Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

Every week we cover the highlights of what's happening in the world of KDE Plasma and its associated apps like Discover, System Monitor, and more.

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This week Plasma gained an initial system setup wizard! For a few years now, we've had Welcome Center, which runs after you log in for the first time. But what creates the user account you log into?

If you're the person who installed the OS, the installer did it after you told it what username and password you wanted. But what if someone else ran the installer? Say, the company you bought the computer from. Or the last person who wiped the machine before giving or selling it you. In this case, no user acounts have been set up, so something needs to do that.

KDE Initial System Setup now takes care of it! Kristen McWilliam has brought KISS from an internal skunkworks project to a production-ready part of the OEM setup story. KISS lands in Plasma 6.5.0.

Notable UI Improvements

Plasma 6.5.0

Plasma panels now become scrollable when they contain far too much to see at once (usually due to opening lots of apps or entering Touch Mode). This scrollability doesn't emerge immediately; first the Task Manager widget's icons compress a little bit, but after a certain point they stop compressing and instead the panel becomes scrollable. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)

Improved the tone mapping curve used by KWin when displaying HDR content. Hopefully it should look even better now! (Xaver Hugl, link)

By default, system Settings no longer shows you the Drawing Tablet page if you don't have any drawing tablets connected. Of course, us being KDE, there's an option to show such filtered-out pages anyway, if you need them for troubleshooting purposes, for example. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

The output stream for volume feedback sounds no longer shows up briefly on the Audio Volume widget and System Settings page. (Ismael Asensio, link)

Improved the accessibility of System Settings' Shortcuts page. (Christoph Wolk, link)

Added more relevant information about your game controllers to System Settings' Game Controller page. (Jeremy Whiting, link)

The notification saying "you missed some notifications" after you leave Do Not Disturb mode no longer becomes visible in the history view after it expires, because if you can see it there, you're already in the place it wanted to tell you about. (Nate Graham, link)

Notable Bug Fixes

Plasma 6.4.5

Fixed several related issues with Plasma panel customization: one issue that prevented the Escape key from closing the configuration dialog, and another that caused widgets to get stuck if you pressed Escape while dragging them. (Niccolò Venerandi, link 1 and link 2)

Cloning a panel now also clones the settings of its System Tray widget, if it has one. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)

Fixed a layout issue with the Audio Volume widget that could cause an app's recording stream to be visually indented more than it should have been. (Christoph Wolk, link)

Plasma 6.5.0

Applied several more bug fixes for desktop icons to make sure they don't shift around so much. One of them fixes a related issue whereby the icons would reset their positions after you switched between the Folder layout and the Desktop layout, and then back again. (Akseli Lahtinen, link)

Made a few reliability fixes for the built-in RDP server to make sure that on every distro, it can be manually enabled, and also doesn't auto-start unless specifically told to. (Arnav Rawat and Nate Graham, link 1 and link 2)

Fixed an issue causing a standalone Audio Volume widget on a panel to sometimes take up too much space. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)

Other bug information of note:

• 5 very high priority Plasma bugs (up from 4 last week). Current list of bugs
• 27 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 28 last week). Current list of bugs

Notable in Performance & Technical

Plasma 6.4.5

Worked around a nasty issue in the AMD GPU graphics drivers. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Fixed a case where Plasma could hang after copying files from a slow (or later inaccessible) network location and opening the clipboard popup. (Fushan Wen, link)

Plasma 6.5.0

Swiched to a more lightweight timer for KWin's render loop, slightly reducing resource usage everywhere. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, link)

Implemented support for version 2 of the global shortcuts portal. (David Redondo, link)

Frameworks 6.18

Further improved the speed of thumbnail generation throughout all KDE software. (David Edmundson, 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!

You can also help us by making a donation! A monetary contribution of any size 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.

23 Aug 2025 4:03am GMT

## Bureaucracy

You may have noted that there wasn't a Foundation Update last week. This is because almost everything that has been happening at the Foundation lately falls under the banner of "bureaucracy" and/or "administration" and there isn't much to say about either of those topics publicly.

