Eike Hein 

There's a lot of intense, opinionated debate on the current state of Plasma's Wayland session these days. This seems to be fueled by mainly two events, Fedora's announcement to flip to Wayland by default for version 34 of their KDE variant, and a a recent fork of KWin and a few other components of Plasma, KWinFT. Read More

On the Linux desktop today, we have two dominant IPC technologies in use between applications and the desktop environment: Wayland and D-Bus. While created for different reasons, both are generically extensible and can be used to exchange data, synchronize state and send requests and signals between peers. A large number of desktop use cases are implemented using either technology, and some use cases are already distributed across both of them. The status quo is mostly the result of organic growth, with individual implementation choices down to tech friction or the lack thereof. Read More

Over at Akademy 2020, I just witnessed a fantastic talk by KDE contributor mainstay Kévin Ottens on "Lost Knowledge in KDE". In the presentation, Kévin showed us a series of examples of sophisticated solutions to important problems KDE has innovated and implemented over the years - and subsequently lost knowledge of, applying them sparingly or inconsistently, or developing new solutions redundantly. He also talked about how this is a familiar problem to organizations, with a research field known as knowledge management itself looking to develop solutions and tools to combat this problem since the late 20st century. Read More

Today I'm in beautiful Milano, Italy, where the KDE community has gathered for its annual user and developer conference, Akademy. At Akademy I've had an opportunity to present my new KDE project to a larger audience: A ground control application for drones, Kirogi. Read More

In June, I had a great time at a series of KDE events held in the offices of Slimbook, makers of fantastic Neon-powered laptops, at the outskirts of Valencia, Spain. Following on from a two-day KDE e.V. board of directors meeting, the main event was the 2019 edition of the Plasma development sprint. The location proved to be quite ideal for everything. Slimbook graciously provided us with two lovely adjacent meeting rooms for Plasma and the co-located KDE Usability & Productivity sprint, allowing the groups to mix and seperate as our topics demanded - a well-conceived spatial analog for the tight relationship and overlap between the two. Read More

Twice a year (on that note, happy new one!), the KDE e.V. board of directors comes together for an in-person meeting, taking care of business. It's become a tradition that on one of the two meeting days, the board hosts a dinner event open to KDE users, contributors and other interested parties. Read More

This week, we have received a number of inquiries into how Plasma extensions, particularly those found on the KDE Store, relate to the stability and safety of a Plasma system. With an engineering focus, this blog hopes to provide answers. Read More

Desktop icons in Plasma 5.12 LTS Beta (Click to enlarge) Recent news in the Linux desktop community recall an interesting time in Plasma's history: Release 4.1 in 2008, Plasma's second release ever, that time we (in)famously abandoned desktop icons (sneak preview: they came back). Read More

A few months ago, I had the opportunity to give a talk on Input Methods in Plasma 5 at Akademy 2017 in lovely Almería in Spain. If you were interest in my talk but were unable to attend, there's now video (complementary slides) available courtesy of the Akademy conference team. Yay! Read More

As has become tradition in recent years, the KDE e.V. board will have an open dinner alongside its in-person meeting in Berlin, Germany on October 14th, at 7 PM. We know there will be a lot of cool people in town next month, thanks to a KDE Edu development sprint, Qt World Summit, the GNOME Foundation hackfest and probably other events, and you're all invited to drop by and have a chat with us and amongst yourselves - and enjoy good food. Read More

It's time to talk about exciting new things in store for the Konversation project! Konversation is KDE's chat application for communities. No matter whether someone is a newcomer seeking community, a seasoned participant in one, or a community administrator: our mission is to bring groups of people together, allow them to delight in each other's company, and support their pursuit of shared interests and goals. Read More

This July KDE's user and developer community is once again going to come together at <a href=''https://akademy.kde.org/2017">Akademy, our largest annual gathering. I'm going there this year as well, and you'll even be able to catch me on stage giving a talk on Input Methods in Plasma 5. Here's the talk abstract to hopefully whet your appetite: Read More

Surprisingly not enough A brief note: If you're a developer or user of input methods in the free desktop space, or just interested in learning about "How does typing Chinese work anyway?", you might be interested in a discussion we're now having on the plasma-devel mailing list. In my opening mail I've tried to provide a general overview about what input methods are used for, how they work, who they benefit, and what we must do to improve support for them in KDE Plasma. Read More

Serving the quadruped audience Intrepid journalist Joey Sneddon over at OMG! Ubuntu! recently pointed out to us that Plasma 5 is currently not doing so well when it comes to serving an important user demographic - bored cats! Read More

New defaults: Plasma 5.10 with desktop icons A brief history lesson To set the stage, we need to briefly recap some of the problems with the KDE 3.x desktop that (among others) Plasma initially set out to solve. Read More

I was sorely remiss not to blog more during the Plasma 5.9 dev cycle. While 5.9 packs a fair amount of nice new features (e.g. here's the widget gallery in Application Dashboard at some point during development), there was not a peep of them on this blog. Let me do better and start early this time! (With 5.9 out today ...) Read More

Simple Menu v1.0 Quite a while ago already I wrote a launcher menu widget named Simple Menu. It's using the same backend I wrote for our bundled launchers, and it's a little bit like Application Dashboard scaled down into a small floating window, plus nifty horizontal pagination. It's also really simple and fast. Read More

Powerful: The Code I'm Still Ashamed Of Things like this are a big reason why I work in open source.

