Planet KDE

This year’s foss-north was the tenth incarnation. I’ve been organizing foss-gbg since 2013, and foss-north since 2016 (two events in 2020 makes it ten in total). It’s been quite a journey – moving between three venues, working with amazing speakers and sponsors, finding a way through the pandemic, while getting to know so many people.

The conference continued when fscons moved from town. Henrik, who helped start fscons has been invaluable during the foss-north years.

Over the years, there has been multiple people helping out with things like announcing speakers, manning the registration booth, finding speakers and creating a program. One of the people who has been around the whole time is Tobias, who is ran a large portion of the show this year and is taking over the lead organizer role.

Private life has been rough over the past two years, so the decision to step back from foss-north has been more or less inevitable. So it’s a great feeling to be able to sit down and enjoy the show and know that the event is in good hands with Tobias.

Thank you all for speaking, visiting, helping out at, and sponsoring foss-north. See you at next year’s event. I’ll have more time to mingle than ever before! ;-)

Last week I attended KDE’s joint sprint on accessibility, sustainability and automation hosted at MBition in Berlin. Having had little opportunity to sit down and discuss things since Akademy 2023 and the KF6 release the scope grew even wider in the end, my notes below only cover a small subset of topics.

Sustainability

I was mainly involved regarding the energy measurement CI tooling here:

• Resolved some problems with measurement runs getting stuck while running standard usage scenarios.
• Set up VNC remote access to debug and resolve similar issues more easily in the future.
• Identified issues in the measurement data processing and reporting pipeline.

There was also some discussion around “sustainable” or “ethical” “AI”. While its pretty clear that open source implementations are strictly preferable over proprietary ones and that locally runnable systems are strictly preferable to hosted ones things get a lot more muddy when it comes to the licensing of the input data.

This boils down to the question to what extend we consider the output data derivative work of the input data. Besides the current legal interpretation (which I’d expect to be subject to change), this is also about how we see this regarding the spirit of share-alike licenses (xGPL, CC-BY-SA, etc).

Accessibility

Overall the most effort here probably went into learning and understanding the internals of the accessibility infrastructure in Qt, and exploring ways how we could make non-trivial things possible with that, something that should pay off going forward.

But there were also some immediate results:

• Submitted a patch to Qt that should make interactive ItemDelegate instance in lists or combo boxes accessible by default. Those inherit from AbstractButton but have their accessibility role changed which makes them lose the default interaction handling at the moment.
• Made the time picker actually accessible and match how similar controls are represented e.g. by Firefox (MR).
• The date picker (while seemingly a very similar control conceptually) proved much harder, but David eventually found a solution for this as well (MR).

Automation

With the AT-SPI accessibility interface also being used for our test automation tooling all of the above also helps here.

• Implemented the missing plural version of finding elements of sub-elements in the AT-SPI Selenium driver (MR).
• Integrated Selenium tests for Itinerary, which then also already found the first bug (MR).

Improvements to monitoring the overall CI status also had some immediate effects:

• K3b, KImageMapEditor and Kirigami Gallery were switched to Qt 6 exclusively, having been identified as already ported.
• poxml (an essential part of the documentation localization toolchain) was identified as not having been ported to Qt 6 yet, which meanwhile has been corrected.
• Unit test failures in kcalutils and messagelib were fixed, allowing to enforce passing unit tests in those repositories.
• Global CI monitoring also helped to identify gaps in CI seed jobs and pointed us to a Qt 6.7 regression affecting ECM, all of which was subsequently fixed.

Other topics

I also got the chance to look at details of the Akademy 2024 venue with David and Tobias (who are familiar with the building), to improve the existing OSM indoor mapping. Having that data for a venue opens new possibilities for conference companion apps, let’s see what we can get implemented in Kongress until September.

Indoor map of the Akademy 2024 venue with routing and event-specific MapCSS stylesheet.

As Nate has reported already we didn’t stay strictly on topic. More discussions I was involved in included:

• Sharing code and components between Itinerary, KTrip and NeoChat. Some initial changes in that general direction have meanwhile been integrated.
• The implications of sunsetting QCA.
• Changes to the release process, product groupings and release frequencies.

You can help!

Getting a bunch of contributors into the same room for a few days is immensely valuable and productive. Being able to do that depends on people or organizations offering suitable venues and organizing such events, as well as on donations to cover the costs of travel and accommodation.

New Features

On System Settings’ Region & Language page, you can now choose how you’d like storage sizes to be displayed. This means you can change them to the more common MB and GB style, instead of MiB and GiB, for example. Note that the default value has not changed, but you have the option to change it yourself (Méven Car, Plasma 6.1. Link):

The popular Kirigami.ContextualHelpButton component now has a QtWidgets counterpart: KContextualHelpButton! (Felix Ernst, Frameworks 6.2. Link)

UI Improvements

On X11, Spectacle now makes it obvious that screen recording isn’t supported when you try to run it in recording mode using a global shortcut (Noah Davis, Spectacle 24.05. Link)

Plasma’s Vaults widget now appears visible in the active part of the system tray only when a Vault is actually open, bringing the System Tray closer to its platonic ideal of only showing things that are contextually relevant (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Apps inhibiting sleep and screen locking are now shown by their pretty names, not their technical names (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 6.1. Link):

Adopted the new frameless message header style in Discover, as seen when there’s a distro upgrade available (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.1. Link):

Bug Fixes

Kate once again works as expected with multiple virtual desktops, opening files in a new window in the current virtual desktop rather than attaching it to an existing instance in a different virtual desktop (Christoph Cullmann, Kate 24.05. Link)

Fixed Spectacle’s multi-monitor screenshots on X11 not working either at all, or well (Vlad Zahorodnii, and Noah Davis, Plasma 6.0.5. and Spectacle 24.05. Link 1 and link 2)

Fixed a semi-common crash in System Monitor when switching to the Applications page (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 6.0.5. Link)

When updating the system using Discover, there are no longer gaps in the updates list as items complete and disappear (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 6.0.5. Link)

