Welcome to a new issue of "This Week in KDE Apps"! Every week we cover as much as possible of what's happening in the world of KDE apps.
This week, we are adding the final touches to our applications for the KDE Gear 24.12.0 release coming next Thursday. We are also releasing KPhotoAlbum and KGeoTag, now based on Qt6; improving Itinerary's ticket extractor support coverage in central Europe; and continuing our work on Karp, KDE's new PDF editor.
Meanwhile, as part of the 2024 end-of-year fundraiser, you can "Adopt an App" in a symbolic effort to support your favorite KDE app. This week, we are particularly grateful to
Stuart Turton for NeoChat;
Lukas, Stuart Turton and J. for Merkuro;
Andreas Pietzowski, Dia_FIX and Alex Gurenko for Ark;
Stuart Turton and Cameron Bosch for Tokodon;
Alex Gurenko and Steven Dunbar for Gwenview;
Alex Gurenko, Kasimir den Hertog and Pokipan for KWrite;
crysknife, Ian Kidd and Felix Urbasik for KRDC;
Ian Nicholson for Alligator;
Cameron Radmore for ISO Image Writer;
Marcel Janik Kimpel and @[email protected] for KDE Partition Manager;
Marton Daniel for Plasma System Monitor;
Alessio Adamo for AudioTube;
zukigay for Kasts;
Anael for Elisa;
Stuart Turton and Clément Aubert for Konqueror;
Ulrich Palecek, @ddjivan.bsky.social and Andreas Zautner for Discover;
Butters for KolourPaint;
KjetilS for krfb;
and finally fabacam, Michael Klingberg and Gianmarco Gargiulo for GCompris.
Getting back to all that's new in the KDE App scene, let's dig in!
When updating, adding, or removing a tag/category to a calendar event, the update is immediately visible without having to sync again with a remote server (Daniel Vrátil, 24.12.0 — Link).
Amarok devs fixed Ampache version check. Ampache is self-hostable music streamer service server and the version check was broken since Ampache changed their version format, but it works again now (Ian Abbott, Amarok 3.2.0 — Link).
You can also filter a collection by tracks that have tags missing or when tags are empty (Tuomas Nurmi, Amarok 3.2.0 — Link — an 11 year old feature request!).
Arianna now uses foliate-js instead of epub.js to render EPUB files. foliate-js provides some advantages like no longer requiring to load the whole book into memory, and comes with a better layout engine (Ajay Chauhan, 25.04.0 — Link).
Accessibility support in Dolphin was adapted to better work with Orca 47 (Felix Ernst, 25.04.0 — Link), and, continuing with accessibility improvements, after activating a folder in the Dolphin sidebar, the view is now always focused (Felix Ernst, 25.04.0 — Link). Likewise, when clicking on "Open Path" and "Open Path in New Tab" after searching for an item, the view will scroll to the selected item (Akseli Lahtinen, 25.04.0 — Link).
The placeholder message when Samba isn't and can't be installed was improved (Ilya Katsnelson, 25.04.0. and partially backported to 24.12.0 — Link), and the Flatpak version now allows compressing files into an archive (Justin Zobel, 25.04.0 — Link).
When removing the last track associated with an artist or a music genre, the artist or genre is now removed from the internal database (Jack Hill, 25.04.0 — Link).
Volker wrote a recap for the past two months in Itinerary and can read it on his blog. The post includes a report on work unrelated to Itinerary development, but nevertheless important, like the lobbying of DELFI, a cooperation network of all German federal states for public transport.
The "Vehicle Layout" page and the "Journey Details" page were slightly tweaked and use the new unified component to display the name of the train or bus (Carl Schwan, 25.04.0 — Link 1 and link 2).
We also made significant progress on Itinerary's extractors this week, with many new extractors, including:
The Colosseum Ticket in Rome (David Pilarcik, Link)
The Polish online ticket sale system Droplabs (David Pilarcik, Link)
The train booking platform Leo Express (David Pilarcik, Link)
The German trade fair, congress, and event ticket sale system, Dimedis Fairmate (Kai Uwe Broulik, Link)
It is now possible to resize Konsole's search bar (Eric D'Addario, 25.04.0 — Link), and to search for an open tab by its name (Troy Hoover, 25.04.0 — Link).
