I had an amazing opportunity to attend Conf KDE India this year. It was hosted in the wonderful city of Gandhinagar, Gujarat known for its well planned modern architecture and Khadi exports. I was really looking forward to see some familiar faces from last year's cki and meet new ones.

Day 0

I arrived a day before the conference in Gandhinagar. I really appreciate Bhushan for picking all of us from the airport, that was a very warm gesture. I had an early morning flight from Delhi so by the time I reached my hotel room I was really tired and dozed off for quite a while. Thankfully I woke up by evening, around the time when few of us decided to meet up for dinner. I also met Joseph for the first time in person, we have been working together on KEcoLab, a KDE Eco project so I was looking forward to meet him in person and suffice to say he is as warm and kind a person irl as he is when remote. After dinner, I worked on my slides and wrote a bit of qml code for my workshop. Rishi arrived later that day or rather early morning next day and we spent a bit of time tinkering with his Steamdeck before we dozzed off.

Day 1

The first day of Cki 25 started with Bhushan introducing what KDE Community is, what we do and why we do to the crowd which comprised mostly of eager local college students. This was followed by Vishal talking about "Embracing FOSS in Edtech" a pretty interesting talk about the widespread use of open source software in various Indian schools and state governments.

After the lunch break, Shubham talked about how he self hosts everything using open source softwares and encouraged achieving digital independence through it. It was a pretty interesting talk for me considering I am pretty close to using up my free storage I get with my google account so this was a nice motivating step for me to break away from google. This was followed by a remote talk by Soumyadeep about using GhVmCtl to test GUI applications directly with ci runners. I think this project is quite similar to selenium-webdriver-at-spi that KDE maintains so it was interesting to know gnome is also working on something similar. After the coffee break Ravi talked about using Prav an XMPP based free chat software as an alternative to Quicksy. He covered a lot about the importance of federated ecosystems, data privacy and how Prav is playing a crucial role in this. The last talk of the day was by Subin where he talked about using Malayalam language (a popular language from the State of Kerala wirh roughly 37 million speakers worldwide) on Ubuntu through maintaining the Varnam Project, which is an open source cross platform transliterator for Indian languages. I enjoyed his talk a lot personally because I also speak Malayalam (although I am not a fluent in it) and it was interesting to know the progress he made on making Malayalam language having first party support on linux.

Afterwards for dinner we had punjabi style north indian kulche and lassi, pretty delicious indeed 😋

Day 2

I started the second day by giving a workshop on "Building your first QML Interface". The idea was to build a small mvp of Whatsapp web interface (one of the most widely used chat application in India) in qml, although we werent able to completely build it but the feedback I got was that many were excited about qml and actively following along the workshop so I consider that a mild success. After this Shivam gave a talk about Clazy, its architecture, real world usage in KDE ecosystem and technical challenges faced in implementing static analysis. I am ashamed to admit I not used this tool much before but the talk definitely sparked my interest and I am keen to test it out and maybe integrate it into my workflow as well. This was followed by Joseph talking about End of 10 upcycling campaign also highlighting its importance in the Indian context, again another interesting talk.

After the lunch break, I enjoyed Rishi's talk a lot about using nix and integrating it into your workflow. I have used nix os in the past and my spare laptop still runs it so I was happy to see it being mentioned in a kde conf. After this Keith talked about the widespread use of open source software in Australian schools, the talk had quite the parallels to the widespread use of Linux in the Indian state of Kerala so it piqued my interests again. The last talk of the day was given by Sahil where he shared his experience running various mirrors for KDE, VLC, Libreoffice, Blender and many other open source softwares and how we can also do that, another pretty intriguing talk. I have had to battle with Qt mirrors in the past so to know what all goes behind the scene to host these mirrors made me appreciate it a lot more than before and you never know maybe I might host a few mirrors for Qt some day.

After the conference all the speakers met together for dinner and we had pretty delicious south indian food.

Day 3

The third day was more about Workshops and Unconference sessions. I started the day by giving a workshop on KEcoLab, how anyone can use our infrastructure (or rather KDAB's) to test their application's energy consumption and optimise it. This was followed by Advaith conducting a workshop on writing plugins for Suse's Cockpit, a web administration tool for linux machines. Afterwards we had an unconference session by Joseph on End of 10, it was a pretty engaging session by him and focussed a lot about the campaign's outreach in India. We had another unconference session on HackMud by Advaith, Hackmud is a text based multiplayer hacking simulator and was proposed by him as an alternative way to learn programming. This was followed by demo with steamdeck and plasma mobile on pinephone, and suffice to say everyone were excited to try out the devices. SuperTux was especially the fan favourite game 🐧

After the conference ended, we visited the Adalaj Stepwell, a stepwell located in the nearby small town of Adalaj Gujarat.

