Since I am planning to go on vacations very soonish (actually, just idling the time until I head for the airport…), I think it is good time to wrap-up the recent changes in the KDE Yocto area.

As you might have noticed, 4 weeks ago there finally was an in-person FOSDEM again. It was great event, many interesting people were there and I had really good chats. One of the main topics for me was discussing the next steps for our Yocto efforts, in particular as Volker and Hannah were also around.

Our current state is as follows:

1. meta-kf5 is updated the the latest KF5 release, 5.103.0. We plan to update that branch further as more KF5 releases appear. But it will stick with KF5 and KF6 is packed separately (see below).
2. meta-kde also got an update, but a much bigger one than meta-kde: here, you will now find KDE Plasma 5.27.0 as well as support for Yocto Langdale and all needed backports in the Wayland area to make it work with Kirkstone. I expect this layer at some time to switch to Qt6/KF6 support and at latest once I am back, there will appear a kf6-staging branch.
3. meta-kf6 is probably the most interesting point on the list. Following the Yocto project’s approach to have one repository per layer, there now is a new meta-kf6 repository. In this repository we use branch names that follow the supported Yocto releases to make it easier for device creators to pick compatible versions.
   This meta-kf6 repository now has an initial set of Git master hashes that are known to build regarding Langdale and scripting is prepared such that we can do semi-regular updates of the hashes as long as now official KF6 releases exist. Stressing the meaning of “Git master hashes”, please do not in any way expect that to be stable The only safeguard at the moment before updating the hashes is that we check that everything is building on Yocto Langdale. Currently, the main purpose is to catch packaging regressions early and support KF6 development with build fixes for more exotic setups.

Talking about “exotic setups”, I was very glad about the interested in our Plasma Bigscreen @ RISC-V/VisionFive2 demo at FOSDEM. All the WIP changes which were needed for this demo are finally landed in the KDE Yocto layers. There is only one remaining (very big) MR pending for meta-riscv which needs to get merged. The overall state of the board image though is quite basic and a lot of things are still to do (if you know Yocto and have such a board, help is welcome ) For example, RAM size is reported incorrectly from the Kernel, the screen looks too pink, GStreamer and Kwin does not want to work yet together with the GStreamer-OMX backend from Starfive…
Recreating my setup should be fairly simple, just use this manifest file, add meta-riscv with the branch of the above mentioned MR and do “MACHINE=visionfive2 . ./setup-environment && bitbake kde-demo-image-bigscreen”.

So, 2022 was a successful year for Qt - and we highlight the Qt 6.3 and Qt 6.4 releases, Qt World Summit, and Qt Contributor Summit.

And our community members keep up with the activity by writing diligent bug reports, contributing patches, giving technical advice, or helping out other users in forums and mailing lists.

New Gamepad KCM

The Joystick KCM is pretty bad shape right now, for numerous reasons:

• What the heck is a joystick?
• What is the purpose of this KCM if I can’t even configure anything?
• Why is it telling me about device paths?
• What’s up with all of the tables?

So one of my big “Plasma 6” goals is to rewrite the KCM with a few goals in mind:

• Re-brand it around “Gamepads” and “Game Controllers” instead of “Joystick”. A lot of people have mentioned they didn’t even know it supported regular game controllers.
• Based on modern APIs and frameworks such as Solid.
• QML-based, with clear a symbolic gamepad layout which makes it easier to test a controller. No more tables of buttons!
• Remap buttons for SDL games along with the regular calibration found in the old KCM.

I’ve been collaborating with Jeremy Whiting on this project, and it’s been going through some technical turmoil but it’s making solid progress:

Next month hopefully we’ll be able to get a proper UI working, now that mapping buttons is mostly sorted.

See my merge request and Jeremy’s UI merge request.

Tokodon changes

I landed a bunch of features in Tokodon this month, including some much needed bugfixes for some rough edges of the project.

Web+ap support

[Feature] I landed support for the web+ap url scheme used to open ActivityPub objects in Tokodon! Just like matrix.to links in NeoChat, these allow linking to ActivityPub objects online. Once everything is in place, we will be one of the first clients to support it!

