Tech Over Tea - KDE Plasma 6 Launch And Global Themes | David Edmundson

Episode Date: March 29, 2024

Recently Plasma 6 dropped so it was time to bring some KDE people back on but then there was also the Global Theme situation and who better to discuss that than the man who wrote the first response blog David Edmundson. =========Guest Links========== KDE Twitter: https://twitter.com/kdecommunity/ KDE Website: https://kde.org/ Blog: http://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/ Github: https://github.com/davidedmundson ==========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 Supercozman https://twitter.com/Supercozman https://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. Welcome back to the show. I'm as always your host Brodie Robertson and today we have David Edmondson back on the show. You might remember him from the previous episode. We were talking about the like KD like desktop recovery stuff last time weren't we? I feel like that's what I was saying. And Wayland in general yeah. I joined the show specifically to try and make you teach you how to pronounce the word Quinn correctly. And given that's failed, I've come back and will keep coming back until it's landed. Yeah, keep saying K-Win. K-Win. QT.

And there's another one in your last video you kept getting wrong. Feature request. You kept pronouncing it as bug. Oh that's just Australian. You can't get rid of that one. Yeah, so we're about to be doing an Australian thing of getting that one wrong. Yeah, no, that one's not gonna change. Like my accent's cleaned up quite a bit when I'm on camera. I do notice it, especially when I'm just talking to, like, regular people. The Australian thing is where you just slur all of the syllables together. Basically, you just delete as many syllables as possible,

and people still know basically what you're saying. Fortunately, I don't have an accent. That's how being English works. Everybody else does. Yeah, actually. Look, the Americans think they don't have accents, so I'll let you have that one. No, I'm wrong.

They are definitely very wrong. But we're not here to laugh at the Americans. That can be for another episode. So, I guess, do you want to get into

the main thing with the global themes, or do you want to talk about general plasma thing with the global themes, or do you want to talk about general Plasma stuff first? Because I'm happy to go either way. We're going to start with something positive before you start bringing everybody down with miserable- I'll be fair, I think the way global themes have been handled actually has been really

good. There's been a couple of people I've seen being kind of pedantic about the certain things with the store, but- Okay, so it's not like we're talking about global themes. Let's go into global themes. We can do that, yeah, sure. As I said, I don't care. Let's go global themes. Do you want to give a recap of what happened

from your perspective? Okay, sure. So the way I understand it is global themes aren't really themes. Global themes are a sort of general package for styling and modifying Plasma, which include things like Plasma themes, icon themes, wallpapers,

all of which are generally safe, assuming someone doesn't bundle something weird with it, which I'm... My understanding is they can with Pling. That's what I heard from Nate, at least. Yeah, so... Back to why we're talking about this. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

A user installed a global theme, or from my perspective, an add-on from a KDE store, which is a third-party website-ish, but it's under KDE brand. Yeah, we'll talk about that as well. Operated by Pling. And it got some content. It wasn't designed to be malicious. I don't want to go too much into specifics of calling a particular author out. No, from my understanding, it was just a dev who used a Plasma 5 plasmoid.

He didn't realize that in certain situations it can lead to an empty string being set. It doesn't seem like it's malicious. No, but a user's home directory got lost, which is pretty bad. Things could be worse. I mean, it could be a more security issue, but it brings up the conversation about, well hold on

what's happening with the KD store and the content in it and this isn't a new topic I mean we've been talking for years about how the stuff in the store is not sandboxed in fact all through December and January

we had one of these security researchers coming up to us and saying, Oh, plasmoids can run arbitrary code. And our response, you know, and I was one of these people who was like, Well, yeah, we know. Here's the API for it. There's documentation of how to do exactly this. My understanding, correct me if I'm wrong, Kim, my understanding is internally, it's been fully aware that this is how it's worked for a long time. It's just not being communicated to the public in the most clear way. Yeah, I mean, I think when you're on the inside, you just have this hat of, oh, this is how it works.

That's always how it works. Right, right. And with global themes especially, we've had this situation where it started off as being about bundling code for your lock screen and all these other very core system things. And it was like, well, that's as core as it gets. It's clearly designed to come from trusted sources. Therefore, it doesn't matter if anything else happens. And then more and more stuff got piled in and piled in and piled in and piled in. Right. And that was fine.

But because more stuff got piled in, that messaging changed on top. I was like, oh, well, this is a convenient way to set up all of my applets in the way I want them out of the box and there was a little UI tool to take your configuration and save it into a global theme so you can get a new laptop and restore everything back to how it was so it's a very conscious effort to allow everything and then users started liking that and wanted to share stuff that i've made and curated together and then the messaging changed around what it was because people were using it for this new thing so this is very just very slow gradual things changed over time and not everything caught up i mean kd is this very old project itDE store. It used to be kde-loc.org

and it's at least 15 years old. Wait, hold up, hold up, hold up. Wait, so you had a different domain that was not on the KDE domain? Yeah, so it was run independently. Oh, okay. Set up by how most things get set up. Some person who likes KDE goes and, oh, I'm going to create this website to curate all of this stuff. And there used to be two. There was kd-look.org and kd-apps.org.

Right. And I mean, this is the days before Flatpaks and Snaps and anything by a long, long way. And KDE apps had all of the binary content that you download and compile yourself and type.configure because that was the way things were back in the day.

And KDE Look had the graphical assets. There was no confusion. That's how things were nicely split. KDE apps faded away over time because there were new ways to get apps now, which generally better. People aren't just compiling

things by hand all of the time. KD looks came around. That source split off into gnomelook.org, XSE look, and all these spin-off websites, which on some of those I've died anyway because I've got new replacements to come about I don't think anybody uses gnomelook.org

and KD wanted to sort of bring it under our umbrella um we've got a domain name redirect and it stayed I don't know who hosts it I don't know the details of all of this sort of thing. It might be us. It might still be third party. But, you know, it became part of store.kd.org. Right. Well, what I do know with the store is I believe Nate is listed as one of the moderators.

Probably. He's everywhere. Give me a second. Yes, Nate is on... I don't know how actively i know he deleted the um the recent like plugin so he definitely gets involved there sometimes but i don't know if he's like checking it frequently or just going there when someone tells him that something needs to be removed yeah so so i mean there's a channel where you can reach out and just tell people. It normally is spam just being uploaded.

Right, right, right. It is a load of reviews. Some stuff doesn't make it anywhere. It's normally a lot of comments which are just telling people to buy drugs on the internet rather than content. So any website, it gets filled with gibberish. And it needs moderation, which is time-consuming. And people do review stuff. Stuff does get taken down.

So, that part's not abnormal. In fact, if you have a website, bad stuff can get on it. Absolutely, yeah. And there's a lot of things on there. We had a check. It's 30,000 items on store.kdu.org, which is mostly just anime wallpapers. But if you ignore those 29,000,

it is quite a lot of content. So nobody wants to, you know, just chuck that away because there's good stuff on there. There's quite a lot of content, so nobody wants to, you know, just chuck that away because... Yeah. Good stuff on there. Yeah, so one of the issues I brought up in my video is the fact that it's on store.kd.org. Because it's on that domain, it looks a lot more official than it otherwise is treated by the project. Like, from my understanding, the store is treated as this outside thing.

We have it on our domain. It's the store that you generally go to, but it's not something that the KDE project is actively moderating or anything like that. And I think having it on the official KDE domain does make it seem a lot more official than it otherwise should be treated. I think the AUR does the same thing.

It's on the official Arch domain, but they have a big, bold disclaimer at the top of the page that's like, use at your own risk. Don't be stupid. Yeah, and the fact that you've got content and add-ons that can do stuff isn't weird. I mean, no extensions can do anything. Inkscape extensions can do anything.

GIMP extensions, you can download and they do it. GIMP is just Python. Right, exactly. In Python, you import OS, OS.org, whatever. All of these things are absolutely... They exist and people do good stuff with them. And if you don't have that, then you end up with this first party and third party system where what we do is privileged and special, but you can't compete.

And it is important to allow people to, well, I'm going to bank my own network configuration app list and they can build that up. Maybe talk to IWD instead of network manager or something. It can build that up independently. Users can use it. And then at some point we could say, well, you know what, we'll swap that out. I mean, that's happened in the past. So it's important to have this open level playing field.

But, you know, there's challenges that come with it. I think if you don't have some sort of official means, you end up encouraging users down like a much worse route, because what'll happen is the plugins will still exist, but they'll be on GitHub repos and you might have people that are like oh install it with curl pipe into bash which is not a good i i'm doing a video on this soon like people need to stop recommending this is a good idea just please download the script first look at it and then do it like even if the developer is not trying to be malicious with a download method like that if the download breaks in the middle of the download, you might have a script where you have a malformed

RM command and that could end up deleting parts of your system and you don't want that to happen. Just download the file, check it, then run it. Very simple.

Yep. I was about to say, oh, you should have a podcast. Can you imagine that? Yes. You can't stop. I was about to say, oh, you should have a podcast. Can you imagine that? Yes. I got so distracted by it. And I think actually one of the problems is us main devs weren't using a store for some of our content.

I think if we'd used a store more, we would have taken more care about it. Right. Because right now your core devs, when they want to make a plasmoid for something abnormal, we've got this one rep of KDPlasma add-ons where we ship stuff that we don't want in the core because it's a bit too… it's extra stuff, like the desktop cube. Nobody needs a desktop cube. It's in this extra repository where you can go and get it. But almost all your distributions,

that gets given to users through distribution channels, regular Pac-Man, Debian stuff. So we stopped caring about the store as main developers. And I think that's actually part of the problem, that we need to use this stuff that we want other users to use. So the reason I laughed there is I just noticed that

people actually have been watching. They did watch the stream. I noticed that the readme on Plasma add-ons now has a list of what's in Plasma add-ons, which is something I've brought up multiple times. Previously, there wasn't anything there. It was just like, it's a thing that exists. You can download Plasma add-ons.

It was a dumping ground. Yeah. It was a dumping ground where if a user wanted to install it, they didn't actually know what they were getting with it. Add-ons. Yeah, add-ons of some description. Yeah, yeah. No, I get it, like, it makes sense as a dumping ground, and it sort of creates this...

It did this thing before, like, where you're saying there's, like, a... A tiered system where you have, like, the third party and the first party, where even though this is, like, the add-ons thing, it's the official Plasma add-ons, it's on the Plasma GitLab, so it's like a little bit different to being on the store. Yeah, so I think if we start using the store more, it's actually going to encourage us to make a store that works, where we can say, well, you know what, we've verified this, here's a little batch, and doing more additional checks that we want to do. doing more additional checks that we want to do. Right, right. No, that makes sense.

