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Introduction -Over the last 10 weeks, I had the opportunity to contribute to MankalaEngine by exploring and integrating new algorithms for gameplay, as well as working on adding the Pallanguli variant to the engine. My journey involved researching about various algorithms like Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), implementing Q-learning, an ML-based approach, and evaluating their performance against the existing algorithms of MankalaEngine. Also assisted in reviewing the implementation of the Pallanguli variant. Implementing and Testing MCTSI first explored Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) and implemented it in MankalaEngine. To assess its effectiveness, I tested it against the existing algorithms, such as Minimax and MTDF, which operate at depth 7 before each move. MCTS Performance Results - Player 1 Player 2 MCTS Win Rate Random MCTS 80% MCTS Random 60% Minimax MCTS 0% MCTS Minimax 0% MTDF MCTS 0% MCTS MTDF 0% The results was not good enough. This was expected because existing Minimax and MTDF algorithms are strong and operate at depth 7 before each move. Moving to Machine Learning: Implementing Q-Learning.Given MCTS's poor performance against strong agents, I explored Machine Learning (ML) techniques, specifically Q-Learning, a reinforcement learning algorithm. After learning its mechanics, I implemented and trained a Q-learning agent in MankalaEngine, testing it against existing algorithms. Q-Learning Performance Results - Player 1 Player 2 Q-Learning Win Rate Random Q-Learning 100% Q-Learning Random 98% Minimax Q-Learning 100% Q-Learning Minimax 0% MTDF Q-Learning 100% Q-Learning MTDF 10% Q-learning showed significant improvement, defeating existing algorithms in most cases. However, it still had weaknesses. Techniques Explored to Improve Q-Learning Results:To improve performance, I experimented with the following techniques: Using Epsilon decay to balance exploration (random moves) and exploitation (using learned strategies). Increased rewards for wins to reinforce successful strategies. Training Q-learning against Minimax and MTDF rather than only against itself. Despite these improvements, Q-learning still could not consistently outperform all existing algorithms. After these experiments and research, I believe more advanced algorithms like DQN or Double DQN are needed to outperform all existing algorithms. This would also an exciting project for this summer. Work related to Integration of Pallanguli VariantApart from exploring ML algorithms, I also worked on integrating the Pallanguli variant of the Mancala game into MankalaEngine. My contributions included: Reviewing Srisharan’s code, suggesting fixes and discussions. Creating Merge Request (MR) that allows users to input custom initial counters for Pallanguli. Conclusion -This journey has been an incredible learning experience, and I am grateful for the guidance of my mentors, Benson Muite and João Gouveia, who were always there to help. I look forward to continuing my contributions to the KDE Community, as I truly love the work being done here. Thank you to the KDE Community for this amazing opportunity!

Many people are, understandably, confused about brightness levels in content creation and consumption - both for SDR and for HDR content. Even people that do content creation as their job sometimes get it really wrong. Why is there so much bad information about it out there? Before jumping into the actual topic, I want to emphasize that most people that have gaps in their knowledge about HDR and SDR are not to blame for it. The standards that define colorspaces are usually confusingly written, many don’t paint the full picture, finding the one you actually need can be difficult, some you need to pay for to even read, and generally there is not a lot of well organized and free information about this out there. When you have basically no information, you just go with what you do know - you see how Microsoft Windows does HDR for example, maybe you take a look at a draft for the sRGB specification or simply the Wikipedia pages, and do the best with what you have. The result is often less than ideal. Having worked on this stuff for a while now, and having read lots about it from people that actually know what they’re doing, I think I know the topic well enough to clear up some misconceptions, but do keep in mind that my knowledge is limited too, and I may still make mistakes. If you’re sure I got anything wrong, tell me about it! If you want an entry point for way more information than this blog post provides, check out color-and-hdr. How brightness works with sRGB sRGB is the colorspace most content uses today. Despite that, very annoyingly, its specification is not openly available… but there’s a draft version that you can download freely here, which is good enough for this topic. The (draft) specification defines two things that are important when it comes to brightness: a set of reference display conditions a set of reference viewing conditions (I’ll call that “viewing environment” from here on) The reference display conditions are seemingly quite straight forward. The display luminance is 80cd/m², we have a whitepoint of D65, and a transfer function. Transfer functions describe how to calculate the output luminance from the encoded values of an image, and with sRGB that’s Y = X ^ 2.2 where Y is the relative luminance on the display, and X is the relative luminance on the input. The viewing environment has a few more parameters, but it’s conceptually not difficult to understand: It describes how bright your environment is, what color temperature the lights in your room have, and how much your display reflects the environment at you. How to create sRGB content “correctly”? The assumption that many people take from the specification is that you should calibrate your display to 80cd/m². On its own, that information is completely wrong! It’s obvious when you think about how end users actually view content: They set the brightness level of the display to what they’re comfortable with in the current environment. You make the display really bright when you’re outside, less bright when in a normally lit room, and even darker than that when the lights are off. The part that’s missing with just calibrating the display to some luminance level is that you must take the viewing environment into account. Either you set up the sRGB reference viewing environment (with measurements!)… or you just don’t. When you create content, in most cases you should do exactly the same thing as the person that will consume the content does: Just set the brightness to what’s comfortable in the environment you’re in. It still helps to keep your viewing environment mostly fixed of course, lots of brightness changes mean you’re constantly readjusting and that’s not good. There’s another big thing to take into account for sRGB, which is its confusing transfer function. The sRGB transfer function The sRGB specification doesn’t just define a transfer function for the display, but it also defines a second transfer function. This sRGB piece-wise transfer function is if X < 0.04045: Y = X / 12.92 else: Y = ((X + 0.055) / 1.055)^2.4 and it’s slightly different from gamma 2.2 in that it has that linear bit for the very dark area. The purpose of this transfer function is to optimize encoding of dark parts of the image - with 8 bits per color, gamma 2.2 becomes really small in the lowest few values. 1/255 for example results in roughly 0.0000051 with gamma 2.2, and 0.0003035 with the sRGB piece-wise transfer function. This difference might sound insignificant, but it is noticeable. The most well known place of where the wrong transfer function is used is Microsoft Windows: When you enable HDR in Windows, it uses the piece-wise transfer function for sRGB content, instead of the gamma 2.2 transfer function that which your display uses in SDR mode. The result is that dark areas of SDR games and videos are brighter than they should be, and look “washed out”. So when should you use the sRGB piece-wise transfer function? So far, I don’t know of any case where you should, outside of working around that Windows problem in your application… I’m also only concerned with displaying images though, and not editing or creating them, so take that with a grain of salt. How brightness works with HDR Most HDR content uses the SMPTE ST 2084 transfer function. The specification for this is freely available here. SMPTE ST 2084 is a bit different from the sRGB spec, in that it only defines a transfer function but no complete colorspace or viewing environment. That transfer function is the Perceptual Quantizer (PQ): It tries to compress luminance levels in a way that matches how sensitive human eyes are in specific luminance ranges, and it’s defined in absolute luminance - a PQ value of 0.0 means <= 0.005cd/m², and 1.0 maps to 10000 cd/m². The missing parts are defined by different specifications, rec.2100 and BT.2408. More specifically, rec.2100 uses the BT.2020 primaries with the PQ transfer function (or the HLG transfer function, but we’ll ignore that here) and a recommended viewing environment for such HDR content: BT.2408 expands on that with an HDR reference white and graphics white, at 203cd/m². This is mostly meant for the context of broadcasts, referring with “graphics” to logos or subtitles in the video stream. Despite the transfer function being “absolute”, just like with sRGB, the luminance numbers don’t mean anything in isolation. When displaying HDR content, just like with SDR, we need to take the viewing environment into account, and adjust luminance levels accordingly. How is this handled in Wayland? Every transfer function in the color management protocol has reference display conditions and a viewing environment attached to it, defined by a few parameters. Most relevant for this topic are a reference luminance, also known as HDR reference white, graphics white or SDR white minimum and maximum mastering luminances, basically how dark and bright the display the content was made for can go When content is displayed on the screen, the compositor translates between the viewing environment of the content, and the viewing environment of the user. While we don’t usually have full knowledge of what exactly that viewing environment is like, the brightness slider in KDE Plasma provides a very good approximation by configuring the reference luminance to be used for content on the display. The calculation for this brightness adjustment is rather simple, in linear space you just do output = input * output_reference / input_reference You can configure the maximum reference luminance (brightness slider at 100%) with the “Maximum SDR Brightness” in the display settings of Plasma 6.3. The minimum and maximum luminance your display can achieve can only be configured with the kscreen-doctor command line tool right now, but an easy to use calibration utility for this is nearly finished (and the default values are usually fine too). In general, this system is working really well… with one rather big exception. HDR in Windows games As mentioned before, Windows in HDR mode does sRGB wrong, but the story with HDR content is kind of worse. When you use Windows 11 on a desktop monitor and enable HDR, you get an “SDR content brightness” slider in the settings - treating HDR content as something completely separate that’s somehow independent of the viewing environment, and that you cannot adjust the brightness of. With laptop displays however, you get a normal brightness slider, which applies to both SDR and HDR content. The vast majority of Windows games expect the desktop monitor case: Static, never changing luminance levels, which are displayed on the screen without any adjustments whatsoever. Windows also didn’t have a built-in HDR calibration tool until Windows 11, so nearly every Windows game ships with its own HDR calibration settings and completely ignores system settings. This doesn’t just cause issues for Windows 11 laptops of course, but also for playing these same games with HDR on Linux. Until Plasma 6.2, we worked around that, also mostly not doing brightness adjustments, and the result was that those HDR calibration settings in games worked basically like on Windows. However, these workarounds broke Linux native applications that want to mix HDR and SDR in their own windows, made tone mapping worse, and blocked features like HDR on “SDR” laptop displays, so in Plasma 6.3 we had to drop them. This doesn’t mean you can’t play Windows games with HDR in 6.3 anymore, you just have to adjust their configuration to match the changed brightness levels. In most cases, this means you set the HDR paper white in games to 203cd/m², and then set the maximum luminance with the game’s configuration screen, like this one from Baldur’s Gate 3: How to implement good HDR After ranting about how Windows games do it wrong, I should end this blog post by also explaining how to do it right. I will skip most of the implementation details, but on a high level if you’re implementing HDR in a Wayland native application or toolkit, you should use the Wayland color management protocol get the capabilities of the compositor and/or graphics driver, specifically the transfer functions they support get the preferred image description from the compositor, and the luminances you’re supposed to target from that. When using these luminance values, keep in mind that reference luminance adjustment the compositor will do! every time the preferred image description changes, get the new one and adjust your application to it now render for these parameters, and set the image description you actually ended up targeting on the surface, either through Vulkan or with the Wayland protocol (not both at the same time!) SDR things, like user interfaces in games, should use the reference luminance too if your application has some need to differentiate between “SDR” and “HDR” displays (to change the buffer format for example), you can do so by checking if the maximum mastering luminance is greater than the reference luminance now you can, and really should drop all HDR settings from your application. If HDR has a performance penalty in your application, a toggle to limit the app to SDR could still be useful, but everything else should be completely automatic and the user should not be bothered with calibration screens or similar annoyances