If you can’t wait, it’s also possible to open up regular https linked posts in Tokodon by passing it as an argument, if you want to hook it up somehow in your browser.

See the merge request and the wishlist bug.

Post language support

[Feature] You can now select the language you’re posting in! You can’t view a post’s language or filter them from within Tokodon yet, but it’s a start¹. Your preferred languages (chosen through the Languages & Formats KCM if you’re using KDE) is shown at the top of the list.

See the merge request.

Poll support

[Feature] Tokodon has supported viewing polls already, but not posting them. Now you can create polls! All of your usual options are exposed, including some not even shown on Mastodon Web. This is not merged yet, but will be soon.

See the [merge request]https://invent.kde.org/network/tokodon/-/merge_requests/152).

More Changes

• [Bugfix] A bunch of Android bugs are squashed, including links not working. I just recently got my PinePhone working again too, so expect more mobile-related work soon! :) See the merge request.
• [Feature] Soon you’ll be able to configure the network proxy on the login page. See the merge request.
• [Bugfix] Posting is much more reliable in general, and it’s clearer when an error has occurred. Hopefully no more of your toots get eaten. See the merge request.
• The README finally includes a screenshot! See the merge request.

NeoChat Notification Badge

[Bugfix] One thing that always irked me with NeoChat is the notification badge. The number never feels right, and no matter how many rooms I read it never changes:

Now the badge will actually update based on your current notification count, hurrah! See the merge request.

PulseAudio KCM

[Feature] Last month I redid the Window Decoration KCM, and this month I did the same for the PulseAudio KCM, although the changes needed where much smaller.

See the merge request.

Kirigami and QQC2 Desktop Style

[Bugfix] For Kirigami, I tried to focus on fixing up Dialog behavior to mixed results. I wanted to change the dialog closePolicy, but that’s been more complex than expected. I attempted to fix the extra horizontal scrolling bug in Dialogs², but that has unintended regressions in Discover and I’m not really happy with the solution. I also have a bunch of OverlaySheet fixes that I need to rebase³ :) So a bunch of half-baked things I should start finishing next month!

[Bugfix] I noticed an issue where Breeze Icons on Android wouldn’t work if you had a custom icon theme in your application - which I tried to fix but I’m not happy with the solution. It looks like the built-in icons index.theme is not installed properly, and I want to figure out if we can fix that first.

[Bugfix] For qqc2-desktop-style, I fixed an odd case where you could select text in TextAreas that explicitly disabled it by using the right-click context menu.

Plasma Welcome

Oliver landed the Plasma Welcome redesign for 6.0, which looks wonderful. As with all great features, this has had it’s fair share of technical issues which I had the pleasure of helping with, including fixing this bug:

Embedded KCMs create and manage their own QML engine. Objects like Kirigami.ApplicationWindow are separated though, because that exists in Plasma Welcome’s engine and not the KCMs, which breaks a lot of things including the global toolbar. I figured out that you can inject your own QML engine to KDeclarative, which will fix most of the issues. While doing this, I also simplified embedded KCMs in Plasma Welcome which will help developers creating their custom pages.

There’s one lingering issue – KDeclarative get’s a little bit too greedy with the engine we give it and will try to destroy it to due to std::shared_ptr shenanigans, but fixing it will require changes to the framework. Right now we work around the issue by not assigning a parent, but I want to look into changing that soon.

See Oliver’s merge request.

Fun with Doxygen

This month we had a strange incident where api.kde.org fails to generate a page for IconItem, but why?

Of course the first thing I tried was running kapidox locally for plasma-framework, but there’s still a doc page for IconItem generated. Huh. So I started looking into what the binary factory actually does to see if there’s some inherent issue with our system. What I ended up with is a bash script which emulates what binary factory does, but locally.

What I noticed is terrifying, the doc page doesn’t show up here! So I had an idea, what if the problem is that the name is colliding? After some quick global code searches using our LXR, I discovered that Maui recently introduced a new type called IconItem which coincidentally fits within the timeline of IconItem disappearing. How can this even happen in the first place?

