This release introduces a wide variety of new features and several fixes.

New Animation Features

One new feature is the overshoot keyframe preset, with this comes the ability to edit the keyframe transition to go beyond the previously imposed limits.

Added support for "auto orienting" groups and layer, automatically aligning their rotation with the motion path.

Composition Overhaul

This is a major change of how compositions are handled internally, all compositions now share the same attributes and features, without having a "main" composition that dictates how other compositions should behave.

This fixes several minor inconsistencies that were previously caused by this distinction.

Additionally, when saving formats that support a single composition, Glaxnimate will automatically export the active composition, simplifying the exporting process and enhancing overall project management.

File Formats

The main new feature is support for Adobe After Effects Project files (.aep). This allows you to open animations created in AE directly within Glaxnimate.

While not all AE features are supported, most animations should work fine.

There have been several improvements to other file formats as well.

SVG

Now importing a non-animated SVG uses the same duration as the current composition, making it easier to use SVG files as assets.

Support has been added for importing SVG with animated path shapes, as well as animateMotion.

Animations within <defs> now are imported correctly.

Some other import improvements include fixes to group opacity, clip paths, anchor point detection, and detection of the start and end frames (The latter fix also applies to AVD import).

Exporting to SVG has received numerous improvements such as better star shape conversion, miter limit being correctly exported, removing unnecessary stroke shapes, and fixing export of precompositions with stretched time or time offsets.

Lottie

Lottie import has received several improvements as well.

Now Glaxnimate supports loading lottie files with radial gradient highlights, split positions, and auto-oriented layers. Zig zag import has also been improved.

There have also been fixes to dotLottie import, now images and custom metadata are properly supported.

Open / Save Improvements

Along with format support, this release introduces several quality of life improvements to the open / save flow.

Saving a file sets the default export path to the folder the file is saved to, this is to avoid having to select the folder again if you want to export the file into multiple formats.

When possible, backup files are saved in the same directory as the file being edited. Previously backup files were stored exclusively in the glaxnimate data directory, which made them more difficult to access.

Directly opening a static image file sets the animation to 1 second rather than 0.

A new setting has been introduced in the preferences dialog that allows toggling between the system native file dialog and the Qt widgets one.

There have also been improvements in the script API to handle import / export plugins: the new window.choose_option() method shows a dialog to display a selection from a list, and exception from I/O plugins now show in the script console.

More Accurate Animations

Animation rendering has received several fixes. Some files might look slightly different but now the animation appears as intended.

Easing curves for keyframes now offer more accurate timing. Some issues with the rendering of the last frame for layers and hold keyframes have been resolved, also the UI no longer makes frames outside the composition range available for selection.

There have been visual fixes for masks, trim path and offset path modifiers.

Minor Features

Added support for loading image assets from the web rather than limiting to local files.

Added built-in palettes with RAL and web colors and the palette selector has been improved to accommodate these large palettes.

Holding Ctrl now allows you to snap the transform position handle to the x or y axis for precise adjustments.

Finally some buttons in the advanced page of the trace dialog have been fixed.

Experimental Android APK

There's now an arm64 APK download for Android, providing you with the opportunity to experience Glaxnimate on your mobile device.

This is experimental so not all features might be available and the user interface hasn't been polished yet.

Today is my birthday but it’s also the day Francis got its first release. Francis is a pomodoro app, which was originally developed by Felipe Kinoshita. The Pomodoro Technique is a time management method developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s. It uses a kitchen timer to break work into intervals, typically 25 minutes in length, separated by short breaks.

The app is very simple and can be used as inspiration to develop your own Kirigami application.

Get Involved

If you are interested in helping, don’t hesitate to reach out in the Plasma Mobile matrix channel (#plasma-mobile:kde.org) and I will be happy to guide you.

I also regularly post about my progress on many KDE apps on my Mastodon account, so don’t hesitate to follow me there ;)

And in case you missed it, as a member of KDE’s fundraising working group, I need to remind you that KDE e.V., the non-profit behind the KDE community accepts donations.

Packager section

You can find the package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with my GPG key.

The Qt 6 based KDE Frameworks 6 (KF6) development is ongoing since some time.

Already many things including Plasma and several applications, like Kate, have working KF6 based development versions.

KDE contributors did meet this week online for planning the final release time-frames.

We came up with this current plan:

Frameworks / Plasma/ Gear Release Schedule Plan

Following on from the last Akademy we checked where we were with our development progress in a meeting and settled on the following plan for all 3 major parts:

• In KDE Gear master will be open for Qt6 code to land for those ready to move. Not all apps need to port.