We ended the day by having dinner at one of the traditional gujrati thali place which had unlimited servings, this was my first time having a gujarati thali and I was blown away by its taste, specially the mango purée.

Day n/n

This was the last day of my stay in Gujarat and I ended my trip by visiting the local landmarks with Bhushan. We visited the Sabarmati Ashram, the main residence of Mahatma Gandhi and saw many artifacts from his time. I got a few souvenirs for my family from this place and We visited the Sabarmati Riverfront after this.

Regardless to say I had a blast attending the conference and it will be one of my best memories.

17 Apr 2025 7:50pm GMT

Very busy releasetastic week! The versions being the same is a complete coincidence

https://kde.org/announcements/gear/25.04.0

Which can be downloaded here: https://snapcraft.io/publisher/kde !

In addition to all the regular testing I am testing our snaps in a non KDE environment, so far it is not looking good in Xubuntu. We have kernel/glibc crashes on startup for some and for file open for others. I am working on a hopeful fix.

Next week I will have ( I hope ) my final surgery. If you can spare any change to help bring me over the finish line, I will be forever grateful

• GoFundMe
• Patreon
• Github
• Donorbox

17 Apr 2025 7:00pm GMT

The Kubuntu Team is happy to announce that Kubuntu 25.04 has been released.

Codenamed "Plucky Puffin", Kubuntu 25.04 continues our tradition of giving you Friendly Computing by integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution.

The release features the latest KDE Plasma 6.3 desktop, KDE Gear 24.12.3, kernel 6.14, and many other updated applications and libraries.

Applications for core day-to-day usage are included and updated, such as Firefox, and LibreOffice.

In addition to the applications on our install media, 25.04 benefits from the huge number of applications in the Ubuntu archive, plus those installable via snap or other methods.

Please refer to our release notes for further details.

Download Kubuntu 25.04 or learn how to upgrade from 24.10.

Note: For upgrades from 24.10, there may a delay of a few hours to days between the official release announcements and the Ubuntu Release Team enabling upgrades.

17 Apr 2025 4:18pm GMT

System Tools

Dolphin

KDE's flexible file and folder browser/manager gets a makeover, starting with its new icon including an actual dolphin!

KDE developers and designers are working hard to improve Dolphin's accessibility and usability. Your favorite file explorer has improved its integration with Orca, Linux's de facto screen reader. This improvement was made possible thanks to the support of funding from the European Commission and NLnet.

Focus now works intuitively when you click on an element in the Places sidebar or click on Open Path and Open Path in New Tab in the context menu after searching for an item. And when in Selection mode (hit Space to get there), Dolphin lets you navigate files with the arrow keys and select them using Enter, bypassing the need to hold down Ctrl. Subtle changes like these, boost productivity and make Dolphin easier to use for everyone.

This version of Dolphin also makes it harder to make catastrophic mistakes. The "Empty Trash" icon is now red, indicating that this is a dangerous action that cannot be undone. And the Restore context menu item has moved away from Delete to keep you from accidentally doing the opposite of what you want, which could lead to data loss.

In our quest to support an ever-growing audience, Dolphin now comes with initial support for right-to-left written languages, such as Arabic or Hebrew.

Type dolphin --reverse in a terminal window to try it out! Thanks to the European Commission and NLnet for funding this work.

More changes to Dolphin include:

• You can rename tabs: right click on the tab and choose Rename tab.

• Adding an item to the Places panel will now show its folder's custom icon, and the item will be created globally by default, so it appears in the file dialogs' Places panels too.

• Dolphin's layout is now tidier, packing the three view buttons into a single menu button.

• The status bar is now much more compact, preserving more space for the file view.

Konqueror

KDE's 25-year-young file/web browser keeps receiving updates. This time it's the Save As dialog that now remembers where a file was last downloaded and will show that location the next time you pick the option.

KRDC

KRDC is the app that allows you to view and control the desktop session on another machine, whether it's on the same local network, or over the Internet 1,000 kilometers away.

This version allows you to scale down the remote machine's desktop to fit inside KRDC's window, adds support for the domain field in the authentication process, and now works with the new version of the FreeRDP protocol.

