fidzu : KDE

KDevelop 5.4.3 released

kossebau Mon, 2019/10/21 - 18:31

21 Oct 2019 4:31pm GMT

21 Oct 2019 12:56pm GMT

Qt 3D makes heavy use of threads, as a way to spread work across CPU cores and maximize throughput, but also to minimize the chances of blocking the main thread. Though nice on paper, the last case eventually leads to added complexity. Sometimes, there are just one too many threads.

In the past, we've been guilty of trying to do too much within Qt 3D rather than assuming that some things are the developer's duty. For instance there was a point in time where we'd compare the raw content of textures internally. The reason behind that was to handle cases where users would load the same textures several times rather than sharing one. This led to code that was hard to maintain and easy to break. Ultimately it provided convenience only for what can be seen as a misuse of Qt 3D, which was not the the original intention.

We had similar systems in place for Geometries, Shaders… Part of the reason why we made such choices at the time was that the border between what Qt 3D should or shouldn't be doing was really blurry. Over time we've realized that Qt 3D is lower level than what you'd do with QtQuick. A layer on top of Qt 3D would have instead been the right place to do such things. We've solved some of these pain points by starting work on Kuesa which provides assets collections.

In the past couple of Qt releases we've been trying to simplify the code where it had become overly complex for debatable convenience. For Qt 5.14 we have decided to rework the threading architecture.

Before we dive into what has changed and what we gain from it, let's first go over the architecture that was in place until 5.13.

Qt 3D Threading Architecture as of 5.13

The Main Thread

This is the Qt application thread where the Qt 3D Entity/Component scene tree lives.

The Aspect Thread

This is the thread in which Aspects live. Each Aspect is responsible for maintaining an internal backend tree that reflects the frontend tree. A messaging mechanism has been set up in order to maintain frontend and backend trees in sync. Most of these messages contain a property name as a string and a value as a variant.

The ThreadPool

Each frame, based on changes and content of its backend tree, and each aspect will get a chance to schedule work that needs to be performed:

• The Render aspect will for instance launch jobs that prepare the content for rendering, load buffers, load textures …
• The Input aspect will look for pending input events and send messages to the frontend tree to notify it about any state change

The RenderThread

Pure Qt 3D Case

This is the thread tasked to submit the rendering commands that have been created previously by the render aspect's jobs. The idea is that submitting these commands in a dedicated thread allows to unlock the Aspect and Main threads so that we can prepare content for frame n + 1 while rendering frame n.

One thing to be noted however, this thread is only available when using "pure" Qt 3D, in other words when using Qt 3D without QtQuick and Scene3D.

Scene3D Case

When using Scene3D, we instead rely on the SceneGraph Thread (which can potentially be the same as the main thread) to ask for the rendering commands to be submitted.

Since the Scene Graph thread is outside of our control, when it asks for Qt 3D to submit commands it could be that the Render aspect jobs in charge of preparing said commands have yet to be completed. To handle that case, we would return early in the renderer and expect that when we're called again in the future, jobs would finally have completed.

This means that potentially Qt Quick and Qt 3D would not be rendering at the same refresh rate. This can be seen as good or bad depending on your use case:

If 3D content is just there but not critical, then having Qt 3D not block Qt Quick can be interesting for you. If on the other hand you want Qt Quick and Qt 3D to be synched, this was until recently not possible.

The Simulation Loop

The loop behind Qt 3D that drives aspects, rendering and synchronization:

1. We wait for the Renderer to be ready for the next frame
2. Synchronize the aspect's backend trees by distributing change messages from the frontend tree stored in the ChangeArbiter
3. Ask each aspect to launch jobs that need to be performed for the current frame
   • One job from the RenderAspect will notify the RenderThread that all RenderCommands have been prepared
4. We wait for all jobs to be completed
5. We wait for the next frame
   • Once RenderThread has all that's required for rendering, it calls proceedToTheNextFrame and does the graphics submission
   • This allows to start the next loop of the simulation loop while we are still rendering.

What has changed in 5.14?

As you can see, aspects are living in their own thread. The main reason for this is to allow Aspect to launch jobs and communicate while the main thread is blocked. This unfortunately forces to use string based messages to synchronize the trees. It also makes synching between threads to handle all cases quite difficult.

What have we done for Qt 5.14? Simply put, we've removed the Aspect Thread.