• The KDE Gear release will move by 2 months to allow for the extra time needed for testing initial Qt6 changes

• An Alpha will be made in November (a soft freeze in Plasma terms)

• Betas/RCs will be made throughout December and January (3 releases, 3 weeks apart)

• Final release of all 3 major parts in sync in February

Due to the delay of KDE Gear by an additional patch release of 23.08 will be made.

This is still up for discussion, but if no objections come up, we will see a triple release of a first stable KF6, KF6 based Plasma and KF6 based Gear next February.

There is still a lot to do, help is welcome!

Last weekend, I went to Freedom Not Fear 2023 in Brussels. Fnf is an unconference for and by European digital activists. It covers various topics, from the latest terrible European law (Chat Control) to discussing how to get more involved in our democracies.

I usually attend more technical conferences, and it was refreshing to participate in a conference where ethical and political discussions around digital rights were a central topic. It was an occasion to meet people from different backgrounds, from a Dutch politician (and self-proclaimed student for life), to a member of various organizations (e.g. Edri, NlNet, epicenter.works, Chatons, …) and journalists from Netzpolitik.

On Friday evening, aside from the welcome talk, we had a presentation from the European Data Protection Supervisor (Wojciech Wiewiórowski) about their work on deploying a Mastodon instance for the EU institutions and how the lack of subscribers makes it hard to justify continuing investing in it.

The presentation is on Peertube if someone wants to watch it.

During the weekend, we had an unconference-style conference where everyone could create a topic of discussion and present their work interactively. This worked very well.

Many participants were using Linux (and often with Plasma), but others were unaware of KDE. So I did a small lighting talk about the KDE community and presented a few utilities we create: Plasma, GCompris, Labplot, Krita, Merkuro and Itinerary. Time was limited, so I couldn’t show everything we were doing, but I hope this small list of software shows that we are covering many different types of software.

I prepared my slides the day before, as I saw some slots for lightning talks were still available, and the new KDE For pages were of great help. But it makes sense to have some slides provided by KDE Promo, which can then be reused and modified depending on the audience. I’ll bring up the idea at the next KDE Promo sprint in 2 weeks.

Aside from the weekend, which was packed with discussion, we went on Monday to the European Parlament and had a small presentation about how the European Parlament works. We also had the opportunity to ask Patrick Breyer from the German Pirate Party questions.

I enjoyed this conference and thank the organizers and Digital Courage for organizing this event and the two MEPs for using some of their travel allowance to bring many people to Brussels.

For a while now DrKonqi has a special developer notification system when used in combination with coredumpd. I just realized I never told anyone about it 😅 though.

It’s terribly simple: When used with coredumpd, parts of DrKonqi implicitly look at all crashes that pertain to your current user. Because of that it can also notify on all crashes, not just the KDE-related ones. Obviously it can’t report bugs or anything but sometimes, as a developer, it’s nice to know when things explode.

This is a purely opt-in feature and shouldn’t be enabled unless you know your way around the debugger GDB or really want to know about all the crashes.

To enable the feature simply add KDE_COREDUMP_NOTIFY=1 to your environment. For example using an environment.d file:

mkdir -p ~/.config/environment.d/
echo 'KDE_COREDUMP_NOTIFY=1' >> ~/.config/environment.d/50-$USER.conf

Rive is a popular tool for vector animations. While the editor itself is a closed source commercial product, there are FOSS implementations for the player runtime. basysKom has developed a QtQuick integration based on the rive-cpp library. This article introduces the project and its current state.

Continue reading Introducing the RiveQtQuickPlugin – Powerful Animations For Your QtQuick Applications at basysKom GmbH.

The other week the question came up how one can debug an application crash when the Windows Store crash tracking system is unable to produce a usable stack trace. Seemed a good enough opportunity to share some wisdom :)

Generally speaking in order to get a stack trace you first need a minidump. minidumps are kind of like core dumps on POSIX systems, well, except, mini. Acquiring that is should be your first goal.

There are a million ways to get a dump, I’ll highlight two of the easiest that I know of.

Partner Center Dumps

Ideally the Microsoft Partner Center will have a dump for you. You can find it usually where the stack trace is as well. To get access to KDE’s applications you need to be a KDE developer and file a sysadmin request. Once you have access you have to head from the Dashboard to Insights then navigate in the left hand pane to Health there use the drop-down to select the application you want to look at. This should give you every bit of information about the application health your heart could desire. You’ll probably also want to switch from viewing the last 72 hours to the last month, unless the application is particularly faulty of course.

