The post Kdenlive 24.12.3 released appeared first on Kdenlive.

11 Mar 2025 1:38pm GMT

Last week I decided to clean up a bit of digital cruft. That is, I moved a few of my websites onto a single VPS, saving quite a bit of monthly server hosting costs.

What I did was that I moved VPSes from Linode (Akamai) to DigitalOcean, but also migrated a full web hotel from One to DigitalOcean (converting email accounts to email forwards).

As this is something that I do very rarely, I decided to document the process here so that I don't have to look everything up again next time around.

The grunt work was about migrating a number of L*MP services to a LEMP server. There are a couple of tasks involved here, mainly migration of databases and getting WordPress running in a subdirectory using Nginx. The rest of the exercise had to do with the moving of nameservers and waiting for DNS propagation to get certbot to provide certificates for the new location.

Migration of MySQL databases

The migration of a database between machines can be broken down into three stages:

1. Dumping the old database
2. Creating a new database and user
3. Sourcing the database contents into the new database

I choose to do it in these three stages, as I'd like to keep the old database dump as an additional backup. The other option would be to transfer the database contents in a single step, merging steps 1 and 3 into one

Nevertheless, I use mysqldump to dump the database contents, and then bzip2 to reduce the size of the dump. This is efficient since and SQL dump is quite verbose.

mysqldump -u username -p --databases databasename | grep -vE \"^(USE|CREATE DATABASE)\" | bzip2 -c - > dumpname.sql.bz2

This is derived from the answer by Anuboiz over at stack overflow. The resulting file is then transferred to the new server using scp together with the actual website.

The next step is to create a new database and a new database user. Here, I assume MariaDB (using the mysql commands), as my main target is WordPress. For other database engines, e.g. Postgresql, please check the docs for exact grammar, but the SQL commands should be very similar.

sudo mysql
mysql> CREATE DATABASE databasename;
mysql> USE databasename;
mysql> CREATE USER 'username'@'localhost' identified by 'password';
mysql> GRANT CREATE, ALTER, DROP, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, SELECT, REFERENCES, RELOAD on databasename.* TO 'username'@'localhost' WITH GRANT OPTION;
mysql> EXIT

Check out this digital ocean tutorial for details on the above commands.

The next step is to read the database contents into the new database. For this, we need to unzip the sql dump, e.g. bunzip2 dumpname.sql.bz2, which will result in a file called dumpname.sql. Please notice that bunzip2 unzips the file and removes the original, zipped, file. If you want to keep the original, use the -k option.

Once you have the dumpname.sql file available, you can read it into the database with the newly created user using the source command as shown below.

mysql -u username -p
enter the password here
mysql> USE databasename;
mysql> SOURCE dumpname.sql;
mysql> EXIT

Now you should have a new database with the old database contents on the new server, with an associated database user. For WordPress sites, make sure that you reflect any changes in the associated wp-config.php file.

WordPress in a subdirectory using Nginx

The other piece of the puzzle that was new to me was to run WordPress from a subdirectory, e.g. example.com/blog/, rather than from the root level, e.g. example.com/.

Removing most of the nginx server configuration, the following parts does the magic:

server {
        root /var/www/thelins.se;
        index index.php index.html;

        server_name thelins.se www.thelins.se;

 ...

 # For root
        location / {
                try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;
        }

 # For subdirectory
        location /johan/blog/ {
                try_files $uri $uri/ /johan/blog/index.php$args;
        }

        location ~ \.php$ {
                fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
                fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php7.4-fpm.sock;
                fastcgi_index index.php;
                include fastcgi.conf;
        }

 ...
}

The trick was to ensure that the subdirectory try_files statement refer to the correct index.php. Notice that this has to be done for each WordPress instance, if you happen to have multiple WordPress installations in various subdirectories on the same domain.

Conclusions

Its a bit of hassle to migrate a lot of web sites at once, but the monetary saving from moving the low traffic sites onto a single VPS, and the simplification of the management and monitoring by moving all VPSes to a single provider makes it worth it.

11 Mar 2025 8:49am GMT

Tuesday, 11 March 2025. Today KDE releases a bugfix update to KDE Plasma 6, versioned 6.3.3.

Plasma 6.3 was released in February 2025 with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience.

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

• Breeze: Do not cascade header colors when using non-global color scheme. Commit.
• Breeze: Kstyle/breezetoolsareamanger.cpp: menu bar colors from header. Commit.
• Breeze: Fix Qt6 build regression with MinGW. Commit. Fixes bug #500106

View full changelog

11 Mar 2025 12:00am GMT

Today I'm going to talk about something a bit different. Maybe very different!

After six years at Blue Systems GmbH, I've had the privilege of working daily with some of the finest and most ethical engineers I've ever known; lots of people whose names you probably recognize, because they're some of the biggest contributors to Plasma and KWin, and regularly appear in This Week in Plasma.

Starting earlier this month, about a dozen of Blue Systems' current people - myself included - have moved over to a new company named Techpaladin Software that's co-owned by me and someone else you probably know: David Edmundson!

No, this isn't some kind of hostile takeover or internal corporate backstabbing. Rather, it's the result of a mutual decision made between the owner of Blue Systems, myself and David Edmundson, and Blue Systems' other personnel who are moving over.

Practically nothing changes for KDE: Techpaladin will sponsor almost all of the same people Blue Systems did, and they will continue to enjoy the same wide latitude to improve KDE software for a living with a high level of personal and professional freedom. Techpaladin will be a KDE e.V. Patron, too. Keeping this transition as smooth as possible was a major goal here!

I'm incredibly grateful to Blue Systems for the personal and professional opportunities I've had over the past six years. Working on KDE for a living has been one of the greatest privileges I've ever been blessed with - undoubtedly the most satisfying years of my career, and I have Blue Systems to thank for it.

Wait what

Yeah for real! To be honest, in the beginning of this process, I was as surprised to learn about the opportunity as you may be while reading about it right now.

Now, I've been a business owner before, but admittedly only at a smaller scale, running a two-person 3D printer company from 2011 through 2014. In fact, some of you who were around for the early days of 3D printing and the RepRap project might remember a company bearing the similar name of "Techpaladin Printing". That's right, this was my company! Back then, we helped fellow community members people build MendelMax 3D printers (you can find an archived build guide of mine linked to on that page) from our parts and kits, starting with a humble order of 250 plastic Igus bushings - which at the time could only be purchased in commercial quantities, not at retail. It was my first serious exposure to FOSS (and FOSH!) principles in action, and also where I first fell in love with the movement.

Techpaladin is a much bigger business, of course - with a headcount of over a dozen spread across 7 countries and 2 continents, more complicated accounting, and a co-owner. There are a lot of moving parts; the setup process has been challenging for sure. But I think we're up to the task!

So this is you throwing off the mask and revealing yourself as some kind of evil techbro corporate oligarch, right? I knew it!!!

And you should buy my new cryptocoin, too!

But seriously, setting up this enterprise has refocused my conviction that while organizing a business is real work that can be done well or poorly and should not be discounted, the true value in a company is generated by the workers - and those workers should be the overwhelming beneficiaries of that value. I'm still me, and my primary goal remains to propel KDE to world domination! Techpaladin is simply a new and powerful arrow in that quiver, particularly on the topic of helping people make careers out of KDE - a topic near and dear to my heart.