KDE Connect

KDE Connects bridges the gap between your phone and computer. This version improves the speed of transferring data when using Bluetooth.

Travel Assistants

Itinerary

Every new version of Itinerary increases the number of transport and event services supported in the app. This one adds support for Bilkom and PKP PDF tickets, International Trenitalia ticket barcodes, Danish language support for Booking.com, ticket emails for Universe (e.g. Lollapalooza), and many east European travel companies, especially from Poland, Slovenia, and the Czech Republic.

Not only that, but this version adds a My Data page where you can keep track of your program memberships, health certificates, saved locations, and travel statistics. It also lets you import and export all that data.

This version features a redesign of the timeline and the query result pages when searching for a public transport connection. They now work better with a small screen, while still showing all the relevant information, like platform information for bus reservations. It also unifies the formatting of temperature ranges depending on the home country, and shows Imperial speed units for countries that use them.

Kongress

The app that helps you navigate congresses, summits, and other events now includes the name of the speaker for each talk.

Productivity Tools

Merkuro

Merkuro provides a modern suite of groupware utilities, including contact management, calendar, tasks, and soon email.

Merkuro Calendar's region settings for holidays is now configurable, so you can also select more than one region. You can also show holidays in the week view and the month view.

Other new features included in this version are that you can filter tasks to only display the ones due today, and the contact list now supports multiple selections as well as applying actions to all selected contacts.

Kontact

The feature-rich Kontact suite of groupware applications provides an extensive array of tools to manage everything, from your email and calendars, to RSS feeds and journals.

Improvements to KMail's security features make it easier to check the validity of an unknown OpenPGP certificate, as it now automatically checks a key server when you click on it.

KOrganizer gets a new date picker that makes navigating to a selected date faster.

Okular

Okular, KDE's document viewer, ramps up its support for digital signing with support for PGP/GPG based signatures. PGP signatures have the advantage of being a lot easier to get a PGP key than a S/MIME key - something that Okular has supported for a while. Note that this feature is not yet enabled by default, and for the moment only works between Okular users.

Apart from supporting more types of signatures, you can now filter the list of certificates to only show certificates for Qualified Signatures. The mobile version of Okular has also improved how it displays signature and certificate details.

Furthermore, when creating a new signature, Okular will now automatically scale the text to fit the available space. This allows you to make signatures much smaller than before.

In non-signing related news, it's now possible to choose a custom default zoom level in Okular, and the look of the banner messages has been tidied up.

Keysmith

Keysmith supports importing tokens from QR codes and the unmaintained app andOTP.

Creativity

Kdenlive

Kdenlive is KDE's powerful video editor, which can now import and export projects using the OpenTimelineIO format. This allows importing and exporting projects files to/from other video-editing applications that implement this open standard.

The audio waveform viewer was completely rewritten in this version; it's now twice as fast to generate and much more accurate. In addition, the clip monitor background can optionally use a checkerboard pattern.

KWave

KWave is an audio editor. This version significantly improves playback performance.

Connections

NeoChat

NeoChat lets you chat using the Matrix messaging system. This version can now sort rooms in the sidebar based on their most recent activity instead of by unread notifications. NeoChat also gains a "Copy Link Address" item in the context menu when you right-click on a message with a web link in it.

Tokodon

Tokodon is you gateway to the Mastodon social network. You can use it on your desktop and your phone (although the Android version is still work-in-progress).

This version allows you to save drafts of toots and schedule them to be sent later - even if you're away from your computer and it's turned off.

A healthy relationship with social media runs though filtering out what you don't want to see. Mastodon has done its part and now so has Tokodon, as this version includes a menu item under the Filters timeline to help you configure what shows up in your feed. Tokodon now also hides tags and polls when the post has a content notice, and includes a button to mute conversations so you don't get any notifications for conversations you aren't interested in.

To make sure you don't accidentally overshare or boost the wrong thing from the wrong place, Tokodon now features a confirmation dialog that pops up before the post is sent. Tokodon will now also remind you to add an alt text to your images.

Finally, Tokodon now works better with screen readers and has better performance.

Falkon

KDE's web browser can now also block websockets.

Downtime

Arianna

Arianna is a modern and easy to use eBook reader. Arianna's new rendering engine based on foliate.js makes KDE's eBook reader faster and gives it better support for languages that are written right-to-left books.

