As you have probably heard, two weeks ago a bunch of KDE contributors gathered in Berlin to attend to a sprint to move forward on current KDE community Goals.
I attended the sprint and it was a pleasure to get together with fellow KDE contributors, and discuss our experiences, our plans and aspirations.
Goal Work
My main objective for this Goal was to get automated GUI testing merged for Dolphin.
This is important as it paves the way to better testing, accessibility improvements and power-usage measurement, making progress towards the three Goals at once.
I wanted to get this done, since last akademy, and I gave it a try but it wasn't fruitful then.
This time with Harald around, selenium webdriver at spi author, I would get a chance to poke him to overcome my difficulties.
And indeed Harald was very helpful. It took me a while to setup properly my local testing environment.
But then I could update the existing MR by Marco and iron it up slightly to get it merged.
Another objective I had coming to Berlin, was improving KIO-'s CI-testing situation.
Currently a bunch of tests are failing and we don't require tests to pass for KIO.
KIO is a very important library for Dolphin, as such I spend an important part of my contributor time on improving it, so this is quite important to me.
I sent a fix for a test but CI can't really run this kind of test.
Those test the launch of programs using systemd, except our tests run inside containers which limits what tests can do at runtime.
We did a little progress, and I learned what needs to be done to fix this case.
We need some work on our dev-ops side of things for those ones.
A bunch other tests still need fixing.
Dolphin
And I got busy doing Dolphin reviews.
A particular one of interests for developpers will be that there will be a git clone dialog in dolphin-plugins.
Nikolai Krasheninnikov, the feature contributor, and myself are still improving it to be both nice and very practical.
There is another feature I have been reviewing, but it is too early to speak about publicly.
I also for the first time tried out neochat and I was pleased.
So, it’s been a while since I’ve last blogged.
A lot has happened in the mobile Linux world since I made the post sharing the State of Linux on mobile.
We’re 5 years further now, some distro options have disappeared and others have popped up, and although I’ve always been really optimistic about what Linux on mobile promises and can become I’ve never actually used it as my daily driver.
Even though I work on postmarketOS and would say I know a fair bit about it’s shortcomings and possibilities, I’ve been relying on an Android phone for all this time to get me through life.
And I’ve noticed that this is the case for a lot of people and especially developers in the Linux world.
Recently I decided this should change.
How can we ever get Linux on mobile up to a state where we can use it as a proper replacement for the duopoly that is Android and iOS if nobody, including the developers, actually use it even though it’s already out there and available?
I’m of course a KDE fan and would love to use Plasma Mobile specifically but it has a ton of papercut issues that could easily be solved if the developers actually noticed them by using it!
So about two weeks ago I decided to get myself a new, second-hand, phone to actually daily drive postmarketOS with Plasma Mobile on and I’ll tell you about my experiences with it so far.
My setup
Although a lot of people still seem to think Pine64’s PinePhone (Pro) or Purism’s Librem 5 are the best options for a Linux phone out there, I would argue this is not the case any more.
Besides the PinePhone being awfully slow hardware it is suffering from a lack of software support, the kernel is maintained by a single person in their spare time and has a ton of things not actually upstreamed to mainline, and the Librem 5 is way too expensive for what it offers and is made by a company that currently seems to have severe financial problems (they recently layed off most of their developers).
Instead I would recommend a well supported (former) Android device, the postmarketOS wiki has a good list of well supported devices and specifically I would recommend getting a SDM845 device, namely the OnePlus 6/6T, SHIFT6mq (you can buy these brand new even) and the Xiaomi Pocophone F1.
These are fully mainline supported and are easily buyable second-hand through platforms like eBay for not too much.
I however decided to get a Pixel 3A. This device is also fully mainline supported and I think it’s good to not have all attention focused on a few specific devices but get broader support available.
The Pixel 3A was a popular phone when it was still newly sold so a lot of people might actually still have one laying around.
postmarketOS also supports a bunch of tablets which would actually be a really good use-case for Plasma Mobile.
