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Kate KF6 Status

Tue, 2023/12/12 - 8:07pm
Current state of the port

Thanks to the help of our contributors the current state of Kate for the upcoming first Qt & KF 6 release looks very promising. This includes not just people working on Kate and KTextEditor/KSyntaxHighlighing, but all of KDE Frameworks and Qt.

I now use the KF 6 based version both at work and home exclusively after we switched the master branch over to that. So far, beside the natural issues that can occur using a branch under active development, nothing really did stick out as a blocking issue.

Build it yourself and contribute

Our official Build It guide now shows how to get the KF 6 version, too. That is the version we want to have new contributions for, the KF 5 variant is now in pure bugfix mode. If you don't just want to fix a pure KF 5 bug, please aim to contribute to the current master branch. We can still backport stuff, if really needed.

We encourage you to have a look at our merge requests, see what else is going on there and maybe start working towards your very first own contribution. The current state for the first release based on Qt & KF 6 is very good, but naturally, there is always stuff to improve!

Comparison of the KF 6 and KF 5 versions

No post about some state without some proper screenhots ;0

Here the current state of Kate on KF 6, with current Breeze and Konsole part, built like described on Build It:

Kate KF 6

More or less the same with the latest KF 5 release as shipped with NixOS:

Kate KF 5

Beside the small cleanups in the design both in Kate and Breeze, I think that looks more or less identical.

Naturally under the hood a lot of things did change, but there are no disruptive changes and all features we had in the current stable version did survive the KF 6 port.

We had more or less the same amount of feature development and bug fixing like during the KF 5 time frame, just with some KF 6 porting 'sprints' mixed in.

Thanks again to all that made that feasible.

Special thanks to Waqar Ahmed from me, he did not only get Konsole to work on Windows in KF 5, he did help a lot to get that ported to KF 6, too, beside a lot of work on all other parts of Kate and Co.! All that work is invaluable, thanks a lot :)

Just take a look at our team page, more than 100 people did contribute to our stuff just in the last 12 months, that is amazing. And not just one or two lines. During the porting a lot of other people out of the KDE community stepped up to work on API adaptions and cleanups, that is awesome. Not only did Frameworks improve, people do care and fix up the users of changed API, too.

End of the year outlook

I think the current state of the port is good. We can be proud that we are more than ready for the upcoming 'megarelease'.

If you have time to test the beta or other snapshots, feedback is welcome. Please report bugs and if you can, please help to fix them.

Not all is well in the world, but at least from the perspective of the move from KF 5 to 6, for Kate/KWrite, all seems to have worked out very good this year.

In any case, I wish all people a good end of this and an even better start in the next year.

If you celebrate Christmas or any other festivity in the next weeks, I hope you have there a good time with family and friends!

Kdenlive 23.08.4 released

Mon, 2023/12/11 - 6:49pm

Kdenlive 23.08.4 comes with a safeguard when working with variable framerate footage and fixes time remapping and subtitling issues. This version also brings back audio stem export support, which allows to render audio tracks as separate files. In case you are wondering why there is no 23.12 major release this month, the KDE community is gearing up for a mega release which will upgrade our software stack to Qt6 and KF6 frameworks. Although these are mostly under the hood changes, it means having a more modern and stable interface with improved Wayland support for Linux users. This transition paves the way for the upcoming performance enhancements effort, such as the integration of GPU effects.

Full log

  • Fix transparency lost on rendering nested sequences. Commit. Fixes bug #477771.
  • Fix guides categories not applied on new document. Commit. Fixes bug #477617.
  • Check MLT’s render profiles for missing codecs. Commit. See bug #475029.
  • Fix crash on auto subtitle with subtitle track selected. Commit.
  • Fix qml warning (incorrect number of args). Commit.
  • Fix audio stem export. Commit.
  • When pasting clips to another project, disable proxies. Commit.
  • Don’t allow creating profile with non standard and non integer fps from a clip. Commit.
  • Fix mix not always deleted when moving grouped clips on same track. Commit.
  • Fix remap crashes. Commit.
  • Ensure timeremap option is disabled when effect is deleted. Commit.
  • Time remap: fix changing speed broken / crashing. Commit.