While not being advertised on the KDE neon main page just yet (and it won't be for a while), we've recently begun doing regular builds of a special Korean Edition of neon's Developer Edition tracking the stable branch of KDE's code repositories. The Korean Edition pre-selects the Korean language and locale at boot, packs all the Korean translations we have and comes with a Korean input method pre-setup. Read More

The other day I wrote about the Pager improvements awaiting in Plasma 5.8. In the comments user btin re-raised the issue of limiting the Pager's display to the screen it's currently on, instead of being all-exclusive. Read More

On the heels of the Plasma 5.7's new Task Manager backend, the upcoming Plasma 5.8 LTS release will sport substantially rewritten Pager and Activity Pager widgets, aimed at improving efficiency and conserving resources in a typical Plasma Desktop setup. Read More

During the last several months, I've been rewriting the backend for Plasma's Task Manager, the strip of launchers and windows embedded into the panel at the bottom of the screen. Read More

Earlier this week, the loved one of a man I used to babysit was pushed into the path of an oncoming subway train car, by a stranger, and soon after died of their injuries. Read More

In later versions of Plasma 4, the Folder View widget adopted a special appearance when placed in a panel: It would arrange folder contents in a simple list instead of the usual icon grid. Folder View had to be rewritten completely for Plasma 5, and while there were various improvements along the way, the list view mode unfortunately went missing. Until now - on popular request, this feature will make a return soon in Plasma 5.4: Read More

The other day I introduced a new Rust code completion plugin for Kate, powered by Phil Dawes' nifty Racer. Since then there's been a whole bunch of additional developments! Read More

A few days ago the Rust community announced v1.0 of their new systems programming language, Rust. Having followed the project for some time and finally having used the language for a number of small projects this year, I've come to feel that using Rust is interesting, fun and productive. I'd like to highly encourage everyone to give it a look now that it's finally considered ready for prime time. Read More

Getting a move on (notice the mouse pointer) In Plasma Desktop 5.3 (released today), the desktop configuration dialog offers a new experimental tweak: A mode in which widgets can be dragged around by pressing and holding anywhere on the widget. When enabled, the widget handle is also no longer shown just on hover, but only after a press and hold. Read More

With the release of Plasma 5.3 only days away, it's time to start talking about some of the new features users of Plasma Desktop will get their hands on in the new version. Read More

The Hunminjeongeum (or 훈민정음). This 1446 document first introduced the modern Korean writing system to the Korean people and is now listed among the UNESCO Memory of the World. (Photo: Jeon Han, CC BY-SA 2.0) In addition to my usual work on things like Plasma, I've been hacking away on bugs that pose barriers to the use of the Korean language and writing system in KDE/Qt systems lately (I took up studying Korean as a new hobby). As a bonus, many fixes also tend to help out users of other CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) languages, or even generally of languages other than English. Read More

The Konversation team has started porting the application to Frameworks 5 earlier this month, getting things to build and run on top of KDE's next-generation libraries. Here's all the info you should need to help out. Read More

I'll keep things brief, since I'm inbetween KDevelop windows right now: It's out today, and in my mind it took just about nine months to make it. Nine months, now that's a timescale with some cachet. Read More

Things have been rather quiet in Yakuake land for a while. 2014 is going to shake things up, though, so it's time for a brief look at what's been going on and where things are headed next. Read More

For several years, I used to maintain a collection of clippings showing the KDE workspaces in use in interesting settings - popping up on TV shows, on public terminals in odd locations, in articles on leading scientific endeavours. All sorts of cool cases. More recently I haven't been collecting as diligently anymore, though, for perhaps the best possible reason: It's happening so frequently now that individual examples have lost much of their novelty. Read More

Monday saw the release of version 1.2.0 of Homerun, now a collection of launcher interfaces for Plasma Workspaces, powered by a common foundation. If you're already familiar with, or even a happy user of Homerun this description of it might make you raise an eyebrow, so let's take a look at what's new in this version. Read More

With some idle time on my hands due to waiting on an especially long build, I decided to put some time into cleaning up my KDevelop's UI layout today: Click for original resolution. I removed all but the elements I actually ever click on in the main window -- all the rest I usually access via keyboard shortcuts or the menu (which I'm now going to try using via the window deco button). Since working on an IRC client makes you feel at home with text fields at the bottom of windows, I moved those toolbars down below the bottom toolview button and moved the remaining toolbar actions into the left toolview button column (I already use label-less toolbars on the left in some other apps, e.g. Gwenview). All together, this saves a lot of vertical space, which is precious on my widescreen laptop. Read More

One of the many things to look forward to in the impending KDE Plasma 4.11 release is a new version of the default Task Manager applet, which had its front-facing bits rewritten from scratch, along with additional support work and improvements in the underlying library. Read More