On a personal level, I fully intend to continue working on KDE software in my technical and organizational capacities, in addition to my new tasks managing the business. For example, you can see I'm still publishing This Week in Plasma, still doing technical work, still reviewing other people's merge requests, and still triaging bug reports.

I'm sure I'll make some dumb mistakes as I find my way on this journey, and be deservedly criticized for them. When that happens, I'll try my best to learn from them and do better in the future. So thanks in advance for bearing with me!

What's your business model?

Like Blue Systems, Techpaladin is a software consultancy, and clients can pay for work on KDE software. And we're inheriting Blue Systems' contract with Valve Inc. as our first client! So Techpaladin will continue to maintain and develop large amounts of KDE software relevant to the Steam Deck.

In that case, can you fix this awful bug I'm experiencing?

Why yes, as a matter of fact! If you'd like to sponsor a bug fix - or a new feature, or custom development work of any kind - do get in touch. Techpaladin draws from the same deep well of top Plasma talent that Blue Systems did.

Are you hiring?

Not at the moment. We just got started, but if things go well, we will be open to hiring! If and when that time comes, I'll announce it publicly.

Wow, what a weird thing to happen

Isn't it!? The world is a weird place, and if there's anything I feel like it's been trying to teach me over the past five months, it's that you can't really predict anything. I think all you can do is be flexible in the face of events, and try to make a positive difference within the sphere of what you do have influence over, so that's what I'm aiming for here.

Thanks as always for your time, everybody, and let's continue to propel KDE to ever greater heights together. Today I'm feeling even more optimistic that the absurd goal of getting KDE software onto every device on the planet is actually doable!

10 Mar 2025 9:36pm GMT

Model/View Drag and Drop in Qt - Part 2

Moving a row between treeviews, step 1

Moving a row between treeviews, step 2

Moving a row between treeviews, step 3

class CountryModel : public QAbstractTableModel
{
~~~
Qt::ItemFlags flags(const QModelIndex &index) const override
{
if (!index.isValid())
return {}; // depending on whether you want drops as well (next section)
return Qt::ItemIsEnabled | Qt::ItemIsSelectable | Qt::ItemIsDragEnabled;
}
// the default is "return supportedDropActions()", let's be explicit
Qt::DropActions supportedDragActions() const override { return Qt::MoveAction; }
QMimeData *mimeData(const QModelIndexList &indexes) const override; // see below
bool removeRows(int position, int rows, const QModelIndex &parent) override; // see below
};

QMimeData *CountryModel::mimeData(const QModelIndexList &indexes) const
{
QByteArray encodedData;
QDataStream stream(&encodedData, QIODevice::WriteOnly);
for (const QModelIndex &index : indexes) {
// This calls operator<<(QDataStream &stream, const CountryData &countryData), which you must implement
stream << m_data.at(index.row());
}
QMimeData *mimeData = new QMimeData;
mimeData->setData(s_mimeType, encodedData);
return mimeData;
}

bool CountryModel::removeRows(int position, int rows, const QModelIndex &parent)
{
beginRemoveRows(parent, position, position + rows - 1);
for (int row = 0; row < rows; ++row)
m_data.removeAt(position);
endRemoveRows();
return true;
}

class DropModel : public QAbstractTableModel
{
~~~
Qt::ItemFlags flags(const QModelIndex &index) const override
{
if (!index.isValid())
return Qt::ItemIsDropEnabled;
return Qt::ItemIsEnabled | Qt::ItemIsSelectable; // and optionally Qt::ItemIsDragEnabled (previous section)
}
// the default is "copy only", change it
Qt::DropActions supportedDropActions() const override { return Qt::MoveAction; }
QStringList mimeTypes() const override { return {QString::fromLatin1(s_mimeType)}; }
bool dropMimeData(const QMimeData *mimeData, Qt::DropAction action,
int row, int column, const QModelIndex &parent) override; // see below
};

