Tech Over Tea - From Plasma Mobile To Plasma Bigscreen | Devin Lin

Episode Date: August 29, 2025

Today we have a developer from the Plasma Mobile project on the show who then began working on the Plasma Bigscreen project in an attempt to try and revive this branch of KDE==========Support The Channel==========► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson==========Guest Links==========Plasma Bigscreen: https://plasma-bigscreen.org/Plasma Bigscreen Article: https://espi.dev/posts/2025/07/plasma-bigscreen/Plasma Mobile: https://plasma-mobile.org/==========Support The Show==========► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson=========Video Platforms==========🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg=========Audio Release=========🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw==🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea==========Social Media==========🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345==========Credits==========🎨 Channel Art:All my art has was created by Supercozmanhttps://twitter.com/Supercozmanhttps://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

Good morning, good day, and good evening. I'm as well as your host, Brodie Robertson. And today we are doing a break from the game developer podcast to talk about Linux, which is going to be a long break between some of them. I've got a big lineup of game dev ones coming up. Anyway, that's for another time. So, I think, what was it? What is it?

July 10th, you put out a post on, Plasma Big Screen. I'm on the wrong overlay. There we go. You put out a post about Plasma Big Screen. I didn't even know that Plasma Big Screen existed before this post was made. And I thought it was really cool. I'm, it reminded me of the whole like Ubuntu Unity stuff that Canonical was doing like years back and that kind of got like completely abandoned. I had no idea that something like that even existed within the world of Plasma. So, seeing that and then seeing that somebody was interested in, at least trying to do something with it, definitely got me interested. And, hey, I'm glad you're here. And we can talk about that. And then we can talk about a bit of plasma mobile as well, which I'm sure a lot of people interested to hear about as well. I haven't had someone to talk about Linux mobile. Yeah, I don't know why I never did that.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that sounds good. yeah um like i am so i have been contributing for katie for about four or five years now mainly i said one thing before we go on and this becomes a problem i think the discord noise cancellation is playing up a little bit oh um seems to be off it is off okay you're your voice Cutting out a little bit. Oh, okay. Let me just double check.

Yeah, I have input sensitivity. Oh, oh, noise suppression. No mind. Okay, there's a rendered. Okay, okay. This couldn't be pretty aggressive with that. Yeah, I didn't realize there's two levels of noise suppression, but does it sound better now?

We'll keep going on and hopefully it doesn't cut out, and I'll answer you later on. Sounds good. Yeah. Oh, yeah, just let me know. Okay, we'll just cut out that, like, last minute just reintroduce yourself and we'll go from there okay sounds good um yeah so my name is devon and i've been a katy contributor for about four or five years now um most of my work has been

in plasma mobile uh but yeah a few months ago i decided to try to kind of take a stab at big screen because i have a lot of experience with working on the plasma shell from like a mobile perspective um the project wasn't really, wasn't really active, I decided to kind of come in and kind of use my, the experience I gained from POSMobile to kind of just make sure that, or kind of upgrade big screen and make it up to date with the current Plasma 6 release, having all the dependencies up to date and also just kind of giving it a small refresh. I think the best place to start is just explaining like, I, I think, I'm just, you know, bit of background on Plasma big screen and like what it is just for anyone entirely unaware of

the project yeah so like Katie's kind of more and well known for Plasma desktop which is our desktop environment for laptops, well you know like it's it's kind of the general purpose desktop or anything but when Plasma was designed I think especially in Plasma 5 um they sorry this lawnmower but yeah plasma was kind of designed

to be used with different form factors so internally there's it's quite generic so that's how plausible was able to be created using like shared base with plasma desktop

and so like I don't have like a super good history of big screen but from what I can tell from looking at the history as well as like previous blog posts about it. Around 2020, Plasma Big Screen was kind of released to the public as part of there was a

developer that worked on it for targeting Mycroft, which is some sort of hardware platform for like as a smart speaker with like a small screen on it, I think. And I think the core thing about it was that it had this this library for doing voice recognition and like it kind of it's kind of like an open source Alexa or forget the other ones yeah people know if you say Alexa they'll know what you're talking about yeah yeah so basically you're supposed to run that software on your TV you can kind of like have a remote or some sort a mic you can tell it certain commands using your voice and then it can do you can basically control your tv like that and then it was also like an interface to launch apps to basically

interact with your tv but it runs so the special part about that is that it's running on just like regular like a regular Linux distribution and you'd install the same way that you'd install plasma desktop or gnome or other desktop environments. For anyone I'm kind of curious, I was having to look at Mycroft at one point and one of the people involved in

like the actual startup of it is Ryan Sipes who's now over at Thunderbird doing their like big marketing stuff. I think he was like a big part of the reason they started doing their like donation drive the like donation pop-up thing they have. So just

random bit of a random bit of law involving that project. Besides that, I don't think anyone's even heard of Mycroft, right? Like, I had no idea this even existed beforehand, and I don't think anyone even remembers it exists. The code for it is available. You can actually go find the code still. It's just the hardware itself. If somebody has some hardware and can actually show it to me, that would be cool. I'll very much appreciate that. Yeah, yeah. Like, I thought it was a pretty cool project, but yeah, it just seems that kind of died out in the past few years. There is another project that, like, I think some of the maintainers actually contact me.

I enter their Matrix channel to kind of continue the software side of Mycroft. Except I think what they, I forget the exact vision, but I believe some parts of Mycroft are kind of closed off to contributions. So it was actually started when Mycroft was running. They kind of want to create a completely open version of that. Right. They had like, weren't they going to have like front ends for like Spotify and stuff like that? Yeah, they have some sort of like app system, I think, to basically load like extensions to the system. So you can add like voice integration as well as like an actual touch or TV interface. That's how the original big screen apps are kind of shifts.

They were shipped as this thing called Microw's Skill. What a name. Yeah. So the way that you described it here is just like mini applications. I don't know what they were doing with the Mycroft skills name, but it's basically like apps that you would have on any other sort of system. That's just the simplest way to look at it. Yeah. Like all the skills that were shipped in big screen,

were like Qute-based, which makes me think that I think they had some sort of integration, I think they had some sort of integration with Q'd specifically to do the skills, but anyway, it was kind of specific to Mycroft. So yeah, now on we're probably going to just focus on making regular Linux desktop apps that are just built for TVs. So you can use like a TV remote to navigate everything, but yeah. So before you had a look at anything. So first, first off, you're not the only person who's doing stuff. I know there are other people involved and I do want to make sure those get highlighted as well. Um, but before you or anybody else involved, like sort of revived what was going on here,

what sort of state were, like, was things left in? Was my- Oh, sorry, just heard my voice back then. Or did I hear another voice? Maybe there was just a voice in the background I heard. um i don't know i do have my senior setup so i hope they're not feedbacking into itself okay okay um i only just heard it then so it's it hopefully that doesn't happen again anyway anyway um before there was this sort of revival of the project what sort of state was things in because my understanding is it was on qt 5 before and then the port was sort of done to 6 and that's kind of when the project like faded out of development yeah so last year the original

maintainer did come back and actually do the port to cute six and plasma six it was a few months late so it didn't actually make the plasma 6.6 at least i think it was already 6.2 at that time um so yeah there's like a massive merge request that like affected like almost every file And it also overhauled the UI a bit and like kind of got rid of all the Mycroft stuff. And like it was trying to kind of, yeah, reoriented itself as like a regular desktop environment. But there weren't any contribution since then really from that maintainer. I think, yeah, they used to work for blue systems. But I think they've moved on to, he's moved on to another company.

So it's not really his day job anymore. but yeah the shell worked like you could launch it you could that's a start at least and like there were a few there are a few people that weren't like

they didn't have KD developer accounts but they were trying to contribute to the project they're just really really interested in getting big screen off the ground right so they didn't have people interested but there was nobody there to merge stuff I'm guessing yeah yeah and the other plasma

developers, I don't think we're super comfortable merging things to a project they didn't really, they weren't really that involved in. Sure, sure. So there were a few merger request merged, but not too much. Yeah, there was this one specific developer, oh, he wasn't like, he doesn't make a KD developer account, but this person called user 8395 who's done a lot of investigation in the past few months into big screen and they were also involved in mobile so i was kind of watching him work on it and i was thinking yeah this project might need some help um so that along with one of my other friends

who also started working on big screen um yeah kind of joined in after that so the port was there to shoot six but like where how how how Okay, there's sort of a couple of directions we can go with this. Like, you, let's start, I guess, UI-wise. Like, UI-wise, it seemed like it was basically the port was there, but design work kind of wasn't yet. It was like, we got it working, it's basically using desktop elements forced into a big screen kind of look, or big screen kind of layout,

but not necessarily designed with, that sort of environment in mind. Yeah, specifically talking about the UI. The thing is we don't have a framework for like making TV widgets. So most of the stuff in big screen was kind of created from scratch. So like we have, yeah, we do have plasma desktop and elements so you can kind of draw panel backgrounds and shadows and things like that

and that's what the original port had. um but yeah like i noticed that we actually had a designer who worked on big screen mockups a few years ago and those like kind of inspired me to copy that and pour it over and then um i decided to try to kind to make like a baseline like a small framework for making controls so that we can standardize the way that we're making like settings modules and apps and things like that But yeah, like for example, if you're making a desktop app right now for K-D- or for Plasma desktop or Plasma Mobile, we have Kiroami, we have all the cute styling, we have like a well-thought-out way of making, of aligning controls of, you know, this is a page, you know, page action, you

have this is how you lay out the page and things like that. We don't really have that for big screen. So like I can see it as like a single developer who works on the shell. um it's overwhelming you kind of have to work on making things work but then you also have to work on the UI and making things consistent it's definitely not easy to do so so what's like available net like so putting big screen aside just a moment if you're developing a application with plasma in mind is and you want it to say be an application that works on desktop and on mobile like how does that currently work and then how would you bring big screen into that Yeah, uh, so currently, if we're talking about specifically making like a kirogami

Yeah, yeah, yeah, um, because you can still make cute widgets apps, which is kind of the traditional, like dolphin and, um, console are still using that, but yeah, there's that issue with plasma where there's like three or four different ways to make interfaces, which yeah, yeah, which is, creates like a themey. I know there's like, yeah, I know there's like, yeah, I know there's like, efforts to sort of unify the theming. We'll see where those go. Hopefully it's not like, hey, we have 87 standards. We made a standard to unify the standards. Now we have 88 standards. Yeah, it's not an easy problem. And there's some work in that direction.