I’m no expert in doxygen (is anyone?) but there is something called “tags” which is basically an index of every type that doxygen indexes. Doxygen also uses these tags to interlink doc pages together, so what’s going wrong? Well, kapidox actually runs the doc generation twice, once initially and then another time to interlink dependencies. What I theorize is that when it’s plasma-framework’s turn to generate, doxygen sees that “IconItem” is already in Maui’s tagfile and refuses to generate the page again.

With this new caveat in mind, I submitted two MRs to hopefully fix the documentation problems:

• Renaming unnamespaced classes on the doxygen side.
• Removing unnecessary qmldirs that were exposing private APIs.

… Except that I forgot about the KF5/KF6 split, which makes this harder. Next month will be focusing on rebasing those into KF5, and then creating KF6-specific MRs if needed (but a lot of fat is being cut here, so it might not be).

KDevelop.org

I took the responsibility of converting the bit-rotting kdevelop.org site to Hugo, which should be live soon! Most of the old site content is brought over (and converted to Markdown) while pages are updated where needed. The new site is now live at kdevelop.org!

See the new repository.

Updating go-kde-org

I opened an MR to update the matrix.to redirector hosted at go.kde.org which should include a link to open in NeoChat! Once it’s merged, I plan on replacing the links on the KDE Community Wiki with these instead of the WebChat links we have now.

Changing Notification History Order

This is something that’s been sitting on my backlog, but I’m super annoyed about the ordering of notification history. Whenever I miss a notification⁴ I scroll through my notification history. However, it’s ordered seemingly randomly, because it’s sorted by “type and urgency”. That’s not too helpful because neither criteria is really exposed in the UI. I propose changing it to “Date” which makes way more sense for a history view of notifications.

See the merge request.

Manjaro ARM is proud to present the packages for Plasma 5.27.0 together with the packages for Plasma Mobile Gear (soon to be regular Gear) 23.01.0 for the mobile devices.

These packages are currently being tested in our Unstable branch and will soon be transferred to Testing and then finally to Stable branch when the time comes..

This also makes our next Beta images (Beta 15) the last that will be tagged as Beta. We are preparing to include PinePhone and PinePhone Pro images into our main release cycle from either 23.04 or 23.06.

How to try

If you want to try this early, you can switch your current Manjaro system running Plasma mobile to Unstable branch and update this way:

sudo pacman-mirrors -aS unstable
sudo pacman -Syyu

Some new features

New features in this release/update includes, but are not limited to:

• New Power Off Menu
• More KCMs are mobile friendly
• Added User KCM (although it does not save changes)
• Lots of under-the-hood changes and fixes

And a couple of screenshots:

I am happy to announce Tokodon 23.02. This release contains around one month’s worth of improvements, and while it is only one month, this release is feature packed! This was an exciting month for me in general, I started working at KDAB, went to FOSDEM in Brusels where I meet a bunch of other KDE folks, and spend time enjoying my new life in Berlin.

Fortunately I still found some time to contribute to Tokodon, and Joshua Goins has also been a very active contributor. The number of contributors is also growing with a bunch of new faces: Aakarsh MJ, Harshil Jani, Mohit Marathe, Raphael Gaschiganrd, Rishi Kumar who also contributed some code in this release.

So what is Tokodon? Is is basically a client for the federated social network Mastodon. It is built with Kirigami with the goal to have a great integration with Plasma Desktop and Plasma Mobile, but it also works on other desktop environments, and even Windows and macOS.

Get it!

You can download Tokodon 23.02.0 from Flathub and from F-Droid using the KDE repo. Currently we don’t offer binaries for Windows and macOS but if you want to help with that, please get in touch on Matrix.

Post composer rewamp

As part of this release, we reworked the post composer considerably. This is the central area of your interaction with Mastodon and we wanted it to be more reliable.

It is now possible to add an alternative description to images and videos sent via Tokodon. This is very important for accessibility as images without alternative description are invisible for screen readers. (Carl Schwan, Link)

It is also now possible to see the upload progress when uploading an attachment, giving you some visual feedback that something is happening. (Carl Schwan, Link)

An error message will be displayed when sending a message didn’t work. The post composer will only be closed once the message is sent, so if there is an network error the post you wrote is not lost and you can try posting it again. This should make Tokodon much more reliable for interacting with Mastodon. (Joshua Goins, Link).

