We are just about ready to launch the rebase of KDE neon on Ubuntu 22.04 Firefox is the browser again now as a Snap package. This breaks plasma-browser-integration but is otherwise working fine. Release now with Snaps or spend a couple more weeks working on other package formats?
People are always saying that they want us to slow down on the features and focus on stability for a while. Well, we’ve heard you and we’re doing just that for Plasma 5.26 in general, and specifically are focusing almost entirely on bug work during the one-month beta period. The results so far have been tremendous! I suspect everyone reading this post should find something in the “Significant Bugfixes” section to be happy about! Possibly multiple things. This is the time to file your beta bugs! They’ll get fixed quickly. Let’s all help to make Plasma 5.26 the most stable release ever!
Kdenlive has now adopted KHamburgerMenu, so if you turn off its normal menu bar (which remains visible by default), you can still access its full menu structure (Julius Künzel, Kdenlive 22.12. Link)
If your keyboard has a “Calculator” button, pressing it will now open KCalc (Paul Worrall, KCalc 22.12. Link)
The global Edit Mode toolbar now has a nicer and smoother enter/exit animation (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.24.7. Link)
The Plasma Media Player and Notifications plasmoids are now grouped with system services rather than app status indicators, so your apps’ System Tray icons will always be together in a group, without these plasmoids appearing in random-seeming positions among them (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.26. Link)
You can once again switch tabs in Kickoff the Ctrl+Tab shortcut, and now also the standard ones too (Ctrl+PageUp / Ctrl+PageDown and Ctrl+[ / Ctrl+]) (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.26. Link)
The marks you make on the screen using the Mouse Mark effect now appear in screenshots and screen recordings (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.26. Link)
On the lock screen, you can now zoom in and out, and clear the password field with the semi-common-ish Ctrl+Alt+U keyboard shortcut (Ezike Ebuka and Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.26 and Frameworks 5.99, Link 1 and link 2)
Tooltips throughout Plasma and QtQuick-based apps now smoothly fade in and out when they appear and disappear (Bharadwaj Raju, Frameworks 5.99. Link 1 and link 2)
(This is a curated list of e.g. HI and VHI priority bugs, Wayland showstoppers, major regressions, etc.)
In the Plasma Wayland session, Plasma no longer sometimes crashes when dragging items from Kickoff that aren’t on the Favorites page to somewhere else (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.24.7. Link)
On System Settings’ Fonts page, the sub-pixel anti-aliasing and hinting settings now reflect the true state of reality on first boot as configured by your distro, rather than inaccurately always saying that the system is using RGB sub-pixel anti-aliasing and slight hinting (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.24.7. Link)
Also fixed the most common Plasma crash, which could happen sometimes when searching using KRunner (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.26. Link)
Fixed the second-most-common Plasma crash, which could happen sometimes when dragging widgets out of the widget explorer (Fushan Wen, the latest release of the KDE Qt patch collection. Link)
Desktop widgets and icons no longer randomly move around and reset their positions sometimes when you log in! (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.26. Link 1 and link 2)
When using an NVIDIA GPU in the Plasma Wayland session, clicking on Kickoff’s panel button now always opens it as expected (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.26. Link)
On the subject of NVIDIA, we also fixed a major issue with NVIDIA GPUs that could cause various elements of Plasma to be visually corrupted after the system wakes from sleep (David Edmundson and Andrey Butirsky, Plasma 5.26. Link 1, link 2, and link 3)
Right after the system wakes up, the desktop is no longer displayed for a moment right before the lock screen appears (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.26. Link)
In the Plasma Wayland session, dragging files to Firefox now works properly again (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.26. Link)
Un-maximizing a maximized window while using a floating panel no longer leaves a weird shadow floating in space (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.26. Link)
The desktop context menu’s “Add Panel” sub-menu no longer shows non-functional items for “Empty Grouping Plasmoid” and “Empty System Tray” (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.26. Link)
In the Plasma Wayland session, those of you using the latest Frameworks plus Plasma 5.25.5 should now see your widgets and notifications positioned in the right place (Xaver Hugl, Frameworks 5.99 or else distro-patched 5.98. Link)
Floating panels and the corners of Plasma dialogs/popups no longer exhibit the customary dots and other visual glitches you’ve become accustomed to 
(Niccolò Venerandi, Frameworks 5.99. Link)
Fixed yet another way that some Kirigami-based scrollviews using a recent version of the KDE Qt patch collection could display an unnecessary horizontal scrollbar (Marco Martin, Kirigami 5.99. Link)
Other bug-related information of interest:
Something worth noting is that this week we made our Bugzilla bot start automatically promoting bugs to be 15-minute bugs or very high priority bugs to reduce the manual work for bug triagers. As a result, the total numbers kept going up this week as the bug bot did its work to re-classify old bugs. So the fact that we still managed to keep ahead of that and reduce the totals on net–and during a Plasma beta period too, when people are filing more bug reports than average–is very impressive to me!
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, fix Plasma 5.26 beta bugs! Let’s make this bug list empty before the final release!
Beyond that, 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.
I’ve just merged in kio-gdrive master the support for Shared With Me files. This new feature will be shipped with the next KDE Gear 22.12 release.
Your shared files and folders will be presented in a virtual “Shared With Me” folder (similar to the “Shared With Me” tab in the Google web-UI):
The properties dialog in dolphin will also show the date the file/folder was shared with you (if available):
Please test it and report any bugs you’ll find :)
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2022-38.