Yeah. So what general things are being discussed in regards to the changing global themes? Because I know there's a couple of open merge requests that... And I know there was a... Was it the meetings that you guys were having you maybe would discuss stuff today, I think? Or yesterday? Oh, Monday. Monday? Okay. Monday. Also, if you notice, I'm at plasmadevelop.org. Was it the meeting that you guys were having you maybe would discuss stuff today? I think, or yesterday?

Oh, Monday. Monday, okay. Monday. Sorry, it's not. PlasmaDevel.org. Yeah, so, I mean, it's things which are happening. I mean, it's something we all knew. So, as people right now want them to do,

it's very knee-jerk reactions. Right. This has existed for 10 years, but now we need to shut it down completely. I did see something like, delete K-New stuff. We don't need it. Yeah, yeah. Shut it all down. And... We don't want to just jump into something. We definitely need to address things. We don't need to jump into things.

Especially if we have stepped up in moderation on server side as well, which is something happening somewhat transparently in the background so there's things happening so we're separating different types of content to have different warning messages

because we wanted to change that warning message when you first download it because that's like the initial step that we can get to users within a few weeks when your translations come in. So that's like the warning message if you go to like get new,

like the little box at the top. Yeah. Okay. Because right now it says, for anyone who doesn't know, what it says right now is the content available here has been uploaded by users like you

and has not been reviewed by your distributor for functionality or stability. Which is a fine message, but my issue is it didn't mention KDE there. Like, because it's on the KDE store, it's sort of implied that it's reviewed by KDE because they don't mention it in the warning. Like, it's a weird message.

Yeah. And it is reviewed by people who are KDE people. I mean, you mentioned Nate, there's Justin, there's a bunch message. Yeah. And it is reviewed by people who are... Kelly people. I mean, you mentioned Nate, there's Justin, there's a bunch of other people. Right, but it's not like every single theme's been reviewed. Yeah. So, our message is changing, but we don't want to just blindly change it

because then it's just ignorable. If we change it so downloading a JPEG anime wallpaper, which there's too many of, if that has a big warning, everyone's just going, lawyer warning. If we change it to downloading a JPEG anime wallpaper, which there's too many of, if that has a big warning, everyone's just going, lawyer warning. Absolutely. So it's about trying to make it more specific so people actually look at it.

So that's the first step that's happening. That's going to land very soon. And then architecturally, in global themes, it's something that's just grown and grown and grown into this monster, where we didn't care about security because it was never intended for it. So we're now just trying to split stuff out of that and then replace that with some new mechanism. So the first step is just coming up with new ways to do things that people were doing that could have been done

before into these separate channels. So if a distribution needs to change, lock screen, they've got an option to do that. But that doesn't necessarily need to be distributed on the store. It can be separate channels, that sort of thing. In fact, probably doesn't need to be on the store at all, that sort of level of unnecessary customization. Some people need it. I mean, I know we've got quite a lot of government deployments and it's certainly one of the big cities. If you've got a lock screen and a paste of background with a video of the city before you can unlock your screen, because that was important to them. The city of Munich had various things, so in a big deployment you need to be able to provide these hooks.

Yeah, correct me if I'm wrong here, but the, um... The lock screen themes are an especially, uh... Security issue-y one. Because it depends on the way that SDDM was set up on that distro. I know Neon has it in its own... SDDM user. But some will run it as root. No, I don't think that's true.

STDM always has a tiny part that runs as root. And a tiny part runs as another user. And you have to explicitly go out of your way to get that wrong. So it will always run as another user.

But it's two steps, you agree to parts where you've got your visuals on screen but you do need some back end part of running as root there shouldn't ever be a case where that front end runs as root there is a case where you can configure the X server beneath

that to run as root but that's for different reasons. Historical. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But I think splitting things out into their own... Like, I know there's, like, some discussion here about, like, splitting all the code out

into its own separate code stuff and then having the themes be just purely cosmetic themes i don't know if that's going to be what happens in the long run but i know it has had a little bit of discussion yeah i mean because i mean the themes themselves are i mean this is one of the problems about news cycle um is people you get you get your blog spam comments you read a news article and then they paraphrase it and then somebody else reads that article, paraphrases it, and then it goes on. And then when those people write it, and you read it, it makes it sound like the sort of theme that could be replaced by CSS or metadata has some security hole in it.

And there was never a security hole like that. It was just bad communication. So those themes already should be safe. I mean, they're not going to make any promises. They need a good review from. Yes, but they are just metadata. So they are already individually downloadable. So, yeah, finding an alternative way to group that together

without having any of the other stuff that global themes has is probably on the cards i think yeah i i do think that's for the best that's obviously like a long-term thing i think more short-term stuff is definitely like sorting out a way to handle a warning message like that's obviously you need to deal with translation and like translation is a way to handle a warning message like that's obviously you need to deal with translation and like translation is a big problem because you want to make sure like the tone and the severity are like similar levels across the different languages which i'm sure is a absolute nightmare for the translation people i don't know i've got no way to review it so um hopefully they know what they're doing with that

Our translation team From what I've heard are awesome You definitely hear good feedback From people saying that Obviously it depends on the language I'm sure And in our translation framework I assume it's quite common But you have your message

But you can also write another message That only translators can see Where you can say this is message that only translators can see, where you can say, this is what I'm trying to say in the part you're translating. So you can provide their message. So it's like notes for the translation. Exactly, yes. Okay, that makes sense. Actually, regarding the message, there is one thing that I do think is weird about the way it's handled.

Like the way it's currently being handled. So, you know, you can, like, set an accent color and that is used for, like, I don't know, highlighting things and all that. Why does the accent color affect the info box window? Like, the little, the box that the text is in on that.

I don't know. I mean, it's clearly deliberate. Because I've got my accent colour set to red, so my info boxes are now red, which is obviously not what info box is supposed to be. I think it's a problem with configuration. If you over-provide too much, where's the line? What should be configured, what shouldn't? Right, right. I know. I do fall into don't feel my apps category type of person so I'm running breeze dark right

now the only thing I've changed in regarding to the theme is the accent color and look what's happened now I think I deliver it's a little bit, I mean, it's different categories of, or when you have these inline messages. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What you want to convey. And if you hardcode colors, you will upset some people, but some things shouldn't be, so it's a balance. Right, right, right. I mean, I'm going to punt that question to some designers.

It's, yeah, it's not like a major deal, I guess, but it's just something I did notice that seemed a little bit off to me. But, yeah. So, yeah, I think the... Well, it's kind of funny that we had this situation happen so close to the Snap situation like just a few days prior. Because you can kind of look at the response from both And I think the way KD has handled things is actually really good

Look, the canonical response is interesting To say the least I don't know if you want to get into that I don't know much about the canonical store situation They didn't do anything. Say again, sorry? They didn't do anything until Alan Pope made a thread on the forum. He was like, hey guys, can you stop people uploading for a couple of days?

But it was half parallel. I mean, we knew the store was in this situation and we acted when the social media stuff hit um because i mean that really emphasized how much disconnect there was between what those comments were saying of i didn't know this so that's why we're acting um yeah so in terms of yeah i mean you're right because i mean i've always had this attitude of, you're downloading third-party add-ons, but it's no different, and I think I even use that phrase in my comments, it's no different to a Snap store having malware,

and then I look down and there's, like, people complaining about a Snap store having malware. And, okay, right, that's... That parallel is correct, but it's not an excuse. It's just a statement. What do you think about the idea of changing the name of global themes? Assuming that... I think if they... It needs to happen.

If they are just themes, I think global themes fine. But if you're going to have code in there, I don't know what the best name would be. The global themes in their current state are kind of like they're like a mega radon I don't really Nate suggested like having the word package

or plugin in there I don't know what a good word for it would be though that's the thing the best one I've seen in the comment section was full desktop mod and I quite liked that. I liked it as well. I don't know though.

Naming things are hard, right? Naming things are hard. I mean, that's the biggest problem in computer science, right? Underneath this is called a look and feel package. That's a technical term. Still there. Also not a good name.

Naming things is hard. And that's why we have a window manager called TWM. Tom's Window Manager. Good name. Yeah, it's a fine name. Works just fine. Works well for Tom. Yeah.

So, I guess that's pretty much all that needs to be said on the global theme stuff because right now it's just it's in the process of being resolved and like it's it's not 100% clear like what those resolutions are fully going to be no i mean it's going to be a gradual process it's immediate actions and i mean long term we've talked about being able to run some of these things from getting them from flat hull and running in a sandbox environment and okay it's tech demos for all of this that spans back years as gradual um progress on some of these things like our search providers so when you type in alt space and you can start searching. It used to be a set of plugins, and plugins are... I've never used that. I've never used that finding.

Wow. Okay, we're going to talk about your plasma experience, because I think you've handed yourself in multiple ways. Again, discoverability, I guess, and messaging. So you've got this feature, which you're now going to love and use. You can search for anything. And that's backed by plugins, and plugins are limited. Plugins are a problem. So just from security, because you can't sandbox part of an application and also just distribution it's distributing a binary is a mess so we've got all those out of process so it could be

completely sandboxed they can be downloadable from this from from from flat hub in theory it's just some hooks on getting that integration to say, oh, this is actually not an application, but I want to be Dbus activated and whatnot. So there's these tiny little hooks remaining, but a lot of our core infrastructure is there. So there's all the rest of stuff happening around, and it's going to be amazing in 10 years, maybe. Yeah, by the time we have Plasma plasma 7 we'll be in a good state yeah um so i guess let's let's move into plasma 6 stuff we can either go into my experience my experience with it or we can talk about like the general reception of it

well i'm gonna go general reception first okay sure sure we can do that yeah and then you can bring everybody down no um in our point o releases have a history of being questionable and that's putting it very favorably people remember four but what was 5 like then? 5 wasn't as bad. 5 was nowhere near as bad as 4. 4 had a problem of last minute... Being a dev release. This whole, let's rewrite a workspace and come up with all these new ideas, a bit too much ambition. We were riding high on the KDE 3 stage, which is sort of where I joined KDE.

We had these really big apps which were going well, we had this desktop that was functional, and then trying to land a rewrite too late in the cycle. And that caused a lot of problems of not all parts of KDE are equal. And this stuff what we had with the desktop just wasn't ready yet. And it didn't get pushed back. I mean, I was very, very junior back in those days. I wasn't. But yeah, I mean, it just wasn't ready. So 5 was better. We learned a lot from that.