Qt is pleased to announce Qt for MCUs 2.10, a release packed with exciting new features designed to broaden GUI capabilities across IoT, consumer, and automotive segments. This update is filled with enhancements that will empower developers to create even more dynamic and efficient applications. This blog lists some of the standout highlights from the 2.10 release.

In the past two months since the last update localization of KDE Itinerary has been improved, more ticket formats are supported and work on public transport information infrastructure continued, among many other things. New Features Localized units In locales using imperial units Itinerary now shows distance, speed and temperature values converted to the corresponding units. Distance and speed values in imperial units. If you are using one of those locales but still want to use metric units that of course remains possible, there’s a switch on the settings page for forcing the use of metric units. Metric unit switch. Events We are in the middle of conference season, so there were several opportunities to watch Itinerary-adjacent talks: Felix, Jonah and Marcus presented Transitous at the Railway and Open Transport track of FOSDEM. Also at FOSDEM, Itinerary had a cameo-appearance in Hans-Jörg Happel’s talk about Structured Email in the Modern Email track. I spoke at the Wikidata Data Reuse Days about Itinerary’s use of Wikidata. Wikimedia Germany also covered that in a blog post. We had two presentations at the FOSSGIS Konferenz, with me introducing Transitous and Felix covering the routing engine behind it in more detail (both in German). Besides conference talks there were also a few related sprints and meetups: The bi-annual OSM Hack Weekend in Karlsruhe. Another iteration of the Carl’s Kitchen Sprint. This continues with the Plasma (Mobile) Sprint in Graz three weeks from now. Infrastructure Work Transitous GBFS rollout Transitous has started to test first/last mile routing with shared vehicles in a few areas. If things hold up this is will be gradually added in more areas where there necessary data is available. Similar to the GTFS format for public transport schedule data, there’s GBFS as the open standard for positions of currently available shared vehicles. That’s covering anything from bikes over electric kick-scooters to cars. Client-side we are prepared for this already, KPublicTransport support this as routing parameters e.g. with OpenTripPlanner backends already. There’s however still more work needed to expose this properly in the UI, not just as ad-hoc options as it’s done now but also as part of a persisted personal routing profile. DOSIPAS ticket barcode container support The travel document extractor can now decode UIC’s “DOSIPAS” ticket barcode container. That stands for “Double Signed Package Structure” and is the designated replacement for the UIC 918.3 container format. It uses the very compact but nasty to parse ASN.1 unaligned packed encoding rules (uPER) instead of zlib-compressed ASCII-ish content, and allows for more modern cryptographic signatures. Similar to UIC 918.3 it can contain multiple payloads, both standardized and vendor-specific ones. The predominant one we found so far is “FCB” (Flexible Content Barcode), an also ASN.1 uPER encoded common superset of all European ticket data models with several hundred (mostly optional) properties. We had two of the three FCB versions already implemented fortunately. DOSIPAS tickets are in use in some areas of France for regional trains, e.g. Grand Est and Normandie. While this generally should improve Itinerary’s ability to detect tickets correctly, to the point of importing by just scanning the barcode even, there’s a darker side to this as well, the “Double Signed” part in DOSIPAS. That’s (optional) infrastructure for shortlived ticket barcodes that the vendor app continuously regenerates, not unlike what 2FA apps do. The mechanism for this is documented, so we could also implement this of course. The challenging part here however is getting to the necessary secret key used to generate the dynamic signature. For now most of the DOSIPAS samples found in the wild are fortunately still static, e.g. in PDFs. Should the dynamic ones become mandatory at some point that would basically imply a mandatory use of the vendor app. KPublicTransport journey subsection API Continuing the work around trip queries mentioned last time, KPublicTransport’s journey API received to few changes to make selecting sub-sections of a journey easier and to make reassembling journeys from sub-sections possible. The main technical limitation for this so far was that the departure and arrival stops were treated specially and couldn’t hold the same information as intermediate stops. That’s a historical leftover from before we even had support for intermediate stops and meant that shortening/extending a journey would lose information. While maybe a seemingly small implementation detail this nevertheless required quite some effort, and will allow removing some limitations in e.g. how train trips can be edited in Itinerary. Fixes & Improvements Travel document extractor Added or improved travel document extractors for 12go, Amtrak, Color Lines, Eventyay, Flixbus, Ghotel, SBB, SNCF, UK national railways, Universe and VR. Fixed validity end date parsing in FCB customer card barcodes. Fixed a crash on VDV tickets without a basic ticket data block. All of this has been made possible thanks to your travel document donations! Public transport data Read operator and occupancy information from DB Zugportal onboard API. Fixed OJP journey queries using stop identifiers (used e.g. in Switzerland). Correctly merge journey sections with partial intermediate stop data. Itinerary app Correctly display coach/seat numbers when having a separate seat reservation or multiple travelers with different seat reservations. Don’t show delay information for walking legs. Fixed showing intermediate stops for bus trips. Don’t hide essential trip group map elements on low zoom levels. Fixed trip group map bounding box computations for trips without elements that change locations. Fixed data loss when realtime information would change the type of a reservation. Changed importing data from OSM to use Nominatim, as described here. Allow transfers to favorite location independent of the next reservation. Correctly handle nested events when determining transfers. Disabled Deutsche Bahn online ticket import as the corresponding API is no longer available. Don’t show city name in location search results if that matches the station name. Update statistics automatically when removing trips. Fixed misrendered labels in wallet passes created by the vdv-pkpass converter. Itinerary also benefited from work on improving the Android platform integration of KDE apps as well as various fixes in the QtQuick Controls Breeze Style. How you can help Feedback and travel document samples are very much welcome, as are all other forms of contributions. Feel free to join us in the KDE Itinerary Matrix channel.

Kaidan 0.12.2 fixes some bugs. Have a look at the changelog for more details. Changelog Bugfixes: Fix removing corrected message (melvo) Fix showing message bubble tail only for first message of sender (melvo) Download Source code (.tar.xz) (sig signed with 04EFAD0F7A4D9724) Linux (Flatpak on Flathub) Or install Kaidan for your distribution:

