4 ms·

Hi folks, author here. Happy to answer questions.

by kokada 1y ago

sho_hn 1y ago
Plasma dev here, also happy to answer questions!
- a3w 1y ago
  Are error messages, e.g. when trying to connect wifi, as expressive and case-complete?
  - sho_hn 1y ago
    Honestly, this one I'm not sure about as I haven't worked on the connectivity UIs myself. I know we have backends to NetworkManager and ConnMan, and generally I would assume we pass through errors they generate and perhaps try to augment them, but I'm not personally aware of the SOTA on WiFi error reporting and how we stack up. I'm sure if you're missing anything useful diagnostics-wise it's worth a FREQ though. A lot of us also do travel with our laptop to numerous FOSS events all over the place and encounter sub-par networks left and right, after all.
    - The_President 1y ago
      Piggybacking on the context of your network role, is there an initiative to fix temporarily unavailable sshfs mounts freezing Plasma and Dolphin?
      - reitanuki 1y ago
        Side-note: Depending on what you're after, you can navigate to `sftp://` (and `fish://`) URLs in Dolphin & most KDE (Qt?) applications directly, you don't need to use a sshfs mount, and this way it doesn't stall (or screw up system sleep, which is another problem I have with sshfs mounts). Somehow or another, if you open a file in Dolphin on one of these network addresses in a non-KDE application, it seems to pass it through using a FUSE filesystem, which does work somewhat but not 100% in my experience (I don't really know how this works or remember when it falls down). The terminal view in Dolphin also `cd`s to this virtual directory. Of course, if you really really wanted the sshfs mount for some reason, then this workaround doesn't help you.
        The_President 1y ago
        I like your workaround ideas, thank you.
- Yizahi 1y ago
  Hello. What Linux distributives in your opinion have KDE as a first class desktop? With priority support for KDE, testing, driver compatibility etc.?
  - sho_hn 1y ago
    This will be a purely personal answer, as we don't really maintain any official list of favorites. Myself and my family are running Fedora's KDE edition. The Fedora team has a long history of working very closely with the Plasma dev team, quite actively contributes upstream, and I haven't been disappointed. I'd vouch for this one from first-hand experience! We also have a new project to produce a distro of our own in the works, called KDE Linux. That has recently had its first alpha release. It still has some real feature gaps and may not serve you well if one of the missing bits is something you require, but it's definitely worth looking into. It has a lot of next-gen ideas baked and some things we got to learn during the SteamOS effort, and think it has a place in the ecosystem. In the dev community I generally see a lot of people running KDE on Arch, Debian and openSUSE as well.
    - nomdep 1y ago
      What's the relation of KDE Linux with KDE Neon? The former was made by Blue System and the new one by Techpaladin or something like that?
      - sho_hn 1y ago
        KDE Neon was originally founded by devs who worked on Kubuntu previously, and some of that team has now moved on to KDE Linux. The company stuff in the background doesn't really matter. The team working on KDE Linux are motivated by addressing some structural challenges that always plagued KDE Neon from the concept of trying to graft more recent SW on top of the Ubuntu LTS base, plus some lessons learned from the SteamOS project's way of handling updates, and fully utilizing more recent Linux/systemd features. It's sufficiently different that sticking with the Neon brand and swapping it out for that userbase would have been pretty disruptive, so they felt it was better to go with a distinct identity.
- panny 1y ago
  No questions, I just want to say thank you. Plasma is great and has sane defaults unlike Gnome.
  - sho_hn 1y ago
    Thanks!
- pabs3 1y ago
  No questions, just some rough edges to report; infinite clipboard history would be nice, notifications search/sorting would be nice, notifications panel gets slow with hundreds of notifications (from IRC bots) when dragging the scrollbar, notifications panel icons could be removable or made smaller or just have one per app.
  - lionkor 1y ago
    Not the person you asked, but maybe open Issues somewhere for that?
    - pabs3 1y ago
      Not sure how welcome feature requests and bugs non-standard use-cases issues are. Time is limited here too.
  - 2b3a51 1y ago