It still had big changes. And then 6, generally, there's not been any massive freakouts. From people who have upgraded from 5.27 to 6, there's not been any, oh my goodness, what's happened, this is the worst thing ever. I think the biggest, oh my god, what's happened, this is the worst thing ever. I think the biggest, oh my God, what's happened? This is the worst thing ever, is people who are like, my plugins don't work anymore.

That's pretty much the worst I've seen. Yeah, which is a challenge of, once you have API compatibility, at some point it needs to break. And that's always a challenge. And that's why we have these point O releases, which are problematic, is because there's a warm chance to break things for six years.

So people try and get lots and lots and lots of stuff in because it's a warm opportunity. And it's not just us doing that. It's our upstream as well. Qt, they are extremely good at being backwards compatible for even a major minor releases but it's still an overhead and um when these big big big changes happen it all gets bundled up together so we've got all of our upstream changes and all of our changes and

they have to come at the same time because of binary compatibility in c++ for now and while developers still depend on that sort of thing with the way distributions work there's one chance to change everything and that's not the best way for things to work. The good news is that's not going to happen much longer because as we've seen Flathub and ContainerTech or Snaps or as ContainerTech, where you have your application and all of the libraries, then we don't need to have such massive ABI promises of we're going to be completely stable for five years

because someone wants to run an old version of a library, yeah, I can do that. There's no need for them to upgrade at the same time. And if that allows us to make changes more iteratively rather than waiting and bundling things up, that's going to be a good thing. So I envision and hope that we're going to have KDE Framework 7, KDE Framework 8

with much shorter cadences than 10 years because this container tech is going to help. Mm-hmm. Hmm. I've been hearing from a lot of different people because this container tech is going to help. I've been hearing from a lot of different people from all different parts of the open source space about container tech on the desktop. And I know there's people who just are really confused about it still. And it's not new, right?

It's been around for a decade. But it's kind of new in the desktop space in a sense. It's new right it's been around for like a decade but it's kind of like new in the desktop space in a sense it's new in like getting popular and like being a thing that you're just most people probably have at least a couple of containerized applications installed even if you're not on a like a fully containerized system or like a like anything else like that you you probably have at least like one or two flat packs or maybe snaps or yeah um once it becomes the default way that's going to give library maintainers if we get rid of all these api api promises and can i mean not get rid of all of them and you still need to maintain it within this minor release cycle but if we can if it's easier to just say well we're breaking but your app's going

to be fine um that's going to be a good thing to get a breakup more often because then we're not going to have these big point o's where we have to bundle everything together i think that'll that'll be interesting i'm very curious to see what will happen by the next like the next time it's it's time to do like a big new release like what the state of thing's time to do a big new release. What the state of things are going to be in, whether really that can happen yet, or whether it's going to be the next cycle after that. It's really hard to guess what's going to happen

five, six years from now. Definitely. But I think the next big Plasma KD release is going to, you know, hopefully be in a point where most apps don't come from a distribution, but come from container tech. Some distribution might not want to hear that, but it's going to be good for the user.

And that ultimately that's what matters. So maybe this is going to be not popular here. Would you say that at some point in the future we're going to be at a point where not doing basically all your user applications in containers is kind of going to be thought of in a similar way to like you know those distros that don't ship systemd

or there's going to be distros coming soon that don't ship Wayland and they're like Xorg only distros it's going to happen it's definitely going to be distros coming soon that don't ship uh wayland and they're like exorg only distros it's gonna happen give it enough it's definitely gonna happen i mean and it's i think we have a responsibility as upstream to allow this to happen but then if they get a file conflicts and if they get a library problems that can be on them to try and sort out and find their own way of handling this sort of thing so what has the general reception for plasma six been like so far yes so generally it's certainly our first week was extremely

positive and i was very happy to see that, obviously. So our first week, very positive. People saying nice things. We also had the Wayland by default switch as well. And that's very important because a lot of people, end users don't necessarily change defaults. I mean, I've got a metrics chart of how many Wayland users we have on people doing a telemetry. And when the default switched that jumped

and surprisingly I mean it's what happened so and that's it's a good thing for us in a way so because with the accession our systems were somewhat slow compared to on these Wayland composites. And that was obviously reflected bad on us. But Wayland's also in a slightly problematic state of not everything works quite as well as it should do. Wayland is still in flux. I would not call Wayland finished at an application level. So even though we have Plasma's in a good state quinn's in a pretty

good state um applications do have issues so trying to find that balance of where do we switch of we're certainly not regression free for all these applications but overall it's a better experience but that's subjective and finding a, well, we need to do it, because otherwise we're lagging behind. I think that's been a good thing. And overall, we've not had many complaints about switching a default. I guess people who have issues know how to switch back. Well, right now, the people who are are using plasma 6 would be those on rolling

releases uh people who are testing out the fedora beta and people who are running neon i guess i those seem like the main group i don't think there would be i don't think there's any like point release that's shipping it yet like in their full s release. You're right. And Fedora's been on Wayland by default for a lot longer anyway. So... But like, what I was getting at there

is like the people... Sorry, no, it's all good. I cut you off. No, you're going sort of like people using it now are sort of tech enthusiasts. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

I know, you're right. Absolutely. That is true. There are also some of the most brutal. So, they're more likely to provide feedback in some form.

Yeah, that's one way to put it. Yes. I mean, it's kind of weird. Our bug tracker, you see the same names over and over and over again. And then you speak to people, when you go to, you know, FOSS and whatever,

and you speak to all your actual users and then they're a very different group of people to people who interact with you on the social medias or your bug trackers and whatnot. You've got these very different groups and it's easy to end up pandering to the group who talks to you

rather than the demographic you're necessarily aiming for right yeah i this is very much the same on uh on on youtube like so there is this i'm sure it's gonna be like similar with uh something Plasma as well. There is this viewer power fantasy that they are like the center of attention. Like the opinion that they have on it is like the opinion that everybody holds. And in reality, it's not at all. And a lot of the time time what they think is best is not what most people

think is going to work like i'll get people that say they don't like this style of video and i look at my numbers and it's like best video in the period like okay but like the numbers tell me that you're wrong. So... I'm a big fan of metrics in general. They're very good. The numbers do not lie. Yeah, exactly. So we didn't need more of that. So, plus my six feet back,

we keep sort of drifting off on that. Yeah, yeah. That first week was overwhelmingly positive. And then we were sort of waiting for the storm. And we were like, okay, storm hasn't happened yet. Storm hasn't happened yet. Storm hasn't happened yet.

We were just sort of confused, waiting for things to explode. And nothing really exploded. There has been sort of a reality kicking off that wave of excitement of, I like it, but I wish, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Not naming any names, Brodie. And that sentiment's been repeated in various other platforms of, I know, I'm using it,

I'm happy with Upgrade, Upgrade didn't explode, things are generally better, but I've still got quite a bit to sort out. And we, Upstream, have quite a bit to sort out. I mean, there is a problem that we are a very old project with a lot of craft that's dragging behind us and every now and again we have to take that oldest worst piece, fix it up, then take the next oldest worst piece and fix it up. And there are several, there's several weak parts of Plasma right now where that needs to happen. I mean that's a normal part of software development, it's not necessarily a bad thing, but

There's definitely stuff to fix. There's stuff that we don't like. Right, like my personal pet peeve right now, I did this video the other day on the way that virtual desktops work in Plasma. I don't know if you know what I am getting at here. Well, I know it's going to be complaining. That's true. You are very right there. No, it's fine. It's fine.

Take as many jabs as you want. No, it's that virtual desktops are shared across all your screens instead of being per screen. So if you swap to Workspace 2, it swaps to Workspace 2 on every screen. And there's been an open issue about it since KDE 3, I believe. I can imagine that. And it's one of the things that some people want it.

And the window manager part's super trivial. We can do a window manager part easily. The challenging part is when you have this modular user experience where you don't say we always have a panel on every screen, well how do you make a page work? And if it's with a panel on the one, I mean what GNOME does, GNOME has a setting for per screen retro desks but they've got this concept of the primary stays and you can move and you move secondary and if you can control

how it interacts with the rest of the stack that's fine. I mean if you're only a window manager that's fine, you don't have these things like pages and the context menus and the task manager and whatnot to have to take into consideration. Right, right. And that's the part that I'm not quite sure how that would play out because that's not just a case of making this work, but it's also creating a new communication channel for your task manager to say, I mean, right now, if you're on X11 specifically,

I've got a window on screen A, a window on screen two, on a second, on a different version. Screen A and screen two, yeah thank you for the naming. Pardon? You said screen A and screen two. Sorry I got... No it's fine. Yes well users can name things however they want. They can do that, yes.

On virtual desktop C. No, it's the task manager that does the filtering of saying, well, I know what all your windows are. I know what virtual desktop I'm on. I know what screen I'm on if I'm filtering right out. So it's an ancillary part of that's a challenge. Certainly now, I mean, before it was stuff with specification, but we would need to come up with our own specification to talk to our task manager as well. Which

on Wayland we have, on Wayland we've got a completely bespoke protocol to talk to your task manager and say, here's the information of what's available. So when we drop an X11 session at some point, some of these things become easier because you don't have like two separate code paths. We can just tell your task manager, this is visible. You don't need to know why it's visible, but you should show it. And that sort of problem goes away because quinn can just tell it this sort of information um but i mean everyone's got your own feature

request sure um and it takes somebody who wants it to go and work on it i guess because when it comes to feature requests i'd love to bugged Trackertix filled up with feature requests and it takes an incredibly good feature request to make me think you know what I'm going to stop doing the things that I want to do I think that idea is better so when we get these feature requests often people try and say why they want it right they'll say I want this because and they'll give an impassioned reason why they want it but what they don't do this because and they'll give impassioned reason why i want it but what i don't do is out of impassioned reason of why it's good for everybody why it's

good for your ecosystem because that's the sort of comment that makes me go oh you know actually that's going to make my product better therefore we should put time in it no that is understandable yeah yeah i mean i mean i've got my own list of things I want to do. If I was locked in a room on my computer for 100 years, I could keep myself busy. Not like that. But writing code. And I think every developer's like that.