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. This week we drilled into the outstanding bug lists, and drove the number of HI and VHI priority bugs down to their lowest ever numbers! In addition, we boosted performance, made high-visibility improvements to notification history and screen locking, implemented support for multiple cross-desktop standards, and way more! So, quite a big week. Notable UI Improvements Plasma 6.4.0 Notifications in the history popup now retain their interactive buttons, if they have any. If they don't but clicking on their background normally does something when they're in pop-up form, then they'll show an "Activate" button when in the history. (Dominique Hummel and Kai Uwe Broulik, link 1 and link 2) On the lock and login screens, The clock and interactive UI elements are now only shown on one screen at a time when using a multi-screen setup; they fade out on screens without the pointer or keyboard focus, leaving those screens free to display pretty wallpapers. (Yifan Zhu, link 1 and link 2) System Settings' Display Configuration page gained some UI Improvements; now the screen arrangement view is hidden when there's only one screen, and with more that one, there's a big obvious screen chooser at the top of the page to make it clear which screen is selected, and when there are any disabled but connected screens. (Oliver Beard, link) Improved the appearance of the Comics widget when it hasn't been set up with any comics yet, or when there's been an error of some kind. (Christoph Wolk, link 1 and link 2) You can now also use Meta+Tab and Meta+Shift+Tab to switch between windows, in addition to the current shortcuts. This supports our push to have all global actions include the Meta key for at least one of their shortcuts. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link) KWin's "Fade Desktop" virtual desktop switching effect now has a customizable duration. (Konstantin Kharlamov, link) Plasma's Notifications now respect requests to play sounds using "sound hints". (Ruslan Khabibullin, link) The Breeze cursor theme with dark cursors is now named "Breeze Dark", and vice versa for the ones with light cursors. (Niccolò Venerandi, link) Notable Bug Fixes Plasma 6.3.4 Fixed the most common Plasma crash! This one could happen when unplugging screens, especially with a dock involved in the process somewhere. This was the final VHI priority bug! (David Edmundson, link) Fixed the remaining causes of two common KWin crashes. (Xaver Hugl, link 1 and link 2) Fixed a severe crash in Breeze-themed apps that we accidentally introduced in Plasma 6.3.3 alongside a change to fix a bug with color scheme support for creative color schemes. The change itself was fine, but it exposed a pre-existing issue that was also benign on its own. When the two combined… kaboom. But no more, now that it's fixed! (Albert Astals Cid, link) Fixed a clipboard bug that caused non-ASCII text from items re-ordered in the history to become mangled when pasted. (Fushan Wen, link) Fixed a bug that made it impossible to remove previously-added languages on System Settings' Region and Language page. (Christoph Wolk, link) Fixed a bug that made Discover sometimes fail to show the current version of an app or package being updated to a newer one. (Ismael Asensio, link) Fixed a visual glitch affecting auto-hiding top-positioned fit-content panels. (Niccolò Venerandi, link) Plasma 6.4.0 Fixed several issues in the desktop & wallpaper settings window that prevented certain pages from being scrollable when the content was long. (Christoph Wolk, link 1 and link 2) Notifications created by apps using the Notifications portal that specify something to happen when clicked now actually perform that action. (Kylie CT, link) Fixed the System Tray's adherence to the part of the StatusNotifierItem spec that allows tray icons to ask to display a context menu on left-click. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link) Flatpak apps from non-standard user-defined repositories are now shown on System Settings' Flatpak Permissions page. (Harald Sitter, link) Fixed a bug that broke scrolling on certain scrollable views in the Application Dashboard widget. (Tomislav Pap, link) When using the "Choose Player Automatically" feature of the Media Player widget, the actual name of the player is now shown on the lock screen (when using the feature to show media information on the lock screen) instead of the text "Choose Player Automatically". (Fushan Wen, link) Fixed a bug that prevented the Media Frame widget from pausing the slideshow when hovered with the pointer, as it was originally intended to do. (Christoph Wolk, link) Other bug information of note: Zero very high priority Plasma bugs! (3 last week). Current list of bugs 18 15-minute Plasma bugs (21 last week). Current list of bugs Notable in Performance & Technical Plasma 6.4.0 Massively improved performance when making screen recordings in Spectacle using the VP9 video format, which is used by default. (Arjen Hiemstra, link) Implemented support for the wp_fifo_v1 Wayland protocol. (Xaver Hugl, link) Implemented support for the Clipboard Portal. (David Redondo, link) Made KWin more resilient against the issue of windows moving to strange positions when changing the screen arrangement or number of screens. (Xaver Hugl, link) Plasma's log output is pretty quiet now thanks to Christoph's hard work. Nonetheless, he continued that work to help get us to zero! (Christoph Wolk, link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5, link 6, link 7, link 8, link 9, and link 10) 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: Triage and confirm bug reports, maybe even identify their root cause Contribute designs for wallpapers, icons, and app interfaces Design and maintain websites Translate user interface text items into your own language Promote KDE in your local community …And a ton more things! You can also help us by making a donation! 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 a new Plasma feature or a bugfix mentioned here, feel free to push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.

The KDE community will again participate in the Open Source Promotion Plan (OSPP), a program in which students can contribute to open source projects. Burgess Chang, is the KDE community contact. As part of OSPP 2024, Hànyáng Zhāng (张汉阳) added Android support to Blinken. The work done is described in a series of blog posts, available in both English and Mandarin. The Android version is available from the KDE F-Droid nightly repository. Unlike the Google Summer of Code, where stipends are funded by a company, stipends are primarily funded by the Chinese government with options for open source communities to contribute additional stipends if they wish to have more students participate in their projects than they get allocated. It is good that there is recognition that contributing to open source software is a skill that students should acquire. The range of contributions that can be made in OSPP is not just limited to programming, contributions to other aspects that improve the open source software ecosystem such as translation and documentation are welcome. As it is a government funded program, there is a little more oversight to ensure tax payer funds are well spent. In particular, for most projects, contributions should be made to a publicly available repository associated with the project and that student participants are selected primarily based on their project application. The plan aims to increase the programming and software engineering skills of students by encouraging them to participate in real world projects during their vacation period. While it is funded by the Chinese people, open source projects with contributors from all over the world apply to participate, and students from any part of the world can also apply to participate. Mandarin and English are the official communication languages for the program, knowledge of one of these is sufficient to participate in the program. The OSPP website lists the dates for each phase of the program. Important dates for this year are: 04 April - 04 May: Project submission period for approved open source communities 09 May - 09 June: Student project application period 01 July - 30 September: Coding and development period for accepted projects

Kaidan 0.12.1 fixes some bugs. Have a look at the changelog for more details. Changelog Bugfixes: Do not highlight unpinned chats when pinned chat is moved (melvo) Fix deleting/sending voice messages (melvo) Fix crash during login (melvo) Fix opening chat again after going back to chat list on narrow window (melvo) Increase tool bar height to fix avatar not being recognizable (melvo) Fix width of search bar above chat list to take available space while showing all buttons (melvo) Fix storing changed password (melvo) Fix setting custom host/port for account registration (melvo) Fix crash on chat removal (fazevedo) Move device switching options into account details to fix long credentials not being shown and login QR code being temporarily visible on opening dialog (melvo) Allow setting new password on error to fix not being able to log in after changing password via other device (melvo) Download Source code (.tar.xz) (sig signed with 04EFAD0F7A4D9724) Linux (Flatpak on Flathub) Or install Kaidan for your distribution:

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-13. OpenAI’s Studio Ghibli meme factory is an insult to art itself Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, politics, culture, art, copyright Sure, a filter which turns pictures into something with the Ghibli style looks cute. But make no mistake, it has utter political motives. They need a distraction from their problems and it’s yet another way to breach a boundary. Unfortunately I expect people will comply and use the feature with enthusiasm… https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/openais-studio-ghibli-meme-factory Trapping misbehaving bots in an AI Labyrinth Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, security When a big player has to prepare a labyrinth of AI generated content to trap bots used to feed generative AI learning pipelines… something feels wrong. https://blog.cloudflare.com/ai-labyrinth/ Improved ways to operate a rude crawler Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copilot, satire Don’t underestimate how much of a skill making a stupid crawler can be… https://www.marginalia.nu/log/a_115_rude_crawler/ Proof of work reverse proxy to protect against scrapers Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copilot, security And yet another reverse proxy to use as a scraper deterrent… It looks like several are popping every week lately. https://git.sr.ht/~runxiyu/powxy Exploring Generative AI - The role of developer skills in agentic coding Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, copilot, ide, tools, programming Again that confirms that all the hype and grand announcements are not deserved. It also gives a good idea of the skills which are required to use those tools, clearly the setup process is involved if you want to don’t want to be overwhelmed and drowning in bad code. https://martinfowler.com/articles/exploring-gen-ai.html#memo-13 Scallop, a Language for Neurosymbolic Programming Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, neural-networks, logic, prolog This is definitely an interesting declarative language. Looking forward to more such neurosymbolic approaches. https://www.scallop-lang.org/ Servo vs Ladybird Tags: tech, web, browser, foss A good look at both incumbents in the web browser engine space. Still quite some way to go but the results are interesting already. https://thelibre.news/servo-vs-ladybird/ REST in Peace? Django’s Framework Problem Tags: tech, python, django, rest, sustainability, community There’s a sustainability issue for the REST support with Django. Hopefully this will resolve. https://danlamanna.com/posts/rest-in-peace-djangos-framework-problem/ git-who: Git blame for file trees Tags: tech, version-control, git, tools Looks like a neat little tool to explore git repositories. https://github.com/sinclairtarget/git-who Quadlet: Running Podman containers under systemd Tags: tech, tools, containers, podman, systemd Looks like a nice way to orchestrate rootless podman containers. https://mo8it.com/blog/quadlet/ Closing the chapter on OpenH264 – Pixels Tags: tech, video, codec, patents, foss Or why software patents can get in the way… You can work around them somehow, but that quickly leads to shipping binaries you can’t properly check. https://bbhtt.space/posts/closing-the-chapter-on-openh264/ Things that go wrong with disk IO Tags: tech, io, storage, filesystem, databases A reminder that writing on disks is a longer process than you could suspect. Many things can go wrong on that chain. https://notes.eatonphil.com/2025-03-27-things-that-go-wrong-with-disk-io.html C++/Rust Interoperability Problem Statement Tags: tech, rust, c++, interoperability Looks like there’s movement at the Rust Foundation level to have better C++ and Rust interoperability. We’ll see what comes to fruition, this could be interesting. It’s needed for sure. https://github.com/rustfoundation/interop-initiative Use the rr debugger without HW performance counters ! Tags: tech, debugging, tools Interesting fork of rr to have time travel debugging with software counters. Hopefully will allow using rr in environments where it’s limited by lack of access to hardware performance counters. https://github.com/sidkshatriya/rr.soft Postel’s Law and the Three Ring Circus Tags: tech, foss, protocols, design, standard Nice post about the practical impacts of Postel’s law. It’s especially problematic in the case of Open Source software. Companies producing proprietary software even use that to their advantage. https://alexgaynor.net/2025/mar/25/postels-law-and-the-three-ring-circus/ War story: the hardest bug I ever debugged Tags: tech, debugging, web, browser, google Interesting story… when you end up turning to v8 having a bug in the field, you’re really in trouble. https://www.clientserver.dev/p/war-story-the-hardest-bug-i-ever Why developers question everything - Tim Hårek Tags: tech, craftsmanship, programming, estimates, risk, complexity Or why analogies with physical work don’t work… https://timharek.no/blog/why-developers-question-everything/ Sun Tzu wouldn’t like the cybersecurity industry Tags: tech, security It’s better if you prepare your security policies properly… https://kellyshortridge.com/blog/posts/sun-tzu-wouldnt-like-the-cybersecurity-industry/ The Worst Programmer I Know Tags: tech, team, productivity Trying to measure individual productivity is definitely a trap. You’d better not try, otherwise you’ll have wrong behaviors or you’ll punish the wrong persons. https://dannorth.net/the-worst-programmer/ How to Write Blog Posts that Developers Read Tags: tech, blog, writing A bit cynical at times, but shows tricks to improve the writing and style of blog posts. If I ever find the time to write something sizeable again I guess I’ll try some of them. https://refactoringenglish.com/chapters/write-blog-posts-developers-read/ Teach to Learn: Why Sharing What You Know Makes You Smarter Tags: teaching, learning I like this attitude obviously… Go out and teach! Share what you learn! https://hardmodefirst.xyz/teach-to-learn-why-sharing-what-you-know-makes-you-smarter Post Apocalyptic Computing Tags: tech, low-tech, history, reliability Interesting rambling and exploration. What would a computer built to last a century look like? https://thomashunter.name/posts/2025-03-23-post-apocalyptic-computing Bye for now!