Another big thing is that we are now supporting editing posts, so in case you made a typo you don’t need to delete your post and post it again. (Joshua Goins, Link)

And finally Tokodon respects your default sensibility and visibility preferences when posting, and when replying to a message, the visibility of the message will be inherited in your reply. So if you are replying to a private message, the reply will automatically be set to be also private. (Carl Schwan, Link)

Timeline and notification view

Aside from the improvements to the post editor, we continued to polish the timeline.

The models for timelines has been completely refactored. Aside from making the code nicer to work with and a bit faster, it also made it possible to show the avatar of who boosted or liked a post. (Carl Schwan, Link)

Tokodon now doesn’t only support image as attachments, but we now also have a prelimary support for videos and gifs. (Joshua Goins, Link).

Additionally the previews for attachements should be better displayed with correct aspect ratio. (Joshua Goins, Link 1, Link 2)

Other ways to interact with a post are now available in an overflow menu for posts adding actions like a “Copy link to post” feature (Joshua Goins, Link), a bookmark feature (Joshua Goins, Link) and the previously mentioned edit feature (Joshua Goins, Link)

There are now some new special pages available in the sidebar to display your bookmarks as well as your favorite posts. (Joshua Goins, Link)

We now handle notifications for poll updates (Riya Bisht, Link), and when a post you interacted with gets updated (Harshil Jani, Link)

There are now placeholders for when you currently don’t have any notifications or conversations instead of showing you an empty view (Mohit Marathe, Link)

Search

The search field introduced during the last released got a nice visual refresh…

… And it now supports searching for hashtags. (Joshua Goins, Link)

Other Improvements

It is now possible to configure the color scheme used by Tokodon independently from the Plasma color scheme. (Joshua Goins, Link but most of the code was copied in good tradition from NeoChat)

We added the missing separators in the settings pages (Rishi Kumar, Link)

It is now possible to directly edit your account from your profile page (Joshua Goins, Link)

The user’s avatar in the profile page now uses the standard Kirigami.Avatar component (Joshua Goins, Link)

The behavior of selectable text fields is now consistent (Aakarsh MJ, Link)

Important Bugfixes

A bug that broke loading the timeline in some conditions has been fixed (Carl Schwan, Link)

We fixed rendering of some attachments caused by a bug in the blurhash decoding. (Joshua Goins, Link)

Storing the account settings is now using the account username and instance hostname as a unique identifier. This fixes situations where someone had multiple accounts with the same username on a different instance. (Raphael Gaschiganrd, Link)

Technical Details

Aside from the many new features, there were several large re-factorings of the code base to cleanup some code that younger-me wrote. The C++ code base now has a coverage of 36%, this is a small increase compared to the previous release. Rishi Kumar is also working on integration tests as part of his Season of KDE project.

Get Involved

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

I’m also regularly posting about my progress on Tokodon (and other KDE apps) on my Mastodon account, so don’t hesitate to follow me there ;)

And in case, you missed it, as a member of the 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.

After the announcement upstream, Fedora’s @kde-sig follows up by making KDE Plasma 5.27.0 available on Fedora 36 and Fedora 37.

There’s a catch though: you will have to use our COPR.

The regular update on Fedora repositories will follow shortly, I will keep you all posted.

Feel free to join us at our Matrix room!.

Glaxnimate is proud to announce the release of version 0.5.2. This latest update brings several exciting new features and improvements to enhance your animation creation experience.

Animation along Path

Earth and Moon graphics are from Noto Emoji

One of the major additions in this release is the ability to animate objects along a path. This is a feature that allows you to animate elements in a more natural and organic way by having them move along a custom path instead of a straight line. With this feature in Glaxnimate, you can create animations of objects following a curved path, like a bouncing ball or a spaceship flying through space.

After you add position keyframes to an object, the path can be adjusted with the edit tool, giving you full control over the motion of your elements, and the ability to fine-tune your animations until they look just right.

