Welcome to a new issue of "This Week in KDE Apps"! Every week we cover as much as possible of what's happening in the world of KDE apps.

This week, we released KDE Gear 24.08.3 and we are preparing the 24.12.0 release with the beta planned for next week. The final release will happen on December 12th, but, meanwhile, and as part of the 2024 end-of-year fundraiser, you can "Adopt an App" in a symbolic effort to support your favorite KDE app.

This week, we are particularly grateful to @[email protected], @[email protected] and Karcsesz for showing their support for Tokodon; manchicken for Merkuro and fat_malama, Alexandru Traistaru and Neeko iko for KDE Connect.

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. So consider donating today!

Getting back to all that's new in the KDE App scene, let's dig in!

Alligator Feed reader for mobile devices

The user can no longer open the feed details page multiple times (Soumyadeep Ghosh, 24.12.0, link).

Falkon Web Browser

It is now possible to open a context menu with Greasemonkey (Juraj Oravec, 24.12.0, link). Greasemonkey lets you run little scripts that make on-the-fly changes to web page content. Juraj also removed the advertised FTP support in Falkon as the support for FTP was removed from Chromium. (Juraj Oravec, 24.12.0, link)

Dolphin Manage your files

We no longer ask password twice when entering the Dolphin's admin mode (kio-admin) (Felix Ernst, 24.12.0, link).

Felix also improved the keyboard navigation in the toolbar, now the elements are focused in the right order (Felix Ernst, 24.12.0. link 1 and link 2).

KDE Itinerary Digital travel assistant

Itinerary can now show you a map of the whole trip (Volker Krause, 24.12.0, link).

And display some statistics about your trip, for example the CO₂ emission, the distance travelled and the costs (if available) (Volker Krause, 24.12.0, link).

Finally, the alignment of timeline elements in Itinerary is now much more consistent (Carl Schwan, 24.12.0, link).

Okular View and annotate documents

When loading PDF files with Ink annotation containing an empty path, Okular won't crash. You shouldn't be able to create such annotations with Okular anyway, but some PDF files out there do contains such annotations (Albert Astals Cid, 24.12.0, link).

We also no longer hide the signing UI prematurely and now ensure it is visible until the signing process is actually finished (Nicolas Fella, 24.12.0, link).

Finally we fixed a small memory leak in Okular's latex support (Nil Admirari, 24.12.0, link).

Kaffeine Multimedia Player

Kaffeine got ported to Qt6/KF6 (Tobias Klausmann, 24.12.0, link).

Calculator A feature rich calculator

Kalk will now correctly handle pressing the Esc key and clear the input field like many other calculator applications do, instead of creating strange characters in the input area (Devin Lin, 24.12.0, link).

Kasts Podcast application

Bart de Vries fixed password loading for synchronisation services on Windows (Bart De Vries, 24.12.0 link).

Kate Advanced Text Editor

The performance of displaying the build output has been improved (Waqar Ahmed, 24.12.0 link).

KDevelop Featureful, plugin-extensible IDE for C/C++ and other programming languages

We addressed certain annoyances when working with the flatpak runtime. This included, for example, improving the handling of .flatpak-manifest.json files which we use in KDE for storing application's Flatpak manifest (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, 24.12.0 link).

KMail A feature-rich email application

KMail and other PIM applications can now be compiled on Windows (Ingo Klöcker and Laurent Montel link 1 and link 2). Having KDE PIM applications work well on Windows is still in early stages of development. There is still a lot of work required to make Kontact a good experience on that platform.

KMix Sound Mixer

KMix got ported to Qt6/KF6 (Jonathan Marten, 24.12.0 link).

Krita Digital Painting, Creative Freedom

SVGs with clip masks now render faster (Dmitry Kazakov, link).

Konsole Use the command line interface

Konsole now always creates a cgroup hierarchy when creating new process. This prevents entire applications getting killed in an Out-Of-Memory (OOM) scenarios when a tab consumes too much RAM (David Redondo, 24.12.0, link). David also ensured the subprocess of Konsole are correctly mapped to Konsole's .desktop file (link).

Kwave Sound editor

Kwave now provides a better visual indication when playback is paused (Mark Penner, 24.12.0, link).