There's no shortage of ideas. So feature requests, it's all about trying to sell your idea of why it's so much better than the ideas that they already have. Well, I've got a video on the tiling. I won't spoil the entire video. But one of the feature requests I did bring up in that, I have opened up the wishlist thing as well for it. So what I don't like about the way it currently works

is the quick tiling bindings don't interact with the tiling editor layout. Yeah. That was true. It's true in 6.0. In fact, it's true right now. When we added this tile, or snap tile support, because we've got your original version which was with the corners, and then we added in this customisation sort of opt-in level of the next step on from that,

and they share some code underneath. 6.1, they're going to share even more code. They're definitely going to be moving towards that, but it was done in a let's not introduce regressions and workflow changes way, which you need to do to an extent. Be somewhat conservative

and have a slow path. Some people are used to just snapping, dragging things to a corner and whatever. Quinn's not a tiling window manager and i mean if people want that i mean i don't want to say i should use something else but sometimes that's the right answer every desktop does cater for something different and cosmic alpha is out next month wait sorry month after that it's still may yeah yeah i mean that is by default i mean if you build up a cosmic air tiling render manager with that as your intention you're going to get a different different result so cosmic's also interesting because like as you said a couple of times kde is a very very

old project whereas cosmic it only started like a year ago so it doesn't have that legacy craft there they they can start at like a very a much cleaner state than than kd is in it's not like they're trying to fix up you know 20 year old code bases where people thought that doing this thing was a good idea or something designed around the way that X works and now it has to be redesigned for, like, a more Wayland approach. Like, you start from doing it the way that you'd want to do it if you had a clean slate from today. And that's got a lot of potential.

I mean, you're advantageous to having years of experience and fixes and sorts of things. I mean, you've got to support for all sorts of weird calendars and whatnot for things that I don't understand but are very important to some people. And I suspect, I'm not going to make claims, but I suspect any new desktop coming in isn't going to have that sort of thing. It's probably not going to have a UI for setting up your printer or your fund of authorization or these things.

So I mean, nobody expects that on day zero. The question is, will it build up in the community enough to sort of get to that level? And that's going to be exciting part is does Pop!OS build a community and fledge out and how I manage that because having community contributions is a challenge sometimes. I mean it's an amazing thing. I mean I provide community contributions but get some amazing stuff from amazing contributors. Also where you end up with quite difficult code if you don't have a top-level design down of people writing things. So how Pop!OS embraces that is going to be interesting to see and only

time will tell on that. So I mean mean, I'm definitely going to try it out when it's available somewhere. I'm sure you will too. Yeah, I definitely will be. And I wish this was my best, or second best, obviously. It's fine. But the developers I've spoken to from Pop!OS are really nice people.

For the record, Carl Rochelle does watch this show, so you might hear the one. Yeah, the System 6 CEO. I'll drag him back on the show and ask him about that one. Anyway, I sidetracked you there, going on what you were saying. I don't know,

I'm just focused on PopOS now, or Cosmic. I think that... I think what people need to realise is, like, the desktops we have on Linux aren't, like, competitors in the same sense as, like, a product would be. Like, obviously you want your desktop to be the best desktop there is, but it's not like, you know...

Like, you know, you guys can take inspiration from what other desktops are doing if there's something that Cosmic is doing really well then like you guys can integrate that into Plasma as well if someone wants to do that or if Plasma is doing something well then they can integrate that into their system like if what people are trying to do is at the end of the day just make better software yeah I mean there were sometimes tensions raised uh mostly not about competing it's about trying to make sure your stuff integrates into other people's desktops and vice versa and making sure that's a consistent playing field doesn't always happen i mean we have several known specific work around in Qt Wayland,

which I mean, happens. And you want to see what is reciprocated. So I mean, there's tensions, but I mean, when you have an in-life meetup, everyone's always positive, everyone wants the same thing of Linux is five. And we do have different demographics, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. Not sure where Pop!OS is aiming now. It's because they are targeting typical users. I mean, System76 sells laptops to regular people. So where they pitch themselves is also a bit of an

unknown right now. Well, they have business partners as well, and I don't know. I'm curious to see what ends up happening with it. I hope it becomes another good desktop because that means that there is

the potential to have another maybe this isn't a good thing actually another voice in the the whalen protocol discussion um and they are active there which is nice um but they'll have more clout when they have more users which you'd hope to make sense like and it'll be also you'll be interested interesting how Iced Toolkit develops as well. Yeah, Rust GUI stuff is very, very new. Like, past couple of years sort of new. So, a lot of the Iced functionality...

If you look at the Iced Reaper, I think Jeremy Sola is one of the top contributors now. Like, that's how new we're talking with the GUI stuff in Rust. So that's going to be intensely high outplayed, though. And I don't want to speculate. I'm just going to sit back and hope that we don't get completely crushed. I don't get completely crushed. I don't know.

I'm sure there's going to be people trying it out. And I, like what you're not going to be able to do no matter what is, as you said, like compete with that years and years of community add-ons and all of this stuff. Like that just doesn't happen overnight. Like whether it be things that are built into Plasma or whether it be additional, like, plasmoids and whatever,

like, that's something that comes over time and comes from an active and thriving community. But I'm sure if people like it, they will make things for it if the API is reasonable enough to make things for it if the api is reasonable enough to make things for it yeah yeah and i think that integrate well into it as well you know application stack i mean because one thing that kd has always excelled at is we don't have necessarily a most apps but apps we have tend to be the massive big hitters that are on multiple platforms those caden lives creators cakes and whatnot because our backend stack that cute and everything that's a very multi-platform

i mean cute's multi-platform first it's not whalen first it's multi-platform first wayland's just this side forgotten not forgotten about thing but it's not the main focus so getting our apps on android or whatever is relatively trivial even web assembly we can compile some of the apps to that so we've got these big header apps which nobody else can compete with yet but we don't necessarily have bulk of apps as well so it's definitely different different things that we're all aiming for in regards to cute you mentioned also um at some point obviously plasma kde is gonna drop x11 support one day we don't know when one day would it happen i don't know maybe this is just like you can't really answer this yet because it's not really sure, but would that happen because Qt is dropping X11 support, or do you see it happening before that time? It'll probably happen before that time because Qt's got little maintenance burden with maintaining X support

because the platform abstraction's really quite good. I mean, you've got 14 platforms I think that you can run on. So when you've got that many, having that one extra one is not slowing you down in any way. And it doesn't need any changes.

It just works for now. And whilst they have people using it, they're not going to drop it. So they're not going to drop it before us. Right. Well, yeah, obviously. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

Right. So from that point of view, I think we'll end up dropping things first. How we drop things is also not decided because it's probably not going to be we support it and then we don't it's going to be either we start dropping some specific functionality on X11 like saying

okay you've got X11 but you can't say we're composed to anymore because that's an annoying code path to try and maintain that and Wayland or it would be this part a compositor anymore because that's an annoying code path to try and maintain that and Wayland. Or it would be this part is for a fork of Quinn, I have two versions of Quinn, one which is maintaining, one which is stuck on a different mode in a different repository and you download one with two different repositories. That's on the cards. So it's probably gonna be a slightly slow gradual thing.

But eventually it's gonna happen. Because it does hold you back. You've already taken the first step with Weyland now being the default. So it's already at that point where a lot of people... Unless you actively know like the difference between X11 and Weyland and why you might want to run one over the other like most people are probably I know generally most people are running Weyland at this point I think it's it's at least from the the polling that I've done like I had like 10,000 people answer the poll I had and

it was like 55 45 with Weyland ahead uh but it might be skewed with my audience maybe but it's definitely definitely close so in our metrics downstream we've got um before plasma 6 we were only at 20 percent wayland wow 30 percent um gaming on on Linux.org has stats where Wayland's only on the 20, 30% as well. That's rising. For us, I know our metrics, we've jumped up to 35% quite quickly. And as those other distributions are going to hit, that number's going to jump. But yeah, it's relatively low be interesting to see Gnome's numbers

because you'd expect that to be much much higher well they've been Wayland Default for a much longer I don't know when the project went Wayland Default but Fedora went Wayland Default like way before it was ready like 4 or 5 years ago

like actively things were just actively, you, like, things were just broken. Like, you couldn't screen record back then. Like, basic things just didn't work.

But Fedora, they do things when Fedora wants to do things. Like, Fedora was shipping SystemD the first distro. They were the first ones to do it. They were the first distro

to ship Pulse Audio. Like, Fedora does Fedora, what Fedora wants to do. What? Yeah is i don't remember what it's called they're like um, no, you're not doing that. You can stop shipping it.

You can stop shipping the package, but you have to have an X11 package in the repo. That's what they're at right now. Okay. I don't see what they gain from rushing that, because if you change the default,'ve made a statement you're going to have people switching and there's already a path in that direction trying to rush things is only going to get people more infuriated rather than more excited and if people are infuriated they're

going to push back more so i think it's a bit of a shooting in the foot but it's a prerogative so I mean I'm proved wrong a lot of the time so maybe I'll be proved wrong again here so I don't we'll see what happens I mean they switched the whaling before I thought it was a good idea and they got good results out of it. Because other people are more confident. Because they don't see how a meet is made, as it were. I think, in the long run, Fedora is right. I don't think any of the changes they've made have been wrong. They swapped SystemD, they swapped Pulse Audio,

they swapped Pipewire, they swapped Wayland. All of these changes long run are correct it's just, when they do it you know it's just maybe a touch too soon I think with the dropping Wayland stuff

we both know there are actual legitimate problems that still exist in the Wayland session I've covered plenty of stuff whether it be related to like this is the the dumbest the dumbest protocol discussion i don't know how it's gotten so many comments like having window icons and have like a protocol to set window icons it has like 500 comments on it now i don't know why it's such a insane protocol. But there's other things like... What is it? The VR protocol.

The one that GNOME doesn't support, that I'm blanking the name on. GOM Lease. That one, yes. There's things like that that still aren't properly dealt with. It's dealt with everywhere else, except GNOME. And accessibility, which is also... Absolutely, yeah. Quite a... I mean, for a lot of people, not an important thing at all. For some people, the most important thing in the world. Well, also accessibility's not like a one-size-fits-all thing. Like, I had a guy... I brought this guy up a bunch of times, but I had a guy on the other time, the other week. He has, like, perfect hand movement, but his vision is very impaired.

So he runs Plasma at, like, he uses, like, the desktop effect, like, zoom thing, and he runs it at, like, 1600% zoom. And he's a game developer. Like, he develops a game in Unity at, like Unity doing that.

