Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-44.

Sakana AI’s CTO says he’s ‘absolutely sick’ of transformers, the tech that powers every major AI model

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, business, research, science

I’m happy to see I’m actually very much aligned with one of the “Attention Is All You Need” co-authors. The current industry trend of “just scale the transformer architecture” is indeed stifling innovation and actual research. That said I find ironic that he talks about freedom to explore… well this is what public labs used to be about, but we decided to drastically reduce their funding and replace that with competition between startups. It’s no surprise we have very myopic views on problems.

https://venturebeat.com/ai/sakana-ais-cto-says-hes-absolutely-sick-of-transformers-the-tech-that-powers

Kafka is fast – I’ll use Postgres

Tags: tech, architecture, complexity, databases, queuing, distributed, postgresql

Indeed, in most case you don’t need the extra complexity. Also interesting is showing that even if the application has to scale rapidly you still got quite some time to plan the transition to something else. It makes Postgres a sane default choice.

https://topicpartition.io/blog/postgres-pubsub-queue-benchmarks

WebDAV Isn’t Dead Yet

Tags: tech, webdav, storage

Indeed, WebDAV is too easily overlooked nowadays although it’s a respectable protocol with general availability. It’s likely available somewhere in what you already use.

https://blog.feld.me/posts/2025/09/webdav-isnt-dead-yet/

You already have a git server

Tags: tech, version-control, git, tools

A good reminder that you don’t always need a full blown forge.

https://maurycyz.com/misc/easy_git/

Use the XDG Base Directory Specification!

Tags: tech, standard, unix, linux, freedesktop

Nice little website advocating for more use of the XDG base directory specification. This is still needed to push for it indeed.

https://xdgbasedirectoryspecification.com/

fnox - Fort Knox for your secrets

Tags: tech, tools, security, secrets

Looks like an interesting tool to go with mise.

https://fnox.jdx.dev/

The Linux Boot Process: From Power Button to Kernel

Tags: tech, linux, kernel, hardware, system

Nice explanation of the very early steps leading to the kernel loading.

https://www.0xkato.xyz/linux-boot/

The Journey Before main()

Tags: tech, kernel, elf, linux, system

A good introduction at the early steps when a process is started. Covers what happens in the kernel, the ELF interpreter and your language runtime before the main function is called.

https://amit.prasad.me/blog/before-main

Stackful Coroutine Made Fast

Tags: tech, asynchronous, coroutine, performance, hardware, cpu, c++

Maybe we have a path forward for performance stackful coroutine? More pieces need to fall in place but this looks promising.

https://photonlibos.github.io/blog/stackful-coroutine-made-fast

Quantifying pass-by-value overhead

Tags: tech, cpu, hardware, performance

Interesting to see how it behaves in practice when passing parameters by value. Turns out there are surprising patterns in the data.

https://owen.cafe/posts/struct-sizes/

Closure captures

Tags: tech, c++, rust

Indeed, the C++ syntax for closure captures is way superior to the Rust one. Interesting musing on a potential path forward for Rust.

https://andwass.github.io/rust/2025/10/23/closure-captures.html

How to Avoid Fighting Rust Borrow Checker

Tags: tech, rust, memory

Interesting notes about borrow checking in Rust. Looks like it does a good job exploring the whole space of issues one can encounter with potential solutions.

https://qouteall.fun/qouteall-blog/2025/How%20to%20Avoid%20Fighting%20Rust%20Borrow%20Checker

Image Dithering: Eleven Algorithms and Source Code

Tags: tech, graphics, colors

Interested in how dithering works? All the algorithms you will ever need are probably on this list.

https://tannerhelland.com/2012/12/28/dithering-eleven-algorithms-source-code.html

By the power of grayscale!

Tags: tech, computer-vision

A good way to see the basics of computer vision. This gives all the building blocks needed.

https://zserge.com/posts/grayskull/

Serverless Is An Architectural Handicap (And I’m Tired of Pretending it Isn’t)

Tags: tech, cloud, architecture, complexity

A bit of an advertisement toward the end. That said, the evaluated constraints are completely valid. You don’t want to fit your whole code base into the “cloud function” model, only a few workloads will make sense there.

https://viduli.io/blog/serverless-is-a-handicap

Mistakes I see engineers making in their code reviews

Tags: tech, codereview, quality

An interesting set of principles for code reviews.

https://www.seangoedecke.com/good-code-reviews/

As an engineer, you have more power than you think

Tags: tech, engineering, technical-debt

Definitely this. It’s a good reminder of the boy scout rule. It’s fine to clean up as you go and when you find the opportunity.

https://candost.blog/journal/engineers-have-more-power/

The simplest, hardest way to “live like a local”

Tags: tourism, satire

An excellent satire about tourism. Are you sure you want to “live like a local”? Think twice.

https://andrewsamtoy.substack.com/p/ten-ways-to-live-like-a-local-anywhere?ref=DenseDiscovery-362

Bye for now!