    Thanks to all the KDE devs for their work. Something I use a lot on xfce4 is the Alt-F11 shortcut (it toggles) that maximises a window over the bottom bar and removes the title bar. In this way, with LibreOffice or say Inkscape I get the application menus at the top and the applications controls at the bottom of the screen. No hotspots - nothing pops up. On Fedora's live KDE iso I can use the window control menu to supress the title bar on a maximised window and I can hide the bottom bar but its a faff requiring multiple steps.
- The_President 1y ago
  What recommended long-term-support stable version release channels are available for Plasma? edit: According to AI, LTS is not provided. Was my AI answer accurate, and if so is there consideration of an initiative to implement an LTS channel?
  - sho_hn 1y ago
    Canonical provides commercial support for Plasma on Ubuntu last time I checked :)
    - The_President 1y ago
      After reading your reply, I plugged the exact question of my text into an LLM and it answered my question perfectly. Your answer was in the context of commercial support which wasn't in the question or answer.
      - sho_hn 1y ago
        Well they're also famous for having an LTS version of Ubuntu as well (and coined the term), which I assumed you probably know with an LTS interest. But sorry I couldn't satisfy you!
        The_President 1y ago
        The distinct advantage of a KDE LTS support release is that it would be distro agnostic. Benefits being that it delegates maintenance and security updates for an LTS version to KDE away from the distro maintainers, and as a plus this provides greater appearance of continutity from KDE to the public.
        sho_hn 1y ago
        I think I got confused by your "release channels" bit in the original comment, because I thought you were asking for distros which ship and support the Plasma LTS release, but I guess you're asking more whether we have an LTS release? We did in fact have versions marked as LTS in the Plasma 5.x generation, but the concept never quite worked that well practice (e.g. because distros generally shipped newer versions based on user demand and didn't really adopt the LTS releases, even for their own LTS distro releases, so the benefit calculation for them was different from your expectation) and we haven't kept them for the Plasma 6.x series. You can read some background here: https://pointieststick.com/2025/05/01/notes-from-the-graz-plasma-sprint/ https://pointieststick.com/2025/05/01/notes-from-the-graz-pl... It might come back some day in some form, but the discussion is ongoing.
- traverseda 1y ago
  https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=107302 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=107302 How can we make this happen? I am a programmer but I am not in a good position to do this specific kind of programming myself. This seems tightly integrated to a lot of stuff I don't have a good understanding of. Is there a way to donate to specific features, could I do some crowdfunding to hire a dev to do this feature and if so who? Is there any way at all you can think of that I could effect this feature landing other than spending a few years learning this kind of development?
  - sho_hn 1y ago
    I can't quite promise yet that we will do this, but let's say there have been two recent developments that increase the probability by quite a lot: - X11 is nearing EOL, and once we drop support for it this will get a lot less painful to do. - If we want to switch to a virtual desktop / paging protocol that supports this we need to switch away from the current one, and it just so happens that in late 2024 a new protocol called ext-workspace made it into Wayland that is flexible enough to work for this purpose. I'd say at this point the biggest problem is designing a UX for it that makes sense and doesn't confuse the hell out of people. If you want to contribute to e.g. that design discussion in our VDG working group that could be a good place to start. > could I do some crowdfunding to hire a dev to do this feature and if so who? Someone else has pledged a bounty: https://discuss.kde.org/t/bug-fix-per-screen-virtual-desktops/16241 https://discuss.kde.org/t/bug-fix-per-screen-virtual-desktop...
- kokada 1y ago
  Hey, since you're here, let me complain about an issue I found this morning. As I said in my blog post, my current setup involves my desktop being connected in the TV and monitor at the same time. Right now I have the TV disabled, but if I go to the Display settings and enable it, the TV and monitor have a huge gap for some reason and KDE can't apply the configuration since it says that there should be no gap between the displays. I can of course fix this manually and apply, but if I disable and enable the TV again it seems that it forgots my layout and I need to setup everything from scratch again. But anyway, thanks for the fantastic work!