Help us Beta test Kubuntu Plucky Puffin! Kubuntu Plucky Puffin (25.04) Beta released Kubuntu work: Fixed an issue in apparmor preventing QT6 webengine applications from starting. Beta testing! KDE Snaps: Updated Qt6 to 6.8.2 Updated Kf6 6.11.0 Rolling out 25.04 RC applications! You can find them in the –candidate channel! Life: I have decided to strike out on my own. I can’t take any more rejections! Honestly, I don’t blame them, I wouldn’t want a one armed engineer either. However, I have persevered and accomplished quite a bit with my one arm! So I have decided to take a leap of faith and with your support for open source work and a resurrected side gig of web development I will survive. If you can help sponsor my work, anything at all, even a dollar! I would be eternally grateful. I have several methods to do so: GoFundMe Patreon Github Donorbox If you want your cool application packaged in a variety of formats please contact me! If you want focused help with an annoying bug, please contact me! Contact me for any and all kinds of help, if I can’t do it, I will say so. Do you need web work? Someone to maintain your website? I can do that too! Portfolio Thank you all for your support in this new adventure!

The beta of Kubuntu Plucky Puffin (to become 25.04 in April) has now been released, and is available for download. This milestone features images for Kubuntu and other Ubuntu flavours. Pre-releases of Kubuntu Plucky Puffin are not recommended for: Anyone needing a stable systemRegular users who are not aware of pre-release issuesAnyone in a production environment with data or workflows that need to be reliable They are, however, recommended for: Regular users who want to help us test by finding, reporting, and/or fixing bugsKubuntu, KDE, and Qt developersOther Ubuntu flavour developers The Beta includes some software updates that are ready for broader testing. However, it is an early set of images, so you should expect some bugs. Highlights include an update to KDE Plasma 6.3. We STRONGLY advise testers to read the Kubuntu 25.04 Beta release notes before installing, and in particular the section on ‘Known issues’. You can also find more information about the entire 25.04 release (base, kernel, graphics etc) in the main Ubuntu Beta release notes and announcement.

Twinimation Studios have released a new Krita workshop, and we wanted to give them a chance to introduce their new offering to Krita's users: Greetings everyone! Entering the art world is sometimes seen as an expensive endeavor. From art schools to subscription based software, artists across different fields tend to have notable expenses. But have you ever wondered if you can become an artist without spending a fortune? Twinimtion Studios is back to answer the question with our very first full workshop! Becoming an Artist on a Budget is a specialty made guide guide to help aspiring artists begin their artistic journey WITHOUT breaking the bank. This workshop consists of 9 main videos bundled into one easy to digest package, along with some special bonus showcase videos as well. Included is also a bonus freebie list of numerous artistic products ideas to begin a paid art hobby or career. There should have been a video here but your browser does not seem to support it. Within this workshop, we provide tips and tricks on how one can begin their art journey for completely free. After reviewing a list of affordable resources to learn art skills, we recommend numerous free art programs with a special spotlight on Krita! We explain how versatile Krita is, and how it can be used across numerous different art fields, such as animation, comics, and painting! Following some other drawing tutorials, the workshop concludes with a special lesson on entrepreneurship, where we explain how aspiring artists can create a paid hobby or full business through their artwork while remaining on a budget. With so many people wanting to enter the art scene and build a career from it, we hope this workshop will be a helpful guide for all of those who wish to create their own artistic brand. Additionally, we have many other Krita focused animation courses on our website! Twinimation Studios was founded by instructors Andria and Arneisha Jackson; MFA graduates who've studied animation for 9 years and want to share their professional knowledge with the world. We provide tutorials on different styles of animation, character design, illustration, film creation and so much more! Look forward to our future tutorials and workshops where we will continue to expand our repertoire to fit several different art fields. Here is a link to the workshop: Become an Artist on a Budget

Plasma's login experience is an area that we know requires some improvement — it works OK in the basic case, but it's very barebones and doesn't handle anything beyond that. As a complete desktop experience, it's our job to provide support for the edge cases too. What we want Great out-of-box experience in multi-monitor and high DPI and HDR Keyboard layout switching Virtual keyboards Easy Chinese/Japanese/Korean/Vietnamese (CJK) input Display and keyboard brightness control Full power management Screen readers for blind people (which then means volume control) Pairing trusted bluetooth devices Login to known Wi-Fi for remote LDAP Remote (VNC/RDP) support from startup A brief history In Plasma 5, we retired our own bespoke display manager KDM, in favour of SDDM. A display manager started for multiple lightweight Qt Desktops. It was modern at the time making use of new QML for the front and as a big selling point at a time when Plasma was also making use of it. SDDM's Big Architecture Problem We ran into a problem, though. SDDM is designed to show a single greeter window, loading arbitrary QML from the specified theme. Whilst this all sounded great for Plasma, the abstraction is at the wrong level — for our wishlist we need a lot more tight integration from our login screen than just a window showing sessions and users. With SDDM, power management is reinvented from scratch with bespoke configuration. We can't integrate with Plasma's network management, power management, volume controls, or brightness controls without reinventing them in the desktop-agnostic backend. SDDM was already having to duplicate too much functionality we have in KDE, which was very frustrating when we're left maintaining it. The Competition GNOME's GDM is the gold-standard of display managers, and it achieves this higher level of quality by running half of a Gnome session. SDDM got closer when it added Wayland support — it had to use a compositor such as KWin. But because the project tries to be agnostic between desktops, it has to support any compositor. There aren't compositor-agnostic ways to do even simple things like set the keyboard layout, so in the end this compositor agnosticism goal simply didn't work. Theme Problems A major mistake we made throughout Plasma 5 was conflating "writing UI in a high level scripting language" with "it's themable" as the same thing — they are not. QML does make it easy to modify and iterate without programming skills, but it still contains business logic. It should not be the primary method of customisation that we expose to users. Ultimately, this was poor for end users. We pushed back on adding support for configurable theme options, because building a theme engine within a theme was wasteful! But often people want to just change a few things. Choosing a theme meant finding a combination that had everything. The store filled up with themes that are 99.9% identical code-wise; most are just wallpaper mods. It was also poor for theme developers. Not only do they have to modify the visuals, but also re-implement focus handling, accessibility, and the same boring logic again. They can't benefit from widespread testing so regressing these functionalities is common. Reddit is full of screenshots of broken SDDM themes. Finally, it's poor for us Plasma developers: theme support holds us back from adding new features or tidying code; if we want to add a new feature that in any way affects existing UIs, the situation get very messy very fast. The end result is that features just don't land, and the end user is the one that misses out. So, what's the plan? It's worth stressing nothing is official or set in stone yet, whilst it has come up in previous Plasma online meetings and in the 2023 Akademy. I'm posting this whilst starting a more official discussion on the plasma-devel mailing list. Oliver Beard and I have made a new mutli-process greeter, that uses the same startup mechanism as the desktop session. It doesn't have all the features that we propose at the start of the blog, but an architecture where features and services can be slowly and safely added. For customisation we intend to expose the same familiar settings that exist in Plasma and bring the design more in-line with the existing screenlocker where we also dropped arbitrary QML years ago. We'll make the wallpaper configurable with any existing wallpaper plugins, and expose the existing plasma theme and colour settings. Syncing will be a case of copying files, not re-inventing things. The backend When starting work on this, I tried to explore all alternative backends out there even with fully working implementations, however in practice nothing was maintained that matched our requirements. SDDM has been proven in the real world, so we have taken that and stripped it down to cover what we want moving forwards. I also aim to incubate it into the KDE ecosystem to have full autonomy over the project and merging stuck patches. Current State All of this has been implemented as two new repositories. Plasma Login Manager a continuation of SDDM and Plasma Login for front end and KCM (settings) code. These might be merged at some point. The new code all works, and is at roughly feature parity with what we're replacing. A screenshot looks roughly the same as a stock Plasma SDDM setup. Whilst this is at a state where developers can opt-in, I would not want distros to be packaging things at this point. Please do reach out if this sounds interesting, either directly or in the Plasma Matrix room - or with merge requests!