bool DropModel::dropMimeData(const QMimeData *mimeData, Qt::DropAction action, int row, int column, const QModelIndex &parent)
{
~~~ // safety checks, see full example code
if (row == -1) // drop into empty area = append
row = rowCount(parent);
// decode data
const QByteArray encodedData = mimeData->data(s_mimeType);
QDataStream stream(encodedData);
QVector<CountryData> newCountries;
while (!stream.atEnd()) {
CountryData countryData;
stream >> countryData;
newCountries.append(countryData);
}
// insert new countries
beginInsertRows(parent, row, row + newCountries.count() - 1);
for (const CountryData &countryData : newCountries)
m_data.insert(row++, countryData);
endInsertRows();
return true; // let the view handle deletion on the source side by calling removeRows there
}

The post Model/View Drag and Drop in Qt - Part 2 appeared first on KDAB.

10 Mar 2025 8:19am GMT

Back this month with another update on the progress for our new design system in Plasma.

This update includes:

- Icon selection and request to submit bugs

- Icon review and changes

- Plasma Sprint updates

If you would like to participate in an open design project like ours, learn more about it here: https://community.kde.org/Get_Involve… Learn more about our organization:

• Facebook: KDE Community

• Twitter: @kdecommunity

• Mastodon: @kde@floss.social

• LinkedIn: KDE • Reddit: r/kde

• Lemmy: KDE Community

• Instagram: @kdecommunity

• YouTube: KDE Community

• PeerTube: KDE Channel

#FigmaIcons #IconDesign #FigmaTutorial #LearnFigma #FigmaTips #UIUXDesign #GraphicDesign #VectorArt #FigmaDesign #IconCreation #FigmaForBeginners #FigmaWorkflow #DigitalDesign #FigmaCommunity #FigmaIconDesign #DesignWithFigma #UXDesignTips #FigmaTipsAndTricks #IllustrationDesign #IconDesignTutorial #penpot #opensource #opendesign

09 Mar 2025 8:09pm GMT

LSP Support in KDevelop, systemDGenie rewrite and big UI changes in Dolphin

Welcome to a new issue of "This Week in KDE Apps"! Every week we cover as much as possible of what's happening in the world of KDE apps. This time we will cover the past two weeks as I was traveling last weekend.

Last week we released KDE Gear 24.12.3, which concludes the 24.12 series of KDE Gear. 25.04.0 is right around the corner, with only a few days left before the beta and feature freeze. Aside from the numerous bug fixes and polishing going on, we also had some pretty big changes in Krita regarding advanced text editing options, KDevelop with support for the LSP protocol, some big UI changes in Dolphin, and a complete rewrite of systemDGenie.

General Changes

Balló György added improvements to many Kirigami projects for when they run with the software rendering backend. Projects that have been improved include Kirigami and Kirigami Addons, but also many apps like Tokodon, Kaidan, Angelfish and more.

Volker wrote a small report about the recent improvements to KDE Apps on Android. You can find it on his blog.

We fixed an issue in KIO SFTP support where symlinks would be truncated (Kishore Gopalakrishnan, 25.04.0. Link), and another in KIO SMB support where shared resources from other computers on multiple LANs and virtual LANs were not displayed when using WSDD (Harald Sitter, 24.12.3. Link).

Another thing that got fixed was an issue where the report bug button would not open the report URL (Carl Schwan, KF 1.12.0. Link).

Graphics and Multimedia Apps

Elisa Play local music and listen to online radio

Balló György fixed restoring the hidden Elisa instance on file opening (Balló György, 25.04.0. Link), and Jack Hill fixed the spacebar play/pause action, as it was not being triggered when specific buttons had the focus (Jack Hill, 25.04.0. Link).

Gwenview Image Viewer

Pedro Hernández added an option to display hidden files (Pedro Hernandez, 25.04.0. Link), and we changed how image size integers were displayed to make them clearer in all languages. Previously, we displayed 1,024x1,024. Now it is 1024x1024.

Kasts Podcast application

Bart De Vries properly implemented single instance behavior (Bart De Vries, 25.04.0. Link).

Okular View and annotate documents

Okular now supports, in addition to S/MIME based signatures, PGP/GPG based signatures. PGP signatures have the advantages that it is a lot easier to get a PGP key than a S/MIME key. Note that this feature is not yet enabled by default and for the moment only works between Okular users (Sune Vuorela, 25.04.0. Link).

Creative Apps

Kdenlive Video editor

Darby Johnston added support for OpenTimelineIO export and import using the C++ library. This allows importing and exporting projects files to/from other video-editing applications that implement this open standard (Darby Johnston supported by KDenlive fundraiser, 25.04.0. Link).

Krita Digital Painting, Creative Freedom

Wolthera van Hövell implemented basic support for the font-feature-settings CSS property in Krita. This allows tweaking the rendering of text based on OpenType font features (Wolthera van Hövell, Link). Wolthera wrote an excellent blog post on this topic, as well as covering the support of font variants mentioned two weeks ago. You can find the post on her blog.

Maciej Jesionowski added a global pen tilt direction offset, which can be helpful to make the brushes feel the same for right- and left-handed users (Maciej Jesionowski, Link).

The process of porting Krita to Qt6 is making good progress: the macOS version now compiles (Freya Lupen. Link), and the implementation of the tablet switching API for Windows is now using Qt APIs instead of a custom implementation (Dmitry Kazakov, Link).

In other news, Carl Schwan fixed the menubar visibility state being saved as non visible if the global menu option is turned on. This become an issue when turning off the global menu, as Krita's menubar wouldn't appear again (Carl Schwan, Link).

Personal Information Management Apps

KOrganizer KOrganizer is a calendar and scheduling application

Allen Winter improved the agent selection dialog. Now the Ok button is only enabled when an item is selected and the search text field has a placeholder (Allen Winter, 25.04.0. Link).

Merkuro Calendar Manage your tasks and events with speed and ease

Shubham Shinde added support for displaying holidays in the week view and the month view. Note that it is possible to disable this feature (Shubham Shinde, 25.04.0. Link 1, link 2 and link 3).

Kleopatra Certificate manager and cryptography app

Tobias Fella fixed decrypting files with very long paths on Windows (Tobias Fella, 25.04.0. Link).

Akonadi Background service for KDE PIM apps

Milian Wolff optimized some code in Qt related to timezones to improve the performance of some serialization in Akonadi. (Milian Wolff, Qt 6.8. Link)

KDE Itinerary Digital travel assistant

Volker Krause unified the formatting of temperature ranges and dynamic depending on the home country. Similarly, imperial speed units are shown for countries that use them (Volker Krause, 25.04.0. Link 1 and link 2).

Again Itinerary has increased the number of ticket types it supports and now handles multi-page 12go PDF tickets and Ghotel reservation emails.

Social Apps

NeoChat Chat on Matrix

Joshua Goins moved the "Explore rooms" button from the hamburger to the space drawer (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link), added a dialog explaining what to do next when tapping "Verify this device" (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link), and made joining remote rooms more reliable (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link). Joshua also fixed a bug where emoji autocompletion would destroy the current message draft (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link).

Meanwhile, James Graham improved the handling of switching link previews on and off (James Graham, 25.04.0. Link).

Developer Apps

Kate Advanced text editor

Niels Thykier added built-in support for the debputy language server. This is used when writing Debian package (Niels Thykier, 25.04.0. Link).

Meanwhile, Joshua Goins improved the titles of terminal tabs and assigning an icon to them (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link). Joshua also improved the UI of the compiler explorer integration. This includes polishing some strings, adding tooltips and fixing some padding issues (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link).

KDevelop Featureful, plugin-extensible IDE for C/C++ and other programming languages

KDevelop now support the Language Server Protocol (LSP) in addition to the native support for C++, PHP and Python. This reuses Kate's plugin, so, at the moment, it is only available when Kate is also installed (Igor Kushnir and Sven Brauch, 25.04.0. Link).

Konsole Use the command line interface

Jonathan Marten fixed a crash when double clicking on a terminal scroll bar (Jonathan Marten, 25.04.0. Link).

System Apps

Ark Archiving Tool

Natsumi Higa fixed the extraction of timestamps from 7-Zip archives, which now includes nanoseconds (Natsumi Higa, 25.04.0. Link).

Dolphin Manage your files

Dolphin is having its looks tweaked and has a new icon with an actual picture of a dolphin inside it! (Darshan Phaldesai, 25.04.0. Link).

In the same vein, Akseli Lahtinen added a background to the navigation bar of Dolphin and Gwenview (Akseli Lahtinen, KF 6.12.0. Link).

