Qt Quick Controls 2 applications provide a native look and feel for several target platforms by using styles such as the macOS, Windows, or the Material style for Android. This has so far not been the case for iOS. QQC2 applications running on iOS did not look native and developers had to manually customise the controls or create their own style in order to give their UIs a more native look.
Today we break ground. Today we launch the first of what will be many fundraisers for specific projects. Our goal is to get funds directly into the hands of the people who make the software.
Up until now, when KDE has run a fundraiser, or received donations, the proceedings have gone to KDE as a whole. We use the money to fund operational costs, such as office rent, server maintenance, and salaries; and to pay for travel expenses for community members, event costs, and so on. This has worked well and helps the KDE Community and common project to flourish.
But the fundraiser starting today is very different. For the first time KDE is running a fundraiser for a specific project: today we have the ambitious goal of raising 15,000€ for the Kdenlive team. The funds will be given to contributors to help Kdenlive take the next step in the development of KDE's advanced, free and open video-editing application. For the record, on the cards for upcoming releases are nested timelines, a new effects panel, and improving the overall performance of Kdenlive, making it faster, more responsive, and even more fun to work with.
The advantages for the Kdenlive team members are many, but mainly there is no need for them to worry about setting up and managing bank accounts, or, indeed, a whole foundation. KDE's financial, legal, promotional, and admin teams are there for Jean Baptiste, Julius, Camille, Farid, Massimo, and Eugen, and are helping make the process as streamlined and painless as possible.
There are also immense advantages for the KDE Community as a whole. This event will set the basis for similar future fundraisers for all KDE projects. Our aim is that contributors be able to work on their Free Software projects with the peace of mind that comes from having their financial needs covered.
Want to help? Head over to the Kdenlive fundraiser page and donate now.
Want to help more? Join KDE and contribute to building the future of KDE.
Are you using Kubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish, our current stable LTS release? Or are you already running our development builds of the upcoming 22.10 Kinetic Kudu?
We currently have Plasma 5.25.90 (Plasma 5.26 Beta) available in our Beta PPA for Kubuntu 22.04 and for the 22.10 development series.
However this is a beta release, and we should re-iterate the disclaimer from the upstream release announcement:
DISCLAIMER: This release contains untested and unstable software. It is highly recommended you do not use this version in a production environment and do not use it as your daily work environment. You risk crashes and loss of data.
https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/5/5.25.90/
5.26 Beta packages and required dependencies are available in our Beta PPA. The PPA should work whether you are currently using our backports PPA or not. If you are prepared to test via the PPA, then add the beta PPA and then upgrade:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kubuntu-ppa/beta && sudo apt full-upgrade -y
Then reboot.
In case of issues, testers should be prepared to use ppa-purge to remove the PPA and revert/downgrade packages.
Kubuntu is part of the KDE community, so this testing will benefit both Kubuntu as well as upstream KDE Plasma software, which is used by many other distributions too.
Please review the release announcement and changelog.
[Test Case]
* General tests:
– Does plasma desktop start as normal with no apparent regressions over 5.24?
– General workflow – testers should carry out their normal tasks, using the plasma features they normally do, and test common subsystems such as audio, settings changes, compositing, desktop affects, suspend etc.
* Specific tests:
– Check the changelog:
– Identify items with front/user facing changes capable of specific testing.
– Test the ‘fixed’ functionality or ‘new’ feature.
Testing may involve some technical set up to do, so while you do not need to be a highly advanced K/Ubuntu user, some proficiently in apt-based package management is advisable.
Testing is very important to the quality of the software Ubuntu and Kubuntu developers package and release.
We need your help to get this important beta release in shape for Kubuntu and the KDE community as a whole.
Thanks!
Please stop by the Kubuntu-devel IRC channel on libera.chat if you need clarification of any of the steps to follow.