We fixed the "Grab Keys" feature on Wayland when switching from and to full screen. Additionally the "Grab Keys" feature, now also correctly forwards every shortcut to the remote applications (Fabio Bas, 25.04.0 — Link 1 and link 2).
We also fixed building KRDC on Haiku (Luc Schrijvers, 24.12.1 — Link).
You can now sort rooms in the sidebar based on their most recent activity instead of by unread notifications (Soumyadeep Ghosh, 25.04.0 — Link), and added a "Copy Link Address" context menu when clicking on a message (Kai Uwe Broulik, 25.04.0 — Link).
We fixed the capitalization of the account dialog as well as many of NeoChat's settings pages (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0 — Link), and removed device details from the device display name, as this could leak sensitive information (Tobias Fella, 24.12.0 — Link).
When creating a new signature, Okular will automatically pick a font size depending on the available size instead of using a hardcoded size. This allows you to make signatures much smaller than before (Nicolas Fella, 25.04.0 — Link). This work was sponsored by the Technische Universität Dresden.
We improved the support for Piped, an alternative privacy-friendly YouTube frontend, in PlasmaTube, as we have improved the parsing of its media format information (Alexey Andreyev, 25.04.0 — Link).
The Mastodon client used when posting on Mastodon is now displayed as a Kirigami.Chip element (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0 — Link).
We also fixed the support for GoToSocial (snow flurry, 24.12.0 — Link 1 and link 2), and added prelimary support for Iceshrimp (Joshua Goins, 24.12.0 — Link)).
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.
Thanks to Michael Mischurow and Tobias Fella for proofreading this post.
I promised new features soon, and here they are! There are plenty of positive UI changes too. Hopefully what this week's post lacks in quantity will be made up by depth, because these are some nice changes that have been in development for quite some time. Have a look:
Notable New Features
It's now possible to clone a panel! (Niccolò Venerandi, 6.3.0. Link)
KWin's Custom Tiling system now remembers tile arrangement on a per-virtual-desktop basis. (Marco Martin, 6.3.0. Link)
You can now set keyboard shortcuts to move windows between Custom Tiling (as opposed to Quick Tiling) tile zones based on directionality. No default shortcuts were set up for now because all the obvious Modifier+Arrow combinations were already taken. This is an avenue to ponder further in the future. (Akseli Lahtinen, 6.3.0. Link)
It's now possible to limit the upper and lower ranges for tablet pen pressure, not just the shape of the pressure curve. (Joshua Goins, 6.3.0. Link)
Notable UI Improvements
Categories in Kickoff no longer automatically switch on hover by default; they have to be clicked like all other list items elsewhere. This fixes a host of issues related to unexpected category switching and freezes when moving the pointer rapidly over categories. Those who preferred switch-on-hover can turn it back on if they like. (Noah Davis, 6.3.0. Link)
The way Quick Tiling (i.e. with Meta+Arrow keys) works has been slightly changed; now when trying to tile a window in a direction it can't be tiled in anymore because it has hit a screen edge with nothing beyond it, it will simply sit there, rather than un-tiling and teleporting to a potentially unexpected place. (Vlad Zahorodnii, 6.3.0. Link)
System Settings' Display & Monitor page now shows a slider for normal/SDR brightness for each screen, just in case you expected to find it there rather than in the System Tray's Brightness and Color widget. (Xaver Hugl, 6.3.0. Link)
When you hold down Alt+Tab to open the window switcher and then keep those keys held down, the selection highlight will now go all the way to the end, but will no longer hilariously wrap around infinitely until you release the keys again. (Ismael Asensio, 6.3.0. Link)
The active virtual desktop is now remembered per activity. (Xaver Hugl, 6.3.0. Link)
Notable Bug Fixes
Fixed a bug that could cause placeholder and typed text to overlap in KRunner's search field under certain circumstances. (Jack Xu, 6.2.5. Link)
Metadata displayed for Bing picture of the day wallpapers is now displayed correctly. (George Travelbacon, 6.2.5. Link)
When you copy images from Plasma notifications, they can now be pasted into sandboxed apps. (Alessandro Astone, 6.2.5. Link)
After using an application that goes through the input capture portal (e.g. Input Leap) and it quits unexpectedly, you now regain full control of your pointer and keyboard immediately. (David Redondo, 6.2.5 Link)
Keyboard navigation between a filtered subset of windows in the Overview effect now works as you expect it to. (Niccolò Venerandi, 6.3.0. Link)
When you delete a panel but haven't yet dismissed the option to unto this, the deleted panel no longer inappropriately and surprisingly responds to any keyboard shortcuts that toggle any of their widgets. (Niccolò Venerandi, 6.3.0. Link)
110 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed over the last week. Full list of bugs
Notable in Performance & Technical
Slightly increased the performance of every app and window that uses KWindowStateSaver. (David Edmundson, Frameworks 6.9, 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.