Software
So as I mentioned earlier I’m a KDE fan, so of course I opt to run Plasma Mobile.
I maintain a (semi-)nightly repository of all KDE packages that tries to build the entirety of KDE from git master every day.
This has been proven very useful for Plasma Mobile development as newly merged changes can be quickly tested by consumers and also reduces the need to compile the entirety of Plasma on your phone if you want to change just a few lines in the code.
It was made to support the transitioning to Qt6 but I find it so useful that I’ll keep it around in the future.
So on my new phone I enabled this repository, executed the upgrade and rebooted into a fresh Plasma 6 installation straight from git master the day before.
It is good to note that although I’m definitely daily driving postmarketOS now, my sim-card is actually still in my Android phone.
I do not currently trust the stability of phone calls, mostly when it comes to audio. We (postmarketOS) are working hard to improve the situation, especially by switching to PipeWire for audio hopefully soon, but for now I’m carrying two devices around having my Android phone share a hotspot to postmarketOS.
The camera also currently doesn’t work so for that having the Android phone around for now is also still very useful.
The camera however is making good progress with projects like libcamera making it possible to create camera applications and use it in browsers like Firefox.
So, what do I actually use this phone for?
These are some of the use-cases I have and the applications I use for them:
I would actually prefer to use Firefox to not support Google’s monopoly on the web by using a Chromium-based browser but I currently think Angelfish’s experience is better than the Firefox one on mobile
make and keep track of notes with Marknote, for example shopping lists
sync files and pictures from my NextCloud server with GhostCloud
I actually used this years ago when I still used SailfishOS.
I was very glad to see it’s still around and even supports Ubuntu Touch and regular desktop Linux (and thus Plasma Mobile) as well nowadays.
A Kirigami based-UI for this so it fits in better would be nice but it’s very usable as is
I find this application incredible.
In my mind navigation is a difficult to create app but Osmin works well and calculates routes very quickly (completely offline!).
It’s not yet as feature-full as say OSMand on Android but it’s very usable
This actually covers a huge part of what I would do on Android as well, now I just do these on postmarketOS instead using almost exclusively KDE applications! I’m still missing a few (for me) important things, most notably a Keepass-compatible client to get the passwords needed for aforementioned applications.
I worked around that however by using KDEConnect to share my clipboard from my desktop where I just use KeepassXC.
And of course the few Android applications that just don’t have FOSS-replacements like WhatsApp or my bank app, but I’m hoping either Waydroid or even the in my opinion more promising android-translation-layer (basically Wine for Android apps) can be used for that in the future.
Now although this is a very usable setup for me, when actually using this you’ll quickly notice a lot of small but annoying issues.
These are all small in size and would easily be fixed if there were developers to experience them but accumulating together they make the whole experience a bit frustrating still.
I’ve been reporting everything I could find so far (for example see all the issues I’ve made on just the Plasma Mobile shell).
A few examples:
several applications have multiple actions on the same button press, like NeoChat both opening a room and opening a context menu for it when pressing on a room in the room list, BUG: 486545
Angelfish automatically switches to a newly opened tab which is unlike any other mobile browser, unexpectedly throwing the user off whatever they’re reading, and shows an unnecessary message telling the user the new tab has been opened which is blocking the button to go back to the previous tab, BUG: 486463
QMLKonsole (the mobile alternative to Konsole) for some reason has it’s own button to open and close the keyboard but pressing it has various buggy behaviours, BUG: 355
various applications have context hints that are meant to be shown on desktop when hovering an element but show up when pressing buttons or input fields on mobile, BUG: 360
various desktop widgets are completely broken, BUG: 354
sometimes (not often) the shell just crashes, I haven’t been able to find a good reproducer yet
Development
To a lot of KDE developers developing for Plasma Mobile is an unknown (and possibly scary) territory and they might not know how to do it easily. Will you compile everything on your device or cross-compile from your desktop instead, use kde-builder or do it manually?
