I promised new features soon, and here they are! There are plenty of positive UI changes too. Hopefully what this week's post lacks in quantity will be made up by depth, because these are some nice changes that have been in development for quite some time. Have a look:

Notable New Features

It's now possible to clone a panel! (Niccolò Venerandi, 6.3.0. Link)

KWin's Custom Tiling system now remembers tile arrangement on a per-virtual-desktop basis. (Marco Martin, 6.3.0. Link)

You can now set keyboard shortcuts to move windows between Custom Tiling (as opposed to Quick Tiling) tile zones based on directionality. No default shortcuts were set up for now because all the obvious Modifier+Arrow combinations were already taken. This is an avenue to ponder further in the future. (Akseli Lahtinen, 6.3.0. Link)

It's now possible to limit the upper and lower ranges for tablet pen pressure, not just the shape of the pressure curve. (Joshua Goins, 6.3.0. Link)

Notable UI Improvements

Categories in Kickoff no longer automatically switch on hover by default; they have to be clicked like all other list items elsewhere. This fixes a host of issues related to unexpected category switching and freezes when moving the pointer rapidly over categories. Those who preferred switch-on-hover can turn it back on if they like. (Noah Davis, 6.3.0. Link)

The way Quick Tiling (i.e. with Meta+Arrow keys) works has been slightly changed; now when trying to tile a window in a direction it can't be tiled in anymore because it has hit a screen edge with nothing beyond it, it will simply sit there, rather than un-tiling and teleporting to a potentially unexpected place. (Vlad Zahorodnii, 6.3.0. Link)

System Settings' Display & Monitor page now shows a slider for normal/SDR brightness for each screen, just in case you expected to find it there rather than in the System Tray's Brightness and Color widget. (Xaver Hugl, 6.3.0. Link)

When you hold down Alt+Tab to open the window switcher and then keep those keys held down, the selection highlight will now go all the way to the end, but will no longer hilariously wrap around infinitely until you release the keys again. (Ismael Asensio, 6.3.0. Link)

The active virtual desktop is now remembered per activity. (Xaver Hugl, 6.3.0. Link)

Notable Bug Fixes

Fixed a bug that could cause placeholder and typed text to overlap in KRunner's search field under certain circumstances. (Jack Xu, 6.2.5. Link)

Metadata displayed for Bing picture of the day wallpapers is now displayed correctly. (George Travelbacon, 6.2.5. Link)

When you copy images from Plasma notifications, they can now be pasted into sandboxed apps. (Alessandro Astone, 6.2.5. Link)

After using an application that goes through the input capture portal (e.g. Input Leap) and it quits unexpectedly, you now regain full control of your pointer and keyboard immediately. (David Redondo, 6.2.5 Link)

Keyboard navigation between a filtered subset of windows in the Overview effect now works as you expect it to. (Niccolò Venerandi, 6.3.0. Link)

When you delete a panel but haven't yet dismissed the option to unto this, the deleted panel no longer inappropriately and surprisingly responds to any keyboard shortcuts that toggle any of their widgets. (Niccolò Venerandi, 6.3.0. Link)

Other bug information of note:

• 3 Very high priority Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
• 35 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 37 last week). Current list of bugs
• 110 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed over the last week. Full list of bugs

Notable in Performance & Technical

Slightly increased the performance of every app and window that uses KWindowStateSaver. (David Edmundson, Frameworks 6.9, 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.

Thankfully, thousands of you have stepped up in the past week to do just that financially, donating a record-breaking amount of money to KDE e.V., which is just incredible, awe-inspiring even.

So that's a great way to help out. But if you've got more time than money or want to make a difference more directly, then 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!

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.

This time, it’s a short one: We ported KPhotoAlbum to Qt6/KF6. That’s it ;-)

The port itself has been done by Johannes and me, additional commits have been contributed by Randall Rude and Fabian Würfl. Thanks for working on KPA with us!

One thing that’s worth mentioning is: For the map/geodata functionality, we need Marble. The Qt5/KF5 version of Marble can’t be co-installed with the Qt6/KF6 version, and this one is not released yet. But Marble 24.12.0 (which will be the first official Qt6/KF6 release) will be released in a few days. So just wait until it's out before upgrading to KPA 6, to not lose the map parts.