I think he swapped back to Windows now because he had some other unrelated issue. But, yeah. That is great for those people, but then there's the whole issue of screen reader support and having the global hotkeys working with that. And I know there's the global shortcut portal now,

but there's not really anything that's using it. I don't think GNOME has their shortcut portal implemented yet So it's like this weird visit. There's a solution that is there It's just the piping to the solution is not yet in place and I yeah, I don't know if does the the the KD portal have an interface for the The shortcut portal yet. Yeah, we would we did that first. Okay. Okay, um, but we don't have that many things using it so standing is zero

I It's definitely One anyway One sure That's not really selling it, is it? No. Ultimately, at some point, we need to bridge our APIs to your portal APIs, and then we bring in all of these applications for free.

Yeah. Yeah. Because as these portals become for more and more niche cases, there aren't going to be that many things using them. But the things using them are going to be important. Right, right, right. Yeah.

I think... Accessibility is still a big one that needs to be dealt with. I think that's the last really fundamental thing. But then there's a lot of rough edges that need to be resolved as well like the rough edges i think we're going to be dealing with like well into like plasma 7 that i don't think it's going to be resolved quickly yeah there's a discrepancy between should wayland accommodate what application needs or should applications rewrite themselves based on Wayland and that's always

a grey area which needs to needs to be met with compromise and right now that compromise doesn't exist I think where we're really going to see things heat up is when Red Hat

fully gives up on X-11, which they are scheduled to do at 2032. That's where their last release that ships X-11 is going to go EOL. After that point, they are full in on Weyland.

So, yeah. So your clock is ticking? Yeah. I better stop hanging around on podcasts and do some work. So, yeah. So your clock is ticking? Yeah. I better stop hanging around on podcasts and do some work. No. But overall... Back to the original topic.

I'm going to be responsible... We go way off sidetracked. It's fine. Plasma 6 feedback. Your Weyland part hasn't been that big of an issue. That's been met generally with positivity and there's been a couple of minor visual glitches and you know, because we've got more user base and not having had users running at code for a year.

But once now that's all about to ironed out generally, criminally. So I guess you probably want to hear some of the stuff, my, my, my, some of my thoughts on what's my experience. And you want to talk about that a bit. I feel your users will want to hear your viewers are going to want to hear this thing. I'm going to put my fingers in my ears. want to hear your viewers are going to want to hear this thing i'm gonna put my fingers in my ears no go for it well i just like before like the feature request stuff i do have like some

general like i have a couple of stutter issues they're only stutter issues with the desktop effects like if i if i open up the tiling editor it will stutter before i go into it if i close the tiling editor it stutters after i i leave it if i close the tiling editor it stutters after i i leave it it's like my mouse stops registering for a second and same with things like opening up like the overview and things like that like there's a stutter before and a stutter after i know this isn't like a a one-off thing i've seen some other people mention it but other people say that amd is perfectly rock solid but but I'm running AMD myself. So I don't know Yeah, I do know what bug this is

It's very frustrating So obviously we would time how long it takes for a renderer frame and then we target things based on how long that last frame was and everything And the way we do this is we ask a GPU, oh can I have a timestamp? And then we, you ask it asynchronously and then at the end you say, what was your timestamp when we asked you?

Because it's a separate channel. And that's great in paper, and it works great on ours, but then it turns out in real life, a lot of the GPU drivers just do random things. Just report times in the future, in the past, and we're getting these things that, oh, it took zero seconds to render your last frame. OK, well, it takes zero seconds to render a frame. We'll schedule it here. And then we have to wait until that catches

up. And that's not helped by the fact that your GPU clock speeds up and slows down, speeds up and slows down. And when you activate an overview effect, it speeds up and then it seems some throw away your timing information. There's guards now for when we get given surprise values from the hardware. We're still going to have various issues. for when we get given surprise values from the hardware. We're still gonna have various issues. I mean, stuff is such a generic symptom there. Right, right.

I'm not gonna play unit six with that particular issue, but I know we had that issue. A lot of debugging happened by people cleverer than me. And we came up with these guards, and to those people it got fixed. Whether yours are the same,

I don't know. We'll find out when you get 603. Oh yeah, that came out today, didn't it? Well,

don't test it now. Well, no, I just haven't updated today. No, and start doing

something that's continually going to be improved upon in performance and whatnot. Um, okay. Honestly, I think... Well, yeah. I don't know if it's the same stutter issue, but sometimes it

completely locks up, and the tiling editor doesn't even open. So that could be the same sort of stutter and it just i i maybe i like click maybe because i know if you click the background it closes the tiling editor so maybe i accidentally click or something and it closes it before it opens and it like during the time where it's locked up so i i don't know it's it because it like yeah i i don't know what the deal is with that. It's a weird one.

I it could be anything. I just said stutter issues are weird. And yeah, but that's like it's like a it doesn't happen consistently. It's like once every like 20 or 30 times I do it. So it's. Computers are weird. They are very weird. You get the same result. I mean, that's what logic are weird, right? They are very weird. You expect it to be the same thing,

you get the same result. I mean, that's what logic tells you, what math tells you. That's what... Hmm. That's not what happens. Yeah, yeah. Well, one of my issues I know

is getting resolved in 6.1. The way the edit panel works, so if you, right now, if you're in edit mode, whatever, edit mode, is that what it's called? Yeah, edit mode. It's a global edit mode and it's a panel edit mode. Yeah, and then you click on the little tiny icon in the corner and that gets you into panel edit mode.

I know that there's now going to be a big thing where you just click on the panel. I know I wasn't the first one to suggest that, but I'm happy it got implemented. I don't want to get everyone thinking if you make a YouTube video your bugs get fixed. It's not how feature requests get fixed. But I mean, the timings, edit mode has always been slow iteration, slow iteration. And that's the way we do a lot of KDE is iterate feedback, iterate feedback, iterate feedback, iterate feedback, rather than a top down. And that can be good, you can get really good results out of this constantly listening and evaluating. But it

can also end up in a situation where you don't actually have a coherent big picture. Right. Until someone steps back and goes, actually, we need to look at a big picture again. Because in that globe where that mode you were in didn't exist before. Right, yeah. I heard there was some people... That was added, but then not really thinking about

how it interacts with other things. And it's one thing that if you're used to it, if you know it, you go, okay, I'm going to edit mode to panel. Yeah, that's what I got from a lot of people. A lot of the experienced people, they're like, no,'m going to edit mode to panel. Yeah, that's what I got from a lot of people. A lot of the experience applies to people. They're like, no, it works fine. But, yeah.

Like, I think... If you're used to the old way of you had the desktop edit mode, or you had the panel edit mode, it's fine. You just continue that thought process, but something changed and I kept in sync. I think what's really important is because I've been using Linux for

a while, five or six years now, but I haven't used Plasma before, so I can just turn me up a bit. I can hear myself now. Okay. I couldn't hear myself the entire... Did you change

your volume? Not knowingly. Uh, I don't know what happened there. Um, anyway, um, because I have no experience using Plasma before, like I've used GNOME in a couple of streams just because people get angry when I use GNOME and it's funny um but i i hadn't actually actively used plasma so i'm going into plasma seeing these like issues that might have been there since five or four or so on and that to me they are new experiences and especially with like the ux stuff where i am a new user to plasma so like the so the UX that is sort of treated as like, this is just the way

that Plasma works, I'm seeing this as a new user, and maybe it's fine the way it is, and I'm just stupid. Very possible. Actually, incredibly possible. Or, maybe there actually is an issue there that people are just used to, and they never really thought about it being an issue

because, well, that's just the way that Plasma's always worked. And it is useful to get that feedback from these new people. And one of the best things that happened in one of the really good peers of Plasma was this one developer who worked in an office and he got his colleague who sat next to him to switch to Plasma. And we got all of these merge requests that started with i was watching my colleague do this task and and then and then every merge request came in that same

format of i saw this happen this is why he thought that this is the confusion here's how it affects is going to be and they were some of the best series of patches of having that i could i mean just having someone telling you how things should work doesn't really work but watching somebody else fail is really important yeah i i think that's i i hope that's what people can get out of the videos that i'm doing like i know it can come across like i'm some people see it as like me demanding changes like that's not the way it is like i would like changes to be made like absolutely i would like it to work the way that i would like it to work but i also understand that like you know someone has to implement it and i like to say things kind

of straight to the point and i i'm not going to be like oh well you know dance around what i'm trying to say for five minutes before i say anything. Like, I'm going to say exactly what I'm trying to say, and like, especially in, like, the tiling case, because there's a lot of things I would like. I already brought up the quick tiling stuff before, but that's just one of the things. I would also like, you know

how there's, like, the load layout button? It would also be nice if there was, like, a way to save your current layout. If you didn't talk plasma sdk um but yes it's it's in the way yeah okay so it well i i think that's me going with the developer mode of oh it is if you do this and this and yeah no i think you also brought that doesn't help i mean that was good feedback of you couldn't see how to do it i think you brought up it might have been your might have been someone else who said in one of my like one of my comments Maybe it was someone else

I don't know someone brought up the fact that you can save existing panels and like put them into like this is like a way you can like There's like a file or the JavaScript file Yeah, yeah, but there's no like That's how we uh started some of this but like there's no specific user facing save button it's like there's a developer way to do it and you can write plugins and stuff like obviously there's a plugin you can do so there's a way to do it but it's no like save like that i believe plasma sdk which is a whole set of tools of dumping ground,

a set of tools for people doing third-party add-ons, that has a button where you can... I see. In the look and feel editor, you can say, save my current layout, so that you can then pop it to somebody else. If you do that with metadata packaging of saying, well, here's attached previews

and here's my name and email address and whatnot. I'm not surprised it's somewhere. But it's not like... So it doesn't totally work actually. But yeah, that's what I hope people get out of what I'm doing.

Just like, I am someone new to Plasma. Here are some things I think would be cool that I think would make it better. I am someone new to Plasma, here are some things I think would be cool, that I think would make it better. If someone wants to work on them, that's cool. If they don't, that's fine. But like, a lot of the time the things I'm bringing up also, maybe it's things people haven't thought of, or maybe someone thought of like 10 years ago and they forgot about it and it just never got implemented so it is i like to open up like

sort of a a discussion amongst like the community because you know there's a lot of people who have ideas but they see the plasma issue tracker and they're like i have no idea where to go i know it's better than it used to be but the plasma issue tracker is like i so i i wanted to add a wish list for quick tiling, like the thing regarding quick tiling keys should interact with the tiling editor. So I went to the Plasma bug tracker, then I went to the Plasma section, then I went to KWin,

then I went to quick tiling, and then I... Like, there's just so many... Which is also a KWin section, rather than KWin. Whatever. Well, I initially searched for the Plasma section, but there was no... Like, there's no, like...