Hi folks, author here. Happy to answer questions.

by kokada 1y ago

Hi folks, author here. Happy to answer questions.

sho_hn 1y ago

Plasma dev here, also happy to answer questions!

a3w 1y ago
Are error messages, e.g. when trying to connect wifi, as expressive and case-complete?
- sho_hn 1y ago
  Honestly, this one I'm not sure about as I haven't worked on the connectivity UIs myself. I know we have backends to NetworkManager and ConnMan, and generally I would assume we pass through errors they generate and perhaps try to augment them, but I'm not personally aware of the SOTA on WiFi error reporting and how we stack up. I'm sure if you're missing anything useful diagnostics-wise it's worth a FREQ though. A lot of us also do travel with our laptop to numerous FOSS events all over the place and encounter sub-par networks left and right, after all.
  - The_President 1y ago
    Piggybacking on the context of your network role, is there an initiative to fix temporarily unavailable sshfs mounts freezing Plasma and Dolphin?
    - reitanuki 1y ago
      Side-note: Depending on what you're after, you can navigate to `sftp://` (and `fish://`) URLs in Dolphin & most KDE (Qt?) applications directly, you don't need to use a sshfs mount, and this way it doesn't stall (or screw up system sleep, which is another problem I have with sshfs mounts). Somehow or another, if you open a file in Dolphin on one of these network addresses in a non-KDE application, it seems to pass it through using a FUSE filesystem, which does work somewhat but not 100% in my experience (I don't really know how this works or remember when it falls down). The terminal view in Dolphin also `cd`s to this virtual directory. Of course, if you really really wanted the sshfs mount for some reason, then this workaround doesn't help you.
      - The_President 1y ago
        I like your workaround ideas, thank you.
Yizahi 1y ago
Hello. What Linux distributives in your opinion have KDE as a first class desktop? With priority support for KDE, testing, driver compatibility etc.?
- sho_hn 1y ago
  This will be a purely personal answer, as we don't really maintain any official list of favorites. Myself and my family are running Fedora's KDE edition. The Fedora team has a long history of working very closely with the Plasma dev team, quite actively contributes upstream, and I haven't been disappointed. I'd vouch for this one from first-hand experience! We also have a new project to produce a distro of our own in the works, called KDE Linux. That has recently had its first alpha release. It still has some real feature gaps and may not serve you well if one of the missing bits is something you require, but it's definitely worth looking into. It has a lot of next-gen ideas baked and some things we got to learn during the SteamOS effort, and think it has a place in the ecosystem. In the dev community I generally see a lot of people running KDE on Arch, Debian and openSUSE as well.
  - nomdep 1y ago
    What's the relation of KDE Linux with KDE Neon? The former was made by Blue System and the new one by Techpaladin or something like that?
    - sho_hn 1y ago
      KDE Neon was originally founded by devs who worked on Kubuntu previously, and some of that team has now moved on to KDE Linux. The company stuff in the background doesn't really matter. The team working on KDE Linux are motivated by addressing some structural challenges that always plagued KDE Neon from the concept of trying to graft more recent SW on top of the Ubuntu LTS base, plus some lessons learned from the SteamOS project's way of handling updates, and fully utilizing more recent Linux/systemd features. It's sufficiently different that sticking with the Neon brand and swapping it out for that userbase would have been pretty disruptive, so they felt it was better to go with a distinct identity.
panny 1y ago
No questions, I just want to say thank you. Plasma is great and has sane defaults unlike Gnome.
- sho_hn 1y ago
  Thanks!
pabs3 1y ago
No questions, just some rough edges to report; infinite clipboard history would be nice, notifications search/sorting would be nice, notifications panel gets slow with hundreds of notifications (from IRC bots) when dragging the scrollbar, notifications panel icons could be removable or made smaller or just have one per app.
- lionkor 1y ago
  Not the person you asked, but maybe open Issues somewhere for that?
  - pabs3 1y ago
    Not sure how welcome feature requests and bugs non-standard use-cases issues are. Time is limited here too.
- 2b3a51 1y ago