That's, I guess, what I can say. But yeah, that's a really big topic. But, yeah, specifically talk about kind of the, intended way nowadays to make new apps, which is cute, quick, and kirogami. Kirogami handles a lot of the convergent stuff for you. I mean, in recent years, we've tried to make desktop apps and mobile apps not that different in terms of layouts. Like, nowadays, like, the page layout is exactly the same.

The toolbars are exactly the same. So, like, when you design a desktop app, you can kind of reasonably expect it to be 90% of the way there to be mobile friendly. There's maybe small things like instead of a sidebar, like on desktop, maybe you want to use a bar like on the bottom. You call it a navigation tab bar, but you're probably familiar with it on phone apps. They usually have like a bar on the bottom

with like a few different categories. You can kind of click. Right. Yeah. Yeah, like things like that, you can kind of insert yourself. But yeah, in general, It's not too hard to make things mobile friendly with KyriGyukuk. Now for TVs, I am a little bit, it's a lot harder to just make Kiroami and, yeah, to kind

adapt to Kirogami to TV apps because I feel like the layout of TV apps is generally like way, way, way different from mobile and desktop apps. First of all, you need a really kind of big commitment to keyboard navigation. Like on desktop, a lot of apps, if you want to go between views, you'd use tab to kind of switch your keyword focus between views. And then you also mix in like arrow navigation within a view to navigate, but like on a TV, we want the entire view to be navigable with just arrow keys. And it also has to be like, all the elements have to be like super big. pop-ups have to be nice and large buttons have to be large

the way you kind of lay out things you don't want a lot of things on the screen so that's why there's no concrete things we have in this direction yet for adding like and TV support to Kirogami but I was thinking of just

making a completely separate UI for TV apps for now that's the approach that I've seen other companies like Google and Apple both have like their own separate controls and everything for TV app. So I was thinking if they're going that direction and we have less resources, we might as well also try to not like fit TV stuff into like our current framework. And for now, like it's easier for us to just make our own controls and deal everything ourselves. Yeah. Right, especially as it's kind of, it exists as a project, but it's not really like a mainline thing.

So trying to fit it in there and try to get everything else to work with it. It's like, you've got to like deal with the other things that are already kind of like, desktop is the obviously main focus and then mobile is like a secondary focus. And then trying to bring another thing in there that like kind of doesn't really have a life at the moment. it's like kind of trying to be like revived like trying to get that into there would be very difficult yeah it would just be a lot significantly more work and maintenance-wise you need to make sure that if something gets added for like a for for if someone from plasma desktop wanted to add something to cure gum me that's for that's how we need to make sure that it works on mobile

and tv now so right right just a lot more overhead right um Yeah, but speaking about apps, I mean, a big screen originally had two, like, full desktop apps. We had, oh, we still have, like, a media player and a browser. Those were, like, originally, they're currently, they're still designed with just, like, completely custom controls. Like, they're literally drawing rectangles with colors and things like that to make all the different models and things. But, yeah, I mean, I think that a prototype. which is fine for now. The biggest thing is I don't think as a project right now

we should be focusing too much on apps. There's a lot of apps out there that do a really good job at what they do. So if we split our efforts to also develop media apps, I think that we won't do as good of a job as like, say, Cody and like all these things that are out there. Dedicated projects to doing that. They've been around for a long time,

have big communities behind them, yeah yeah so as like as a project right now i think we already have more than enough to do just from the perspective as a shell and as a way of watching apps and being like your primary way of interacting with the system setting up like shortcuts connecting to the internet bluetooth all these different things i think are already like plenty plenty for us to um to do yeah so the focus should be on like polishing that shell experience and then once that's done then you can kind of like branch out from there and try other things but there are already like a lot of applications that work in this context anyway so rather than trying to build everything from the ground up and never get

like anything sort of done just focus on what you focus on the thing that's right in front of you basically. Yeah, yeah. Just concentrate on making the shell work well and everything on top or support everything else that runs on top. Right, right, right. I'm going to mention something else about the shell. Okay, I completely forgot, but yeah, we'll focus on the shell. Well, what is the state of the show? Like, where was it before and where is it now? Yeah, actually, uh, one thing I didn't mention in the blog post was big screen had a depend, or big screen before that was dependent on X-11. Oh, okay. They had a wayland session there and like things technically worked, but that wasn't

the primary target. They actually stayed on X-11. Well, this was an issue with Plasma desktop as well, where it had like a dependency on X-11, and that only got removed, I think, fairly recently. I believe when Fedora first wanted to drop the X-11 session, I don't think you actually could build the Wayland session without the X-11 side. I think that's fairly recent. Yeah. Like, beyond just being a dependency, like, there were some features that were lacking on the Wayland.

session. Right, right. Compared to the X-11 session. And they were stuck on X-11, I believe, specifically because of the keyboard situation. Like, so when you go on a tech, when you enter a text field on a TV, you want to make sure like a keyboard pops up, right?

Right, right, right. And so, like, some of the big, the apps that we made by KD4 TVs, they had a keyboard built into the app. But if you're using it elsewhere, you need like a system keyboard to kind of pop up and there wasn't a thing that we really had for Oh wait so the keyboard was kind of like

application dependent It was fine if it was application dependent on Wayland because then we didn't need to deal with the keyboard at a system level But if an app has a text like context But it didn't have the keyboard shipped in the app our system need to pop up a keyboard and there was one for X11 by cute I believe they used cute virtual keyboard

and had keyboard navigation I think the main thing is like we have Mali for mobile or for Plaza Mobile that is that's for way like but have navigation for like a TIE remote that's kind of their major barrier I believe for switching to Wend there might have been some other

the other reasons, but I think that was the main one. So that kind of brought me into also working on the Plasma Keyboard Project, which is like a kind of a rethink of how we're approaching virtual keyboards. And I was able to kind of just tag on an arrow navigation feature into it, so we could use on big screen. But yeah, I think the biggest thing is we were able to then kind of drop the x11 session and moves completely to wayland and you know if apps require x11 they can use x wayland but i think yeah focusing on two different platforms especially once we

work on some more compositor side things if we start making like quinscripts uh then we probably need to have a hard dependency on wayland would be extra work yeah that um i i i would assume it that 11 side was in there because it came from the plasma 5 side it was just barely poured it to plasma 6 and like so the it kind of had like that that long plight even though it was a fairly new project it still had that long plasma 5 history that it was built off of and that was like taking you deep back into you know the whalen session barely being supported x11 still being the main focus so it kind of makes sense why that was there at the time um But for the longevity of the project, obviously getting rid of that made the most sense.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think it's just kind of like just because of the legacy of the project. It started from X-11, but I mean, like on Plaza Mobile, for example, we've, for many years, we've never had an X-11 session. So it's been easier for us to just focus on Wayland and make that, like, work for all use cases. We don't need to worry about having two different platforms to target. And in general, like coding for it, actually, it's just, it's just, things make a lot more sense. It's a much more, like reading the documentation for it, I feel like things are kind of more

standard, ever approaching different things like plausible. We have a way of raising windows over the lock screen, for example, if you have a call, that's like something we're able to add through Wayland pretty easily but with like permissions and stuff like that anyway I do want to get into Plasma mobile later on I know

it's better I think that's all the feature exists right right right so as you've been going through this process did you run into any sort of unexpected issues like the obvious visual ones

like hey this really doesn't look like something made for a TV, things like that. But was there anything that you just didn't even realize was an issue initially? In terms of developing big screen. One thing was

looking through the settings. That ended up being the bulk of the work was redoing. I ended up rewriting a lot of the settings modules. Yeah, looking at what it originally looked like, I can see why. Yeah, there's a different vision in terms of the way you, well, UI-wise, how you lay it out.

Right, right, right. But some of the settings were also kind of broken, especially the display one. We have a framework now. Actually, I don't totally remember exactly how it did it, but I wasn't able to get it working at all, so I had to rewrite some of the settings modules to use, like, the way we would approach it on desktop, just use our standard frameworks for doing that. So yes, display specifically, shortcuts handling.

That was a bit hard to look through because there was a lot going on. And I realized they didn't have support for a back button, really in the shell. Right. They relied on like, all the UI elements had like a back button to kind of close out like dialogues and to close out of app windows and things like that.

