I don't run a lot of extensions on Gnome, but this one is a great way to add some customisation to the desktop.

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 enhanced the accessibility of a bunch of our most popular apps; released new versions of KleverNotes, KPhotoAlbum; and improved the performance and usability of KDE Connect, Kate, Konqueror, and more.

Over the years I have accumulated a sizable music library (mostly flacs, adding up to a bit less than 1TB) that I now want to reorganize (ie. gradually process with Musicbrainz Picard).

Since the music lives in my NAS, flacs are relatively big and my network speed is 1GB, I insalled on my computer a hdd I had laying around and replicated the whole library there; the idea being to work on local files and the sync them to the NAS.

I setup Syncthing for replication and... everything works, in theory.

In practice, Syncthing loves to rescan the whole library (given how long it takes, it must be reading all the data and computing checksums rather than just scanning the filesystem metadata - why on earth?) and that means my under-powered NAS (Celeron N3150) does nothing but rescanning the same files over and over.

Syncthing by default rescans directories every hour (again, why on earth?), but it still seem to rescan a whole lot even after I have set rescanIntervalS to 90 days (maybe it rescans once regardless when restarted?).

Anyway, I am looking into alternatives.
Are there any you would recommend? (FOSS please)

Notes:

• I know I could just schedule a periodic rsync from my PC to the NAS, but I would prefer a bidirectional solution if possible (rsync is gonna be the last resort)
• I read about unison, but I also read that it's not great with big jobs and that it too scans a lot
• The disks on my NAS go to sleep after 10 minutes idle time and if possible I would prefer not waking them up all the time (which would most probably happen if I scheduled a periodic rsync job - the NAS has RAM to spare, but there's no guarantee it'll keep in cache all the data rsync needs)

The Clipboard Project is a clipboard manager that works entirely in your terminal. It has tons of swanky features including this new one in 0.9.1 that lets you securely ignore copying passwords and other things like that!

Link to the code: https://github.com/Slackadays/Clipboard

This full packed release comes with three new staging protocols:

• system bell - allowing e.g. terminal emulators to hand off system bell alerts to the compositor for among other things accessibility purposes

• fifo - for implementing first in first out surface content update behavior

• commit timing - for adding time constraints to surface content update

Other than this, the presentation timing protocol protocol got a version minor bump describing how to deal with variable refresh rate.

Other protocols saw the regular clarifications and bug fixes, and some deprecated events is now properly indicated as such in the XML. Please see individual commits for details.

On Thursday, the Bundestag's Budget Committee decided to increase the funding for the Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) with the majority of the parliamentary groups in the traffic light coalition. A total of almost 29 million euros is now available for 2025. This is around 4 million euros or 15 per cent more than initially planned by the Federal Cabinet. Almost 3.4 million euros of this is directly attributable to the STF, whose budget for 2025 was initially set at 15 million euros.

590,000 more than planned will also flow into the ‘Bug Resilience Programme’ coordinated by the STF, for which a total of 2 million euros will now be available in 2025. It is intended to ensure that security vulnerabilities in software are not only found, but also actually fixed. In total, the STF will end up with around 19 million euros, compared to just 17 million in 2024.

The SFT plays a central role in the development of open source software as a basic digital technology. Among other things, the STF managers organised competitions to promote active collaboration on open source infrastructures. The government has so far disappointed free software advocates

‘These investments make us less dependent on large providers, more resilient to digital crises and promote Germany's digital sovereignty,’ emphasised Anna Kassautzki, digital policy rapporteur for the SPD parliamentary group. Maik Außendorf, digital policy spokesperson for the Greens, emphasised that Germany is thus taking on a ‘pioneering role in open source’

The Open Source Business Alliance (OSB) and the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) had expressed their disappointment with the course taken by the Ampel in 2022. In its coalition agreement, the government had explicitly emphasised the importance of open standards and interfaces as well as open source for digital sovereignty. However, there are no concrete plans for an alternative hyperscaler, especially for cloud projects.

Instead, dependencies on Microsoft, for example, would be further cemented. The federal government's licence costs for proprietary software providers have recently reached a high level in the billions. The OSB Alliance has just called for the administration to switch its IT completely to open source.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

Any recommendations for low-impact tools I can use to better understand the activity of expired processes?