[1] – #kubuntu-devel on libera.chat
[2] – https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/kubuntu-devel
The Krita Foundation is very happy to announce that Intel is the first Patron Member of the Foundation’s Development Fund Intel and Krita have a long history together of successful collaboration on projects like Krita Sketch, improving multithreading and HDR painting.
This strategic collaboration will deliver a series of new painting capabilities, making full use of the 12th and future Gen’s Intel Core Hybrid technology using powerful P-cores and E-cores, as well as the Intel Arc GPUs, all resulting into a more powerful painting experience with less lag. We are also excited about the support for JPEG XL, offering significantly better HDR experience and higher compression ratios, hereby meeting the needs of image delivery on the web and professional photography.’ Jerry Tsao, VP/GM of Intel CCG Mobile Enthusiast & Creator Segment.
With Intel’s support, Krita can build a more stable developer foundation, allowing to hire and retain the best developers in the industry.
With this new Intel partnership, we are already seeing improvements. A recent result is in the Krita 5.1 release: full support for the new JPEG-XL file format. JPEG-XL is a new image format that offers significantly better compression and image quality than normal JPG images. The file format is currently behind experimental flags in most web browsers, so it is an upcoming format that we want to support. Together with Intel we are working with the JPEG-XL developers and the Chrome developers to ensure interoperability.
In the future, the Krita community will collaborate with Intel in the creation of technical documentation in the form of white papers. These white papers will explore new art and painting technologies. Krita will add the new ideas and features in the application, and assist Intel in writing the white paper explaining the new technologies.
The Krita Development Fund accepts donations to support sponsored developers to work on exciting new features, performance improvements and stability improvements, as well as outreach to users in the form of manuals, tutorials and resources for painters.
Learn more at fund.krita.org
The post Intel Becomes First Krita Development Fund Corporate Gold Patron appeared first on Krita.
Last month, I was in Saumur (France) to attempt a KDE Promo sprint. This was my first sprint since the pandemic, actually this might even be my first ever official KDE sprint as before the pandemic I primarely attended conferences (Akademy, Fosdem, Libre Graphics Meeting, Linux App Summit, …) but no official sprint.
The sprint took place during the weekend and was a great occassion to meet Allon, Aron and Neophytos for the first time. Aside from them I also meet Claudio, Paul, Joseph and Aniqua would I had already had the chance to meet before.
While the sprint was only 2 days long, I think we had some really productive discussions about the general strategie we should take and also how to move forward with some stuck tasks.
Personally I was quite happy to unblock one of my previous idea of creating “KDE for”-webpages. I already created a KDE for Kids page a long time ago but never managed to find the time and motivation to create more of them. So during the sprint, we started to brainstorm a bit for a “KDE for Creators” page, you can already take a look at the wip prototype here and if you have suggestions and want to help we have a phab task.
Aside from all the productive discussions, Allon made us discover Saumur. It’s a really nice city near the Loire. But I need to say that I was quite depressed at the level of water in the Loire, it looked almost empty. Good reminder that climate change is real and human made.
Aside from the sad state of the Loire, we also tasted a lot of good food. We had some gallete bretones on Sunday evening and it was delicious. Allon also invited us Saturday night at his place and he made fouée for us.
It’s a local speciallity and it was really good and I was so full at the end of the day. Thank you Allon and your family for being such wonderful hosts!
The first maintenance release of the 22.08 series is out fixing issues with project archiving, same track transitions among others.
The post Kdenlive 22.08.1 released appeared first on Kdenlive.
Tuesday night, I managed to break the screen of my laptop. This is particular annoying when you don’t have any external screen at home and need to work. Fortunately the scren wasn’t completely broken, and I managed to survice Wednesday, with half of the screen working.
From half of the screen working on Wednesday, the situation got worse on Tursday and I was forced to find another solution. My only other Linux powered devices at home were a PinePhone and my SteamDeck. Performance wise, the choice was easy and I choose to try to use my SteamDeck. And so my workstation on Tursday and Friday ended up like this:
I connected the dev environment of my laptop with SSH and it kinda worked. I did some commit. I even managed to do call and share my screen for a demo/presentation at work. But still the experience on the small screen wasn’t that great.