NeoChat Chat on Matrix

We improved the network proxy's config page look to make it more consistent with the other config pages (Joshua Goins, 24.12.0, link).

Joshua Goins and Olivier Beard improved the link preview. Now clicking anywhere on the link preview will take you to the linked webpage (Joshua Goins, 24.12.0, link). The separator shown to the left of the preview and quoted text also got stylish rounded corners (Olivier Beard, 24.12.0, link).

NeoChat now hides non-standard rooms from the room list as most of the time they are used exclusively for holding data (e.g. trip group information from Itinerary) and not meant to be interacted with (Joshua Goins, 24.12.0, link).

We also improved the way polls look (Carl Schwan, 24.12.0, link).

And made sending messages and inserting newline shortcuts configurable (Eren Karakas, 24.12.0, link).

Tokodon Browse the Fediverse

Right clicking on a link on a post will now show a context menu allowing users to copy or share the URL directly (Arran Ubels, 24.12.0, link).

And all this too...

The layout of the About dialog of applications using QtWidgets has been improved (Carl Schwan, KDE Frameworks 6.10.0, 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.

We've released a new video! ..Templates! you can create them with Krita to save time in your digital paintings and be more focused on your artwork. They are seamless, they are useful, and they are really easy to generate. So let´s go with another supercool feature of Krita.

Check out the video for download links for the templates themselves!

Here's our bi-monthly update from KDE's personal information management applications team. This report covers progress made in September and October 2024.

Since the last report, 24 people have contributed over 1100 changes to the KDE PIM code base. We also released a two bugfix releases of the KDE PIM Suite with the Gear releases 24.08.1 and 24.08.2

Please note this is the last bi-monthly blog post for KDE PIM. We will continue to work on KDE PIM but weekly improvements to KDE PIM are now included in the This Week in KDE Apps blog.

Akademy

The KDE PIM team was at Akademy from the 7th to the 12th of September in Würzburg (Germany). We hosted again a PIM BoF.

We covered a few topics and made plans. In particular we touched upon contributions blockers, we hope the milestone system will help and also working on the amount of repositories which are not part of KDE Frameworks. Things are progressing in the right direction but slowly. Feel free to reach out to help!

Milestones

Talking about the milestones. You can see what we got in store on the Gitlab board. Some of them are progressing nicely like the resurrection of Kontact for Windows or the port away from QCA.

If you see anything you fancy and you would like to help, reach out to us on the #kontact:kde.org Matrix channel!

Applications

Itinerary

Our travel assistance app Itinerary got a new two-level trip/timeline view, an extended public transport location search, a new full trip map view and better Android platform integration. Read more in [its own bi-monthly update] (https://volkerkrause.eu/2024/10/03/kde-itinerary-august-september-2024.html).

KAlarm

David has been working on fixing bugs around sound handling. In particular, repeating audio alarms only playing once have been fixed. Likewise the failure to play sound files using libVLC on some systems is gone. Also the backend to play sound can be changed at build time, it can use VLC or MPV.

But that's not the only bugs which got squashed. It's now possible to wake from suspend when using RTC wake and a crash has been fixed affecting systems where the kernel supports alarm timers.

Last but not least, the GUI has been improved around the run mode options in the preferences dialog.

Merkuro

Claudio has been busy fixing regressions and improving the stability of Merkuro. Notably, maps are now displayed again (if the event contains coordinates). Also, the collection combobox in the editors are now initialized with a valid collection and filtering features have been repaired.

KAddressBook and KOrganizer

The general improvements to support Plasma Activities is still on going. It is not enabled by default as it requires Akonadi Resources support to become really useful and the corresponding changes are not there yet.

KMail

On the KMail front the search has been greatly improved. There is now a custom syntax usable in the search text field. One can now use keywords like subject:, body:, to, from, has:attachment, is:important, is:replied and so on to make more precise queries.

For instance one could write "from:[email protected] to:[email protected] is:important" to get only the emails from Volker on the kde-pim mailing list which are also flagged as important.

As you may know, Fedora KDE 41 was released a couple of weeks ago.