Oh, Plasma Desktop section, sorry. So Plasma Desktop isn't a section there. It's another section. But the Plasma bug tracker... I think that the problem with the Plasma bug tracker is just the fact that there are so many things under the Plasma banner. I don't know how you can make it easier to work with.

It- there's just too much there, so it's- Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's naturally gonna be a nightmare. There's a lot of stuff. Um... And we knew it was a forum as well, for that less intense, uh... I guess this is why a lot of people just- Discussion forum.

A lot of people will just, will just report things on the Reddit because they just don't know how to use the bugs. It's frustrating because that's also something, someone who's not used Plasma will go see you on social media if that's full of people saying this should work this way, it's not great.

So I don't want to fix things just because they're on social media. Sure. Because that was spiked. Because I am very petty. But yeah, I mean, I've got no objection to you doing your videos. I mean, when Linus from Linus Tech Tips did it, there was more follow-up. So if you're on the same level, you can. more follow-up so if you're on the same level you can

look I will do more I'll do more work than Linus did I will make bug reports which is an improvement they will come in slowly because I need to find time to actually write them and people like Brody have you made bug reports everything you made in the video

no I haven't found time to sit down and actually write them all but I'll get to it. Soon, eventually. It will happen at some point. Okay, well, I look forward to reading them. Assuming you can find them in... Assuming I report them in the right section. If the thing reports you in the wrong section,

within reason, it gets found and moved. Because people subscribe to just, by date, for everything, and just pop it in the right place if it's not. Right, right, right. Yeah.

I want to make it clear that, like, I know you, actually, what was the specific wording that you wanted me to say? Hold on. Hold on. The specific wording that you came up with. Sure. Okay.

I'm going to vote for now. Where did I? That's fair. What? Where is the comment? In the Discord chat. If you scroll up in the window, you're currently in. Ah, right. Most of the experience has been good, but there have been a few sticking points. I think they've been more

noticeable because most of it has been good, so the bad parts stand out. I completely... Look, I... There's probably a better way to word it, but I do think that's the case. The reason why I can talk about tiling, or the reason why I can talk about the way the edit mode works,

or the reason why I can bring up this stutter issue, is because most of the rest of it is fine. I don't need to talk about the system settings. They work fine. I don't- I actually- I do have a problem with the fact that you have like a million different modules- No! No! I don't understand why kscreen is a separate package. Like that's- that doesn't make any sense to me. It should like be part of the- it should- I don't understand why monitor configuration needs to be an extra package. But that's, like, plans for having a million packages for doing things.

Anyway. Do you want to know? Sure. Why? It's just coming out of one word. History. Yeah, okay, fair. Or, like, I know the... about my system,

whatever it's called. The info center? What's the... That's also a separate package for... Yeah, about this system, whatever it's called. Any info center? What's the... That's also a separate package for... Yeah, about this system. About this system is like a separate package, which it just... It makes sense that it's legacy.

I don't know... Yeah. I mean, we should try and hide that from users, maybe just... Because what we have on the Git side and what we provide to distribution doesn't have to be the same thing. So there's

room for improving. It wouldn't matter... It's not something that most users see. Right, because they use a distro that just fills everything, yeah. Yeah. But it is a situation that comes from just history of k-screens as a separate package because it was a competitor to replace something that already existed. So it starts off in its own repo, because that's how you write a competitive, aggressive fork. And then we're like, okay, that's clearly better.

Get rid of the old code. At some point, moving it is always good stuff here. What's the point of moving it? It doesn't affect anything. And that's how we get this flipped. Yeah, that's how we get this flipped yeah that's fair but it's not it's not a justification for why it should be like that right right right but like the point out before before i got sidetracked again the point i was getting at is like the core fundamentals of being a good desktop i bear like i i it's fine like okay, I'm going to play host.

Actually, sorry, one thing I will bring up. Pardon? One thing I will bring up is I don't like the up and down arrow for minimize and maximize. I don't know why those are the things that are used. It just seems weird to me. It doesn't matter. I never minimize windows anyway. So.

Favourite feature so far. Favourite feature so far. Nice being asked questions you weren't expecting, is it? Favourite feature so far. If I'm actually being honest, the fact that your portals work properly for video capture Yeah, I like because I've been having issues on on hyperland with portals crashing my entire desktop And yeah, that's a problem. But I open up OBS all of the portal windows open. I click the thing and it just works

OBS, all of the portal windows open, I click the thing, and it just works. That's how things should be. Yeah, it's nice. I don't use it often because I don't really use Discord, but I do like having the XWeld and VideoBridge stuff there as well. That is really nice. On the one

occasion every month I use it, it's nice to have there. Cool. Yeah, I mean, I think we have made an effort for your backwards compatibility. I mean, generally. I don't know, thinking about third-party applications as people we care about most. Don't break user space and all.

I do like the quick tiling. I would like it more, obviously, if it interacted with the tiling editor, but as a stopgap, I think it works just fine. Yeah, I mean, I think that's definitely something we put in as a first step to build upon. So hopefully you'll be happier as time progresses. Yeah, like most things,

most things I just don't have an opinion on because they just work fine. They don't work exceptionally, they don't work badly. They work exactly as I would expect. And that's what I would want from it. Yeah, I do agree that people get excited over a desktop environment. It's something I find a bit weird.

Like when people are like, oh, I can't wait for the next release. I can't sleep. I've been up for two days. Like, why? It's weird. Well, what you would want... It's something you should use rather than something to be excited about. But some people are, so...

It's nice for there to be like great positive feedback about things but it's also nice where people just don't like they don't have anything to say about it like yeah people shouldn't have anything to say about your minimize or your maximize or like closing windows like no you shouldn't have an opinion on that they should just do what they do exactly or like actually one thing i thing I know that Nico doesn't like is I don't actually care for the floating panel, I disable the floating panel. I'm sure he's going to be very upset when he watches this. Yeah, because he made like the whole, he made it like a big deal in his channel when

he got the floating stuff done. I mean it's because he did it, I mean everyone's proud of the stuff they did, so, you know, it's cool, right? Yeah, I've just always had my bar directly on the bottom of my screen. So, for me, it's just, like, yeah. It's neat. It's neat, I guess, but it's just not my thing.

Right. Actually, sorry, I completely forgot about, like, the main thing I really cared about. I actually, I, what, uh, sorry. Sorry. Let me start again. I completely forgot about the main thing I really cared about. I actually... Sorry. Let me start again. Widgets. I...

There are a lot of times where I just have my... So I have my bar set to be... Hide... It's hiding when a window's on top of it. And then it shows when a window's not there. Whatever that mode is called um so if i go into like full screen my bar isn't always on my screen i think it's really annoying when it's there uh but i also like to have a clock visible so i like

to put like a clock widget on like another screen it's just nice i can just put it there and it works okay why is the hair because i mean widgets sometimes does feel like it's dated content because it was cool and OSX had it. Right, right, right. And then they sort of faded away to be more minimalist. So that's cool. It's not just dead code. Well, on a lot of other window managers,

I would have a bar on every screen. Yeah. But I don't need a bar on every screen. So the main reason I have a bar on every screen. Yeah. But I don't need a bar on every screen. So, like, the main reason I have a bar on every screen is because I want to have my, like, desktop switcher there. But I don't really use virtual desktops because I don't like the way they work on Plasma. So I don't really need desktop switcher there.

But we got into that before. Yes. Because right now I use... I would normally be a very heavy virtual desktop user. I use two right now. So, look, maybe Plasma's actually fixed my bad habits. I don't know. It sticks to your need for virtual desktop

by providing more intuitive ways to find your windows. But I guess so. You might be doing it on something. My podcast. So, um... but I guess so you might be doing it or something my podcast so um one thing I did want to ask you about because

I I think it's weird they're doing it but it makes sense kind of um Kabunju

with 24.04 they are going to be shipping 5.27 I mean people said good Kabunju with 24.04, they are going to be shipping 5.27. I mean, people said good things about 5.27. The fact that it's on the end of the cycle has solid benefits.

So if you're trying to get that long-term support, that's cool. I mean, we are going to be doing security patches into 5.27 for anything that comes up And if there's anything major we'll backport that so you know it's not forgotten about So

That's great, I mean it's good to have different distributions providing something different otherwise, what's the point of them? So if distributions providing something different otherwise what's the point of them so if if if providing something on 527 you know as selling point of saying this is how we're going to differentiate ourselves by being this more consistent base that's not going to change over time there's an advantage there not for everybody but that's fine and then when they get a plasma 6 i mean i said to you, don't use Plasma 6.0 because we have bad.0. And then I did.

And then I did. You just ignored me. Yeah. I've got to get the views. And now look what's happened. That's fair. You make a good point. So, yeah, I don't necessarily think that's a good thing or a bad thing.

It's entirely up to them, and I think there's going to be a user base that caters for well. 6 is in a good place moving forward. And 6.0 is our starting point to then build and build on from. And that's something to bear in mind with all of this. My promo spiel pitch here. 6.0 is our launching point for what comes afterwards. And the gap between 5.0 and

what happened after that was big. 6.0 is the better starting point. It's going to just improve from there. I would assume the logic is they don't want to ship a point zero release it would be they'd probably be shipping like 603 or something but like i think right now maybe they'd be shipping like 601 because right now i think they're actually in their feature

freeze it's difficult everyone has their feature freezes ahead of time and you can't come up with a calendar that works for everybody so so maybe they just want to avoid that because i obviously 24.10 is gonna be uh there's no way it's not gonna be plasma 6 by that point but so i mean i think that's probably a perfectly solid choice uh I know there's like a release schedule for like the bug fix releases but is there like a release date sort of plan for 6.1

or any sort of rough guidelines four months after 6.0 so four months three times a year so I can't do a math on February plus four, but it's up.

It's not February, it's March. Yeah, but we released in February. Oh, right. So, right, yeah, okay. Maths is hard, right? Yeah, no, it is. Yeah, that's... I'm stupid. It's fine. Yeah.

So, I guess some people probably want to know, like, what's in the pipeline, if not for 6.1, maybe something in the future, like, neat things that are being worked on that, at some point, are probably going to be shipped. Okay, I mean, I can give a more... I mean i mean talking more fundamentally one of the really nice things that came in 6.0 is uh we've got this automatic crash reporting so uh rather than things going to bugzilla where it wastes loads of time with people marking duplicates whatever whatever things go to sentry a u UI designed specifically for this, and it automatically duplicates things, de-duplicates, and you've got a dashboard just for this. And that's worked wonders.