Now all you need to do is click on the crash you want to look at, and not get too annoyed over the unknown crashes you can’t do anything about 😡.

At this point you should be able to find a stack trace link and an additional download link. Sometimes the download link is not there, I have no idea why but I’m sure it’s documented somewhere. The download link is what we are after, it contains the minidump along with some other metadata.

User-Mode Dumps

Now, sometimes the partner center is not able to help us for whatever reason. Maybe the download link is missing, maybe it just doesn’t show the crash we are after, maybe the dump on the partner center is useless. Who knows. In that case we need some help from the user. Thankfully it’s not too painful. They need to enable collection of user-mode dumps by creating the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Error Reporting\LocalDumps, which then causes the Windows Error Reporting to throw a minidump into %LOCALAPPDATA%\CrashDumps. The user then needs to reproduce the crash and obtain the dmp file from the aforementioned location.

Debug Symbols

Once you have obtained a minidump it’s time to find us some debug symbols. The sad truth here is that I can’t really help with that. Depending on how your application was built you’ll be able to get PDBs somehow hopefully. They will either float around as PDBs somewhere or at the very least will be available inside the .appxupload or .appxsym zip files. As a general best practice for KDE software I would advise that when you do a binary release to the Windows Store you also release the x86_64-dbg.7z file to download.kde.org so we can get the relevant PDBs when needed.

Tracing

Alright, I hope you had luck with finding your debug symbols, because now it’s time to do some tracing! Whee. You’ll need Microsoft Visual Studio. Any edition will do. File->Open->File... the minidump and you should be greeted by a nice overview of metadata about the crash.

First we’ll want to setup our debug symbols. For that you first want to place your PDBs somewhere in convenient in your file system. I’m lazy and usually just slap them on the Desktop. In Visual Studio you should find the option Set symbol paths in the right hand list of actions. The option opens the settings window on the correct page. Simply hit the ➕ and type out the path where you extracted the PDBs.

Once the symbol paths are set up you can hit Debug with Mixed and off the tracer goes. Slowly, because it needs to download a million symbols. But eventually you’ll arrive at your stack trace.

(nevermind my crazy setup, I was doing some wonky multi threaded debugging earlier and don’t know how to restore the UI 😅)

Hope this helps some!

New Falkon version 23.08.0 is being released as part of KDE Gear.

Notable changes

Zoom indicator to the AddressBar

When the zoom level on the page is different than the default, show current zoom level in the address bar.

Expand address bar suggestion popup to the window width

It is possible to widen the address bar suggestion popup to the window width. This option is disabled by default, but it can be useful on smaller screens.

Permanent certificate exceptions

Certificate exceptions can now be stored indefinitely. There is also a GUI to see and manage the current exceptions which is located at [Preferences > Other > Certificate Exception Manager]

Contributed by Javier Llorente.

Changelog

• A bit faster restoring of session with a lot of tabs
• Add support for custom URI schemes (BUG: 434099)
• Add CMake option “BUILD_PYTHON_SUPPORT” to enable/disable Python support
• Add zoom indicator to the addressbar (BUG: 399001)
• Add an option to expand addresbBar suggestion popup to the window width
• Implement a GUI for managing ignored SSL hosts (by Javier Llorente)
• Add KDE branding bookmarks and speeddial entries (By Javier Llorente)
• Implement download integration with Plasma (By Javier Llorente)

Download: ffalkon-23.08.0.tar.xz (sig signed with EBC3FC294452C6D8)

Hardware¶

Case & Dimensions¶

First impressions start with the outside look and while I was concerned about that the silver colour would get on my nerves – it is OK really.

What is not just OK, but abso-bloody-lutely amazing is the custom engraving on the laptop lid Slimbook did for me. It is a Conant Gasket fractal and I have to thank María Hornos at Slimbook for both patience and perseverance in making this engraving a reality.

True to its name the case is very slim and in fact slimmer than both my old laptops. When it comes to the length and width it fits just between the two.

The fan intake is quite big and at the bottom side, with the outtake being at the back between the hinges. On low load, it is (quasi-)silent, during some serious load it is still much more quiet than either of my two old laptops and their old fans.

Input: Keyboard, Touchpad & Camera¶

To be frank, my very first impression of the keyboard and touchpad were that I felt a bit disappointed. These are not keys that I am typically used to and I tend to prefer harder keypresses. I also never had a touchpad with no buttons.

But it did not take long for me to get used to both and I can say they are both growing on me.