Maybe, the Qt6/KF6 version contains some regressions. The codebase is quite well advanced in years in some parts, and we had to mess with quite some legacy issues to make the whole thing fit for Qt6/KF6. So if you notice anything, please file a respective bug report and/or contact us via our mailing list or Matrix channel (cf. User support → Communication). Thanks for your participation (hopefully, it won’t be necessary too much).

Have a lot of fun with KPhotoAlbum 6 :-)

— Tobias

Plasma Wayland Protocols 1.15.0 is now available for packaging. It is needed for the forthcoming KDE Frameworks.

URL: https://download.kde.org/stable/plasma-wayland-protocols/
SHA256: e5aedfe7c0b2443aa67882b4792d08814570e00dd82f719a35c922a0993f621e Signed by: E0A3EB202F8E57528E13E72FD7574483BB57B18D Jonathan Riddell jr@jriddell.org

Full changelog:

• Add a request to create a virtual output stream with description
• Add alpine CI
• Add modifier information to keystate
• gitignore: use same as KWin
• Add a destructor to appmenu manager
• Add protocol tests
• Add CI for static builds on Linux

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-49.

Pourquoi les médias devraient créer des serveurs Mastodon maintenant

Tags: tech, social-media, fediverse, bluesky, politics, business

Article in French

Very good piece explaining why the Ferdiverse is currently our only option for a decentralized social media platform. Maybe Bluesky will become another option… maybe… but so far it’s only empty promises with a real risk of capture.

https://blogs.mediapart.fr/gaetan-le-feuvre/blog/291124/pourquoi-les-medias-devraient-creer-des-serveurs-mastodon-maintenant

Core copyright violation claim moves ahead in The Intercept’s lawsuit against OpenAI

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

Another lawsuit making progress against OpenAI and their shady practice.

https://www.niemanlab.org/2024/11/copyright-claim-moves-ahead-in-the-intercepts-lawsuit-against-openai/

New era of slop security reports for open source

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

Let’s hope security teams don’t get saturated with low quality security reports like this…

https://sethmlarson.dev/slop-security-reports

SmolVLM - small yet mighty Vision Language Model

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, vision

Nice vision model. Looks like it strikes and interesting balance between performance and memory consumption. Looks doable to run cheaply and on premise.

https://huggingface.co/blog/smolvlm

First Router Designed Specifically For OpenWrt Released - Software Freedom Conservancy

Tags: tech, foss, hardware, networking

This is an excellent milestone reached for the OpenWrt project. Easily available hardware is a must. It’s rather cheap too.

https://sfconservancy.org/news/2024/nov/29/openwrt-one-wireless-router-now-ships-black-friday/

Why pipes sometimes get “stuck”: buffering

Tags: tech, unix, system

Good post about the very much overlooked fact that lots of command buffer internally when their output is not a TTY.

https://jvns.ca/blog/2024/11/29/why-pipes-get-stuck-buffering/

Compilation on the GPU?

Tags: tech, compiler, gpu, research

Interesting research about feasibility of making compilers parallelized on the GPU. I wonder how far this will go.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.¹¹⁴⁵⁄_3528416.3530249

Legacy Safety: The Wrocław C++ Meeting

Tags: tech, c++, safety

Interesting piece, it highlights well the struggle for the C++ community to come up with a cohesive approach to improve safety. It doesn’t look like the solution is going to come from the standardization committee (unfortunately).

https://cor3ntin.github.io/posts/profiles/

Structured Binding Upgrades in C++26

Tags: tech, c++

Very nice improvements finally coming to structured bindings indeed. Should make them even more useful.

https://biowpn.github.io/bioweapon/2024/12/03/structured-bindings-cpp26.html

Why I Hate Language Benchmarks - gingerBill

Tags: tech, language, benchmarking

Comparing languages based on some benchmark is probably a fool’s errand indeed. To many factors can change between language and benchmark implementations.

https://www.gingerbill.org/article/2024/01/22/comparing-language-benchmarks/

If Not React, Then What?