Why?

Well, what's the gain of having it? Even if the Aspect thread can spin freely while the main thread is blocked do we really benefit from this behavior?

From experience, in 90% of cases, we use Qt 3D with Scene3D. Which means that if the main thread were to be locked, Qt Quick wouldn't sync and Qt 3D wouldn't render anything.

So arguably, we have a thread that's making things more complex to handle a case that very few of us might benefit from. This benefit couldn't offset the difficulties that resulted from it:

• Slow synching mechanism
• Very hard to control Qt 3D from the outside
• Lots of optimizations left on the table because it adds complexity to lots of areas (backend trees, string based messages, blocking threads to sync, hard to know what has changed…)

What do we gain from that?

This now means Aspects and the simulation loop are performed in the main thread.

Gains from that are:

1. We don't need to use messages to sync, we can just compare against the frontend nodes directly:
   • This removes lots of allocations, string comparisons
   • QVariant comparison was a huge performance hit because of the way it handles multithreading
   • Technically we could now go as far as not having a copy of the tree in the aspects
   • This should make caching commands a lot easier.
2. This allows to have a greater control over the simulation loop:
   1. We can now decide whether Qt 3D should be in the driver seat or not
   2. Control can now be manual, done by the user
      • Makes integrating Qt 3D with 3rd party engines a lot easier
      • Scene3D integration uses that approach.
3. Qt Quick and Qt 3D now run in sync at the same refresh rate
   • The downside is that if Qt 3D content is slow to render, Qt Quick will be impacted.
4. Should allow us to introduce more sync stages to avoid having to wait more than 1 frames to react to things like inputs, capture request…
5. Greatly simplifies startup and shutdown sequences.

What's next?

In a follow up article, we will see how Qt 5.14 was also modified to change the way the scene state get sync'ed between frontend and backend nodes, providing significant performance gains on very dynamic scenes.

The post Qt 3D: One too many threads appeared first on KDAB.

21 Oct 2019 8:00am GMT

At this year's KDE conference Akademy we discussed how to evolve Kate over the next years. One of the areas we want to improve is better git integration out of the box. Currently, Kate ships the Projects plugin, which automatically detects and loads your file structure from your git repository. If a project is loaded, then the Search & Replace plugin allows to search&replace in all project files. In addition, the Quick Open feature also supports opening files from the currently active project - all explained here.

However, the Projects plugin does not provide any real git integration: You can neither pull nor push, commit, diff, etc. If at all, additional git functionality is available only via external tools like gitk or git-cola (e.g. available in the context menu).

This is something we would like to change by having really nice git integration.

Using Existing Git Clients

Since we don't have the resources to start a git client from scratch, we had a quick look at existing git clients, preferably written in C++ and Qt5. What we found so far:

GitQlient and QGit

Back in 2007, the Qt-based git client QGit emerged. QGit is still alive and maintained. However, no new major features seem to be added either. QGit is licensed under GPLv2.

Just some weeks ago, two blogs appeared on planet.qt.io about GitQlient, which is a fork of QGit. As discussed in part 1, the idea of GitQlient is to have a nice widget that can be embedded into Qt Creator. This idea is elaborated a bit more in the follow-up part 2. The GitQlient additions are licensed under LGPLv2+, but given it's based on QGit, the effective license is GPLv2 only for now.

What's nice about GitQlient is that it is Qt5-based and uses just 74 .cpp/.h files, and has only a total amount of 11393 source lines of code (slocs) including API documentation and empty lines. So it's not that much code, which is good maintenance-wise. However, both QGit and GitQlient currently are one-man shows, so the developer base is rather small at the moment.

gitahead - Understand your Git History

Another Qt5-based git client that caught our attention is gitahead. gitahead seems to be a full-feature git client with many features. What's very nice about gitahead is: It's licensed under MIT license. However, the source code is much larger: ~52000 slocs. In addition, the 3rd party dependencies include e.g. scintilla and many other libs, adding another ~184000 slocs. Compared to QGit/GitQlient this is 20 times more, and many dependencies we certainly would not want in Kate.

Join the Discussion

At this point, nothing is decided yet. As it currently stands, GitQlient looks a bit more promising, since it's simply much smaller code-wise and therefore likely easier to adapt to Kate. If we decide to give GitQlient a try, I'd like to contact the initial and current QGit authors to try getting it relicensed from GPLv2 only to GPLv2+ or even LGPLv2+.

