We just branched for Plasma 6.1 and released the beta, which means the window to add new features has now closed. But before it did, a ton of amazing stuff snuck in! Plasma 6.1 promises to be a large and impressive release.

Probably the most impactful thing is triple buffering support on Wayland! This should make animations and screen rendering smoother in general–ideally up to the level of the X11 session, which already did triple buffering. This work by Xaver Hugl has been in progress for a long time and lands in Plasma 6.1. Link

That’s not all though… oh no, not by a long shot:

New Features

Dolphin now includes a feature to move the selected items into a new folder, all at once (Ahmet Hakan Çelik, Dolphin 24.08. Link)

KDE’s desktop portal implementation now includes support for the Input Capture portal (David Redondo, Plasma 6.1. Link 1, link 2, and link 3)

Plasma now supports enabling and disabling the feature of some Lenovo IdeaPad and Legion laptops whereby the battery can be configured to only charge up to a specific fixed level (sometimes 60%, sometimes 80%; it depends on the machine) to maximize battery health (Fabian Arndt, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Plasma’s Edit Mode has a beautiful new zoom-out effect to help you notice and understand you’re in a separate mode, and also make it easier to get out once you’re done (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.1. Link 1 and link 2):

You can now configure the screen locker to unlock without a password, letting it be used as a traditional screensaver if you enable a visually attractive wallpaper plugin and disable the clock (Kristen McWilliam, Plasma 6.1. Link)

UI Improvements

Our long national nightmare of jarring error beep sounds is now over!!!! Plasma now intercepts attempts to ring the system bell (which generally sounds so unpleasant that you feel the need to immediately commit an act of violence) and replaces them with a nice sound from the active sound theme (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 6.1. Link 1, link 2, and link 3)

KRunner search results already prioritized apps by default, but now they also prioritize System Settings pages too (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 6.1, link 1, and link 2)

On System Settings’ Power Management page, a few UI controls that used spinboxes have been replaced with fancy comboboxes. This fixes some bugs and offers a faster interaction paradigm for the basic use case of choosing a common value — with an expert workflow of letting you select anything you want in a dialog box (Jakob Petsovits, Plasma 6.1. Link):

System Settings’ Printers page now guides you through the process of installing the system-config-printer package to improve printer detection, if it wasn’t pre-installed by your distro (Mike Noe, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Getting information from weather providers can sometimes be a bit flaky, so Plasma’s Weather Report widget now informs you to just try again in a little bit when this happens (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.1. Link):

The way Welcome Center presents KRunner has gotten a major overhaul, and now shows a fancy animated depiction of actually using it! In addition, the final page is now more streamlined and less demanding of your time and money (Oliver Beard, Plasma 6.1. Link 1 and link 2):

Plasma’s Weather Widget no longer shows the “Appearance” page in its config window when used on the desktop, since nothing on that page is applicable to the desktop form factor (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 6.1. Link)

KWin’s custom tile editor now uses clearer terminology for creating split views (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.1. Link):

System Settings’ Background Services page is no longer actually visible in System Settings by default; everything here is an implementation detail, and monkeying with its settings is an easy way to break your system. If you’re an expert, you can still get to it by searching for it in KRunner, but it won’t be shown in System Settings anymore (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 6.1. Link)

The remainder of the header messages in System Settings pages have been ported to the new frameless style, making them all consistent now (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.2. Link):

Improved the way SVG images render on screen when using a fractional scale factor, reducing blurriness (Marco Martin, Frameworks 6.3. Link)

Bug Fixes

Filelight no longer counts files stored in OneDrive cloud as local files that occupy space (Harald Sitter, Filelight 24.05.1. Link)

In KColorChooser, the “Pick Screen Color” button is no longer missing on Wayland (Thomas Weißschuh, KColorChooser 24.05.1. Link)

Made Plasma more robust against crashing when any widgets have malformed size values, which can happen under certain circumstances (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.0.5. Link)