Kasts

Kasts connects you to your favorite podcasts, both on your desktop and on your phone. In this version, you can choose whether you want to use mobile or desktop mode, and the configuration dialog now works better on mobile devices.

Elisa

Elisa is a simple local music player. In this version, Elisa will play files automatically when opened from a different app (e.g. Dolphin).

Audiotube

AudioTube is the best way to look for and play music on YouTube. This version gains the ability to show synchronized lyrics provided by LRCLIB.

Full changelog here

Where to get KDE Apps

Although we fully support distributions that ship our software, KDE Gear 25.04 apps will also be available on these Linux app stores shortly:

If you'd like to help us get more KDE applications into the app stores, support more app stores and get the apps better integrated into our development process, come say hi in our All About the Apps chat room.

17 Apr 2025 12:00am GMT

Haruna version 1.4.0 is released.

Added support for recursive subtitle search, rotating video and opening youtube playlists from a video url containing a playlist id https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=video_id&list=playlist_id

Fixed issues with tracks menus showing incorrect tracks and changed the behavior of progress/seek slider while pressed to pause the video.

Windows version:

• haruna-1.4.0-windows-gcc-x86_64.exe
• haruna-1.4.0-windows-gcc-x86_64.7z

Availability of other package formats depends on your distro and the people who package Haruna.

If you like Haruna then support its development: GitHub Sponsors | Liberapay | PayPal

Feature requests and bugs should be posted on bugs.kde.org, ignoring the bug report template can result in your report being ignored.

Changelog

1.4.0

Features

• Added setting to search subtitles recursively. Searches folders relative to the parent folder of the playing file and folders defined by the `Load subtitles from` setting
• Added support for opening youtube playlists from urls containing a playlist id
• Added actions to rotate video clockwise (ctrl + r) and counter clockwise (ctrl + e)

Bugfixes

• Fix tracks menus showing tracks from previously opened files
• Fix subtitles added by drag and drop not being added to the subtitles menu
• While the progress/seek slider is pressed the video is paused, fixes continuously opening the next video when dragged and held all the why to the end

16 Apr 2025 6:00pm GMT

In first of a kind movement to develop free and open source fonts for traditional Malayalam scripts, the Rachana Institute of Technology, KaChaTaThaPa Foundation and Sayahna Foundation had previously announced font design competition in May 2024.

Many participants registered from all over India and shared their initial design of a few selected characters. Ten submissions were shortlisted, and the selected participants were invited for a two-day in person workshop conducted at River Valley campus, Trivandrum. The workshop was lead by the jury members - Dr. KH Hussain who designed notably Rachana and Meera fonts (among many other); eminent calligrapher and designer of Sundar, Ezhuthu, Karuna & Chingam fonts, Narayana Bhattathiri; type designer and multi-scripts expert Vaishnavi Murthy; and yours truly. High quality sessions & feedback from the speakers and lively interactive sessions enlightened both experienced and non-technical designers about the intricacies of typeface design.

Refinement

To manage the glyph submissions for collaborative font projects, a friend of mine and I built a web service. The designers just need to create each character in SVG format and upload into their font project. This helped to abstract away from the designers all the technical complexities, such as assigning correct Unicode codepoint, correct naming convention, OpenType layout & shaping etc.

There was mid-term evaluation of the completed glyph set in October 2024; and a couple of online sessions where the jury pointed out necessary corrections and improvements required for each font.

The final submissions were done near the end of December 2024; and further refinements ensued. All the participants were very receptive to the constructive feedback and enthusiastic to improve the fonts. The technical work for final font production was handled by your humble correspondent.

Results

In March 2024, the jury made a final evaluation and adjudged the winners of the competition. All the six fonts completed are published as open source, and they can be downloaded from Rachana website. See the report for the winning entries, font specimens & posters, prize money, and all other details.

RIT Thaara (താര), calligraphic style, named after Sabdatharavali.

RIT Lekha (ലേഖ), body text font.

RIT Lasya (ലാസ്യ). The Latin glyphs were drawn independently based on Akaya Kannada font, as suggested by a jury member.

RIT Ala (അല).

RIT Keram Bold (കേരം).

RIT Indira Bold (ഇന്ദിര).

I am very happy to have the chance to collaborate over the course of a year with designers from various backgrounds to develop beautiful traditional Malayalam orthography fonts and make them all available under free license. I would like to thank the jury members who did exemplary work in evaluating the designs and providing constructive feedback & guidance multiple times that helped to refine the fonts; CVR for the work to create web pages on Rachana website; and the three Foundations for the initiative and funding to make this all possible. Full disclosure: all the jury members worked in volunteer capacity.

