On Saturday, 16 April I had the honor of representing KDE at the 15. Augsburger Linux-Tag, one of the oldest and largest Linux gatherings in southern Germany.
Author: Kai Uwe
KDE at the Augsburger Linux-Infotag
Next Saturday I’ll be in Augsburg at the 15th Augsburger Linux-Infotag.
Here you’ll have a chance to meet in person, have a look at the latest and greatest Plasma Desktop and try out Plasma Mobile and Plasma Media Center.
Date: Saturday, 16 April 2016
Time: 9:30 – 17:30
Place: Hochschule Augsburg, Fakultät für Informatik, Friedbergerstr. 2
We’re experienced in nuclear fusion!
In less than 24 hours more than 40 people, including me, from various KDE projects will gather in beautiful Geneva at CERN to shape the future of KDE.
With Plasma 5.6 Beta out the door, we can now concentrate on Plasma 5.7 and beyond.
My contributions to Plasma 5.6 include Jump Lists, a Supercharged Task Manager, better media controls, and many more. All of this would not have been possible without all the people who support KDE. If you like what you saw, please support us! :)
Outside the Stellarator
After having spent a great deal of time improving Plasma, I recently focussed on other ares of our workspace, such as KRunner, and various KDE Applications.
On Being More Convenient
As you may or may not know, Plasma’s mantra basically is “help you get stuff done”. This means it helps you to achieve your goals as easily for you as possible. Plasma 5.6 will be one of those releases where we’ve focussed a lot on getting in your way less and removing obstacles in the way between you and your tasks.
Continue reading On Being More Convenient
Making Something Unpleasant More Pleasant
Happy Holidays, everyone!
I’m sure we’ve all had this unpleasant experience where you’ve been immersed into a task up until, boom, you were greeted by this dialog:
Pursuing Awesomeness
Plasma 5.5 hasn’t even been released yet but work on the next version is already commencing.
Introducing U-Bahn
I’ve seen Plasma setups resembling Unity, or Gnome Shell, or OS/2, but I haven’t seen Windows 8 yet.
Plasma 5.5 Release Party in Heidelberg
This time we’ll celebrate early!
Date: Friday, 4 December 2015 (correct year this time around)
Time: 19:00
Place: Medocs Cafe am Bismarckplatz, Sofienstraße 7b, 69115 Heidelberg
Who: You! And fellow KDE developers and users
What we’re going to do: Have a few beers, a delicious dinner, talk, have fun, …
Please ping me, if you’re around and planning to come (contact info can be found in the Impressum, or tell kbroulik in #plasma on Freenode), so I can extend the reservation, if needed.
Polish, Polish, Polish, 5.5 Edition
With Plasma 5.4.2 out the door, it’s time to look ahead at what Plasma 5.5 will bring to a Desktop near you. Even though we’ve gone mobile, we won’t neglect traditional Desktops. In the upcoming release, I took care of the little things, as well as bringing back specialized tools that haven’t been a priority for the initial releases.
User Switching done right
I could never comprehend why KRunner was responsible for switching between users – KRunner is for running applications, searching your stuff, and doing Maths. We have a gorgeous lock screen with a neat user switcher, so why not use it? That’s what I did. Continue reading Polish, Polish, Polish, 5.5 Edition
Fruits of Akademy
For the second time I had the chance to attend Akademy, this time in cold and rainy La Coruña. It has been a week of interesting talks, good food (except for one Tortilla incident), and hacking.
My personal highlight was obviously the introduction of Plasma Mobile on Saturday, an event that caused the one or other tear of joy. Later that day I gave a talk titled “Qt’s Road to Mobile Domination” (Update: Fixed link) looking back on what has improved with Qt on mobile platforms as well as what we can expect in upcoming releases.
One interesting BOF I attended was about LiMux where two guys from Munich shared their experiences with the Plasma desktop in an enterprise environment and what we could do to ease their eventual transition to Plasma 5 in a a few years, notably: Kiosk support, ie. locking down the UI so the user couldn’t mess it up, for which, at that very day, I wrote a proof of concept for making Plasma config dialogs smarter by automatically disabling elements whose backing config is marked immutable.
KRunner History is Back
Supposedly this was one of the reason I still saw quite a few people running Plasma 4 during the conference but now there’s no more reason not to do the switch! ;) Continue reading Fruits of Akademy