Continue reading "Blasting bugs and passing reviews — Kalendar devlog 19"
…But after you read this post, I bet you’ll want to jump straight to Plasma 5.24 already! A lot of good keyboard navigation and Discover-related work was done this week, as well as loads of bugfixes.
Skanlite now supports scanning to PDF! (single page only at this point; Skanpage supports multi-page PDF scan, though) (Alexander Stippich, Skanlite 21.12)
Gwenview now shows you an estimate of the image’s new file size when you’re in the middle of resizing it (Antonio Prcela, Gwenview 21.12):
Task Manager tasks now have a “move to Activity” context menu item (Benjamin Navarro, Plasma 5.24):
Okular’s Bookmarks menu now reloads itself properly and continues to display the correct set of bookmarks when switching between open documents (Albert Astals Cid, Okular 21.08.3)
Spectacle now takes correctly-colored screenshots on screens with 10-bit-per-channel color support enabled (Bernie Innocenti, Spectacle 21.12)
Automatic screen rotation now works while the “only in tablet mode” setting is in use (John Clark, Plasma 5.23)
Logging in using the login screen’s “Other…” page where you can enter a username and password once again works (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.23.1, and distros should be backporting it immediately)
The Plasma Wayland session no longer crashes immediately after login if you happen to be using the “Right Alt never chooses 3rd level” advanced keyboard setting (Andrey Butirsky, Plasma 5.23.1)
KWin no longer sometimes randomly crashes when you quit Firefox (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.23.1)
The kded5 background daemon no longer sometimes randomly crashes when using a multi-screen setup (Fabian Vogt, Plasma 5.23.1)
Discover no longer crashes when clicking on the “Installed” page when using a distro like Gentoo which has no distro-packaged apps and you’re using Discover to get Flatpaks and Snaps (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.23.1)
Right-clicking on a file on the desktop when multiple files are selected no longer de-selects all the files you didn’t right-click on (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.23.1)
OpenConnect VPNs can now be connected to as expected if you have an FSID-protected key passphrase with a user certificate but no private key (Raphael Kubo da Costa, Plasma 5.23.1)
In the Plasma Wayland session, windows of some apps no longer open at the smallest possible size the first time the apps are launched (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.23.1)
In the Plasma Wayland session, Maximized GNOME apps now fully update their contents in the whole window, not just most of the window (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.23.1)
Switching between views on the Application Dashboard is now nice and fast (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.23.1)
UI elements in the Notifications applet no longer sometimes overlap when there are a lot of notifications form different apps visible (Carl Schwan, Plasma 5.24)
Menus no longer have an extra outline around the edges when using a fractional global scale factor (Tatsuyuki Ishi, Plasma 5.24)
The Widget Explorer sidebar’s vertical scrollbar is no longer always visible when when the current view isn’t scrollable (Méven Car, Plasma 5.24)
Volume sliders in the Audio Volume applet once again have a background; two different colors are used to distinguish the maximum volume level from the volume of the currently-playing or recording audio (Tanbir Jishan, Plasma 5.24):
The Plasma Wayland session no longer sometimes crashes when you repeatedly hover and un-hover Task Manager thumbnails under certain circumstances (Vlad Zahorodnii, Frameworks 5.88)
Sharing a file to Telegram when installed from a Flatpak once again works (Alexander Kernozhitsky, Frameworks 5.88)
It’s once again possible to change the icons of panel app launchers (Fabio Bas, Frameworks 5.88)
The 16px size of the im-user-offline icon is now displayed with the correct color (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.88)
Spectacle no longer recommends that you install Vokoscreen or OBS if they’re already installed (Anthony Wang, Frameworks 5.88)
A constellation of issues related to windows getting stuck in ghost form after switching virtual desktops or disappearing after using the Show Desktop feature has now been fixed (Vlad Zahorodnii, Qt 5.15.3 via the KDE patch collection)
Dolphin’s prompt to restart the app after changing settings in the version control plugin now offers you a button that will do so when clicked (Someone going by the pseudonym “Blaster goo”, Dolphin 21.12)
Discover no longer shows a redundant tooltip when you hover the cursor over the size text for an app or a package (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.23)
In the Plasma Wayland session, the virtual keyboard now only appears when you explicitly focus a text-based UI control with a touch or stylus poke (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.24)
