AUA: We are the Plasma dev team. Ask Us Anything about Plasma 6, gear 24.02, Frameworks 6 and everything else in the upcoming Megarelease.

David, Nate, Josh, Marco, Carl, and Niccolò are here ready to answer all your questions on Plasma (all versions), Gear, Frameworks, Wayland (and how it affects KDE’s software), and everything in between.

Fire away, Lemmy!

We were expecting to be done in an hour and we have past the 2-hour mark already! Time flies when you are having fun.

Thank you for all the questions and the welcoming and friendly atmosphere, but the devs must get back to making Plasma 6 great.

Please keep the conversation going and KDE contributors will continue to answer over the next days as time permits.

Thank you all!!

azvasKvklenko ,

Are there any big things that you couldn’t squeeze in time for the mega release, but can’t wait to have them implemented in Plasma 6.1 later this year?

Pointedstick ,

Accent-colored tinted window headers, touchpad gesture configurability

merthyr1831 ,

I’m so hyped for configurable touchpad gestures!!!

soupermkc ,

Wouldn’t that be changing the corresponding color entries in the colorscheme? At least all of Plasma 5’s window decorations seem to respect those. Stuff like selection color’s already changed so it doesn’t seem too difficult?

morrowind ,
@morrowind@lemmy.ml avatar

There’s been an undercurrent of discussion I’ve noticed (and tend to agree) that C++ is not the most friendly language for new/outside contributors, even the newer standard you use. Is there an effort to bring first class support/documentation for another higher level language as well? e.g dart/ruby/lua/python/javascript/C#/go (whatever is most feasible)

PureTryOut ,
@PureTryOut@lemmy.kde.social avatar

I have some very, very, very, very WIP KDE widgets for Dart/Flutter in a project running. Currently it has almost nothing but it already automatically switches color theme when you switch color schemes in KDE for example 😄

Don’t expect too much of that though, it’s very unofficial and something I’m doing whenever I feel like it.

merthyr1831 ,

Amazing! Would love to have a nose at that when its mroe mature !

merthyr1831 ,

Some of the plasmoids are implemented in JavaScript I think, but personally I’d love to see Dart as a consideration for that “high level language” choice.

It already does a great job at gluing high level rendering abstractions with low level rendering libraries within the Flutter SDK, and supports a lot of useful paradigms in UI development such as first class functions, null safety, enhanced enumerators, etc.

I can see why it’s given a wide berth from FOSS since it’s associated with JavaScript AND Google (two controversial terms in programming to say the least…) but working with it daily really does remind me how well it lends itself to frontend development.

Pointedstick ,

Something that’s often not mentioned is that C++ with Qt is often a very different beast to use compared to C++ with the stdlib and other GUI frameworks. IMO Qt takes a lot of the pain out of C++, such that the criticism becomes blunted and mostly articulated by people looking in from outside who haven’t tried it yet.

morrowind ,
@morrowind@lemmy.ml avatar

that suggests if nothing else, that point needs to be articulated more. But also then, C++ with QT is a very specific skill people now have to learn to help out, as opposed to stuff that would be more universally useful

Pointedstick ,

Sure, but Qt is the largest C++ toolkit in the world with millions of developers, so it’s not exactly a small niche thing that someone who knows C++ hasn’t heard of. :)

domi ,
@domi@lemmy.secnd.me avatar

With HDR making its debut on Plasma, what are the plans moving forward?

From what I have seen getting games to work in HDR currently requires the correct vulkan layers and a recent gamescope version?

As a side question, will there be an easy way to get HDR working with the Steam flatpak for the Plasma 6 launch?

Zamundaaa ,

A near term plan is to make it so you don’t have to use any Vulkan layer to make it work, by having gamescope use the protocol directly. After that, add support to all the other clients - Mesa, SDL, glfw, mpv, Krita, Chromium and so on

will there be an easy way to get HDR working with the Steam flatpak for the Plasma 6 launch?

You can run Steam in gamescope, doesn’t matter if it’s sandboxed or not.

domi ,
@domi@lemmy.secnd.me avatar

Thanks for the response, excited to see more support being added!

You can run Steam in gamescope, doesn’t matter if it’s sandboxed or not.

So, installing your Vulkan layers and gamescope-git on the host and running ENABLE_HDR_WSI=1 gamescope --hdr-enabled --hdr-debug-force-output --steam – env ENABLE_GAMESCOPE_WSI=1 DXVK_HDR=1 DISABLE_HDR_WSI=1 flatpak run com.valvesoftware.Steam -bigpicture should do it on Plasma 6?