Of course this all comes down to personal preferences in the end but let me tell you how I do it.
Like I mentioned earlier I’m maintaining a nightly repository shipping the entirety of KDE from git master.
I highly recommend using this repository so you can quickly test and use new features and bug fixes.
Instructions to set this up are on the postmarketOS wiki.
Although compilation on device (e.g. using kde-builder) is most definitely possible, this is just regular good ol’ Linux after all, it’s a slow process due to the limited performance of a phone and might warm it up more than is safe for the device.
Instead I would recommend using the lovely pmbootstrap tool we use for postmarketOS development and build on your way more performant PC instead.
This tool builds software using Alpine’s simple APKBUILD format.
You don’t have to worry too much about learning this format, these APKBUILDs already exist for basically every KDE package out there and you can just reuse these.
After setting up pmbootstrap (pmbootstrap init) you can get such an APKBUILD for a KDE package either by manually downloading it from the upstream repository and placing it in the location pmbootstrap expects or run pmbootstrap aportgen --fork-alpine <package name>.
This makes pmbootstrap get the APKBUILD from Alpine Linux and put it in your local checkout of postmarketOS packages.
The APKBUILD just downloaded can be used as is and you can now build the package with pmbootstrap build --arch <CPU architecture of the target device> but you probably want to use your local checkout of the code with your changes instead.
For this pmbootstrap supports the --src argument which makes it build the same APKBUILD but with the source replaced for your local checkout.
If your changes require any dependencies changed from what is currently provided by the package you can edit either the $makedepends or $depends (build dependencies and runtime dependencies respectively) variables in the APKBUILD ($depends might not exist, just create it if it doesn’t).
When you’ve successfully built the package you can send it to your device using pmbootstrap sideload <package name>.
This will send it to a device running postmarketOS and let the packagemanager APK install it.
Restart the application in question and your changes will be ready to test! pmbootstrap supports way more fancy features and I recommend you read it’s documentation to see what you can do.
Conclusion
In my opinion Plasma Mobile on postmarketOS is very usable right now but at the moment suffers from a lot of papercuts.
I hope that since I now daily drive the system I can find all these papercuts, report them and possibly even fix one or two of them.
But even more so I hope I can convince KDE developers to pick up a phone themselves and start using the system they’re in fact already developing for (95% of the Plasma Mobile stack is the same as Plasma Desktop and all the applications used were made to be used on desktop as well!).
The system has a lot of potential and is already great to use, it just needs developers!
Get a cheap second hand phone, flash postmarketOS on it and start using it!
I’m dreaming of a day where I’m not the only one at Akademy that not only has Plasma on their laptop but also their phone!
Akademy 2024 (the annual world summit for KDE) is happening in Würzburg, Saturday 7th – Thursday 12th September. (I hope you knew that)
First of all, if you're reading this and thinking, "Should i go to Akademy?"
The answer is [most probably] YES! Akademy has something for everyone, be it coders, translators, promoters, designers, enthusiasts, etc.
Now, with this out of the way, one of the many things that makes Akademy is the talks on the weekend, and you know who has something to say? *YOU*
Yes, *YOU*. I'm sure you've been working on something interesting, or have a great idea to share.
*YOU* may think that your idea is not that great or the things you work on are not interesting, but that's seldomly the case when someone explains me their "boring" thing they've been working on, i always think "Wow that's great".
Ok, so now that I've convinced you to send a talk proposal, when better than *TODAY* to send it?
Yes I know the Call for Participation is open until the 24 of May, but by sending it today you make sure you don't forget sending it later and also [more important for me] you help those of us in the Program Committee not to worry when the final date starts approaching and we don't have lots of talks yet because you all prefer sending talks on the very last minute.
This week we put some of the final Plasma 6.0 bugs to rest, and continued working towards Plasma 6.1 with a variety of UI improvements. Nothing ground-breaking this week, just a slow grind of useful work towards a solid release!