When KWin falls back to using a software cursor after the graphics driver rejected the use of a hardware cursor, this can no longer lock up the entire screen under certain circumstances — such as with XWayland-using apps on an Apple Silicon Mac (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.0.5. Link)

Spectacle no longer takes blurry screenshots on systems with multi-screen plus mixed-scale-factor setups (Volodymyr Zolotopupov, Plasma 6.0.5. Link)

Global shortcuts are now more robust and stable on NixOS and other distros that regenerate the sycoca cache repeatedly in an automated manner (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.0.5. Link)

Fixed multiple longstanding issues in System Settings whereby switching pages, clearing the search field, or opening a new page form outside of System Settings would cause the sub-category column to show the wrong thing (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 6.0.5. Link 1, link 2, and link 3)

Fixed a case where turning off an external monitor plugged into a laptop with its lid closed could cause KWin to crash (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.1. Link)

On Wayland, Plasma no longer quits when you open an enormous number of windows (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.1. Link)

The “Activation Gestures” category of System Settings’ Accessibility page is back, after being accidentally removed when the page was ported to QML (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 6.1. Link)

On Wayland, when any apps that have System Tray icons are running, there’s no longer a little invisible square in the top-left corner of the screen that eats input, and also no elevated CPU usage with certain screen arrangements (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.1. Link 1 and link 2)

Pressing Meta+B repeatedly no longer opens multiple Power Profile chooser OSDs, and therefore no longer represents a way for you to exhaust your system’s memory by generating an infinite stack of them (Fabian Arndt, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Made KWin more reliable about detecting screens’ physical sizes (Jakub Piecuch, Plasma 6.1. Link)

When using a Plasma Panel in “Fit content” mode with only an Icons-Only Task Manager on it, there’s no longer unnecessary empty space on the right side of it on login (Akseli Lahtinen, Plasma 6.1. Link)

In the dialog that lets you choose windows and screens to share, clicking on the checkboxes to select items now works. Previously you had to click on the whole items themselves, but the checkboxes didn’t work; now both work (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 6.3. Link)

Fixed several issues preventing certain Breeze icons from adjusting their colors properly when run with a dark color scheme, as well as issues with generation of static dark-theme-compatible icons (Corbin Schwimmbeck, Frameworks 6.3. Link 1 and link 2)

Re-spun the KWidgetsAddons framework to include a bugfix for an issue that caused OBS to crash when selecting files, and also one that caused KMessageWidgets to sometimes show incorrect background colors (Joshua Goins and Albert Astals Cid, KWidgetsAddons frameworks 6.2.2. Link 1 and link 2)

Re-spun the KWallet framework to include a bugfix for an issue that caused the Secrets portal to not work in Flatpak apps (Nicolas Fella, KWallet 6.2.1. Link)

Context menus should now be a lot less likely to appear as odd standalone windows with titlebars when activated on an inactive window (Vlad Zahorodnii, Qt 6.7.2. Link)

Other bug information of note:

• 3 Very high priority Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
• 36 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 39 last week). Current list of bugs
• 105 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed over the last week Full list of bugs

Performance & Technical

Reduced frame drop on a variety of hardware (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Improved the speed with which Discover launches and how responsive it is when scrolling through long app lists while the Flatpak backend is active (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Automation & Systematization

Added some new autotests for Plasma panels and containments to make sure they get sized and located correctly (Marco Martin and Akseli Lahtinen. Link 1, link 2, and link 3)

…And Everything Else

This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! If you’re hungry for more, check out https://planet.kde.org, where you can find more news from other KDE contributors.

How You Can Help

The KDE organization has become important in the world, and your time and labor have helped to bring it there! But as we grow, it’s going to be equally important that this stream of labor be made sustainable, which primarily means paying for it. Right now the vast majority of KDE runs on labor not paid for by KDE e.V. (the nonprofit foundation behind KDE, of which I am a board member), and that’s a problem. We’ve taken steps to change this with paid technical contractors — but those steps are small due to growing but still limited financial resources. If you’d like to help change that, consider donating today!