Improved User Interface

The interface layout has also been updated with new presets to provide better display on smaller screens, and the ability to set custom shortcut settings for plugins has been added.

Enhanced Input/Output Functionality

To make your workflow even easier, a new export option as an image sequence has been added to the menu.

This release also brings support for loading and saving Rive animations, improving the quality of video exports, and adding command line options for rendering images without starting the GUI.

Issues with loading Glaxnimate and old Lotties files have also been resolved, as well as a crash on SVG export.

Scripting Additions

For developers and advanced users, the new release features a function to render a node at a specific frame, providing even more control over your animations.

Bug Fixes and Minor Enhancements

This release also includes several bug fixes, including resolution of issues with loading Lotties with hidden fill and stroke, improved previews in the stroke style view, and proper application of duration changes in the startup dialog to all layers.

Additionally, Glaxnimate 0.5.2 includes the addition of Flatpak, improved Freedesktop file naming and metainfo, and the ability to view contributors. Messages are also logged to a file for better tracking of errors and issues.

The Select tool has also been improved, allowing for better handling of ungrouped shapes, making your editing process smoother and more efficient.

Download

We are confident that these new features and improvements will enhance your experience with Glaxnimate and look forward to continuing to bring you the best vector animation application.

If you're interested in trying it out, head over to our download page to get started. As always, if you have any questions or feedback, feel free to reach out to us via our issue tracker.

Thank you for your continued support of Glaxnimate!

As announced previously, Plasma 5.27 will have a significantly reworked multiscreen management, and we want to make sure this will be the best LTS Plasma release we had so far.

Of course, this doesn’t mean it will be perfect from day one, and your feedback is really important, as we want to fix any potential issue as fast as they get noticed.

As you know, for our issue tracking we use Bugzilla at this address. We have different products and components that are involved in the multiscreen management.

First, under New bug, chose the “plasma” category. Then there are 4 possible combinations of products and components, depending on the symptoms:

In order to have a good complete information on the affected system, its configuration, and the configuration of our multiscreen management, if you can, the following information would be needed:

• Whether the problem happens in a Wayland or X11 session (or both)
• A good description of the scenario: how many screens, whether is a laptop or desktop, when the problem happens (startup, connecting/disconnectiong, going out of sleep and things like that)
• The output the terminal command: kscreen-doctor -o
• The output of the terminal command: kscreen-console
• The main plasma configuration file: ~/.config/plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc

Those items of information already help a lot figuring out what problem is and where it resides.

Afterwards we still may ask for more informations, like an archive of the main screen config files that are the directory content of ~/.local/share/kscreen/ but normally, we wouldn’t need that.

One more word on kscreen-doctor and kscreen-console

Those 2 commands are very useful to understand what Plasma and the rest of the system thinks about every screen that’s connected and how they intend to treat them.

kscreen-doctor

Here is a typical output of the command kscreen-doctor - o:

Output: 1 eDP-1 enabled connected priority 2 Panel Modes: 0:1200x1920@60! 1:1024x768@60 Geometry: 1920,0 960x600 Scale: 2 Rotation: 8 Overscan: 0 Vrr: incapable RgbRange: Automatic
Output: 2 DP-3 enabled connected priority 3 DisplayPort Modes: 0:1024x768@60! 1:800x600@60 2:800x600@56 3:848x480@60 4:640x480@60 5:1024x768@60 Geometry: 1920,600 1024x768 Scale: 1 Rotation: 1 Overscan: 0 Vrr: incapable RgbRange: Automatic
Output: 3 DP-4 enabled connected priority 1 DisplayPort Modes: 0:1920x1080@60*! 1:1920x1080@60 2:1920x1080@60 3:1680x1050@60 4:1600x900@60 5:1280x1024@75 6:1280x1024@60 7:1440x900@60 8:1280x800@60 9:1152x864@75 10:1280x720@60 11:1280x720@60 12:1280x720@60 13:1024x768@75 14:1024x768@70 15:1024x768@60 16:832x624@75 17:800x600@75 18:800x600@72 19:800x600@60 20:800x600@56 21:720x480@60 22:720x480@60 23:720x480@60 24:720x480@60 25:640x480@75 26:640x480@73 27:640x480@67 28:640x480@60 29:640x480@60 30:720x400@70 31:1280x1024@60 32:1024x768@60 33:1280x800@60 34:1920x1080@60 35:1600x900@60 36:1368x768@60 37:1280x720@60 Geometry: 0,0 1920x1080 Scale: 1 Rotation: 1 Overscan: 0 Vrr: incapable RgbRange: Automatic