Zamundaaa ,

Yes

Kalcifer ,
@Kalcifer@sh.itjust.works avatar

Is there a plan to allow KDE Discover to update flatpaks automatically?

Blisterexe , (edited )
@Blisterexe@lemmy.zip avatar

Thanks for all the great work on kde! I was wondering if the KDE theme refresh, (brise) and icon (app and plasma icon) proposals are going to happen in plasma 6.1? Or is that not on the table? Also, are there plans to have KDE connect support making your phone a webcam?

Edit: grammar

leopold ,

offtopic, but why is this comment yellow? never seen that before.

EDIT: Oh wait, I think it’s to mark unread comments. Haven’t seen that before. Must be a new thing.

Blisterexe ,
@Blisterexe@lemmy.zip avatar

I have no idea, what client do you use? (Its not yellow for me on sync) Edit: yeah maybe I don’t know to be honest

leopold ,

I just use the web client

Bro666 OP Mod ,
@Bro666@lemmy.kde.social avatar

The instance has recently been updated.

davidre ,

Also, is there plans to have KDE connect support making your phone a webcam?

That’s an amazing idea! Currently I am using my laptop next to my desktop screens as a sudo webcam :D

Blisterexe ,
@Blisterexe@lemmy.zip avatar

Yeah the only way to do it right now is using droidcam, and I took one look at the documentation and gave up, and continued using my bad webcam. Also afiak the new pipewire video portals should make that feature easier to implement.

Edit: thank you for the reply!

KindaSuS ,

You should check out “scrcpy”, it’s on GitHub and it is great for using your phone as a webcam and more things.

Blisterexe ,
@Blisterexe@lemmy.zip avatar

scrcpy

thanks!

sohrabbehdani ,
@sohrabbehdani@lemmy.world avatar

is there any plans for more mobile friendly applications?

the only problem that i have currently with plasma mobile is the lack of mobile friendly applications :)

Bro666 OP Mod ,
@Bro666@lemmy.kde.social avatar

Josh says: “Yes, we are always interested in making our applications mobile-ready and almost every new KDE application uses Kirigami our convergent framework. Some of our older applications such as Okular, Dolphin, etc need more work on mobile but this is something that’s being worked on.”

Bro666 OP Mod ,
@Bro666@lemmy.kde.social avatar

Carl says: Also take a look at plasma-mobile.org which lists most of the kirigami apps that work on mobile.

carlschwan Mod ,

In addition to that Josh said, we have a list of mobile friendly first party applications here: plasma-mobile.org It’s not completely up to date and is missing some newer additions.

sohrabbehdani ,
@sohrabbehdani@lemmy.world avatar

thanks your for sending this link :)

is there any plans for tok to return? the need for a proper telegram client is a lot , telegram desktop cannot be as good as a native client on mobile screen.

Bro666 OP Mod ,
@Bro666@lemmy.kde.social avatar

Josh says: “Unfortunately we lack a maintainer for Tok. If anybody would like to step up…”

MylesRyden ,
@MylesRyden@vivaldi.net avatar

@Bro666 @sohrabbehdani

Tik says she will do it.

Bro666 OP Mod ,
@Bro666@lemmy.kde.social avatar

That would be awesome. community.kde.org/Get_Involved#Start_Here.21

sohrabbehdani ,
@sohrabbehdani@lemmy.world avatar

and I don’t know if it is a right place to ask, but the maui toolkit hig is missing :)

PureTryOut ,
@PureTryOut@lemmy.kde.social avatar

It’s not really KDE though, it’s kinda it’s own thing…

Bro666 OP Mod ,
@Bro666@lemmy.kde.social avatar

A close cousin 😉

leopold ,

Maui confuses me. The Plasma Mobile homepage features Index, Pix and Vvave prominently. Additionally, those three and Nota are featured on apps.kde.org and the git repositories for all Maui applications are hosted on KDE’s GitLab at invent.kde.org/maui. Index in particular is very important for KDE, since it’s the only mobile-friendly file manager Plasma Mobile has. The Maui blog is also aggregated on Planet KDE. So clearly Maui is very closely related to KDE.

However, Maui Shell is hosted on Nitrux’s GitHub, not KDE. Maui apps also don’t use a lot of standard KDE infrastructure like bugs.kde.org. Plus, the elephant in the room, Maui apps have a totally different HIG from the rest of KDE. Mauikit apps are convergent, use CSD and force the standard Maui theme. They always use hamburger menus over menubars and rarely use more than one window. Apps focus on simple interfaces and simple feature sets. Some of these things, such as convergence, preference for hamburger menus and single window interfaces are also found in some Kirigami applications, but in Maui it’s universal. It feels like a Qt version of GNOME much more than it feels KDE. Combine Maui Shell with Maui applications and you end up with a desktop environment which has nothing in common with KDE’s flagship Plasma. So what’s Maui? How is it related to KDE? I don’t get it.

