Just in time for KDE Plasma 6, Chromium 122 and Electron 29 have been released! They contain my patch that adds support for Wayland’s new cursor-shape-v1 extension protocol. When running natively in a Plasma 6 Wayland session, up-to-date Chromium-based browsers and Electron apps should now always use the correct mouse cursor theme and have the cursor drawn in the correct size, even when running in a Flatpak sandbox. You can enable Chromium’s native Wayland support by setting chrome://flags/#ozone-platform-hint to “Auto” or with a command-line flag. There are multiple ways to apply this preference to Electron apps as well. ...

It’s been a long while since I posted to my blog, and I apologize for the unpleasant period of boring silence, but I hope to make up for some of it with a brief overview of what happened to me since my last update 🙂 First and foremost, I would like to express the gratitude for my second year of university, which was the most exhausting period of studies that I’ve had so far but taught me a great deal of patience, focus, and perseverance. Also, I cannot but mention that never have I valued friendship as much as I do now. I was able to pass my exams with satisfying grades, and while I do not yet feel ready to dive into the next academic year, I am a lot more confident about its success. ...

2018, my favorite year so far, has come to its end. So, I decided to recap what happened in my life this year, as well as to tell about events I haven’t covered yet. 2018 was the first year for me that started with exams. Not that I haven’t spent holidays studying for exams before, though, so with some persistence and tangerine fuel 🍊 I passed them all good enough and had a week of TV series and open source contribution before the upcoming semester. With some help from Halium project maintainers and a steep learning curve, I was finally able to conquer graphics libraries on an x86 Android phone and start a Wayland compositor. At the same time, my efforts on the Russian-speaking KDE community became visible, as our friendly local group crossed a symbolic border of 1000 members! ...

This week I was assigned to implement a number of string related algorithms that perform substring search and count, calculate helper functions and build performant structures on them, etc. Algorithms themselves were not too complicated, so I decided to challenge myself and solve the problems using Rust (instead of my main language C++). Now that I’ve solved the task, I can tell a bit about my experience, things that I found convenient or complicated. I’m a beginner in Rust, but if my idea of the language is interesting to you, read on! 🙂 ...

There was a small problem with Qt’s deployment tools that could, however, cause some struggle for beginners. windeployqt, macdeployqt and linuxdeployqt could not add a third-party Qt Quick module (i.e. one that is not located inside Qt’s installation directory, like Kirigami) to the resulting bundle. It was, of course, possible to workaround the issue by copying the missing files to their expected locations with a script or manually. For non-systemwide Qt installations, there was also an option of installing the libraries by side with Qt’s own modules. However, these are still platform-dependent workarounds we shouldn’t rely on long-term. ...

Today, on September 18th, 2018, the Russian-speaking KDE community launches its updated website on KDE.ru. The new website serves as the main page for the Russian-speaking community. It provides localized information about the community, product download links and the list of social network pages we maintain. It is also meant to help new members get involved in KDE’s projects, particularly in our translation and promotion efforts. The website was created by me and Alexander Potashev on top of Jonah Brüchert’s work for plasma-mobile.org. It uses Jekyll and is now hosted on official KDE servers. It replaces the old forum that has significantly lost its users in the past years. ...

Chaos Constructions is an annual computer festival held in Saint Petersburg, Russia. It is centered around demoscene — a form of computer art where participants write programs that produce short audiovisual presentations. Apart from the demoscene contests, you can enjoy computer-related seminars, live acts, and a computer exhibition. CC'2018, ZX Spectrum AY-music Talks, seminars Computer exhibition, retro gaming consoles On 25-26th of August I was lucky to be there and give an introductory talk about Plasma Mobile, Halium and other projects that aim for a complete GNU/Linux experience on smartphones and tablets. ...

THE EXAMS ARE OVER! Finally! My university freshman year has come to its end. I have successfully passed all the exams (yep, math included), so I’m ready to embrace summer adventures! Well… after a bit of sleep, ok? 🙂

Better late than never, right? 🙂 I finally got a small break from the endless studies, so I decided to share my experience during C++ Russia 2018, an amazing C++ developer conference that I was lucky to attend as a volunteer. The conference is a fun 3-day-long event hosted by the C++ Russia User Group, and an opportunity to listen to deep knowledge and practical wisdom of speakers from all over the world. This year’s keynote speaker was Jon Kalb, a C++ developer with 25-years of experience. ...

This January, an amazing milestone has been passed by the Russian KDE community: our VK group, main local community page, got more than a thousand subscribers! Globally, that doesn’t sound like much, but that’s really a lot for a local page of a FOSS community! My participation started more than a year ago, and throughout the year we’ve been covering all major events in community life, helping new users find their ways in FOSS and KDE in particular, inviting everyone to participate and do whatever they can to make the bright future of software freedom closer. ...