And Nate Graham added a nicer split icon to the toolbar (Nate Graham, 25.04.0. Link).

In other Dolphin news, Akseli Lahtinen fixed a crash when opening a new tab with search (Akseli Lahtinen, 24.12.3. Link).

systemdGenie System service manager

systemDGenie was completely rewritten using QML. The new version also relies a lot less on blocking DBus calls (Carl Schwan, 1.0.0. Link).

KWalletManager Wallet Management Tool

Xuetian Weng sorted a security issue and passwords copied from the KWallet Manager are no longer visible in the clipboard history of Plasma (Xuetian Weng, 25.04.0. Link).

Education Apps

Kiten Japanese Reference and Study Tool

Balló György fixed the font size of the result view. The font size was stored as point size, but passed as pixel size, causing that the actual font size is smaller than it should be (Balló György, 25.04.0. Link). Balló also fixed the background color of some views when switching to a dark theme (Balló György, 25.04.0. Link).

KHangMan Hangman Game

Max Brazhnikov Added support for non-latin alphabets (Max Brazhnikov, 25.04.0. Link).

KStars Desktop Planetarium

Hy Murveit added an altitude graph to the scheduler table (Hy Murveit, Link)

Utilities

Alligator RSS feed reader

Mark Penner made the text elide in the RSS entry list so that the buttons are always visible (Mark Penner, 25.04.0. Link), and Balló György set the default format to import and export feeds as OPML (Balló György, 25.04.0. Link).

KDE Connect Seamless connection of your devices

José Rebelo added the possibility of filtering out notifications from the Android work profile (José Rebelo, Link).

KDiskFree View Disk Usage

Kai Uwe Broulik added an option to explore in Filelight (Kai Uwe Broulik, 25.12.0. Link), and icons to the context menu entries (Kai Uwe Broulik, 25.12.0. Link).

KGet Download manager

Balló György fixed the windows activation when the current window is in the system tray (Balló György, 25.04.0. Link).

KRDC Connect with RDP or VNC to another computer

Fabio Bas added a setting for desktop scale and device scale (Fabio Bas, 25.04.0. Link), while Fabian Lesniakd disabled Kerberos support completely, since it turned out that having a broken support for it was worse than no support at all (Fabian Lesniak, 25.04.0. Link).

OptiImage Image optimizer to reduce the size of images

Balló György fixed the name of the generated optimized images, and now the suffix is appended before the file extension (Balló György, Link).

…And Everything Else

This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! If you're hungry for more, check out Nate's blog about Plasma and be sure not to miss his This Week in Plasma series, where every Saturday he covers all the work being put into KDE's Plasma desktop environment.

For a complete overview of what's going on, visit KDE's Planet, where you can find all KDE news unfiltered directly from our contributors.

Get Involved

The KDE organization has become important in the world, and your time and contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we're going to need your support for KDE to become sustainable.

You can help KDE by becoming an active community member and getting involved. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE - you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don't have to be a programmer either. There are many things you can do: you can help hunt and confirm bugs, even maybe solve them; contribute designs for wallpapers, web pages, icons and app interfaces; translate messages and menu items into your own language; promote KDE in your local community; and a ton more things.

You can also help us by donating. Any monetary contribution, however small, will help us cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors and in general just keep KDE bringing Free Software to the world.

To get your application mentioned here, please ping us in invent or in Matrix.

09 Mar 2025 7:55pm GMT

Make sure you commit anything you want to end up in the KDE Gear 25.04
releases to them

Next Dates
March 13 2025: 25.04 Freeze and Beta (25.03.80) tag & release
March 27, 2025: 25.04 RC (25.03.90) Tagging and Release
April 10, 2025: 25.04 Tagging
April 17, 2025: 25.04 Release

https://community.kde.org/Schedules/KDE_Gear_25.04_Schedule

08 Mar 2025 5:30pm GMT

Here's an overview of recent work around the Android platform support for KDE Frameworks and KDE applications. Since the last update there have been improvements in localization and packaging, and an encounter with a bizarre calling convention issues deep down in the Android stack.

Localization

Application-specific language settings

Starting with SDK 33 Android allows apps to opt-in to application-specific language settings. That is, you can select a different language for an application than for the platform itself. This is for example useful when using a language the application doesn't support.

For this to work applications need to indicate which languages they support, which can be done with minimal changes to the build.gradle file:

android {
...
androidResources {
generateLocaleConfig true
}
}

As well as adding android/res/resources.properties with the following content:

unqualifiedResLocale=en-US

See also this example in Itinerary.

Qt translation catalogs

We fixed bundling (MR 488) and loading (MR 135) Qt's own translation catalogs, and applied the same fallback language fixes described last time for those as well (MR 136).

This should fix some small but somewhat prominent gaps in the translation coverage, such as standard dialog button texts.

Runtime language change

The foundational changes to support language changes during application runtime have meanwhile landed in both Qt and KDE Frameworks. To benefit from this make sure your application is using the new API for setting up its KLocalizedQmlContext:

KLocalization::setupLocalizedContext(&engine);

More QML API has also been updated to support this, such as the formatting functions in KCoreAddons (MR 474).

QLocale support for 24h time format

Android has a system setting to force a 24h time format even in locales that would otherwise use an AM/PM format. With Qt 6.8 this is considered by QLocale, ie. all its date/time formatting functions will automatically follow this (CR 600295).

Packaging

APK version codes

We have reworked the APK version code generation to comply with the various ordering constraints posed by Android, F-Droid and Google Play also when building APKs for multiple architectures in parallel in the CI system.

APK version codes need to:

• be strictly increasing for Android to install a newer version.
• be different for all architectures for Google Play to accept them.
• not have a higher version code on ARM32 APKs than ARM64 APKs for F-Droid to not complain.
• have a higher version code on ARM64 APKs than ARM32 APKs for Google Play to not complain.

Our previous approach managed to only guarantee the first constraint, for all others it depended in which order the CI was building things, ie. it was effectively random. Additionally, the version code logic was copy/pasted into all applications.

Starting with KDE Frameworks 6.12 this has been improved by ECM providing a Gradle include file with version code computation that satisfies all of the above constraints (MR 513, MR 514).

What remains in the application build.gradle file then is the following:

apply from: '../ecm-version.gradle'
...
android {
...
defaultConfig {
...
versionName ecmVersionName
versionCode ecmVersionCode
manifestPlaceholders = [versionName: ecmVersionName, versionCode: ecmVersionCode]
}
}

Qt 6.8 update

The Qt version used for CI/CD builds and thus also the release APK packages has been updated to 6.8. What sounds like and should be a relatively straightforward process was unfortunately unusually bumpy.

• 6.8.0 broke packaging of the QQC2 Breeze style and thus practically all our APKs (MR 111).
• 6.8.1 broke the build all over the place (list of MRs).
• Finally, 6.8.2 was relatively smooth, as it should be.

SDK/NDK update

There has also been work towards updating to SDK 35 and NDK 27, by fixing numerous build errors across the stack caused by the newer versions (list of MRs).

We aren't quite there yet though, as the changes to window insets/edge-to-edge mode in Android 15 might require new API in Qt 6.9 to prevent our application from rendering behind to Android status bar. Attempts to find a workaround for this led to discovering the following issue.

Qt and JNI native function calls

For interfacing with Android's Java-based platform API Qt heavily relies on the Java Native Interface (JNI), a way for C++ and Java code to call each other. JNI is very fundamental for Android and Java in general and is decades old technology, ie. usually not a thing you'd expect to change or break.

And yet, that's exactly what we observed under certain conditions in December last year: When calling native functions from Java code with floating point arguments on Android 15 and x86_64 the arguments arrived corrupted on the native side. One of the calls affected by this was passing the screen geometry to Qt, which arrived there as negative values. That is physically impossible of course, and resulted in all kinds of spectacular UI breakage.