And I’d say it’s a pretty good release! As with all large sets of changes, there are a couple of regressions we’re tracking, particularly around the areas of external monitor brightness and multi-screen performance. They are being actively investigated. Other than those, so far all the issues have been fairly minor, requiring people to jump through various hoops to experience them. We’re still working on fixing them, of course! I’ll be writing up another post soon on these issues, discussing how they snuck into the final release, and what we can learn from the experience. But in the meantime, here’s the Plasma team’s work from this week.

Google is developing a Terminal app for Android that'll let you run Linux apps. It'll download and run Debian in a VM for you.

...

Engineers at Google started work on a new Terminal app for Android a couple of weeks ago. This Terminal app is part of the Android Virtualization Framework (AVF) and contains a WebView that connects to a Linux virtual machine via a local IP address, allowing you to run Linux commands from the Android host. Initially, you had to manually enable this Terminal app using a shell command and then configure the Linux VM yourself. However, in recent days, Google began work on integrating the Terminal app into Android as well as turning it into an all-in-one app for running a Linux distro in a VM.

...

Google is still working on improving the Terminal app as well as AVF before shipping this feature. AVF already supports graphics and some input options, but it’s preparing to add support for backing up and restoring snapshots, nested virtualization, and devices with an x86_64 architecture. It’s also preparing to add some settings pages to the Terminal app, which is pretty barebones right now apart from a menu to copy the IP address and stop the existing VM instance. The settings pages will let you resize the disk, configure port forwarding, and potentially recover partitions.

...

If you’re wondering why you’d want to run Linux apps on Android, then this feature is probably not for you. Google added Linux support to Chrome OS so developers with Chromebooks can run Linux apps that are useful for development. For example, Linux support on Chrome OS allows developers to run the Linux version of Android Studio, the recommended IDE for Android app development, on Chromebooks. It also lets them run Linux command line tools safely and securely in a container.

What has your experience with Linux been like so far? How long has been your Linux journey? Mine began while I was studying computer science, and I've been in love with Linux since.

wayland/wayland-protocols!248 Needs 2 Acks + Review

wayland/wayland-protocols!320 Just got Completed:

wayland/wayland-protocols!256 FIFO Just got completed too.

Hello! Halt on Linux is disabled for average user by default. It will try to request sudo/root password and if fails returns:

sasha@fedora:~$ systemctl halt
Call to Halt failed: Access denied

How can I make same behavior for poweroff action? I know it is possible somehow via PolicyKit rulle

When I read through the release announcements of most Linux distributions, the updates seem repetitive and uninspired—typically featuring little more than a newer kernel, a desktop environment upgrade, and the latest versions of popular applications (which have nothing to do with the distro itself). It feels like there’s a shortage of meaningful innovation, to the point that they tout updates to Firefox or LibreOffice as if they were significant contributions from the distribution itself.

It raises the question: are these distributions doing anything beyond repackaging the latest software? Are they adding any genuinely useful features or applications that differentiate them from one another? And more importantly, should they be?

It's a breadboard with an extender for a Raspberry Pi's pins flipped upside down, a Raspberry Pi Pico, jumper wires, and a clip that came with a CH341A that suffers from the issue of being 5V.

The issue I think would be length of the wires.

Any thoughts? I'd consider soldering something together but I don't have a soldering iron that would be great for something so small and I'm working with what I have on hand.

I also have a Raspberry Pi 4 and the CH341A that has the voltage issue if anyone has a better idea that might work.

https://imgur.com/a/aR5lfkS

i, a simpleton, have succeeded in placing cava within my waybar. But i, a simpleton, have succeded in making cava a solid bar when audio is playing. is there a way to adjust this ? should i remove some of the icons in the modules section of my waybar config? would that even help? am i to just shout into the void?

tldr: cava make too big. Me unhappy.

Hello! I have a very old PC with intel i915 graphics, which doesn't correctly display KDE and shows a lot of bugs. I know it is possible to switch to software acceleration in X server. On NVdia I can pass nouveau.noaccel=1 to kernel. So how can I disable hardware acceleration here? Maybe this is possible via Xorg config?

The Kubuntu Team is happy to announce that Kubuntu 24.10 has been released, featuring the new and beautiful KDE Plasma 6.1 simple by default, powerful when needed.

Codenamed “Oracular Oriole”, Kubuntu 24.10 continues our tradition of giving you Friendly Computing by integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution.

Under the hood, there have been updates to many core packages, including a new 6.11 based kernel, KDE Frameworks 5.116 and 6.6.0, KDE Plasma 6.1 and many updated KDE gear applications.