If you know of any other Qt-based git clients that can nicely be integrated into Qt/Kate, then please join the discussion at the KDE subreddit.

20 Oct 2019 5:51pm GMT

Every once in a while I need to do a fresh installation (usually because of new hardware) and then I encounter this:

This is a long-known bug with countless Reddit/Forum/… posts with often the correct answer how to fix it.

So what I decided to do is to make a package that does that semi-automatically:

Basically the problem is: When there's no "default" set in /usr/share/icons/, Plasma or KWin or whatever doesn't always pick the selected cursor set (happens only under X11, not Wayland) and this package simply installs a default theme that contains no cursor files and merely inherits Breeze.

Here's the source code if you want to make sure nothing nefarious is going on.

20 Oct 2019 5:20pm GMT

Plasma 5.17 was released this week to glowing reviews! As with most new releases, our loyal users wasted no time in finding all the bugs we missed! So you know what that means, right? We all burned the midnight oil fixing the problems you found, and Plasma 5.17.1 will be released in just a few days with everything we've knocked out so far (detailed below) so never fear!

New Features

• The System Settings Widget Style page now has a shiny new grid-style user interface that follows the new format and looks and works much better (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.18.0):
  
• The weather widget now shows windy conditions with fancy new icons (me: Nate Graham, Shawn Starr, and Carson Black, Plasma 5.18.0 and Frameworks 5.64):
  

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• Clicking the "Defaults" button in the System Settings Global Shortcuts page no longer erases all the Task Switcher shortcuts (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.12.10)
• The new startplasma-* apps no longer break multi-line shell functions and environment variables (Fabian Vogt, Plasma 5.17.1)
• When you plug an external screen into a laptop, close the laptop's lid, and then re-open it, the laptop's screen is now re-enabled as expected (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.17.1)
• Certain System Tray icons no longer have an ugly black background (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.17.1)
• Non-critical notifications are no longer inappropriately suppressed when an external screen is connected to a laptop and the laptop's built-in screen is disabled (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.17.1)
• Some GTK2 apps no longer look weird after using another GTK2 app with global menu support (Fabian Vogt, Plasma 5.17.1)
• When one screen is a replica of another, the name of the replicated screen is now shown properly in the System Settings Display Configuration page (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.17.1):
  
• The NOAA environmental visualization picture of the day wallpaper now works again (they keep changing the structure of their website so parsing keeps breaking) (Yunhe Guo, Plasma 5.17.1)
• In the System Settings Display Configuration page, the rotation icons no longer have huge borders and mis-positioned tooltips (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.17.1)
• The "bouncing app icon" effect (which can be disable if you hate it, BTW) is now scaled to the proper size when using High DPI scaling (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.17.1)
• When the version strings in Discover's Updates page become shortened because there's not enough space to display everything, they now return to their full forms when the window is resized to add additional space (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0):
  
  http://s1.webmshare.com/Zxxby.webm
• The System Settings Compositor page no longer crashes in certain circumstances (David Edmundson, Frameworks 5.64)
• Media icons throughout Plasma are no longer subtly blurry (Noah Davis, Frameworks 5.64)
• Accessing remote Samba shares is now more accurate when you enter the wrong password (Harald Sitter, Frameworks 5.64)
• KOrganizer is once again able to find and downloads add-ons (Allen Winters, Kontact 19.08.3):
  
• When Konsole is used outside of Plasma, its scrollbar no longer floats over the left side of the window (Mariusz Glebocki, Konsole 19.12.0)
• Search results in Discover are now more accurate, particularly for exact matches (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, AppStream 0.12.10)

User Interface Improvements

• Previews in the System Settings SDDM theme chooser page are no longer ugly when using a high DPI scale factor (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.17.1)
• The System Settings Display Configuration page now lets you switch between the settings for multiple connected displays using a combobox (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.17.1)
• Discover's "Updates are available" notification is no longer persistent and once again disappears on its own, because there's already a persistent thing in the System Tray when updates are available (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.17.1)
• The Plasma Audio Volume applet now uses an outline-style star icon for the "Default Device" buttons corresponding to non-default devices (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0):
  
  http://s1.webmshare.com/Mxxer.webm
• The scale factor value in the System Settings Display Configuration page is now expressed as a percentage rather than a decimal, and now limits the increments to 6.25% on X11, which minimizes visual glitches in applications (this restriction is not present on Wayland, which is able to handle a broader range of scale factors) (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0)
• The System Settings Thunderbolt Device Management page now shows a placeholder message in the device list when it's empty so you don't think it's broken (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0):
  