This is particularly tricky to track down as for normal debugging tools the breakage happens behind the scenes of a method call, something that is usually seen as an atomic step not able change any data. Instead it gets you into the dark magic of platform-specific calling conventions.

While we still haven't managed to pinpoint the change in Android causing this, the best guess at this point is that an optimization in Android's JNI implementation missed (or intentionally ignored) that the way floating point arguments are passed to native functions differs between regular and va_arg functions on x86_64. The JNI specification suggests that the latter is supposed to work as well, and that's the thing that broke here.

That combination is probably quite rare, x86_64 is practically only relevant for the emulator, and you'd only use va_arg functions as a last resort in generic code normally. And that's what Qt did in Q_DECLARE_JNI_NATIVE_METHOD.

For the full story see QTBUG-132410. If you look at the names and times there, the Qt chief maintainer himself implementing a fix on Christmas Day gives you an idea of the severity of this.

CR 613563 reproduced the issue in the Qt CI, CR 613552 works around it by replacing the use of va_arg functions with clever template magic.

Outlook

We still have plenty more to do regarding Android platform integration. The currently probably most pressing issues are the following I think:

• There's an annoying interaction between input focus, the onscreen keyboard and resizing/repositioning the application window that makes using input forms rather unpleasant.
• On some devices the font size is unusably small, caused by the display scale factor being wrong.
• Selecting files in the platform file dialog that are located on a cloud storage such as Nextcloud silently fails.

If you are interested in Android integration for KDE applications, feel free to join us in the #kde-android Matrix channel!

08 Mar 2025 9:15am GMT

Welcome to a new issue of "This Week in Plasma"! Every week we cover as much as possible of what's happening in the world of KDE Plasma and its associated apps like Discover, System Monitor, and more.

This week we took a break from new features and put on our bug-fixing hats, squashing a very large number of bugs and annoyances, because it's important not to break things when you move fast! Some nice UI refinements landed as well.

Notable new Features

Plasma 6.4.0

You can now control whether a window has a titlebar and frame from its Task Manager context menu, like you can with various other window tweaks. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

Notable UI Improvements

Plasma 6.3.3

The Digital Clock widget now shows a nicer-looking font picker dialog when you customize the text style of the clock; we went back to the older style after Qt 6 changed the default to something that isn't as suitable for our purposes. (Nate Graham, link)

Improved the way screens are presented to remove the technical information in cases where it isn't needed to distinguish screens from one another. (Oliver Beard, link)

Plasma 6.4.0

It's once again possible to configure the lock screen's clock to disappear when the rest of its UI fades out, providing once again for the possibility of a screensaver-like experience. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

Bluetooth devices are no longer inappropriately shown in the System Tray popup when Bluetooth is disabled but the wireless adapter is still powered on, which is a state that some devices can get into. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Improved the ordering of search results in the "Add keyboard layout" dialog. (Bharadwaj Raju, link)

Notable Bug Fixes

Plasma 6.3.3

Fixed two serious issues that could make KWin crash on login or fail to allow login at all on systems with certain types of monitor arrangements, on distros that ship user software with asserts turned on. (Xaver Hugl, link 1 and link 2)

Finally figured out and fixed for good the issue that could cause the lock screen to sometimes be all black on X11. (David Edmundson, link)

Fixed a subtle way the screen locker could fail to respond to keyboard actions with certain configurations applied. (David Edmundson, link)

Fixed one of the top 20 Plasma crashes - this one a case of crashing after waking from sleep. (Fushan Wen, link)

Fixed a strange crash that could happen when configuring Plasma to have multiple "Notifications" widgets. We traced it to a Qt bug and implemented a workaround in Plasma, and then the Qt bug was also fixed! (Marco Martin and David Faure, link)

Fixed a case where Plasma could crash when closing apps by middle-click (this is off by default) on the Task Manager while their window previews were visible. (Harald Sitter, link)

The names of some NVIDIA GPUs are once again shown correctly in Info Center, after this regressed due to a related change to show nicer GPU names didn't work 100% for all GPUs. (Harald Sitter, link)

Fixed a recent regression that made it harder to see release notes for updateable Flatpak and Snap apps in Discover. (Ismael Asensio, link)

Fixed a recent regression that made the "Legacy X11 app scaling" setting not take effect immediately, as it was supposed to. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Rapidly clicking the "Next" or "Previous" buttons on the calendar in the "Calendar" and "Digital Clock" widgets now switches to the appropriate month, year, or decade. (Matthias Tillman, link)

Disabling animations globally no longer makes it impossible to configure panel widgets while in panel edit mode using their hover pop-ups. (Nate Graham, link)

Fixed two color scheme issues: one that would make menu text look wrong with creative color schemes that have headers colored differently from the rest of the window, and another that would let an old color scheme's header colors briefly remain visible after changing the color scheme. (Evgeniy Harchenko and David Redondo, link 1 and link 2)

Fixed some visual glitches visible on blurred Plasma widgets that some people were experiencing with some GPUs when using the new "Prefer color accuracy" setting. (Xaver Hugl, link)

KRunner no longer becomes an unreadable mess when the text you enter is so long that it starts to overflow off the right edge. (Nate Graham, link)

Fixed a keyboard accessibility issue on System Settings' "KWin Rules" page. (Ismael Asensio, link)

Fixed keyboard navigation working incorrectly in the "Application Dashboard" widget when using a right-to-left language. (Christoph Wolk, link)

Discover no longer tries and fails to uninstall end-of-life Flatpak runtimes that are still in use by apps, displaying an ugly and un-actionable error message in the process. (Harald Sitter, link)

Plasma 6.4.0

Fixed a small visual glitch in the Global Menu widget seen when moving the pointer between open menus. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)

Other bug information of note:

• 2 very high priority Plasma bugs (down from 3 last week). Current list of bugs
• 24 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 27 last week). Current list of bugs
• 136 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed over the past week. Full list of bugs

Notable in Performance & Technical

Plasma 6.3.3

Implemented support for battery charge thresholds on more devices. (Jakob Petsovits, link)

Further improved the way colors are displayed on screen when using Night Light on systems with Intel GPUs. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Forcing "Adaptive Sync" to be on no longer reduces the refresh rate of certain screens under certain circumstances. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Added little warning messages when you disable power management, complying with new EU regulations taking effect in two months. This is what happens when you become important, folks! (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

Copying text in LibreOffice Writer no longer inserts anchor links into it, shown by little gray brackets around letters. This isn't a new thing, and not really a bug, either; it was happening for ages and ages, but nobody ever noticed until a recent change in LibreOffice to surface these links visually. (Fushan Wen, link)

Fixed a couple of behavioral anomalies when manually manipulating windows in the stacking order. (Jarek Janik, link 1 and link 2)

Plasma 6.4.0

Fixed a memory leak found in Plasma. (Fushan Wen, link)

The kscreen-doctor tool can now be used to toggle HDR mode on and off, in addition to its existing abilities to enable or disable it. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Put a lot of effort into reducing Plasma's log spam caused by binding loops and other warnings. (Christoph Wolk, link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5, link 6, link 7, link , link )

How You Can Help

KDE has become important in the world, and your time and contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we need your support to keep KDE sustainable.

You can help KDE by becoming an active community member and getting involved somehow. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE - you are not a number or a cog in a machine!

You don't have to be a programmer, either. Many other opportunities exist:

