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!!

  • @merthyr1831@lemmy.world
    9•1 year ago

    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.

      • @merthyr1831@lemmy.world
        2•1 year ago

        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@lemmy.kde.social
      2•1 year ago

      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)

  • Russ
    8•1 year ago

    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)?

    • Carl SchwanM
      14•1 year ago

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

      • Russ
        3•1 year ago

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

  • Domi
    6•1 year ago

    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@discuss.tchncs.de
      2•1 year ago

      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
        2•1 year ago

        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?

  • Lunch
    4•1 year ago

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

  • @macattack@lemmy.world
    4•1 year ago

    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@lemmy.kde.social
      6•1 year ago

      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
        5•1 year ago

        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@lemmy.kde.social
          6•1 year ago

          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
            0•1 year ago

            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@lemmy.kde.social
              1•1 year ago

              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!

    • @davidre@lemmy.kde.social
      1•1 year ago

      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

  • kellyaster
    4•1 year ago

    Hello David, Nate, Josh, Marco, Carl, and Niccolò. How are you all feeling today?

  • @azvasKvklenko@sh.itjust.works
    3•1 year ago

    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?

      • MKC
        1•1 year ago

        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?

  • Sohrab Behdani
    3•1 year ago

    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 :)

    • @notmart@lemmy.kde.social
      3•1 year ago

      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

    • @Bro666@lemmy.kde.socialOPM
      3•1 year ago

      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.”

      • Sohrab Behdani
        0•1 year ago

        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.

          • Sohrab Behdani
            0•1 year ago

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

            • PureTryOut
              0•1 year ago

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

              • @leopold@lemmy.kde.social
                0•1 year ago

                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 https://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
                  1•1 year ago

                  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.

  • @Auzy@beehaw.org
    2•1 year ago

    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?

  • Leo
    2•1 year ago

    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?

    • @notmart@lemmy.kde.social
      3•1 year ago

      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
        2•1 year ago

        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? :)

    • @Pointedstick@lemmy.kde.social
      2•1 year ago

      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
        1•1 year ago

        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 :)

  • Kalcifer
    2•1 year ago

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