Otherwise, visit https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover other ways to be part of a project that really matters. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE; you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to already be a programmer, either. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-21.

Gender bias in open source: Pull request acceptance of women versus men

Tags: tech, foss, bias

A bit too GitHub centric for my taste. Still it shows some unwarranted bias, especially when outsiders to a project are identified as women. We should do better.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/308716997_Gender_bias_in_open_source_Pull_request_acceptance_of_women_versus_men

BitKeeper, Linux, and licensing disputes: How Linus wrote Git in 14 days

Tags: tech, foss, version-control, linux, git, history

The often forgotten history behind the creation of Git. This article does a good job summarizing it.

https://graphite.dev/blog/bitkeeper-linux-story-of-git-creation

Pluralistic: The Coprophagic AI crisis

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

The training dataset crisis is looming in the case of large language models. They’ll sooner or later run out of genuine content to use… and the generated toxic waste will end up in training data, probably leading to dismal results.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/14/inhuman-centipede/#enshittibottification

Google Is Paying Reddit $60 Million for Fucksmith to Tell Its Users to Eat Glue

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, google, data, quality

No, your model won’t get smarter just by throwing more training data at it… on the contrary.

https://www.404media.co/google-is-paying-reddit-60-million-for-fucksmith-to-tell-its-users-to-eat-glue/

How DeviantArt died: A.I. and greed turned a once-thriving community into a ghost town.

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, art, social-media, criticism

This is indeed sad to see another platform turn against its users. This was once a place to nurture young artists… it’s now another ad driven platform full of AI made scams.

https://slate.com/technology/2024/05/deviantart-what-happened-ai-decline-lawsuit-stability.html

OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk, but the new ChatGPT release can? - Vox

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

Open is unsurprisingly only in the name… this company is really just a cult.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2024/5/17/24158478/openai-departures-sam-altman-employees-chatgpt-release

New Windows AI feature records everything you’ve done on your PC | Ars Technica

Tags: tech, microsoft, windows, security, privacy

This is completely nuts… they really want to unleash a security and privacy nightmare. The irony is that it does respect DRM content on the other hand, we can see where the priorities are.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/microsofts-new-recall-feature-will-record-everything-you-do-on-your-pc/

A Grand Unified Theory of the AI Hype Cycle

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, hype

Definitely this, it’s not the first time we see such a hype cycle around “AI”. When it bursts the technology which created it is just not called “AI” anymore. I wonder how long this one will last though.

https://blog.glyph.im/2024/05/grand-unified-ai-hype.html

A Plea for Sober AI | Drew Breunig

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, hype, criticism

Definitely too much hype around large models right now. This over shadows the more useful specialized models.

https://www.dbreunig.com/2024/05/16/sober-ai.html

Bing outage shows just how little competition Google search really has | Ars Technica

Tags: tech, google, microsoft, web, search

We’re still fairly dependent on just two major web indices… time for an index built as a common for everyone to use?

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/bing-outage-shows-just-how-little-competition-google-search-really-has/

stract: web search done right

Tags: tech, web, search

Looks like an interesting new search engine.

https://github.com/StractOrg/stract?tab=readme-ov-file

The curious case of the missing period - Tjaart’s Substack

Tags: tech, email, debugging

Fascinating bug… the fine details of mundane protocols like SMTP can sometimes be surprising.

https://tjaart.substack.com/p/the-curious-case-of-the-missing-period

Firefox bookmark keywords for faster navigation

Tags: tech, firefox, bookmarks

Interesting Firefox feature I didn’t notice. Looks fairly nice, I’ll use it more.

https://blog.meain.io/2024/firefox-bookmark-keywords

CADmium: A Local-First CAD Program Built for the Browser

Tags: tech, web, frontend, cad, physics, mathematics

This gives a good idea of the important parts in a CAD program. It also list a few of the usable libraries to build one such program in the browser.