Also, last Friday was GNOME's 28th birthday and no one wants to hear about paper-shuffling on their birthday.

I'm sorry to say there isn't much to add this week, either. But I hope you did all take a moment to reflect on the nearly-three-decades-of-work that's gone into GNOME last week.

Happy Belated Birthday, Computer.

23 Aug 2025 3:48am GMT

Let's go for my web review for the week 2025-34.

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Google is killing the open web

Tags: tech, google, web, xml, xslt, html, history, vendor-lockin

Or why the XML roots of the web are important to keep in shape. I'm not necessarily in love with how verbose XML is, but it's been a great enabler for interoperability. That's indeed the latter reason which pushed Google to try to get rid of it as much as possible.

https://wok.oblomov.eu/tecnologia/google-killing-open-web/

Is Germany on the Brink of Banning Ad Blockers?

Tags: tech, advertisement, attention-economy, law

This latest ruling from the German supreme court is rather worrying…

https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2025/08/14/is-germany-on-the-brink-of-banning-ad-blockers-user-freedom-privacy-and-security-is-at-risk/

The Lawnmower IRC Server

Tags: tech, hardware, irc

OK, this is completely useless but definitely a fun project.

https://jotunheimr.idlerpg.net/users/jotun/lawnmower/

The future of large files in Git is Git

Tags: tech, version-control, git, storage, tools

Looking forward to Git LFS going away indeed.

https://tylercipriani.com/blog/2025/08/15/git-lfs/

Introduce git-history command for easy history editing

Tags: tech, tools, version-control, git

Let's see if this gets merged. This could be interesting convenience.

https://lore.kernel.org/git/20250819-b4-pks-history-builtin-v1-0-9b77c32688fe@pks.im/

Cheap tricks for high-performance Rust

Tags: tech, performance, memory, rust, tools

No good tricks to optimize your code, but knowing the tooling knobs sometimes help.

https://deterministic.space/high-performance-rust.html

The issue of anti-cheat on Linux

Tags: tech, gaming, windows, linux, kernel, system

Or why competitive multiplayer games which anti-cheat probably will never make it to Linux. I'm not into this kind of games but this is an interesting piece on comparing the differences between the Linux and Windows kernels. It also show that with some care from the game developers, those anti-cheats might not be necessary in the first place.

https://tulach.cc/the-issue-of-anti-cheat-on-linux/

Predictable memory accesses are much faster

Tags: tech, cpu, hardware, memory, performance

Indeed, CPU prefetchers are really good nowadays. Now you know what to do to keep your code fast.

https://lemire.me/blog/2025/08/15/predictable-memory-accesses-are-much-faster/

Fun and weirdness with SSDs

Tags: tech, databases, ssd, performance

Interesting, it looks like index scans in your databases can have surprising performance results with SSDs.

https://vondra.me/posts/fun-and-weirdness-with-ssds/

How to Think About GPUs

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpu, tpu, hardware

Long but interesting chapter which shows how GPUs architecture works and the differences with TPUs. This is unsurprisingly written in the context of large models training.

https://jax-ml.github.io/scaling-book/gpus/

Tag-based logging

Tags: tech, logging

The idea is interesting, I wouldn't throw away level based logging but this could complete it nicely.

https://mmapped.blog/posts/44-tag-based-logging

A programmer's field guide to assertions

Tags: tech, safety, programming, organization

A bit of a long read, but does a good job explaining the use of assertions and how to introduce them in your organization.

https://typesanitizer.com/blog/assertions.html

A Better Vocabulary for Testing

Tags: tech, tests

There's a need for clearer vocabulary about testing indeed. The write up is a bit dry here but that's a start.

https://alperenkeles.com/posts/vocab-for-testing/

Everything I know about good system design

Tags: tech, system, design, complexity

A good list of things to consider when designing systems. And indeed in case of success the result looks probably boring.

https://www.seangoedecke.com/good-system-design/

Why do software developers love complexity?

Tags: tech, complexity, architecture, programming

Indeed, let's not fall for the marketing. It's better to write less code if it's enough to solve actual problems.

https://kyrylo.org/software/2025/08/21/why-do-software-developers-love-complexity.html

Are Your Programmers Working Hard, Or Are They Lazy?