But yeah, looking around doing some research at other platforms, everyone kind of has back buttons on their TV remotes and they don't expect you to put back buttons in the UI. So I had to, I kind of made a shift to doing that and then adding support for mapping a back button to that shortcut. That was also a big task. But, yeah, I was overall just kind of trying it on my TV, seeing what kind of works if it doesn't work going back in. doing more research and writing code for it, then going back. It's kind of an iterative process. You mentioned a couple of times, like, looking at other platforms. So, like, what, how much research did you do into these other platforms and what were you

trying to take from them? Yeah, so I think especially Google for their Android, is Android TV or Google TV? I think it's Google TV now, but they have the whole web page. page on how you design TV apps and I'm sure they've spent money doing some user research into that like what kind of yeah you know they they've probably researched ways or and they also have some rationale on like their design pages on why you should design certain controls in that way right so yeah I kind of read those pages and took that into account when I worked on,

especially like the control framework we have now for settings. That's based on kind of, somewhat based on those principles. I also took some stuff from our like designer's mockups. But yeah. Yeah, the improved settings menu is like, it, like, yeah, it's very clearly improved. It's very clear that like, it looks really good

like that's it how does they any better but like the new settings look really good and like clearly you can like you can very much still see that like desktop plasma

inspiration like it looks like it is plasma it looks like it fits into that sort of that ecosystem but it's like adjusted to fit to that sort of big screen environment right like the it's still supposed to look and feel like plasma that's clearly what you're going for here but in a way that makes a lot more sense like on a tv yeah we definitely kind of like

i really wanted to make sure that it seems still you know plasma i didn't want to completely go off in a different direction so um yeah but it's good good to hear that that kind of worked out. We can kind of take that approach to some of our TV apps, which look, I think, I've been quite different. But, yeah. Yeah, I think that's going in a good direction right now. So what do you want to do with the project?

Yeah, so originally I didn't intend on, like, I intended, like, I kind of wanted to go in and kind of get the project started, and that's why I kind of worked on it for, like, about a week or two. And then I went back to doing Plasma mobile stuff. But especially after that I posted that blog post, a lot of people have been expressing interest in our Matrix channel. Okay. A lot of people have been trying it out for sure. I wasn't ready for that. We have Katie, I didn't put this on my blog post, but we have Katie neon images that.

You can just install and you can just use in development. But so there's a lot of people trying it out and yeah, I was kind of inspired to continue doing a bit of work for it. Unfortunately, I have too many things that I'm working on at the same time. So I can't like solely dedicate all my focus on that, but I've been trying to also help review MRs that have been created against a project and making sure it kind of fits with the sky. with the scope, what it is right now. I do want to make sure that the project or the repositories get packaged, or they're part of the Plaza 6.5 release. So specifically we have the...

When is that scheduled for at this point? I think it's October. Okay. October, September is probably the freeze. So I haven't even sent out the proper email. and stuff for getting this or getting the process started but like it's gone through the original kd review and like we have like a whole process for getting into plasma it's out there that before um so i mean it was just dropped in plasma 6 so hopefully it's not too crazy i mean the shell and everything

i think works the only thing is the keyboard is not ready because plasma keyboard is not a finished or not a release thing either right um that might be able to be really released as part of Plasma 6.5. Most of my work the past few weeks have been on the keyboard. I guess that's kind of part of big screen, but also part of like desktop and mobile. You do eventually want to switch over to that. But yeah, I think beyond keyboard or input methods,

controller support, making sure the TV remote support is all good. And there's some settings modules that are in development. We have a contributor working on adding Bluetooth settings. And there's also been some other people trying to put big screen on different things that I originally intended. There's some in the Matrix channel that put it on like a handheld. I was going to say, I don't know how many how many comments I saw. I was like, hey, I want to put this on my steam deck. What if I put it on my steam deck? Like, I guess you could do that, yes.

Not entirely what it's, what the original intention was. But I guess you could do that. Yeah, like originally, like in my head, I thought Plasma Mobile would probably be a better fit for those platforms because like the devices themselves are like these battery powered devices you kind of move around with and you expect to have like a lot of different features more similar to a phone than a TV. But I do realize that like there's a big focus on keyboard navigation and simplicity. And like the big screen UI looks a lot more similar to like Steam's big picture mode,

I feel. So I've like I've done a few tweaks to try to make it work better on smaller devices. I'm not super sure exactly, like, I don't have one of these, so I'm not super sure exactly what people are doing on them or how they're using it and what kind of problems they have. So I'm open to any feedback in that regard. But like I think, I think at least not making the experience worse for those devices could be definitely a goal. You know, if there's any tweaks that we can do to make the experience better, that's definitely something that's within the scope, I think, big screen. Yeah, even if it's an unexpected use case for it, if it kind of aligns with it, there's kind of no reason, like, if it seems to fit, right, and it's not getting in the way

of it being big screen, like, I think that, I think it's cool, right? I think it's cool when people take software like this and, you know, experiment with it. And again, it does fit with that steam, that steam big picture thing or big, yeah, big, yeah that's big picture this is big screen I think I don't know how many times in the video I mixed up the two that the big picture

yeah I wonder if that was an inspiration for the name I don't know where big screen came from like the name itself but yeah honestly it's probably just the fact that it's plasma on a big screen that's it's probably just engineer naming yeah my friend made the joke that just like we should rename plasma little to plasma small screen

and then we have desktop plasma mid screen kind of unifier naming or branding yeah i'll run that by there's some people i'll send uh i'll send uh nate email see how he feels about that yeah i'd be interested to hear this is a joke for anyone doesn't realize it Oh, no, but I think the whole project, like, as an idea is cool. And I do like the idea of, like, as I mentioned, like, back in the intro, there have been attempts at making Linux desktops around smart TVs in the past. If you go all the way back to the Unity project, one of the things they wanted to do, the idea of Unity was to unify the experience,

across desktop, across mobile, they had, they actually, they had a Kickstarter for that. It was, no, sorry, Indigo-Go-go? One of the two. It was one of the most, I think it was the most successful at time, actually, with how much they raised. I want to say, they had a Kickstarter for Unity? Sorry? Or, they had a Kickstarter for, like, No, they had a Kickstarter for the Ubuntu Edge. Do you not know about the Ubuntu? Oh, yes. I am somewhat familiar with that. Okay, okay. I thought I got, okay. Sorry, I now actually have to teach people at the I would do edge phone. I'm glad that you know about it, but this phone was just basically, yeah, it was a phone in 20, Indiegogo.

So what did they raise for it? Let me just double check. It was some crazy number. 20 million. Yeah, he's 20 million Australian dollars. I think it was like 15 USD. And it was a crazy phone. It had like crazy spec.

They were promising specs that were great than the iPhone. It was like Kickstarter Indiegogo sort of specs, where it's like, are these going to be real specs? We'll see about that. But my point, anyway, is that they had this plan of building a desktop across all of these different platforms. One of those platforms was going to be smart TVs. And this was like, it was still early days in that smart TV market.

It was like Apple TV and I think it was I think it was Android TV I don't know what They've rebranded it like three times Whatever Google was at the time Those were like established But it was still fairly early on where They didn't have like complete market dominance

Where if you want to buy a TV now It's gonna be a smart TV Like you it's really hard to buy TVs that are not smart TVs at this point It's annoying I don't want to deal with them I just want to if I want a smart TV I'll plug a computer and tool or like a some fire stick or something um but it is cool to see that there is like some

interest in still having something like this even though it kind of like died off for a really long time the the idea of home theater pieces never died off and that's still even if you're not going to be running it like directly on the tv with like the microth stuff from before having it as a home theater PC interface I think that Like, that already is really cool. Yeah, yeah. I mean, like, the mainstream desktop environments haven't really looked into TV stuff as much.

I guess Plasma big screen has kind of been the only effort on that I'm aware of. But projects like Cody that have, like, their own Linux distributors, Libra Elic, I think. There's some Linux distribution that ships with, like, that's kind of meant for this. Like, you know, there's work on that in overall in the ecosystem, right? So yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So I don't think we're like doing anything trailblazing, completely new, but having it at the approach that we're doing at, like having it as like an easily installable desktop environment that's, have like a lot of the stuff that we have on plasma desktop.

There's even a feature that one of my friends implemented that allows you to do. to switch from Plasma desktop to Plasma big screen directly. You don't have to log out. Okay. I just switch for you like while you're in Plasma desktop. Things like that. Like the sort of integration we can have in Plasma, I think, gives a lot of potential to the project. Yeah. Like...

I think that... Sorry, I just want to sidetrack there. That feature actually is really cool. that one I actually could see a lot of like interesting uses for like going back to the whole idea of running it on um on like a steam deck so I could imagine so you know how um there's been this idea of like you know carryable computing you would take your phone or your whatever sort of computing device you have you'd use it on the go and then you dock it and then you use it on like a monitor like I could imagine somebody taking something like a steam deck and then using the big picture mode as like the thing they use on like on the go when they're just like using the device when they're moving and then they swap over to desktop mode and then plug a monitor into it and then use it like that. Yeah, it's something that we've looked into a lot on Linux mobile. I think the name most people use there is convergence. So yeah, yeah. You have a phone that's also like, you plug it in and it just like becomes a desktop with like the screen. It's something we haven't fully accomplished on Plasma mobile, unfortunately, despite our efforts.