Tags: tech, foss, business, economics
Very interesting report although I admit I’m a bit skeptical at the strong “apolitical” message in it. This highlights very well a few challenges specific to Europe. We need to see them tackled I think. It’s nice to see moves in the public sector but clearly it needs to go further and faster. Same thing regarding the creation of OSPOs in companies.
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/research/world-of-open-source-europe-spotlight
Tags: tech, google, surveillance
We all know you shouldn’t use Google Analytics. Now we also know that if you’re in Europe and you’re using it, it’s probably illegal.
https://www.datatilsynet.dk/english/google-analytics/use-of-google-analytics-for-web-analytics
Tags: tech, web, search
Could this lead to the open web index we all need? I hope this research will have high impact.
Tags: tech, foss, ethics
Slightly depressing when it’s laid out like this… still there is some truth to it. Maybe it’s time to rethink a few things.
https://j3s.sh/thought/drones-run-linux-free-software-isnt-enough.html
Tags: tech, design, ux, self-hosting
Since I regularly see Figma used by customers I really hope this will boost adoption on Penpot. A good open alternative you can even self-host.
https://stackdiary.com/figma-alternatives/
Tags: tech, 3d
Interesting dive into the implementation of a render graph system for a 3D engine.
https://poniesandlight.co.uk/reflect/island_rendergraph_1/
Tags: tech, webassembly, portability
Definitely a big deal for the development of WebAssembly. We’ll have to see if the security promises hold but this definitely shows interesting features.
https://bytecodealliance.org/articles/wasmtime-1-0-fast-safe-and-production-ready
Tags: tech, rust, complexity, community
Interesting set of challenges indeed. I think Rust is a bit at a crossroad now. The next few years will be crucial, either they will lead to further adoption or it will stagnate and slowly disappear.
https://www.ncameron.org/blog/ten-challenges-for-rust/
Tags: tech, c++, complexity, safety
Now this is very interesting. An excellent teaser for Herb Sutter’s CppCon 2022 talk. Let’s see where that goes.
https://github.com/hsutter/cppfront
Tags: tech, foss, work, life
Good reminder of the sometimes uneasy relationship between users and maintainers. This needs to stay healthy. Users need to know their place and maintainers should feel OK saying no to things.
https://mikemcquaid.com/entitlement-in-open-source/
Tags: business, hr, culture, organization
A very important and unfortunately underestimated factor for a sane and welcoming culture.
https://kevinyien.com/blog/cultivating-hospitality.html
Tags: tech, surprising, culture, low-tech
The death of the floppy disk has been greatly exaggerated it seems. At least for now…
https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/we-spoke-with-the-last-person-standing-in-the-floppy-disk-business/
Tags: photography
A long and complete article about the important parameters when taking photos and processing them. So it gives a few tricks for shooting the picture but also when you sit in front of the computer.
https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/photo_basics/
Bye for now!
FontForge is the long standing libre font development tool: it can be used to design glyphs, import glyphs of many formats (svg, ps, pdf, …), write OpenType lookups or integrate Adobe feature files, and produce binary fonts (OTF, TTF, WOFF, …). It has excellent scripting abilities, especially Python library to manipulate fonts; which I extensively use in producing & testing fonts.
When I wrote advanced definitive OpenType shaping rules for Malayalam and build scripts based on FontForge, I also wanted to reuse the comprehensive shaping rules in all the fonts RIT develop. The challenge in reusing the larger set of rules in a ‘limited’ character set font was that FontForge would (rightly) throw errors that such-and-such glyph does not exist in the font and thus the lookup is invalid. For instance, the definitive OTL shaping rules for Malayalam has nearly 950 glyphs and lookup rules; but a limited character set font like ‘Ezhuthu’ has about 740 glyphs.
One fine morning in 2020, I set out to read FontForge’s source code to study if functionality to safely skip lookups that do not apply to a font (because the glyphs specified in the lookup are not present in the font, for instance) can be added. Few days later, I have modified the core functionality and adapted the Python interface (specifically, the Font.mergeFeature method) to do exactly that, preserving backward compatibility.
Next, it was also needed to expose the same functionality in the graphical interface (via File→Merge Feature info menu). FontForge uses its own GUI toolkit (neither GTK nor Qt); but with helpful pointers from Fredrick Brennan, I have developed the GUI to take a flag (default ‘off’ to retain backward compatibility) that allows the users to try skipping lookup rules that do not apply to the current font. In the process, I had to touch the innards of FontForge’s low-level code and learn about it.
This worked fine for our use case, typically ignoring the GSUB lookups of type sub glyph1 glyph2 by glyph3 where glyph3 does not exist in the font. But it did not properly handle the cases when glyph1 or glyph2 were non-existent. I’ve tried to fix the issue but then was unable to spend more time to finish it as Real Life
caught up; c’est la vie. It was later attempted as part of Free Software Camp mentoring program in 2021 but that didn’t bear fruit.
A couple of weeks ago, Fred followed up now that this functionality is found very useful; so I set aside time again to finish the feature. With fresh eyes, I was able to fix remaining issues quickly, rebase the changes to current master and update the pull request.
The merge request has landed in FontForge master branch this morning. There’s a follow up pull request to update the Python scripting documentation as well. I want to thank Fredrick Brennan and Jeremy Tan for the code reviews and suggestions, and KH Hussain and CVR for sharing the excitement.
This functionality added to FontForge helps immensely in reusing the definitive Malayalam OpenType shaping rules without any modification for all the fonts! 
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!
ngraham
