Distrobox gives developers a fast, practical way to work across Linux distributions without the setup time and resource overhead of full virtual machines. This in-depth guide explains how Distrobox builds on OCI containers and tools such as Podman or Docker to create tightly integrated development environments—with access to your home directory, graphical sessions, devices, and host tooling. Learn why it is useful for reproducing distro-specific bugs, testing software on multiple platforms, accessing alternative package repositories, and combining a stable host OS with flexible, disposable userlands.

In a recent email, KDABian Leon Matthes highlighted some of his go-to command line tools for everyday use on Unix. His recommendations sparked a lively exchange among our colleagues, each sharing their own favorite utilities. Many of these tools offer efficient alternatives to standard Unix programs, speeding up the workflow or otherwise enriching the development […]

Recap In Part 1, we covered PCM audio and superimposing waveforms, and developed an algorithm to combine an arbitrary number of audio streams into one. Now we need to use these ideas to finish a full implementation using Qt Multimedia. Using Qt Multimedia for Audio Device Access So what do we need? Well, we want […]

Motivation When using Qt Multimedia to play audio files, it’s common to use QMediaPlayer, as it supports a larger variety of formats than QSound and QSoundEffect. Consider a Qt application with several audio sources; for example, different notification sounds that may play simultaneously. We want to avoid cutting notification sounds off when a new one […]

Motivation Let’s say we’re working on a QML project that involves a TextEdit. There’s some text in it: here is some text We want to select part of this text and hit ctrl+B to make it bold: here is some text In Qt Widgets, this is trivial, but not so much in QML – we […]

KDAB’s newest open-source library is now publicly available: KDSPDSetup! KDSPDSetup is a small library written in modern C++ (≥ 20) that initializes objects from the spdlog library by reading a toml configuration file. This makes setting up loggers more convenient and results in cleaner-looking code. Let's take a look at an example to see how […]

The Need for Simple & Modular QR Generation in QML Recently, our designer Nuno Pinheiro needed to generate QR codes for an Android app in QML and started asking around about a simple way to do this. The best existing QML solution was QZXing, a Qt/QML wrapper for the 1D/2D barcode image processing library ZXing. […]

This article walks through an implementation using C++11 or later, Qt 6.5 or later for WebAssembly (multithreaded), and CMake. The browser environment used was Mozilla Firefox 119.0.1 (64-bit) provided by the Mozilla Firefox snap package for Ubuntu. Overview & Motivation Lately, I’ve been working on a small Qt Widgets project to help manage some weekly […]