The post Kdenlive 23.08.4 released appeared first on Kdenlive.

Akademy 2023 - Over a million reasons why Snaps are important.

Mon, 2023/12/11 - 12:34pm

Speaker: Ms Scarlett Moore

I will start out with the fact that snaps have had over a million downloads and with those kind of numbers, they cannot be ignored. I will continue on to describe here my journey in creating a vast amount of snaps, the automation of said snap building using invent.kde.org and Ubuntu launchpad builders. I will explain the hurdles I have overcome and what needs to be done to keep the snaps updated and how developers can help ensure the users are getting updates in a timely manner. The hard part is done, I have made it easy, just a few more minutes of your time at release.

See the slide of this talk here

KDE: KDE Snaps 23.08.4, PIM! KDE neon, Debian

Sun, 2023/12/10 - 1:33pm
KDE PIM Kaddressbook snapKDE PIM Kaddressbook snap

KDE Snaps:

This weeks big accomplishment is KDE PIM snaps! I have successfully added akonadi as a service via an akonadi content snap and running it as a service. Kaddressbook is our first PIM snap with this setup and it works flawlessly! It is available in the snap store. I have a pile of MRs awaiting approvals, so keep your eye out for the rest of PIM in the next day.

KDE Applications 23.08.4 has been released and available in the snap store.

Krita 5.2.2 has been released.

I have created a new kde-qt6 snap as the qt-framework snap has not been updated and the maintainer is unreachable. It is in edge and I will be rebuilding our kf6 snap with this one.

I am debugging an issue with the latest Labplot release.

KDE neon:

This week I helped with frameworks release 5.113 and KDE applications 23.08.4.

I also worked on the ongoing Unstable turning red into green builds as the porting to qt6 continues.

Debian:

With my on going learning packaging for all the programming languages, Rust packaging: I started on Rustic https://github.com/rustic-rs/rustic unfortunately, it was a bit of wasted time as it depends on a feature of tracing-subcriber that depends on matchers which has a grave bug, so it remains disabled.

Personal:

I do have an interview tomorrow! And it looks like the ‘project’ may go through after the new year. So things are looking up, unfortunately I must still ask, if you have any spare change please consider a donation. The phone company decided to take an extra $200.00 I didn’t have to spare and while I resolved it, they refused a refund, but gave me a credit to next months bill, which doesn’t help me now. Thank you for your consideration.

https://gofund.me/b74e4c6f

Plasma Browser Integration 1.9

Sat, 2023/12/09 - 8:52am

I’m pleased to announce the immediate availability of Plasma Browser Integration version 1.9 on the Chrome Web Store. This is a maintenance release shipping a couple of important changes as well as the usual translation updates. The extension now ships 46 different localizations and will of course continue working just fine under the upcoming Plasma 6!

Dark blue space background with stars, a cute dragon wearing a red bandana with a "K" on it, sitting ontop of the Earth which has a blue network cable plugged in whose lose end is squiggling around the KDE Plasma logoKonqi surfing the world wide web

Plasma Browser Integration bridges the gap between your browser and the Plasma desktop. It lets you share links, find browser tabs and visited websites in KRunner, monitor download progress in the notification center, and control music and video playback anytime from within Plasma, or even from your phone using KDE Connect!

The Firefox update has been stuck in review for a month now, so I decided to just release this announcement anyway. When Firefox users will get the update? I don’t know. The update on the Microsoft Edge store has been postponed for now as they demand Manifest Version 3. A migration in the works and will be released in time before Chrome starts disabling “legacy” extensions.

What’s new?

(also see the Changelog Page on our Community Wiki)

Reworked page injection code

While most Plasma Browser Integration features can be provided independently from any websites by using official browser extension APIs, adding media controls and the Web Share API requires adding some variables to the website’s JavaScript environment. Previously, this was done by injecting JavaScript tags into the DOM which then had access to the website’s realm. However, with the advent of Content Security Policy this became more and more restricted. While this is a good thing, it proved challenging for Plasma Browser Integration to continue offering the functionality people have grown to love over the years.