• Triage and confirm bug reports, maybe even identify their root cause
• Contribute designs for wallpapers, icons, and app interfaces
• Design and maintain websites
• Translate user interface text items into your own language
• Promote KDE in your local community
• …And a ton more things!

You can also help us by making a donation! Any monetary contribution - however small - will help us cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors, and in general just keep KDE bringing Free Software to the world.

To get a new Plasma feature or a bugfix mentioned here, feel free to push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.

08 Mar 2025 1:00am GMT

So, after my last blog post, I ended up taking another few months to get the fonts branch just right, but now we have font resource that can be tagged, filtered and searched upon.

After that, I needed my next text editing project to be a bit more manageable. Given that I had already made some head start on it at the beginning of last year, I continued with UI for the OpenType features.

OpenType Features

Usually, OpenType features are explained away as "that's for ligatures and stuff", which, while not incorrect, is maybe a little simple. "It enables advanced typographic features" is a little more correct, but it makes OpenType feature support sound less rudimentary than it really is these days.

What might be more clear is to think of a font file as a mapping between input characters and their glyphs. This is fine for simple Latin. But what if you want to show Arabic connected? Well, then you need a second table to keep track of the glyphs for start, middle and end of a word, and substitute the correct glyph as necessary.

Or maybe you want to have kerning, so that A and V nest into each other nicely. Another table for that then, that keeps track of the position adjustment between two consecutive glyphs.

How about small caps? Substitution table. Dynamically placing diacritics? Positioning table. Cyrillic has different glyph traditions in Serbia and Bulgaria, similarly for Han script use in East-Asia: Substitution table. Han script is usually typeset in mono space, but when two brackets follow one another, they often have extraneous white space that should be removed: Positioning table. These are all OpenType features.

The more you look into it, the more it becomes clear that if you want your text layout to support more than plain English, you will need to allow these extra tables to be used and read through. This is in short what Harfbuzz does for us. You can enable and disable these features by taking their name (A 4 letter tag), and indicating to Harfbuzz you want them enabled for a given section by sending a number (0 for off, 1 for on… and 2, 3, 4, […] 256 for indicating which alternate you'd like if the font has multiple alternates available for that feature).

Some of these features are enabled by default, and the basic text layout will process them just fine. However, others are optional, and within CSS all of them can be turned off and on at the typesetters' wish. Which brings us to the widgets.

CSS font variants

There's two types of CSS opentype toggles. The first of these are the font-variants, which have a somewhat confusing name in this day and age of OpenType variable fonts, but at the time they were named font-variants were limited to Small Caps, and expected to be separate font files.

The font-variant features more of a guidance suggestion, meaning that you turn them on or off for a piece of text, unrelated to whether the current font actually supports the feature in question. The idea being that you could set a different font elsewhere in the text, and that if this font supports those features, they could be controlled this way.

This means that the UI for these features is somewhat straight forward and unopinionated, being a collection of drop-downs and check boxes. I renamed them "glyphs:" in the UI to avoid confusion with Variable fonts, which is also possible because the majority of them represented which glyphs are being used.

CSS Font Feature Settings and the Glyph Palette

font-variants only cover the most common features, and as of writing, there's over 120 registered OpenType feature tags. CSS allows controlling this via the second type of properly "font-feature-settings". A property that wants you to be very specific about which tag you want to enable, and whether you want to have it not just enabled, but also which sub index of the feature you would like to enable.

Now, there's a bit of a problem here: 120 features is a bit much. Furthermore, two of those registered features, Character Variants and Stylistic Sets, are registered 99 and 20 times respectively, meaning the total is closer to over 230 features. And, further furthermore, fonts may have custom OpenType feature tags.

And that's not the only problem: Access All Alternates, Stylistic Alternates and Stylistic Sets are very common features, but the way they are configured in CSS as a font-variant feature is somewhat complex, and to have each manually enabled inside the OpenType Features widget is going to feel very clunky for artists.

For these reasons, I ended up building two controls for this CSS property. A main widget for the text property docker that allows artists to enable and disable any OpenType feature that can be found inside the font, and the second being a glyph palette, that allows artists to select alternate glyphs.

The glyph palette was actually made first, so lets go over that. It is in effect a character selection map that allows artists to select alternates to the current glyph or to any glyph inside the font. Filtering can be done with Unicode blocks and search.

It uses KoFontGlyphModel, a QAbstractItemModel, that collects all the available characters inside the font, as well as their Unicode variations (Unicode variations are an extra code point added behind a character to indicate it needs to be a specific version of that glyph. It's main use is to ensure people's names are written with the correct glyph variant).

It then takes the locale of the text, and uses those to go over the OpenType tables with Harfbuzz. The locale of the text, or "text language" is necessary because some OpenType features are only available for certain locales. Furthermore, the aforementioned Character Variants and Stylistic Sets may have been named inside the font, meaning that it also takes the interface languages to get the correct name for the current localization of Krita.

Of course, using these alternate names means we need default names first. Which is why I also spend some time on creating a factory where each known OpenType tag is stored with its proper name from the official registry and a hand written summary of the feature for the tool tip. These can now be localized.

Then when we have the feature, we go over the glyphs marked by the table and if that glyph coheres with a Unicode code point, add the table as a potential sub glyph for that Unicode value.

Now here another problem rears its head: We need to know which glyph coheres with which Unicode code point, and while for basic values that isn't a problem, it is when decomposition comes into play.

Decomposition in this case, is a feature that allows for replacing a given glyph with two other glyphs. A reverse ligature, if you will. It is frequently used to match Unicode decomposition: Ä according to Unicode can be decomposed into A (U+0041) and ◌̈ (U+0308, combining diaeresis). So then, the glyph for Ä can be decomposed into those two glyphs. Afterwards, OpenType allows positioning that diaeresis accurately with the mark positioning feature. This is useful, because we can then take that A glyph, and use things like the Small Caps feature, or a Stylistic Set to turn it into a small A or a decorative A, and as long as these alternate glyphs have been configured for mark positioning, they'll by themselves support Ä.

So that's pretty neat. But the problem is that Harfbuzz doesn't provide enough information for me to discover how a glyph gets decomposed. Meaning that for fonts that are structured this way, I can't tell whether style sets or the like can be applied to these glyphs, so these don't show up in the character map. I have a similar problem with ligatures, but that is also compounded by having trouble with the user interface.

For the glyph palette, the way you use it is either by using the glyph alternates, where double clicking one will replace the current grapheme (that's a set of Unicode values that is often treated as the smallest editable chunk of text) with one that either has the appropriate Unicode variation selectors attached, or one that has the appropriate OpenType features enabled.

The other option is to use the character map, which is much like character maps in other software, allowing you to scroll over all available Unicode values in a font, and sorting them by Unicode block, or searching them. Clicking on a glyph with variants ops out a context menu with the glyph alternates.

The glyph palette itself is written with QML, but because the rest of Krita is not in QML, it is embedded into a QQuickWidget, that is inside a QDialog, which in turn means the context menu needed to be inside a QQuickWidget inside a QPopup, because QQuickWidget will clip any QML pop-up items. QML side, we use DelegateModel to show the child indices of a given character map index.