It’s been several years since I announced Plasma’s 15-minute bug initiative, and you can see the weekly numbers in every week’s “This Week in Plasma” post. Today I thought I’d share a high-level recap of where we’re at as of the first quarter of 2025. In short: really good. We dipped below 20 bugs for the first time today, with the number currently standing at 19! This is good progress; it was at 32 during last year’s update. But wait a minute… 13 bugs in a year? That actually sounds pretty pathetic. Well here’s the thing: we’re adding more bugs to the list all the time. So it’s basically a “oh wow, we’d better fix this soon before people notice it” list, and newly-discovered significant issues in git master are commonly marked as HI priority and fixed before they reach users — otherwise known as “QA”. Last year, the total number of lifetime fixed 15-minute bugs was 231. Today, it’s 413. So actually, we fixed 182 15-minute bugs in the past year or so, and reduced the total number of outstanding 15-minute bugs by 13. With only 19 left, that means we’ve fixed over 95% of all 15-minute bugs ever! If you look at the remaining bugs, some patterns emerge: Hardware-specific issues (e.g. only certain ASUS laptops, or only certain screens) Use of common though non-default settings (e.g. changing the scroll speed, hiding tray icons of Electron-based apps) Intensive use of the system (e.g. filling the entire panel up with icons-only Task Manager icons, docking and un-docking a laptop to an external screen with carefully-curated window arrangements) Random and unreproducible crashes (if they were reproducible, they’d have been fixed ages ago!) And some egregious bugs that just need to be fixed! (we’re working on them) How you can help As always, help work on the existing 15-minute bugs if you can! If not, it’s always useful to work on bug triaging, so that more of those issues that will eventually become 15-minute bugs can get discovered earlier. Another impactful way is to donate to KDE e.V., the nonprofit that supports KDE on a ridiculously small budget. Prior donations have allowed KDE e.V. to recently start the process of hiring a Plasma developer, so it’s not a black hole!

KdeGuiTest (previously called KdeEcoTest) is an automation and testing tool which allows one to record and simulate user interactions with the GUI of an application. It is being developed as part of the KDE Eco initiative to create usage scenario scripts for measuring the energy consumption of software. The main goals in Season of KDE 2025 are (i) to debug remaining issues, and (ii) to make KdeGuiTest more user-friendly by creating a Graphical User Interface so it is easier to create, edit, and run emulation scripts. Progress of the KDE season so far: Creation of a 4-cross PDF to be used for testing shift coordination. Detection of the issues affecting shift coordination. Fixed “Platform supported” error due to pynput. Integration of KdeGuiTest with its own newly-built Graphical User Interface. SHIFT COORDINATION ERROR There is a difference between what is recorded when creating a script and what is played when running the script. How I planned to fix this: Identify the root of the shift error by creating a script to click on four target crosses, and then running the script to locate and solve differences. Develop and implement a correction mechanism to accurately map recorded coordinates to playback positions. My progress so far on the shift error: Creation of the 4-crosses PDF to test shift error: A target PDF is created with 4 crosses horizontally and vertically opposite each other. CC-BY-SA-4.0 license.)" src="https://eco.kde.org/blog/images/Target_pdf.png" style="max-width: 100%; height: auto" /> Created a test script on the target PDF to detect shift error: I created a test script that clicks on the four crosses. I tested the KdeGuiTest tool on the target PDF and identified the issues affecting the shift error, namely: Difference in mouse coordinates when scripts are created and playback Screen position Screen resolution I am still working on a fix for this. See my comments at the end of this post for more. FIXED “PLATFORM NOT SUPPORTED” ERROR DUE TO PYNPUT While creating a script with KdeGuiTest we encountered the error “Platform not supported”. It was not recognizing the pynput backend in the code, which is the main technology used in KdeGuiTest to simulate user interactions in software applications. pynput is a Python library that allows you to control and monitor input devices. It is used for interacting with your keyboard and mouse through Python code. Read more from Mohamed Ibrahim in SoK23 here, Athul Raj K in SoK24 here, and Amartya Chakraborty in SoK24 here. The error was fixed by installing the pynput package from https://github.com/krathul/pynput and other packages like Rust. GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACE FOR KDEGUITEST USING PyQt5 One of the main goals in Season of KDE 2025 is to make KdeGuiTest more user-friendly and have it be easier to create, edit, and run final scripts using a Graphical User Interface. To better understand the idea of the interface Emmanuel had in mind, I presented a prototype in one of our weekly meetings. Fortunately, it fit the proposed idea! To implement the prototype, I built the GUI from scratch with some feedback from my mentor Emmanuel. PyQt5 is used for creating graphical user interfaces with Python. It's a powerful and versatile toolkit that allows developers to build desktop applications that look and feel native on various operating systems, including Windows, macOS, and GNU/Linux. The GUI has the following features: Create script interface Buttons for the following commands: dw - define window ac - add clicks sc - stop add clicks ws - write to the screen wtl - write test timestamp to log wmtl - write message to log Action buffer widget Final script widget A run script interface File dialog You can see the current version of the scripting interface below. CC-BY-SA-4.0 license.)" src="https://eco.kde.org/blog/images/Create_script.png" style="max-width: 100%; height: auto" /> LOOKING TO THE FUTURE OF KDEGUITEST First, fixing the shift error: The main shift error identified is due to differences in mouse coordinates. The mouse coordinates are recorded in the GUI in order to track them. I will then develop and implement a correction mechanism to accurately map recorded coordinates to playback positions. Second (time-permitting), developing three test scripts in collaboration with KEcoLab to compare energy consumption of PDF readers: GNU/Linux + Okular Script: Open PDF document Simulate typical reading patterns (scrolling, page turns) Test PDF search functionality Change to different view modes (single page, continuous) Measure annotation and highlighting features Document energy consumption metrics Windows + Okular script: Replicate testing scenarios from GNU/Linux + Okular script Adapt window management code for Windows environment Collect equivalent energy consumption data points Windows + Adobe Acrobat Script: Mirror the same testing scenarios as Okular script for a direct comparison Account for Adobe Acrobat's specific UI elements and behaviors Test comparable features (navigation, search, annotations) Measure energy consumption patterns Interested In Contributing? KdeGuiTest is hosted here. If you are interested in contributing, you can join the Matrix channels KdeGuiTest, KDE Eco, and Measurement Lab Development and introduce yourself. Thank you to the Season of KDE 2025 admin and mentorship team, the KDE e.V., and the incredible KDE community for supporting this project. Please feel free to contact me here: <@oree_x:matrix.org>