Tags: tech, organization, team, productivity, quality, management

A good reminder that long hours are not a sign of success with your project… on the contrary.

https://mikehadlow.blogspot.com/2013/12/are-your-programmers-working-hard-or.html

Hordes Of Novices

Tags: tech, craftsmanship, learning, quality

Easy to misunderstand as an elitist stance… But it's not the way I read it. Churning more code faster isn't going to help us, you need to take the time for people to grow and improve. It's not possible to achieve if you're drowning in eager beginners.

https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2013/11/19/HoardsOfNovices.html

The 10 models of remote and hybrid work

Tags: tech, gitlab, remote-working, management, culture, organization

A good way to frame the possible models for your organization regarding remote work. The GitLab Handbook stays a very good resource regarding remote work, they really thought about it and documented their findings.

https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/company/culture/all-remote/stages/

Agile Product Ownership in a nutshell

Tags: tech, agile, product-management

I think this is still one of the best distilled explanation of product ownership. It's also interesting for the other parties on an agile project.

https://blog.crisp.se/2012/10/25/henrikkniberg/agile-product-ownership-in-a-nutshell

Managing in Mayberry: An examination of three distinct leadership styles

Tags: tech, management, leadership

Interesting parable, it's indeed a good way to illustrate different leadership styles. Being more strategic is clearly what one should try to do.

https://www.donaldegray.com/managing-in-mayberry-an-examination-of-three-distinct-leadership-styles/

The importance of stupidity in scientific research

Tags: science, research

An important essay in my opinion. It reminds us quite well what the core drive of scientific research is about.

https://journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/121/11/1771/30038/The-importance-of-stupidity-in-scientific-research

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Bye for now!

22 Aug 2025 12:10pm GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from August 15 to August 22.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Glycin ↗

Sandboxed and extendable image loading and editing.

Sophie (she/her) announces

Glycin 2.0.beta.3 has been released. Among the important changes are fixes for thumbnailers not working in certain configurations, loading speed for JPEG XL having been dramatically improved, fixed sandbox rules that broke image loading on some systems, and fixed editing for some JPEG images saved in progressive mode.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Déjà Dup Backups ↗

A simple backup tool.

Michael Terry announces

Déjà Dup 49.beta was released! It just fixes a few small bugs and uses the new libadwaita shortcuts dialog.

But if you haven't tried the 49.x branch yet, it has a big UI refactor and adds file-manager-based restore for Restic backups.

Read more details and install instructions in the previous 49.alpha announcement. Thanks for any testing you can do before this reaches the masses!

Third Party Projects

Mir Sobhan announces

We forked the TWIG website and forged it into a "good first issue" tracker. It catches all GNOME-related projects on GitHub and GNOME GitLab to show issues labeled "good first issue" or "Newcomers." This can help newcomers find places to contribute including myself.

Website: https://ggfi.mirsobhan.ir Repo: https://gitlab.gnome.org/misano/goodfirstissue

Džeremi says

Chronograph gets a BIG new 4.0 update!

What is Chronograph?

Chronograph is an app for syncing lyrics, making them display like karaoke in supported players. It comes with a beautiful GTK4 + LibAdwaita interface and includes a built-in metadata editor, so you can manage your music library along with syncing lyrics. Default LRC files can be published to the large lyrics database LRClib.net, which is widely used by many open-source players to fetch lyrics. Until now, Chronograph supported only line-by-line lyrics, which was enough for most cases since standard LRC is the most common format. But times change…

Word-by-Word support!

Starting August 24th, Chronograph will gain support for Word-by-Word syncing. This feature uses the eLRC format (also known as LRC A2 or Enchanted LRC). In eLRC, each word has its own timestamp, allowing players that support it to animate lyrics word-by-word, giving you a true karaoke experience. And this is just the beginning: future updates will also bring support for TTML (Timed Text Markup Language).