And I hope that will continue to do so, because in, let's say, Craft Reports, there's also any asserts or any time go, this looks weird, or just bail out now. So that's going to be really cool that's something that's going to start reaping benefits in 6.1 and 6.2 onwards because then we'll have the worst feedback from that so that's going to be really cool another thing that landed in 6.0 but i don't think it's necessarily understood yet. Quinn got a desktop cube, right? And it's a gimmicky feature, whatever, secure, right? But that doesn't work by just doing a perspective transform

on a bunch of rendering. It's a full 3D renderer. And bear with me on this, right? Because this is exciting. No, I can only think of some dumb things you can do with this. Yes, okay. Oh, there's so many dumb things. I'm not writing a single line of C++ or anything.

The problem Quinn had was we had this graphics library which was too slow for our first painting, where you've just got irregular windows and you're not doing an effect. But also not very good for writing proper effects because doing stuff by hand is difficult. Writing text in OpenGL, especially if you want to get Vulkan layers as well, is really difficult. Writing text and even loading an image, that sort of thing. So we've gone through a split. There's now effectively two renderers in Quinn that interact

and swap with each other, being able to share information between each other very smoothly. Which meant we've got this very, very, very fast, simple renderer for your normal case. And that's faster than it was before much more streamlined much more simplified it's just here's a bunch of squares random can be super fast it's what you want and then when we bring in the effects whatever they are then we can leverage qquick which is an amazing 2D or 3D, you get to choose a framework where you can do anything you'd expect with Unity. I mean, not at the level of Unity, but drawing a cube and then putting a lighting effect in the shadows and textures and bump, displacement, that sort of thing is trivial. And you're doing that in a high level script scripting language, in that memory-safe QML.

So when we start to see people doing interesting things with that, it's going to start off gimmicky. It's going to start off stupid. It's going to start off with a cube, and it's probably someone's going to make a sphere, and someone's going to make a teapot where your windows morph or whatever. But with these sorts of frameworks, you see people do gimmicky

things and then desktop effects in general it were gimmicky and then people did really really interesting stuff with them and stuff that if you now don't have them if you don't have those smooth animations things look awful you expect some of these things so we're able to hopefully get the best of both worlds there. We've got high-level language for higher stuff, which is smooth and brilliant and great. And then we've got faster, simple things, the common case, which is faster than before. And then when you throw in a Vulkan framework, which is underway, we only have to port to simple parts and in a high level language we get it for free.

Because Qt Quick has done all of the work. So what you're saying is you're waiting for someone to port Doom to it. I guess it's doable. We'll see what happens. You shouldn't do it but if someone wants to...

So, I mean, I think that's something to be excited about. And QML in general, I mean, memory-safe languages are something people are talking about, and nearly that go-to thing of rewrite everything in Rust is the only way to a memory safe language

I think most people don't realize that a lot of modern languages are just memory safe by default. Yeah Maybe rust for all these things which aren't just memory safety, but But there are plenty of memory safe languages and I mean QML and JavaScript is one And as we move more stuff to that we're going to get this more stability and everything and it's really providing a high fast turnover for designers to just come in not knowing any code and work on our UI which really pays off because you don't want developers doing UI because they suck at it. Yes, they do. So, I wanted to get some of that tooling and infrastructure in place to get these core

components which needs to be worked on. Because right now we're being very conservative and making our stuff look like our old widget framework. And that's very slow, performance-wise, which I think I care about. But also it's holding us back quite a bit. So at some point that's going to get a new way of working and we can leverage that and it's going to be awesome. Also, most importantly, there is funding coming in from various sources. I'm allowed to say that Valve funded

a lot of bug fixing over 6.0 just last month. And they've got specific features of funding. But there's also funding from other places. Another company wanted to do some 5.27 LTS support recently. They've got money in the KDEV to fund two people doing various projects and that makes a

difference because more developers who have more time you get more stuff done it's not a complicated equation there but it really pays off and once you have a better product hopefully that will bring in more as well so there's a reason to be excited about Plasma 6. I'm assuming Valve's probably in the process of deciding when they want to move the Steam Deck over. That's probably why they're... Obviously they're trying to improve things generally as well,

but that's going to be a big part of the reason why they're doing it. Yeah, I mean, they've got, they've got a Plasma 6 deck at some point that's going to swap. Yeah, it's, it's 527 right now, but at

some point, presumably, unless they just abandon the device, it'll be Plasma 6. Yeah. Yeah.

I have a specific question, something to take to Valve, but yes. No, that's, that's, that's really cool. It seems like there's a lot of like really cool stuff like in the works, like's really cool. It seems like there's a lot of really cool stuff in the works,

in the pipeline. Not all of it's user-facing, like the bug reporting stuff. But for the developers, that is going to help dealing with the problems. I know that a lot of KD people don't like to hear it, but there are a lot of bugs to be resolved because you can see the change notes, there's a lot of KD people don't like to hear it, but like, you know, a lot of, there are a lot of bugs to be resolved, because like, you can see like, the change notes, there's a lot of bugs being resolved, um, and having that reporting coming in in a more accessible way, and more useful way, that gets rid of all of the noise, and collapses it down into, like, collapses duplicates down

into things that like, you know, you don't have 500 reports of the exact same thing uh it's gonna make it easy to search for things and hopefully more problems that are being effect like being seen by a lot of people are able to be more easily uh i guess identified yeah yeah yeah better triaging of that sort of thing so right right i think that's really encouraging i think that's something because i mean we've got a reputation there to shake off i think we're making steps towards that and hopefully our reputation will sort of it takes it takes a lot of effort to shake a reputation right uh and that's something we need to put an effort into yeah I'm sure

you've heard plenty of times from people maybe they have no idea what they're talking about saying it would be nice if Plasma stopped adding features and then focused on bug fixes for a year or two or whatever yeah it doesn't work like that but that perception is there for a reason

because there were rough periods like Plasma 4 I guess with KDE 4 back then. I think it was... When did the swap over to calling the desktop Plasma come in? It came slightly after 4,

but it was in that phase, partly because of poor reception of the desktop, and the applications wanting to not be tied together with it. But now it's going the other way because in part of this perception is KD is massive and we've got a lot of stuff so should the reputation of plasma be tied to a reputation of K-Marjon card game? Probably not, but if it's all under the same umbrella,

people will make that association. I mean, if Apple made a bad calculator app, people would associate it all together. Right, right. So we are too big and we do need to streamline

of this is what we consider core this is what we consider to be uh and to use gnome's terms that circle of gnome they've got um a circle kd and i think we've we've lost that that sort of this is our core we're focused on this is the stuff with secondary level yeah um i think i think thenome Circle stuff is cool, because, like, it... Is there any sort of equivalent on the KDE side? I mean... Not... It's complicated to draw exact equivalents,

because, I mean, you've got this thing where you have to apply the HIG and everything. We have tried... It's become a KDE policy of trying to be as open... welcoming various projects. So as soon as any project wants to be hosted, they can get hosting, and they can become part of KDE app.

And us providing hosting is one thing, but then that also gets associated with you are KDE now and then they get your branding with that and not everything's at the same level, there's some applications which are amazing which are bringing us up and there's other things

that bring us down and so some more separation would be good to convey so uh but yeah it was something in a sense of there's loads of apps i know and there are people making apps and they're somewhat targeting kde as their environment oh i thought you had more to say there. No. Just a random side note, I kind of liked when the K in KDE stood for cool. The cool desktop environment, that was a...

You can always just pretend it does, like, every time you see it. That's fair. That's how I handle GTK, the GNOME toolkit. GNOME tool cool. Hmm? GNOME tool cool. That's how I handle GTK, the Gnome Toolkit. Gnome Tool Cool. Hmm? Gnome Tool Cool. Gnome Tool Cool.

You know what? We can go without everyone from now on. That'll work. What else did I have on here that we didn't talk about? Talked about Fedora already, we talked about that... Um... Huh. I- Somehow I think we actually hit on everything I have here. I don't know how that happened. Actually, well, one thing I did want to talk about is... So, a lot of people have been very critical of the way that I installed Plasma. Because I did not install the meta package.

And I did this for a specific reason. To be as annoying as possible. Yes. Actually, not even wrong. Because... So... I... actually not even wrong because so I the KDE packaging guidelines they suggest these are the packages that are recommended to install

alongside Plasma or install as a meta package I wanted to see what would happen if I just did not install the meta package and what I've noticed is there is a lot of silent issues where certain things just don't do anything. There's like a button there.

And it'll work all fine with the meta package installed, but it doesn't call you a moron because the package is missing. There's some extra challenges in this because we have Plasma deployed on various embedded boards or even in some cars, there's some prototype stuff there to have certain KD stuff there. So you can't have a pop-up dialogue saying, I can't find a system tray because that would be quite annoying if you're using

Plasma as a base for whatever weird embedded device you're doing. So is it a balance between you're on a desktop and you've forgotten something, and you're making a minified build and deliberately forgotten something? And trying to separate. Sorry, one situation I saw, just as an example. So for some reason, this might be Arch being stupid with their package. They don't have, for KDE add-ons,

for some reason Qt Quick 3D is not a hard dependency. So the Qt just doesn't work. The problem with KDElasma add-ons being too many things. Right. And QQuick3D being quite a big thing. They're like, well, maybe somebody only wants a comic applet.

Sure, sure. So I think that's Archer's rationale. I know our metadata does list it as recommended. But Archer had that rationale it's not the wrong rationale it's not one that worked out but

hopefully it gets fixed over time right? Hopefully but in cases I understand that being an issue as well where you just can't like randomly throw pop-ups but i i don't know like in cases like that it would be nice if there was some indication that something was missing whether it be like in the desktop effects itself being like hey you're missing this library at this location or something. In fact, something did land for the cube specifically, I think. Okay.