Fortunately, I ordered a new laptop (Thinkpad E14 gen 4) and it arrived on Friday afternoon. The new laptop has a working screen but no mainline wifi drivers. So took me a bit more time than expected to build and sign the out-of-tree drivers with secure boot enabled.
I love hardware.
As previously announced, Akademy 2022 will be happening in Barcelona at the beginning of October.
On top of that, Akademy-es [the Spain spin-off of Akademy] is also happening in Barcelona the days before (29 and 30 of September). So if you're interested in KDE and understand Spanish a bit, please drop by https://www.kde-espana.org/akademy-es-2022 and register yourself at https://www.kde-espana.org/akademy-es2022/registro.php
There's also a quite pretty t-shirt you can order but if you want it, you have to register BEFORE the end of the weekend if you want it!
Since the last update we finally have all Frameworks build with Qt 6 and got one more platform covered on the CI. We are also only two weeks away from Akademy, which is where we’ll make important decisions on how to proceed.
Besides Linux and Android we now also have FreeBSD CI coverage for the Qt 6 builds, thanks to Qt 6 having become available as FreeBSD packages. The roll-out is largely complete, and was remarkably painless. Pretty much everything built without needing additional fixes, and unit test results match the results with Qt 5.
That’s even more surprising given there is one crucial difference in the FreeBSD CI: it doesn’t use separate containers for the Qt 5 and Qt 6 builds. Instead both versions are built on the same system, with both Qt versions installed. This is of course something that eventually has to work, but that has caused various unintended version mixes in the beginning.
The last missing platform for full Qt 5 parity is now Windows. Work for creating a CI image for that is meanwhile under way as well.
One of the more invasive changes when porting to Qt 6 is the way how shader programs are handled. In Qt 5 that was done by providing OpenGL shaders directly, Qt 6 abstracts the graphics backends (OpenGL, Vulkan, D3D, Metal) and expects shaders in a backend-neutral GLSL format. Those are then translated by the Qt Shader Tools into the specific backend formats. See Eskil’s recent blog post for details.
While that technically makes sense it requires rather substantial changes to the shader code, the build system and the integration code, which is why we had stayed away from this until now. However corresponding changes have meanwhile been integrated in Kirigami, KQuickCharts, Plasma Frameworks and KWin.
With this done all non-deprecated Frameworks can be built against Qt 6 now.
Another noteworthy milestone was being able to run a nested KWin Wayland session with a Qt 6 based KWin. This is not only an important step towards eventually bringing up a Qt 6 based Plasma session, it’s also rather reassuring given the many changes around Wayland in Qt 6, and the long “blind” work on porting KWin.
Akademy is now only two weeks away. Besides the KF6-related talks by Alex, Nico and myself, we’ll also have a KF6 BoF on Monday Oct 3rd at 15:00 CEST in room 1. That’s where we have to discuss and take some decisions on how to proceed, as with the current progress I don’t think we are terribly far away from branching anymore.
As those are questions not only affecting KDE Frameworks contributors, I can only encourage everyone to participate and provide their respective input on this!
This week we have, like, a quadruple whammy. We released the Plasma 5.26 beta, annihilated a huge number of high profile bugs, added new features, and improved the UI throughout Plasma!
