Looking Back at 2022

Depending on your calendar system, another year is coming to a close very soon. While this year was a lot more enjoyable for many of us than the last two, we surely didn’t expect things to go downhill even more for others. As I am looking forward to some days off with my family, let me take a step back and reflect on some of the things I did in KDE in the last twelve months.

Konqi, KDE's mascot, a green cute dragon, dressed as Santa Claus with white long beard, red robe, and some KDE presents in his sack
“Happy Holidays”, Konqi called at the cheering crowd in front of him (CC-BY-SA raghukamath)
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Reunited after a decade

It’s been more than ten years since Dolphin, KDE’s versatile file manager, introduced its own custom QGraphicsView-based view engine. With that came more detailed view modes with grouping support, animated transitions, and a new places panel with sections. Unfortunately, it is all based on a now long-abandoned “Itemviews NG” project, and is inherently incompatible with Qt’s traditional model-view code used elsewhere in KDE.

Dolphin's (file manager) main window with sidebar of places (Home, Pictures, Documents, Downloads, Music, etc)
Looks virtually the same, doesn’t it?

A few weeks ago I sat down and over the course of a few evenings I ported Dolphin back to using the KFilePlacesView provided by KIO which is used in the Open and Save dialogs, among other places.

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Blast from the Past: Icon Dialog

In my 10 year anniversary blog post I mentioned how I wanted to fully redesign the icon chooser dialog which hasn’t changed since its inception and my childhood. Well, guess what I just did between sessions at this year’s Akademy.

Dialog window with a 6x3 icon grid and a context menu for icon category selection
Fully redesigned icon dialog

I recently added a job creator test application to KJobWidgets so I could test the job tracker in Plasma’s notification center without having to write fake KJob classes all the time. The user interface for it was quickly bodged together in Qt Designer, so the other day I figured, I might as well try to recreate the new icon dialog layout and hook its existing C++ logic to a new UI.

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10 Years in KDE – A Retrospective

(or: “Accidental Autobiography”)

Can you believe how time flies? Today, ten years ago my first ever KDE patch was merged. A little while later I was granted KDE developer rights with write access to all of KDE’s git repositories. This power was somewhat frightening, after having submitted not even a hand full of patches at that time, and it actually took many years for the thrill of hitting Return on a “git push” to abate. Let me take this decennial as an opportunity to tell you stories from back in the days™ and how I ended up where I did, where I surely would not be without KDE!

A box cake with blue icing, in its tin, "20 years of KDE" written on it
Let’s have some cake, too!

I actually started writing on this blog post last December, to have plenty of time for collecting trivia and ideas, never before seen prototype screenshots, and more. I surely wouldn’t have thought this to turn into half an autobiography. Mind that I’ll try my best to verify the statements that follow but they can still be inaccurate or skewed from being just memories. Now grab a cup of your favorite beverage, sit back, and join me on this trip down memory lane.

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Shaping the Future of KDE Frameworks

(or: “KDE Frameworks 6 Planning Sprint in Berlin”)

Only two weeks after my previous Berlin visit I came back for the KDE Frameworks 6 planning sprint, kindly hosted by MBition in their posh offices near Spree river and Landwehrkanal.

A whiteboard with a more than 50 sticky notes, mostly orange, some blue, with various KDE Frameworks written on them
Three days’ worth of discussions in a nutshell

Already during this year’s Akademy we started discussing our strategies for a Qt 6 transition and created a giant work board of tasks for our next major release of Frameworks. Overall our goal is to keep API breakages to a minimum while still cleaning up some cruft that might have built up over the years. We kicked off the sprint Friday morning with discussions mostly around policies and guidelines.

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