I know something landed there because you weren't the only person. Well, yeah, I searched for the problem and I had like a wall of Reddit posts come up and like installed this package. Yeah, which, they're right. It's something that doesn't get seen because any testing you do You install it before even if I grab myself if you're testing on neon, it's It's yeah So I mean people did do some clean vm testing

But clean vm testing is not the same thing. So So I told you not to install 6.0 but did you listen well if you installed 6.1 i would install plasma desktop and then i would have the same problem yeah maybe maybe but i i here's one of the other things with me complaining about stuff. People are like, oh, well, no, no, this is actually a good thing for you. People will complain about me complaining, but my argument for why it's a good thing, and I'm on Arch, so I'm going to get things like way before, you know, especially Kubuntu, but even before Fedora. So by the time that Kubuntu is seeing it, the people on Kubuntu should be thanking

the rolling release people that they are running the 0.0 release. And they are... Because obviously you had all the beta testing, right? But a beta test is one thing. The real beta test is going to be when it's out to the public. And it's not just people that are hyperactive KDE,

like developers and hyperactive KDE users. It's the general audience. That's when you're going to start seeing even more issues that nobody even realized were there because people have weird setups. For example, I have three monitors, but I have two vertical monitors. I don't know if there's specific issues with vertical monitors,

but yeah, don't question my setup. But most people don't run vertical monitors. Maybe there's some issue with vertical monitors. I haven't found one but like things like that We had a bug report today Somebody who has a setup, we've got two monitors and they touch in the corner So like there's one in here and the other diagonally placed next to it Can you move it through the corner? Yes, and just go through that one corner. And then you posted it, and it was like, okay, that's a weird bug, how did you end up...

Or set up like a... No, I deliberately set it up to that. Wow. Sure, okay. Exactly, that's what I mean, people are going to have weird setups. It wasn't even this bug, Like, apparently it worked absolutely fine. It was just a bug or something kind of related. Or they have, like, weird hardware. Like, or they'll, you know, I don't know, they have, like, a...

I don't know, how many people are, like, doing wireless printers, for example? I don't know, maybe a lot more people. I don't know how many people are... You're probably not going to see that until someone, like, uses Plasma like a business or university. Like, most people don't have printers. So, I don't know, there could be some random printer issue or, like, I don't know,

some weird... Like, I know drawing tablets, for example. Like, there's a... A lot of artists have been... Like, this was a big discussion with Fedora going Wayland only with Plasma. My understanding is a lot of

things that are missing for tablets that are like very artist specific things they would like to see added and most people are just not going to test that because they just don't use it. Yeah, I know some developers bought some tablets to hook everything up. But if you hook everything up in a tablet that I can afford it has two buttons and a pointy stick thing right yeah the ones that other people developers have yeah API has how have a puck we can move and then you've got this controller and then that's got and more accesses of rotation and exists in the physical world and then another devices on top and and the spec's insane.

And the spec's insane because the device is complicated and insane. Yeah. So, yeah, you're right. I mean, there's stuff to fill in. And I think the real problem with Plasma, and it's the problem and the benefit, is because there is so much customization and there are so many different ways it can be run,

you're going to run into situations where a subset of settings just doesn't get used by anyone but one person. Yes. Yes. We have a lot where there's a specific focus policy. The window, the window on the mouse gets focused

automatically. Nobody tests that. Going back to the guy I mentioned before who runs Plasma at 1600% zoom, he had an issue with the so he uses the

push. So when you push the edge of the screen, it then moves around. Have you ever used the zoom decimal effect? Yeah. Okay, yeah. He doesn't use the one that follows the mouse. He likes to push the edge of the screen. And there was an issue where...

So he has offset monitors. So in his actual layout, he offsets... In the in-case screen, he offsets, in the in-case screen, he offsets them because he wants them to line up in the real world. That's his logic. And he doesn't have an arm so he can level them up,

so he offsets them in software as well. I don't remember the full logic behind it, but there was an issue, and he actually ended up implementing the fix himself and working with the developer to do it. There was an issue where, I think it was on the screen that was higher you couldn't pan to the top of the screen oh no it was the screen that was lower you couldn't pan to the top of the screen on the screen that was lower so like header bars would be cut off yeah but like hardly anyone uses that so

he ended up getting that resolved and Yeah, it things like that like most people are gonna mess around with it So, you know, there's only so much like testing that can be done Like you you're gonna have like test pods that you're gonna run internally, but you can't run a test for every single feature There's just too many things Even if you did, you'd still get bug reports. The best bug report I've ever had was a guy

and his bug report was when he resumed from suspend plus the shell closes and he's got a backtrace and the backtrace has nothing relevant in it. It's just idling. You know, it's like back and forth going through it. Four messages in, trying to get him some

logs or whatever. And then he goes, I don't know if it's relevant, but I've got a script I have hooked up to systemd resume. Like, yeah, okay, what is it? And it's kill all dash tag v, pass me the shells. This should have been mentioned somewhere near the beginning of this conversation, because, yes, I think it is somewhat relevant. Why did that script exist? Did he ever say that? Pardon? Did he ever say why that script existed? No.

It was like, there's no justification. It was like, I don't know if it's relevant, but... And it failed to piece the two together. And then I was too irritated, so I don't know what you would have said afterwards, I mean that was... Bugzilla, we've got two levels of close, you're closing, you can't reopen this button. And I went straight to that one because like oh plasma shuts down my computer randomly have like an hour-long discussion oh yeah sometimes my cat likes to play with the power button like maybe you should have mentioned that from the start i don't know it seems pretty

important i'm i i'm sure you've had plenty of weird bug reports where you're just like why? this is not a bug when it's like complete user error, like there's no issue with Plasma whatsoever it's not even like

Plasma's UX issues they've installed something where, I'm sure this has come up a lot where especially with like UX stuff where it's like they've got some crazy theme or they've got like some plasmoid installed and it changes some core functionality and they think there's an issue with plasmoid in reality it's entirely their own setup I mean we definitely have many many many of people opening an nVIDIA X configuration tool which can move monitors

about, and then saying, my monitor's moved about. That took a long time. Oh, and Bleachbit. Hundreds of duplicates of this thing where it just deleted some fairly important files in the config folder because it didn't

think it was necessary. I mean, that was quite a while ago. I mean, it must have been 10 years ago, actually, but I hold a grudge for a long time of duplicate, duplicate, duplicate, duplicate. Still don't see where it's coming from. We've written a file just here. How could it be gone? written a file just here how could it be gone?

Oh god It would be nice if everybody just had like they had clean backtraces, they had everything in order, they had like perfect replication conditions but sadly that's not reality everything in order. They had perfect replication conditions. But sadly,

that's not reality. The only solution is rather than people running Pac-Man on their own machine, they can just SSH into here. Because it works on my machine. Maybe that is the solution. Cloud computing. Exactly.

We're coming up on the two hour mark so I guess we'll end it there yes I'm good um where do you oh I know you've got your your blog do you occasionally chuck things up on but is there anywhere you want to direct people to I think what a certain theme on the store I can recommend. Hmm. No. Make it breeze dark. Oh yeah.

No, obviously planet.kde.org, get everyone's blogs. And I recommend people check out Brodie Robertson's YouTube channel. I was going to shoo myself anyway. It's fine, you do that for me. Oh. Yeah, Planet K that for me. Yeah, PlanetKDE is cool. I love PlanetKDE. I don't go to it enough. I should go to it more often.

I mean, all the good stuff gets picked up by big bloggers anyway. Oh yeah, you have like a one-line comment on Phoronix about it, and then like it would be like one one comment is like of a giant essay and you're like okay well thank you for at least linking it i i do appreciate that phoenix always links the uh the source so i can go read it and just post it's frustrating when you get paraphrased and then people give commentary on that paraphrasing which frustrating yeah that's why i always like to like the full quote on screen, so if I do paraphrase it and someone wants to call me stupid for paraphrasing it, they have the source right there. No, I like the way you do it. I mean, you tend to read verbatim and then provide feedback on... And your opinion can still be, I read David's blog and I think it's stupid. But it's better than I paraphrasing something and then

Yeah Yeah I always have a bunch of the links in the description as well, so if you really want to check out the full source, I'll usually usually I end up skipping paragraphs that I don't think are important, like there might be additional context

You might have explained something that I explained earlier in the video or something like that. Maybe I can say it in less words. You might explain the global theme situation, for example. I think you had a description of what happened, and I had already said it earlier in the video or something like that.

So, like, okay, just skip that. Don't need to read it. We'll go to the next part. Yeah. But anything else you want to direct people to or is that pretty much it download plasma at your nearest distribution

yes it will be available on fedora 40 whenever fedora 40 comes out I don't know April maybe

I don't know something like that sounds right yeah I feel like I should know this stuff but it'll be out soon go to the fedora website you'll find it out there I don't know. April? Maybe. I don't know. Something like that. Sounds right. Yeah, I feel like I should know your stuff, but... It'll be out soon. Go to the Fedora website.

You'll find it out there. Yeah. And then, I guess, not Kubuntu, because... Yeah, you've still got 5.27. Good release. I think OpenSUSE has it. So... I know Tumbleweed has it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I don't know what their point releases are going to do. I don't know. And Manjaro has it, because it's just Arch. I don't know what their point releases are going to do. I don't know. And Manjaro has it because it's just Arch. I don't know. I don't know what else is out there. Debian will have it in like four years. I don't know.

Yeah. Yeah. So if that's pretty much it, I guess we'll just do my outro. That's pretty much it. Is there nothing else for you to say? Yep, yep, yep. I thought you were going to do my outro. That's pretty much it. Is there nothing else for you to say? Yep, yep, yep. I thought you were going to do your outro. Thank you for your wonderful sponsors.

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I don't actually have sponsors on here. I should find some sponsors. Look, if you want to sponsor me, hit me up. I'm not going to read my email out because then the scrapers will scrape the text here and then they will start sending spam.

But if you go to my channel, you'll find it. Anyway, the main channel is Brody Robertson. I do Linux videos there six days a week. By the time this comes out, I'm actually going to move this forward in my schedule so it can be more relevant. Check out my April

Fool's Day video when it comes out because i i had very fun going very very um off the rails with that one so enjoy that uh i i always upload them the day before april fools australian time so like i'll blow on like the first for me which is not the first for the americans so it confuses them they think it's serious for the first couple of minutes it's always fun um i've got the gaming channel, BrodyOnGames. I'm probably, yeah, I'm playing through God of War 2 still. I'm probably done this week, and I'm going to be finishing off New Year's with you, and I'm, I don't know, if you pop around after this goes live on Saturday, I might be streaming the new Path of Exile League, so pop around for that if you want Saturday. I might be streaming the new Path of Excel League.

So pop around for that if you want. And if you're listening to the audio version of this, you can find the video version on YouTube at Tech Over Tea. And if you want to watch the, if you want to listen to the audio, you can find the audio on any audio podcast platform. There is also an RSS feed. Put it into your favorite app and you'll be good to go.

What do you want to say? how do you want to end us off goodbye is a traditional way of ending things that works pretty well okay see you guys later goodbye oh it's a hand wave yeah for that salute chill that works