The Networks applet is now fully keyboard navigable, including niceties like hitting the down arrow key to go to the first item in the list and making the tab key go to the next button in the focused list item (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.24)
In the same vein, the Clipboard applet is now also fully keyboard navigable! (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.24)
Discover now tries to help less technical users learn what they can do next if they search for an app they know exists but nothing is found (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.24):
Discover now shows a bottom tab bar in narrow/mobile mode, and its sidebar handles no longer cover up the content area (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.24):
Discover now switches its home page to a two-column card view when the window is very wide (Felipe Kinoshita, Plasma 5.24):
Notifications about video files now display a thumbnail in the notification, just like for image files (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.24):
Header and title text in notifications now has better contrast and visibility (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.24):
The “add a keyboard layout” dialog is now much simpler and easier to use (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.24):
KWin’s “Pack Window X” shortcuts have been renamed to “Move window X” to make their purpose clearer (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.24):
The Digital Clock applet now has a “Date always below time” option to complement its “Date always beside time” and “Automatic” options (Yuval Brik, Plasma 5.24)
Section headers in Kirigami FormLayouts are now horizontally centered and slightly larger in size (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.88):
Keep in mind that this blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! Tons of KDE apps whose development I don’t have time to follow aren’t represented here, and I also don’t mention backend refactoring, improved test coverage, and other changes that are generally not user-facing. If you’re hungry for more, check out https://planet.kde.org/, where you can find blog posts by other KDE contributors detailing the work they’re doing.
Have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover 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!
Finally, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.
I've been hearing about ninja, I had looked at it some time in the past, and did some local basic benchmarking (using time), and didn't find a huge difference in build times, both from scratch and incrementally. I tried ninja again recently and found one feature that sells it pretty well to me, it can show the build progress on one line in the terminal.
So I switched to ninja to see how that goes, seems to work OK, but a new tool, new quirks, right? :).
I happened to be using git interactive rebase, and so was jumping between commits, some files were renamed (with git mv), that's when ninja failed to build incrementally, clearing the build dir and starting anew, worked fine. But incremental builds are very useful, otherwise the waiting times between the usual "modify code, compile, test, repeat" cycles would be longer, and those waiting times aren't my favourite pastime. The workaround turned out to be simple, touch CMakeLists.txt file in the top source dir, then run ninja again and it should pick up the changes.
FWIW, that touch CMakeLists.txt method works too if say, you built KIO against some other Framework's libfoo.so.n, then libfoo.so.n was updated to .n+1, which would make the incremental build fail (with make at least, haven't seen that with ninja (yet?)), touch the file, and it picks up the changes (probably since it will check the build dependencies again).
Have fun hacking at code.
On October the 13th, the Italian broadcaster Mediaset showed a 2-minute clip during the prime-time Comedy Show Honolulu on its Italia 1 channel. This is that clip:
The “News from the Future” segment was produced using Kdenlive, and that is a milestone for our community because, along with the recent inclusion of Kdenlive in ASWF’s landscape catalog (https://landscape.aswf.io/), it places Kdenlive on a whole new level.
Our beloved application was able to deliver the content keeping to a deadline (which on TV is always very tight), at the requested quality standard, and in the required format. Also, Kdenlive allowed us to quickly carry out a lot of the modifications the network asked for to better adjust the content to their internal policy.
But this is not the end of our quest for quality and improvement, in fact, it is only the beginning. It is, however, a sign we are moving in the right direction. But we cannot carry on without you, our community. You help us improve, and we would love to share your recent productions with the world. Send us your work and help us and others learn how Kdenlive is being used and how the community is growing.
Thank you for being part of Kdenlive.