We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 18!

Qt Creator 18 adds experimental support for Development Containers and many more improvements.

For a while now, probably two years, I wanted to have support for high-contrast colorschemes in KDE Plasma.

Technically, this was already doable, by just modifying your colorscheme to such colors. However one thing was lacking: Outlines were calculated automagically with hardcoded value.

Well, no more! Now you can set your own frame contrast value! And you may ask "Why not change the color completely?" which is a good question and I will answer that later.

This feature will be in Plasma 6.6. Hopefully. Or if you use KDE Linux you can already try it out. :)

The settings

This is how the settings will look like.

This setting used to be a slider.. And guess what, it did nothing in Breeze style. It was leftover from Oxygen times. Do not worry though if you use Oxygen style, the slider value is just percentage now and it will be converted to the value Oxygen uses.

Desktop examples

Some examples how it might look like in desktop setting.

All items are updated to follow this:

• QtQuick windows (qqc2-desktop-style)
• QtWidgets style and decorations (Breeze)
• Plasma SVG files (Anything using class: ColorScheme-Frame )

There's still some bugs with panels not always updating immediately, though we're working on fixing them.

Why not change the whole color?

Currently across all of our apps and styles, we do the following:

• Take background color and foreground color
• Mix them with previously hardcoded frameContrast value, which was 0.2
• Use that as the color for all the frames

If we wanted this to be recolorable completely, we would have to go through every single occurence of this color mixing. Most apps luckily rely on the styling, but some may have custom things, for example custom QtQuick Controls that are doing this manually, using the Kirigami.Theme.frameContrast value.

I think we most likely would have gotten away with it for most apps, but then rest of them would look wrong, and some of them may not even be KDE apps but are using Kirigami.. So we would need to tell everyone to do this update, or risk things look broken.

This was the compromise solution: Allow users to change the Kirigami.Theme.frameContrast value to whatever they wish, even turn it off. :)

A lot of work

This was a lot of work. In total, it was 8 merge requests that had to work together and be merged in correct order, etc..

And this is why modifying Breeze in our current stack is so difficult. You have to do many many changes across the platform.. And make sure that nothing breaks in the process!

My first draft: Use kdeglobals

First step for me was trying to make this a global configuration value only in ~/.config/kdeglobals, which every platform would watch for modifications for this particular value.

It worked fine, but it was quite messy, and I had to make sure all the default values across the stack would be synced. That is annoying for anyone who wants to maybe modify the default value later. On top of that, I felt like different platforms constantly watching the config file for changes just was not a good idea..

Second draft: Use KColorScheme

After chatting with people, we decided it would be best to just add this as a new value into our KColorScheme library. Instead of all the platforms looking for this configuration change, only the KColorScheme library did it.

This allowed me to simplify the implementation significantly.

Summary of changes

All in all, I had to do the following:

• Update KColorScheme to load this value from kdeglobals/current colorscheme | Link
• Update the settings for plasma-workspace to allow users to change this value | Link
• Update Breeze window decorations and QtWidgets style to use this value | Link
• Update Kirigami platformtheme to notify any platforms that use it about the changes | Link
• Update the libplasma library to actually listen for changes to this contrast value and change accordingly | Link
• Update qqc2-desktop-style (QtQuick style) to listen for changes to this value and change accordingly | Link
• Update KSvg library so that the Plasma styles can now use ColorScheme-Frame class to load correct color | Link
• Update kde-gtk-config to make sure the Breeze GTK theme also updates correctly when value is changed | Link

Yeah. It's a lot. This took me about a week to work on.

A week to make one number user modifiable.

Now imagine how long it would have taken if I had made the whole color modifiable!

And remember, there's tons of legacy code here which rely on each other, so I could not take shortcuts at places without possibly breaking everything.

And that's why Union was born

This is why Union is such an important project when it comes to styling, and which is why we are most likely NOT going to modify Breeze much further, aside maintenance: A lot of work for even small changes.