• You're now warned when launching a new Windows executable that can be opened with WINE (Yunhe Guo, Frameworks 5.64)
• Dolphin no longer tortures you by displaying advanced search options that won't work when you're searching in a non-indexed location; instead they're just hidden instead (Ismael Asensio, Dolphin 19.12.0)

How You Can Help

Check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved and find out ways to help be a part of something that really matters. You don't have to already be a programmer. 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.

20 Oct 2019 6:01am GMT

I've been working on Calamares, the Universal Linux Installer, for a little over two years - following up in the role Teo started. It's used by Neon (for the dev version, not the user version) and Manjaro and lots of other Linux distributions. I've typically called it an installer for boutique distro's, as opposed to the Big Five.

Well, Debian 11 has plans. And lubuntu uses it as well (and has for over six months).

Those seem pretty big.

This does not change the way Calamares is developed (much), really. The same principles apply as with each recent release.

• PRs are welcome. Really! Especially if you have something specific to implement, or specialised knowledge. I'll quibble about code formatting and style and possibly encourage you to do things in a more general fashion, but most PRs are good.
• Well-written feature requests get attention (drop in on IRC to talk about them).
• Regressions get fixed now (if I understand your bug report).

I consider Calamares development to be collaborative, and I'm mostly here to deliver the things that distro's downstream need (since my "own" distro would be FreeBSD, and that's a long-long-term project with Calamares).

19 Oct 2019 10:00pm GMT

It is time for another installment of Godot (previous entries: introduction, 2D). This time, I have dived into the world of 3D. The goal is to recreate parts of an old time favorite: Kosmonaut. Something I remember playing a lot on my dad's 286 with amazing EGA graphics.

The state of the game when writing can be seen in the short screen capture below. This is more of a tech demo status than a full game at the moment, but I hope you will still find it interesting. You can also get the complete source code.

The project is split into two major parts: the Player and the World. Each of these contain scripts that I will refer to below. But first I want to talk about how to create 3D scenes.

Of course every scene can be created manually from individual elements. However, in 2D games it is common to use tiles to create large worlds from common elements. Godot's analog in the 3D world is the GridMap.

A grid map is more or less a 3D tile map. Inside each tile (or cell, or whatever you call them in 3D) you can place an item. The way you create these items in Godot is to place each 3D element in a scene and then convert it to a mesh library. Then you can draw your 3D scene much like you can draw a 2D scene from tiles.

Once we have a world with a track (the grid map), we add a player to the scene (the yellow blob in the image above - I need to learn Blender to create a proper ship). The player scene contains the ship - and the camera. This means that the camera follows the player automatically - very convenient.

The player script is responsible for this ship's movements based on user input. Inputs can either be pressed for a long time, used for sideways movement, or just tapped (i.e. the release is ignored), used for jumping. Each of the inputs are mapped to a keyboard key (or other input device) in the Project Settings dialog, under the Input Map tab. This feels a bit awkward to me and makes me lose the feeling of flow - but I don't know how to do it better.

Getting gravity, jumping and bouncing to work was fun. It reminded me of coding games on my Atari ST. The character controller code is really basic, but can become super complex if one does not think through the order of the things you do. I ended up exporting some tunables so that they can be adjusted in the editor, just to figure out how high to jump and how fast to run the ship.

Figuring out crashes was easier than expected. Through the KinematicCollision objects retrieved using get_slide_collision, the normal of the surface collided with can be retrieved. From there on, it is easy to determine if the ship is sliding along a wall, or just hit it head on. The latter is deadly and the crash signal is emitted.

The crash signal leads to the world script. Here we handle the second death scenario - falling. This is a handled by the world, rather than the player, as the world knows what the lowest possible y value is.

The world also refers to two invisible scene elements used to mark the starting position ($StartPosition) and goal position ($GoalPosition). The first is used when resetting the player, while the latter is used to determine when the goal has been reached (duh).

