KDE
digiKam 7.2.0-beta2 is released
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Tuesday 29th of December 2020 03:23:20 AM Filed under
Just a few words to inform the community that 7.2.0-beta2 is out and ready to test four month late the 7.2.0 beta1 release.
After integrating the student codes working on faces management while this summer, we have worked to stabilize code and respond to many user feedbacks about the usability and the performances improvements of faces tagging, faces detection, and faces recognition, already presented in July with 7.0.0 release announcement.
One very important point introduced with this release is the separation of the huge data model files used with face detection and recognition which are now downloaded on demand at run-time if necessary. This reduces a lot the size of digiKam bundles files published at release times..
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The Universe full of hydrogen and … a new feature in LabPlot
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Monday 28th of December 2020 12:31:32 PM Filed under
The Universe is full of the hydrogen and one of its emission lines that is very important in astronomy is caused by the hyper-fine interaction. This electromagnetic radiation has the frequency of ca. 1420.4MH which corresponds to the vacuum wavelength of ca. 21cm.
Observations performed at this wavelength reveal many structures in the Universe. The following plot shows the results of such observations in the Milky Way...
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Jot down your ideas in a digital notebook
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Sunday 27th of December 2020 08:23:43 PM Filed under
KJots is the default personal wiki of KDE’s Plasma desktop. If you’re running the Plasma desktop on Linux or BSD, you already have KJots, and you can launch it either as a self-standing application or from the Kontact Personal Information Manager (PIM) application.
[...]
Editing text in KJots is a lot like editing text in KWrite or medit. There’s a button or menu for whatever you need to do, including styling your text as bold or italics or color, changing the font, adding arbitrary bookmarks (in KJots), creating lists, and so on. It’s not as flexible as Kate, but it’s got all the basics you need for general-purpose composition.
Linking
One thing that’s difficult to simulate in the digital world is the ease of flipping back and forth between pages in a physical book. I don’t know that anyone’s solved this problem yet, but as consolation, KJots allows you to link between notes. In a way, you’re anticipating your future desire to flip back to a previous note by including an easy-to-follow hyperlink straight to the page you want yourself to refer to later. Technically, it’s more efficient than the physical equivalent (although it does require you to think of it beforehand, or else you’re back to scrolling through notes or using Ctrl+F to find a keyword).
To link from one note to another, select the word or phrase you want to make a hyperlink. Click the Format menu, and select the Link option. You can choose to create an external link (to a website, for instance) or an internal link to another note, even if the note is filed in a separate book.
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KDE: A Year of KDE Itinerary, Slackware Updates and Plasma Mobile
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Sunday 27th of December 2020 06:54:02 AM Filed under
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Wrapping up 2020 and looking forward to 2021
As 2020 comes to a close, there’s several things ongoing around KDE Itinerary which a year ago I would have considered out of reach, or simply didn’t have on the radar yet at all. The common theme in all of those is collaboration with other communities and organizations. And I’m looking forward to more of this in 2021!
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December updates and a Christmas goodie for cable geeks
...my Plasma5 ‘ktown’ first got adopted as Slackware ‘vtown’ in testing and a bit later replaced the old KDE4 in the core distro. Lots of package recompilations and upgrades to work with the newer stuff in Slackware.
[...]
Despite that stress I have been enjoying myself still, just not in the spotlights. The semi-sudden switch in Slackware from KDE4 to Plasma5 and refreshing its XFCE Desktop had some consequences for my liveslak project. It took some time to work out a new optimal package set for the small XFCE image, and in particular the DAW Live image which is based on a bare Plasma5 Desktop needed attention to make it tick again.
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Blog housekeeping and stuff
I had planned to write different blog post but this housekeeping took most of the time for me, so I will finish post tomorrow.
On separate topic, I realize my blog has been dormant for a year now. Last blog post I made was Plasma Mobile as a daily driver about when I was stuck in Europe with no working phones except PinePhone. While this blog was mostly dormant, I had been writing various posts and contributing to posts on Plasma Mobile blog.
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This week in KDE: kio-fuse and NeoChat rise
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Saturday 26th of December 2020 08:36:10 PM Filed under
First of all, KDE’s FUSE-based remote location mounter kio-fuse got its first stable release, which means it can now be pre-installed by distros.
