Kai Uwe's Blog – Stories of a KDE developer

Plasma Browser Integration 2.0

I’m pleased to announce the immediate availability of Plasma Browser Integration version 2.0 on the Chrome Web Store and Microsoft Edge Add-ons page. This release updates the extension to Manifest Version 3 which will be required by Chrome soon. The major version bump reflects the amount of work it has taken to achieve this port.

Konqi surfing the world wide web

Plasma Browser Integration bridges the gap between your browser and the Plasma desktop. It lets you share links, find browser tabs and visited websites in KRunner, monitor download progress in the notification center, and control music and video playback anytime from within Plasma, or even from your phone using KDE Connect!

Getting ready for Akademy

Next week Akademy, KDE’s annual community conference, will take place in Würzburg, Germany. There are a few features that I actually began during various conferences throughout the years to address real-world problems. I decided to have look at some of them again that would be most useful for people travelling to Akademy from abroad or who will be giving a presentation there.

Fresh Breeze Dialog Icons

The Breeze icons used in message boxes always felt a little odd with a status icon placed inside some kind of speech bubble, effectively an icon within an icon. Three months ago they got replaced by more simplistic ones that I felt didn’t fit very well either. Therefore I put my Inkscape skills to the test and created a new set of Breeze-style dialog icons.

Three message boxes staggered: red octagon with a cross “This is an error”, orange triangle with exclamation point “Be careful, please”, blue circle with an I “Everything is alright”

A Fresh Perspective on Things

Can you believe it’s already been almost half a year since Plasma 6.0 came out? Time really flies! The other day I went through some of my 50+ open merge requests on KDE’s GitLab and took another stab at them. Some are four years old at this point but it definitely helped to let them sit for a while and finish them with a fresh new perspective and clear mind.

Dolphin file manager, Places panel hovered "USB Stick", tooltip reads "/media/USB (from /dev/sdb1), 28.8 of 2.98 GiB Free (3 % used)" — Places panel tooltip indicating mount point, device name, and free space information

Plasma Browser Integration 1.9.1

I’m pleased to announce the immediate availability of Plasma Browser Integration version 1.9.1 on the Firefox Web Store. This is the Firefox release of version 1.9 that was released way back in November 2023. We’re not sure how it got stuck in Add-on review and that we didn’t realize this but whatever the reason, it’s out now! This is a maintenance release shipping a couple of important changes as well as the usual translation updates. The extension is of course fully supported under Plasma 6!

Konqi surfing the world wide web

Contributing is more than just code

When thinking about how to contribute to KDE, many people probably still think that you have to write actual code. While it’s true that C++ and QML is at the heart of our applications, it’s just one puzzle piece of many that make up a successful product. Besides donating money to KDE or developers like me individually, there’s much more you can do to support us: promo work, drawing icons, brainstorming ideas, writing documentation, triaging bug reports or writing new ones, or in this case sending the relevant piece of hardware to a developer. Every single contribution counts!

Dolphin Places sidebar listing various drives, among them a "CD-ROM" in the "Removable Devices" section — It’s been at least ten years since I last used an optical drive

A key ingredient to KDE’s cross-platform story is Solid, our device integration framework. It lets applications enumerate devices, such as hard drive partitions, USB thumb drives, but also batteries and peripherals, in a platform-independent way. When it comes to hardware, sometimes emulating its behavior is tough and even a virtual machine might not behave exactly the same as the real thing. Here’s the story of how the donation of a portable DVD drive let me unlock a massive performance boost.

Plasma 5: The Early Years

With KDE’s 6th Mega Release finally out the door, let’s reflect on the outgoing Plasma 5 that has served us well over the years. Can you believe it has been almost ten years since Plasma 5.0 was released? Join me on a trip down memory lane and let me tell you how it all began. This coincidentally continues pretty much where my previous retrospective blog post concluded.

Plasma 5.1 desktop with pastel colored diamond pattern as wallpaper, white panel at the top, kickoff menu open with various apps in it, and fuzzy lcock widget “quarter past twelve” visible in the background — The earliest clean full-desktop Plasma 5 screenshot I could find in my archives, dated December 2014

KDE Release Party in Nürnberg

Last night SUSE invited to their new Nürnberg offices at the Franken Campus in the city’s south for a KDE MegaRelease 6 release party. There were around 25 people from KDE, SUSE, and owncloud, with a good portion of non-contributors meeting some of the people behind their favorite desktop environment and suite of applications in-person for the first time.

ThinkPad 600E with a Pentium 2 processor running an old version of SUSE Linux with KDE 1.1 — Live demo of the latest and greatest KDE 1.1 on a ThinkPad 600E

Qt Wayland, Supercharged

One of the key components to using a Plasma Wayland session is obviously the Qt Wayland Client module for running Qt applications in a Wayland environment. While it has been successfully deployed to millions of devices over the years, there’s still a few areas that feel like they haven’t been touched much since its inception as part of the Qt Lighthouse project, what turned into QPA, the Qt Platform Abstraction.

On the Road to Plasma 6, Vol. 5

The new year has just begun and we have six weeks left before the final release! The most noticeable change since my last post is obviously that we have decided on the wallpaper to be used in Plasma 6.0! But of course there’s more going on under the hood than just that.

Plasma 6 desktop with custom panel at the top, bottom right corner reads “KDE Plasma 6.1 Dev, visit bugs.kde.or to report issues“. New wallpaper with orange/purple colors, sun, birds, clouds in background, and a tree at the edge of a sloped hill — My desktop isn’t usually that tidy

I actually spent most of my time in Qt Wayland rather than KDE code lately but more on that in an upcoming blog post once all my changes have been integrated. Nevertheless, there are still plenty of Wayland-related and other improvements on the Plasma, Frameworks, and KDE Gear side to talk about here.