Firefox in particular for the longest time has been enforcing CSP even for browser extensions with access to a particular website. However, Manifest Version 3 in Chrome also does the same, so there will soon be no way around it. Thanks to Fabian Vogt, the extension has been ported to use a static script file with all endpoints pre-defined as opposed to injecting JavaScript strings built at runtime. It then communicates back and forth with the website using custom events. This makes the extension much more resilient and future-proof but more importantly makes media controls in Firefox fully work on Spotify!

Firefox window showing the kde.org website, context menu emerging from its tab on the tab bar, last option on the menu is “Share…” highlighted by the mouse cursorGeneric “Share…” option on the tab bar

Speaking of Firefox, Joshua Jackson ported browser detection away from checking for the InstallTrigger, which is deprecated. Additionally, the generic “Share…” entry is now available on a tab’s context menu alongside KDE Connect just like on the website’s context menu.

Performance improvements

Additionally, to improve startup performance, download monitoring is now only installed once a download has been started. On startup, the browser might send us an event about every single download (often hundreds!) that is still stored in the downloads history, even though we don’t care about them. Furthermore, thanks to Ambareesh Balaji the media players are now tracked in a WeakSet to reduce the likelihood of a memory leak of keeping long gone player instances alive.

From Plasma 5.27 Media Session API album cover processing is more lenient toward malformed data: SoundCloud has a bogus letter “t” in the image size string which previously broke displaying the album cover in Plasma’s Media Player applet. I reported that issue to their support in December 2022 but the issue still hasn’t been resolved. There have also been fixes to improve players in iframes, such as an embedded Vimeo player.

Everything else

In addition to that, Plasma Browser Integration no longer sometimes pretends to be a random web app rather than the browser it launched from. The tabs runner also excludes windows from web apps now as they are in a separate window and might as well be accessed via the “Open Windows” runner.

The history runner also filters “blob” URLs. Those are URLs pointing to data dynamically generated by JavaScript and cannot be referenced after the page that created the URL has closed.

Snippet from the extension console output, showing various debug messages and warnings.Should something go wrong on the host side, you’ll see that more easily.

Calls to Native Messaging meanwhile check whether the port actually is open before sending a message. This avoids repeated console warnings being generated when the extension is installed on an unsupported system, as can easily happen when it is synced across devices to e.g. a Windows machine. Finally, debug output coming from the host binary looks much prettier in the developer console now.

Future text improvements in Qt 6.7

Fri, 2023/12/08 - 2:23pm

The Qt 6.7 feature freeze is today, and we now start the process of further stabilizing the code. The actual release is still a few months off, but I thought I would look ahead at bit at what improvements are in store for font handling in Qt and Qt Quick. More specifically there are three things discussed: Variable font support, a brand new "large font" text renderer and font shaping feature support.

Web Review, Week 2023-49

Fri, 2023/12/08 - 10:21am

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2023-49.

Mobilizon V4: the maturity stage – Framablog

Tags: tech, framasoft, privacy, social-media, foss

Another important software release. Let’s wish luck to the new maintainers!

https://framablog.org/2023/12/05/mobilisation-v4-the-maturity-stage/


Introducing Wikifunctions: first Wikimedia project to launch in a decade creates new forms of knowledge – Wikimedia Foundation

Tags: tech, wikipedia, knowledge, programming

Interesting move, I’m wondering how far this will go. Reuse of those functions in other Wikimedia project will be critical to its success.

https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2023/12/05/introducing-wikifunctions-first-wikimedia-project-to-launch-in-a-decade-creates-new-forms-of-knowledge/


Toxic comments are associated with reduced activity of volunteer editors on Wikipedia | PNAS Nexus | Oxford Academic

Tags: tech, wikipedia, knowledge, community, sociology

Very interesting study, shows how toxic comments impact contributions. Gives a good idea of the probability for people to leave. In the case of Wikipedia this highlights reasons which contribute to the lack of diversity in the contributors. This is a complex community issue in general, this studies does a good thing by shedding some light on the dynamics in the case of Wikipedia.