Stability improvements in KDE PIM-land, and polls in NeoChatWelcome 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. We had a busy week in PIM land with various stability improvements. We also did a small mini sprint on Saturday in Carl's kitchen where we worked and discussed about online accounts, KDE PIM, Itinerary, and Transitous, among others. (Only photo we made during the sprint) Due to a personal vacation, during which I will enjoy a three-week break from computers, this is my last "This Week in KDE Apps" blog post until April 20. General Stefan fixed several memory issues in the KDE mobipocket support library, which is used in Baloo and Okular. (Stefan Brüns, 25.04.0. Link) Personal Information Management Apps Akonadi Background service for KDE PIM apps Krzysztof fixed a crash when opening an email with a calendar invitation. (Krzysztof Nowicki, 25.04.0, Link) Krzysztof also fixed the reauthentication and OAuth credentials storage of the EWS support in Akonadi. (Krzysztof Nowicki, 25.04.0. Link) Carl hid the mail-specific caching options from calendar and contact folder options. (Carl Schwan, 25.04.0. Link) Merkuro Calendar Manage your tasks and events with speed and ease A new contributor, Pablo Ariño, fixed a bug in which double-tapping in the calendar failed to open the event creation dialog. Pablo also fixed a bug that occurred when clicking on the "New Event" button on mobile. (Pablo Ariño, 25.04.0. Link 1 and link 2) Tobias ported the dialog that lets you see and edit the calendar settings from QWidgets to QML, redesigning the whole dialog at the same time. This is currently only available in the Calendar app, but also expected to be added to the Contact and Mail app soon. (Tobias Fella, 25.04.0. Link) Tobias improved the text of various UI elements, for example when addings tags, todos or using proper American English spelling when using the app in American English. We also fixed numerous recent and less recent regressions to Merkuro Calendar. (Carl Schwan and Tobias Fella, 25.04.0. Link, link 2, link 3) Merkuro Mail Read and write emails Tobias and Carl worked on preventing the user from removing the "local folder" resources, which Merkuro Mail requires to work correctly. (Tobias Fella & Carl Schwan, 25.04.0. Link 1, link 2 and link 3). Tobias also fixed a crash when trying to open some folders. (Tobias Fella, 25.04.0. Link) Merkuro Contact Manage your contacts with speed and ease Carl reworked the list of contacts; similar to the email list in Merkuro Mail, the contact list now supports multiple selection as well as applying actions to all selected contacts. The code was also cleaned up a bit, and the avatar of the icon is now displayed at higher resolution. (Carl Schwan, 25.04.0. Link) KOrganizer KOrganizer is a calendar and scheduling application Allen added a new date picker that allows navigating faster to a selected date. (Allen Winter, 25.08.0. Link) Allen also improved the tooltip of the search fields. (Allen Winter, 25.08.0. Link) KDE Itinerary Digital travel assistant Volker fixed the display of coach/seat numbers when having a separate seat reservation or multiple travelers with different seat reservations. (Volker Krause, 25.04.0). Carl added support for events' ticket emails from Universe (e.g. Lollapalooza) in English. (Carl Schwan, 25.04.0. Link) System Apps Dolphin Manage your files The "Open Terminal" and "Open Terminal Here" actions will now use the icon of your default terminal instead of the generic utilities-terminal icon. (Angus McLean, 25.08.0. Link). Two weeks ago we announced a new style for the location bar. As with most very visible changes, the response to this was mixed. We are currently working on options that will hopefully make everyone happy. Kup Backup scheduler for KDE's Plasma desktop Kai excluded the state configuration folder (i.e. $XDG_STATE_HOME) from the set of files to back up, as this only includes machine-specific settings. (Kai Uwe Broulik, 25.08.0. Link) Social Apps Kaidan Modern chat app for every device Melvin fixed deleting and sending voice messages. (Melvin Keskin, Link) Melvin and Linus also made the QXmpp library used by Kaidan part of KDE. (Melvin Keskin and Linus Jahn, Link) NeoChat Chat on Matrix James fixed a few issues related to viewing polls in Neochat, and, more notably, made it possible to create them! (James Graham, 25.08.0. Link) Educational Apps WordQuiz Flash card trainer Andreas fixed a crash when trying to open a broken or missing document. (Andreas Cord-Landwehr, 25.08.0 but a backport request was created for 25.04.0. Link) Artikulate Artikulate Pronunciation Trainer Andreas also finished porting Artikulate to Qt 6, building on earlier work started by Grigoris Pavlakis. (Andreas Cord-Landwehr and Grigoris Pavlakis, 25.08.0. Link) KHangMan Hangman Game Dimitrios Los added support for the Greek alphabet. (Dimitrios Los, 25.08.0. Link) Utilities Gwenview Image Viewer Gwenview now uses the standard Qt-provided QtMultimedia library instead of the older Phonon library. (Lukas Kahnert, 25.08.0. Link) Kate Advanced text editor Arnd added the configuration that makes fish-lsp work out of the box in Kate. (Arnd Diestelhorst, 25.08.0. Link) KTrip Public transport navigator Carl adapted the query page from Itinerary to be used in KTrip, significantly improving the UI while also exposing the mode of transportation. More UI sharing between Itinerary and KTrip is also planned. (Carl Schwan, 25.04.0. Link) …And Everything Else This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! If you’re hungry for more, check out Nate's blog about Plasma and be sure not to miss his This Week in Plasma series, where every Saturday he covers all the work being put into KDE's Plasma desktop environment. For a complete overview of what's going on, visit KDE's Planet, where you can find all KDE news unfiltered directly from our contributors. Get Involved The KDE organization has become important in the world, and your time and contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we're going to need your support for KDE to become sustainable. You can help KDE by becoming an active community member and getting involved. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE — you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to be a programmer either. There are many things you can do: you can help hunt and confirm bugs, even maybe solve them; contribute designs for wallpapers, web pages, icons and app interfaces; translate messages and menu items into your own language; promote KDE in your local community; and a ton more things. You can also help us by donating. Any monetary contribution, however small, will help us cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors and in general just keep KDE bringing Free Software to the world. To get your application mentioned here, please ping us in invent or in Matrix.

Here are some more notes on getting KDE Plasma 6 on FreeBSD up and running on a Framework 13 AMD laptop. This follows up on previous notes about getting the hardware together and installing FreeBSD. First off, I think it’s hard to express how high the DPI is on the screen in this laptop. I have been using 27” 2560x1440 monitors for a couple of years, which I feel is fine for regular desktoppy-office-coding work. I’m not a monitor junkie by a long shot. I can’t even fit a screenshot from the laptop, on my desktop monitor at 100% scaling. KDE Plasma 6 desktop showing KInfoCenter with FreeBSD details and Discover. Original size 2880x1920, scaled down to 25% in each direction. Getting to KDE Plasma 6 on FreeBSD I’m sure I have written it down before, but here’s the quick steps to a working KDE Plasma 6 on FreeBSD: pkg install kde sddm sysrc dbus_enable=YES sddm_enable=YES Add suitable values (e.g. 65536) for net.local.stream.recvspace and net.local.stream.sendspace in the file /etc/sysctl.conf Step 1 there is “get the software” and step 2 is “enable the software”. I can get behind that choice, since FreeBSD doesn’t come with the assumption that installing KDE means you want a graphical login. Step 3 is kind of regrettable. There’s no convenient tool for this, but without those tweaks, Akonadi (and hence KMail) are crap on FreeBSD. Reboot or service sddm start, and you get the well-known SDDM greeter. On this machine, make sure to pick KDE Plasma X11, because Wayland doesn’t work. My Own List of First-Run Customizations Focus follows mouse (in KDE System Settings, under Window Behavior, Focus; searching for Focus finds it) Put the control key where it belongs, to be to the left of the letter A (in KDE System Settings, under Keyboard, then click the weirdly-named and -placed Key Bindings button, enable Configure keyboard options, then search for Swap Ctrl and Caps Lock) The X11-keyboard-options code seems to have been (or become) broken, at the very least on FreeBSD, so here’s a little script to do it by hand; you do need to pkg install setxkbmap for this: #! /bin/sh setxkbmap us setxkbmap -option ctrl:swapcaps Customizations for this Laptop Set global scale to 175% (in KDE System Settings, under Display Configuration, value of Global Scale; changing this value requires log-out and log-in again to make it take effect, and doesn’t seem to influence KWin decorations or cursor size – but this is X11, which is basically abandoned upstream) Things that are Cool KDE Discover detects updates. I have no idea how it decided that I have 16 things installed (devel/apr and editors/kate are listed, but not KDE Plasma itself) to display in the list of installed applications, but they did need updates today. Things to Investigate and Fix On the KDE side: Plasma 6 Wayland (on this specific GPU model) is the big-ticket item. Keyboard options, for instance all the options related to what-does-caps-lock-do. (This already applies to Plasma 5 on FreeBSD) Konsole starts in / rather than in my home directory. (This also) KDE Discover’s Home page just displays a “no internet” warning. After first logout, KWin lost whatever keybinding it had. I have managed to get alt-tab to switch windows again, but not found where alt-F4 binds to Close Window. On the FreeBSD or hardware side: Figure out how to make F-keys default, rather than the media controls (so I don’t have to hold the Fn key to, say, reload a web-page with F5). Figure out how to make the media keys work at all (e.g. brightness, which is on the F7 and F8 keys). Figure out WiFi, since a laptop with a bright red ethernet cable sticking out the side is less portable than I might like.

