Plasma – Kai Uwe's Blog

Hardware Shenanigans

(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.

Little Wayland Things

While 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.

Message Box “Close Document: The document has been modified. Do you want to save your changes or discard them?” ontop of a KWrite editor window that is darkened because the prompt is modal — Proper modal dialogs under Wayland (note the darkened editor window) thanks to XDG Dialog and the new Qt 6.8

Getting ready for Akademy

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.

A Fresh Perspective on Things

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.

Dolphin file manager, Places panel hovered "USB Stick", tooltip reads "/media/USB (from /dev/sdb1), 28.8 of 2.98 GiB Free (3 % used)" — Places panel tooltip indicating mount point, device name, and free space information

Plasma 5: The Early Years

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.

Plasma 5.1 desktop with pastel colored diamond pattern as wallpaper, white panel at the top, kickoff menu open with various apps in it, and fuzzy lcock widget “quarter past twelve” visible in the background — The earliest clean full-desktop Plasma 5 screenshot I could find in my archives, dated December 2014

On the Road to Plasma 6, Vol. 5

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.

Plasma 6 desktop with custom panel at the top, bottom right corner reads “KDE Plasma 6.1 Dev, visit bugs.kde.or to report issues“. New wallpaper with orange/purple colors, sun, birds, clouds in background, and a tree at the edge of a sloped hill — My desktop isn’t usually that tidy

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.

On the Road to Plasma 6, Vol. 4

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.

Empty KDE Plasma 6 desktop with a bluish-gray mountain wallpaper. A yellow sticky note on it reading “Hello!”. Bottom right caption reads “KDE Plasma 6.0 Dev. Visit bugs.kde.org to report issues” — It feels like every time I take a desktop screenshot for this type of post, the caption has changed slightly. :-)

On the Road to Plasma 6, Vol. Ⅲ

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.

Empty KDE Plasma 6 desktop with a bluish-gray mountain wallpaper. Bottom right caption reads “KDE Plasma 6.0 Dev. Visit bugs.kde.org to report issues” — Still looks the same now, doesn’t it? By the way, there is a Wallpaper Contest going on!

On the Road to Plasma 6, Cont’d

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!

Empty KDE Plasma 6 desktop with a bluish-gray mountain wallpaper. Bottom right caption reads “KDE Plasma 5.27.80. Visit bugs.kde.org to report issues” — Yes, please do report all the bugs!

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!

On the Road to Plasma 6

After I accidentally screwed up my system Friday night, I ended up with no choice but to install all system updates from KDE neon “unstable” which now defaults to a Plasma 6 session. I certainly wasn’t planning on spending a few hours that evening fixing my setup. Alas, I am now taking “eating your own dog food” to the extreme and made my daily driver laptop run Plasma 6.

“About this System” dialog: KDE neon Unstable Edition.
KDE Plasma Version: 5.27.80
KDE Frameworks Version: 5.24.0
Qt Version: 6.5.0 — There’s a few loose screws here and there.