https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/2/12/pgad385/7457939?login=false


An Open Letter to the Python Software Foundation

Tags: tech, python, community

The fact that they felt the need to write such a letter is troubling. What’s going on in the Python Software Foundation really? Something needs to be fixed it seems.

https://pythonafrica.blogspot.com/2023/12/an-open-letter-to-python-software_5.html


Firefox on the brink? | BryceWray.com

Tags: tech, web, mozilla, google

Let’s hope it won’t get there… I wish people would abandon Chrome en masse. I unfortunately don’t see it happening and it’ll just weaken the Web.

https://www.brycewray.com/posts/2023/11/firefox-brink/


Chrome’s next weapon in the War on Ad Blockers: Slower extension updates | Ars Technica

Tags: tech, google, browser, attention-economy

Still using Chrome? What are you waiting for to change for another browser which doesn’t play against your interests.

https://arstechnica.com/google/2023/12/chromes-next-weapon-in-the-war-on-ad-blockers-slower-extension-updates/


Automakers’ data privacy practices “are unacceptable,” says US senator | Ars Technica

Tags: tech, automotive, privacy

A senator is stepping up and rightfully pointing the finger at automakers. Let’s hope more will follow.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/12/automakers-data-privacy-practices-are-unacceptable-says-us-senator/


PlayStation keeps reminding us why digital ownership sucks - The Verge

Tags: tech, DRM, copyright

If you can’t download it without DRMs you just don’t own it, you’re renting it. This is completely different.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/5/23989290/playstation-digital-ownership-sucks


Just about every Windows and Linux device vulnerable to new LogoFAIL firmware attack

Tags: tech, security, bios

Fascinating vulnerability. When the BIOS is at fault with a crappy image parser… you can’t do much to prevent problems from happening.

https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/12/just-about-every-windows-and-linux-device-vulnerable-to-new-logofail-firmware-attack/


AI and Mass Spying - Schneier on Security

Tags: tech, ai, gpt, surveillance, spy

Definitely one of the worrying aspects of reducing human labor needs for analyzing texts. Surveillance is on the brink of being increased thanks to it.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/12/ai-and-mass-spying.html


Google Researchers’ Attack Prompts ChatGPT to Reveal Its Training Data

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

A glimpse into how those generator models can present a real copyright problem… there should be more transparency on the training data sets.

https://www.404media.co/google-researchers-attack-convinces-chatgpt-to-reveal-its-training-data/


Block the Bots that Feed “AI” Models by Scraping Your Website – Neil Clarke

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

This is clearly an uphill battle. And yes, this is because it’s broken by design, it should be opt-in and not opt-out.

https://neil-clarke.com/block-the-bots-that-feed-ai-models-by-scraping-your-website/


Introducing Gemini: Google’s most capable AI model yet

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt

The Large Language Model arm race is still going strong. Models are still mostly hidden behind APIs of course, and this is likely consuming lots of energy to run. Results seem interesting though, even though I suspect they’re over inflating the “safety” built in all this. Also be careful of the demo videos, they’ve been reported as heavily edited and misleading…

https://blog.google/technology/ai/google-gemini-ai/#availability


Multifaceted: the linguistic echo chambers of LLMs - by James Padolsey

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

LLMs training had a bias from the start… and now we got a feedback loop since people are posting generated content online which is then used for training again. Expect idiosyncrasies to increase with time.

https://blog.j11y.io/2023-11-22_multifaceted/


Seamless Communication - AI at Meta

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, translation, speech

Now this is a very interesting use of generator models. I find this more exciting than the glorified chatbots.

https://ai.meta.com/research/seamless-communication/#our-approach


ChatGPT’s One-year Anniversary: Are Open-Source Large Language Models Catching up?