Plasma’s feature to remember whether Bluetooth was on or off last time now works more reliably (Someone going by the pseudonym “Arctic Lampyrid”, Plasma 6.0.5. Link)

Fixed an issue in Plasma that would cause flickering and stuttering with adaptive sync turned on (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.0.5. Link)

Floating panels now de-float when a window reaches the correct distance away from them, as opposed to de-floating too early (Yifan Zhu, Plasma 6.0.5. Link)

Fixed multiple issues involved with LPD printer discovery and queue management (Mike Noe, Plasma 6.1. Link)

When you have multiple Brightness and Color widgets (for example, because you have multiple panels each with a System Tray on it), the Night Light portions of the widgets no longer interfere with one another and interact in strange ways (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Other bug information of note:

• 3 Very high priority Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
• 39 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 38 last week). Current list of bugs
• 116 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed over the last week Full list of bugs

Performance & Technical

Improved Spectacle-s startup speed on Wayland (Noah Davis, Spectacle 24.05. Link)

Improved the scrolling performance of long scrollable views in Discover. This is an area of focus, so expect more to come soon (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 6.0.5. Link)

Reduced visual glitchiness when the GPU does a reset, which can happen due to driver bugs, or, with NVIDIA, when the system goes to sleep (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Implemented support for the org.freedesktop.impl.portal.Secret portal for KWallet, which lets Flatpak apps use it (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 6.2. Link)

Automation & Systematization

Added some basic GUI tests for Dolphin (Méven Car, link)

Added basic GUI tests for opening Plasma’s Alternate Calendar config page (Fushan Wen, link)

…And Everything Else

This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! If you’re hungry for more, check out https://planet.kde.org, where you can find more news from other KDE contributors.

How You Can Help

The KDE organization has become important in the world, and your time and labor have helped to bring it there! But as we grow, it’s going to be equally important that this stream of labor be made sustainable, which primarily means paying for it. Right now the vast majority of KDE runs on labor not paid for by KDE e.V. (the nonprofit foundation behind KDE, of which I am a board member), and that’s a problem. We’ve taken steps to change this with paid technical contractors—but those steps are small due to growing but still limited financial resources. If you’d like to help change that, consider donating today!

Otherwise, visit https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover other ways to be part of a project that really matters. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE; you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to already be a programmer, either. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-17.

AI isn’t useless. But is it worth it?

Tags: tech, ai, gpt, copilot, criticism, work

It is an interesting essay. It leans on the side of “assistants are useful for simple coding tasks” and it’s a bit more critical when it’s about writing. The stance is original I find, yes it can help with some writing tasks, but if you look at the writing tasks you can expedite this way… if you wish to expedite them isn’t it a sign that they were providing little value in the first place? Is the solution the assistant or changing the way you work? Indeed this might hide some busy work otherwise.

https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/

Magic Numbers | blarg

Tags: tech, networking, history

Interesting facts about how the ethernet frame MTU came to be 1500 bytes.

https://exple.tive.org/blarg/2024/04/24/magic-numbers/

Guiding users away from cd and ls :: Terminal Click — Bringing Dead Text to Life

Tags: tech, command-line, terminal

Interesting ideas for terminal emulators and shells. Maybe will make their way in other software.

https://terminal.click/posts/2024/04/guiding-users-away-from-cd-and-ls/

Tips on Adding JSON Output to Your CLI App - Brazil’s Blog

Tags: tech, json, command-line

Nice set of advices. There are interesting things to do on the command line with more JSON output. It needs to be easy to work with though.

https://blog.kellybrazil.com/2021/12/03/tips-on-adding-json-output-to-your-cli-app/

Modern Linux mounts a lot of different types of virtual filesystems

Tags: tech, linux, filesystem

There is indeed a jungle of virtual filesystems nowadays. That doesn’t make it easy to filter only for the “real” ones.

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/LinuxManyVirtualFilesystems

Shared libs, rpath and the runtime linker

Tags: tech, system, linux, linking, debugging

This can sometimes be confusing. Here are a couple of tips about debugging rpath and linker errors.

https://carlosrdrz.dev/shared-libs-rpath-and-the-runtime-linker

Coverage Guided Fuzzing - Extending Instrumentation to Hunt Down Bugs Faster! - Include Security Research Blog

Tags: tech, tests, security, fuzzing

Maybe a bit dry, but gives a good idea of how a fuzz testing harness works. And also how it can be tweaked.

https://blog.includesecurity.com/2024/04/coverage-guided-fuzzing-extending-instrumentation/

HTML attributes vs DOM properties - JakeArchibald.com

Tags: tech, html, web, frontend

There are differences between attributes on the HTML side and properties on the DOM side. This can quickly get confusing, here is a good reference for it.

https://jakearchibald.com/2024/attributes-vs-properties/

3 important things I overlooked during code reviews | Piglei

Tags: tech, codereview, programming

Indeed, naming, comments and communication styles are three aspects often overlooked during reviews. They are very important though and shouldn’t be neglected.

https://www.piglei.com/articles/3-important-things-I-overlooked-during-cr/

First Come First Served: The Impact of File Position on Code Review

Tags: tech, codereview, cognition

I guess we kind of suspected it, this studies tends to prove it. Defects are more easily found in the first files of a code review rather than in the last ones.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.04259

Random musings on the Agile Manifesto – NeoPragma LLC

Tags: tech, agile, criticism

Interesting musings indeed. That’s lesser heard opinions about the manifesto and its origins. Good food for thought.

https://neopragma.com/2024/04/random-musings-on-the-agile-manifesto/

Calculus Made Easy

Tags: mathematics, learning

I didn’t know this book. It is written in a surprising style, but it’s very much down to earth and to the point. For sure a good way to learn calculus.

https://calculusmadeeasy.org/

You Are What You Read, Even If You Don’t Always Remember It - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

Tags: reading, knowledge

Very good point. You might not remember the content, but if it impacted the way you think it did its job.

https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2024/you-are-what-you-read/

Bye for now!