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Dolphin now lets you set its “homepage” to non-local locations including arbitrary KIOSlaves, such as remote://, baloosearch:// and so on (Derek Christ, Dolphin 21.04)
KRunner’s history is now activity-aware by default! This means for example that there will no longer be a data leak if you use an activity with history turned off (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.21)
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KDE/Kai Uwe Broulik: Holiday Hacking
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Saturday 26th of December 2020 05:32:22 AM Filed under
I want KDE applications to offer thumbnails for as many file types as possible, so over the years I’ve written a bunch of thumbnailers in kio-extras, such as for AppImages, Open Document (odt, ods, odp, …) files, various ebooks formats (epub, fiction book), Microsoft Office XML documents, and other files conforming to the “Open Packaging Convention”. Thankfully, modern document formats are often just ZIP archives (that can easily be handled using our KArchive framework) which already contain a thumbnail generated by the authoring application.
Furthermore, I even improved the Windows EXE and ICO thumbnailer to choose the prettiest icon available and even added support for friggin’ 16-bit executables from Windows 3.1. Qt already comes with support for reading ICO and CUR (Cursor) files but there’s no support for animated cursors (ANI). Naturally, I sat down and started writing a thumbnailer for that. A short while into reading the file format specification, I realized I might as well write a proper KImageFormats plugin, so that any Qt application, like Kolourpaint and Gwenview, can present those files. Gwenview would even play them like a GIF animation!
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A few days ago Nate was approached about a new “platform profiles” ACPI API that will be added to the Linux kernel. It will allow to apply certain power management presets, such as “balanced”, “quiet”, “performance” without having to worry about changing specific details, like setting CPU frequency explicitly on the software side. Knowing that I’ve wanted a setting like this forever, Nate told me about this, and on Christmas Eve after returning from a smaller-than-usual family dinner I fired up a Linux kernel build and wrote a KAuth helper for manipulating those new sysfs files.
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I also added a PowerDevil action which can automatically change the profile when you plug in/out your power supply or the battery is running low. Finally, I also added a DBus interface for enumerating and switching profiles that can then be used for some sort of UI in battery monitor to change between profiles anytime. I actually haven’t managed to get it working on my ThinkPad just yet but it looked simple enough to write that plug-in blindly.
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A Look at KDE Desktop Effects
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Friday 25th of December 2020 06:15:45 PM Filed under

Since KDE 3, with each update, the number of desktop effects multiplied. Let’s take a trip into the land of KDE’s desktop effects and look at how you can use them to improve both your desktop’s aesthetics and usability.
KDE had the reputation of being the most demanding desktop environment. Its effects used to put an extra toll on resources and induce significant lag, but not anymore – at least, not if you bought your PC within the decade. Check out our KDE review for that.
If your PC isn’t a two-decade-old relic, KDE will automatically recognize its GPU and enable its compositor. Under normal circumstances, you don’t have to do anything to enable its support for effects.
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Adriaan de Groot: Improving developer setup
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Friday 25th of December 2020 04:57:15 AM Filed under

One of the important parts of getting-started in an project is setting up a developer environment (if you want to do code contributions; other kinds of contributions need different setup). Calamares has a thing called deploycala.py which mangles the system it is run in (recommended only in VMs or live-ISO) while the KDE project has a wiki page on getting involved as a developer and a build tool that can do initial system setup and help with builds.
As a most-of-the-time-FreeBSD developer, I’m somewhat spoiled for a developer environment: a compiler (clang) is included, and installing package something also installs all the development tooling required for something. In other words: chasing development dependencies is pretty much trivial.
Many Linux distro’s support split dev-packages, and the names of those vary per-distro. My own deploycala.py script handles a half-dozen common variants. The kdesrc-build tool from KDE does something similar, with known-dependencies lists for Alpine, Arch, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Mageia and openSUSE (presumably “and derivatives”). So I decided to put this to the test by turning my recently-installed Plasma Mobile on Desktop into a development VM. Should be simple: the base is KDE neon User Edition, which is (kind of like) Ubuntu, which is (kind of like) Debian, so it ought to be straightforward.
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Second Beta for Krita 4.4.2
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Thursday 24th of December 2020 06:06:25 PM Filed under
The Krita team is releasing the second beta of Krita 4.4.2. Ramon Miranda has just released a video of one of the star features of this release: mesh transforms...
Compared to the first beta, the following issues have been fixed...
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Announcing NeoChat 1.0, the KDE Matrix client
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Wednesday 23rd of December 2020 03:46:02 PM Filed under
Matrix is an instant messaging system similar to Whatsapp or Telegram, but uses an open and decentralized network for secure and privacy-protected communications. NeoChat is a visually attractive Matrix client that works on desktop computers and mobile phones.
NeoChat provides an elegant and convergent user interface, allowing it to adapt to any screen size automatically and gracefully.
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