I wanted to talk about a special feature that our colleague @farchord (with support from upstream developer @Nate Graham) has brought to our Fedora KDE distribution:

Enabling Third Party Repositories With A Single Click!

Thanks to the flexibility of plasma-welcome we can offer this feature

Right after installing Fedora and on first login you will be presented with the Plasma Welcome window:

Before you click on Skip , you can go through the different slides to read about KDE and Fedora and also to decide whether you want to contribute with anonymous metrics or not (note: I personally do not):

Here is where the interesting part comes in, on the next slide:

With a simple click of a button you will enable the most commonly requested by our users Third Party Repositories like rpmfusion! (note: you will be asked for your administrator password)

Once the request is processed, the message will change to:

That’s it! You have successfully enabled Third Party Repositories without needing to modify any file or running any command whatsoever

Before you do anything with your system and your new configuration, I will strongly recommend to update your system via Plasma Discover :

Proceed with all the update and reboot to get the latest and shiniest from our repositories.

Finally, to verify that the Third Party software is available, you can check:

And that is it!

Enjoy!

This is all thanks to farchord, siosm , aleasto and ngraham‘s work!

Has this ever occurred to you? The most joyful moments of your life got filled with sorrow, a grief of loss…

Let’s talk about the Ubuntu Summit first, my international conference and solo travel outside my country. Probably I am the first from my entire extended family to visit a European country. My parents, well-wishers everyone was so happy. Only person didn’t know much about this, my maternal grandfather, whom I called (yes, “called”, he left us on 27th October 2024) Dada. Let me tell you about the summit first.

This week was full of major feature work and UI polishing, in addition to a lot of bug-fixing! I'm pretty sure everyone will find something to be excited about here:

Notable New Features

You can now swap the functions of drawing tablet pen buttons if you like the function performed by one of the buttons, but not which button activates it. (Joshua Goins, 6.3.0. Link)

Info Center now shows all of your GPUs, not just one of them. And they are now indicated in a fancy way! (Harald Sitter, 6.3.0. Link 1 and link 2)

Discover now shows you when apps are either packaged directly by their developer, or verified by a trusted third party. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, 6.3.0. Link)

The Printers widget now shows each printer's print queue inline, right there in the widget! (Kai Uwe Broulik, 6.3.0. Link)

The Task Manager widget now lets you configure whether the "I'm playing audio" icons that appear in the corner of tasks can be clicked to mute the audio. In addition, the audio controls now always appear in the window preview thumbnails, and can't be accidentally disabled. (Petar Margetic, 6.3.0. Link)

When you've set up your system to reboot into the bootloader menu the next time it reboots (and not the firmware screen; that case was already handled), the logout screen how indicates this. (Nikolay Kochulin, 6.3.0. Link)

Notable UI Improvements

When you put a pie chart style System Monitor widget on a really skinny panel, the percentage circle in the center now looks nice, rather than being jagged and overly bold. (Arjen Hiemstra, 6.2.4. Link)

Made the progress indicators on Discover's Updates page more readable. (Nate Graham, 6.2.4. Link)

The Keyboard Indicator widget now indicates when modifier keys are "latched" or "locked", as they can be when using certain accessibility settings. (Nicolas Fella, 6.3.0. Link)

Removed the "Settings" launcher menu category! Now all of its contents have been moved into the "System" category. This reduces the number of categories that don't offer meaningful grouping. (Nate Graham, 6.3.0. Link)

The Printers widget now shows a little busy spinner for any printers that are currently printing, to make them easier to pick out among others when there are a lot of printers available. (Kai Uwe Broulik. 6.3.0. Link)

Widgets placed on the desktop are now very slightly translucent, just like the popups of widgets placed on the panel. (Marco Martin, 6.3.0. Link)

When for some reason the system time zone is set incorrectly or not set at all, the Digital Clock widget now tells you what's going on and offers you the chance to fix it yourself instead of just being broken. (Niccolò Venerandi, 6.3.0. Link)

Added a distinct Breeze icon for System Settings' Shortcuts page. (Joshua Goins, Frameworks 6.9. Link)

Improved the Breeze icon shown on password dialogs. (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 6.9. Link)