From last Friday to Wednesday I was in Berlin to attend the combined 2024 KDE Goals sprint that was graciously hosted by MBition. Compared to previous goals sprints where there were separate sprints Goal this year was different as all three happened at once in the same area. This allowed attendees to freely switch around the different topics and enables more collaboration opportunities. Lets see how that worked out for me.

Most of my time I actually spent in the context of the accessibility goal. I became part of a discussion of how QML comboboxes in general and the Kirigami Add-ons date picker is lacking in the accessibility departement. As the discussion went to how the default representation of a standard combobox could be improved, the question was raised if it would still be possible to do something special for customized comboboxes. This lead to prototyping on the date picker with the first approach being to forego the built in support in QtQuick and implement the relevant interfaces manually like one would do for QtWidgets. This was a lot of boring boilerplate code but it proved that this option is available for very specialized use cases. The solution we came up with in the end for our use cases was to provide the required properties and roles in a proxy Item that exposes the actual controls to the accessibility tools.

On the automatization front I was involved in creating two new CI checks. The first one is a reuse lint check that only checks new files for compliance which enables older projects to enforce coverage at least for new files. The second was an idea that came up during sprint that we could detect untranslated strings in QML files as these are usually to text properties. While it will never catch all cases during testing we found already some problematic cases in Plasma repositories. We discussed also some other points from the idea list such as a cherry-pick bot like the Qt Project uses and automatic updating the fix version field on bugzilla but these innocuous looking problems have some corner cases which require some more thought.

To the Sustainable Software goal I contributed the least. But together with Aleix and Joseph we debugged why the VNC setup of the KDE Eco Lab machine did not work anymore and fixed it. So in the end I interacted with all three goals.

The combined sprint was a nice experience and facilitated many discussion about the Goals but as always also about other KDE topics as is unavoidable when KDE community members are put together in a room. However I feel while it enabled people to jump around the different goals I am wary that in my opinion this setup removes a bit of focus from each goal compared to dedicated sprints.

Thanks to Mbition for hosting us and as a reminder your donations to KDE e.V make sprints such as these possible.

Qt 5.15 introduced “Automatic Type Registration”. With it, a C++ class can be marked as “QML_ELEMENT” to be automatically registered to the QML engine. Qt 6 takes this to the next level and builds all of its tooling around the so-called QML Modules. Let’s talk about what this new infrastructure means to your application in practice and how to benefit from it in an existing project.

Continue reading How To Use Modern QML Tooling in Practice at basysKom GmbH.

The Kubuntu Team is happy to announce that Kubuntu 24.04 has been released, featuring the ‘beautiful’ KDE Plasma 5.27 simple by default, powerful when needed.

Codenamed “Noble Numbat”, Kubuntu 24.04 continues our tradition of giving you Friendly Computing by integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution.

Under the hood, there have been updates to many core packages, including a new 6.8-based kernel, KDE Frameworks 5.115, KDE Plasma 5.27 and KDE Gear 23.08.

Kubuntu 24.04 with Plasma 5.27.11

Kubuntu has seen many updates for other applications, both in our default install, and installable from the Ubuntu archive.

Haruna, Krita, Kdevelop, Yakuake, and many many more applications are updated.

Applications for core day-to-day usage are included and updated, such as Firefox, and LibreOffice.

For a list of other application updates, and known bugs be sure to read our release notes.

Download Kubuntu 24.04, or learn how to upgrade from 23.10 or 22.04 LTS.

Note: For upgrades from 23.10, there may a delay of a few hours to days between the official release announcements and the Ubuntu Release Team enabling upgrades.

In the two previous posts (Part 1 and Part 2), we looked at how to build bindings between C++ and Rust from scratch. However, while building a binding generator from scratch is fun, it’s not necessarily an efficient way to integrate Rust into your C++ project. Let’s look at some existing technologies for mixing C++ and Rust that you can easily deploy today.

bindgen

bindgen is an official tool of the Rust project that can create bindings around C headers. It can also wrap C++ headers, but there are limitations to its C++ support. For example, while you can wrap classes, they won’t have their constructors or destructors automatically called. You can read more about these limitations on the bindgen C++ support page. Another quirk of bindgen is that it only allows you to call C++ from Rust. If you want to go the other way around, you have to add cbindgen to generate C headers for your Rust code.

CXX

CXX is a more powerful framework for integrating C++ and Rust. It’s used in some well-known projects, such as Chromium. It does an excellent job at integrating C++ and Rust, but it is not an actual binding generator. Instead, all of your bindings have to be manually created. You can read the tutorial to learn more about how CXX works.

autocxx

Since CXX doesn’t generate bindings itself, if you want to use it in your project, you’ll need to find a generator that wraps C++ headers with CXX bindings. autocxx is a Google project that does just that, using bindgen to generate Rust bindings around C++ headers. However, it gets better—autocxx can also create C++ bindings for Rust functions.

CXX-Qt

While CXX is one of the best C++/Rust binding generators available, it fails to address Qt users. Since Qt depends so heavily on the moc to enable features like signals and slots, it’s almost impossible to use it with a general-purpose binding generator. That’s where CXX-Qt comes in. KDAB has created the CXX-Qt crate to allow you to integrate Rust into your C++/Qt application. It works by leveraging CXX to generate most of the bindings but then adds a Qt support layer. This allows you to easily use Rust on the backend of your Qt app, whether you’re using Qt Widgets or QML. CXX-Qt is available on Github and crates.io.

If you’re interested in integrating CXX-Qt into your C++ application, let us know. To learn more about CXX-Qt, you can check out this blog.

Other options

There are some other binding generators out there that aren’t necessarily going to work well for migrating your codebase, but you may want to read about them and keep an eye on them:

• Diplomat
• Crubit
• rust-cpp

In addition, there are continuing efforts to improve C++/Rust interoperability. For example, Google recently announced that they are giving $1 million dollars to the Rust foundation to improve interoperability.