PureTryOut ,
@PureTryOut@lemmy.kde.social avatar

Yeah it’as weird. Afaik the apps are part of the KDE but the shell is not. No clue why, I’d remove Maui entirely from KDE tbh…

Index is, as you mentioned, really the only option on Plasma Mobile for managing your files, but Pix and Vvave can be replaced with Koko and Elise respectively. We should probably make work of that.

notmart ,

We sure do plan of moving more and more of our app to the new convergent ui toolkit made with QML and Kirigami, in the future more and more of our apps should become mobile ready

russjr08 ,
@russjr08@bitforged.space avatar

Hey there KDE team! What is your favorite feature that is coming along with Plasma 6 (or even with the KDE Gear / KDE Framework updates)?

carlschwan Mod ,

For me it’s definively the new overview effect, I already use it all the time on my Plasma dev session.

russjr08 ,
@russjr08@bitforged.space avatar

I just upgraded to the RC today, and gave this a try - it looks absolutely beautiful! Major props to you and the team!

LunchEnjoyer ,

If it isn’t too late, What are your personal favourite features from Plasma 6?

leo ,
@leo@lemmy.linuxuserspace.show avatar

What’s the best or recommended way to test out Plasma 6 RC2?

And

What has been the hardest problem to solve moving to Qt6?

Pointedstick ,

What’s the best or recommended way to test out Plasma 6 RC2?

Neon Testing in a VM (or on bare metal if you’re adventurous). Arch with the kde-unstable repo is good too, but that also includes a snapshot of the unreleased Qt 6.7 which introduces more bugs.

What has been the hardest problem to solve moving to Qt6?

Personally I’d have to say the large number of API and behavior changes in QtQuick that Qt 6 has brought. We use QtQuick very heavily throughout KDE, so this has required a lot of mandatory porting work, more than in our QtWidgets-based software. And there have even been changes between Qt 6.5, 6.6, and 6.7, so it’s still a bit of a moving target

leo ,
@leo@lemmy.linuxuserspace.show avatar

Thanks for the answers! You and the others on the team are doing a fantastic job of convincing me to not use any other desktop :)

notmart ,

To just test out without any risk and not touching any running system i would suggest a live image such as KDE Neon Unstable which has dailiy updated snapshots of our software stack

as moving to Qt6 from a developer POV, It has been remarkably uneventful. there are api changes for sure (Especially on the QML side of things) but the changes are not as great as say, Qt4 to Qt5.

leo ,
@leo@lemmy.linuxuserspace.show avatar

Thank you so much for the info. I think I’ll be grabbing a Neon ISO and give it a whirl on real hardware. Gotta do it right, ya know? :)

herzenschein Mod ,
@herzenschein@pawb.social avatar

What’s the best or recommended way to test out Plasma 6 RC2?

See also: community.kde.org/Plasma/Plasma_6#How_to_use/test…

merthyr1831 ,

Hey folks!

With Wayland becoming the “Default” for most distributions now, will KDE begin to integrate some Wayland only features that you’re excited about?

I’ve seem some very interesting experiments for swapping desktop sessions (GNOME to KDE to Sway whole CSGO was running) all without losing state, and storing application state to disk.

Pointedstick ,

In fact there are already quite a few Wayland-only features. You can read about them on community.kde.org/…/X11_Known_Significant_Issues.

merthyr1831 ,

GPU Hotplugging is one I’m pretty hyped for! Hybrid graphics laptops aren’t too different from a GPU hotplugging scenario either, and they’re usually quite janky on Linux getting the external displays to work usually means swapping from hybrid mode to dGPU mode (restarting the X session in the process). At least with Wayland that (eventually) be a lot more graceful!

notmart ,

on the side of our apps (or anything written with Qt) all of that (and most important seamless compositor restart/crash recovery with the application surviving) everyhting should be there for 6.0. with other toolkits the mileage might vary (depending when they include the required changes, when a given distribution packages them and so on)

AVincentInSpace ,

is this true

image macro, featuring Spongebob using a pair of binoculars and Patrick holding a notepad, pencil at the ready, captioned “Microsoft waiting for the release of Plasma 6”

merthyr1831 ,

inb4 floating taskbar in Windows 12

macattack ,

What is one KDE feature developed within the last few years that you think is extremely productive/helpful yet is rarely utilized/talked about.