It's a bit, yeah, it's not super easy because we have all these different shelves. But yeah, I think that approach, because we have this, we have some, we have some new tech that we've implemented mobile and big screen to switch the plasma environment. So, yeah, being able to do that from desktop, I can see people. people like a steam deck or one of those other handhelds definitely making use of um like it's basically it's basically like this app like you open krunner or you're the kickoff and just search big screen and you click it and then it just swaps your question and keeps like the apps that you're currently running uh i think i think there's a lot of potential there um we could even make use of like activities for example you can store the desktop stuff in one activity or all the apps

that you're running in desktop on one activity and then when you switch to um big screen maybe a switch to a different activity i don't know there's there's some ideas we might we need to do some design but yeah there's a lot of potential so let's just say you weren't busy with like tons of other things and you you just had as much time as you wanted to work on this project What would you really love to do with it if you just could spend as much time as you needed on it? Yeah. There's a lot of different things. I think one thing is we don't have a good app distribution or way of getting apps.

Like we have Discover, but Discover is a desktop app. I think for sure I want to make some sort of TV interface to get apps from places like FlatHub or the distributions package manager. Otherwise, I think we could definitely do some work on the home screen as well. Right now it's like this TV, it's this really basic launcher that's just kind of like, it's not even a grid, it's like four rows of different app types and then you kind of just select it and you have to keep pressing right, right, right, right, right. If there's an app all the way down the list, we could do some research into maybe looking into

ways we can get media from different apps and maybe display it. Like if the Cody, if we can fetch like some previews from movies from Cody, you can kind of put it on the home screen. It's, that would definitely need a lot of work investigating what to put. If there's people that are kind of using it more as a console, maybe you can have a mode to, like a game launcher actually built in. It integrates with Steam and other game launchers. other game launchers to have like a tight integration to basically allow you to really get like a console experience, right?

There's definitely like I wouldn't say any of these things are like impossible They just need someone to find them So yeah, if I had time, I think those are things that I could definitely sit down for like a whole month Working on I don't have the time right now, so It's making it making making it in a usable state that I think most people will be able to enjoy, it's already a good enough goal. So if there's anybody who's interested in a side project, there are some ideas for you.

Yeah, for sure. Especially for a university student, because I find a lot of people looking for, I mean, like, when I first started conjuring KV, I was just about to start university. I was in first, about to start first year. and I think like working on open source projects especially like this where you can kind of take ownership of where it's such a big feature it's good like job experience

it's also really good for learning so you know if you have time join the Matrix channel and you can express your interest but like even if you yes obviously doing like big features are cool but even if you're someone who's just interested in like getting like just sort of getting your feet wet like trying it out a bit seeing what you can do making like little patches like

there's nothing wrong with just starting small and then working working your way out from there yeah yeah um yeah like for sure that's how you have to kind of start with contributions too right when you get used to the code base um fixing bugs for sure we have a lot of small things to fix So, yeah, like, I definitely encourage you, even if it's not specifically related to the shell. The shell could be definitely a bit hard to work with, but like at KDE, we have, beyond doing shell work, you have apps, fixing small bugs and apps, I think would definitely be good experience. Fair enough. The nice thing about a project that's still, like, that's not like hyper-polished, is it's usually relatively easy to see where you can get involved. Like, whenever you see something like, something massive, like, you know, the Plasma 6 desktop, and it looks really polished, and it's, like, it's kind of hard to note, which is a good thing, it's hard to notice obvious bugs with it.

it can be hard to work out sort of where to, where to get involved with that. Right? Like, if you look at a, if you look at something that's still, like, let's take the cosmic desktop, for example, it's still in alpha. There are still obvious bugs, but there are things that are obviously missing. And it's a lot easier to sort of work out where you can add value to that when you know that it's not, like, in a really good state yet. Yeah, yeah.

I think that's one of the reasons why I joined Plaza Mobile too. Like I want to contribute somewhere in KDE, but like it seemed you can, first of all, you also get a lot of satisfaction for making something. You're able to work on a lot of things that users will be like to see right off the bat. Right. Like really big impactful features. Right. So I think there's a really good opportunity when like a project is small. and you can definitely influence a lot, like, a lot of the project's direction.

And yeah, like, and you can even become the maintainer for that part of the shell or whatever project you've worked on. So, yeah, right now is a good opportunity. So I guess we can talk a bit about Plasma Mobile then, because I, I, I actually haven't used Plasma Mobile myself. I've used a bit of, like, the, what is, what is Gnomes one called? Is it, it's not Gnomeo? No, is it called Gnomeo? Or Fosh.

My, yeah, no, it was Fosh. It's the, yeah, it's, yeah, it was Fosh. I was sent to a Linux phone a while back. So I don't have a direct experience with Plasma Mobile, but everything I've seen of it, it looks like it's in a pretty good state. But I guess you would have a much better, very, very, biased opinion on the state of opinion. Yeah, it's a tough

project because like actually when I started work on big screen things just seemed a lot simpler to approach because you know with it, it's a computer, right? We don't have to usually nowadays you develop for like X86

and just well yeah if you don't have like mobile devices have so many different things that can go wrong. Right, right, right. We also care a lot about different things like sleep and battery life. Oh, okay, we care about battery life on desktop too, but like there's a lot of places where things can go wrong. So Plaza Mobile right now, in theory, it works pretty well. Sometimes we have problems with certain devices.

It could be a distro issue. It could be the way that we're interacting with like the device. drivers, like the people have post-market OS who, for context, they work on a distribution that's for mobile devices. And they have, they compile like the kernel, they have all the patches that are necessary. There's like a lot of different things that go on in the project. So it's a very, very unique distribution.

But they've done like really good work on trying to port to all these different phones. These, you know, formerly Android phones now, you know, They're trying to put Linux, like a full desktop Linux on it. They've done good work, and we've had a lot of collaboration with them. But like right now, I would say that we still have a lot of work to do. Yeah, only certain phones even have calling. And sometimes, like we're missing things like voice over LTE, which is now a requirement for calling in many places. So we have sometimes some problems with sleep.

some devices interact weirdly with the way that we're doing sleep, I think. I don't totally know about the situation about that. But yeah, I think most of the issues are just we have to deal with hard. Not only do we have to deal with the shell and making stuff work for like a phone. We also have to deal with the layer below getting the actual our base working and dealing above. We have to also deal with apps. So it's like, like, especially a few years ago when I first started the project, we were dealing with a pine phone, going up and down the stack constantly was like a really, it split my attention a lot. So progress has been kind of slow in general, I think, slower than I would have liked.

So what was it that got you sort of interested in working on it? Yeah, I guess I was bored during the pandemic. Fair enough. Well, I've wanted to do open source contributions for a long time. And at the time, the Libram 5 was making a lot of news. Yeah, the Libram 5 and the Pinephone, I think, was just announced. And they, I don't know, like both of them had some sort of talks with KDE initially about using Plasimble Mobile. And so I kind of wanted to jump in.

And I looked at it and I tried Plosomable on a VM. And I thought there's like some things I want to try. working on, like maybe some of the apps. So the first thing I did was work on the clock app in Plasma Mobile that now is convergence. It was also on Plasma desktop. But, yeah, I worked on some app development. The maintainers at the time, like Bouchon's still active, but he was like the key driver for Plasma Mobile for like, especially like the first seven years of its existence from like 2015. He helped me get kind of on board onto. to KDE and how to contribute, how things work in general.

And just over time, I kind of just, I mean, there wasn't like an announcement or anything. I just over time, just got more and more responsibilities in working on things. And so I started like, I was working on an app. And then there were some things I wanted to, like I want to improve kirogami, right? Because we were missing a lot of controls from mobile.

So then I started working kirogami. And I worked on other frameworks that are UI related. Then I realized that now that I kind of know Q'd I couldn't work on some things in the shells. Then I worked on the lock screen. And then I started working on home screen. And then at some point, like Bouchon moved on to, he had a like a job change.

And so he was a lot less active in plausible development. At that point, like I already had the Kiti developer access to be able to review. request and things I kind of took over development of the shell yeah so is you got to go your you've kind of your hand a bit in everything then at least over the time you've been in there yeah yeah like no you know like I worked within Katie but I was also like at the time we collaborated a lot with Minjaro because the pine or Pine 64 I think in 2020 or 2021, they announced their KD edition of the Pine Phone that would ship with Minjaro

with Plasma Mobile. And then eventually, like, when they stopped doing the different editions of the Pine Phone and they just sold the Pine Phone, they just shipped that software. I think like 50% of my time was just investigating why things broke again. On and off and on and off. I wasn't working on the Pine Phone and Minjaro. So it was kind of a tough time at that time because, yeah, I couldn't really spend a lot of time working on the shell. It's just like debugging and debugging and debugging.

There's always something changing somewhere. So it was definitely hard for me, I think. But I don't know, over time things stabilized. Like our support for, I think because of plausible, our support for in plasma, our support for virtual keyboards has gotten a lot better. so there's like a lot of different things that have improved over time for us to now like the past two years i think i've been pretty good for stability um we've generally not really encountered nearly as many regressions as before and so i think the project's on a pretty good trajectory now

Linux like Linux desktops on phones has always been like a very interesting thing to me whether it be fosh Gnome mobile plasma mobile any of this stuff because like the main focus of the mobile space it's it's Android and it's iOS and there are like Android ROMs that exist but then there's this is like little little thing off to the side that some people are like trying to try to like

create this this Linux phone thing and I think it's neat that it's like it's this sort of trying to create some sort of there that even though the range of devices that can be supported just because drivers and all this fun stuff and then the extra fun part so you're talking about how some phones don't support like calls you have another problem where some some sim providers have a device to support a device lists like a voter phone yeah the so when I tried to use the Linux phone I I couldn't, because they have a specific list of devices that the SIM card will work in, and nothing else. Yeah, it's just there's so many hurdles. I think it makes it quite tough.