Conclusion

In the world of programming tools and frameworks, there is never a single solution that will work for everybody. However, CXX, CXX-Qt, and autocxx seem to be the best options for anyone who wants to port their C++ codebase to Rust. Even if you aren’t looking to completely remove C++ from your codebase, these binding generators may be a good option for you to promote memory safety in critical areas of your application.

Have you successfully integrated Rust in your C++ codebase with one of these tools? Have you used a different tool or perhaps a different programming language entirely? Leave a comment and let us know. Memory-safe programming languages like Rust are here to stay, and it’s always good to see programmers change with the times.

The post Mixing C++ and Rust for Fun and Profit: Part 3 appeared first on KDAB.

For the past 8 days I’ve been in Berlin for what is technically four sprints: first a two-day KDE e.V. Board of Directors sprint, and then right afterwards, the KDE Goals mega-sprint for the Eco, Accessibility, and Automation/Systematization Goals! Both were hosted in the offices of KDE Patron MBition, a great partner to KDE which uses our software both internally and in some Mercedes cars. Thanks a lot, MBition! It’s been quite a week, but a productive one. So I thought I’d share what we did.

If you’re a KDE e.V. member, you’ve already received an email recap about the Board sprint’s discussion topics and decisions. Overall the organization is healthy and in great shape. Something substantive I can share publicly is that we posed for this wicked sick picture:

Moving onto the combined Goals sprint: this was in fact the first sprint for any of the KDE Goals, and having all three represented in one room attracted a unique cross-section of people from the KDE Eco crowd, usability-interested folks, and deeply technical core KDE developers.

Officially I’m the Goal Champion of the Automation & Systematization Goal, and a number of folks attended to work on those topics, ranging from adding and fixing tests to creating a code quality dashboards. Expect more blog posts from other participants regarding what they worked on!

Speaking personally, I changed the bug janitor bot to direct Debian users on old Plasma versions to Debian’s own Bug tracker—as in fact the Debian folks advise their own users to do. I added an autotest to validate the change, but regrettably it caused a regression anyway, which I corrected quickly. Further investigation into the reason why this went uncaught revealed that all the autotests for the version-based bug janitor actions are faulty. I worked on fixing them but unfortunately have not met with success yet. Further efforts are needed.

In the process of doing this work, I also found that the bug janitor operates on a hardcoded list of Plasma components, which has of course drifted out of sync with reality since it was originally authored. This causes the bot to miss many bugs at the moment.

Fellow sprint participant Tracey volunteered to address this, so I helped get her set up with a development environment for the bug janitor bot so she can auto-generate the list from GitLab and sysadmin repo metadata. This is in progress and proceeding nicely.

I also proposed a merge request template for the plasma-workspace git repo, modeled on the one we currently use in Elisa. The idea is to encourage people to write better merge request descriptions, and also nudge people in the direction of adding autotests for their merge requests, or at least mentioning reviewers can test the changes. If this ends up successful, I have high hopes about rolling it out more broadly.

But I was also there for the other goals too! Joseph delivered a wonderful presentation about KDE Eco topics, which introduced my new favorite cartoon, and it got me thinking about efficiency and performance. For a while I’d been experiencing high CPU usage in KDE’s NeoChat app, and with all the NeoChat developers there in the room, I took the opportunity to prod them with my pointy stick. This isn’t the first time I’d mentioned the performance issue to them, but in the past no one could reproduce it and we had to drop the investigation. Well, this time I think everyone else was also thinking eco thoughts, and they really moved heaven and earth to try to reproduce it. Eventually James was able to, and it wasn’t long before the issue was put six feet under. The result: NeoChat’s background CPU usage is now 0% for people using Intel GPUs, down from 30%. A big win for eco and laptop battery life, which I’m already appreciating as I write this blog post in an airport disconnected from AC power.

To verify the CPU usage, just for laughs I added the Catwalk widget to my panel. It’s so adorable that I haven’t had the heart to remove it, and now I notice things using CPU time when they should be idle much more than I did before. More visibility for performance issues should over time add up to more fixes for them!

Another interesting thing happens when you get a bunch of talented KDE contributors in a room: people can’t help but initiate discussions about pressing topics. The result was many conversations about release schedules, dependency policy, visual design vision, and product branding. One discussion very relevant to the sprint was the lack of systematicity in how we use units for spacing in the QtQuick-based UIs we build. This resulted in a proposal that’s already generating some spirited feedback.

All in all it was a happy and productive week, and after doing one of these I always feel super privileged to be able to work with as impressively talented and friendly a group of colleagues as this is:

Full disclosure: KDE e.V. paid for my travel and lodging expenses, but not my döner kebab expenses!

Last week was one of the regular KDE e.V. board meetings. We (the board of KDE e.V.) have a video call every week, but twice a year we try to get together and actually put in some full days, actually sit around and laugh, actually listen to Dad jokes and eat food and drink beer or Fritz cola together.

It’s a good addition to our usual workflow.

Berlin is just so much fun (for five days, anyway). I can hop on the train, walk along the Spree to a hotel, walk everywhere – Friday I did 15km – get amazing food for cheap – compared to the Netherlands anyway – and hang out with friends. Some of those friends are the board. The board is some of those friends.

The actual board work is not something to write about all that much. There were HR things and finances and projects and plans and .. you’ll see some of the results on the KDE e.V. website. We also played GeoGuesser and something with WikiData.

One of the HR things I should particularly mention: welcome to Nicole,
our latest employee who is further involved with our sustainable software efforts.

The regular board calls resume next week, and we will meet again in September at Akademy.

Hi, I'm Jakob and this is my new KDE blog. Let's see how this goes as I haven't blogged for literally decades.

I started working on Plasma code sometime last year and hope to play a tiny part in setting the stage for world domination improving user experiences like so many other awesome and dedicated contributors do every week. My Plasma contributions started out with a few rounds of build improvements and bug fixes initially. Before long though, I decided to realize my lifelong dream of a friendly and usable Energy Saving settings page. Thus started a journey into the code of Plasma's power management service, internally known as PowerDevil.

Quick recap: As a service, PowerDevil is mainly responsible for two rough areas.

