This week my fellow developers and I are in Germany for an in-person Plasma sprint–our first since 2019! For this reason, there will be no normal weekly blog post today, and instead next week there will be a combined “what happened over the last two weeks” and “what happened during the sprint” blog post, since otherwise there would be significant of overlap. There’s a lot to do, and here are some of the topics we’re covering:
- Stabilizing Plasma 6 so we can all start living on it full-time
- Discussing significant UX changes we want to make in Plasma 6
- API changes for Frameworks 6 that are relevant for Plasma
- Design vision for Kirigami and various Kirigami-related topics
- Improving our test infrastructure
…And a lot more! I’ll be able to share additional details next week. Wish us luck!
Adventures in Linux and KDE 
Have a wonderful time, and good luck 🙂
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Outstanding!!
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Good Luck!
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Great.
Please also think about tagging improvements (also on network shares).
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Amazing!!!
I wish you all a great time!!!
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Nate, how are you guys finding the move to Qt 6? I tried migrating two applications to it and already some varying experiences.
One was a somewhat simple-ish app, and I just had to make a few modifications to fix some bugs I found during the migration. The other gave me problems since QProcess::setupChildProcess() was axed in Qt 6 without warning, only for its replacement to be in Qt 6.
In both instances, trying to migrate to CMake was a bit of a write-off since Qt Creator doesn’t do well with it, so it’s qmake/qmake6 for me. Their conversion scripts were OKish, but completely missed translations and other resource files. You’d think the Qt folk would have thought about this stuff before they released Qt 6 (which I don’t think is an unfair criticism given they make money off it)!
With that in mind, are you guys having similar experiences? I can’t imagine Plasma 6 being released before mid-2024 if what I experienced in just small projects is anything to go by.
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Most KDE software is already ported to Qt6, in that it compiles and runs. Plasma is in this boat. Most of the challenges we’ve found have been self-imposed, the result of planned code refactoring and library adoptions in Plasma, and intentional API changes in Frameworks making the experience of running QML apps more painful than it should be.
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Being familiar with CMake this was not a challenge for me. For me the transition to Qt 6 is not finished. Most stuff was easy to change and I got why Qt wanted to make the change. But the multimedia framework is a complete rewrite, this is not easy to replace. Not sure whether other rewritten framework are as difficult to port.
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Will the issue of Vulkan support come up?
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So far it’s not on the agenda.
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Here hoping for more attractive Kirigami applications. Elisa currently rocks at this. There’s some nice improvements like the new “no file open welcome screen”. However most applications still look very plain and look like an office spreadsheet.
Activities need love and I would dare to say a considerable scale down on what they’re supposed to do, like keep it to the desktop panels and background, like a skin or information source context. And very optionally, some applications can plug in to check and respond to activity changes.
Speaking about panels, I would like panel applets/widgets to potentially have consistent text across the entire panel. Kind of a status bar for the entire desktop. Currently when you add multiple one-line text widgets, it’s likely that it will be a soup of varied font rendering.
Do you best and have fun at the sprint. I appreciate you guys a lot.
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Yeah, Activities needs rethinking. The only time in my life I thought it would actually be useful is when I thought I could have different panel setups for each activity. Then I found out I couldn’t do it, so…
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Greater compatibility with gtk applications, take care of performance with respect to animations, greater support for wayland.
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Please for the love of all things computing, can we get a auto night theme mode? I mean for now yin-yang works, but I don’t understand how Gnome and KDE doesn’t have this baked in already. I understand their maybe technical issues or other things I’m just hoping this is on the radar, because I know KDE can be so much more seamless than it’s current iteration. Nonetheless, good luck with everything, always appreciative.
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It’s a good idea. Are you willing to help implement it?
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Hmm Plasma 6, so per-activity panels layout when? … Just j/k I guess that one fell off the radar years ago (‘tho’ i’d love to see it someday). I wish you smooth migration to Plasma 6, looking forward to try it … Plasma desktop got so much better/stable with last few major releases.
Now if rest of the KDE components would catch up so it’ll be not just another desktop environment but THE Desktop Environment as it was envisioned in KDE4 era.
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