Tags: tech, web, frontend, react, criticism, product-management, performance

Excellent piece which shows why React (or Angular) is almost always a bad choice and that you’d be better off banking on the underlying web platform. It leads to better user experience full stop. The article also goes in great length debunking the claims which keep React dominant.

https://infrequently.org/2024/11/if-not-react-then-what/

Building A Strong Ownership Culture in A Team

Tags: tech, engineering, management

Nice example of organization to foster more autonomy and ownership in engineering teams. Clearly needs to be adapted to the project context but gives quite a few ideas. It strikes a nice balance at keeping both an individual and a team view of the responsibilities.

https://candost.blog/strong-ownership-culture-in-a-team/

An introduction to thinking about risk - Jacob Kaplan-Moss

Tags: tech, project-management, risk

Excellent article introducing how to analyse risks.

https://jacobian.org/2024/dec/4/risk-introduction/

Tying Engineering Metrics to Business Metrics

Tags: tech, engineering, business, metrics

Good mulling for thought. It’s always a bit challenging to nicely explain the tie between engineering metrics and how they impact the business. This is a nice starting point.

https://icchasethi.medium.com/tying-engineering-metrics-to-business-metrics-f4df7651e026

Bye for now!

Lots of KDE hacking these days, and that comes with compiling large amounts of code. Right now, I am installing, well building from source Plasma Mobile on an “old” laptop so I can test some patches natively on a touchscreen device. The machine has just two cores (hyperthreaded), so builds take rather long, especially if you build Qt and all that 80+ packages that are needed for a fully working Plasma system.
One of the tools that do an incredible job while being super flexible to use is icecream. Icecream (or “icecc“) allows you to distribute your build over multiple machines, it basically ships compile-jobs with all that’s needed to other machines on a local network, meaning you can parallelize your builds.

Icecream has this nice visualization tool, called icecream-monitor which you can stare at while your builds are running (in case you don’t have anyone handy for a sword-fight). In the screenshot you can see manta, the underpowered laptop doing a 32 parallel job build over the network. miro is my heavy workstation, 8 cores and 128GB of RAM, it duely gets the bulk of the work assigned, frame is my (Framework) laptop, which is also quite beefy, gets something to do too, but not taxed as heavily as that build monster in my basement office.
Icecream can be used with most environments that have you run your compiler locally. Different distros are no problem! Just a matching CPU architecture is needed. Icecream does its job by providing its own g++ and gcc binaries, which will relay the build jobs transparently to either your local machine or across the network. So you basically install it, adjust your PATH variable to make sure icecc’s g++ is found before your system’s compiler and start your build. Other machines you want to join in for the fun just need to run icecc-scheduler and they will be automatically discovered as build slaves on your network. If you want to further speed up builds, it works with ccache as well.

Please note that you only want to do this in a trusted environment, we’re shipping executables around the network without authorization!

(originally titled “On Dead Trees”)

There’s features that you know are really important to some of our users but you frankly don’t really care for them much yourself. Printing is one such example. Recently, I actually had to print lots of paperwork, so I had a reason to fix some of my more pressing issues with our Print Manager.

The biggest regression from the Plasma 4 days, when we moved from individual System Tray popups to a unified square view, was that Print Manager had to give up its two pane layout that showed the print queue directly in the popup. In order to view and cancel print jobs, you now had to select the printer and open its print queue window, and close it again after you’re done.

Unfortunately, with printer management, there’s really two opposing use cases: a home computer with maybe a couple of printers, and the office use case of hundreds of remote printers across several buildings. Picking one side usually leaves the other one worse off. However, I did not want to spent too much time on this, so in order to fix my workflow, I simply added the list of print jobs in the expanded view. I then added a busy indicator to a printer when it’s printing to make it easier to find in the list.

CUPS error messages have never been very nice and with all that “driver-less” stuff the user experience seems to have become worse, spitting technical gibberish like “cfFilterChain: Ghost script (PID 123456)” at the user. While printing probably works better now, the overall feature set has definitely regressed for me. In order to accommodate status messages better, Print Manager now shows up to three lines of text, which is particularly important in case of a printer or network error.

Another nice little touch from Plasma 4 was a dedicated laser printer icon. At home I have a black and white laser printer for printing documents and a color inkjet for printing pictures. It’s really nice being able to tell them apart at a glance. Therefore, I added a laser printer icon to Breeze as well. However, when I investigated how it worked, I found it just assumes every black and white printer to be a laser printer. Fair enough. You can ask CUPS for the “marker type”, e.g. toner or ink, and I hoped that I could use it to determine the printer type more accurately. Alas, since updating to the Ubuntu 24.04 base, none of my printers show ink levels anymore, not even after installing the official vendor drivers. Either way, ink status has been hit or miss for me under Linux for as long as I can remember, sometimes randomly working when talking to the printer over the network but not on the computer it was plugged into via USB and so on.