• It will suspend Plasma sessions when the time is right, and also,
• It adjusts backlight brightness levels of your display and monitors, including the ability to turn them off altogether.

In terms of user interfaces, the Energy Saving module in System Settings allows you to set different suspend/shutdown behaviors and brightness adjustments for different power states: on AC power, on battery, and on low battery. Ad-hoc adjustments to the same settings can also be made with two applets in your system tray: Power and Battery, as well as Brightness and Color.

Let's have a look at some of the work that went into Plasma 6.0 in this area. I'm about two months late for a 6.0 news blog, but Fedora 40 KDE Spin is just out as the first major Linux distro on a semi-annual release cycle to feature Plasma 6. So maybe not terrible timing. We'll also have a look at some of what's been brewing for 6.1 so far. You may have seen some of this across a number of different "This Week in KDE" blog posts, but then again maybe you haven't!

System Settings & Config Data

I'm quite happy with the way the new settings worked out. It also took a while to get there.

A year earlier, I posted an outlandish proposal to radically change the Energy Saving page. It's too long and boring and unworkable to cover here. However, it made me think long and hard about all the different ways that the settings page could look like, what its controls must be able to represent. It also made me aware that another UI rework had already been in the works previously, which didn't get merged.

Nothing is ever as easy as one hopes it to be. A substantial redesign of the settings page would require rewriting the UI with modern Qt Quick / QML code, as opposed to the rather unwieldy Qt Widgets that the old UI was using at the time. As I learned, a settings module based on Qt Quick also wants more knowledge about its underlying configuration data. Things such as: "what's the default value for this setting", or "if you click this checkbox a second time can we disable the Reset button again".

PowerDevil had lots of config data and was using old infrastructure in non-standard ways to access it. The service would generate a new config file on first run, with all of its default values written to ~/.config/powermanagementprofilesrc. After creating this config file, it had no clue which of the values were defaults and which were your own customized settings. In Plasma 5.x, pressing the "Defaults" button would open a dialog to warn you that all of your changes will be thrown away immediately and can't be recovered if you proceed. Compare that to other modules, which let you press "Defaults" and "Reset" as much as you want until you decide finally "Apply".

Before even attempting to improve the UI itself, a series of changes was necessary in the code that reads and interprets config files. I got there by extracting and improving one small bite after another from the extensive but ultimately unmerged earlier attempt. A steady stream of small, easy-to-review patches will win the race eventually.

The result is this. Power management settings are now only written if you change away from the default values. If you checked the "Highlight Changed Settings" option, System Settings will be able to show which of your Energy Saving settings have been modified compared to the defaults. You can transfer your SSD from a laptop to a PC and the suspend/shutdown defaults will now reflect the new system's capabilities. Extra config files for the various power states and activities have been migrated to ~/.config/powerdevilrc.

Building on these changes, the UI rework got merged just in time for Plasma 6.0. I think it's significantly cleaner than it used to be, while at the same time there are still things I'd like to change about it. Eventually I'd like to configure my "laptop lid closed" action only once, instead of applying the same change across all three power states. The "custom script" controls make more sense for laptops with different power states than for desktop PCs, where the current design can be a little confusing. Screen and keyboard brightness should ideally move to the Display Configuration and Keyboard settings modules. We'll get there eventually.

Special thanks to Nicolas Fella and Nate Graham for their repeated, kind & thoughtful code reviews. Throughout this project and really everywhere else in KDE. Getting (or giving!) that kind of feedback makes a huge difference.

Moved & Removed Functionality

The UI rework would have been harder if Nicolas hadn't also simplified PowerDevil in other areas. One is that WiFi, WWAN and Bluetooth are gone from Energy Saving, they were more confusing there than they were helpful. Switching wireless devices on or off can still be done through the system tray applets, or the WiFi/Bluetooth modules in System Settings.

Plasma 5.27 and earlier allowed you to set a full power management settings profile if a given Activity is currently active. It's still possible in Plasma 6.0 to block automatic sleep or screen turn-off. Those settings have moved to the Activities settings module, where they can be configured as part of each individual Activity. Entire pages of power management settings cannot be controlled through Activities anymore in 6.0 though. If these capabilities ever end up returning, it will be with a different code architecture and a different UI.

Natalie Clarius has invested lots of time into system tray applets. Instead of a single "Battery and Brightness" applet and a separate "Night Light" applet, the brightness settings in Plasma 6.0 are now colocated with Night Light as "Brightness and Color" applet. This leaves the "Power and Battery" applet by itself, which displays battery status (including peripheral battery, if your mouse or keyboard supports this) and can configure power profiles on the fly (if power-profile-daemon is installed).

New & Improved Functionality

In Plasma 5.x, you were able to configure how long the system should be idle before the display gets turned off. For Plasma 6.0, Jonathan Haney added a setting to configure a shorter turn-off duration on the lock screen. You won't be reading long web pages and PDFs on the lock screen so you might as well avoid distractions and save some power. This setting can be reduced all the way to zero seconds so that the screen turns off immediately when locking the session. I spent some time to make this work reliably on both Wayland and X11.

We still need to streamline the settings UI a bit, in line with the "simple by default, powerful when needed" mantra.

Brightness can be increased or decreased in 5% steps by pressing brightness up/down keys, which are usually found on laptop keyboards. In Plasma 6.0, brightness steps can also be controlled in 1% steps by pressing Shift in addition to the brightness key.

We merged a number of bug fixes to improve reliability of automatic brightness adjustments. Restoring keyboard backlights works better now after waking up from system sleep, dimming after a period of inactivity is less fragile, fading to black before the screen is turned off won't flicker when a mouse move interrupts the fade at the wrong time. If (lib)ddcutil or PowerDevil's use of it makes trouble with controlling external monitor brightness via DDC/CI, it can be disabled by setting a POWERDEVIL_NO_DDCUTIL=1 environment variable for the PowerDevil service on startup.

