Holiday Hacking 2025

Like every year I took a couple of days off at the end of the year to wind down and spent some quality time with the family. Time just flies and it feels like the year had only just begun. I have also taken the time to revisit some of my work-in-progress merge requests and tried to push them over the finish line.

Plasma volume OSD showing a megaphone and “Speak…” indicating that push to talk is enabled and the user may speak now
Please talk now or forever hold your peace.
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Holiday Hacking 2024

Like every year I take a couple of days off at the end of the year to wind down and spent time with the family. The year has brought many major changes, both to KDE and to me personally: We did the KDE MegaRelease 6, the next major update to KDE’s software suite. Plasma 6 further made Wayland the default graphical session. I also spent a lot more time in Qt itself, particularly Qt Wayland, rather than KDE code. Anyhow, between family visits and feasts there’s always some time for quality KDE hacking.

Konsole window with two tabs. Current tab is vi editor, the other tab is called “Progress Test” and shows a little progress bar of around 70% on its tab. The same progress is also shown in Konsole’s task bar button
That’s right: Monitoring task progress in Konsole while busy doing something else
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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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Holiday Hacking

Happy holidays, everyone – I hope you can still enjoy them somewhat given the circumstances. For me it’s always a time of reflection, thinking back on the ending year. You know, I always set high standards for the work I do, I just want to put the highest quality of work out there on the interwebs, so I kinda want to write only about stuff that I’ve already uploaded some actual code for, or where I am at least confident to pull off a release soon. However, often “perfect is the enemy of good”, so I decided to just write about some of the things I did for fun over the past days. All of what you see below may or may not end up in a release at some point, or maybe or maybe not.

Plasma's system tray popup with mouse hovering the VLC player icon that is sporting a santa hat
It’s that time of year again…
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