Everything revolving around our favorite user interface
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?
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.
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.
The M is silent. In computing this stands for the underlined letters in menus that can be triggered using an Alt+Letter key combination, one that you can remember and apply later to navigate around more quickly.
Qt and other toolkits typically use an ampersand to denote a mnemonic when assigning a menu entry. For instance, “&Shutdown” will be displayed as “Shutdown” and trigger on Alt+S whereas “Slee&p” will be “Sleep” and trigger on Alt+P. Of course this isn’t limited to menus, pretty much any control, buttons and what not, can have mnemonics. Since they are part of the label, a translated string can and likely will have a different one.
Continue reading Mnemonics, Mnemonics Everywhere(originally titled “On Dead Trees”)
There’s features that you know are really important to some of our users but you frankly don’t really care for them much yourself. Printing is one such example. Recently, I actually had to print lots of paperwork, so I had a reason to fix some of my more pressing issues with our Print Manager.
The biggest regression from the Plasma 4 days, when we moved from individual System Tray popups to a unified square view, was that Print Manager had to give up its two pane layout that showed the print queue directly in the popup. In order to view and cancel print jobs, you now had to select the printer and open its print queue window, and close it again after you’re done.
Continue reading Hardware ShenanigansWhile I do have a Qt git build on my machine that I use for development, I usually only test individual applications and functionality but hardly ever run my full Plasma session on it. This means that for day-to-day use I typically only get to enjoy new Qt features once they have actually been released.
Next week Akademy, KDE’s annual community conference, will take place in Würzburg, Germany. There are a few features that I actually began during various conferences throughout the years to address real-world problems. I decided to have look at some of them again that would be most useful for people travelling to Akademy from abroad or who will be giving a presentation there.
Can you believe it’s already been almost half a year since Plasma 6.0 came out? Time really flies! The other day I went through some of my 50+ open merge requests on KDE’s GitLab and took another stab at them. Some are four years old at this point but it definitely helped to let them sit for a while and finish them with a fresh new perspective and clear mind.
With KDE’s 6th Mega Release finally out the door, let’s reflect on the outgoing Plasma 5 that has served us well over the years. Can you believe it has been almost ten years since Plasma 5.0 was released? Join me on a trip down memory lane and let me tell you how it all began. This coincidentally continues pretty much where my previous retrospective blog post concluded.