There is now an OSD switcher for power profiles (i.e. Power Save, Balanced, Performance) that will pop up when the battery function key on some laptop keyboards is pressed, or Meta+B.

In Plasma 5.27, you could configure a custom script to run when entering or exiting a power state (AC, battery, low battery) or after a period of inactivity in this current power state. In Plasma 6.0, you can configure a custom script for each of these "run conditions" in each power state. So you can run a script to activate something when you plug in the laptop, and disable it again when removing the power plug.

Auto-suspend after inactivity, laptop lid closure and power button presses now each allow you to select "Sleep" vs. "Hibernate" as their respective suspend actions. The "Hybrid sleep" option and the confusingly placed "Sleep, then hibernate after a period of inactivity" checkbox are now part of a separate drop-down that lets you choose alternative sleep modes. Less confusing than before, although there's more work needed now to make this updated categorization consistent across the entire desktop, like on the logout screen.

Functionality that just keeps working!

For years, the UPower daemon had marked its laptop lid detection functionality as deprecated, to be removed in a future release. Plasma's power management service relies on UPower, and Plasma would have soon lost the ability to react to lid closure events. UPower had already removed this code from their unreleased development codebase, it was only a matter of time until the next official version would be released to break lid handling everywhere. So I started working on a replacement, but getting full coverage across different platforms (X11 vs. Wayland, systemd vs. not-systemd) is quite a bit of effort and there were lots more kinks to figure out.

So I am very happy that UPower has indeed released a new version, one that puts the lid detection code back in for the benefit of upstream users such as Plasma, GNOME and various window managers that have also relied on their lid detection functionality. Better yet, it's meant to stay this time around. Things will just keep working as they do now! It's great to have this kind of system-level functionality available in common infrastructure such as UPower so we don't each have to implement substandard knock-offs individually.

On the monitor brightness front, recent versions of libddcutil have introduced a feature that prevents two independent programs from talking to the same monitor simultaneously. Due to the way that our background service has traditionally been using libddcutil, Plasma 6.0 sessions have been hogging libddcutil's monitor handles. Users who like to perform other operations with DDC/CI, for example through the ddcutil command-line program, would find it non-functional. Starting with Plasma 6.0.4, our DDC/CI code was restructured so that a monitor is only hogged for the short time it takes to change the brightness. ddcutil works again as intended in a Plasma session.

Beyond 6.0

The System Settings module will be renamed from "Energy Saving" to "Power Management". This used to be the name of the entire category containing the "Energy Saving", "Advanced Power Settings" and "Activity Power Settings" modules. After the redesign, there is only one module left and it can be called by the arguably more appropriate name.

After the Plasma 6.0 feature freeze went into effect, Bogdan Onofriichuk significantly improved the code for external monitor brightness handling via DDC/CI (using libddcutil).

Starting with 6.1, the power management service will recognize at runtime when monitors are connected or disconnected. Previously, only a single monitor detection was done on startup and if you changed your monitor configuration afterwards, brightness controls in Plasma would have no effect on newly plugged-in monitors.

Brightness via DDC/CI will not be animated anymore in order to minimize the risk of shortened monitor lifespans. The chance of this happening is hard to verify for someone not in the monitor industry, but we'll follow the example of monitor manufacturers' own helper applets and apply newly adjusted monitor brightness values only after a half-second delay.

Brightness animations of internal laptop backlights, on the other hand, are going to get more responsive when dragging the brightness slider in the applet or holding down the brightness key.

We've done more work on cleaning up the display code, with the goal of allowing per-monitor brightness controls as opposed to the single brightness slider of current Plasma releases. After raising the minimum brightness value to "the lowest value that's higher than 0%" to stop screens from inadvertently turning off, we'll lower it back down to an exact 0 where it's safe to do so. We also want to move the core of screen brightness control into KWin, which will be able to do more awesome things such as adjust brightness on OLED screens that don't even have a backlight to control. No guarantees when any of this will be ready to ship, but it's a lot closer now than just a few months ago.

How You Can Help

There are a lot of edge cases and system configurations that could still be handled in a better way.

Device interactions can be hairy, they will often differ from one system to another. What might work well on my system can break on someone else's. You can use the power of having a different setup to do things that a number of KDE developers cannot. If you're running into issues with suspend, brightness and other things that PowerDevil may have a hand in, check out the new README file.

Consider helping with bug triage! PowerDevil on KDE's bug tracker has a service component with lots of reported bugs, as well as a component for the System Settings module with fewer bugs and quite a few wishlist items. The service component includes some very old bug reports which may or may not fully apply to Plasma 6.0 anymore. Read this if you're interested in helping us determine the amount of developer love still required for different bug reports. Also if you rock at figuring out how to reproduce issues reliably, when the original reporter wasn't able to find a conclusive pattern by themselves.

And of course, if you're a developer, feel free to fix a problem and submit a merge request. Some issues aren't straightforward to resolve. We'll work through them eventually. Probably. I'm a volunteer just like most of you, so no promises whatsoever.

You can also donate to KDE so they can continue to do helpful things like paying Natalie to work on hardware integration, or (if the approval gods are kind) hopefully subsizing my travel costs to Akademy 2024.

Discuss this post on KDE Discuss.

When thinking about how to contribute to KDE, many people probably still think that you have to write actual code. While it’s true that C++ and QML is at the heart of our applications, it’s just one puzzle piece of many that make up a successful product. Besides donating money to KDE or developers like me individually, there’s much more you can do to support us: promo work, drawing icons, brainstorming ideas, writing documentation, triaging bug reports or writing new ones, or in this case sending the relevant piece of hardware to a developer. Every single contribution counts!

It’s been at least ten years since I last used an optical drive

A key ingredient to KDE’s cross-platform story is Solid, our device integration framework. It lets applications enumerate devices, such as hard drive partitions, USB thumb drives, but also batteries and peripherals, in a platform-independent way. When it comes to hardware, sometimes emulating its behavior is tough and even a virtual machine might not behave exactly the same as the real thing. Here’s the story of how the donation of a portable DVD drive let me unlock a massive performance boost.