Next competition

RIT-KaChaTaThaPa-Sayahna foundations have already announced plans for next open font design competition! This time the focus is on body text fonts.

• Competition details in English (or https://rachana.org.in/fcomp-2026-ann.html)
• Competition details in Malayalam
• Register here.

16 Apr 2025 9:14am GMT

We're excited to announce a major step forward for QML development workflows with the upcoming 1.5.0 pre-release of Qt Qml Extension for Visual Studio Code. As part of this release, we've introduced initial support for QML debugging in VS Code - a feature that brings long-requested functionality closer to everyday usage for QML developers using lightweight and cross-platform tooling.

16 Apr 2025 8:36am GMT

With the 0.9 release, you can unshackle yourself from cloud LLM providers, at least for code completion. We support CodeLlama-7B-QML and DeepSeekCoder v2 Lite now. You can run them with Ollama, the LLM self-hosting technology, on your computer with a few clicks and a single CLI command.

16 Apr 2025 7:59am GMT

Fedora 42 has been released! 🎉 So let's see what is included in this new release for the Fedora Atomic Desktops variants (Silverblue, Kinoite, Sway Atomic, Budgie Atomic and COSMIC Atomic).

Note: You can also read this post on the Fedora Magazine.

New COSMIC Atomic variant

The new COSMIC desktop has been packaged for Fedora and a new Atomic variant created for it thanks to Ryan Brue. It is not yet available on the website but should be soon. See fedora-websites#351. Edit: It is now live: Fedora COSMIC Atomic.

See the Fedora change request.

Changes for all variants

composefs enabled by default

Following Fedora CoreOS in Fedora 41, Fedora Atomic Desktops are now using composefs by default. This is an important first step towards better integrity for the system content.

Note: As a side effect of this change, the systemd-remount-fs.service unit may fail to start on your system. Until we find a good way to fix this, you can find a workaround to apply in the atomic-desktops-sig#72 issue or in the common issue thread on the forum.

See the Fedora change request and the tracking issue atomic-desktops-sig#35.

Migration to a static GRUB config

As part of the move to composefs, we had to migrate systems to using a static GRUB config.

This also removes the duplicated entries in the boot menu for installations that pre-dates Fedora 41.

The transition will happen automatically during the first boot on Fedora 42. You can verify that it worked by looking at the status of the bootloader-update service:

$ sudo systemctl status bootloader-update.service

We are still missing documentation on how to change some GRUB settings now that the configuration is static. See the tracking issue atomic-desktops-sig#73.

Custom keyboard layout set on installation (for LUKS unlock)

This fix is important for setups where the root disk is encrypted with LUKS and the user is asked a passphrase on boot. The keyboard layout is now set as a kernel argument during the installation by Anaconda. If you want to later change the keyboard layout used for the LUKS password prompt, you will have to update the kernel argument.

Example to set the keyboard layout to the french keyboard:

$ sudo rpm-ostree kargs --append=vconsole.keymap=fr

Example to replace an existing layout by another:

$ sudo rpm-ostree kargs --replace=vconsole.keymap=de

See atomic-desktops-sig#6.

No longer building for PPC64LE

According to the countme statistics, we did not have users on PPC64LE, so we decided to stop building the Fedora Atomic Desktops for that architecture.

If you relied on those images, you can migrate to Fedora Bootc images (which are available for PPC64LE) or use a conventionnal Fedora package based installation.

See the Fedora change request.

What's new in Silverblue

GNOME 48

Fedora Silverblue comes with the latest GNOME 48 release.

For more details about the changes that alongside GNOME 48, see What's new in Fedora Workstation 42 on the Fedora Magazine and Looking ahead at 2025 and Fedora Workstation and jobs on offer! from Christian F.K. Schaller.

What's new in Kinoite

KDE Plasma 6.3

Fedora Kinoite ships with Plasma 6.3, Frameworks 6.11 and Gear 24.12.

See also What's New in Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop 42? on the Fedora Magazine.

What's new in Sway Atomic

Nothing specific this release.

What's new in Budgie Atomic

The default software center for Budgie Atomic is now Plasma Discover. To rebase from Fedora 41 to 42, you will have to use the command line as rebasing via GNOME Software will move your system to Fedora Silverblue.