Union lets us have a "single source of truth." We can change things only in one place and (hopefully) see the visuals update everywhere, be it QtQuick, QtWidgets or Plasma style or whatever we decide to support! Which means easier to work on styling and iterate on it, designers have easier time collaborating because changes do not take days.. Etc.

So I am putting more effort in Union from now on.

Summary and future

I felt this was important change due to accessibility reasons, so I did it. And I am happy that I did, even if it was tons of work. (And there's more left with bugfixing lol.) This will also help alleviate issues where people feel like our apps are too "framey." You can now turn them off (well, you can make their color same as the background color) by setting the contrast to 0%. I must warn you that setting the value to 0% will probably look broken at some places, so we will probably have to add a warning to the color editor that "hey this is not optimal but you can do it lol."

In short-term future, I want this to be tied to the desktop portal interface for high-contrast accessibility preference: When user has this enabled, be they on Plasma desktop or not, the applications will maximize this frame contrast value automatically.

And then, there's bug hunting and finding out any weird inconsistencies. If you spot any, please report them to https://bugs.kde.org!

In long-term, this whole color thing will be rewritten to something much more robust, shinier, fancier and it will work with Union and everything is nice and beautiful. At least, that's what I hope.

I hope people will like this feature, especially those who need high-contrast colors.

Thanks for reading.

Fedora 43 has been released! 🎉 So let’s see what is included in this new release for the Fedora Atomic Desktops variants (Silverblue, Kinoite, Sway Atomic, Budgie Atomic and COSMIC Atomic).

Note: You can also read this post on the Fedora Magazine.

Changes for all variants

zstd compressed initrds

Alongside the rest of Fedora, we are now compressing our initrds with the Zstandard (zstd) algorithm. This should make the initrd a bit smaller and the boot a bit faster.

See the Fedora Change request and the tracking issue atomic-desktops-sig#34.

2 GB boot partition

Alongside the rest of Fedora, systems will install with a 2GB /boot partition. This should make things easier with the growing initrd sizes (mostly due to firmwares). Existing systems will require a backup and re-install to benefit from this change.

See the Fedora Change request.

wireguard-tools added

We are adding the wireguard-tools to all variants. Users can still use the graphical interface in their desktop environment to configure WireGuard connections. However, it should now be easier to debug issues using the wg tool. This change was decided too late to be included in the installation ISO but it will come via an update.

See silverblue#390 and kde-sig#381.

plocate removed

We removed plocate from all variants.

See atomic-desktops-sig#81.

What’s new in Silverblue

GNOME 49

Fedora Silverblue comes with the latest GNOME 49 release.

For more details about the changes that alongside GNOME 49, see What’s new in Fedora Workstation 43 on the Fedora Magazine.

Workaround for Third Party page hang

We temporarily removed the Third Party page shown during the first boot as it was causing issues. Users will be asked if they want to enable Third Party repositories when then open GNOME Software.

It will be re-enabled once we figure out where the bug is.

See silverblue#650 and atomic-desktops-sig#74.

openssl added for GSConnect

We added the openssl command line tool to Silverblue, to make the GSConnect extension work without having to resort to package layering or sysexts.

See silverblue#201.

What’s new in Kinoite

KDE Plasma 6.4, with 6.5 coming soon

Fedora Kinoite ships with Plasma 6.4, Frameworks 6.18 and Gear 25.08.

The update to Plasma 6.5 is ready should become available soon after the release.

See also What’s New in Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop 43? on the Fedora Magazine.

Weekly automatic updates by default

Updates are now automatically applied on a weekly basis, for Flatpaks and the system. You can configure the frequency or disable auto-updates in the system settings.

See the Fedora Change request and the tracking issue kde-sig#342.

What’s new in Sway Atomic

Fedora Sway Atomic comes with the latest 1.11 Sway release.

What’s new in Budgie Atomic

Fedora Budgie Atomic comes with the latest 10.9.3 Budgie release. Budgie 10.9.3 is a bug-fix and GNOME 49 compatibility release.

What’s new in COSMIC Atomic

Fedora COSMIC Atomic comes with the latest beta release of the COSMIC desktop.

Changes in unofficial images

XFCE Atomic & LXQt Atomic dropped in Fedora 43

Starting with Fedora 43, we will no longer build XFCE Atomic & LXQt Atomic unofficial images.