On Linux, to enumerate storage devices it talks to UDisks2 on DBus. You can actually view all the information yourself by using qdbusviewer or d-feet and navigate to the org.freedesktop.UDisks2 service on the System Bus. The Places panel found in applications like Dolphin but also the Device Notifier applet in System Tray query Solid for interesting storage devices to display to the user.

On a typical system, there’s plenty of mount points (particularly Snap is notorious for creating lots of loop devices) which we don’t want to show. Nevertheless, we have to fetch them all to decide whether they’re interesting to us. For example, usually only storage devices explicitly listed in fstab, mounted from /media (your typical USB stick drive), or originating in the user’s home directory (an ISO image in your Downloads folder) are displayed.

Currently, owing to Solid’s modular nature and the fact that a lot of its original code was written in KDE 4 times where many API conveniences in DBus and UDisks didn’t exist yet, Solid uses the DBus Introspectable interface to enumerate all devices. This gives us an XML description of the available interfaces and object paths on the service. As you can imagine, receiving and processing that data string can be quite expensive. Furthermore, for every device that was enumerated, a Solid Device instance is created which then fetches all properties from all interfaces on the relevant object, which again can be slow. The DBus interfaces an object implements in UDisks gives us a good idea of what type of storage we’re dealing with, for example org.freedesktop.UDisks.Loop contains properties regarding loop devices, such as the original path of the image file that has been mounted, which in turn is also a org.freedesktop.UDisks.Block device, and so on.

Retrieving a mount point via DBus, eventually you realize that “47” is forward slash.

There must be a better way to do this, right? There is! It’s called org.freedesktop.DBus.ObjectManager. It lets you fetch all objects and their properties in a single call. This would allow Solid to query everything at once on startup and then only fetch individual properties when they get invalidated or a new device is plugged in at runtime.

Both encrypted drives and optical media are somewhat special in that they’re a drive (or container) containing the actual media or partition. While a USB stick just disappears entirely as you unplug it, a DVD drive will only have its media ejected. It means we need to monitor the drive and check its media availability and then announce the disc inside of it. However, when I asked fellow KDE developers to test my changes, the patch-set worked fine with the CD-ROM drive emulated in a virtual machine but failed miserably with a legit drive. The situation with Audio CDs was even worse since they don’t have a regular file system associated with. And guess what: there’s also CDs that contian both audio and data.

I asked around on KDE’s Matrix channels whether someone might have a spare USB CD-ROM drive and is willing to help. The other day MartinR approached me in the KDE neon channel and said he had a spare one he could mail somewhere. When it arrived a week later, I immediately tried it out (it’s been some time since I’ve seen a device with a USB Y cable) and it indeed let me iron out a bunch of remaining issues with the original patch-set. There’s other examples, too, where having the actual hardware is key. For instance, in order to properly develop HDR support in KWin, the developers need to have an actual screen capable of displaying it.

KWin Wayland running in HDR mode on a portable OLED screen, courtesy of Xaver (the picture of course doesn’t do it justice)

The change isn’t actually merged yet as I am in the process of writing a fake UDisks2 service for Solid. This would let us run a bunch of automated tests, particularly for the weird cases, and ensure that my refactor doesn’t cause any regressions. Solid has unit tests for its general working but not specifically to the way it interacts with UDisks2. A bug in Solid that renders your data inaccessible (sorry about that encrypted drives bug the other week) or causes the shell or some KDE background service to crash upon plugging in a device would be a disaster.

Having said all of that, let me thank you again very much, without your generous donation I would not have been able to realize this project. On my laptop, the time it took to initialize a KFilePlacesModel went down from 55–60 ms to just under 20 ms. The number of DBus calls it places to the UDisks2 service went down from around 60 “get all properties”, 45 “introspect”, and 15 “get this particular property” calls to a single “get all managed objects” call, and one “introspect” call I have yet to hunt down. I’m sure our users will very much appreciate a faster starting Dolphin and snappier file dialog! Also many thanks to Fabian Vogt and notably Jan R. for continued advice and testing.

If you have a KDE development setup (and if you don’t, go set one up), please test this Solid patch, and let me know if it causes any trouble for you!

Make sure you commit anything you want to end up in the KDE Gear 24.05
releases to them

Next Dates

• April 25 2024: 24.05 Freeze and Beta (24.04.80) tag & release
• May 9, 2024: 24.05 RC (24.04.90) Tagging and Release
• May 16, 2024: 24.05 Tagging
• May 23, 2024: 24.05 Release

https://community.kde.org/Schedules/KDE_Gear_24.05_Schedule

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-16.

The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet afloat

Tags: tech, internet, infrastructure

Very fascinating piece. This shows the underappreciated job of maintaining the subsea cables needed for the Internet to function and how extreme the conditions can be. Definitely a peculiar life for the folks in that trade… also shows the repairs are clearly underfunded and that not enough people are embracing this career. And now, add geopolitics to the mix, it should make you wonder how all of this work at all and for how long it’ll keep working.

https://www.theverge.com/c/24070570/internet-cables-undersea-deep-repair-ships

Where The Wild Things Are: Brute-Force SSH Attacks In The Wild And How To Stop Them : Flux Research Group

Tags: tech, ssh, security

Interesting study on the brute force attacks against SSH. It gives plenty of insights and leads to a potential approach to detect most of them.

https://www.flux.utah.edu/paper/singh-nsdi24

Neverest CLI

Tags: tech, email, tools, command-line

Looks like a nice tool to backup and restore emails. Probably to check out next time you migrate your emails to another server.

https://pimalaya.org/neverest/cli/latest/

Mysterious Moving Pointers - blomqu.ist

Tags: tech, c++, memory

Interesting case… even though honestly we shouldn’t need to dig out this kind of details.

https://blomqu.ist/posts/2024/move/

Traces the shared-object dependencies of a binary, and graphs them

Tags: tech, library, dependencies

Neat little tool. Since I had to do this kind of work a few times, this is indeed a good idea to have a public and maintained script for it.