UI Improvements
Kate now considers a file as recent when it’s saved or closed, not just when it’s opened. This means your recent files list will no longer omit files you kept open for a long time while working on them (Christoph Cullmann, Kate 24.05. Link)
The panel icons for Kickoff (Application Launcher) and Kicker (Application Menu) widgets are now capped in size so they can’t grow ridiculously huge on thicccc panel (Akseli Lahtinen and me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.0.5. Link 1 and link 2)
System Settings no longer lets you choose GNOME’s Adwaita or High Contrast icon themes as your systemwide icon theme, because despite registering themselves as FreeDesktop-compatible icon themes, they are no longer actually designed to be used this way and will break everything from KDE if you try anyway (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.0.5. Link)
The screen that KWin considers active for the purpose of determining which screen to open new windows on is now determined by “last user interaction”, which includes things like mouse movement and keyboard focus. Hopefully this should better match people’s expectations (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.1. Link)
Made the wallpaper chooser views frameless, matching the current styling of most other settings pages in System Settings and Plasma (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.1. Link 1 and link 2):
Plasma’s notifications now use a more appropriate icon for canceling jobs, and also elide long title text in the middle rather than on the left (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 6.1. Link 1 and link 2):
Ok, so maybe “plasma-brows…gration-host” is not a work of towering genius. The fact that a long ugly technical name is shown there is another bug we’ll investigate.
Refined the UI shown when changing global themes to make it clear what will happen and what’s potentially dangerous (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.1. Link 1 and link 2):
When you use the command-line powerprofilesctl tool to change power profiles, the new state is now reflected in the Power and Battery widget (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 6.1. Link)
Several Breeze icons (folder-encrypted, folder-decrypted, and folder-music) now have proper symbolic versions at their 16px and 22px sizes (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 6.2. Link)
Bug Fixes
Gwenview no longer fails to open large images; now its Qt 6 version can open the same size of image that the Qt 5 version could (Méven Car, Gwenview 24.05. Link)
On Wayland, KWin no longer crashes when it’s unable to open a socket to XWayland for some reason (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.0.5. Link)
Fixed a case where Plasma could crash while modifying the set of favorite apps in Kickoff (Application Launcher), Kicker (Application Menu), or another launcher menu using the same backend infrastructure (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.0.5. Link)
When using Qt 6.7, the System Tray popup is no longer sometimes inappropriately resized to a tiny nub, and also clicking a System Monitor widget showing GPU sensors no longer causes Plasma to freeze (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.0.5. Link 1 and link 2)
Fixed an extremely strange issue that could be triggered by opening any windows of IntelliJ IDE apps, and would cause other windows and Plasma panels to become transparent to clicks (Vyacheslav Mayorov, Plasma 6.0.5. Link)
When waking the system from sleep, quick-tiled windows no longer sometimes disappear, and vertically-maximized windows are no longer sometimes mis-positioned (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.0.5. Link 1 and link 2)
On X11, forcing tablet mode on when using a multi-screen setup with global scaling no longer causes one of the screens to scale everything incorrectly (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.0.5 Link)
Applied a workaround in KWin for an AMD GPU driver bug, which should reduce instances of random visual glitchiness (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.1. Link)
Fixed another case of Korners, this time for menus in QtWidgets-based apps (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 6.1. Link)
Resizing a window with a wallpaper chooser grid in it no longer sometimes causes the grid view’s header to disturbingly detach and appear in the middle of the view (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.1. Link)
More audio and video files now have appropriate icons, and when no suitable format-specific icon is found, the system will no longer fall back to an inappropriate symbolic speaker or filmstrip icon (Kai Uwe Broulik and me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 6.2. Link 1 and link 2)
Fixed a case in Kirigami where some UI elements would have incorrect colors when using mixed light/dark color schemes (Evgeniy Harchenko, Frameworks 6.2. Link)
After we fixed the “Pick your installation option popup” in the “Get new [thing]” windows, Qt 6.7 broke it again, so we fixed it again! This time moar betterer (Akseli Lahtinen and Ivan Tkachenko, Frameworks 6.3. Link)
Fixed an issue that caused apps with System Tray icons to inappropriately quit when deleting their tray icons (Tor Arne, Qt 6.7.2. Link)
126 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed over the last week Full list of bugs
Performance & Technical
Implemented a bunch of security hardening for our crash reporting system based on feedback from SUSE’s security team (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.0.5. Link)
Automation & Systematization
Added multiple autotests to ensure that mounting different types of mountable filesystems works as intended (Stefan Brüns, Frameworks 6.2. Link)
Added an autotest to make sure that Plasma-themes UI elements that should have the same height—such as text fields and buttons—still do even if the Plasma style is changed (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.1. Link)
…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!