The Kubuntu Team is happy to announce that Kubuntu 21.10 has been released, featuring the ‘beautiful’ KDE Plasma 5.22: simple by default, powerful when needed.
Codenamed “Impish Indri”, Kubuntu 21.10 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.
The team has been hard at work through this cycle, introducing new features and fixing bugs.
Under the hood, there have been updates to many core packages, including a new 5.13-based kernel, KDE Frameworks 5.86, KDE Plasma 5.22 and KDE Gear 21.08.
Kubuntu has seen many updates for other applications, both in our default install, and installable from the Ubuntu archive.
Krita, Kdevelop, Yakuake, and many many more applications are updated.
Applications for core day to day usage are included and updated, such as Firefox, VLC and Libreoffice.
For a list of other application updates, and known bugs be sure to read our release notes.
Download Kubuntu 21.10, or learn how to upgrade from 21.04.
Note: For upgrades from 21.04, there may a delay of a few hrs to days between the official release announcements and the Ubuntu Release Team enabling upgrades.
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2021-41.
Tags: assange, wikileaks
How a court case crumbles… there is nothing meaningful in the Assange case. Makes it all the more obvious that it is purely political.
https://stundin.is/grein/14117/
Tags: tech, dotnet, free-software, microsoft
More details coming out about the .NET Foundation drama. This indeed looks bad and concerning regarding the stewardship of this foundation.
https://robmensching.com/blog/posts/2021/10/6/how-the-.net-foundation-kerfuffle-became-a-brouhaha/
Tags: tech, programming, craftsmanship
This is an excellent list, I admit I agree with most of it. Couple of those realizations are in fact a deep part of what I do.
https://www.simplethread.com/20-things-ive-learned-in-my-20-years-as-a-software-engineer/
Tags: tech, web, minimalism
Goes a bit in various directions but still interesting food for thought on the various way to strive for tech minimalism in what we produce.
https://benhoyt.com/writings/the-small-web-is-beautiful/
Tags: tech, virtualization, desktop
This looks like a simple and efficient tool for the task. I also like the fact that it’s just a bunch of bash scripts.
https://github.com/wimpysworld/quickemu
Tags: tech, windows, Wayland, linux
Interesting integration of Wayland in WSL.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/wslg-architecture/
Tags: tech, typescript
The ReadOnly and unknown type tricks are especially interesting to improve the type safety further with this language.
https://www.cstrnt.dev/blog/three-typescript-tricks
Tags: tech, kde, free-software
I couldn’t end this week review without mentioning this. :-)
Happy birthday indeed! 25 years already! Still young, lots more to come.
Bye for now!
So first things first... Congrats KDE we rock...
25 years fantastic...
Now I was resting after some rather busy work days and came to an article on phorinix about KDE ... And I get to this user comment on the comment section..
"
And it's still ugly as hell by default. How difficult is it for KDE devs to create a nice and polished default theme? They invest a lot in bug fixes, new features, new functions etc, but they forget about the interface theme...."
Witch is fine I used to get this sort of thing all the time back in the day...
But on the discussion that follow a lot of confusion started to appear..
It's not new confusion, but... Somehow, now that I'm not as involved into the day to day design of it, it really made me angry...
If you you like open source you embrace it fully and embrace that it is about freedom, and part of that freedom is to make a desktop for people that don't mind options.. you like a different desktop with less options?, great we in open source also made that for you enjoy.. and a ton of other things in between, that is what is great about it.. freedom to experiment.. freedom to choose..
The vast majority of the Designers in KDE do their work in their free time without any more compensation than an occasional thank you, back in my time we were no more than 2-3 people at any given time...
Please stop comparing us to the likes of Apple and Microsoft, 2-3 designers can't do the work that you expect from multiple hundreds ? The simple fact that sometimes we nail things better is bloody amazing.. so... Yeah... c'mon we do it for the users not to get random abuse online...
Ok rant mode off...
Congrats KDE what we do works for me and millions more.. love what we, you do...
We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 6 Beta !
clau-cambra