Pointedstick ,

Plasma Vaults! It’s the best implementation of having a little encrypted bucket to put your important files in that I’ve ever used, on any platform. It’s very well integrated into Plasma as a 1st-party supported feature, and it works wonderfully.

semperverus , (edited )
@semperverus@lemmy.world avatar

I use plasma vaults! Its great for homework folders and tax information!

One frustration with vaults though is that theres no clean way to make a portable vault on a USB stick or backed up to a cloud provider (nextcloud, google drive, etc) without digging into weird dot-folder paths and manually entering links to these in a text config file. FUSE-style integration would be rad.

EDIT: The primary use case for this would be to be able to carry sensitive information around like PII, tax, password vaults, family photos, documents, and so on, in such a way that you always have it on you (like on a keychain) or backed up elsewhere, and would be especially useful in cases of disaster - but if you drop and lose it somewhere, a malicious actor doesnt suddenly have your data.

Pointedstick , (edited )

That’s a fantastic idea. I’ve had the same thought myself.

One challenge with making it portable is that you need something that will work on any machine you plug it into. If there’s an emergency and you need the data on there when you don’t have your main computer, it’s likely that the machine you plug it into isn’t running Plasma. For this reason I think a hardware-encrypted flash drive with physical number buttons on it suits the use case better. That way you decrypt it with your fingers, and then the contents are readable on any random Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS etc device you have to plug it into.

semperverus ,
@semperverus@lemmy.world avatar

Thats a good point. I wonder how difficult it would be to package vaults as a standalone .exe or get it onto the Microsoft store like how Kate is.

If I have skills in python and mostly work on ETL-style scripts, how difficult would it be to jump in and try to make this happen? Im just now learning ADO pipelines at work, but I don’t really work with compiled code.

I feel like i’d be jumping into the deep end.

Pointedstick ,

Packaging it as a standalone binary for different platforms seems like a good plan. I have no idea how hard this might be to do though, sorry. But you can always propose it in one of KDE’s chat channels or mailing lists and see if it piques anyone else’s interest or they feel like helping you do it!

Certainity45 ,

I see a huge potential for mobile users in Vault.

davidre ,

It has not been developed in the last few years but always krunner! A recent-ish feature that was already in Plasma 5 is to bind key presses to your extra mouse buttons or tablet tool buttons

macattack ,

Moving to Linux w/ a Logitech MX3 mouse, I legit spent 2-3 days troubleshooting across solaar and piper before I got logiops to work. I’ll disable it and dig around the KDE settings to try for a more integrated solution that is easily editable.

notmart ,

to me, the new kwin tiling that first appeared on 5.27, but this will probably change, as feature development on it is about to reopen :)

jwr1 ,
@jwr1@kbin.earth avatar

Thanks for the AUA and all the work on KDE, especially with plasma 6.

It's not really a question, more of a request, but is it possible you all could make the kwrite/kate situation less complicated? I don't mind having options, but from what I understand, you can only have them both installed (or none), not one or the other. Also, if I want Kwrite to be the default editor, I have to go into every supported mime type (file association) and switch the default (instead of just once for all of them).

My preference would be that there's only one text editor (to cause less confusion; maybe just have a toggle button to switch between basic and advanced modes), and to make it easier to change file associations for common file types (like text files, video files, music, images, etc.); even if it's technically a different file format, e.g. .mp4 vs .mkv for videos, I should only have to set the default app once.

Pointedstick ,

from what I understand, you can only have them both installed (or none), not one or the other

You can have only one installed, and Fedora KDE ships this way. If your distro doesn’t offer that, it seems like a distro packaging issue.

make it easier to change file associations for common file types

That’s in Plasma 6. :)

jwr1 ,
@jwr1@kbin.earth avatar

You can have only one installed, and Fedora KDE ships this way. If your distro doesn’t offer that, it seems like a distro packaging issue.

Thanks for the info; it does look like that's how my distro packages it.

make it easier to change file associations for common file types
That’s in Plasma 6. :)

That's awesome to hear! It's a problem I've had for a while, so I'm glad it's being worked on.

Anyway, I just want to say I really appreciate all the work y'all have done over the years; I've been using plasma for the past 6-7 years, and it's a desktop environment like no other.

Pointedstick ,

You’re very welcome! I’m happy you’re enjoying it.

KRAW ,
@KRAW@linux.community avatar

I’m someone that uses sway because I really like to keep my workflow as keyboard driven as possible. However, I do not necessarily need the minimalism of sway and sometimes miss the more polished experience of a full DE. Are there ways to configure Plasma to give me a sway-like keyboard-driven flow while still getting some of the other benefits of Plasma?

Auzy ,

Firstly love the window tiling system. Have you thought about something similar to magnet which allows a window to fill 2 '/columns of the grid simultaneously?

notmart ,

Good idea

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