Seems getting laid off was pretty good for me after all. Funny how things go sometimes.

A company that works on KDE stuff (and other Linuxy things), interviewed me for a fun job: "Wanna help us work on KDE Plasma?"

You bet I said YES!

So now I work daily 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, to improve KDE Plasma! It's contract work, but I hope people there like me a lot to keep me around. :) At least I am planning to be around for the long haul!

Anyway, this was my first week doing this job!

Everyone I work with is really nice and most of them I have already met during my contribution adventures.

The job itself for now has been about helping finding and fixing bugs in KDE Plasma. I've mostly concentrated on bugs that can appear when moving from 5 to 6, like migrating configs, etc.

There's some other stuff I'm doing as well, but they're not that visible to end user, necessarily. Like fixing warnings.

I am also focusing on learning the stack and hopefully eventually get to work more on Flatpak related things and Kwin related things, since those interest me. I am also hoping to help with accessibility, like high-contrast color schemes and such. And who knows what else I will work on in future!

Also due to my experience in test automation, I have taken on the sidequest to help with that part as well. I have been quite interested how test automation of Linux desktop apps works, and there's quite cool stuff going on there.

In my personal KDE plans, I want to add color customization options for separators, since those can be used in high contrast themes. But since it would be any custom color the user wants, well, they can set it to anything. Anyhow, I will first prioritize fixing bugs and learning more.

Thank you so much for the company who took me under their wing. And thanks to my colleagues for helping me get into this and teaching me things, even when my questions can be a bit dumb at times.. :'D You know who you are!

Expect more posts in future about what I learn during this job! :)

Thanks for reading!

The RiveQtQuickPlugin has now integrated the latest rivecpp version. We've implemented rendering support for rive text elements. We ensured seamless text rendering compatibility across both software and hardware-backed renderers. Explore our latest blog post for a demonstration video and to learn about more rendering enhancements.

Continue reading RiveQtQuickPlugin now with Text Support at basysKom GmbH.

What the Alpha means

The alpha release primarily focuses on preparing our software for a future release. It involves handling unreleased dependencies, version numbers, co-installation conflicts, and all the relevant bookkeeping work.

This release has been somewhat manic, with issues surfacing up to the last minute. However, that's precisely what this early release is for: resolving these issues now and gathering feedback on packaging to ensure a smoother transition to the beta phase.

Feature Freezes

The complete feature freeze for Plasma is scheduled for the day of the first beta, which is on November 29th. After that, bug fixing will be the sole focus for a period of three months leading up to the final release.

A soft freeze is set for the week before, on the 22nd, to accommodate any significant changes and ensure a seamless beta release.
This is mostly a case of doing a final round of landing straggling merge requests rather than developers starting anything new.

Should I run it?

Plasma 6 is in a pretty good state; I've been using it as a daily driver without issues for months

The alpha release does have known issues, some already fixed, but unreleased with the pending Qt 6.6.1, some our side fixed since alpha tagging, and some we need to follow up, particularly in the more esoteric areas of Plasma.
If you're the sort of user that wants to help out Plasma and are of a skill level where you're happy to log into another desktop session if things are temporarily down.

I would recommend as a user finding a distribution that covers 'git master' builds rather than any snapshot as it can provide a more dynamic list . A list can be found at https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Plasma_6#How_to_use/test_it

Pre-upgrade steps

Please take a backup of ~/.config/plasma* before upgrading. Just in case you need to file bug reports about config migration from 5.

Can I get involved?

Absolutely! It's an exciting time for Plasma and KDE in general. There are numerous tasks you can dive into. Check out our onboarding wiki here: https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved

qqc2-breeze5-style is a theme used by Plasma Mobile. This alpha release is a re-bundling of the Plasma/5.27 branch of qqc2-breeze-style. It is for use by distros shipping alpha releases of Plasma 6 so that Qt 5 apps continue to be themed appropriately.

URL: https://download.kde.org/unstable/qqc2-breeze5-style/

SHA256: 813f9da4861567e70d1eccf3a3a092d802ac9475a91070fb47fa
8766f3c1e310

Signed by E0A3EB202F8E57528E13E72FD7574483BB57B18D Jonathan Esk-Riddell <jr@jriddell.org>
https://jriddell.org/esk-riddell.gpg

Oxygen Icons is an icon theme for use with any XDG compliant app and desktop.

It is part of KDE Frameworks 6 but is now released independently to save on resources.

This is the first (and likely only) pre-release, versioned 5.245.0, and it will have a stable release alongside KDE Frameworks 6 in February.

Distros which ship this version can drop the version released as part of KDE Frameworks 5.

sha256: b082a1a9a6d06cdeee2863555951609e95dd499f133035d04719a16f8500497f

URL: https://download.kde.org/unstable/oxygen-icons/

Signed by E0A3EB202F8E57528E13E72FD7574483BB57B18D Jonathan Esk-Riddell <jr@jriddell.org>
https://jriddell.org/esk-riddell.gpg

This project is trying to create a WS-Discovery client library based on the KDSoap
library.