https://mattferraro.dev/posts/cadmium

WebAssembly: A promising technology that is quietly being sabotaged

Tags: tech, webassembly, server

Where WebAssembly is, and where WebAssembly on the server is going… let’s hope it doesn’t become another CORBA.

https://kerkour.com/webassembly-wasi-preview2

Hartwork Blog · Clone arbitrary single Git commit

Tags: tech, git, ci

Neat trick, especially useful for CI uses.

https://blog.hartwork.org/posts/clone-arbitrary-single-git-commit/

Writing commit messages

Tags: tech, version-control, writing, communication

Very extensive guide on writing better commit messages. This is important, it’s a very central communication mechanism with other developers.

https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/quasiblog/commit-messages/

UI Density || Matthew Ström, designer-leader

Tags: tech, gui, ux

Interesting discussion about UI density. What are we talking about? Is there value to is? Which aspects of a UI are impacting it? The conclusion makes it all very clear.

https://matthewstrom.com/writing/ui-density/

Bye for now!

KDDockWidgets has launched its latest version 2.1. This release comes packed with over 500 commits, offering enhanced stability over its predecessor, version 2.0, without introducing any breaking changes.

KDDockWidgets is a versatile framework for custom-tailored docking systems in Qt written by KDAB’s Sérgio Martins. For more information about its rich set of features, have a look at its GitHub repository.

What’s changed in version 2.1?

Here are the main highlights:

Bug Fixes:

For starters, KDDW 2.1 introduces a range of bug fixes aimed at enhancing stability and user experience. Less popular features like nested main-windows and auto-hide received lots of attention and window manager specific bugs such as restoring maximized windows were addressed.

KDDW is now memory-leak free, several singletons were leaking before. We’ve added a valgrind GitHub Actions workflow to prevent regressions regarding leaks.

QtQuick:

KDDW 2.1 also introduces improvements in QtQuick. New features include an API for setting affinities via QML, enabling mixing MDI with docking similar to QtWidgets, and fixing DPI issues of icons in TitleBar.qml for better scaling at 150% and 200%. Additionally, it resolves issues such as MDI widgets not raising when clicked on and various crashes related to MDI mode.

QtWidgets:

For QtWidgets, we’ve improved handling of the preferredSize argument when adding dock widgets. It was being ignored in some cases. Overriding DockWidget::closeEvent() can now be done to prevent closing. Several crashes were fixed and we’ve added a GitHub Actions workflow which runs the tests against a Qt built with AddressSanitizer.

These enhancements improve the functionality and stability of KDDW 2.1 across different Qt environments.

Miscellaneous:

KDDW 2.1 brings miscellaneous updates, including an upgrade to nlohmann json v3.11.3, the addition of a standalone layouting example using the UI toolkit Slint, and extensive testing on CI. Additionally, Config::setLayoutSpacing(int) has been added for increased customization.

Learn about all the changes here. Let us know what you think.

More information about KDDockWidgets

• • A manual on installation and usage written by KDAB’s Sérgio Martins.
  • Find out more about KDAB’s Qt tools.
  • A YouTube video about KDDockWidgets:

The post KDDockWidgets 2.1 Released appeared first on KDAB.

Here are the major changes available in the Plasma 6.1 beta:

• Triple buffering in KWin for smoother rendering and animations
• Support for the Wayland Explicit Sync protocol, which should improve life for NVIDIA users in particular
• Support for the Input Capture portal
• Remote Desktop system integration to allow RDP clients to connect to Plasma desktops, plus a new page in System Settings for configuring this
• New UX for Plasma's edit mode to make its modality more obvious and visually fancier
• Added a configurable edge barrier between screens, to make it easier to hit UI elements touching the edges between screens. This also allows auto-hide panels on edges between screens to work properly
• Fake session restore on Wayland that at least re-opens apps that were open last time, even if they don't get positioned in the same place. Support for real session restore is still being worked on
• Support for syncing the color of your keyboard's RGB backlight with Plasma's accent color
• Support for using the color profile embedded into the display, for displays that bundle these
• Support in Discover for replacing end-of-support Flatpak apps with their replacements
• Support for the battery conservation mode features on many Lenovo IdeaPad and Legion laptops
• Support for passwordless screen locking, for using it as a screensaver in an environment without security concerns
• You can now middle-click the Power & Battery widget to block and unblock automatic sleep and screen locking, and scroll over it to switch the active power profile
• Slightly rounder corners, and more consistency between corner radius everywhere
• Better window layout algorithm for Overview
• The "Shake cursor to find it" effect has been enabled by default
• New off-by-default effect to hide the mouse pointer after a period of inactivity
• System Settings Keyboard page has been rewritten in QML