Notable Bug Fixes

Fixed a case where KWin would crash when plugging in external screens. (Xaver Hugl, 6.2.3. Link)

Fixed a regression caused by a version 0.22 of the power-profiles-daemon service that caused power profiles to not be registered properly by Plasma's Power and Battery widget until you manually restarted the Powerdevil service. (Méven Car, 6.2.3. Link)

Discover's auto-update feature once again works for Flatpak apps. (Harald Sitter, 6.2.4. Link)

The speaker test window on System Settings' Audio page now always fits its content, no matter what the name of the device or its audio profile may be. (Ismael Asensio, 6.2.4. Link)

Fixed a strange issue that would make GTK 4 apps look too dark when using HDR mode. Now they're a bit too light, but this is a GTK 4 bug. (Xaver Hugl, 6.2.4. Link)

Plasma panels in "fit content" mode are now compatible with flexible spacers; placing one on a panel no longer causes it to slowly grow to its full width when Plasma starts up — which was hilarious, but wrong. (Niccolò Venerandi, 6.2.4. Link)

Fixed a small visual glitch in KWin's Overview effect that caused windows dragged-and-dropped onto the desktop bar to strangely glide off screen. (Marco Martin, 6.2.4. Link)

Did a major code refactor and bug-fixing spree for desktop icon positioning, which fixes almost all of the outstanding bug reports about icons moving around, and also adds autotests to validate the fixes! You can read more about it here, too. (Akseli Lahtinen, 6.3.0. Link)

Alt key accelerators for items in the Global Menu widget now work on Wayland. (Nicolas Fella, 6.3.0. Link)

Performing a major system update using Discover no longer makes a pointless and invisible authentication prompt appear behind the logout window when you try to reboot to complete the update. (Alessandro Astone, PackageKit 1.3.1. Link)

Other bug information of note:

• 4 Very high priority Plasma bug (same as last week). Current list of bugs
• 37 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 40 last week). Current list of bugs
• 106 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed over the last week. Full list of bugs

Notable in Performance & Technical

The feature to let you record the screen without re-approval if it's the same as one you did last time now also works when using rectangular region recordings. (David Redondo, 6.3.0. Link)

Implemented support for the Wayland system bell protocol. (David Redondo, 6.3.0. Link)

How You Can Help

KDE has become important in the world, and your time and contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we need your support to keep KDE sustainable.

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:

• Filter 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 donating to our yearly fundraiser! 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.

A few weeks ago Qt 6.8 was released, delivering many fixes and improvements for our software. Some of them were contributed by yours truly, and in this post I want to highlight some of them.

They relate to graphics tablet/stylus input on Wayland. Before we go into the fixes let’s have a quick overview of the flow of tablet input events on Wayland:

The genesis of input events is in the kernel driver for the particular tablet, which talks to the hardware (via USB, bluetooth etc). The kernel passes events to userspace via the evdev system. On the userspace side a Wayland compositor reads those events. Most compositors leverage libinput for this, a library that transforms raw evdev events into something more usable for the compositor while applying some cleaning and configuration. The compositor then delivers events to native Wayland applications using the tablet-v2 protocol. For legacy XWayland applications the compositor uses this protocol to send events to XWayland, which translates them into things X11 apps understand. The compositor can apply useful transformations to the input, like which area of the screen the tablet is mapped to, changing the pressure curve of the pen, or binding buttons to keyboard shortcuts.

The application then processes the events, potentially leveraging a UI toolkit like Qt. Qt creates QTabletEvent object for incoming Wayland events and delivers those to all UI elements. In case no UI element reacts to the event Qt will synthesize a mouse event from the tablet event and deliver that to the UI elements. That way most controls like buttons and menus don’t need special code to handle tablet input. Only when doing very low-level input handling or when needing tablet-specific interactions (like reacting to different pressure values) application developers need to explicitly handle tablet events in their code. Most UI toolkits will work somewhat similar to this. If an application doesn’t react to tablet input at all please file a bug against the application.