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

Very interesting review, we can see some interesting strengths and weaknesses. Also gives a good idea of the different ways to evaluate such models.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.16989


reaction, in replacement of fail2ban

Tags: tech, security, server, self-hosting

Could indeed turn into a nice alternative to fail2ban.

https://blog.ppom.me/en-reaction/


Standard Webhooks

Tags: tech, web, services, webhooks

Interesting attempt at having webhooks implementation a bit more standardized. This is indeed needed, currently everyone does them in slightly different ways and sometimes the quality is debatable. If it gets adopted it’d give a good baseline.

https://www.standardwebhooks.com/


You (probably) don’t need DateTime · Scorpil

Tags: tech, date, time, unix, complexity

Good reminder that the raw UNIX timestamps have interesting properties and often are enough not necessarily needing to rely on something more complex. Also gives nice criteria for picking between said timestamps and higher level types.

https://scorpil.com/post/you-dont-need-datetime/


You don’t need JavaScript for that - HTMHell

Tags: tech, web, html, css, frontend

Nice examples showing JavaScript use can be reduced in the browser. HTML and CSS are gaining nice features.

https://www.htmhell.dev/adventcalendar/2023/2/


Documentation unit tests

Tags: tech, tests, documentation

Interesting approach to reduce the amount of undocumented features because we simply forgot to update the documentation. Shows a few inspiring tricks to get there.

https://simonwillison.net/2018/Jul/28/documentation-unit-tests/


Struct initialization | Sandor Dargo’s Blog

Tags: tech, c++

Good walkthrough the finer points of members initialization in C++. Worth keeping in mind.

https://www.sandordargo.com/blog/2023/11/22/struct-initialization


When static types make your code shorter

Tags: tech, programming, type-systems

Somehow unsurprising, this is often the case: less validation code, but also less automated tests. With types you can write unwanted states out of existence.

https://evanhahn.com/when-static-types-make-your-code-shorter/


Profiling Rust programs the easy way | nicole@web

Tags: tech, rust, optimization, profiling

The Rust tooling makes it super easy to profile your programs. This is neat.

https://ntietz.com/blog/profiling-rust-programs-the-easy-way/


Topics in computer graphics

Tags: tech, graphics, 3d, learning

Very nice collection of tidbits of information for the main topics in computer graphics. A good way to get started or refresh the basics.

https://mrl.cs.nyu.edu/~perlin/graphics/


Nuclear Reactor Simulator

Tags: tech, web, game, 3d, simulation

Very cool simplified simulator. Gives a good idea of how this roughly works.

https://dalton-nrs.manchester.ac.uk/


“Smartifying” my Hi-Fi system

Tags: tech, hacking, raspberry-pi, music, networking, usb

Alright, this is definitely a cool hack.

https://blog.rgsilva.com/smartifying-my-hi-fi-system/


Deciphering Glyph :: Safer, Not Later

Tags: tech, quality, project-management, programming

An interesting interpretation of what was behind the “move fast and break things” motto which is nowadays blindly followed by some. A bit of a long piece but does the job and propose a more complete view and an alternative approach.

https://blog.glyph.im/2023/12/safer-not-later.html


TDD Isn’t Design - by Kent Beck

Tags: tech, tdd, design

Definitely this. Again TDD helps to work on the design, but it’s not a silver bullet which will give you the right design on a platter.

https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/tdd-isnt-design


A few words about Blameless culture

Tags: tech, culture, blameless, quality, trust

Shows why it’s important to go for a blameless culture, also outside of postmortem. This is definitely not easy but worth it.

https://www.gybe.ca/a-few-words-about-blameless-culture/


How to do annual planning and strategy for an engineering organization — Lena Reinhard

Tags: tech, organization, strategy, planning

Good blueprint for building up and following up (the most important part really) of a strategy in your organization.

https://www.lenareinhard.com/articles/annual-engineering-organization-strategy-planning


Return to office is dead, Stanford economist says. Here’s why

Tags: tech, remote-working

Looks like remote work is here to stay for good now.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/30/return-to-office-is-dead-stanford-economist-says-heres-why.html


RFC processes are a poor fit for most organizations - Jacob Kaplan-Moss

Tags: business, organization, decision-making

Good point on why you don’t want to drive your organization simply on RFCs. Yet another fad of “this worked for them, let’s do it as well”… per usual this fails to take into account the specificity of the context where it worked.

https://jacobian.org/2023/dec/1/against-rfcs/


First decide how to decide: “one weird trick” for easier decisions - Jacob Kaplan-Moss

Tags: tech, management, decision-making

Nice ideas for decision making in larger groups.

https://jacobian.org/2023/dec/5/how-to-decide/


Bye for now!