See: fedora-budgie/project/issue/5.

Changes in unofficial images

Until we complete the work needed in the Fedora infrastructure to build and push official container images for the Atomic Desktops (see releng#12142 and cloud-image-uploader#37), I am providing unofficial builds of those. They are built on GitLab.com CI runners, use the official Fedora packages and the same sources as the official images.

You can find the configuration and list on gitlab.com/fedora/ostree/ci-test and the container images at quay.io/organization/fedora-ostree-desktops.

Container images signed with cosign (sigstore)

The unofficial container images are now signed with cosign. You can configure your system to verify the signature of the images using the instructions from the project README.

Container images available for aarch64

We are now building all our variants for the aarch64 architecture as well.

Goodbye to Sericea and Onyx (now Sway Atomic & Budgie Atomic)

We have now removed all container images under that name. Use the new names:

• Sericea: sway-atomic
• Onyx: budgie-atomic

Unofficial, experimental Fedora Asahi Remix Atomic Desktops

We are now producing unofficial, experimental bootable container images targeting Apple Silicon, using the packages from the Fedora Asahi Remix project.

Those images are in a working state, but the installation procedure is not ready for general use. We thus only recommend that you give this a try if you are ready to help with the development or are ready to re-install you system and lose data.

See: fedora-asahi-remix-atomic-desktops project on GitHub

See also the Fedora Asahi Remix 42 is now available posts on the Fedora Magazine.

Note that those images currently do not support the x86 emulation detailed in New in Fedora: Running x86 programs on ARM systems.

Universal Blue, Bluefin, Bazzite and Aurora

Our friends in the Universal Blue project (Bazzite, Bluefin, Aurora) have prepared the update to Fedora 42. Look for upcoming announcements in their Discourse.

I heavily recommend checking them out, especially if you feel like some things are missing from the Fedora Atomic Desktops and you depend on them (NVIDIA proprietary drivers, extra media codec, out of tree kernel drivers, etc.).

What's next

Roadmap to Bootable Containers

The next major evolution for the Atomic Desktops will be to transition to Bootable Containers. See also the Fedora bootc documentation.

We have established a roadmap (atomic-desktops-sig#26) and we need your help to make this a smooth transition for all of our existing users.

Turning the sysext experiment into a good experience

Systemd system extensions (sysexts) are a new option when you need some applications available on your system and can not run them in containers or as Flatpaks for various reasons. They offer an alternative approach to package layering as they do not increase update time and can be enabled or disabled as needed.

Support for sysexts is still in development for the Atomic Desktops but they already provide advantages over package layering for some use cases. See the currently experimental project: github.com/travier/fedora-sysexts.

Unifying the Atomic Desktops documentation

We would like to unify the documentation for the Fedora Atomic Desktops into a single one instead of having per desktop environments docs which are mostly duplicate of one another and need to be constantly synced.

See the tracking issue atomic-desktops-sig#10 if you want to help us do that.

Where to reach us

We are looking for contributors to help us make the Fedora Atomic Desktops the best experience for Fedora users.

• Atomic Desktops SIG: Issue tracker (gitlab.com/fedora/ostree/sig), #atomic-desktops:fedoraproject.org
• Silverblue: Workstation Working Group, #silverblue:fedoraproject.org
• Kinoite: KDE SIG, #kinoite:fedoraproject.org
• Sway Atomic: Sway SIG, #sway:fedoraproject.org
• Budgie Atomic: Budgie SIG, #budgie:fedoraproject.org
• COSMIC Atomic: COSMIC SIG, #cosmic:fedoraproject.org

14 Apr 2025 10:00pm GMT

We're happy to announce the release of version 1.4.0 of the Qt Extension for Visual Studio Code! This release cooked for a bit as pre-release 1.3.0 on the marketplace and has now been promoted to a proper release. Take a look at what's new in this release.

14 Apr 2025 2:34pm GMT

Historically passwords and credentials in all of our apps and services (such as kio and our Network Manager plasmoid), are stored and managed by our KWallet subsystem and API. In a similar way, GNOME had gnome-keyring, and other similar systems were available. A major problem was the mutually incompatible interface between them, making impossible to have a single place where all the passwords go.

For this reason, a standard DBus interface called Secret Service has been developed, and systems like KWallet, gnome-keyring and KeepassXC have adopted the interface as well.

In the future, we want to eventually port our applications to use the Secret Service API directly, preferably via the QtKeychain library (some applications already do), which will use Secret Service natively on Linux. And as a bonus the Windows/Android native systems on those platforms will work too.