When starting a run - or restarting for the millionth time, and when completing a track, a short sequence is shown. These sequences are realized using a CanvasLayer, Sprites and an AnimationPlayer. The canvas layer allows us to add 2D contents on top of (and behind) a 3D (or 2D) scene. Each such layer is broken into a scene of its own that encapsulates one sequence. Each scene have a small script interface with a play function and a finished signal.

When showing a sequence from the main world script, the script is started and then the calling function yields until the finished signal is emitted, as exemplified here. Very convenient!

One more word about the sequences: the animation player is a really convenient way to control all properties of a scene using key frames. It can even be used to call functions. I really like this.

On a side note, I found my first Godot docs bug when writing this post. The pull request is right here ;-)

19 Oct 2019 1:40pm GMT

The Kubuntu community is delighted and proud to ship Kubuntu 19.10. As a community of passionate contributors we need systems and services that enable us to work together, and host our development tools.

Our sponsors page provides details and links to the organisations that have supported us through our development process.

Bytemark is a UK based hosting provider that generously provide racked and hosted bare metal hardware upon which our build chain KCI ( Kubuntu Continuous Integration ) operates.

Kubuntu Continuous Integration Server, provided and sponsored by Bytemark

Linode, our US based hosting provider that generously provide scalable hosting upon which our build chain KCI operates.

Build and Packaging Servers provided and sponsored by Linode

Big Blue Button provide an online virtual classroom primarily targeted for online learning environments, but has proved itself a valuable tool for remote collaborative working, and community events.

Video conference and training suite, as used by Kubuntu Podcast, provided by Big Blue Button

We are deeply grateful for the support these organisations provide, and we welcome others to come join our community and pitch in.

18 Oct 2019 7:05pm GMT

Akademy 2019 was hosted in University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan from 7th to 13th September. It was great to meet all the fellow KDE contributors again

Akademy gives a chance to bring together artists, designers, developers, translators, users, writers and other contributors to meet in person and discuss about achievements of the past year and plan out the goals for the next year.

Group Photo

First two days contributors presented talks on their respective projects. You can go through the talks as now the videos for the same are available.
All talks were so great and full of knowledge, but out of all there were few topics that fascinated me, and I would like to share those topics with you.

• Everything to hide: helping protect the privacy of our users by Ivan Čukić.
• All on board ! Are we there yet? by Neofytos Kolokotronis.
• Plasma for Embedded Devices by Marco Martin and Bhushan Shah.
• Taking KDE to the Skies:Making the drone ground control kirogi by Ekie Hein
• And my favorite talk was the KDE Goals - Panel Discussion hosted by Lydia Pintscher.

Last year in Akademy, KDE Goals were announced, which were:

1. Usability and Productivity for Basic Software.
2. Privacy Software.
3. Streamlined Onboarding of New Contributors.

So in this Interactive Session, Lydia discussed with the goal keepers how far they have reached and how was their experience while working on these goals, and then finally this year's Goals were announced,

• Wayland
• Consistency
• All about the apps

This year unfortunately I didn't give any talk but instead tried my hands in volunteering. I volunteered to be a Session-Chair, basically my job was to introduce speaker and manage talk room. It was such a learning and amazing experience to be a volunteer.

Having a word with the Keynote speaker Leonardo Favario.
{Photo credit Paul Brown}

Rest of the week was BoFs (Bird of Feather), Workshops, Meetings, Daytrip and Training.

There were many BoF sessions scheduled for a week and I attended the following sessions:

KDE PROMO :

We discussed on some marketing strategies, and did some brainstorming on few topics. Learnt how far we have reached on spreading KDE to new users and determined few tasks we would work on for this year.

OpenQA :

I work and contribute in OpenQA Project, in this session Harald Sitter and Jonathan Riddle gave a brief introduction on OpenQA and then we discussed the workflow for writing new tests cases, and I personally got a chance to learn alot of new things from Jonathan Riddle.

KDE India :

We discussed on next KDE Conference India, listed few places were we can host the conference, and I am happy to announce that conf.kde.in is coming back in 2020 It will be held in Maharaja Agrasen Institute of Technology from 17th to 19th January. If you love open source and wish to learn more about our community come join us in this conference

Privacy :

In Privacy BoF we discussed on various aspects, determined goals for this year, talked a bit on funds for next sprint and did brainstorming on few topics.