The approach, it's just the approach that a lot of Linux mold and Post-Markovests taking is something called, it's called mainlining. we try to use like an upstream we try to use like the latest Linux kernel and then we if there are things that aren't supported which almost most definitely there is then they add patches onto that kernel and it's they try to keep it up to date but the problem is it's it's just like for every device we have to port port to and beyond like carriers not supporting things we also also have to like post-market OS, the contributors always have to figure out for every new SOC, they need to figure out like getting camera drivers, getting motor drivers, getting all that stuff. Right.

There's another approach that like Ubuntu Touch and Sailfish OS, and I think the droidian project is taken, is something called Holium, where you use the original kernel that Android uses, which, already has like all the drivers for everything because Android you know like the when the phone was running Android it already had support for all these things right right right right take out the the Android part use the same kernel but then we put like Linux you know our we put our Linux desktop stack onto that and generally you could expect to have yeah all the drivers and everything are there but it's just usually you're running a kernel that could be ridiculously old and you'll encounter all sorts of weird hacks and things to get things working. So, you know, there's like upsides and downsides to both approaches.

Whether which one is better. I mean, for sure, the mainlining one that Postmarkovus is cleaner. But, like, you've seen, I think, more results right now. Or like, like a bunch of touch has a way more supported devices. So it's kind of a tradeoff. Right, right. And I'll often hear people discuss the idea that like, oh, if it's using Hallium, is it really a Linux phone? Like, because you are effectively just like taking what Android is doing and then just un-androiding it.

So it's like, yes, but like it's, when you know, when you have a device that like you can actually write drivers for has for, like, you know, you take a device like the pine phone, for example, like, you know, this is going to be, it's intentionally being. supported with Linux. Like, it's, it's something where you don't kind of just have to, like, hack it to make it so it works. It's, like, a truly, like, Linux device. Like, I get why, I get why there's, like, some criticism there, but I still think both approaches are cool, right? Like, there are certainly issues running an ancient kernel,

but at the end of the day, you have a working phone. but it's so I think it's cooler to be at the main lining the main lining is definitely much

cooler yeah it's hard it's because holium I think the thing is you still have Android running I believe in it

I don't know the exact architecture but I believe you have Android running in a container and all the integration is basically you bridge

Linux to like you add patches to modemander all these all these like regular Linux desktop projects, you add tons of patches to them, to then communicating to this Android container.

It's extremely hacky and like, it's like once you get it working, you can kind of expect it to keep working, but like for new devices, I don't know. I mean, I'm not super involved in kind of the low-level stuff, so I luckily don't have to do with that. But, yeah, it's interesting to see those sort of work that other people are doing in that space. I mean, for us, like, speaking specifically about the Pinephone. I think the main thing that kind of hindered us originally with the pipeline is just it runs like a super old SOC with the Maui 400 I believe it's like 15 years old or older and I think the one one big problem is cute it's just like just our underlying framework makes use of a lot of graphics acceleration things.

So we expect the GPU to be able to support OpenGL and be able to interpret all of our, like, all the UI and stuff is done, graphics accelerated. And at the time, like, we had Fosh come out with a GTK3, and their thing wasn't graphics accelerated. And I honestly found that their shell performed a lot better than ours. We always had problems with that. I mean, like, plasma itself has a lot more animation. and things like that. But that's just because we have graphics acceleration, right? We use the GPU to do things.

So, and in theory on, like, newer computers, that could be a lot more power efficient. The GPU is meant to do graphics, but not the CPU. On the pine phone, it supported, like, this embedded version of OpenGL, like OpenGEL, EES 2.0, which Q doesn't actually technically support by default. You have to add, like, a compiled like. And I don't know how well they supported it because, yeah, we just had a lot of problems.

Sometimes we'd have like the screen would turn black for some reason. And it's just like, oh, the people upstream in, like some of the plasma developers were kind of like Quinn, which is the compositor, right? And they sometimes have to do some of their own OpenGL calls. And they didn't really expect to necessarily be using OpenGL, the S2.0, which has a very restricted like set of functions. So sometimes then they add something that's not supported and then what happens is on the pine film, the screen just goes black. So it was kind of tricky to work with this sort of stack. So in recent years, we've actually kind of moved or shifted our focus away from the pine film. It still works, luckily, all the support still works, but I will say the performance in the past few years has suffered when we switched to Plasma 6.

Like Q'd also had a really big change with the way that they're rendering graphics. I think it might have had an effect on the Pine Phones performance. So I don't know. We just don't have the resources to really look into it that much. And I think most users have gotten a much better experience with some of the other devices that we're targeting now. What are the mainly supported things now? What is like the main focus? Yeah, so like I personally have been testing with the Pixel 3A and the One Plus

as well as a bunch of tablets and like Chromebooks and things like that. I think on a tablet, some people actually would enjoy Plaza Mobile if they're trying to use as like a media consumption device. So yeah, those two devices

are the ones I have. There's also, I believe there's the fair phone four and five and three. I think they're all supported. It's not really available in North America. But I've heard good things about it.

And then there's like a whole host of other phones that work well with post-market OS. So, I mean, if it works well with post-market OS, it should work well as plausible mobile. Right, right. Yeah. So what is your main focus in the project at this point? Yeah. So the past year, we've actually had a lot of interest from new contributors. actually a lot of the time nowadays I'm just spending reviewing merger

requests testing them reviewing testing them review so you know here and there I'm doing lots of refactoring making the code a lot cleaner what was it Plasma 6.5 we've already had a lot of work from people adding there's one contributor that added wageroid support natively into the shell so so for context way droids a it's like a way of running Android in a container and then allowing you to run Android apps or make it look native in the system but you know Android's in a container somewhere so yeah it's important for us to have some sort of Android app integration and yeah he's been working on that we have like some integration in the shell to make it to be able to manage it from like a GUI rather than from like a terminal that's a really big feature otherwise I've been trying to improve performance like our next update the lock screen will load a lot faster it's a very technical reason but

it'll load a lot faster no I do if you want to get into that go right into it yeah the main reason was like we had we we we've when we load the lock screen the quick settings panel was also loaded so we had two copies of the settings panel in the shell and also in the line.

And that was a new factor in it being slow. So we now use, we raise the panel from the desk, or from the logged in shell over the lock screen when you lock the screen. Right. And yeah, so that's, that works now. I'm trying to think of some of the big things. Because like, sometimes I'm reviewing too many merger

because I completely forget what I. sort of like the big picture things. I should refer back to like the plan but like I recently had a blog post I think last month that details all the stuff we did last over the past year on the Plaza Mobile blog that

should have some of the stuff we've recently done yeah I can't really think of all the big things off the top of my head let me quickly just check the merge request list okay right more wage right stuff

Oh, keyboard navigation We're trying to add that to the home screen Because some people want to use on the steam deck I've had some interest Or there's been this one person that's been opening a lot of issues Related to the steam deck Okay Like they run it

I think they run it They run plausible and open Sousa on the steam deck Yeah, yeah, I just, yeah, I just, I've never, I know you talked about this a bit earlier, but I'd never even considered running Plesma Mobile on, on that, but I guess it is kind of like a tablet with a controller attached to it. Yeah, like the home screen is designed to be also for tablets. It's kind of like an iPad interface, I guess, right? It's an app launcher with you can pin things to the home

and you can add widgets and things like that. So like I can see it definitely being used on the, that's why I was originally like my initial reaction to people using big screen on handhelds is, yeah, you can use POS Mobile and we have support for all the integration for all the sorts of system level things. For example, big screen doesn't have. have notifications. Plasma does have good notification support. So yeah. Okay. Okay.

That's actually, yeah, that's fair. Yeah. Oh, another big thing is we've improved the way, like, in the past Plasma mobile and Plasma desktop would conflict if they were installed in the same system because they shared one of the same configs. Plasma 6.4, we finally separated them out. and this work was also important for big screen too because big screen also had that issue conflict in the plaza on desktop so now all the shells are kind of all separated they have their own configs

so we don't have any interaction between them that's like that seems like an issue that it seems like one of those things that like obviously should have been separated from the start do you know of

like the historical reason why it was like that? Yeah, it's just because, like, Plasma Mobile and Plasma on Big Screen were designed to be installed on, like, an embedded device. So you weren't expected to have desktop. It was supposed to be this, it wasn't supposed to be treated as like an environment, a desktop environment you can install from the package manager, right? Be something, get pre-installed on a device. And what was expected was that you shipped config files on the system that sets certain things

certain plasma settings, like for Quinn, for the compositor to do. Like, for example, all having all the app windows be maximized without any, like the X button and stuff like that, like, those are just options for our compositor. So, yeah, now we have it all separated out. So if you change stuff on desktop, shouldn't affect the other shells. And I think this also opens up to allowing a lot more people to trying it out, right? But people using Linux like to tinker.

So allowing them to install as a regular desktop environment, I think opens us up to a lot more users. Yeah. Right. I completely forgotten. No, the main work I've done for Plasma mobile recently was the keyboard. I've been working on Plasma keyboard. So it affects both big screen and mobile. So what is the deal with this project?