This will make our applications work much better, be more integrated in other desktops or platforms, and be less dependent on the KWallet framework which has big legacy code parts at this point.

Right now, KWallet has the option to bring up a Secret Service compatible interface, and this is a valuable first step, but there are still some potential problems in the migration path:

• Applications using Secret Service will store their secret data in different places when running in different environment, including our own that have been migrated. If you login into a different session ,every app will have forgotten its credentials.
• It's possible to use a different Secret Service provider also in a Plasma session, for instance enabling it in KeepassXC. At that point some apps will save into it, while other ones will keep using KWallet with a different storage backend.
• Applications ported from KWallet to SecretService will lose their credentials, unless some clunky porting code is written for each application.

A KWallet compatibility layer

Enter the recent refactor that happened in KWallet: it has now been split into 2 different system services now: one that exposes only the Secret Service API, and one that exposes only the KWallet API.

The service exposing the KWallet API has been written from scratch and is now just a thin wrapper around the Secret Service API, translating the KWallet DBus calls to Secret Service ones. The old KWallet service is now a pure Secret Service provider that just happens to use the old KWallet backend, exposing to Secret Service all the entries that had already been stored in the past.

This decouples our KWallet compatibility layer for existing or old applications (not only KDE applications, also third party ones like Chromium use it) with our actual secret storage and SecretService implementation, allowing a separate development roadmap, and even potential future transition to a different backend in a completely transparent way to the user.

You can see this decoupling in the same spirit as the recent KWin Wayland/X11 split: being able to develop the new technology without risking breaking compatibility of the legacy system.

What it means for users and developers

For the immediate future, not much really changes: users will still have all their secrets accessible, and every app they use that was using KWallet will keep working without forgetting anything.

In the same way, for developers, the whole KWallet C++ API keeps working exactly as it was (even though we're discouraging its use in new projects). Also, the KWallet-to-Secret-Service API proxy layer will save data inside Secret Service with the same schema used by QtKeychain, keeping the data accessible if the application gets ported from using the KWallet C++ API to QtKeychain.

An experimental feature

Disclaimer: The following description is of an experimental feature behind a hidden configuration key: it will take a bit before it's deemed ready for prime time.

One advantage of having 2 independent services to handle the KWallet API and the Secret Service one is that now it's possible to chose different backends as well, such as KeepassXC, gnome-keyring or oo7.

Setting the following in kwalletrc:

[Migration]
MigrateTo3rdParty=true
[KSecretD]
Enabled=false

With this, the old KWallet backend (now a service called ksecretd) won't be started anymore, and instead any Secret Service provider that is running or has been configured to be DBus-activatable will be used. The first time this happens, a data migration procedure will be executed, writing the data in KWallet into the new service, keeping all the user-saved secrets accessible.

14 Apr 2025 1:30pm GMT

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.

As Carl is still in vacation, this issue is only partially complete.

System Apps

Dolphin Manage your files

The Dolphin search integration has been rewritten from scratch. Notably, users can now switch the search tool between a simple search algorithm and one using file indexing and offering advanced search options. This way users are no longer forced to use the file index whenever it is available and can instead search in a slower but more reliable manner.

The overall user interface design is much improved with better clarity about what is currently being searched and which parameters can be changed. It was designed in a collaborative effort by Kristen McWilliam, Jin Liu, Andy Betts, Tagwerk, Felix Ernst, and a few others. (Felix Ernst, 25.08.0. Link)

The "Show in Groups" action was moved from the "View" menu to the "Sort By" menu. (Nate Graham, 25.08.0. Link)

The "Change View Mode" button which was recently added to Dolphin's default tool bar configuration is now icon-only by default (just like we had intended). (Akseli Lahtinen, 25.08.0. Link)

In the Trash context menu the "Properties" action is now once again in the last position just like in all the other Dolphin view context menus. This now-fixed inconsistency was an unintended side-effect of us moving the "Delete" action last to make it less likely to click it by accident when aiming at "Restore". (Kai Uwe Broulik, 25.08.0. Link)

Dolphin will now hide the background of the navigation bar when it's outside of the toolbar. (Akseli Lahtinen, 25.08.0. Link)

Other

Various improvements were made for the KDE Open and Save dialog:

• People using single-click selection can now click on checkboxes to select individual items in multi-selection dialogs. This works similarly to how it does in Dolphin. (Akseli Lahtinen, KIO 6.14. Link)
• Open and Save dialogs now allow quickly filtering through files by filename when pressing CTRL+I or Backslash key, like in Dolphin. (Akseli Lahtinen, KIO 6.14. 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.