Final notes

I hope you'll enjoy using the latest version of Chronograph, and together we can spread awareness of eLRC to the wider community. Sync lyrics of your loved songs! ♥️

Nathan Perlman announces

Rewaita - Give Adwaita some flavour

Hi there, a few weeks ago I released Rewaita, a spiritual successor to Gradience. With it, you can recolour GTK4/Adwaita apps to popular colour schemes. That's where the name comes from ~ Re(colour Ad)waita.

As of v1.0.4, released this week, you can create your own custom colour palettes if the ones we provide don't suit you, and you can also change the window controls to be either coloured or MacOS-styled.

You can find it on Flathub, but also in the AUR and NIXPKGS (the Nix Package is still under review).

Rewaita is also going through rapid development, so any help would be appreciated, or just leave us a star :). In particular, GTK3 and Cinnamon support are next up on the chopping block.

Miscellaneous

JumpLink says

ts-for-gir - TypeScript bindings for GObject Introspection

This week we've released a major improvement for GObject interface implementation: Virtual Interface Generation.

Instead of having to implement all methods of a GObject interface, developers can now only implement the virtual methods (vfunc_*). This matches the actual GObject-Introspection pattern and makes interface implementation much cleaner.

Before (implement all methods):

class CustomPaintable implements Gdk.Paintable {
  // Implement all methods manually
  get_current_image(): Gdk.Paintable { ... }
  get_flags(): Gdk.PaintableFlags { ... }
  get_intrinsic_width(): number { ... }
  // ... and many more
}

After (only virtual methods):

class CustomPaintable implements Gdk.Paintable.Interface {
  // Declare for TypeScript compatibility
  declare get_current_image: Gdk.Paintable["get_current_image"];
  declare get_flags: Gdk.Paintable["get_flags"];
  
  // Only implement virtual methods
  vfunc_get_current_image(): Gdk.Paintable { ... }
  vfunc_get_flags(): Gdk.PaintableFlags { ... }
}

We've created a comprehensive example: https://github.com/gjsify/ts-for-gir/tree/main/examples/virtual-interface-test

This shows both Gio.ListModel and Gdk.Paintable implementations using the new pattern.

Release: v4.0.0-beta.35 and v4.0.0-beta.36

Note: Last week we also released v4.0.0-beta.34 which introduced Advanced Variant Types by default, completing the gi.ts integration with enhanced TypeScript support for GLib.Variant.deepUnpack() and better type inference for GObject patterns.

That's all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

22 Aug 2025 12:00am GMT

Integrate KTextEditor into Cantor(2)

Over the past few months, I've been working on an important refactor in Cantor: migrating the editor for command entries from our in-house QTextDocument implementation to the powerful KTextEditor framework. In my previous update, I described how Phase 1 laid the foundation-command cells were migrated to use KTextEditor::View, enabling basic syntax highlighting and a modern editing experience.

Today, I'm excited to share that Phase 2 is now complete! With this milestone, the migration of command entries to KTextEditor is fully in place, ensuring that all existing functionality works smoothly without regressions. This achievement provides a solid foundation for future enhancements while keeping Cantor stable and reliable for everyday use.

What's New in Phase 2

With Phase 2 now complete, command entries are fully integrated into KTextEditor. Along the way, we introduced three major upgrades to Cantor's core architecture, paving the way for a more consistent, powerful, and future-ready user experience.

🔹 Unified Highlighting Framework

All syntax highlighting in Cantor is now powered by KSyntaxHighlighting, the same robust engine behind Kate and KWrite. This change ensures that every backend (such as Python, Maxima, R, Octave, etc.) benefits from a consistent, accurate, and highly reliable highlighting system.

Previously, each backend shipped with its own ad-hoc rules that were difficult to maintain and often inconsistent in style. With the new centralized approach, Cantor handles highlighting uniformly, not only providing a smoother user experience but also laying the groundwork for future support of custom themes and user-defined keywords.

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🔹 Unified Completion Infrastructure

Code completion has likewise been consolidated into a common framework coordinated through KTextEditor. In the past, each backend had its own incomplete and sometimes inconsistent completion logic. Now, all completion requests are handled in a unified, predictable manner, with backend-specific intelligent suggestions seamlessly integrated.