So what is Plasma Mobile currently using for a keyboarded? What is this thing then? Yeah, we've been using Malit keyboard for ever. I think Malik keyboard was, I think it was sponsored by Nokia. I'm not super sure. It was starting in 2010 for whatever Linux mobile stuff was going on at the time. And then it was adopted by a Bantu Touch by Canonical. But the thing is, it was also adopted by Sailfish OS, but they both forked it. So the project has kind of remained,

but they all kind of forked the keyboard and made it go in their own direction. Right. And so the keyboard project itself has been pretty dead for like ever. I mean, we, when we, when we, When Plasma will kind of start taking off in 2020, we did start contributing to Malit and then it was also adopted for Plasma desktop as kind of the intended way you use or intended virtual keyboard, like the reference virtual keyboard, we'd use for the shell. And it works fine, I think, for what, like, what you'd expect on a phone. You input text, there's, oh, okay. We input text, but like... That's a good start, the keyboard you input text, okay. So we're at the baseline of the function of a keyboard. Yeah, you can input text, but, like, Malit,

I don't know if text prediction ever worked. We've had problems where it's extremely buggy, where if you click like a suggestion, the cursor would start, like, shifting all over the place. I don't know, there's a lot of bugs with Malit with anything beyond just inputting text. And I've had trouble trying to, like, oh, I don't want to phrase this in a poor way, but it's just I've had some trouble trying to get things into Malit. Even trying to get a new release of Malit, the last release of Malate keyboard was in 2022.

And I've had, like, there's been some patches since then, especially to remove the text. text prediction stuff because that's just completely broken right now. But I haven't been able to ping the maintainer to make a new release. In general, the codebase is quite big because it was meant to be a generic way of developing keyboards. There's like an internal maled framework and then there's a mallee keyboard. And we only use maled keyboard with maled framework. So it's just like we have all this code to make a generic input method that works.

works with like all sorts of backends right on a touch it doesn't use wayland uses like debus to do input so yeah supports all these backends but we don't make use of any of that so i'm seeing the latest release was 22 yeah yeah okay yeah so the project is a bit stagnant right now uh There's no one willing to work on it, and I don't have permission to the repo either. So last year, one of the plasma developers created Plasma keyboard as like a proof of concept, which wraps the cute virtual keyboard inside of a app, which then interacts over Wayland to be an input method for the compositor. So, like, Qute Virtual Keyboard is a, that is a, like, an enterprise product that is shipped by the QT company for embedded use cases for whatever people are using Q'd for, maybe like car interfaces or all sorts of embedded electronics. So we know it's a working framework that, like, it's a keyboard that has, like, really good text prediction, has good support for, like, other languages like Chinese and Japanese.

I was going to ask, what is the state of that with Malit? Is it functional? Yeah, so that all exists. It's just, it's very glitchy. Like, going along with the text prediction thing, when you type in Chinese, you kind of type English characters. Or Latin characters, but then there'd be this row on top that you would predict text. Yeah, that's quite broken.

so it's it works it's not the greatest I don't know about the other languages but I'm assuming if Chinese is like that Japanese is probably very similar yeah it's because like Mali originally was like Mali I mean first of all Mali was used by Bantu Touch and canonical originally they did I think they upstream some stuff for sure So, like, it was used in an enterprise product, but it's just over time, especially, like, the switch to Wayland and not having all sorts of, like, back-ins for input methods. I don't know why the text prediction is broken. Yeah, things like that over time, it's broken. And I have often heard people say, like, one of the things that they really like and prefer about Ganoa,

is there is like really good on-screen keyboard support over on that side and it with what you've said it kind of makes sense why on the plasma side it it isn't in as good of a state as you'd like to be and there's the they haven't had a release of the keyboard in three years so any changes that would have been added into that like it's just a bit of a mess yeah it's not a kd project is like for sure way outside the scope of Katie, though we're almost always the only consumer of it, which makes kind of a weird situation. So like Plasma keyboard, I think was a good, originally it was made to be like a different keyboard we can test with. It's good to have more ways of testing like the compositor's

support for virtual keyboards. But like recently I could recently I tried it and it was a little buggy. There were just some loose ends, and then I went and fixed it, and I realized this keyboard is actually, like, it works quite well. Like, internally cute virtual keyboard support for different locales. It's text prediction. It's all working. So that's why I put some work into improving support, into making it, like, something we can actually use in place and value. And I'm hoping that we can actually adopt it on the desktop, on mobile. And especially on big screen too. Yeah.

Right. And as you're saying, with it being like a part of Q, like, they're going to have industry partners who want this keyboard framework to work correctly. So, like, you can kind of expect that you're going to have something which is well supported, gets continually updated. And, you know, it's just generally a solid way to build a keyboard. and it's just a matter of building something on top of that that fits within plasma.

Yeah, so yeah, we get all the benefits of it being like virtual keyboard is not a new project. It's been around for quite a while. And yeah, we get the benefit of an actual company that supports this project. For sure, there's some challenges, though, because we're not building a keyboard from scratch so we don't have control over some things.

For example, for keyboard layouts, they're we can they made it for some reason really tied to locales so you can only have one keyboard layout per language I couldn't like

I wanted to add like a desktop keyboard layout right yeah yeah abundance things like that so short of asking them to create new things we can we have to work around that too

I guess in like a in the context of like a you know on like a car infotainment system like I I understand that limitation like in that context I get it but at the same time for other use cases like if like you know for mobile it's totally reasonable to want to have multiple layouts I it's it's an it's an annoying limitation and hopefully that can be adjusted.

Yeah, we'll try to work with Upstream to get what we want in. And I think generally we don't have to do a lot of anything super weird, right? For sure. For sure, the one thing we'll have to do that will be a big break from the Q Virtual Keyboard is probably to fork the layouts. So they have all their preset layouts for different languages, we'll probably have to fork it because there are some things that we might want to do on desktop that for example having like having like alternate keys on the top of the keyboard be like number keys just something they don't seem to want on virtual keyboard but something that probably we would want like on a phone like if you type the top of row it like the alternate key is like a number yeah yeah yeah right so you have that um that and implementing some wrong features like for example if one implement like swipe um swipe typing We definitely need some control over our layout. And the thing is, like, that goes other ways, right?

Like, if someone reports a bug regarding the keyboard, something like the layout is broken for some locale or the text input doesn't work. If we have the layouts, if we have control over our layouts, we can kind of fix it ourselves rather than wait for, like, the feedback of the Q company and all that. yeah but I think overall this approach will making a new input method from scratch is not easy and I don't have the confidence necessarily to do it myself and I don't think there's enough interest from other developers yet to actually spend all that time so yeah I think this is kind of the way to go yeah I think before you go all out and say let's just build something

scratch just a shift from something that's getting there's not getting releases to getting releases is like a it's an easier jump to make and then if you need to go further from there then at that point you can make that decision um but there's no point just going all the way when there might be something that already exists with you know cute's already being used for the rest of this stuff you might as well try out this thing and just hopefully it goes well and you're You said it was in like a relatively okay state already. Yeah, there's one merge request pending on Quinn to fix the keyboard visibility state. But like it's actually worked quite surprisingly well for me as as as as more like a phone keyboard. There's a lot of people that request on for desktop. they're requesting like a physical keyboard simulator so that's quite different like if you have you want like a tab key an old key control key you know you want to use a terminal with it that's a very very very different use case and i believe that's not a solved problem either on

known side however i did work on a proof of concept and i was actually able to get it working except it has a hard dependency on our compositor. So it could be something that we actually do implement. Like I see online and that's actually like the most requested feature for a virtual keyboard. I can see it like also for accessibility, right? You want to be able to interact with the keyboard without using like maybe like a few buttons. You want to be able to interact at the keyboard. and simulate like things on the system not just type directly into a text input or text

field so for sure I think it's something we'll eventually have to tackle whether it's something within plasma keyboard or it could be a separate project that just pops up a window with a like a fake keyboard in so something yeah there's just a lot of hard problems to solve yes for sure um like there's theming as well i think people eventually want theming for now yeah it's just uh yeah but um there's different in like actually let me just pull up the issue tracker i open a bunch of things i don't totally remember this well yeah you need i always need to make issues for myself otherwise i forget what i'm doing uh oh yes uh wait a global way of toggling whether to show the keyboard.

I think that's something people have requested for sure. Because there are, for example, X-11 apps do not. They don't. Because we use Wayland to show the keyboard. They just don't do that. Right. Because it's X-11. So sometimes people want to, yeah, pop up the keyboard themselves.

Yeah, those are just bugs that need to be fixed. yeah and then right yeah we implemented keyboard navigation for big screen and TV remotes and potentially for accessibility purposes yeah I will say it's

I didn't realize this when I first started contributing to plasma keyboard but apparently it was a kiddie goal to do input methods is like there's every few years they set like Kay Academy I think that's our conference they set a few goals that overall as an organization we should focus on

so one of them was trying to improve input methods and also accessibility around it so that could include like game controllers and key virtual virtual keyboards drawing tablets things like that so they the people that are involved in that have been pretty excited with the work so far um so hopefully we can get this release soon and allow people to use it try it out so it hasn't had like any sort of early releases yet it's just like still in that full dev mode uh there actually the other day i saw a distribution package it i don't know which

distribution it was, I think it's some, it's a built-on-cat, Aaron OS? I'm not super sure. I think it was air in OS. There's someone packaging plasma for one of the distributions. It might have been that one. I'm not, I don't totally remember. And the thing is on the AUR, by the way. Wait, sorry, Sylvie. It is on the A-UR, by the way. Plasma keyboard Git. Ah, okay. The A-U-R strikes again. Of course it is, yes. I guess you can try it. I mean, don't expect everything to necessarily be working.

I don't know how well it's packaged. I mean, it's like, you know, it's random people packaging it. Yeah. But, yeah, it's starting to, like, pop up everywhere. Yeah, the story with, like, that distribution was that they didn't want to package Malley keyboard. Because Malley keyboard requires Q2. It hasn't been parted to Q'd 6 yet. So they'd have to package all of Q'd 5.