13 Apr 2025 4:03pm GMT

Finishing Up

Hey everyone, It's me again, back with the final update for this year's Season of KDE. So, turns out things don't really go as planned and it took me some extra time to bring it over the line.

Since my last post, I wrote the tests for the Kalah game, the associated TUI, a greedy move selection and benchmarked Oware and Bohnenspiel. My mid-sem exams happened, in between, and delayed me by 2 weeks.

13 Apr 2025 11:28am GMT

Dear fans of music & open source music players,
in preparation of the upcoming Amarok 3.3 release, a beta release (3.2.81) has been prepared.

As shown in the ChangeLog, the changes are mostly technical: Qt5 support is removed, and Amarok 3.3 beta is compatible with Qt6/KF6 only. Additionally, a database scheme update (first such since 2012) fixes encoding and date related bugs.

Please note that due to the database update, downgrading from 3.3 beta is not directly possible, and returning to pre-3.3 versions requires the database (at ~/.local/share/amarok/mysqle/) to be manually backed up beforehand.

Aligning with current major KDE Frameworks version should simplify various direct and indirect software dependencies. However, phonon-vlc is the only supported backend on Qt6 Phonon, which Amarok 3.3 beta is still using for audio playback. This imposes some constraints e.g. on equalizer and analyzer functionalities. A more comprehensive overview of audio backend status is available on an invent.kde.org issue and a related work-in-progress merge request.

Additionally, there isn't official releases with Qt6 support of liblastfm available yet (needed for last.fm support). To enable the functionality, one needs to use library version built from e.g. sources at https://github.com/Mazhoon/liblastfm/tree/81e8f9dc16a0a18fe9a066d51c2071086326670b .

The Amarok 3.3 beta source tarball is available on download.kde.org and it has been signed with Tuomas Nurmi's GPG key. In addition to the source code, it is likely that some distributions will provide beta packages. The various nightly git builds provided by various splendid packagers should also provide a way of using the beta changes and participating in the testing.

Happy listening!

13 Apr 2025 8:30am GMT

Final update

So this is my final blog regarding the Season of KDE 2025, I'm feeling happy for what I accomplished. Over the past few weeks, I've implemented PvP system for mancala game, this project has been a deep dive into game development, networking and user experience.

Summary of work done so far

1. Move tracking Mechanics

At the heart of this project lies the MankalaEngine, an engine designed to handle rules and gameplay of various mancala variants. I've added some more feature in the engine:

• Move tracking: The lastMoveMethod() method allows to retrieve the last move played by the player and computer.

2. PvP Mode

It allows the real-time multiplayer gameplay using XMPP. Following is a brief summary:

• XMPP Integration: Players connect to each other using their jabber IDs and exchange move using the established chat room in real-time.
• Turn Management: The Player 1 always start, and turns alternate between the two players.
• Board Syncing: Players manually update their boards based on the opponent's move, ensuring both the players have accurate view of the game state.

3. Man Page Documentation

To make the game accesible, I've created a man page for bohnenspieltui. This man page provides the information abou the game, including:

• Synopsis and Description: A brief overview and explanation of the game variant.
• Usage: Instructions for running the PvP mode.
• Added a minor improvement of card view in Mancala GUI.

Future Work

While the task for this term is completed, their are several areas for improvement:

• Automated board syncing by replacing the current manual one.
• Integrating the engine to the mancala GUI.
• Extending the PvP to other variants.

Final Words

Thanks to KDE community, XMPP community and Benson Muite and João Gouveia and Blue from Macaw.me for the guidance and support. And I encourage the aspiring contributors to take part in Season of KDE to learn and grow as a developer.

13 Apr 2025 12:00am GMT

It looks like Brodie Robertson hasn't gotten sick of me yet, because we sat down again recently, this time on the subject of Techpaladin! We go over a lot of stuff I wrote in the announcement blog post last month, plus more detail and other topics too. This ends up being a pretty nerdy talk as we additionally meander between finance and exchange rates, Dungeons and Dragons, Alpha Centauri, Maslow's Hierarchy of needs, the KWin Zoom effect, and, of course, KDE World Domination.

12 Apr 2025 4:53am GMT