I'm not sure yet how ligatures would be handled here, maybe list them for each glyph, or maybe have a separate model that shows up underneath the glyph alternates and only shows for the current text. There's also the fact that stylistic alts and the like can apply to ligatures, so that's another thing to consider. A similar issue is with emoji zero-width-joiner sequences. This is stuff like "fireman + woman + Fitzpatrick skin tone modifier 5" = . This is typically implemented as a kind of ligature as well, and while Unicode keeps a list of these, I'd prefer to get them from the font.

For the "OpenType features" control in the text properties docker, we reuse the glyph model, but this time its only to figure out which features are available in the font. Because CSS allows for font fallback, we only do this for the first font, but also allow setting any other officially registered OpenType feature on or off. It also shows a sample for the given feature. This widget is mostly useful for the stylistic sets and the positioning features.

Speed-ups

Now, setting up the glyph model can get quite slow, so some trade-offs were established:

• The glyph palette right now only shows a handful of substitution features, to avoid slowing down initialization. These also decide the sample depicted in the OpenType features drop down.
• When a sample is retrieved, it is limited to the first 6 entries. This should be good enough, because the main purpose is to indicate something is going to happen when selecting this feature.
• The QQuickPaintedItem that draws the glyph uses our text layout under the hood, which on one hand is good: this means we always draw something we can show in our text layout. But at the other end, we had to disable some conveniences, like the dynamic fallback (possible because we always know if an input text can be rendered), as well as disabling automatic relayout.

Final Thoughts

One of the things that struck me when writing the original svg text layout post a few years back is that a decade ago, you'd really boast about your OpenType support, but nowadays, OpenType support is so rudimentary, it didn't make sense to dwell on it in that post. This might also be a consequence by how easy Harfbuzz makes using OpenType these days.

That meant I really wanted to get the UI for this feature nice. There was a big post over a decade ago by a UI designer doing UI for free software, where he went into extensive detail about how most software implementing controls for OpenType features is really bad at communicating whether the feature does anything. I think I managed to somewhat get that part working right.

Still, the glyph palette could use more love, and I really need to sit down for the whole ligature UI issue. I'm pretty happy with it none the less, and it is very hackable, meaning that it doesn't necessarily need to be me personally improving it.

I do need to really get going on that language selector though…

Appendix

About the font scanning code

The code for retrieving the OpenType tables was largely based on Inkscape's, and then extended. Inkscape doesn't test on language, and only tests for substitution features, while we test on both substitution and positioning features. Similarly, Inkscape's was written in a time when Harfbuzz could only give information about whether a feature could be turned only on or off, but not whether it had multiple alternates, so it is not yet able to do that.

Of interest is that Inkscape does show a few ligatures, but the only reason those are visible is that there's a handful of ligatures that are encoded into Unicode in the "Alphabetic Presentation Forms" block. Fonts that implement ligatures tend to also setup these Unicode values, but this is not self-evident, which is why I'd prefer not doing this.

(As a random factoid: Adobe's Smart Quote feature will use these Unicode encoded ligatures when the font isn't able to provide them via OpenType.)

I did manage to get ligature samples by simply testing every combination of glyphs that Harfbuzz could tell me were probably relevant to a given table, but this was slow, leading to a 5~ second initialization time on a feature heavy font like Junicode. Maybe the glyph model code can be at some point modified to allow incremental loading, though that wouldn't provide me a quick sample text in the text properties docker…

Shaping Technology

I feel I should probably mention that OpenType isn't the only technology that provides shaping. Apple's Advanced Typography Tables (ATT) and the Graphite shaping language are existing alternatives, but OpenType is far more popular than either, and the CSS working group doesn't give much guidance on how to use anything but OpenType.

Widgets and Items

Qt currently has two UI toolkits: QML and QWidget. The former uses the terminology "Item" instead of "Widget" to refer to UI controls. I find this somewhat difficult to get used to, so when I don't prepend a widget name with Q, assume that I mean a generic UI control. I think most people never even consider what the different UI bits are called, so usually it isn't a problem.

07 Mar 2025 2:05pm GMT

Let's go for my web review for the week 2025-10… somehow this one is really packed with content. Brace yourselves!

The Digital Packrat Manifesto

Tags: tech, culture, streaming, vendor-lockin

Looks like I'm a digital packrat of some sort! There are reasons behind it and it's well explained.

https://www.404media.co/the-digital-packrat-manifesto/

'Flow' wins best animated feature film Oscar

Tags: tech, blender, foss, movie

Behind the movie this is a big win for Blender. It proves Blender is viable for full length movies at this point. The movie was nice too. :-)

https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/flow-wins-best-animated-feature-film-oscar-2025-03-03/

Who is Free Software for?

Tags: tech, foss, politics, culture

Interesting piece, we indeed need to move beyond from the "for hackers by hackers" mindset. I don't even think it was really the whole extent of the political goals when the Free Software movement started. Somehow we got stuck there though.

https://tante.cc/2025/03/03/who-is-free-software-for/

Kagi review - Tim Hårek

Tags: tech, web, search, attention-economy

I admit I'm more and more tempted to pay for my search service as well. It's unfortunately not FOSS… But it's not like the alternatives are better there either anyway.

https://timharek.no/blog/kagi-review/

Why Techdirt Is Now A Democracy Blog (Whether We Like It Or Not)

Tags: tech, journalism, politics

In case it wasn't clear yet that the tech industry was eminently political, this editorial drives the point home. It's also a good reminder that it's been the case for a long while.

https://www.techdirt.com/2025/03/04/why-techdirt-is-now-a-democracy-blog-whether-we-like-it-or-not/

Infrastructural problems and instabilities caused by cloud services

Tags: tech, self-hosting, infrastructure, cloud

Or why you need to own at least some part of your infrastructure.

https://mental-reverb.com/blog.php?id=15

Microsoft begins turning off uBlock Origin and other extensions in Edge - Neowin

Tags: tech, browser, attention-economy, privacy, microsoft

The writing was on the wall. This is an unsurprising development but Edge users should know where it's going…

https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-begins-turning-off-ublock-origin-and-other-extensions-in-edge/

WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

Tags: tech, web, browser, webassembly

Is it the future of web browsers? Maybe… I'm not sure this would be a good thing though.

https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/WASM_Wayland_Web_WWW/

The Empty Promise of AI-Generated Creativity

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, culture, criticism

Sure it makes generating content faster… but it's indeed so bland and uniform.

https://hey.paris/posts/genai/

AI versus the brain and the race for general intelligence

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, cognition, neuroscience, science, research

Friendly reminder that AI was also supposed to be a field about studying cognition… There's so many things we still don't understand that the whole "make it bigger and it'll be smart" obsession looks like it's creating missed opportunities to understand ourselves better.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/03/ai-versus-the-brain-and-the-race-for-general-intelligence/

Structured data extraction from unstructured content using LLM schemas

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, nlp, data

This is one of the handful of uses where I'd expect LLMs to shine. It's nice to see some tooling to make it easier.

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/28/llm-schemas/

Zen and the Art of Microcode Hacking

Tags: tech, cpu, amd, security, complexity

Nice exploration of the microcode patching flaw which was disclosed recently. This gives a glimpse at the high level of complexity the x86 family brings on the table.

https://bughunters.google.com/blog/5424842357473280/zen-and-the-art-of-microcode-hacking

Hardware discovery: ACPI & Device Tree