I guess that's another problem that you have with Malit. Yeah, all the distributions that have Malit have Q'd 5, potentially just for that, just for that project. So, yeah, I mean, I think for most distributions, plasma keyboard will just be like this package that's just alongside the rest of the KDE packages, right? It'll be very easy to packages. If you have plasma package, there's no reason why. why you can't have thousand keyboard packages, just one more package, you don't need any other

external dependencies other than cute virtual keyboard, which you will have because you have cute on the system. So yeah, I think for, yeah, distributions will probably enjoy that. Otherwise, like, there's one of the plasma developers actually packaged it as a as a flat pack. I don't really know how that works. Okay. You can apparently just install it up as a flap and it'll just show up. We have a manifest and everything. I don't know if it's actually built on any, or push to any repo. I haven't tried it myself, but that probably... It's in the manifest is in... Okay. Sure. Yeah, it's in the repo. I don't know if it's published anywhere, but you can build it and you can install it. Yeah.

If it actually works like that, that could be an interesting way to package parts of the show. But that's beyond me. At the same person also tried packaging. He created the Plasma Keyboard Project. He actually apparently got Plasma big screen working in a flat pack, which is interesting. I haven't tried myself either, but I don't know. There's some experiments going on with FlapHacks, and I mean, there's KD.E. Linux going on with, which will have, like, everything immutable and stuff, so it might be involved with that. But, yeah, kind of exciting. That is a different way of doing it.

Did, I saw a bunch of people just, like, posting the link to KD. Linux. Did that just have a release or something? Or did people just realize it exists? the website just got published i think that makes sense it's still in development there's no there's no official releases okay there's a kind of rolling on master you know so you can try it out but don't expect

it to be like or don't definitely don't put like your your main files on it unless you're like a kd developer who knows what they're doing yeah because i saw like a you know the lytics subreddit and a bunch of other subreditors all post a link to it So I wasn't sure what was going on. Because I remember I did make a video on this back when it was when like the original talk about it happened. But I hadn't really followed it since then, so I wasn't entirely sure why now people were talking about it.

Yeah, it's probably just because the website got shared. I remember like two of the plasma developers that work on it, Alish and Harold, they have a live stream like every other week on Twitch. from just showing them developing stuff and uh yeah there were i was watching them work on the website so i definitely know now it's done um yeah hopefully it does have a wonderful release soon hopefully well if there's like a testing release like it can't be too far away from something being there yeah yeah um i'm not like i don't really i'm not super involved with projects i don't know exactly happening right now but you know they're like figuring out documentation what the developer experience is going to look like what a user experience is going to look like all sorts of things

yeah so what is your like history with Linux look like like how have we've been doing stuff and I guess how did you eventually make your way into wanting to contribute to plasma yeah um I think when I sometime in high school I started using Linux. Like, I think, like, I started with Ubuntu, just Ubuntu on my desktop and my laptop. Eventually, I started, you know, distro hop. I think, I feel like this is a path a lot of people take. But, yeah, distro hopping all over the place.

I had, like, 10 different Linux distributions set up on my desktop. It was like 10 OS booting, not dual booting or tribuing, whatever. Oh, wait, like, at the same time. Yeah, yeah. Okay, no, this is new. I've not heard this one before. Well, because I figured out, you can actually, you can, like, when you install a distro, you can have the home partitions separated, right, on a different partition.

And I just kept installing different distros with their OS partition, like maybe I give it 50 or 100 gigs just on the side, and then I'd have it use my home partition mounted. And, yeah, I was able to get, like, Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, Open Suza. I've had some experiences, probably some other, like Solis, I think. I don't remember some of the other ones. I distro hopped a lot.

It was fun, but eventually, you know, it was too much. I also hopped a lot of desktop environments too. I'd have the desktop environment tied to the distro I installed too, so I'd kind of reboot to switch desktop environments. But like for the first few years that I use Linux, I think most of the time I use Nome with a bunch of extensions. Like GTK theming at the time was very, it was very hot. Nowadays, I think this has gone a bit less, maybe because of Livid Way to kind of lock it down a bit more. But yeah, at the time, like, man, the amount of customization you could do with Nome, it was with like extensions and themes and stuff.

It was quite nice, but I did always prefer plasma, I think. So at the time, plasma was pretty buggy. I was like plasma. I think I started with plasma 5.12. Pretty early on. And there was a lot of stability problems, especially on my laptop. Uh-huh. Like I had like a like Kubuntu specifically.

And Katie neon also time was quite buggy. So I kind of hopped between, hop back and forth between them. But eventually, I think around 2019, I just started using plasma. The plasma at that point got a lot more stable. And that's some point I got a four, I like on a 4K monitor from a hackathon. And then all of a sudden I had a 4K monitor and a 10 ADP monitor and X11 hated that. So. Yeah.

Then I switched completely to Wayland and, um, I mean, at the beginning, there were a few issues, but I honestly nowadays, like, like screen sharing works, uh, RDP works, like, everything that I kind of needed is there. And yeah, for anyone who doesn't know, a Discord fixed screen sharing like six months ago. It works now. Yeah, yeah. Like that, that was a shock finally. Um, actually it's funny. apply for an internship at Discord with my description saying I want to just fix the Linux claim. They did not accept me, but they have their one Linux developer already. That's all they need. Thank you to whoever fixed it. It's been many years of just pained with having

so yeah, it's nice that it works. Yeah, I was talking about, like, what I said, I started contributing to KD around 2020 after I had been using plasma, like, solely for about a year. And, yeah, like, everything that I'd learned there was kind of new, like, cute. I wasn't really much of a C++ plus developer either, so I did learn that at that time. QML. What was your main focus at the time? I code a lot of Java because I had a really popular Minecraft plugin

okay okay Minecraft's acceptable if you had any other reason for writing Java code I would be concerned yeah I mean the Java ecosystem is very corporate and enterprise but Minecraft drives a lot of innovation in the in their security space because of all the hack clients that are Minecraft so it's an interesting thing like the Server software is, I don't know, they're like, because the Minecraft server, the Java edition Minecraft server is not open, they have to patch the jar, the Minecraft jar with all sorts of code.

And there's so much, so much going on there. It was exciting working on it, but I didn't really want to continue doing that after I started KDE. So, you know, I had some experience with like Golang, too. That was probably my favorite language at the time. But, yeah, it was interesting jumping to C++. It's not an easy language, for sure. And there's a lot of things that can go wrong. So, but, like, eventually you'll kind of get the hang of it.

I think it just needs extra time compared to some other languages. So what distra did you end up settling on? yeah i settled on arch for a couple of years until i talked with a former former fedora packager and he convinced me to jump to fedora so i think around two years ago i've started using fedora completely i have i have active fedora maintainers shilling fedora to me every time i stream um nil gompah shows up my chat and tries to shill fedora Yeah, he's pretty active around. Yeah, I mean, he's done the past few years.

He's done a lot of work for helping KD be a first class that is in on Fedora too. So I'm like, the experience has been really good. Yeah, it's really cool that it's like a long, it's like now promoted alongside workstation. It's not just like another spin. Yeah, yeah. So I think like most of the plasma devs, if they're not using KD Linux, they're probably using Fedora, all using Fedora or maybe Arch. So like everything is up to date.

It's just a good developer experience for me, but also like just as a user, like being able to be able to recommend a distro to something, like if someone else says, do you want or like what distro should I use? I want to be able to kind of recommend the distro I'm currently using. If I was on Arch, it'd be kind of like, you know, I've tweaked it so much. I can't recommend someone to do that. You know, for an end user, I think Fedora is quite good. Though I always recommend, like, to install everything as a flatpack, even your browser,

just because of the codex situation. Yeah, that's the only little tip, but otherwise, I think, like, yeah, it gives you a pretty good experience. Hopefully this, hopefully this KD Linux thing ends up, like, being something you can start to recommend to people once it's actually in a good state yeah yeah for sure I think one of the original rationale for Kiti Linux

was also having a like a distro we could recommend to manufacturers right or like originally we would recommend like we weren't really sure what to recommend there was neon there's also been jar but neon's base is kind of old right it depends on the LTS So, like, if someone has new drivers, you need to kind of have your own kernel and all that. And then Jaro is, like, like, kind of out, very outside KD.

So I think having this first-party experience, something I could recommend to users, something KD could recommend to anyone who wants a partner with Kiti to ship it on devices. I mean, yeah, maybe in the future we could even get like a big screen or a mobile edition of KD Linux as well. maybe big screen more likely mobile is a bit too match with the kernel situation but yeah yeah I'm pretty excited I don't really know what the status is right now

yeah I think getting big screen onto it would be cool like and you've talked about earlier the idea of like you know be able to swap between big screen and desktop mode so having that is like a a thing that you could do and it's like it it's like a way to demonstrate having that one like a the like first party KDE thing it's a way to demonstrate like what can really be done like the

the all of these cool things that are part of KDE that may not be shipped on various different distros but everything that KD offers it's being offered in this one place and it's a easy way to showcase it in a way that isn't neon which has Neon, like, Neon, it works as a development environment, but I, it's never really been a thing that really made sense for, like, the, the end user. I know people have taught, like, Neon's definitely had, like, people recommend it and use it before. Like, it's not something where, like, nobody uses it. It's just, the LTS base, the LTS base, especially if you're, especially if you want to run, like, modern hardware, right? like if you want to buy like latest GPU like you get you very quickly going to run

to problems and it yeah yeah yeah I think the biggest thing is just the fact that it's on an old base I think like having an up-to-date kernel is important for something you recommend to people because people people buy new computers all the time right I don't really want to you know have someone having to wait yeah and you know having fixes in like relatively quickly is good yeah so yeah so i do want to circle back to bixreen for just a bit if people want to get involved in the project and just help out what right now is an area that like you think really needs a lot of focus Yeah, it's a bit tough because I've narrowed the scope of big screen so much to the fact that we're just working on the shelf, which could be quite technical.