Qt Wayland had support for tablet input for a few years now, so what exactly needed fixing? The first thing is cursors. In Wayland the application tells the compositor which cursor to use. This can be done either by specifying a surface (i.e. an image) or a named cursor shape. Guess which one Qt used? That’s right: Neither. It just didn’t specify a cursor at all. The result depends on the compositor: KWin would display a cross-hair cursor as a fallback, which is ~okay, but not the cursor the application developer asked for. On other compositors I’ve tested there will be no cursor visible at all, which isn’t okay at all. For Qt 6.8 I implemented the missing cursor support, so now tablets get the same cursor as mouse input (unless of course the application developer wants a different cursor for tablet input).

Another thing that affected mostly non-Plasma users is client-side decorated windows. On Plasma Qt applications usually use the server-side decoration provided by KWin, but e.g. on GNOME Qt is responsible for drawing and handling window decorations. For this Qt features a plugin system so different decorations with different look-and-feels can be swapped out. Unfortunately those decorations didn’t handle tablet input at all, so it wasn’t possible to move around or close windows using a tablet stylus. I fixed this by pretending the tablet input is mouse input to the decorations, which was a simple yet effective solution for the issue. If there is ever a need for decorations to treat tablet input different to mouse input we can revisit this.

Talking about moving windows, a feature most KDE apps have (even if off-by-default these days) is dragging any empty area to move the window. This wasn’t working when using a stylus. Why? For that we need to look at how this works on a Wayland level. The xdg-shell protocol (the one responsible for most application windows) has a move request that asks the compositor to start a move interaction for the window. As part of the request the application must pass a serial, which is a number that corresponds to the last input event the application has received. To avoid applications suddenly deciding to move in the background compositors usually only allow move requests as a result of direct user input, so this serial must match the last input event. Qt wraps this move request inside the QWindow::startSystemMove function. The problem was that Qt didn’t keep track of the serial it received as part of tablet input, so when starting the move it would pass a wrong serial and the compositor (rightfully) refused the move. A few extra lines later the serial was tracked properly and moving windows with a stylus worked, just in time for Nate to disable the feature by default.

The same problem also affected drag-and-drop. When starting a drag with a stylus Qt now passes the correct serial, making drag-and-drop work (at least on the Qt side, there currently is a bug on the KWin side that prevents this from working).

The last fix for today relates to how applications react to the tablet events. Sometimes applications process clicks differently depending on what keyboard modifiers are pressed. For example pressing Ctrl while clicking on files in Dolphin allows to select multiple files. For this to work Qt conveniently delivers the active modifiers with every input event. Alas for tablet input the modifiers got lost along the way, so it wasn’t possible to select multiple files using a stylus. One small fix later it works as expected.

That’s all the Wayland tablet related fixes for today. If you find more issues in Qt/KDE apps related to tablet input on Wayland please report them on bugs.kde.org and I’ll look into them.

That’s not all there is about Wayland tablet improvements though. Fully in the spirit of the “We care about your input!” Goal there are exiting things happening on the KWin/Plasma side that I’ve been involved in. Stay tuned for more!

In my position of Software Platform Engineer at KDE I work on common building blocks for KDE software, like Qt and KDE Frameworks. This work is possible thanks to your generous donations. Check out our end-of-the-year fundraiser if you’d like to see more work like this.

Make sure you commit anything you want to end up in the KDE Gear 24.12
releases to them

Next Dates:

•   November 14, 2024: 24.12 freeze and beta (24.11.80) tagging and release
•   November 28, 2024: 24.12 RC (24.11.90) tagging and release
•   December  5, 2024: 24.12 tagging
•   December 12, 2024: 24.12 release

https://community.kde.org/Schedules/KDE_Gear_24.12_Schedule

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-45.