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. This week Plasma 6.4 continued to take shape, with a number of additional user-visible modernizations and improvements — in particular some nice progress on the topics of keyboard navigation, accessibility, and customizing apps' presentation in launcher menus. Notable UI Improvements Plasma 6.3.4 Added keyboard navigation and interaction to the User Switcher widget's popup. (Marco Martin, link) Plasma 6.4.0 KMenuEdit has received a UI modernization, including a simplification of the default toolbar contents, showing a well-curated hamburger menu by default, and adopting modern-style tool view tabs. (Oliver Beard, link 1 and link 2) When installing apps in Discover, progress feedback now appears right in the place you were just looking, rather than in the opposite corner of the window. (Nate Graham, link) Plasma's Calculator widget now announces the calculated result using the screen reader, if one is active. (Christoph Wolk, link) Improved keyboard navigation for Plasma's Calculator widget; now navigation wraps around on the same row or column. (Christoph Wolk, link) In System Monitor's table views, you can now press Ctrl+A to select everything, as you would expect. (Arjen Hiemstra, link) After editing a page in System Monitor, the app now scrolls to show a newly-added row if it would otherwise appear out of the visible area. (Arjen Hiemstra, link) KWin's "Dim Screen for Administrator Mode" plugin is now on by default, helping to focus attention on authentication prompts so you're less likely to miss them or lose them, especially with a cluttered desktop full of stuff. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link) OSDs are now consistently referred to as "OSDs" in all the places you can disable them. (Nate Graham, link 1 and link 2) Frameworks 6.13 System Monitor now displays something more user-friendly when asked to report the battery charge level of a device whose battery technology it can't determine. (David Redondo, link) Notable Bug Fixes Plasma 6.3.4 Narrowed the range of data that the Plasma clipboard accepts to be more in line with what it did in Plasma 6.2 and earlier. This prevents Plasma form crashing when copying certain types of content in certain apps. (Fushan Wen, link) Triggering the system bell a zillion times in rapid succession (e.g. by holding down backspace in an XWayland-using GTK app; don't do that) no longer freezes the entire system. (Nicolas Fella, link) Fixed a bug in the Weather Report widget that caused it to fail to save its settings (size, position, even its existence) under certain circumstances when placed on the desktop, rather than a panel. (Marco Martin, link) The User Switcher widget now lays out text for the username more sensibly, neither getting too big with huge horizontal panels, nor overflowing with not-huge vertical panels. (Marco Martin and Nate Graham, link 1 and link 2) Fixed a regression in the new spatial quick tiling code that made global actions to instantly quarter-tile the active window not always work correctly the first time they were invoked. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link) Fixed a regression that broke pasting numbers into Plasma's Calculator widget. (Christoph Wolk, link) Fixed a regression that caused the icons of Folder View popups in list mode to be displayed with too much transparency. (Nate Graham, link) Fixed a bug that caused KMenuEdit to be unable to save changes you made to systemwide-installed Flatpak apps that had previously been customized using the properties dialog. (Oliver Beard, link) Plasma 6.4.0 Fixed several minor issues affecting the Media Frame widget, including flickering on image change and not remembering customized popup sizes when living in a panel. (Marco Martin, link) Other bug information of note: 3 very high priority Plasma bugs (up from 2 last week). Current list of bugs 21 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 23 last week). Current list of bugs Notable in Performance & Technical Plasma 6.3.4 Non-full-screen screen recordings taken in Spectacle now have significantly higher visual quality when using a fractional screen scale factor. (Vlad Zahorodnii and Noah Davis, link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5) Plasma 6.4.0 Continued the project of cleaning up Plasma's log output. (Christoph Wolk, link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5, link 6, link 7, link 8, link 9, link 10, link 11, link 12, link 13, link 14, link 15, link 16, link 17, link 18, link 19, link 20, and link 21) 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: Triage and confirm bug reports, maybe even identify their root cause Contribute designs for wallpapers, icons, and app interfaces Design and maintain websites Translate user interface text items into your own language Promote KDE in your local community …And a ton more things! You can also help us by making a donation! 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 a new Plasma feature or a bugfix mentioned here, feel free to push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.

Professional update I had joined MBRDI in June 2021, after almost 4 years, I decided to part ways with MBRDI this January 2025 and decided to pursue new adventure, more on that when time comes, but for now I am keeping it under wraps. I hope you can respect that! 🙂 However this is not the only professional update I want to talk about, I want to talk about another exciting opportunity, NGI0 Core grant I am very happy to announce that I will be working on improving Plasma Mobile (and in general, Linux Mobile) power management through funding support from the NGI0 Core Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet program. You can find very thin details on this page. Though this is not the only project that is being funded through NGI0 Core fund, There are total 56 projects being sponsored as part of October call.

I made a change to the KURLNavBar according to old mockup, since we hoped it would be easier to use. This was a bad idea and made many people angry, at least on Reddit. Seems to be a recurring theme with my visual changes, though this time wasn't nearly as bad as that was. Anyway, I wanted to go over the process around it. Maybe someone else than me can learn something from this. So, what happened When implementing this mockup, I was expecting this was something people had been waiting for. It looked good to me, and since we've been wanting to freshen up Dolphin a bit, it felt like a good way to start. (This change wasn't to Dolphin, but our framework, so any apps that would use this navbar would get the changes.) Another reasoning for changes was that there has been many many instances where people didn't even know this field could be clicked! They didn't know these items are buttons, for example on touch devices. That's where the background idea came from. And then make the folders look like clickable items, so people know that, well, they're not there just to look pretty. The work started well enough, though I spent tons of time refactoring and trying to understand the old codebase. On top of that, we wanted to make sure it was as close to perfect as possible. So I added a background first, which was relatively easy, then started modifying the buttons. I wanted to use chevron > style separators between the folders, but there was no easy way to create a button with this shape. Sure, we could do it well for Breeze but any other Qt theme might render it weird and wrong, and that will just cause people report more bugs. So I settled with regular separators. It was a compromise, but I admit it was a rather bad one in the end. I worked so much on this part, trying to figure out a good way to make the new buttons work, following the mockup as close as possible, and I couldn't see the usability issues. This was because I was so entrenched in the work I couldn't practically "see the forest for the trees." I had tons of good feedback, from visual designers and the like. I wanted to follow everyones advice, but had to make compromises at some places. Eventually I got somewhere where we all just liked it enough to push it out to the world. And yeah, the whole process took ~1 month. You would think this is a simple change, but it never is that simple. The feedback I was expecting some pushback, as it always happens with visual changes, but I didn't expect it to be this.. energetic? Sadly, most of the feedback was "it ugly" which gives me nothing actionable to work on! Saying "it looks bad" doesn't help me work on it. It doesn't help me fix anything. I think that frustrated me the most: I wanted to help to fix the situation, but this kind of feedback just makes me wonder endlessly how to fix it. Then I saw some actually actionable feedback: The arrows showed the hierarchy better than the separators I actually agreed with this afterwards, but I couldn't get the chevron thing working as mentioned above I opted for separators because I wanted to keep the button look. Some thought they were tabs and kept misclicking them instead of tabs This was very good feedback and made me rethink the situation I am glad I saw those two things in the sea of "it ugly." It helped me to restructure the whole thing in my mind and start fixing. So yeah I do read your feedback. :P Out with the new, in with the new but old Here's the new iteration: KUrlNavigatorButton: Use arrow as separators I saw the value in the old navbar with the arrows, so I brought them back. I wanted to keep the icons, because I liked the visual flair they added, but they also added clutter. If I could have had the chevron style buttons as shown in the mockups, I would have likely kept the icons. Instead of reworking the old code, I decided to refactor it to best of my abilities: There was some things we didn't need anymore, and some things were a bit buggy due to miscalculations, so I changed things around and got them into good place. I wanted to remove some items I thought people wouldn't use, but in fact I was told quickly that these are very good things to have, so I kept them around. And this is also the kind of feedback I like to see! We're creating custom button components here, so we couldn't utilize more "standard" buttons. That's why there was a lot of math and tinkering with padding involved. I did try to utilize the QStyle methods here though so that it would look okay on any theme, not just Breeze. There will likely be cases where it won't look perfect in custom themes, but utilizing QStyle allows us to at least try. After the refactoring, it got easier to work on this and I started to wrap it up with rapid pace. Instead of a month, it took me around a week. It's not merged yet, but hopefully will be soon. I've been daily driving this iteration on my system and haven't had issues so far. So what's the big deal? Yeah, so, why the big deal? Why write a blogpost about this? I didn't expect this change affect so much to my psyche, so I wanted to talk about this. Maybe some other FOSS devs can relate. I think it's something we should discuss more often, than just the raw results. I like to think I am good at taking feedback. But after working on something for a month, then having to throw it all away even I was told it was ok.. It hurt! It was a lot of time spent on a thing that I hoped would make people happy. I care about the stuff I do. A lot. So yeah, I'm gonna feel hurt when my work is disliked. And that's okay. Anyone who tells me otherwise can pound sand. Rejecting emotions like these just gets you in worse state over time. I speak from experience here. It's easy to say "just ignore the negative feedback" but I literally can't. I am so into working on these things, I love working on KDE applications.. So it does hurt when something that has become such an extension of my own creativity and passion gets disliked... Even when I haven't directly worked on it! Sure, this all is my problem to work on and I don't expect anyone to treat me with silk gloves and pat my head. Just wanted to explain it, that's all. Maybe someone can relate to this and doesn't feel so alone with the problem. I had the same thing when my games got insulted, where I was even more emotionally attached to the things, because I had made them myself completely. Sadly, I kept dwelling on it a bit longer than I wished.. But working on the new version was a great outlet. I noticed old problems, fixed them and the new version is better in many ways. I've noticed that I am not annoyed/upset about negative feedback itself, but how it's conveyed. Negative feedback will always be demotivating and bothersome, but when the negative feedback is written politely and has actually actionable items, it can be rather motivating as well. The "it ugly" feedback has stronger demotivating feedback, because it's not actionable. I think the key takeaway from all of this is that mockups can get stale! If people like some older mockup, then you change to it suddenly, people may get very frustrated about it: They either forgot the old mockup, had never seen it, or they ended up disliking it in actual use. So it's good idea to freshen the mockup before iterating on it: Ask the visual designers about it one more time, maybe share it with the users and ask their opinion on it. Sure you can't gauge everyone's opinion on it, but at least it shouldn't be that sudden to everyone. This whole ordeal has been very tiring, but that's my own fault for not really allowing myself to take a break from it. I get hyperfixated easily, but again, that's my own problem. So yeah, slight burnout by all of this. I'm sure I'll be fine, especially after this is merged so it can stop living rent free in my head. I'm not blaming anyone for anything. Not even myself. Things happened and we all need to chill. Hopes for future There will be many many other times where I or someone else will get it wrong the first time. So, share your feedback, but don't immediatelly go for the nuclear option of removing it all. With FOSS stuff, we don't have these huge QA teams that go yay/nay for something.. But everyone is welcome to join help in that regard! Help us help you with actionable, polite feedback. And thank you so much for everyone who has done so! Now I'm going to try to just let go of this all. It's weekend anyway and I got bunch of games waiting to be played. Thanks for reading as always!