The name is short for Klarälvdalens Datakonsult AB Simple Object Access Protocol Web Services Addressing Discovery Client

It is used by the SMB KIO worker from kio-extras.

kio-extras will have two releases as part of KDE’s 6th Megarelease, one for Qt 5 and one for Qt 6. Distros should build and ship both versions of kio-extras but the Qt5 build should use an internal static copy of kdsoap-ws-discovery-client so does not need to be built separately. The Qt 6 build of kio-extras does need this external build of kdsoap-ws-discovery-client. Distros will need an up to date copy of KDSoap library https://github.com/KDAB/KDSoap/tags.

SHA 256: 5007747f1ce607639bb63244f8894c03a15194c0a891b8d85e10d76dbdf79188
URL: https://download.kde.org/unstable/kdsoap-ws-discovery-client/
Signed by E0A3EB202F8E57528E13E72FD7574483BB57B18D Jonathan Esk-Riddell <jr@jriddell.org>
https://jriddell.org/esk-riddell.gpg

I’m happy to announce the 0.8.0 release of Subtitle Composer.

This release contains lots of bugfixes and new features including:

• Automatic translations using DeepL or Google Cloud
• WebVTT format support
• Subtitle positioning UI and support
• Subtitle class/comments/voice UI and support
• Improved rich text editing/preview
• Rich text rendering on waveform/video/editors
• Qt6 support
• FFmpeg 5 support
• Subtitle lines are always time sorted; remove sort lines menu action
• Replaced Kross with QJSEngine, removed ruby and python support
• Improved script manager and tools menu

As usual all binaries are available from download page.

Source tarball can be downloaded from download.kde.org.

— Mladen

Two new releases are out in preparation of the first alpha release or the February Megarelease.

KQuickImageEditor 0.3.0

This is the new stable version of KQuickImageEditor. Only notable change it the support for Qt6 in addition of Qt5 support.

Kirigami Addons 0.11.75

This is an alpha release and depends on an unreleased KDE Frameworks. Please only package it if you also package the coming alpha megarelease.

Packager section

You can find the package on download.kde.org (kirigami addons) and download.kde.org (kquickimageeditor) and it has been signed with my GPG key.

KUserFeedback is a library for collecting user feedback for apps via telemetry and surveys.
Version 1.3.0 is now available for packaging.

This version adds the option to build it for Qt 6. It can also be built for Qt 5 and distros may want to package it twice, however this will mean handling some overlapping files and most apps which use it will be ported to Qt 6 as part of the KDE 6 MegaReleases in February so distros may prefer to drop Qt 5 builds then.

sha256 252308b822dd4690ea85ab1688c9b0da5512978ac6b435f77a5979fc1d2ffd13

URL https://download.kde.org/stable/kuserfeedback/

Signed by E0A3EB202F8E57528E13E72FD7574483BB57B18D Jonathan Esk-Riddell <jr@jriddell.org>
https://jriddell.org/esk-riddell.gpg

* new release 1.3
* Add CC0-1.0 license
* Do not look for QtHelp if docs are disabled
* Remove unneeded setting of CMake policies, implied by requiring 3.16
* Add flatpak CI
* Bump minimum cmake version to 3.16
* Add explicit moc includes to sources for moc-covered headers
* Remove Designer&#39;s &quot;.&quot; normaloff file data from icon properties in .ui files
* Use latest-kf6 branch for Qt6
* In qt6 plugin name is KUserFeedbackQmlQt6
* PHP 8 compatibility
* Fix Qt 6 build of PHP-dependent unit tests
* categoryaggregationmodel
* Fix include form (use &quot;&quot; instead of &lt;&gt;) for provider.h
* Remove forward declaration as include is already defined
* Fix debug message
* Autogenerate debug categories
* Create logging_p.cpp directly
* Fix show headers in qtc6
* Compatibility is not necessary now
* kuserfeedback_version.h was not installed
* Fix compatibility (install temporary include in KUserFeedBack too)
* Add warning about removing compatibility
* Show all headers in includes
* KUserFeedbackConsole is an internal static lib too
* Not necessary here as it&#39;s an internal static lib
* Fix install target file
* Allow to co-install
* Port to new syntax
* Add Qt 6 Android CI
* typos–
* Add Qt6 windows CI support
* Hide finding docs dependencies behind ENABLE_DOCS
* Install translations
* qtversionsource: fix Qt 6.5 build
* avoid invalid lastX times
* .gitlab-ci.yml: enable static builds
* add it to CI qt6 bsd
* Fix cmakename in metainfo.yaml
* Tell no data has been sent if no data has been sent
* Give the dialog an actual title
* Remove duplicate header between cpp/h files
* Add windows CI