KDE’s 30th birthday is coming up next year. For this year’s holiday season I therefore decided to compile a list of 30 reasons why I love KDE Plasma. It makes me so much more productive and work a lot more fun. While some of the items listed below aren’t unique to Plasma, it’s the combination of all of those things that truly makes it the best desktop environment out there. Tell me, what are your top reasons?
KWin, our fantastic and flexible window manager and Wayland compositor, can not just drive your session but also run in windowed mode for development purposes:
$ dbus-run-session kwin_wayland --exit-with-session kwriteEt voila, a windowed KWin appears, running KWrite. The separate DBus session is important so it doesn’t mess with your running session, notably trying to take over your global shortcuts.
A little side project I just published is a KSplash theme (the loading screen while logging into a Plasma session) that uses BGRT, the ACPI Boot Graphics Record Table. Basically: a KSplash theme that displays the vendor logo that also your UEFI shows during the boot process.
It has been a little quiet around my pet project Plasma Browser Integration. On one hand because I’ve been busy with life but also because browser extension APIs haven’t really gained much new functionality. Nevertheless, for Plasma’s October release I finally found the time to take care of some long-standing feature requests and/or bug reports.
I’ve just returned from this year’s Akademy in Berlin. Unfortunately, I couldn’t attend the entire conference that is still ongoing but the weekend of talks and welcome and social events have been magnificent. I’ve also meet a couple of fellow KDE hackers that I haven’t seen in a decade.
Every year the KDE Community conducts a large-scale field-test of KDE Itinerary, their fantastic travel companion app, disguised as annual community conference. This year’s Akademy takes place in the capital of Germany, Berlin. I have decided to try and exclusively use KDE Itinerary (full trip planner app) and KTrip (focused on public transport) for all my travel needs from and to the venue as well as its accompanying events.
The other day I finally replaced my trusty Thinkpad T480s I bought 6½ years ago. Overall, I was still pretty happy with it and even gave it a little refresh early last year (RAM upgrade, bigger SSD, new keyboard) but the CPU was really starting to show its age when compiling. I’m almost as picky as Nate when it comes to laptops but the P14s Gen 5 AMD (what a mouthful) checked more boxes than most laptops I looked at in recent years.
You click a link in your chat app, your browser with a hundred tabs comes to the front and opens that page. How hard can it be? Well, you probably know by now that Wayland, unlike X, doesn’t let one application force its idiot wishes on everyone else. In order for an application to bring its window to the front, it needs to make use of the XDG Activation protocol.
You may have read about my new-found fondness for Plasma’s Clock app. Following the development of a “Picture in Picture” protocol for Wayland, I remembered how I once saw someone put up a little timer window during a lunch break while screen-sharing a presentation. I figured, I wanted that, too!
KIO (KDE Input/Output) is what allows KDE applications to transparently and asynchronously access files, both local and over the network. It also provides many of the user interfaces for manipulating files, such as the Places panel, Open/Save dialog, folder properties, new file menu, and many more. The other day I went through some of its dialogs and gave them a slight overhaul.
