Polishing of KDE and Adding Git Support to Kate

• This week in KDE: fixing all the things

  Plasma 5.17 was released this week to glowing reviews! As with most new releases, our loyal users wasted no time in finding all the bugs we missed! So you know what that means, right? We all burned the midnight oil fixing the problems you found, and Plasma 5.17.1 will be released in just a few days with everything we’ve knocked out so far (detailed below) so never fear!

• KDE Continues Seeing A Lot Of Bug Fixes, Continued Tweaks Around System Settings

  KDE developers remain busy this autumn on addressing bugs in the recent KDE Plasma 5.17 release and tackling early feature work for Plasma 5.18. Plus work on KDE Frameworks 5 and KDE Applications is as busy as ever.

• Working around the Wrong Cursor bug

  This is a long-known bug with countless Reddit/Forum/… posts with often the correct answer how to fix it.

• RFC - Git Client Integration

  At this year’s KDE conference Akademy we discussed how to evolve Kate over the next years. One of the areas we want to improve is better git integration out of the box. Currently, Kate ships the Projects plugin, which automatically detects and loads your file structure from your git repository. If a project is loaded, then the Search & Replace plugin allows to search&replace in all project files. In addition, the Quick Open feature also supports opening files from the currently active project - all explained here. However, the Projects plugin does not provide any real git integration: You can neither pull nor push, commit, diff, etc. If at all, additional git functionality is available only via external tools like gitk or git-cola (e.g. available in the context menu). This is something we would like to change by having really nice git integration.

today's howtos

• Install Chromium with VAAPI on Fedora 30

• How to edit program shortcuts in Gnome Shell

• How to check the weather in Gnome Shell

• How to Enable SSH on CentOS 8

• Tweaking GNOME Desktop Environment on CentOS 8

• Upstart – How is it better or worse than the others?

• 10 Things You Should Do After Installing Ubuntu 19.10

• What is Git and Its Terminology for DevOps engineers

Games: Humble and Five-or-More Modernisation in GNOME

• Humble Monthly will be changing to Humble Choice later this year

  If you're interested in getting a bunch of games each month, the Humble Monthly has at times been quite generous with the selection. Things are about to change, with it being renamed to Humble Choice with new options. Currently, you pay a set fee of $12 a month (or less for more months) and get at least one game to play early. Then at the end of each month, they give you a bunch more games ranging between 7-11. That's changing sometime later this year with Humble Choice. As the name suggests, it does seem to actually give you a little more control. Games are revealed upfront instead of being a mystery and you pick the ones you want from a larger list.

• Imperator: Rome is getting a free Punic Wars content pack in addition to the big Livy update

  One piece of PDXCON news missed from yesterday: Imperator: Rome is getting a free Punic Wars Content Pack along with the upcoming Livy Update. Paradox Development Studio sure are busy. Not only are they working on multiple Stellaris expansions, Crusader Kings III and Hearts of Iron IV: La Résistance they're also trying to turn around the rough launch of Imperator: Rome. Another big free patch is coming out named Livy which will include: a new character experience system, a rework of the family system, a procedurally generated mission system, a map with greater details including showing war on the map with burning cities and more not yet announced. It's going to be big!

• Five-or-More Modernisation: It's a Wrap

  As probably most of you already know, or recently found out, at the beginning of this week the GSoC coding period officially ended, and it is time for us, GSoC students, to submit our final evaluations and the results we achieved thus far. This blog post, as you can probably tell from the title, will be a summary of all of the work I put into modernising Five or More throughout the summer months. My main task was rewriting Five or More in Vala since this simple and fun game did not find its way to the list of those included in the Games Modernisation Initiative. This fun, strategy game consists of aligning, as often as possible, five or more objects of the same shape and color, to make them disappear and score points. Besides the Vala rewrite, there were also some other tasks included, such as migrating to Meson and dropping autotools, as well as keeping the view and logic separated and updating the UI to make this game more relatable for the public and more fresh-looking. However, after thoroughly discussing the details with my mentor, Robert Roth (IRC: evfool), more emphasis was placed upon rewriting the code to Vala, since the GSoC program is specifically designed for software development. However, slight UI modifications were integrated as to match the visual layout guidelines.

• Five-or-More Modernisation: Now You Can Properly Play It

  As Google Summer of Code is officially drawing to an end, all of my attention was focused towards making the Five or More Vala version feature-complete. As you probably already know from my previous blog post, the game was somehow playable at that time, but it was missing some of the key features included in the old version. So what’s new this time? First and foremost, you can surely notice the game board now sports a grid, which wasn’t there until now. On the same note, there are also animations used for clicking a piece on the board, for an improved gaming experience. For further accessibility, some header bar hints are available at different stages in the game: at the start of any new game, at the end of each game, as well as whenever there is no clear path between the initial position and the cell indicated by the user for the current move.

Linux 5.4-rc4

This release cycle remains pretty normal. In fact, the rc's have been
a bit on the smaller side of the average of the last few releases, and
rc4 continues this, if only barely.

The stats all look fairly normal too. About half is drivers, with
networking being the bulk of it, but there's stuff all over the place:
drm, input, block, md, gpio, irqchip...

The networking backlog shows up outside of drivers too, with core
networking changes being about a third of the non-driver part of the
patches. But there's the usual arch updates (arm64, x86, xtensa), and
a noticeable chunk of mm fixes from Andrew. And the rest is
miscellaneous all over - Documentation, core kernel, filesystems, gdb
scripting, tools.

But none of it is really all that big or looks all that scary or unusual.

Shortlog appended so that you can scroll through it and get a feeling
for the details.

I'm traveling this week before Open Source Summit Europe, but if
things stay this calm it shouldn't even be noticeable.

Linus