Amongst other things I wrote this blog post on the Slimbook and I must say after just one day I might even prefer this keyboard over the one on my work Dell Latitude E7470 (unsure yet about the ThinkPad keyboards).

It may be relevant to meniton that my daily driver is a Keyboard.io Model 01 with Matias Quiet Click modern Alps-mount key switches with a strong tactility and dampened on the down- and up-tick. When it comes to laptops, so far I was pretty pleased with ThinkPad’s keyboards (the older the better). On the other hand, Apple’s chiclet¹ keyboards feel very wrong to me – I really tried, because at some point it looked like I will need to use a macBook at work, but I just cannot get used to them.

While a low-profile laptop keyboard will likely never² has a typing-feel as satisfying as a mechanical keyboard, I did not think I would enjoy typing keyboard as much as I do. For some reason – and this surprised me quite a bit – the weird tiny Up and Down navigation keys work fine for me too.

One feature the ThinkPad keyboard has that sets it apart is its liquid drainage. I will miss that peace of mind when it comes to spillage.

With the button-less touchpad it took me a bit longer to get into the groove, but I can now say I am a convert of multi-finger gestures.

For me, I think the touchpad is of a good size – just big enough to be comfortable for gestures, but not as big to have my palms meddle with it while I type.

I also really like how the touchpad has a small led indicator in the corner to show when you turn it off.

The camera is not great though. Not the worst, but I would have expected more in 2023, even if just for video conferencing. The IR camera is a cool addition though.

(I did not try the microphone. I usually use a headset when I need to anyway.)

Output: Screen & Speakers¶

The screen impressed me quite a bit – the picture is much sharper and the colours prettier than I thought they would be.

I find the speakers to be OK. Nothing earth-shattering, but they can be loud enough and the sound quality is not bad. Honestly, I have had much worse before.

Ports & Misc¶

The one thing that is a bit underwhelming is the power supply. The cable feels a bit flimsy, but at least it is quite small.

The other thing that I miss from my ThinkPad is an always-on USB port, so I can e.g. charge my phone on the go, even if my laptop is asleep.

On the topic of USB ports, I do not understand why there is a USB-2.0 port – that one could have been safely replaced by a second USB-C.

I love the RJ45 jaws though :] – the laptop is too slim for an ethernet port, so it expands with a hinge that looks like a jaw.

Oddly enough, the Asus external DVD-RW drive requires 2 × USB-A to work – I suspect due to the power consumption. Perhaps USB-C might have been a better choice. The glossy case is not really to my taste and the drive is a tiny bit loud, but it seems to work fine.

The mini-dock makes a much better impression than on the pictures and while so far I only tried it as an USB hub, it works as expected. I even tried to plug in both USB-A plugs from the DVD and it went fine.

I find it a bit annoying that there is no LED on the outside, so with a closed lid I cannot tell if the laptop is on, off or sleeping. But I did notice that – no idea if that is by design or a fluke – the LED can be seen from the back through the air vents. So that works for me.

Software¶

Initially I planned to only take a quick look at the hardware, but as luck would have it Slimbook was kind enough to ship the computer with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS plus their own tools.

That gave me an opportunity to kick the proverbial tires a bit more seriously and also a chance to try out GNOME and Wayland.

Ubuntu¶

It should not come as a surprise, this is not my first time with Ubuntu(-based distros), but things have obviously changed since I last ran KUbuntu.

In the two days I have used the laptop so far, the system had two updates and both went well.

What I am a bit confused with though is that nowadays there are several graphical package managers installed: GDebi, Ubuntu Software, Software, and Software Updater are all separate applications. To complicate things further some packages come via Snap, others via Flathub and (seemingly only) a handful from actual APT.

During the two days I did manage to cause one crash (Doom (2016)) and one freeze.

Slimbook tools¶

Using the IR camera’s face-recognition to login using Slimbook Face is pretty cool and practical if you use your laptop in open most of the time. It is especially handy when you are installing things and it instead of having to break away from whatever you are doing and type in a password (on time), the little red square at the top just flashes twice instead.

That said, most of the time my laptop’s lid is closed and I use an external monitor and keyboard, so on a day-to-day basis this is of limited use to me.

About Slimbook AMD Controller and Slimbook Battery, I suspect it is just a handy UI for standard Linux settings, in which case I will be happy to set the settings directly. Then again, it is sometimes handy to have things in one place in a UI.

GNOME¶

I have been using KDE (Plasma) since 1.x, with occasional visits to other DE and WM. So this was a perfect opportunity to try out GNOME after many many year. And it was running on Wayland as well!

