News from the Planet

Another Akademy attended, here's some photos! Hello hello! It was that time of the year where I go to KDE Akademy, talk to fellow nerds, almost lose my voice due to socializing and eat a lot of nice food. This time Akademy was in Graz, Austria. I had never been in Austria before. This time I also…

In 2020 I wrote about terrain analysis related to avalanche risk factors in the snowy regions of New South Wales, Australia. That approach used a slope classifier and metrics about terrain convexity to show where areas with more or less avalanche hazard exist. I’ve wanted to make an update to align…

Highlights Rév O’Conner added a settings popup to control the layout of the Inspector. “Auto” automatically switches the layout at a given toolbox width. The new sidebar (sidebar.revamp) and switcher setting will be enabled by default for users along with Nova in DevEdition, Beta and Release…

Version 2.56 of the Git distributed version-control system has been released. It has 748 non-merge commits since Git 2.55 was released back in June; those commits came from 104 developers, 39 of whom are first-time contributors. New features include a safer workflow for conflict resolution,…

As a professor of biomedical engineering, Martin Uecker perhaps does not fit the profile of a typical presenter at Kernel Recipes. He is, however, a longtime Linux user, and works on free software for controlling magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners. He was at the conference to talk about the…

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (firefox, ipa, kernel, libxml2, perl-DBI, python-cryptography, thunderbird, and unbound), Debian (chromium, evolution-data-server, exim4, ghostscript, incus, lemonldap-ng, libheif, nodejs, php8.4, ruby-oj, swift, and vlc), Fedora (chromium, cinnamon,…

Right after my GSoC tenure ended, I took off to Austria for attending Akademy. This was my first time outside my country and also my first birthday in another country! Meeting New People I met Albert Astals Cid and Sune Vuorela who mentored and helped me during my GSoC tenure on Poppler and…

As usual, crossing the Atlantic is tough for me. I'm just too tall, and the seats are, well... just too small. Not to mention the stress of receiving a message on the day of the trip saying that my flight had been moved four hours earlier! I dropped everything I was doing and ran to the airport,…

I'm happy to announce the availability of a COPR repository which rebuilds Fedora 45 kernels with the patches from the qcom-laptops git branch added. This is a branch where various upstream pending patches with Snapdragon laptop improvements are gathered. For the exact contents of the latest kernel…

August 6th – 9th 2026 FOSSY was held in Vancouver, Canada this year on the University of British Columbia campus. This was my first conference as a KDE representative sitting at the KDE sponsors table. I don’t know if we were the biggest sponsor at FOSSY, but we certainly had the most people and…

Instead of simply updating my Guix home profile I ended up on a small scavenger hunt trying to fix a dependency of one of my audio packages.

After the initial work to make Fedora live iso media boot OOTB on Snapdragon X1 laptops in Fedora 44, I've continued working on improving the Fedora experience on these laptops for Fedora 45. For Fedora 44 a long list of workarounds was necessary, see the Snapdragon laptop install instructions on…

Like sticky popcorn, this is a moreish but ultimately unsatisfying set of stories. After I flamed out of Dungeon Crawler Carl, someone suggested I try this series. I can see why! It's campy sci-fi fun, with enough tropes to keep you chuckling and enough tension to keep you turning the pages. …

One of the primary design principles for Linus Torvalds when creating Git is that it should be a distributed system, capable of working with multiple remotes. However, most people seem to use Git with just one remote, typically having GitHub or GitLab as the only origin. Version control systems…

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 332. This version includes the following changes: [ Chris Lamb ] * Do not Build-Depend on GNU Guix. Thanks to Vagrant and Holger for the reports. (Closes: #1149132) [ Guillaume Girol ] * Update more tests to…

The 7.3-rc5 kernel prepatch is out for testing. Linus said: "I don't think there's any real pattern to it other than 'big'. But nothing looks particularly alarming, I think that despite the diffstat it's just the same old, same old."

Like many, I’ve been thinking a lot about the impact of LLMs on the free software community. In the GNOME community, there have been a couple of posts on Planet GNOME and Discourse, and assorted heated discussions on Matrix and Mastodon. We are not unique in this — there are similar conversations in…

There's an optical illusion known by names like the "lunar terminator paradox". This has much discussion and descriptions online, but none made sense in my head, so I wrote this program to figure out what was going on. The paradox: The moon is illuminated by the sun After sunset, the sun is…

Tellico 4.3 is available, with some additional capabilities, improvements, and bug fixes. I’ve received several code contributions from new people in the last few months and I wanted to say thanks. Depending a little on how I count it, Tellico turns 25 years old next month. It’s always been a hobby;…

Jordan Petridis evidently has strong opinions on the use of LLMs. He’s welcome to those. What’s not welcome is when it escalates into vigilantism and defacement of bug reports. Specifically for me, this bug where a tag “Probabilistically Automated” was added. That tag has a meaning of Usually…

Recently Michael Tunnell interviewed Aleix and I on the subject of KDE’s 30th birthday, Wayland, LTS software, the new Union theming engine, and more! If you’re interested, you can check it out here. Note: if you work at Microsoft, please don’t watch and get any big ideas!

Welcome to post 60 in the R4 series. bubblewrap is a great tool and very suitable for using with an agent harness. It is a very compelling—and lightweight—alternative to using a full-blown <acker container as it offers low-level unprivileged sandboxing on Linux hosts. In a nutshell, bubblewrap can…

For a while now I've wanted a tool to help in a number of areas:

Ahhh! PSB's RFS! A delightfully indulgent soundscape of melodic wonder, performed here on its 10th (ish) anniversary. Is it really nostalgia if an album is only a decade old? It feels like it has been in the air forever. For something which is seemingly made up of samples, it would have been easy…

Last weekend I had the privilege of attending Akademy - the yearly gathering of the KDE community. Taking place in Graz, it was a special one, marking the 30th anniversary of the email that set the Kool Desktop Environment in motion. We got to see the trailer for a documentary that, come October…