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.
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.
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.
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.
Continue reading On the Road to Plasma 6, Vol. 5Earlier this month I traveled to winterly Berlin for the Qt Contributor’s Summit. After having contributed many patches to Qt in the past months in order to make the upcoming Plasma 6 really shine I decided to attend for the first time this year to meet some more of the faces behind our beloved UI toolkit.
The event took place over the course of two days adjacent to Qt World Summit at Estrel Hotel in Neukölln – a massive hotel, congress, and entertainment complex, and actually the largest in Europe. It literally took me longer to walk from its main entrance to the venue than getting from Sonnenallee S-Bahn station to the entrance.
Continue reading Qt Contributor’s Summit 2023I’m pleased to announce the immediate availability of Plasma Browser Integration version 1.9 on the Chrome Web Store. This is a maintenance release shipping a couple of important changes as well as the usual translation updates. The extension now ships 46 different localizations and will of course continue working just fine under the upcoming Plasma 6!
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!
Continue reading Plasma Browser Integration 1.9One of the the less apparent omissions in Plasma’s Wayland session compared to X was the lack of a prompt for terminating an unresponsive app. Of course, you should never see one because any decent app will just crash and quit rather than get stuck. Nevertheless, over the course of three evenings I spent way too much time making the “KWin Killer Helper” work on Wayland and while at it revamped its user interface entirely.
Chill your Champagne bottles – it’s official: the KDE Plasma 6.0 + KDE Frameworks 6.0 + KDE Gear 24.02 Mega Release™ that will take KDE software to the next level is going to happen on 28th February 2024! Let’s have a look at what I’ve been up to in the past two months, again working mostly on either Qt itself or dealing with its behavior changes on the application side.
After four years KDE finally made it to Dornbirn, Austria again for the annual LinuxDay Vorarlberg where Carl Schwan, Tobias Fella and I showcased the latest and greatest in KDE software and hardware.
Another month, another Plasma 6 update. I’ve been pretty busy during the past weeks, mostly further improving the Wayland session, fractional scaling, and dealing with Qt bugs. Working under the hood like this is tremendously important albeit somewhat ungrateful when there aren’t any pretty pictures to show.
A little over two months ago I involuntarily switched my daily driver laptop to a Plasma 6 development build (see this blog post on how that went). Since then there has been stunning progress on ironing out bugs, tidying things up, and implementing new features. Let me show you what I’ve been working on, stumbling blocks to look out for, and what you can do to help to make Plasma 6 a truly great release!
A couple of weeks ago I actually finally switched to a Plasma Wayland session full time and it’s been working great! This now also means I have to fix all of my pet peeve bugs, and boy did I!
Continue reading On the Road to Plasma 6, Cont’d