Thankfully, thousands of you have stepped up in the past week to do just that financially, donating a record-breaking amount of money to KDE e.V., which is just incredible, awe-inspiring even.
So that's a great way to help out. But if you've got more time than money or want to make a difference more directly, then 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:
This time, it’s a short one: We ported KPhotoAlbum to Qt6/KF6. That’s it ;-)
The port itself has been done by Johannes and me, additional commits have been contributed by Randall Rude and Fabian Würfl. Thanks for working on KPA with us!
One thing that’s worth mentioning is: For the map/geodata functionality, we need Marble. The Qt5/KF5 version of Marble can’t be co-installed with the Qt6/KF6 version, and this one is not released yet. But Marble 24.12.0 (which will be the first official Qt6/KF6 release) will be released in a few days. So just wait until it's out before upgrading to KPA 6, to not lose the map parts.
Maybe, the Qt6/KF6 version contains some regressions. The codebase is quite well advanced in years in some parts, and we had to mess with quite some legacy issues to make the whole thing fit for Qt6/KF6. So if you notice anything, please file a respective bug report and/or contact us via our mailing list or Matrix channel (cf. User support → Communication). Thanks for your participation (hopefully, it won’t be necessary too much).
Pourquoi les médias devraient créer des serveurs Mastodon maintenant
Tags: tech, social-media, fediverse, bluesky, politics, business
Article in French
Very good piece explaining why the Ferdiverse is currently our only option for a decentralized social media platform. Maybe Bluesky will become another option… maybe… but so far it’s only empty promises with a real risk of capture.
Nice vision model. Looks like it strikes and interesting balance between performance and memory consumption. Looks doable to run cheaply and on premise.
Interesting piece, it highlights well the struggle for the C++ community to come up with a cohesive approach to improve safety. It doesn’t look like the solution is going to come from the standardization committee (unfortunately).
Comparing languages based on some benchmark is probably a fool’s errand indeed. To many factors can change between language and benchmark implementations.
Excellent piece which shows why React (or Angular) is almost always a bad choice and that you’d be better off banking on the underlying web platform. It leads to better user experience full stop. The article also goes in great length debunking the claims which keep React dominant.
Nice example of organization to foster more autonomy and ownership in engineering teams. Clearly needs to be adapted to the project context but gives quite a few ideas. It strikes a nice balance at keeping both an individual and a team view of the responsibilities.
Good mulling for thought. It’s always a bit challenging to nicely explain the tie between engineering metrics and how they impact the business. This is a nice starting point.
Lots of KDE hacking these days, and that comes with compiling large amounts of code. Right now, I am installing, well building from source Plasma Mobile on an “old” laptop so I can test some patches natively on a touchscreen device. The machine has just two cores (hyperthreaded), so builds take rather long, especially if you build Qt and all that 80+ packages that are needed for a fully working Plasma system. One of the tools that do an incredible job while being super flexible to use is icecream. Icecream (or “icecc“) allows you to distribute your build over multiple machines, it basically ships compile-jobs with all that’s needed to other machines on a local network, meaning you can parallelize your builds.
Icecream has this nice visualization tool, called icecream-monitor which you can stare at while your builds are running (in case you don’t have anyone handy for a sword-fight). In the screenshot you can see manta, the underpowered laptop doing a 32 parallel job build over the network. miro is my heavy workstation, 8 cores and 128GB of RAM, it duely gets the bulk of the work assigned, frame is my (Framework) laptop, which is also quite beefy, gets something to do too, but not taxed as heavily as that build monster in my basement office. Icecream can be used with most environments that have you run your compiler locally. Different distros are no problem! Just a matching CPU architecture is needed. Icecream does its job by providing its own g++ and gcc binaries, which will relay the build jobs transparently to either your local machine or across the network. So you basically install it, adjust your PATH variable to make sure icecc’s g++ is found before your system’s compiler and start your build. Other machines you want to join in for the fun just need to run icecc-scheduler and they will be automatically discovered as build slaves on your network. If you want to further speed up builds, it works with ccache as well.
