Making Plasma Setup More Mobile-Friendly: A SoK'26 Conclusion
Hey everyone! SoK '26 is wrapping up, so here's my final post. If you haven't read the midterm update yet, I'd recommend starting there — this post picks up from where that one left off.
Some relevant links:
TLDR: The project
Plasma Setup is KDE's first-run wizard: it greets you on a fresh install and walks you through account creation, keyboard layout, timezone, and basic system config. It was built with desktop screens in mind, and my project was to make it work properly on phones and tablets running Plasma Mobile without breaking the desktop experience.
Where the midterm left things
By the midterm I had worked through most of the UI issues: overlapping components, wallpaper disappearing on portrait layouts, the wizard not filling the screen on mobile, the hostname field overflowing, the timezone page's OpenStreetMap widget being too fiddly for touchscreens. Two MRs were open, one in plasma-setup and one in plasma-workspace for the timezone selector since that component lives there. The plan was to spend the remaining weeks getting them merged.
That's roughly what happened, though it took longer than expected. I requested a two-week extension so we could handle the review process properly rather than rushing it.
What the second half looked like
Mostly review cycles. Writing the MRs was one thing; getting them merge-readywas another. A fair amount of that time was spent in the terminal, checking diffs, rebasing, keeping the history clean, more than it was actually writing new code. Anyone who's worked on a shared codebase knows how that goes.
The MRs were fairly dynamic throughout. Ideas came up during review that hadn't been in the original scope, some made it in, some got tested and scrapped. The final diff looks quite different from what was there at first open, which is usually a sign the review process is doing its job.
What I did recalibrate to was the specific culture of OSS contribution. The conventions are different from a professional codebase: how commits are structured, how feedback is framed, what a well-scoped MR looks like in this context. Not a harder or easier bar, just a different one, and getting fluent in it is part of the work.
The open threads from the midterm
I flagged two things in the midterm that weren't guaranteed to get done: virtual keyboard handling and the kcm_keyboard dependency decoupling.
Neither got done. The virtual keyboard situation is an open design question for the project, not something I could resolve within this scope. The kcm_keyboard decoupling is something I'd still like to take a crack at. The underlying issue is real: a mobile setup wizard probably shouldn't need to pull in plasma-desktop. But testing showed it wasn't causing visible breakage in practice, so it got deprioritised in favour of getting the UI work properly landed. Worth picking up as a future contribution.
See it in action
Wrapping up
I participated in SoK '25 as well but had to drop out partway through, so finishing this one properly feels good. Plasma Setup on mobile is in a noticeably better state than it was ten weeks ago, and the changes are upstream, which is what matters.
I'm planning to keep contributing to KDE and take on more within the ecosystem. There's plenty left to do and I'd like to have a more permanent stake in it.
Thanks to Kristen McWilliam for the mentorship throughout, and to KDE and the SoK programme for running this. It's a genuinely good way to get people into open source contribution.
You can reach me on Matrix at @onatribar:matrix.org.
Until we meet again!