https://github.com/stolk/sotrace

Create graphs from your CommonJS, AMD or ES6 module dependencies

Tags: tech, dependencies, javascript, tools

Looks like a nice tool to explore dependencies in JS based projects.

https://github.com/pahen/madge

Setting up PostgreSQL for running integration tests

Tags: tech, tests, performance, databases, postgresql

Interesting use of database templates and memory disks to greatly speed up test executions.

https://gajus.com/blog/setting-up-postgre-sql-for-running-integration-tests

WebXR retro computer simulation | Dom Pajak

Tags: tech, web, 3d, xr

Funny side project. This shows well many of the challenges one should expect when working on mixed reality projects. It’s also nice to see how the ecosystem matured for such features in the browser.

https://www.dompajak.com/blog/webxr-beeb-virtual-beeb/index.html

Spectral Ray Tracing

Tags: tech, 3d, art, physics

Interesting approach to have a ray tracer which doesn’t quite follow physics for artistic purposes.

https://larswander.com/writing/spectral-ray-tracing/

What we talk about when we talk about ‘root cause’ · GitHub

Tags: tech, failure, project-management, product-management

This is definitely an ambiguous term. You need to know where stand the people employing it in order to figure out the exact meaning of “root cause”.

https://github.com/readme/guides/root-cause

Why you need a “WTF Notebook”

Tags: management, coaching, learning, organization

Definitely this. Listen and write down issues before you start to complain. There might be reasons why things are as they are. Take the time to understand them and refine to have a better feedback.

https://www.simplermachines.com/why-you-need-a-wtf-notebook/

Mental Health in Software Engineering

Tags: tech, work, life, management, burnout, health

A good reminder that mental health can be hard to keep in check in our profession. Pay attention to how you feel, anxiety is a sneaky foe. Lots can be done to improve if taken care of early enough.

https://vadimkravcenko.com/shorts/mental-health-in-software-engineering/

This is a teenager

Tags: sociology, politics, data-visualization

Excellent visualization which shows how adverse experiences during childhood shape our lives as adults.

https://pudding.cool/2024/03/teenagers/

Bye for now!

Hey everyone! Here is a new video explanation of the changes we have done. This time we tackled Labplot, maps, and media icons! Can you believe it? We are now officially past the mid-way for the icons. So exciting!

Akademy 2024 will be a hybrid event held simultaneously in Würzburg, Germany, and Online.

Hundreds of participants from the global KDE community, the wider free and open source software community, local organisations and software companies will gather at this year's Akademy 2024 conference. The event will take place in Würzburg and Online from Saturday 7th September to Thursday 12th September.

KDE developers, artists, designers, translators, users, writers, sponsors and supporters from around the world will meet face-to-face to discuss key technology issues, explore new ideas and strengthen KDE's innovative and dynamic culture.

Register now and join us for engaging talks, workshops, BoFs and coding sessions. Collaborate with your fellow KDE contributors to fix bugs, pioneer new features and immerse yourself in the world of open source.

For more information about the conference, visit the Akademy 2024 website.

Tuesday, 16 April 2024. Today KDE releases a bugfix update to KDE Plasma 6, versioned 6.0.4.

This release adds three weeks' worth of new translations and fixes from KDE's contributors. The bugfixes are typically small but important and include:

• Foldermodel: Export urls to the Desktop Portal on drag and copy. Commit.
• System Monitor: Fix the column configuration dialog being too small on the overview page. Commit. Fixes bug #482008
• Applets/battery: Check actual battery for charge state workaround. Commit.

View full changelog

The post Kdenlive 24.02.2 released appeared first on Kdenlive.

We’re a few weeks after the KDE 6 Megarelease and while many people have it working well there were too many problems in KDE neon’s rollout.

We’ll be hosting two Open Door Chats on KDE meet tomorrow (Tue 16 April) where users can talk to the developers to talk about any problems you had.

https://meet.kde.org/b/jon-0yw-xqi-sk6 The access code will be posted on the KDE neon Telegram group and Matrix room or e-mail [email protected] for it

Chats at 09:00 UTC (10:00 BST, 11:00 CEST) and 19:00 UTC (20:00 BST, 21:00 CEST) Tue 16 April 2024

Marknote uses QTextDocument for its WYSIWYG text editor. This is surpringly quite powerful and thanks to some code borrowed from KMail rich text editor, it wasn’t hard to implement huge part of the markdown specification.

But while QTextDocument is great, I hit quickly some limits. This is why I started fixing some of them and I already have some patches up for review in Qt.

Default table style

By default the style of the tables looks straight from the 90s, I submitted a patch to use something a bit nicer: https://codereview.qt-project.org/c/qt/qtbase/+/554132

Old style

New style

This is easy to change in the app itself and this is already the case in Marknote and NeoChat table rendering, but by default I believe Qt should provides a nice style so that apps don’t need to figure out how to overwrite the default style.

While working on this, I also noticed that the border-collapse property was not supported by the layout engine in QtQuick and only in QtWidget. This resulted in the border of the tables to be twice as thick as they should be. This was fortunately fixed by a simple patch: https://codereview.qt-project.org/c/qt/qtdeclarative/+/554151

Responsive images

A width and an height can be assigned to an image in a QTextDocument by using the respectives html attributes <img height="500" width="500" \>.This works correctly when the window size is known and static but less so then the window can be resized as will be the user. A common technique in web design is to add the following styles to the website:

And while QTextDocument support some CSS properties, max-width wasn’t implemented. Adding the support for more properties in the HTML and CSS parser is quite simple as it was just forwarding the value of the max-width attribute to the QTextImageHandler, and a bit complicated was the handling of the % unit as previously only px and em was supported by Qt.

This resulted in two more patches, one for QtTextDocument and QtWidget and one for QtQuick.

Future

Hopefully these patches will be reviewed and merged soon. Afterward I want to add support for a few more CSS properties like: border-radius for images and some other elements, as well the border-{width, style, color} properties for paragraphs to better support <blockquote /> (important when displaying emails).