KDE Students Program :

Here we discussed about the students program, took feedback on what we need to improve, what should be the work pattern for this year and our main focus was on Season of KDE Program, It is an upcoming project so we were discussing on its timeline and structure which soon you will come to know

Daytrip

It is a tradition of Akademy that Wednesday afternoon we all attendees go out and explore a particular area. This time the trip went to the North to Varenna near Lake Como, Ahhh! it was indeed the most magnificent place, a day where I enjoyed the nature's beauty accompanied with my incredible friends.

Enjoying Daytrip

Training

Communication Training:

KDE e.V. had organized Communication Training session for community members, and I am so glad I could attend this training. Our trainer Tilman Krakau gave some basic but very essential lessons on communication, how to coordinate with your team-workers and always try to understand the receivers' point of perception.

Conclusion

Akademy was really productive, it was great socializing and meeting old friends and making new ones. Learnt alot of new stuffs and it was an amazing experience. I am really thankful to the KDE e.V. for sponsoring my trip.

And to those who aren't part of KDE yet and wish to be, I have something interesting to share with you, Season of KDE is coming soon. It is a great way to join our community, learn new things and get comfortable with coding, and there is one thing I would like to tell about this program, it is just not for students it is open for everyone

See you all next Akademy, till then Happy Coding!

18 Oct 2019 11:03am GMT

We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 4.11 Beta!

18 Oct 2019 10:29am GMT

Thanks to the awesome KDE community, we are happy to present the Plasma Mobile project's third weekly update.

Shell User Interface

David Edmundson backported some Qt Wayland patches that improve the overall stability of the shell.

Marco Martin added further refinements to the shell.

Kaidan

Jonah Brüchert replaced the custom contacts search field by the recently added Kirigami search field in Kaidan. The search is accessible by using the search action or by pressing Ctrl+F as usual. Robert Maerkisch improved the performance of the search by using a proxy model instead of hiding contacts from QML. Apart from that the contacts are now sorted chronologically and secondarily also alphabetically thanks to Linus Jahn.

Kirigami

Kirigami apps no longer show an empty context drawer in certain circumstances (Nicolas Fella).

Marco Martin fixed the Kirigami drawer handles on Plasma Mobile.

KBibTeX

Thomas Fischer has started work on a mobile-friendly BibTeX client.

Dialer

Nicolas Fella made sure that an appropriate message is shown when no contacts could be found.

Settings Application

The code for the settings applications received a small cleanup. Names of various settings entries have been adjusted to be more concise: they now show "Foo" instead of "Configure Foo" in the top bar.

Calindori

When creating or editing an entry, saving is now the most prominent action.

Angelfish

Angelfish, the browser, has seen some refactoring by Jonah Brüchert which avoids loading all kinds of dialogs (authentication, webrtc permissions etc) at startup and loads them when needed. This should result in reduced startup times.

Input of urls in its settings is now converted into proper urls, to make sure for example the homepage can actually be loaded even though the user did not enter https://kde.org but just kde.org.

Maui Project

The file browser component has gained improvements for focus chaining, keyboard navigation and new keyboard shortcuts. The places list can now browse all available tags. Files now keep their associated tags even when renamed or moved. Furthermore it now supports copy/pasting files into/out of the app.

The file previewer now uses Okular to preview any document supported by Okular.

The browser view has an improved Miller Column view and its model features improved performance by only adding or removing the necessary paths.

The MauiKit framework and some Maui apps can now be built for Android using CMake in addition to qmake. This allows building Index and vvave using the KDE Binary Factory and making them available in the KDE F-Droid repository (Nicolas Fella). This allows you to test some of the Plasma Mobile apps even without a Plasma Mobile device. MauiKit gained initial support for handling system accounts in a more integrated way by using libaccounts on Linux.

MauiKit parts now have been separated into components to allow having lighter builds when using static linking. Those components are: Editor, Filemanager, Tagging, Syncing, Accounts, Terminal and Store.

When using qmake, MauiKit now automatically fetches all the needed extra binaries, library sources, and assets needed to compile when statically linking.

vvave's codebase has received some cleanups and improvements.

Want to be part of it?

Next time your name could be here! To find out the right task for you, from promotion to core system development, check out Find your way in Plasma Mobile. We are also always happy to welcome new contributors on our public channels. See you there!

18 Oct 2019 12:00am GMT

Kubuntu 19 .10 has been released, featuring the beautiful KDE Plasma 5.16 desktop.