Universal Blue, Bluefin, Bazzite and Aurora

Our friends in the Universal Blue project (Bazzite, Bluefin, Aurora) have prepared the update to Fedora 43. Look for upcoming announcements in their Discourse.

As always, I heavily recommend checking them out, especially if you feel like some things are missing from the Fedora Atomic Desktops and you depend on them (NVIDIA drivers, extra media codec, out of tree kernel drivers, etc.).

What’s next

Roadmap to Bootable Containers

The next major evolution for the Atomic Desktops will be to transition to Bootable Containers. See also the Fedora bootc documentation.

We have established a roadmap (atomic-desktops-sig#26) and we need your help to make this a smooth transition for all of our existing users.

New home for the Fedora sysexts

We have moved the systemd system extensions (sysexts) to a new GitHub organization. The sysexts are now split between those built exclusively from Fedora packages and those built from various community sources. Make sure to update your systemd-sysupdate configs to point to the new URLs.

Moving to Fedora’s new Forge based on Forgejo

Now that Fedora’s new forge is available, we will start moving our repos there. You can find the new organization at forge.fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops. We will likely start by moving the documentation and then issue tracker and the sources.

Where to reach us

We are looking for contributors to help us make the Fedora Atomic Desktops the best experience for Fedora users.

• Atomic Desktops SIG: New Fedora Forge organization, Issue tracker (gitlab.com/fedora/ostree/sig), #atomic-desktops:fedoraproject.org
• Silverblue: Workstation Working Group, #silverblue:fedoraproject.org
• Kinoite: KDE SIG, #kinoite:fedoraproject.org
• Sway Atomic: Sway SIG, #sway:fedoraproject.org
• Budgie Atomic: Budgie SIG, #budgie:fedoraproject.org
• COSMIC Atomic: COSMIC SIG, #cosmic:fedoraproject.org

Level up your tabletop RPG experience with Dice Roller 3D!
Whether you’re deep into D&D, Pathfinder, or your favorite homebrew system, DicelyVerse gives you all the power of physical dice and more—right in your pocket.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.rolisteam.dicelyverse

Core Features

3D Dice Rolling Engine
Feel the thrill of real dice physics with stunning 3D visuals. Roll multiple dice with satisfying animations.

Roll Dice with Commands
Type d20+5 or any custom command to get your results instantly. Supports advanced syntax for complex rolls!
The command engine is DiceParser.
See the documentation here.

Reroll with Ease
Need a second chance? Reroll instantly without retyping your command or resetting your dice.

Macros – One Tap Commands
Save your favorite or frequently used dice rolls as macros for quick access. Perfect for initiative rolls, attack rolls, and spell damage!

✍️ Aliases – Shortcuts for Long Commands
Tired of long roll strings? Set up aliases to keep your gameplay fast and your input clean.

Character Sheet Integration
Store your character’s stats, modifiers, and abilities directly in the app. Pull values into rolls on the fly.

Multiple Profiles
Play multiple campaigns or characters? No problem. Create separate profiles to keep everything organized.

Dark Mode
Change the UI to dark mode or light mode on the fly (no need to restart).

Translation
DicelyVerse has translations available now: English, German, French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.

Watch it in Action!

Check out our YouTube demo video showcasing the app’s features and real-time gameplay experience:

Download Now on Android!

Simplify your tabletop experience. Make every roll count—with flair.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.rolisteam.dicelyverse

The post 🎲 DicelyVerse – Your Ultimate Dice Companion for RPGs! appeared first on Renaud Guezennec.

Early this year I got asked by Martin Wolf from Golem.de if I want to appear on their German podcast in respect to my work on Kate and the experience on maintaining it for 2 decades.

During the Akademy at Berlin the stuff got taped at the Golem office at Berlin and now it is online on the 'Besser Wissen' podcast site.

The podcast is in German like the text on the page. There is a full transcript of the podcast on the site, I guess your preferred browser can translate it, if you are interested :)

Comments?

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

KDE e.V. held its annual general meeting online. During the AGM, elections for two vacancies on the board of directors were held. Members Carl Schwan and David Redondo were elected and take a seat on the board.

We would like to thank Nate Graham and Adriaan de Groot for serving on the board during their terms.

Tellico 4.1.4 is available, with several fixes and improvements. I appreciate all the feedback coming in and the bug reports being filed.