Voted in America? This Site Doxed You

Tags: tech, democracy

I didn’t know the voting rolls were public record in the US… this is a really bad idea.

https://www.404media.co/voted-in-america-this-site-doxed-you/

One weird trick to get the whole planet to send abuse complaints to your best friend(s)

Tags: tech, networking, security, protocols

Looks like there are people out there to get Tor relays down… and they found a smart networking trick I’d expect to not work anymore.

https://delroth.net/posts/spoofed-mass-scan-abuse/

XMPP: the forgotten gem of Instant Messaging

Tags: tech, xmpp, ux

Could XMPP make a come back if the user experience was better?

https://adele.pages.casa/md/blog/xmpp-the-forgotten-gem-of-instant-messaging.md

A conceptual model of ATProto and ActivityPub

Tags: tech, protocols, fediverse, governance, decentralized

Interesting explanation of the different visions and governance behind ActivityPub and ATProto.

https://fediversereport.com/a-conceptual-model-of-atproto-and-activitypub/

A Map of Sync

Tags: tech, syncing, data

Interesting dimensions to use when classifying syncing solutions and to see which ones will meet your constraints.

https://stack.convex.dev/a-map-of-sync

DuckDB over Pandas/Polars

Tags: tech, databases, data-science

A good reminder that I should probably evaluate DuckDB for some of my tooling.

https://pgrs.net/2024/11/01/duckdb-over-pandas-polars/

Why systemd is a problem for embedded Linux

Tags: tech, systemd, embedded

This is a good point. systemd is kind of turning into a monoculture, but what are we loosing? Indeed, right now things could be better on deeply embedded systems (I insist on the “deep embedded” here which is often more limited in resources). Unlike the author I think they could be improved and they don’t quite apply to a good chunk of recent embedded platforms though.

https://kevinboone.me/systemd_embedded.html

How the New sqlite3_rsync Utility Works

Tags: tech, databases, sqlite, tools, syncing

If you wonder how the protocol is designed and how the actual implementation works, this is a nice introduction. Clearly it’s helped by the size of that program which is fairly small.

https://nochlin.com/blog/how-the-new-sqlite3_rsync-utility-works

C++, Complexity, and Compiler Bugs

Tags: tech, c++, complexity

Good illustration of how the C++ language complexity is out of hands.

https://azeemba.com/posts/cpp-complexity-compiler-bugs.html

Having fun with modern C++ – Daniel Lemire’s blog

Tags: tech, c++

Still, C++ improved in recent years. The problem is that we tend to stick too much to the old constructs we already know and that things keep piling up but nothing is removed.

https://lemire.me/blog/2024/11/02/having-fun-with-modern-c/

smolweb HTML specification

Tags: tech, html, accessibility, low-tech, complexity

A nice subset of HTML to ensure better accessibility and reduced complexity.

https://smolweb.org/specs/index.html

HTML link, or button, that is the question

Tags: tech, web, frontend, html

Each has a use, they shouldn’t be conflated. It makes for poor user experience and accessibility otherwise.

https://marijkeluttekes.dev/blog/articles/2024/11/04/html-link-or-button-that-is-the-question/

Long Distance Relationships

Tags: tech, remote-working, management, product-management

A bit biased toward stable product teams only. Still, there are good tips which are more widely applicable here. This gives a good idea of the management of a distributed team of remote workers.

https://matt.blwt.io/post/long-distance-relationships/

Bye for now!

I spent past three weeks working on refactoring and fixing legacy code (the oldest of which was from 2013) that handled positioning Plasma desktop icons, and how this data was saved and loaded.

Here's the merge request if you're curious: plasma-desktop: Refactor icon positioner saving and loading

The existing code worked sometimes, but there were some oddities like race conditions (icon positioning happens in weird order) and backend code mixed in with frontend code.

Now I am not blaming anyone for this. Code has tendency to get a bit weird, especially over long periods of time, and especially in open source projects where anyone can tinker with it.

You know how wired earbuds always, always get tangled when you place them in a drawer or your pocket or something for few seconds? Codebases do the exact same thing, when there are multiple people writing on things, fixing each others' bugs. Everyone has a different way of thinking, so it's only natural that things over time get a bit tangled up.

So sometimes you need someone to look at the tangled codebase and try to clear it up a bit.

Reading code is the hardest part

When going through old code, especially some that has barely any comments, it can take a very long time to understand what is actually going on. I honestly spent most of my time trying to understand how the thing even works, what is called when, where the icons positions are updated, and so on.

When I finally had some understanding of what was happening, I could start cleaning things up. I renamed a lot of the old methods to be hopefully more descriptive, and moved backend code — like saving icon positions — from the frontend back to backend.

