) but it can help other applications too! The selectByMouse property is now respected, the cursor handles should show up less. [6.0]
[Bugfix] Invisible MenuItems in qqc2-breeze-style are collapsed like in qqc2-desktop-style. Mobile applications should no longer have elongated menus with lots of blank space! [6.0]
[Bugfix] You can finally right-click with a touchpad in qqc2-desktop-style TextFields again! This bug has been driving me up a wall when testing our Qt6 stuff. [6.0]
[Feature] When the Kirigami theme plugin fails to load, the error message will soon be a bit more descriptive. This should make it easier for non-developers to figure out why Kirigami applications don’t look correct. [6.0]
[Bugfix] Fixed KWeather not launching on Android because it needed QApplication. I didn’t know QtCharts is QWidgets-based! [24.02]
I also went around and fixed up a bunch of other mobile applications with Android contributions too small to mention. Applications like Qrca, Kongress, etc.
[Bugfix] Prevent the NeoChat notification daemon from sticking around forever although that should rarely happen. [24.02]
Nagged for a new QtKeychain release due to a critical bug that would cause applications to never open KWallet5. Please also nag your distributions to package 0.14.2 soon! Anything using QtKeychain 0.14.1 or below won’t work in Plasma 6. This doesn’t affect people in the dev session, because QtKeychain should be built from git.
Helping the Gentoo KDE Team with packaging Plasma 6 and KDE Gear 6. I managed to update my desktop to Plasma 6 and submitted fixes to get it closer to working. I also added Arianna, PlasmaTube and MpvQt packages.
TSDgeos
@jriddell:kde.org
alex1701c