Codenamed "Eoan Ermine", Kubuntu 19.10 integrates the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution.

The team has been hard at work through this cycle, introducing new features and fixing bugs.

Under the hood, there have been updates to many core packages, including a new 5.3-based kernel, Qt 5.12.4, KDE Frameworks 5.62.0, Plasma 5.16.5 and KDE Applications 19.04.3. Firefox 69 is the default browser and LibreOffice 6.3 is provided by default in the full installation, along with updates and bugfixes to latte-dock, Elisa 0.4.2, Kdenlive, Yakuake, Krita, Kdevelop and Ktorrent.

Getting Kubuntu 19.10

Upgrading from 19.04
Detailed upgrade instructions can be found here: Kubuntu 19.04 to 19.10 Upgrade

Download a Disk Image
Download a Bootable image. Direct downloads, torrents, and zysnc are available as options.

For more about the changes in the Ubuntu base, see the Ubuntu Release Notes

Since Plasma 5.17 has been released too late in our release cycle to make it into 19.10 as default, users can install these via our backports PPA.

A Plasma Wayland session can be added by installing the package plasma-workspace-wayland, but is not officially supported. This will add a Plasma (wayland) session option at the login screen. Users needing a stable desktop experience should select the normal 'Plasma' (without Wayland) option at login.

NVIDIA drivers are now included with the ISO, which allows the installer to select and install these when the 3rd party and restricted drivers and codecs option is chosen, even if you are installing offline.

ZFS on root installer support landed too late in the Eoan cycle to implement and test for the Ubiquity KDE front end. This option is therefore targeted for the 20.04 LTS release.

See our Release Notes for more information: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/EoanErmine/ReleaseNotes/Kubuntu

17 Oct 2019 10:40pm GMT

At least twice I have been to India. Atil Chitnis closed FOSS.IN in 2008, and I wrote about that only briefly, and in 2011 there was conf.kde.in in Bangalore which I wrote about some more.

During one of those conferences I fell asleep on the ground in the hall at the KDE booth.

But there's a new conf.kde.in happening at the beginning of 2020. You can read more on the dot. Based in Delhi this time, the conference remains true to its roots:

conf.kde.in is a platform for Qt/KDE contributors, developers and enthusiasts to come together, share their knowledge, contribute, learn and play.

Kai-Uwe has made a badge that, frankly, rivals my own kolourpaint prowess:

Now, I'm not going yet. Like everyone else, I go through the call-for-papers process (which means thinking up things to talk about!). You can find the link on the site, along with other information (you'll need a KDE identity account).

During one of those conferences there were monkeys.

For me personally, it's weird and inspiring seeing conf.kde.in return. I remember the excitement of an own conference in India, of first shirt designs, of The KDE Handbook which Pradeepto put together with the enthusiasts of the time (I still have my copy). The amazing "we'll make it work" attitude to conference organization which seems to be a hallmark of KDE events to this day.

If you watched the Akademy BoF summary videos this summer, you saw the results of the KDE India BoF, which included planning - starting the planning - of this event. And now it's here.

So watch the site, write a proposal, and be there!

17 Oct 2019 10:00pm GMT

Announcing a small update for the goal: KDE is All About the Apps. kde.org/applications is now listing the stores where the application is available. For the moment, it's only listing Linux and the Windows Store, but support for F-Droid and the Play Store is planned. Stay tuned!

17 Oct 2019 6:35pm GMT

Hi there,

The seventh edition of the KDE Latin-American Summit (LaKademy 2019) is ready to go! It will take place at Salvador-Bahia, northeastern Brazil, from 14th to 17th November. 24 participants, hopefully accompanied by some local guests, will meet at Information Technology Superintendence of Federal University of Bahia for four days of hacking sessions, promo meetings, and all sort of KDE-related things.

Salvador (the city I live in) is well known for its beatiful beaches, the biggest carnival in the planet, and its unique cuisine. In November, attendees can already have a glimpse on our warm summer and hopefully that will bring a bunch of additional energy for having a fun and productive meeting.

Salvador - Bahia - Brazil

Stay tuned for the upcoming news of our achievements at LaKademy 2019. Many thanks to Angela Cunha for coming up with such a nice LaKademy 2019 logo and to the KDE e.V. for supporting the meeting.

See you!

17 Oct 2019 5:53pm GMT