Tags: tech, system, hardware, kernel

Nice post explaining the need of ACPI or Device Tree and how they are leveraged by kernels.

https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/hardware-autoconfiguration

How fast can you open 1000 files? - Daniel Lemire's blog

Tags: tech, filesystem, system, performance, multithreading, linux, apple

Nice performance comparison of file handling in multithreaded context. It's surprising how slow MacOS seems to be there.

https://lemire.me/blog/2025/03/01/how-fast-can-you-open-1000-files/

3,200% CPU Utilization

Tags: tech, multithreading, safety

Another illustration that with race conditions all hell can break loose. It's not only about data corruption or deadlocks. This case is explored in depth which is nice, also compared across several languages.

https://josephmate.github.io/2025-02-26-3200p-cpu-util/

Git without a forge

Tags: tech, git, tools, version-control

There are pros and cons to using a forge, same thing when not using a forge. Let's not forget you don't have to use one though. Also this piece mentions git bundles which I didn't know about, it looks interesting.

https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/quasiblog/git-no-forge/

Globstar - The Open-Source Static Analysis Toolkit

Tags: tech, static-analyzer

Looks like an interesting toolkit to make your own code checkers.

https://globstar.dev/

Is Rust a good fit for business apps?

Tags: tech, programming, rust

A long piece which explore the reasons why Rust is likely not the best pick for enterprise software. It's niche is clearly system programming but beyond that and because of its qualities in that space it quickly become a sharp and dangerous tool.

https://www.bartoszsypytkowski.com/is-rust-a-good-fit-for-business-apps/

Some things that make Rust lifetimes hard to learn

Tags: tech, rust, programming, memory

This is an important concept in Rust… but clearly it's harder to grasp than you'd expect.

https://ntietz.com/blog/rust-lifetimes-learning/

Succinct data structures

Tags: tech, data, programming, science

Interesting class of data structures with funny properties. Looks like there's a lot to do with them.

https://blog.startifact.com/posts/succinct/

Binary search as a bidirectional generator | mathspp

Tags: tech, python, programming

Nice little Python trick using bidirectional generators.

https://mathspp.com/blog/binary-search-as-a-bidirectional-generator

Falsehoods programmers believe about languages

Tags: tech, language, translation, complexity

Translation and localisation is a complex topic too often overlooked by developers. This is a modest list of widespread misconceptions. If you get in the details it get complex fairly quickly.

https://www.lexiconista.com/falsehoods-about-languages/

Troubleshooting: The Skill That Never Goes Obsolete

Tags: tech, problem-solving, debugging

An excellent article, that troubleshooting skill is really important in many fields… In particular software engineering. It's hard to teach and learn but it makes all the difference.

https://www.autodidacts.io/troubleshooting/

Cleaner codebase, happier mind

Tags: tech, programming, craftsmanship, technical-debt

Makes sense, the "boyscout rule" has a psychology impact as well.

https://blog.danieljanus.pl/2025/03/02/cleaner-codebase/

Your Next Two Zeroes

Tags: tech, engineering

It like this parallel. The bigger the endeavour, the more complexity… And that will require thinking in very different ways for each order of magnitude.

https://taylor.town/next-two-zeroes

Should managers still code?

Tags: tech, engineering, management, leadership

There's clearly a tension on that topic and the expectations from engineering managers tend to change over time. I like the proposed answer here and the distinction made between writing code and being in the code.

https://www.theengineeringmanager.com/growth/should-managers-still-code/

Age and cognitive skills: Use it or lose it

Tags: neuroscience, cognition, research

Interesting study even though it bears some important limitations. Still it seems to indicate that one shouldn't rest on its laurels and keep practicing cognitive skills even when older (actually might have to get started in the 20s latest).

https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.ads1560?af=R

Bye for now!

07 Mar 2025 11:25am GMT

Over 180 individual programs plus dozens of programmer libraries and feature plugins are released simultaneously as part of KDE Gear.

Today they all get new bugfix source releases with updated translations, including:

• kwordquiz: Fix opening files from the command line (Commit, fixes bug #487774)
• kio-extras: Fix opening AFC filesystems on iPhone/iPads (Commit, fixes bug #487874)
• okular: Avoid crashes when adding small background images when signing (Commit, fixes bug #499746)

Distro and app store packagers should update their application packages.

• 24.12 release notes for information on tarballs and known issues.
• Package download wiki page
• 24.12.3 source info page
• 24.12.3 full changelog

06 Mar 2025 12:00am GMT

Just a quick update: Recently, you might have heard that GTK 4 added support for the cursor-shape-v1 protocol on Wayland. The main advantage of the cursor-shape-v1 protocol is that it ensures consistent cursor look between apps. In Plasma, additional perks come with it, for example the cursor can look more crisp with fractional scale factors because SVG cursors are used. We (KDE) took a shot at backporting the cursor shape protocol support to the GTK 3 branch and, as of this moment, it's already merged . This means that you should experience fewer cursor issues in applications running on Wayland that still use GTK 3, mainly Firefox.

I would like to express many thanks to Max Qian for starting the work on adding support for the cursor-shape-v1 protocol, and Matthias Clasen for pushing it over the finish line and reviewing our backport MR.

05 Mar 2025 3:02pm GMT

Qt's 3D offering is changing, so we decided to look at different options for rendering 3D content in Qt.

Continue reading 3D Rendering Solutions in Qt - an Overview at basysKom GmbH.

03 Mar 2025 1:45pm GMT

I have one desktop machine, my daily-driver, which runs FreeBSD 13 - the latest supported version is 13.5 - and which I want to keep on KDE Plasma 5 (and all the rest of the last-gen KDE things). I do also want a modern KDE Plasma 6 desktop, but I'll do that on a slightly newer machine. Here's some notes-for-myself.

The FreeBSD ports tree is branched every quarter, roughly with the idea that you can pick a stable(-ish) branch of ports to consume, or you can go with main and get the ports-du-jour. The branches also offer a way of sticking to older releases of some software.

KDE Plasma 6 (and most of KDE Gear, and all the supporting KDE Frameworks) have arrived in main, and the KDE Plasma 5 ports have been removed. That's a decision of the kde@ group of maintainers of the KDE ports in FreeBSD, one which boils down to not having the time available to maintain both versions, and wanting to be able to upstream fixes.

But I want to stick with older KDE software, at least on my daily driver, a little longer. Oh, and I want a recent Telegram port. And a pony, too.

Previous-generation Stuff

KDE stuff is simple to do:

• Check out the ports tree, e.g. git clone https://git.freebsd.org/ports.git
• Switch to the last branch that has KDE Plasma 5-era software, e.g. git checkout 2025Q1
• Build KDE software, e.g. use poudriere(8) to build the port x11/kde5

Some additional things that I use also work from that ports branch:

• Firefox
• LibreOffice

Somewhat surprising (to myself, anyway) was that Telegram, a desktop instant-messaging client, was not a very-recent version in the branch, but also that the version available in the branch did not even compile. The problem looks like this:

tdesktop-5.10.0-full/Telegram/lib_base/base/qt/qt_compare.h:24:43:
error: redefinition of 'operator<=>'
24 | [[nodiscard]] inline std::strong_ordering operator<=>(
/usr/local/include/qt6/QtCore/qstring.h:777:5: note: previous definition is here
777 | Q_DECLARE_STRONGLY_ORDERED(QString)

That's just a clash between the Qt6 bundled with Telegram and the one on the system, but it is rightly annoying. I ended up cherry-picking updates from Telegram 5.10.0 up to 5.10.7 from the main branch (it took a couple of rounds of conflict-resolving, though) which is recent-enough and also builds. Thanks Sergey for maintaining that port.

Next-generation Stuff

Over on FreeBSD 14.2, my "other" machine which I kind of hope to make my main desktop soon-ish, using the main branch from FreeBSD ports gives me fairly-recent KDE software. In this branch, we (as in kde@ in the FreeBSD ports tree) gave up again on KDE version numbers. KDE software is just KDE software - which is also what the KDE community would like us to call it.

Six years ago, I wrote about kde5 which kidded around a bit, but we had x11/kde4 and x11/kde5 side-by-side for a long time. No more. You (metaphorical "you, the person using KDE on a FreeBSD desktop") get the latest stuff, and it's just called KDE, and we're not going to bother with those version labels anymore (which is what upstream has been saying for over ten years now).

01 Mar 2025 11:00pm GMT