I think we need some work on the distribution side. People are packaging it now. If you're someone who's involved with distributions, you can get in touch and we can help try to make sure that your setup works well. as someone who's kind of just going into the project I think working on the shell for sure I think could be useful if you do want to do that you have to pick up QML like the language you use for doing UI I've started creating issues on the repo that like a bunch of like bugs and stuff you could look into

if you want you can for sure like the if you want to help come into the Matrix channel first of all you can talk to me. There's a bunch of other people too. Actually, most of the discussion is just people talking about what kind of use cases they want to use it for. It's mostly like potential end users that are talking there right now, but I think there's, I think it's nice that there's a lot of excitement. But beyond that, our website also needs some work. If you know how to use Hugo and like HTML CSS, and like mark down.

You know, we need some help on the website. I do kind of want to start like a plasma big screen blog maybe that we can have on the website, similar to the mobile side. I haven't really had time for that. You can also work on apps if you want to, though. It wouldn't really be big screen related necessarily. You can work on, like there are some old code

that for like a YouTube client, a SoundCloud client, I think, as a Microsoft skill. you could try making a new app for making these sorts of media clients if you're interested in that actually time you should definitely message me or come to the channel yeah because there's just no one looking at that right now if you want a very a very simple change to make the screenshot the screenshot is still of the old version yeah yeah no for sure yeah definitely And then like there was someone that went in and just updated the website to say everything doesn't work.

It's just like everything is gone. We have no distros, we have nothing. I think on the install page is just like, okay, it's gone. Nice. We could probably add some more, like we also need some sort of way of presenting documentation on how do you use big screen for the first time? How do you set up your controller? I don't know where to put that.

where to put that. Maybe it could be on the website. Maybe it could be on some other place. But yeah, there's like these sorts of things around big screen, not necessarily just code, but like organization and things. I haven't really had the time to really do proper like project management for sure. So it's a little bit disorganized. But that's, but there's also a lot of opportunity. Like if you do the work, I'm just going to merge your merger request. If it looks good to me, right? I'm not going to cherry, like, you know, really nitpick everything. And I think in general, with these smaller projects, that's just the case.

If you do the work, over time, we can, we can sponsor you to be a KD developer, or like to have this KD developer account to be able to push to the repo yourself and, you know, review merge costs yourself. So if you're, like, interested in, like, getting more into KDE, I think, you can just, And you can just do the work and we can sponsor you. What about over on the Plasma mobile side? I'm sure there's a lot more things over. There's a whole range of things to work on on that side.

If somebody wants to get involved in there, what do you think right now is an area that kind of needs a lot of focus? Yeah, Plasma Mobile, we have much more to you. We have much more organization. We have a lot of issue trackers. We don't have enough people looking at issues for sure. There's a lot of small nitpicky stuff that I think could be addressed, especially apps. Actually, we've had a problem with app maintainership.

We have a lot of apps that are created, like when plausible mobile was kind of taking off around 2020, where we still are getting a lot of contributors. But then all these apps have all gotten inactive. I would love for a lot of people to come in and actually, actually, it could relate to big screen as well. like, for example, like a weather app, like the K weather, actually technically I maintain it, but I haven't had time to really look into it. If there's people that are interested in working into, like we want to have a new weather back in for it, that's actually a really good project, I think, to try out. You can even port the app to have like a TV version for big screen if you want to do

more work. But yeah, just like a lot of apps, like the calculator, the clock has been more maintainership now. The phone app is just basically me coming in every few months to fix something. The messenger app, the camera app I've done some work recently. I wrote a blog post about it, but we don't have any really active maintainers, so I'm just split the tea too many projects. So if you're interested in cameras, live camera, for sure, you can speak to me or kind of the Paws Mobile channel and I can help you. Is there anything else? Oh, right, relating to big screen. The App Store. thing that i kind of do want someone to look into i mean i feel like that one could be kind of

technical so maybe i do kind of need to get started on it first before someone can kind of help but if you're interested in that project and you kind of know some cute and some stuff related to how you're you're kind of you're comfortable with like programming because you'll have to you know figure a flat pack and stuff um maybe you can help us make an app store right for a big screen uh yeah i think the main thing is for big screen we need an issue track it's it's just like a scattering of a bunch of random bugs right now but we don't have like a cohesive vision or any like any issue for that and uh yeah that's that's kind of all i have for yeah but just for sure just come into the matrix channel and i'll probably have something for you

yeah well this has been a lot of fun I definitely did enjoy I learned a bit about Plasma Big Surin a little bit about Plasma Mobile and yeah I had fun I enjoyed this yeah thank you for having me

this was yeah I also had fun talking about the project I really often have the chance to talk I think about it in person it's always it's always in chat and stuff like that so it's kind of pretty cool and it's not often you really get like a chance to sit down and just talk about the work

you're doing for like two hours right like even if you you might have like small conversations here and there but like having a a long form discussion about the work like there's there's no many opportunities in your life you can just sit down and just do that and kind of be um like uninterrupted for a while yeah yeah yeah for anyone listening i mean i hope i I've kind of given some insight into the inner workings of KDE a bit. I mean, it's not, it's, I think the main thing is online. Some people have this impression that KD is a company or that there's big KDE and everything is top down.

It really is not. There are some people that are contracted to be into working Kiti, but it's a, it's a, it's a nonprofit organization. So, like, if you're interested in contributing, I like, it's, it's not the barrier to entry, I don't think is super high. It's definitely possible. Like, I'm kind of an example of it, too. Yeah.

Fair enough. So if people want to find any of, I know that you write blog posts and stuff from time to time. So if you want to check out any of that stuff, where can they have to? Yeah, my own website is sb.dev. And I have some blog posts. most of the time I, like, my blog posts have been on the Plasma Wool website,

because almost all the stuff I'm doing is, like, Posmal-Related. So, uh, if you go to, like, the Plasma website and go under Blog, you can definitely read some of the stuff that we've been doing. Um, yeah, on my own website, I have, yeah, that big screen post, as well as recently I also posted a thing about Plasma camera. and the Plasma Sprint I attended a few months ago where we just met all the Plasma developers in one room and hacked some stuff together.

Awesome. Is there anything else you want to mention anything we didn't really get to? I think we've covered basically everything. Yeah. I mean, oh, if people are wondering about the status of big screen, we're trying to target the next release. Okay. We're trying to target 6.5. There is a chance that might not make it, but I hope it does.

And then it'll be a bit easier to try it. But yeah, so many people have been asking, how do I try it? How do I try it? I've been giving links in like the channel. We have some neon builds that are like development builds, so for sure don't trust your data on it. But yeah. yeah and once it actually is part of a plasma release then it should be like it should be more likely for distros to go and package it yeah i think a lot of distros have already

been trying i saw someone working on debbie in packaging for it i think already for put two i'm not super sure uh that was in the channel but like it's it's also very easy to package if you have plasma it's just one other package you just yeah so I expect like distros like maybe arch or

Fedora to probably get it quite quickly Debian unfortunately we missed Debian 13 I think that's releasing this year so it might be two years until we can make

to a stable Debian release Okay well we'll probably be unstable if someone packages it so or Cid I can't remember the rolling yeah yeah yeah I expect it to be

packaged quite quickly it's it's very it's very easy to package okay no other links you want to send people to I guess go donate to the KDEV if you want to support the project Yes, yes, for sure. KV, I mean, like, related to there's also, I think they're running a fundraiser now for specifically input methods, the KD goal.

Actually, I don't know where the link is. Yeah, I've mentioned many times to people that navigating the KDE website is not great. okay if you wanted to donate kd.org there's a big donate button at the top that one's easy i think um yeah so here you can have it yeah uh yeah helps our work overall maybe it's donate to kd the nonprofit so it helps us be able to have the infrastructure to actually do work it helps us be able to have meetings and do what we like to do so You'd be very much appreciated. Awesome.

I guess we'll end it off there. I'll do my outro, and then we'll end it. Unless there's anything else you want to say. Nothing else. Okay, cool. My main channel is Brodie Robertson. I do Linux videos there, six-ish days a week. Sometimes I stream.

I don't know. When there's a package available, maybe I'll do a stream on big stream or something. Big screen, big screen. Jesus Christ. Okay, it's 2.30 in the morning here. It's fine. The gaming channel is Brodion Games. I'm currently playing through probably still split fiction and maybe Kazan the first berserk. If I'm not, it'll probably be Metal Gear Solid and I don't know, yuck as a 6 maybe.

Go to the channel, you see what's there. And if you're listening to the audio version of this, you can find the video version. on YouTube at Tech Over T. If you want to find the audio version, it is on basically every podcast platform. There is an RSS feed, search Tech Over T, and you will find it. I'll give you the final word.

What do you want to say to sign us off? Yeah, thank you for having me today. I really enjoyed talking about KDE with you. And to anyone watching, like, I hope you can try out, Plasma big screen, or Plasma mobile, or, well, just, Plus of desktop as well, I guess. Yeah, it was bloody having you on.

I've really enjoyed this. So, yeah. Yeah, I'll just end it there, I guess.