Krita 5.2.2 Released!

Thu, 2023/12/07 - 1:37pm

We bring you another 5.2 series bug fix release with Krita 5.2.2! Check out release notes for everything that was new in Krita 5.2.0.

Some of the highlights in this bug fix release is that we managed to track down a frequent crash on android, as well as fixing a bug where brush presets with masked brushes were not loaded correctly.

  • Make sure that the image is properly updated on frame switch on merge (Bug 476495)
  • Various fixes to the snap version, courtesy of Scarlett Moore
  • Fix a race condition when merging non-animatied layer over an animated one (Bug 476472)
  • Don’t enable combined opacity-flow option on masked brushes (Bug 476506)
  • Disable checkability of Opacity and Flow options for Masked Brushes (Bug 476505 , Bug 476076)
  • Fix redo of a flatten layer operation when it is animated (Bug 476511)
  • Hide perspective ellipse if assistants are globally hidden, courtesey of Maciej Jesionowski.
  • Fix Specific Color Selector changing to black (Bug 476614)
  • Add brush tip rotate actions and and a angle slider.
  • Extract the cache in KisMyPaintOpSettings to properly handle size updates (Bug 476141)
  • Remove wrong assert (Bug 476761)
  • Fix cancelling of the selection when doing two consequtive selections (Bug 474525)
  • Fixes for Qt: MDI titles and unbalanced non-us shortcuts (Bug 464175)
  • Draw assistants directly on the canvas (Bug 361709Bug 401940)
  • Various palette docker fixes courtesy of Mike Will
  • Better integration with windows darkmode, setting the window frame to dark when this is enabled (Bug 477266)
  • Use PreciseTimer type with KisPlaybackEngineQT (Bug 476059)
  • Various fixes to shortcuts, among others, to get altgr to work as a shortcut (Bug 459557Bug 474912Bug 469691Bug 473923)
  • Fix jumps just adjusting brush size with ‘[’ and ‘]’ shortcuts (Bug 456787)
  • Replace fcitx-qt5 with fcitx5-qt, which should help the look and feel of fcitx-based input methods.
  • Increase xmlgui version to be bigger that 5.1.6, which should solve old toolbars being reset (Bug 475698)
  • Fixes a very frequent crash caused by QAccesibility on Android (Bug 472705)

Download Windows

If you’re using the portable zip files, just open the zip file in Explorer and drag the folder somewhere convenient, then double-click on the Krita icon in the folder. This will not impact an installed version of Krita, though it will share your settings and custom resources with your regular installed version of Krita. For reporting crashes, also get the debug symbols folder.

Note that we are not making 32 bits Windows builds anymore.

Linux

The separate gmic-qt AppImage is no longer needed.

(If, for some reason, Firefox thinks it needs to load this as text: to download, right-click on the link.)

macOS

Note: if you use macOS Sierra or High Sierra, please check this video to learn how to enable starting developer-signed binaries, instead of just Apple Store binaries.

Android

We consider Krita on ChromeOS as ready for production. Krita on Android is still beta. Krita is not available for Android phones, only for tablets, because the user interface requires a large screen.

Source code md5sum

For all downloads, visit https://download.kde.org/stable/krita/5.2.2/ and click on Details to get the hashes.

Key

The Linux AppImage and the source .tar.gz and .tar.xz tarballs are signed. The signatures are here (filenames ending in .sig).

Please support Krita by making a donation or joining the development fund!

Join the Krita Development Fund

The post Krita 5.2.2 Released! appeared first on Krita.

Off-Theme Presents: Commonality

Thu, 2023/12/07 - 11:57am
For the fourth installment of Off-Theme we have a global theme based on the granddaddy of all the classic Unix desktops, a desktop that ruled the roost of the workstations from a bygone era. It is time to pay tribute to the DE that once dominated the Unix world.