Next, while tinkering with printer settings, I noticed the nice little search box we have in our settings dialogs nowadays. Trying to find a certain option, I was surprised it didn’t highlight it, even though I clearly typed the exact name on the label. You see, controls in Qt can have “mnemonics” or “accelerators”, this is the underlined letter you typically see on a button that tells you what Alt+key to use to trigger it. The letter is prefixed with an ampersand (&) in the string, so “Pap&er size” shows as “Paper size” and will trigger on pressing Alt+E. KDE applications automatically assign a free accelerators to most widgets unless explicitly provided through the ampersand notation. The settings search did not account for this and subsequently failed to find it.

Leaving the subject of printers for now, I made a few minor improvements regarding batteries. One of my earliest contributions to Plasma’s power management system over ten years ago was a notification when a peripheral device, such as mouse or keyboard, runs low on battery. While the notification showed a dedicated icon for headsets (i.e. headphones with a microphone) it did not provide one for regular headphones, and neither did battery monitor, but it was an easy fix.

Additionally, when switching output devices, a brief on screen display is shown. In case of Bluetooth devices, battery status is included alongside the device name, to quickly see when the headphones you just connected are almost out of juice. When I switched to PipeWire this stopped working, no battery percentage was shown. I didn’t fully understand how it works but with PulseAudio it probably has exclusive access to the Bluetooth device and is the one that has to read the battery information and provide it to others as audio device property. With PipeWire, I guess things are different, and I just get to read battery information over the regular BlueZ battery interface, so that’s what Plasma will consult before showing the device popup.

Finally, the Energy Information page now displays the number of charge cycles your laptop battery has experienced so far in addition to the capacity estimation (“battery health”). The ability to query this information was added to Solid, KDE’s Hardware Abstraction Framework, and is supported by all of its backends. My trusty ThinkPad has over 700 charge cycles now and still reports 77% capacity left. I was still quite happy with its battery life during this year’s Akademy – admittedly I didn’t compile much during talks and had the screen brightness very low.

If you like what you saw and want to support the KDE Community and enable the good people behind it to create the best software possible, please consider donating to our Year End Fundraiser! KDE is funded mainly by you: our friends, users, and supporters. Thanks to your donations, we can deliver the best free and open software that respects your privacy and gives you control over your devices and digital life.

KStars v3.7.4 is released on 2024.12.05 for Windows, MacOS & Linux. It's a bi-monthly bug-fix release with a couple of exciting features.

I am still here. Sadly while I battle this insane infection from my broken arm I got back in July, the hackers got my blog. I am slowly building it back up. Further bad news is I have more surgeries, first one tomorrow. Furthering my current struggles I cannot start my job search due to hospitalization and recovery. Please consider a donation. https://gofund.me/6e99345d

On the open source work front, I am still working on stuff, mostly snaps ( Apps 24.08.3 released )

Thank you everyone that voted me into the Ubuntu Community Council!

I am trying to stay positive, but it seems I can’t catch a break. I will have my computer in the hospital and will work on what I can. Have a blessed day and see you soon.

Scarlett

TL;DR: The binary packages of Qt 6.8 or later in the Qt Online installer contain build SBOM documents.

An SBOM is:

A machine-processable document containing the details and supply chain relationships of various components used in building software, similar to food ingredient labels on packaging.

Why SBOM?

Building and shipping software requires a lot of care. Some aspects of building software are often neglected yet are considered important by many. I'm talking about security, build reproducibility, supply chain tracking, license compliance, and copyright attribution.

I just looked at our GitLab page today and thought: Amazing!

I thank you all for the great contributions of the last years.

Let's hope we see even more contributions in the future.

If you are unsure how to contribute, just take a look at the existing merged stuff as reference.

The upcoming 24.12 release will be a good one, we did polish Kate a lot.

I know not all is well on the world, but I still hope you have a good end of the year and an even better start in the new one!