Here we can see we have 3 outputs, one internal and two via DisplayPort, DP-4 is the primary (priority 1) followed by eDP-1 (internal) and DP-3 (those correcpond to the new reordering UI in the systemsettings screen module).

Important data points, also the screen geometries (in italic in the snippet) which tell their relative positions.

kscreen-console

This gives a bit more verbose information, here is a sample (copied here the data of a single screen, as the output is very long):

Id: 3
Name: "DP-4"
Type: "DisplayPort"
Connected: true
Enabled: true
Priority: 1
Rotation: KScreen::Output::None
Pos: QPoint(0,0)
MMSize: QSize(520, 290)
FollowPreferredMode: false
Size: QSize(1920, 1080)
Scale: 1
Clones: None
Mode: "0"
Preferred Mode: "0"
Preferred modes: ("0")
Modes:
"0" "1920x1080@60" QSize(1920, 1080) 60
"1" "1920x1080@60" QSize(1920, 1080) 60
"10" "1280x720@60" QSize(1280, 720) 60
"11" "1280x720@60" QSize(1280, 720) 60
"12" "1280x720@60" QSize(1280, 720) 59.94
"13" "1024x768@75" QSize(1024, 768) 75.029
"14" "1024x768@70" QSize(1024, 768) 70.069
"15" "1024x768@60" QSize(1024, 768) 60.004
"16" "832x624@75" QSize(832, 624) 74.551
"17" "800x600@75" QSize(800, 600) 75
"18" "800x600@72" QSize(800, 600) 72.188
"19" "800x600@60" QSize(800, 600) 60.317
"2" "1920x1080@60" QSize(1920, 1080) 59.94
"20" "800x600@56" QSize(800, 600) 56.25
"21" "720x480@60" QSize(720, 480) 60
"22" "720x480@60" QSize(720, 480) 60
"23" "720x480@60" QSize(720, 480) 59.94
"24" "720x480@60" QSize(720, 480) 59.94
"25" "640x480@75" QSize(640, 480) 75
"26" "640x480@73" QSize(640, 480) 72.809
"27" "640x480@67" QSize(640, 480) 66.667
"28" "640x480@60" QSize(640, 480) 60
"29" "640x480@60" QSize(640, 480) 59.94
"3" "1680x1050@60" QSize(1680, 1050) 59.883
"30" "720x400@70" QSize(720, 400) 70.082
"31" "1280x1024@60" QSize(1280, 1024) 59.895
"32" "1024x768@60" QSize(1024, 768) 59.92
"33" "1280x800@60" QSize(1280, 800) 59.81
"34" "1920x1080@60" QSize(1920, 1080) 59.963
"35" "1600x900@60" QSize(1600, 900) 59.946
"36" "1368x768@60" QSize(1368, 768) 59.882
"37" "1280x720@60" QSize(1280, 720) 59.855
"4" "1600x900@60" QSize(1600, 900) 60
"5" "1280x1024@75" QSize(1280, 1024) 75.025
"6" "1280x1024@60" QSize(1280, 1024) 60.02
"7" "1440x900@60" QSize(1440, 900) 59.901
"8" "1280x800@60" QSize(1280, 800) 59.91
"9" "1152x864@75" QSize(1152, 864) 75
EDID Info:
Device ID: "xrandr-Samsung Electric Company-S24B300-H4MD302024"
Name: "S24B300"
Vendor: "Samsung Electric Company"
Serial: "H4MD302024"
EISA ID: ""
Hash: "eca6ca3c32c11a47a837d696a970b9d5"
Width: 52
Height: 29
Gamma: 2.2
Red: QQuaternion(scalar:1, vector:(0.640625, 0.335938, 0))
Green: QQuaternion(scalar:1, vector:(0.31543, 0.628906, 0))
Blue: QQuaternion(scalar:1, vector:(0.15918, 0.0585938, 0))
White: QQuaternion(scalar:1, vector:(0.3125, 0.329102, 0))

Important also the section EDID Info, to see if the screen has a good and unique EDID, as invalid Edids, especially in combination with DisplayPort is a known source or problems.