Plasma Wayland Protocls 1.13.0 is now available for packaging.

This adds features needed for the Plasma 6.1 beta.

URL: https://download.kde.org/stable/plasma-wayland-protocols/
SHA256: dd477e352f5ff6e6ac686286c4b22b19bf5a4921b85ee5a7da02bb7aa115d57e
Signed by: E0A3EB202F8E57528E13E72FD7574483BB57B18D Jonathan Esk-Riddell jr@jriddell.org

Full changelog:

• plasma-window-management: add a stacking order object
• output device, output management: add brightness setting
• outputdevice,outputconfiguration: add a way to use the EDID-provided color profile
• Enforce passing tests
• output device, management: change the descriptions for sdr gamut wideness

Update: Windows versions removed as they are broken.

Haruna version 1.1.1 is out.

You can get it now on flathub:

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, but for bugs make sure to fill in the template and provide as much information as possible.

Changelog:

1.1.1

Bugfixes:

• Subtitles menu not including manually added subtitles
• Duration in the playlist being 0
• Preview popup being visible for audio files
• AB loop not resetting

1.1.0

Features:

• Setting to open playlist items with single click

Bugfixes:

• Video opening in a separate window when using mpv version 0.38.0
• Mute resetting when opening a new file
• Playing item in playlist is no longer bold, it made text hard to read under certain conditions

Haruna allows you to run any mpv command through it's Custom Commands settings page. The most useful command would be the set command which lets you set an mpv property to some value. For example to set the hwdec property to vaapi you use set hwdec vaapi in the command field of Haruna's Custom Commands page; if the value contains spaces wrap it in quotes.

Custom commands can be triggered either at startup or through a shortcut (this can be set when creating the custom command).

If you want to set multiple commands you can create an mpv config file and load it with set include "/path/to/config/file.conf".

mpv scripts can also be loaded, but they are more cumbersome to use. Create a custom command loading your script load-script "/path/to/script.lua".

If you want to interact with a script you must create another custom command script-message-to target arg1 arg2 ... script-message-to.

• target - the filename of the script (without the file extension)
• arg1 - the name assigned to a function inside your script by register_script_message, can be the same as the function name
• arg2, arg3 etc. - arguments passed to the function

Example:

-- my_simple_script.lua
function set_volume(volume)
 mp.commandv("set", "volume", volume)
end

mp.register_script_message("set_volume", set_volume)
-- ............................^ name to use in the script-message-to call

-- mp.register_script_message("set_volume", set_volume)
-- .............................................^ name of the function

1. create a my_simple_script.lua containing the code above
2. create a custom command to load the script load-script "/path/to/my_simple_script.lua"
3. create a custom command (triggered by a shortcut) to interact with the script script-message-to my_simple_script set_volume 56
4. assign a shortcut to the script-message-to custom command
5. trigger the script-message-to command after the script is loaded (depends on how you load the script, at startup or by shortcut)

Note

When running the flatpak version the scripts won't be able to access system programs/binaries/executables.

Tuesday, 21 May 2024. Today KDE releases a bugfix update to KDE Plasma 6, versioned 6.0.5.

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

• Dr Konqi: Postman: don't run too often. Commit.
• Wallpaper of the Day: fix dragging preview image in Qt6.7. Commit.
• Fix keyboard navigation. Commit. Fixes bug #485588. Fixes bug #477348