I recently went on Brodie Robertson’s Tech Over Tea channel for a second time. I guess I didn’t succeed at pissing him off enough on the first go-around, because he invited me back! Let’s see if I did a better job of it this time by telling him he was using Arch wrong.
Anyway, Brodie was a fantastic host, and we talked about a number of topics such as KDE’s position in the world, institutional continuity, fundraising and financial stability, the difficulty of reporting and triaging bug, the challenges of packaging software, and windows that block WiFi signals.
Radio Free Fedi - Sounds from the Fediverse to the Universe
Tags: tech, fediverse, streaming, culture
I’ve been listening to these radio channels the past few weeks. It’s quirky, it’s weird, it’s wild. I definitely recommend them to get out of your usual music bubble.
Very nice account of how the Internet is nowadays and how it got there. I like the gardening metaphor which works nicely here. And yes, we can go back to a better Web again. It’s a collective decision though, that’s what makes it hard.
Google Made Me Ruin A Perfectly Good Website: A Case Study On The AI-Generated Internet
Tags: tech, web, advertisement, google, criticism
Ever wondered why the quality of websites seems to go down? Well, here is a case study of what you end up needing to do if you try to fund a website through ads (like most websites).
Latest Google layoffs hit the Flutter and Python groups | Ars Technica
Tags: tech, google, flutter
Looks like Flutter’s days are counted. It seems it has peeked and announcements like this are likely to move people away from it. Time will tell of course.
Looks like an interesting tool for infrastructure automation. It’s all Python based which is an interesting departure from yaml files in that space. Could be a nice alternative to Ansible. I might take it out for a spin.
Reflectively constructing enums at runtime - Highly Suspect Agency
Tags: tech, java
Probably shouldn’t do this in most case… but if it’s really needed and you can bare the pain, Java has solutions for you. This is an interesting dive in lower parts of the APIs.
Use them to promote Akademy on your websites, blogs, social media headers, or any other platform.
There are three different sizes to choose from. If you decide to use the banners, it would be great if you could link them to the Akademy website to help attract more visitors.
Let's spread the word about Akademy and make it a success!
Like in many families, there's always a bit of.. turmoil and drama in FOSS.
Something breaks (either on purpose or by accident), people get frustrated.. The usual.
It is kind of to be expected when it comes to very social projects, like let's say, Linux desktop environments.
People have their own visions and ways to see things. They often clash. That's normal. It's quite human.
I do like to think that Linux desktop environments especially are like siblings that have rivalries.
But we got to remember that it's not "us vs them" here. We don't have the resources to fight each other.
We need to work together even with our incompatible visions sometimes. Otherwise things will keep fracturing
and get even worse.. And nobody gains from that. Well, except the proprietary platforms. :P
In the end we all want to make good software for everyone to use and enjoy.
Let's help each other to do that as well as we can.
Nothing wrong with "Oh you made that? Well watch this!" type of friendly rivalry however,
it keeps us doing what we do best. :)
I just wanted to write this down as somekind of reminder that we got to remember to
work together if we want to succeed. Even when frustrated.
And no I am not any high and mighty person to really say this, I have had my own share of frustrations and quips.
This post serves also as a reminder for myself.
meven
, this time for menus in QtWidgets-based apps (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 6.1. 