After the announcement upstream, Fedora’s @kde-sig follows up by making KDE Gear 22.12.2 available on Fedora 37.

As per Fedora’s policy, the software will first land on updates-testing and after receiving feedback and karma it will land on the updates repository.

If you want to help, make sure to follow the instructions on the update. You only need to run:

sudo dnf upgrade --enablerepo=updates-testing --refresh --advisory=FEDORA-2023-17c31eabf7

Feel free to join us at our Matrix room!.

This is a non-comprehensive list of all of the major work I’ve done for KDE this month of January. I think I got a lot done this month! I also was accepted as a KDE Developer near the start of the month, so I’m pretty happy about that.

Sorry that it’s pretty much only text, a lot of this stuff isn’t either not screenshottable or I’m too lazy to attach an image. Next month should be better!

Custom icon theme in Tokodon

[Feature] I threw all of the custom icons we use in Tokodon into a proper custom icon theme, which should automatically match your theme and includes a dark theme variant. In the future, I’d like to recolor these better and eventually upstream them into Breeze.

KXMLGUI tooltips

[Bugfix] As part of cleaning up some KDE games-related stuff, I also looked into the issue of duplicate “What’s This?” tooltips. This also fixes that visual bug where you can close normal tooltips that don’t have “What’s This?” information to actually open.

KBlocks background changes

[Feature] This one isn’t merged yet, but in the future - KBlock themes authors will be able to specify where to pin the background instead of having it stretched by default.

Kirigami “About KDE” dialog

[Feature] I added something that’s been wanted for a while, Kirigami’s own “About KDE” dialog! It’s currently sitting in Add-ons, but will most likely be moved in the future. If you would like to suggest what we do about the About pages/windows in KDE, please check out the proposal. See the merge request.

Media improvements in Tokodon

[Bugfix] I did a lot of work improving media in Tokodon this month, including fixing the aspect ratios scaling correctly, video support (not merged yet) and other miscellaneous fixes. I also caught a bunch of blurhash bugs along with making the timeline fixed-width so images aren’t absurdly sized on a typical desktop display. Also a fix for three media attachments!

Krita.org dark theme

I’m starting to get involved in improving the KDE websites, and currently working on the new Krita.org website and adding a proper dark theme to it.

See the work-in-progress merge request.

Gwenview MPRIS fixes

[Bugfix] Not merged yet (due to MPRIS bugginess in general?) but I cracked a shot at improving the MPRIS situation with Gwenview. Notably, slideshow controls no longer “hang around” until a slideshow is actually happening.

CMake Package Installer

I worked a little on solving the kdesrc-build issue of manual package lists, and created cmake-package-installer. It parses your CMake log and installs the relevant packages for you. I want to start looking into hooking this into kdesrc-build!

See the repository.

KDE Wiki improvements

I made some misc changes to the Community Wiki this month, mostly centered around fixing some long-standing formatting issues I’ve noticed. The homepage should be more descriptive, important pages no longer misformatted (or just missing?) and the Get Involved/Development page should be better organized.

Misc Qt patches

[Bugfix] I cherry-picked a Qt6 commit fixing video playback in QML, which should appear in the next Qt KDE Patch collection update, mostly for use in Tokodon when video support lands. I also submitted an upstream Qt patch fixing WebP loading, meant for NeoChat where I see the most WebP images. See the GStreamer cherry-pick and the WebP patch.

Window Decoration KCM overhaul

[Feature] This isn’t merged yet (but it’s close!) so it barely misses the mark for January, but I’ll include it anyway. I’m working on making the Window Decoration KCM frameless and give it a new look that matches the other KCMs. See the merge request.