news
KDE: Lokalize, Wayland, Marknote, and More
-
KDE ☛ [SoK 2026] Appium Testing for Lokalize
Hey there! I'm Vishesh Srivastava, and this is the full write-up for my SoK 2026 project: adding Appium-based UI tests to Lokalize.
So what's Lokalize?
It's KDE's translation tool - the app translators use to work with PO files and manage translation projects. It already had unit tests, but no UI tests. So the goal of this project was to setup a UI testing framework using Appium.
-
Vlad Zahorodnii ☛ Addressing global removal race in Wayland
Global objects are one of the core abstractions in Wayland. They are used to announce supported protocols or announce semi-transient objects, for example available outputs. The compositor can add and remove global objects on the fly. For example, an output global object can be created when a new monitor becomes available, and be removed when the corresponding monitor gets disconnected.
While there are no issues with announcing new global objects, the global removal is a racy process and if things go bad, your application will crash. Application crashes due to output removal were and still are fairly common, unfortunately.
-
KDE ☛ Marknote 1.5.2
Hello again! Welcome to another bugfix release.
-
[Old] Vlad Zahorodnii ☛ Dark mode improvements in Plasma
My journey to improving dark mode capabilities started at the recent Plasma Sprint. A while ago, I developed a wallpaper plugin that’s capable of synchronizing images to the position of the Sun, which I wanted to upstream but one of the biggest issues was the sheer size of the project. It supports a bunch of modes, it requires special tooling, and the wallpaper format is too cumbersome for upstream (although it’s amazing for 5K or 8K images!). So, I decided to make a pitch for adding one of the modes available in that plugin to other Plasma developers, which should be very easy to integrate with the existing infrastructure in Plasma. The idea was well-received and it led to a discussion about other related things, like better integration of geolocation services in Plasma, etc.