The first impression was that everything looks very sharp and pretty. I cannot say if this was because of AMD Vega, Wayland, the screen or what, but it was quite an improvement even over the Dell Latitude.

What I really like though is how the Super/Meta/Win key opens up a very useful overview – I hope the upcoming overview on Plasma will be similar, but include Activities too!

The three-finger gestures are also something I got used to really quickly and I would love to see in Plasma!

What bothers me quite a bit though is that the “this application is taking a long time” pops up way too quickly and often – I see several a day.

From the PIM side, Geary is just too simple for my use. I do somehow like the simplicity of the Calendar app though. I am not sure yet how it would work in the long term, but it worked well.

In a nutshell I can see the appeal – it does have a certain elegant simplicity to it –, but there were several occasions where it was not doing what I want it to and I could not figure out how to make it.

That said, if I was forced to use it, I would be OK with it. I still much prefer KDE Plasma (perhaps even i3 / SwayWM).

Gaming¶

If I already have a Vega 8 graphic card, I tried a few games both from Steam and GOG and it started as a mixed experience, but after I messed with Proton a bit, I am now (reasonably) impressed – for a mobile graphics card it performs pretty well. Then again, I have not had a dedicated graphics card in decades, so take that with a grain of salt.

It started off a bit depressing since I could not get Doom (2016), Redout: Enhanced Edition, and Divinity: Original Sin 2 to run on Steam – Doom actually crashed the desktop session. Everspace on GOG also did not start at all.

On GOG, Fort Triumph installs and runs, but not as well as I would hope.

On the other hand, the following work like a charm and survive pretty high settings and full HD:

• BallisticNG (max. settings)
• Epistory (very high settings)
• Pychonauts (very high settings)
• Return to Monkey Island (max. settings)
• Secrets of Rætikon (max. settings)
• Unvanquished (max. settings, ran as part of the phoronix-test-suite)
• Ziggurat (high settings)

I suspect I either have something wrongly set up with Proton or the issue is connected with (Proton on) Wayland.

Yes, it was a Proton issue. With the help of ProtonDB and some internet searching, after tweaking some Proton settings in Steam I got the following to run fine:

• Redout: Enhanced Edition (high, but not epic settings)
• Valkyria Chronicles (max. settings)
• Wasteland 2 (performance not great)

For Doom (2016) I needed to edit its config file to force it to use Vulkan (instead of OpenGL) to stop crashing Wayland. It still performs like crap, but it runs, so that is progress.

As for Everspace, the trick was to run EverspaceWithSystemLibraries.sh instead and then it ran fine even on high settings.

Divinity 2 remains a mystery, why I cannot get it to run. But at this stage, it is the only game I have not managed to get running eventually. So that is a huge improvement.

As launchers I tried Lutris and GameHub too and had a better experience with Lutris. Some games simply did not want to install on GameHub, but on Lutris there was no problem.

BTW, when did PC games become so massive? … 40 GB per game, seriously?!?

Benchmarks¶

I ran some benchmarks with phoronix-test-suite (not that I can tell much from them) and uploaded them to OpenBenchmarking.org, if you are into that stuff.

Miscellaneous¶

I was surprised how good LibreOffice runs and looks – I know! I never thought I would say that!

As for Thunderbird, I have do admit it has improved a lot since I last used it, but I still much prefer Kontact/KMail. What surprised me too is that it does not allow for special characters in the From: field.

I have mixed feelings about Marker. In principle I like the concept and also how clean it is, but something felt off, especially with the font size and the settings, so in the end I wrote this blog post in the standard GNOME Text Editor.

I have similarly mixed feelings about Apostrophe. It is very similar to KDE’s GhostWriter, but for GNOME. But you cannot change the editor font and its syntax highlighting is very limited. It may be due to Wayland and new hardware, but it perhaps feels a bit cleaner, but is also (too) limited in features.

Next time¶

Next step: start of installation.

I hope to write blog posts while I am doing the installation and set-up. So far the idea is that I would have smaller posts for each of the bigger steps (instead of one giant HowTo).

As such the next blog post should be about a simple install of EndeavourOS on a LUKS-encrypted Btrfs.

My plan is to first create a simple Btrfs and turn it into a RAID-1 Btrfs later on with btrfs balance start -dconvert=raid1 -mconvert=raid1. Fingers crossed!

… but spanners may meet cogs at weird angles, let us see.

hook out → day two with Slimbook, so far so good