  Thanks to all the KDE devs for their work. Something I use a lot on xfce4 is the Alt-F11 shortcut (it toggles) that maximises a window over the bottom bar and removes the title bar. In this way, with LibreOffice or say Inkscape I get the application menus at the top and the applications controls at the bottom of the screen. No hotspots - nothing pops up. On Fedora's live KDE iso I can use the window control menu to supress the title bar on a maximised window and I can hide the bottom bar but its a faff requiring multiple steps.
The_President 1y ago
What recommended long-term-support stable version release channels are available for Plasma? edit: According to AI, LTS is not provided. Was my AI answer accurate, and if so is there consideration of an initiative to implement an LTS channel?
- sho_hn 1y ago
  Canonical provides commercial support for Plasma on Ubuntu last time I checked :)
  - The_President 1y ago
    After reading your reply, I plugged the exact question of my text into an LLM and it answered my question perfectly. Your answer was in the context of commercial support which wasn't in the question or answer.
    - sho_hn 1y ago
      Well they're also famous for having an LTS version of Ubuntu as well (and coined the term), which I assumed you probably know with an LTS interest. But sorry I couldn't satisfy you!
      - The_President 1y ago
        The distinct advantage of a KDE LTS support release is that it would be distro agnostic. Benefits being that it delegates maintenance and security updates for an LTS version to KDE away from the distro maintainers, and as a plus this provides greater appearance of continutity from KDE to the public.
        sho_hn 1y ago
        I think I got confused by your "release channels" bit in the original comment, because I thought you were asking for distros which ship and support the Plasma LTS release, but I guess you're asking more whether we have an LTS release? We did in fact have versions marked as LTS in the Plasma 5.x generation, but the concept never quite worked that well practice (e.g. because distros generally shipped newer versions based on user demand and didn't really adopt the LTS releases, even for their own LTS distro releases, so the benefit calculation for them was different from your expectation) and we haven't kept them for the Plasma 6.x series. You can read some background here: https://pointieststick.com/2025/05/01/notes-from-the-graz-plasma-sprint/ https://pointieststick.com/2025/05/01/notes-from-the-graz-pl... It might come back some day in some form, but the discussion is ongoing.
traverseda 1y ago
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=107302 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=107302 How can we make this happen? I am a programmer but I am not in a good position to do this specific kind of programming myself. This seems tightly integrated to a lot of stuff I don't have a good understanding of. Is there a way to donate to specific features, could I do some crowdfunding to hire a dev to do this feature and if so who? Is there any way at all you can think of that I could effect this feature landing other than spending a few years learning this kind of development?
- sho_hn 1y ago
  I can't quite promise yet that we will do this, but let's say there have been two recent developments that increase the probability by quite a lot: - X11 is nearing EOL, and once we drop support for it this will get a lot less painful to do. - If we want to switch to a virtual desktop / paging protocol that supports this we need to switch away from the current one, and it just so happens that in late 2024 a new protocol called ext-workspace made it into Wayland that is flexible enough to work for this purpose. I'd say at this point the biggest problem is designing a UX for it that makes sense and doesn't confuse the hell out of people. If you want to contribute to e.g. that design discussion in our VDG working group that could be a good place to start. > could I do some crowdfunding to hire a dev to do this feature and if so who? Someone else has pledged a bounty: https://discuss.kde.org/t/bug-fix-per-screen-virtual-desktops/16241 https://discuss.kde.org/t/bug-fix-per-screen-virtual-desktop...
kokada 1y ago
Hey, since you're here, let me complain about an issue I found this morning. As I said in my blog post, my current setup involves my desktop being connected in the TV and monitor at the same time. Right now I have the TV disabled, but if I go to the Display settings and enable it, the TV and monitor have a huge gap for some reason and KDE can't apply the configuration since it says that there should be no gap between the displays. I can of course fix this manually and apply, but if I disable and enable the TV again it seems that it forgots my layout and I need to setup everything from scratch again. But anyway, thanks for the fantastic work!