Please note that you only want to do this in a trusted environment, we’re shipping executables around the network without authorization!
There’s features that you know are really important to some of our users but you frankly don’t really care for them much yourself. Printing is one such example. Recently, I actually had to print lots of paperwork, so I had a reason to fix some of my more pressing issues with our Print Manager.
Print jobs right at your finger tip
The biggest regression from the Plasma 4 days, when we moved from individual System Tray popups to a unified square view, was that Print Manager had to give up its two pane layout that showed the print queue directly in the popup. In order to view and cancel print jobs, you now had to select the printer and open its print queue window, and close it again after you’re done.
Unfortunately, with printer management, there’s really two opposing use cases: a home computer with maybe a couple of printers, and the office use case of hundreds of remote printers across several buildings. Picking one side usually leaves the other one worse off. However, I did not want to spent too much time on this, so in order to fix my workflow, I simply added the list of print jobs in the expanded view. I then added a busy indicator to a printer when it’s printing to make it easier to find in the list.
CUPS error messages have never been very nice and with all that “driver-less” stuff the user experience seems to have become worse, spitting technical gibberish like “cfFilterChain: Ghost script (PID 123456)” at the user. While printing probably works better now, the overall feature set has definitely regressed for me. In order to accommodate status messages better, Print Manager now shows up to three lines of text, which is particularly important in case of a printer or network error.
Just pretend the pile of paper at the top of the laser printer is actually the printed pages
Another nice little touch from Plasma 4 was a dedicated laser printer icon. At home I have a black and white laser printer for printing documents and a color inkjet for printing pictures. It’s really nice being able to tell them apart at a glance. Therefore, I added a laser printer icon to Breeze as well. However, when I investigated how it worked, I found it just assumes every black and white printer to be a laser printer. Fair enough. You can ask CUPS for the “marker type”, e.g. toner or ink, and I hoped that I could use it to determine the printer type more accurately. Alas, since updating to the Ubuntu 24.04 base, none of my printers show ink levels anymore, not even after installing the official vendor drivers. Either way, ink status has been hit or miss for me under Linux for as long as I can remember, sometimes randomly working when talking to the printer over the network but not on the computer it was plugged into via USB and so on.
Next, while tinkering with printer settings, I noticed the nice little search box we have in our settings dialogs nowadays. Trying to find a certain option, I was surprised it didn’t highlight it, even though I clearly typed the exact name on the label. You see, controls in Qt can have “mnemonics” or “accelerators”, this is the underlined letter you typically see on a button that tells you what Alt+key to use to trigger it. The letter is prefixed with an ampersand (&) in the string, so “Pap&er size” shows as “Paper size” and will trigger on pressing Alt+E. KDE applications automatically assign a free accelerators to most widgets unless explicitly provided through the ampersand notation. The settings search did not account for this and subsequently failed to find it.
Leaving the subject of printers for now, I made a few minor improvements regarding batteries. One of my earliest contributions to Plasma’s power management system over ten years ago was a notification when a peripheral device, such as mouse or keyboard, runs low on battery. While the notification showed a dedicated icon for headsets (i.e. headphones with a microphone) it did not provide one for regular headphones, and neither did battery monitor, but it was an easy fix.
Unlike a mouse or keyboard, it’s probably not as bad that it may turn off at any time
Additionally, when switching output devices, a brief on screen display is shown. In case of Bluetooth devices, battery status is included alongside the device name, to quickly see when the headphones you just connected are almost out of juice. When I switched to PipeWire this stopped working, no battery percentage was shown. I didn’t fully understand how it works but with PulseAudio it probably has exclusive access to the Bluetooth device and is the one that has to read the battery information and provide it to others as audio device property. With PipeWire, I guess things are different, and I just get to read battery information over the regular BlueZ battery interface, so that’s what Plasma will consult before showing the device popup.