Ark has now been ported to use KHamburgerMenu for a cleaner default user interface (Andrey Butirsky, Ark 22.12. Link):
Not quite a new feature, more like a brought-back-from-the-dead feature, but anyway… You can once again use a flag+label style for the Keyboard Layout plasmoid (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.26. Link):
You can now add an “Open Terminal” menu item to the desktop context menu if you want (Neal Gompa, Daniel Vrátil, Jan Grulich, Marc Deop, and Rex Dieter, Plasma 5.26. Link):
Info Center now has a page where you can see support info and technical details about the KWin window manager, which can be useful when filing bugs (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.26. Link):
The opening/closing animation speed for the Overview, Desktop Grid, and Present Windows effects has been changed back to what it used to be: 300ms (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.26. Link)
When previewing the color temperature adjustment on System Settings’ Night Color page, the message that tells you what’s going on is now in an OSD, not inline on the page (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 5.26. Link)
When the virtual keyboard is visible, there’s now always a button in the System Tray to close it, even when you’re not in Touch Mode (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.26. Link)
You can now close notification pop-ups by middle-clicking on them (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.26. Link)
The Plasma Widget Explorer, Alternatives pop-up, and all Plasma plasmoids that use expanding list items can now be navigated entirely using the arrow keys (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.26. Link 1, link 2, and link 3)
You can now use the Ctrl+Alt+[arrow keys] keyboard shortcuts to re-arrange items in Kickoff, the Quick Launch plasmoid, and the Task Manager (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.26. Link 1, link 2, and link 3)
Inactive Breeze-themed tab bar tabs are no longer quite so distractedly dark when using a dark color scheme (Waqar Ahmed, Plasma 5.26. Link)
Switching to the next month, year, or decade in the Digital Clock plasmoid now shows a nice animation (Tanbir Jishan, Plasma 5.26. Link)
The Networks and Bluetooth plasmoids now display relevant actions in their context menus for faster access (Oliver Beard, Plasma 5.27. Link 1 and link 2):
When using the “Accent color from wallpaper” feature, the accent color generated by the system should now look significantly nicer, better reflecting the most eye-catching color in the image (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.26 with Frameworks 5.99. Link)
The “Download new Wallpapers” dialog’s footer now looks better and isn’t visually broken (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.99. Link 1 and link 2):
Standalone links in Kirigami-based apps now always have an underline, so you can more easily tell they’re links (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.99. Link)
(This is a curated list of e.g. HI and VHI priority bugs, Wayland showstoppers, major regressions, etc.)
When using an NVIDIA GPU in the Plasma Wayland session, the Application Launcher menu once again always appears when you click on its Panel icon (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.26. Link)
Dragging windows in the Desktop Grid effect once no longer uses a visually broken animation (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.26. Link)
When the Overview, Present Windows, and Desktop Grid effects are activated with a screen corner, continuing to push the pointer into the corner when the effects are already open no longer closes them immediately (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.26. Link)
Scrolling on the desktop to switch virtual desktops now always works (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.26. Link)
Even though we haven’t fully finally for-realsies fixed the issue of Plasma desktops and panels being scrambled or lost, panels should now at least be less likely to get lost (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.26. Link)
It’s once again possible to tell identically-named screens apart in the System Settings Display & Monitor page’s screen view and “Identify” feature (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.26. Link 1 and link 2)
In the Plasma Wayland session, your keyboard delay and repeat rate settings are now respected (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.26. Link)
A variety of fixes were made to make autostart apps more likely to autostart successfully when using the Systemd startup feature: Systemd itself is now more tolerant of minor issues in autostarted desktop files, and both KMenuEdit and the properties dialog make it harder for you to create or edit a desktop file in a way that’s invalid (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.26 with Frameworks 5.99 and systemd 252. Link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, and link 5)
In the Plasma X11 session, KDE apps now correctly remember their window sizes and positions on multi-screen arrangements (Richard Bízik, Frameworks 5.99. Link)
Using a touchpad to scroll through scrollable lists in Kirigami-provided overlay sheets should just kinda be a lot less janky in general (Marco Martin, Frameworks 5.99. Link)
Other bug-related information of interest:
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.
If you’re a developer, check out our 15-Minute Bug Initiative. Working on these issues makes a big difference quickly! Otherwise, 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.
CarlSchwan