Improvements

• Added configurable image size to OpenLibrary data source.
• Updated OpenLibrary source to find covers for books without ISBN (Bug 507912).
• Updated OpenLibrary source to update via OLID, if available (Bug 508897).
• Updated OpenLibrary source to fetch notes (Bug 509062).
• Updated OpenLibrary source to fetch plot (Bug 509124).
• Updated CSV importer to load images.
• Added option for image links to CSV importer (Bug 508666).
• Added option for image links to GCstar importer (Bug 508665).
• Updated GCstar importer to read external collection models (Bug 508664).
• Added KDE shortcut keys for previous/next tab (Bug 508789).
• Updated iTunes source for better movie results.
• Updated iTunes source to allow specifying country.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed crashing bug for opening truncated files (Bug 509364).
• Fixed crashing bug for collections without a title field.
• Fixed bug in location for saving images for temporary entry (Bug 508902).
• Fixed bug in location for saving images for new collections (Bug 509245).
• Fixed bug with matching entries with 979 ISBN prefixes (Bug 510329).

New features in Krita, Calligra Plan ported to Qt6 and a simplified Itinerary UI

Welcome to a new issue of "This Week in KDE Apps"! Every week (or so) we cover as much as possible of what's happening in the world of KDE apps.

Getting back to all that's new in the KDE App scene, let's dig in!

Travel Applications

Last weekend, some of the developers behind Itinerary and KTrip were in Vienna for the first edition of the Open Transport Community Conference, where there were many discussions relevant to Itinerary and Transitous.

KDE Itinerary Digital travel assistant

Jonah Brüchert simplified the journey selection by moving the mode of transport selection to a separate page (25.12.0 - link) and by asking for a trip group after selecting a journey (25.12.0 - link).

Jonah also brought back the top-level import action in the trip group list page (25.12.0 - link)

Volker Krause added the altitude information to the live status map when the information is available (25.12.0 - link).

David Pilarčík added 10 new extractors and improved some existing ones (25.12.0 - link)

Joshua Goins made the United extractor more resilient when parsing multi-passenger tickets (25.12.0 - link)

PIM Applications

Volker Krause and Albert Astals Cid fixed some safety issues found by the newly added OSS-Fuzz tests in KMime (25.12.0 - link 1 and link 2).

Office Applications

Plan Project Management

miko53 ported Calligra Plan to Qt6 (link).

Creative Applications

Krita Digital Painting, Creative Freedom

Carsten Hartenfels added a Marker blend mode to Krita, which works like Alpha Darken but properly adheres to channel flags (so it e.g. obeys alpha lock and inherit alpha) and interpolates colors without artifacts. When you use it on a brush in build-up mode, it will only increase opacity up to your stroke's intended opacity but not compound what's on the layer, while the colors get interpolated. It works like Paint Tool SAI's marker tool, hence the name. (link)

Wolthera van Hövell improved the support for loading and saving PSD files and now text, shapes, and guides are supported (link).

Pavel Shlop added the possibility to edit icons for toolbar actions in the toolbar editor (link).

Kdenlive Video editor

Jean-Baptiste Mardelle improved the audio view in the clip monitor (link).

Utilities Applications

KAIChat AI Chat

Laurent Montel released a new version of KAIChat. This version adds tools support, make it possible to download Ollama on Windows and macOS and add some configuration options to some plugins.

Kate Advanced text editor

Waqar Ahmed enabled bracketed paste when piping text to the terminal (link).

KRegexpEditor

Matthias Mailänder fixed some UI elements when using KRegexpEditor with dark mode (link)

System Applications

Dolphin Manage your files

Marco Martin removed some unnecessary animations in Dolphin (25.12.0 - link 1 and link 2)

…And Everything Else

This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! If you’re hungry for more, check out Nate's blog about Plasma and be sure not to miss his This Week in Plasma series, where every Saturday he covers all the work being put into KDE's Plasma desktop environment.

For a complete overview of what's going on, visit KDE's Planet, where you can find all KDE news unfiltered directly from our contributors.

Get Involved

The KDE organization has become important in the world, and your time and contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we're going to need your support for KDE to become sustainable.

You can help KDE by becoming an active community member and getting involved. 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. There are many things you can do: you can help hunt and confirm bugs, even maybe solve them; contribute designs for wallpapers, web pages, icons and app interfaces; translate messages and menu items into your own language; promote KDE in your local community; and a ton more things.

You can also help us by donating. 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 your application mentioned here, please ping us in invent or in Matrix.