Screens and icons

Every screen (PC monitor, TV…) tends to have it's own quirks. Some, when connected with display-port adapter, tell your PC it's disconnected if your PC goes to screen saving mode. Some stay connected, but show a blank screen.

One big issue with the icon positions was that when screen got turned off, it thought there was no screen anymore and started removing items from the desktop.

That's fair. Why show desktop icons on a screen that is non-existent? But when you have a monitor that tells your PC, "Okay I'm disconnecting now!" when the PC says it's time to sleep, wrong things would happen.

This condition is now handled by having a check that if the screen is in use or not. Now when screen is not in use, we just do nothing with the icons. No need to touch them at all.

Stripes and screen resolution

Our icon positioning algorithm uses something called "stripes."

Every resolution has it's amount of stripes. Stripes contain an array of icons, or blank spots.

So if your screen resolution is, let's say, 1920x1080, we calculate how many stripes and how many items per stripe will fit on that screen.

Stripe1: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Stripe2: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Stripe3: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

And so on..

But when you change your screen resolution or scale factor, how many icon stripes you have and how many icons fit on each stripe will change.

So if you have one of those screens that looks to the system like it's been unplugged when it goes into sleep mode, previously the stripe amount would change to 1 row, 1 column. And the icon positioner would panics and shove all icons in that 1,1 slot.

Then when you'd turn the screen back on, the icon positioner would wonder what just happened and restore the proper stripe number and size. But by that point it would have lost all our positioning coordinate data during the shoving of icons in that one miniscule place, so instead it would reset the icon positions… and this leaves users wondering why their desktop icon arrangement is now gone.

Here we have to also check for the screen being in use or not. But there were other problems.

Saving icon positions

The prior code saved the icon positions every time the positions changed. Makes sense.

But it didn't account for the screen being off… so the icon positions would get saved while the desktop was in a faulty state. This also causes frustration because someone arranges the icons how they wish, but then screen does something weird and they're now saved in wrong places again.

Our icon positions were updated after almost every draw call, if the positions changed. So this would mean the saving would happen rather often and no matter what moved them.

We had to separate the user action from computer action. If computer moves the icons, we ideally do not save their positions, unless something drastic has happened like resolution change.

The icon positions are saved per resolution, so if you move icons around while they're displayed on a 3440x1440 screen and then change the resolution to 1920x1080, both will have their own arrangements. This part of the codebase did not previously work, and it would always override the old configuration, which caused headache.

So now we only save icon positions when:

• The user adds or removes a desktop icon
• The user moves a desktop icon
• The user changes the desktop resolution

This makes the icon position saving much less random, since it's done only after explicit user actions.

Margin errors

The last thing that caused headaches with the icon positioning was that the area available on the desktop for icons was determined before panels were loaded. When the panels loaded, they would reduce the amount of space for desktop icons, and that area would constantly resize until everything is ready.

In previous code, this would cause icons to move, which updates positions, which then saves their positions.

So let's say you arrange your icons nicely, but the next time you boot into plasma, your panels start shoving the poor icon area around and the icons have to move out of the way… and now they're all in the wrong places.

This was already partially fixed by not saving when the computer moves the icons around: we just load the icon positions when the screen is in use and we are done with listing the icons on the desktop. Part of the margin changes happen when screen is off.

We still need to fix the loading part; ideally we load the icon area last, so that it gets the margins it expects and doesn't shuffle around while panels are still appearing. But it was out of scope for this merge request.

Conclusions

It may not sound like much, but this was a lot of work. I spent days just thinking about this problem, trying to understand what is happening now and how to improve it.

Luckily with a lot of help from reviewers and testers I got things to work much better than it used to. I am quite "all-over-the-place" when I solve problems so I appreciate the patience they had with me and my questions. :D

What I mostly wished for when working on this were more inline code comments. You don't need to comment the obvious things, but everything else could use something. It's hard to gauge what is obvious and what is not, but that kind of answers the question: If you don't know if it's obvious or not, it's likely not, so add some comment about it.

I do hope that the desktop icons act more reliably after all these changes. If you spot bugs, do report them at https://bugs.kde.org.

Thanks for reading! :)

PS. The funniest thing to me about all of this is that I do not like having any icons on my desktop. :'D