The result is less duplicated code, easier maintenance, and-most importantly-a more cohesive user experience. Whether you are writing Python scripts or Maxima formulas, code completion now behaves consistently, making Cantor feel smarter and more reliable.

---

🔹 Reduced Code Redundancy

By adopting KTextEditor as the core for command entry editing, we eliminated a significant amount of custom code that had been written in Cantor over the years to handle code completion and highlighting for the different supported languages.

This streamlining improves maintainability, reduces potential bug risks, and makes Cantor's codebase more approachable for new contributors. Developers no longer need to reimplement low-level editor features, allowing them to focus on advancing high-level functionality. In short: less boilerplate, more room for innovation.

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Functional demonstration: new and old comparison, take a look!

Thanks to the new KSyntaxHighlighting backend, we can now temporarily change the theme of command entries, demonstrating future possibilities.

Please note that this is currently a preview feature; global "sheet themes" (applying themes uniformly to the entire sheet,) are our next steps.

• Breeze Dark

  

• Github Dark

• Breeze Light

By integrating KTextEditor, Cantor now provides a unified and reliable code completion experience for all backends (such as Python, R, and Maxima).

Cantor also supports consistent multi-cell handling, with themes and syntax highlighting applied uniformly.

Why This Matters

This migration is not just a technical change under the hood-it directly impacts how Cantor evolves:

• Stability first: by ensuring no regressions during the migration, users can continue to rely on Cantor for daily work without disruption.
• Consistency across backends: highlighting and completion now feel the same, no matter which computational engine you choose.
• Future-proof foundation: less redundant code and more reliance on KDE Frameworks means Cantor can keep pace with new features in KTextEditor and the broader KDE ecosystem.

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What's Next

With command entries now fully migrated, the door is open for exciting new improvements:

• Theming support: enabling custom color schemes and styles, giving users the ability to tailor Cantor's appearance to their preferences.

• Vi mode integration: bringing modal editing from Kate into Cantor.
• Spell checking: powered by Sonnet, useful for Markdown and explanatory text inside worksheets.
• Smarter backend completions: richer suggestions, function signatures, and inline documentation.
• Performance work: optimizing for very large worksheets and heavy computations.

Theming support (planned)

For now, Cantor will keep the Default theme, which uses the desktop palette. This preserves the familiar look and behavior.

Next, we plan to introduce a Worksheet Theme setting. Users will be able to:

• Stay with Default (desktop palette, as before), or
• Choose a theme from KTextEditor/KSyntaxHighlighting, just like in Kate.

The selected theme will apply consistently across the worksheet-including command entries and results-for a unified appearance. Instead of relying on hardcoded colors or the system palette, Cantor will use the color roles provided by KTextEditor and KSyntaxHighlighting.

This approach avoids performance overhead from repeatedly reading theme files, ensures instant updates when switching themes, and lays the foundation for richer customization in the future-such as clearer distinctions between prompts, results, and errors, all within a consistent global style.

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22 Aug 2025 12:00am GMT

At the Linux App Summit (LAS) in Albania three months ago, I gave a talk about testing in the xdg-desktop-portal project. There is a recording of the presentation, and the slides are available as well.

To give a quick summary of the work I did:

• Revamped the CI
• Reworked and improved the pytest based integration test harness
• Added integration tests for new portals
• Ported over all the existing GLib/C based integration tests
• Support ASAN for detecting memory leaks in the tests
• Made tests pretend to be either a host, Flatpak or Snap app

The hope I had is that this will result in:

• Fewer regressions
• Tests for new features and bug fixes
• More confidence in refactoring
• More activity in the project

While it's hard to get definite data on those points, at least some of it seems to have become reality. I have seen an increase in activity (there are other factors to this for sure), and a lot of PRs already come with tests without me even having to ask for it. Canonical is involved again, taking care of the Snap side of things. So far it seems like we didn't introduce any new regressions, but this usually shows after a new release. The experience of refactoring portals also became a lot better because there is a baseline level of confidence when the tests pass, as well as the possibility to easily bisect issues. Overall I'm already quite happy with the results.

Two weeks ago, Georges merged the last piece of what I talked about in the LAS presentation, so we're finally testing the code paths that are specific to host, Flatpak and Snap applications! I also continued a bit with improving the tests, and now they can be run with Valgrind, which is super slow and that's why we're not doing it in the CI, but it tends to find memory leaks which ASAN does not. With the existing tests, it found 9 small memory leaks.

If you want to improve the Flatpak story, come and contribute to xdg-desktop-portal. It's now easier than ever!

21 Aug 2025 11:00pm GMT

At the Linux App Summit (LAS) in Albania three months ago, I gave a talk about testing in the xdg-desktop-portal project. There is a recording of the presentation, and the slides are available as well.

To give a quick summary of the work I did:

• Revamped the CI
• Reworked and improved the pytest based integration test harness
• Added integration tests for new portals
• Ported over all the existing GLib/C based integration tests
• Support ASAN for detecting memory leaks in the tests
• Made tests pretend to be either a host, Flatpak or Snap app

The hope I had is that this will result in:

• Fewer regressions
• Tests for new features and bug fixes
• More confidence in refactoring
• More activity in the project

While it's hard to get definite data on those points, at least some of it seems to have become reality. I have seen an increase in activity (there are other factors to this for sure), and a lot of PRs already come with tests without me even having to ask for it. Canonical is involved again, taking care of the Snap side of things. So far it seems like we didn't introduce any new regressions, but this usually shows after a new release. The experience of refactoring portals also became a lot better because there is a baseline level of confidence when the tests pass, as well as the possibility to easily bisect issues. Overall I'm already quite happy with the results.

Two weeks ago, Georges merged the last piece of what I talked about in the LAS presentation, so we're finally testing the code paths that are specific to host, Flatpak and Snap applications! I also continued a bit with improving the tests, and now they can be run with Valgrind, which is super slow and that's why we're not doing it in the CI, but it tends to find memory leaks which ASAN does not. With the existing tests, it found 9 small memory leaks.

If you want to improve the Flatpak story, come and contribute to xdg-desktop-portal. It's now easier than ever!

21 Aug 2025 9:00pm GMT

If you have spent any time around HID devices under Linux (for example if you are an avid mouse, touchpad or keyboard user) then you may have noticed that your single physical device actually shows up as multiple device nodes (for free! and nothing happens for free these days!). If you haven't noticed this, run libinput record and you may be part of the lucky roughly 50% who get free extra event nodes.

The pattern is always the same. Assuming you have a device named FooBar ExceptionalDog 2000 AI[1] what you will see are multiple devices

/dev/input/event0: FooBar ExceptionalDog 2000 AI Mouse
/dev/input/event1: FooBar ExceptionalDog 2000 AI Keybard 
/dev/input/event2: FooBar ExceptionalDog 2000 AI Consumer Control 

The Mouse/Keyboard/Consumer Control/... suffixes are a quirk of the kernel's HID implementation which splits out a device based on the Application Collection. [2]

A HID report descriptor may use collections to group things together. A "Physical Collection" indicates "these things are (on) the same physical thingy". A "Logical Collection" indicates "these things belong together". And you can of course nest these things near-indefinitely so e.g. a logical collection inside a physical collection is a common thing.

An "Application Collection" is a high-level abstractions to group something together so it can be detected by software. The "something" is defined by the HID usage for this collection. For example, you'll never guess what this device might be based on the hid-recorder output:

# 0x05, 0x01,                    // Usage Page (Generic Desktop)              0
# 0x09, 0x06,                    // Usage (Keyboard)                          2
# 0xa1, 0x01,                    // Collection (Application)                  4
...
# 0xc0,                          // End Collection                            74

Yep, it's a keyboard. Pop the champagne[3] and hooray, you deserve it.

The kernel, ever eager to help, takes top-level application collections (i.e. those not inside another collection) and applies a usage-specific suffix to the device. For the above Generic Desktop/Keyboard usage you get "Keyboard", the other ones currently supported are "Keypad" and "Mouse" as well as the slightly more niche "System Control", "Consumer Control" and "Wireless Radio Control" and "System Multi Axis". In the Digitizer usage page we have "Stylus", "Pen", "Touchscreen" and "Touchpad". Any other Application Collection is currently unsuffixed (though see [2] again, e.g. the hid-uclogic driver uses "Touch Strip" and other suffixes).

This suffix is necessary because the kernel also splits out the data sent within each collection as separate evdev event node. Since HID is (mostly) hidden from userspace this makes it much easier for userspace to identify different devices because you can look at a event node and say "well, it has buttons and x/y, so must be a mouse" (this is exactly what udev does when applying the various ID_INPUT properties, with varying levels of success).

The side effect of this however is that your device may show up as multiple devices and most of those extra devices will never send events. Sometimes that is due to the device supporting multiple modes (e.g. a touchpad may by default emulate a mouse for backwards compatibility but once the kernel toggles it to touchpad mode the mouse feature is mute). Sometimes it's just laziness when vendors re-use the same firmware and leave unused bits in place.

It's largely a cosmetic problem only, e.g. libinput treats every event node as individual device and if there is a device that never sends events it won't affect the other event nodes. It can cause user confusion though: "why does my laptop say there's a mouse?" and in some cases it can cause functional degradation - the two I can immediately recall are udev detecting the mouse node of a touchpad as pointing stick (because i2c mice aren't a thing), hence the pointing stick configuration may show up in unexpected places. And fake mouse devices prevent features like "disable touchpad if a mouse is plugged in" from working correctly. At the moment we don't have a good solution for detecting these fake devices - short of shipping giant databases with product-specific entries we cannot easily detect which device is fake. After all, a Keyboard node on a gaming mouse may only send events if the user configured the firmware to send keyboard events, and the same is true for a Mouse node on a gaming keyboard.

So for now, the only solution to those is a per-user udev rule to ignore a device. If we ever figure out a better fix, expect to find a gloating blog post in this very space.

[1] input device naming is typically bonkers, so I'm just sticking with precedence here
[2] if there's a custom kernel driver this may not apply and there are quirks to change this so this isn't true for all devices
[3] or sparkling wine, let's not be regionist here

20 Aug 2025 1:12am GMT

Hi!

This month I've spent quite some time working on vali, a C library and code generator for the Varlink IPC protocol. It was formerly named "varlinkgen", but the new name is shorter and more accurate (the library can be used without the code generator). I've fixed a bunch of bugs, updated the service implementation to use non-blocking IO, added some tests and support for continued calls (which are Varlink's way to emit events from a service). I've also written a patch to port the kanshi output configuration tool to vali.

Speaking of kanshi, I've released version 1.8. A new kanshictl status command shows the current mode, and wildcard patterns are now supported to match outputs. I want to finish up relative output positioning for the next release, but some tricky usability issues need to be sorted out first.

Support for toplevel capture in xdg-desktop-portal-wlr has been merged. This was the last missing piece to be able to share an individual window from Web browsers. libdisplay-info v0.3 has been released with support for many new CTA data blocks and groundwork for DisplayID v2. José Expósito has sent libdrm and drm_info patches to add user-space support for the special "faux" bus used in cases where a device isn't backed by hardware (up until now, the platform bus was abused).

The Goguma mobile IRC client now displays a small bubble when someone else mentions you, making these easier to spot at a glance:

Jean THOMAS has added a new option to choose between the in-app Web view and an external browser when opening links. Hubert Hirtz has tweaked the login forms to play better with the autofill feature some password managers provide.

I've released go-imap v2 beta 6, with support for SPECIAL-USE and CHILDREN thanks to Dejan Štrbac and legacy RECENT thanks to fox.cpp. I'd like to eventually ship v2, but there are still some rough edges that I'd like to smooth out. I now realize it's been more than 2 years since the first v2 alpha release, maybe I should listen a bit more to my bio teacher who used to repeat "perfect is the enemy of good".

Anyways, that's all for now, see you next month!

16 Aug 2025 10:00pm GMT