Finally, the Energy Information page now displays the number of charge cycles your laptop battery has experienced so far in addition to the capacity estimation (“battery health”). The ability to query this information was added to Solid, KDE’s Hardware Abstraction Framework, and is supported by all of its backends. My trusty ThinkPad has over 700 charge cycles now and still reports 77% capacity left. I was still quite happy with its battery life during this year’s Akademy – admittedly I didn’t compile much during talks and had the screen brightness very low.
If you like what you saw and want to support the KDE Community and enable the good people behind it to create the best software possible, please consider donating to our Year End Fundraiser! KDE is funded mainly by you: our friends, users, and supporters. Thanks to your donations, we can deliver the best free and open software that respects your privacy and gives you control over your devices and digital life.
KStars v3.7.4 is released on 2024.12.05 for Windows, MacOS & Linux. It's a bi-monthly bug-fix release with a couple of exciting features.
Imaging Planner
Hy Murveit added a brand new Imaging Planner in KStars to facilitate imaging.
The Imaging Planner tool helps users choose which objects to image. Users can download catalogs of recommended objects, or possibly create and share their own catalogs. The tool computes when the objects in a read-in catalog may be imaged on the selected night given constraints such as minimum altitude, terrain and moon separation.
It can sort the objects along several different dimensions including the number of hours an object may be imaged tonight (given the users geography, constraints and possibly artificial horizon), its peak altitude, distance from the moon, constellation, name and type. Objects can also be filtered out for several reasons (e.g. type of object, whether it was previously imaged, keywords the user has added, whether the object has been selected, user not interested, etc).
This tool helps users research the objects by showing small images of the objects, showing the objects' sky locations on the skymap, and by providing links to follow to internet sites with more information and images. It allows users to attach notes and links to objects, and select certain of them for further consideration. This tool can be used in conjunction with the Ekos imager or any other imaging tool. It does not currently directly interact with the actual imager; it only helps the user decide what to image.
Simbad Integration with FITSViewer
John Evans added a new, experimental feature to the FITSViewer that allows the user to dynamically query the SIMBAD astronomical database and highlight the results on the image in the FITSViewer. The user draws a circle on the image and the objects within that circle are then displayed in a table and on the image.
It is possible to filter by object type and click through to the Simbad / CDS or NED websites for more information about the objects.
This is an interesting tool to see what is in your image, be it a subframe whilst you are imaging or a completed image that you have reloaded into the FITSViewer.
In order to use the feature you will need an internet connection to access the online Simbad database and an image must have WCS enabled within the FITSViewer. For the most accurate results, plate solve the image with the build-in FITSViewer plate solver. The feature is controlled by a toggle in the FITSViewer options.
New Focus Measures
John Evans introduced a new contrast based focusing algorithm suited for solar and planetary imaging.
4 new focus measures have been added to the Focus Module to complement the existing measures of HFR, FWHM, etc. · StdDev. This is similar conceptually to the Fourier Algorithm but is simpler. It uses an algorithm based on the standard deviation of the pixels in the image as the measure of focus. It can be used on star fields. · Contrast based measures use algorithms that can be found in other areas of image processing and uses the contrast of texture in the image in various way as a measure of focus. The following measures are available:
o Sobel o Laplassian o Canny
These measures require some form of extended object in the image so will not work on star fields. They are intended for Solar, Lunar and planetary focusing.
These algorithms can be used on the whole image or with the existing mask features, or with a user-defined region-of-interest that is used in single-star mode for star based focusing measures.
This new feature requires the openCV library to be installed (a standard installation is fine). This library is not installed by default with Kstars so anyone wishing to use these features will need to first install openCV and then rebuild Kstars on their system. It will not be available with pre-built executables.
I am still here. Sadly while I battle this insane infection from my broken arm I got back in July, the hackers got my blog. I am slowly building it back up. Further bad news is I have more surgeries, first one tomorrow. Furthering my current struggles I cannot start my job search due to hospitalization and recovery. Please consider a donation. https://gofund.me/6e99345d
On the open source work front, I am still working on stuff, mostly snaps ( Apps 24.08.3 released )
Thank you everyone that voted me into the Ubuntu Community Council!
I am trying to stay positive, but it seems I can’t catch a break. I will have my computer in the hospital and will work on what I can. Have a blessed day and see you soon.
anditosan
#this-week-kde-apps:kde.org