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-12. Please stop externalizing your costs directly into my face Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copilot, criticism Those bots are really becoming the scourge of the Internet… Is it really necessary to DDoS every forge out there to build LLMs? And that’s not even counting all the other externalities, the end of the article make it clear: “If blasting CO2 into the air and ruining all of our freshwater and traumatizing cheap laborers and making every sysadmin you know miserable and ripping off code and books and art at scale and ruining our fucking democracy isn’t enough for you to leave this shit alone, what is?” https://drewdevault.com/2025/03/17/2025-03-17-Stop-externalizing-your-costs-on-me.html FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copilot, criticism More details about the impacts of the LLM companies acting like vandals… This is clearly widespread and generating work for everyone for nothing. https://thelibre.news/foss-infrastructure-is-under-attack-by-ai-companies/ Careless people – Aral Balkan Tags: tech, facebook, politics, law, gdpr, surveillance, attention-economy I guess more reviews of that book will come out. It looks like Meta and some EU politicians are even more rotten to the core than we ever suspected… https://ar.al/2025/03/21/careless-people/ Everything you say to your Echo will be sent to Amazon starting on March 28 - Ars Technica Tags: tech, amazon, privacy, surveillance Now is the time to wake up and get those surveillance devices out of people’s homes… https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/03/everything-you-say-to-your-echo-will-be-sent-to-amazon-starting-on-march-28/ Man Tests If Tesla Autopilot Will Crash Into Wall Painted to Look Like Road Tags: tech, tesla, safety In case it wasn’t clear yet that not relying on Lidar was a stupid move for self-driving cars. https://futurism.com/tesla-wall-autopilot Dad demands OpenAI delete ChatGPT’s false claim that he murdered his kids Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, law Still so reliable… could we confine this to NLP uses please? Should never had been used for anything looking remotely like search. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/03/chatgpt-falsely-claimed-a-dad-murdered-his-own-kids-complaint-says/ It’s all hallucinations Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt Words are important, I’m dismayed at how the marketing speak around generative AI is what people use… that completely muddies the thinking around them. https://tante.cc/2025/03/16/its-all-hallucinations/ “Vibe Coding” vs Reality Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copilot, programming Despite the marketing speak… it’s definitely not there yet. So far all the attempts at using LLM for coding larger pieces end up in this kind of messy results. It helps kickstarting a project indeed but quickly degenerates after that. https://cendyne.dev/posts/2025-03-19-vibe-coding-vs-reality.html My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting A Romance Fraudster | www.bentasker.co.uk Tags: tech, security, scam Fascinating exploration of the techniques scammers are using to hook their victims https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/security/seducing-a-romance-scammer.html Introducing Orpheus Speech - Canopy Labs Tags: tech, speech, ai, machine-learning Impressive new models for text to speech. https://canopylabs.ai/model-releases HTTP/3 is everywhere but nowhere Tags: tech, http, quic, community The picture is a bit to bleak I think, but there’s indeed currently a divide in terms of HTTP/3 adoption. This is fairly aligned with the big players vs long tail creators divide. Hopefully this will get solved at some point. https://httptoolkit.com/blog/http3-quic-open-source-support-nowhere/ Were multiple return values Go’s biggest mistake? Tags: tech, programming, go With the little Go I wrote, I admit that the multiple return values feature is… odd. Worse though, it has bad ramifications. https://herecomesthemoon.net/2025/03/multiple-return-values-in-go/ I don’t think error handling is a solved problem in language design Tags: tech, programming, language, exceptions Indeed, it’s something where we lack consensus across languages and sometimes within the same ecosystem. https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/programming/ErrorHandlingNotSolvedProblem The Defer Technical Specification: It Is Time Tags: tech, c, standard, memory, safety This could be a big improvement for C. We’ll see how far this goes. https://thephd.dev/c2y-the-defer-technical-specification-its-time-go-go-go Speeding up C++ code with template lambdas – Daniel Lemire’s blog Tags: tech, c++, programming, optimization Definitely ugly in the end. Still it does the the trick. https://lemire.me/blog/2025/03/15/speeding-up-c-code-with-template-lambdas/ Our interfaces have lost their senses Tags: tech, gui, ux Beautifully crafted post. So much of it is true as well, having several modalities available is better for interactions. We’ve been loosing this overtime, it’s time to reintroduce it… there’s so much to do in the HMI space. https://wattenberger.com/thoughts/our-interfaces-have-lost-their-senses Xenographics – Weird but (sometimes) useful charts Tags: tech, data-visualization Need new ideas for data visualization? This seems like a good resource. https://xeno.graphics/ Passive Voice Considered Harmful · Refactoring English Tags: tech, documentation, writing Good explanation of why the passive voice should be avoided. Also it gives a few cases where you want to favor the passive voice. https://refactoringenglish.com/chapters/passive-voice-considered-harmful/ Why I’m No Longer Talking to Architects About Microservices Tags: tech, architecture, microservices, criticism Interesting piece… why talking about microservices generally leads nowhere. This is a too loosely defined term and we’re often confusing means and ends. https://blog.container-solutions.com/why-im-no-longer-talking-to-architects-about-microservices Who are your teammates? Tags: tech, leadership, management, team Interesting way to frame the question for leadership roles. https://ntietz.com/blog/who-are-your-teammates/ Why “Normal” Engineers Are the Key to Great Teams - IEEE Spectrum Tags: tech, organization, team, culture, productivity We should definitely put the 10x engineer myth to rest. Let’s focus on setting up the right organisation and culture instead. https://spectrum.ieee.org/10x-engineer Battery breakthrough as 99.99% of lithium extracted from old cells Tags: tech, battery, ecology If it can be done at scale this would be very good news. https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/battery-recycle-lithium-ion-environment-b2713723.html Why Your Brain Blinds You For 2 Hours Every Days Tags: science, cognition, neuroscience Nice video which gives a glimpse on how our brain constantly tries to build a coherent picture of the reality around us. This is quite a feat since our senses are ill equipped to produce such a picture. Of course we don’t even notice all those processes when we go about our days. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo_e0EvEZn8 Bye for now!

Kaidan 0.12.0 looks and behaves better than ever before! Chats can now quickly be pinned and moved. In addition, the list of group chat participants to mention them is placed above the cursor if enough space is available. With this release, OMEMO can be used right after migrating an account and migrated contacts are correctly verified. Have a look at the changelog for more details. Changelog Features: Use square selection to crop avatars (fazevedo) Use background with rounded corners for chat list items (melvo) Remove colored availability indicator from chat list item (melvo) Display group chat participant picker above text cursor in large windows (melvo) Do not allow to enter/send messages without visible characters (melvo) Remove leading/trailing whitespace from exchanged messages (melvo) Ignore received messages without displayable content if they cannot be otherwise processed (melvo) Allow to show/hide buttons to pin/move chat list items (melvo) Bugfixes: Fix style for Flatpak (melvo) Fix displaying video thumbnails and opening files for Flatpak (melvo) Fix message reaction details not opening a second time (melvo) Fix opening contact addition view on receiving XMPP URIs (melvo) Fix format of text following emojis (melvo) Fix eliding last message text for chat list item (melvo) Fix unit tests (mlaurent, fazevedo, melvo) Fix storing downloaded files with unique names (melvo) Fix overlay to change/open avatars shown before hovered in account/contact details (melvo) Fix verification of moved contacts (fazevedo) Fix setting up end-to-end encryption (OMEMO 2) after account migration (melvo) Notes: Kaidan requires KWindowSystem and KDSingleApplication now (mlaurent) Kaidan requires KDE Frameworks 6.11 now Kaidan requires KQuickImageEditor 0.5 now Kaidan requires QXmpp 1.10.3 now Download Source code (.tar.xz) (sig signed with 04EFAD0F7A4D9724) Linux (Flatpak on Flathub) Or install Kaidan for your distribution:

Here are the new CMake changes in Qt Creator 16: