Tech Over Tea - KDE Plasma Lead Propagandist | Nate Graham

Episode Date: November 3, 2023

Today we have another big name in the KDE space, the only and only Nate Graham who you may recognise from his blog Adventures in Linux and KDE along his general contributions to the overall project. ==========Guest Links========== Season Of KDE: https://dot.kde.org/2022/12/14/join-season-kde-2023 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. I'm, as always, your host, Brodie Robinson, and today we have the one and only Nate Graham on the show, who you might know from his KDE propaganda blog. I don't know. How you doing? Welcome to the show. Thank you very much. It's great to be here.

So I guess before we get into anything, I sort of want to just ask about your name, because everywhere you go by pointed stick, but I've never really known why. be here. So I guess before we get into anything, I sort of want to just ask about your name, because everywhere you go by pointed stick, but I've never really known why. Ah, this is maybe my favorite story. So are you a fan of Monty Python at all? Ah, I can't say I've enjoyed, I can't say I've experienced all of it, but I'm aware of most of it. Well, there's this famous sketch where somebody is teaching self-defense against fresh fruit. And the people taking the class are very anxious to learn how to defend themselves against real weapons. And at one point, one of them goes, what if he's got a pointed stick? And the instructor goes, shut up, very loudly.

And this becomes a running gag throughout the sketch that he's not going to teach them to defend themselves against pointed sticks. And so I've always thought that was very funny. But when I got started in KDE, one of the things that I find myself doing a lot is sort of poking people. I'm not a technical expert, although I can do things, but I find that I end up doing a lot of sort of social coordination stuff. And in this respect, being able to poke people works very well. So my sort of online handle of pointed stick has become rather prophetic there. So I keep going by it. Well, yeah, look, you've got consistent branding everywhere, which works out pretty well. My branding is garbage.

I've got like Brody on Linux in one place. I've got Brody Robinson on YouTube. At least my gaming channel and my podcast, sorry, my gaming channel and my Twitter sort of line up because I've got Brody on Linux and then Brody on games. But that's pretty much as consistent as it gets and then the podcast is technically honestly it's just laziness because i can't remember more than one or two handles at once so i just make everything the same so that

i always remember what my login is for everything do you ever have trouble like grabbing that name anywhere like is that something that people ever try to grab yes okay yeah so occasionally pointed stick is taken and on those accounts i do pointiest stick instead and that's never taken so that's what i am on reddit and discord i'm a pointiest stick there well mostly consistent we'll say mostly as much as is feasible so when do you find yourself getting involved actually we'll start with when you get when did you find yourself getting involved in linux and then after that whether that was at the same time as kde or if that came later yeah great question um my very first exposure to linux was in, but I'm not sure I would really call that involvement. My first really formal involvement was in about 2011 when I started running a

business selling 3D printer stuff. And at the time I was a Mac user and connecting to 3D printers worked a lot better if you had a Linux machine, just because most of the people who had made these DIY devices were hackers themselves. So, you know, everything matched up. So I started using Linux Mint as my primary machine, and I ended up using that for a couple of years. And I started doing the whole upstream bug reporting thing. I didn't really do a lot of technical contributions at the time, mostly just bug reporting and, you know, donations, things like that. And for various reasons, I ended up stopping using Linux Mint. And then I came back to Linux in the year 2016 after leaving my previous employer. And I decided this is it.

I'm going to start using Linux full time. this is it. I'm going to start using Linux full-time. I'm going to start shopping around for an environment that I feel like can replace Mac OS. I was still a big Mac fan boy at the time. And I started with GNOME and my experience there was pretty good, but I got a bit of the cold shoulder when I tried to contribute. And so then I moved to KDE and I got a much warmer reception in KDE and I've been there ever since. So that was in early 2017. So I've been a KDE guy since then. Wow. So actually it wasn't that long before I got involved just using Linux. I thought you would have been around a lot longer than that. No, in the grand scheme of things, I'm a relative newcomer.

I mean, most of my colleagues in KDE have been doing things for 10 years, 15 years, some 20 years, 25 years. So I'm the new kid on the block. Yeah, a lot of the people I bring on, they're like, oh, my first distro was Red Hat Linux. Not RHEL, like Red Hat Linux. first distro was red hat linux not rel like red hat linux or like some other distro from the 90s that just doesn't exist when it had an actual red hat in the box right yeah look i i i appreciate someone who i can at least relate to a little bit more with like how their Linux experience started.

I start on Arch. So my experience is don't do that. But it's at least like relative to the things that I understand exist today. Do you remember why it was Mint in particular? Was it just a matter of Mint being a popular beginner distro back then? Or do you recall? Yeah. Okay.

Makes sense. That was it. I was not embedded in the community at all. So I did 10 minutes of online research. You know, what is a good first Linux distro, right? Linux Mint popped up as a good beginner's Linux distro. And in general, I found that that was true. It was a very good beginner's first Linux distro

I liked it I enjoyed it I only really stopped using it because it broke every time I tried to do a system upgrade and fixing that was way beyond my abilities at the time um and it I I was also getting lured back into the Mac world for various reasons. So I said, well, maybe this wasn't for me. I'll just go back to Mac for a while. It didn't really occur to me that I could swap it out for something else or get a different distro. I mean, I guess it did in the back of my mind vaguely that I could try something else.

But my experience was, well, this is a cool thing, and I used it for a while while but it's time to go back to something stable because for me at the time stable was mac os because that's what i was used to what version of mac os would it have been at the time because i was using mac os around then as well oh gosh good question like mountain lion wouldn't it yeah yeah around then it was before they rebranded it with the mountains. Oh, yeah. It's funny, you know, back when I was a kid and younger, I used to be such a huge

Mac fanboy. I knew all the code names. I knew absolutely everything. And then I actually got hired by Apple and I worked at Apple for seven years as an engineer. And while I was there, I completely lost touch with the user facing stuff entirely. So I never had a back end version. What was that? Were you doing like stuff that just didn't really, what were you doing there? If you don't know what I'm asking. I was doing build engineering. Oh, way away from user facing stuff. DevOps stuff, right? So I never knew what version of the OS I was running.

As far as I was concerned, I was running whatever ISO came over the network that morning, right? So I lost touch completely with what the versions were, what the features were in each one. It was like basically Git master every day for me, which maybe colored my experience because that's what I do now. I run Plasma from Gitmaster every day. I'm actually on Plasma 6 Wayland right now while we're chatting here. So, you know, fingers crossed that

KWin doesn't crash, but it's fine these days. That would be a great advertisement. I know, right? Well, I got a shout out to my colleague, Harold Sitter, who fixed a KWin Wayland crash that I was experiencing just recently. So I'm running with this patch right now. That's good. I mean, it's a dev version, right? You expect everything to be broken for a while. But, you know, I've been living on it for months.

So it's good enough to do work on from my perspective. I wouldn't recommend it for a grandma, but it works for me. What are you using as a distro right now? I'm using Fedora KDE. Okay. Does, to you right now, considering what you do with the whole KDE environment, does the distro to you matter at all anymore?

Or is it just like get build, whatever the base is, it is what it is you know the distro does matter um but it matters for sort of the opposite reason why you might expect uh you might know in kitty we have neon of course and neon is like a stable ubuntu base plus rolling or unstable kde stuff what i find i need is literally the opposite of that. I need for everything that's not KDE to be as cutting edge as possible so that I have all the build dependencies I need. But the actual KDE stack could be 10 years old for all I care because I'm just going to build

it all from source. So that inherently pushes me in the direction of rolling release distros or at least semi-rolling distros. I used to use Tumbleweed. Tumbleweed is very good. I've never been an arch guy, but I decided to move to Fedora KDE because I kind of liked the user experience of it a little bit better, while the dependencies that it provided were 95% new enough for what I need. So occasionally I'll need to build something from source for like a week or two before Fedora ships it, but that's not a big deal.

Well, I guess that sort of leads into a big topic from recently, which was the whole thing that Neil was pushing for where dropping the X11 site on Fedora KDE. Yeah, that's a big thing. Where do you stand on that because i asked uh david when i had him on last time and if i recall he was like i i think he was slightly wary but not opposed to the idea yeah so in general i think this is a good fit for Fedora's user base. Fedora is a cutting-edge distro.

They inherently like to push the technology stack forward. And so I think if you are a Fedora user who's in the target demographic, this is something that should make you feel excited, right? This isn't something that should fill you with dread. And if it does, it's probably a sign that Fedora isn't the right distro for you. And I think that's totally fine. Not everybody needs to use the exact same distro in the world. I think it's a very aggressive plan. I doubt it will end up happening, to be perfectly honest, because the condition for doing this is that we in KDE knock off every single item on our true Wayland

Showstoppers wiki page. And there are, I was looking at it this morning, I think we've got seven items left and a couple of those are in progress. But to be honest, I would be surprised if we managed to get every single one finished by Plasma 6. I'm guessing probably 6.1 or 6.2 will be when we finally get all of those done. I could be wrong. Maybe we'll be super fast and amazing and everything will be done by 6. But what Neil has told me is that if we don't manage

to knock all of those out by 6.0, then they're going to defer the idea of shipping without the X11 session. Well, yeah, it's going to happen at some point. It will. I would not, like, it makes sense that Katie, so that Fedora is the first place to happen. It makes more sense that Gnome's the first place that completely drops X11,

but the first distro that decides to do it optionally, Fedora makes the most sense, outside of, like, you know, the experimental distros. Because I think the first distro ever to ship Weyland was Rebecca Black OS. Amazing. Which goes by RBOS right now, so most people just forget what the, like, full name was, and they just use it as, it as a regular distro.

But it's very much one of these small niche distros. Right, yeah. But you are right. I think Fedora KD was the biggest sort of mainstream-ish distro to ship Plasma Weyland by default. And they did that a few years ago. They did that like two or three years ago, I think. So Fedora, it's in a weird spot

because there was this push a couple of years back. I don't know if you remember this, but a bunch of Linux YouTubers were pushing it as like this Ubuntu replacement. It's like a really beginner-friendly distro. I do remember this, yes. Yeah. I didn't get involved with that myself,

but Fedora, that's just not what they do. I do remember those skins. Yeah. I didn't get involved with that myself, but Fedora, that's just not what they do. Like, not to say they're an unstable distro that's not suitable for someone who's new, but their goal isn't to be this consistent, stable base. Fedora has always been, we sort of push the limits a little bit too early like they started they were one of the first districts to do system d one of the first districts to do pulse audio probably one of the first to do pipewire pipewire wasn't really that bad of a push though because it just worked

for the most part yeah um but this is what fedora's pretty much always done so it kind of makes sense that it happens again with kde as well it's a little bit before it's ready even if the true showstoppers are done there's still going to be those extra things like um multi-window apps being a bit uh being a bit rough there's going to be some portals that still uh multi-window apps where there's just no way to place... for the client to place where they want the windows to be. So they just go wherever the compositor feels like they want. I don't know what Plasma's rules are for that,

but I would imagine just stacks them on top of each other. Yeah, so as with most things in KDE, it's customizable, right? But by default, windows are placed in the center, and if windows would be overlapping completely, they get cascaded sort of down to the right. Right. So if you opened up... It's not going to remember for sure. If you opened up GIMP, it's multi-window mode, for example.

So it would just like find a spot. I imagine that's a little bit weird. Yeah. Okay. That's what I was meaning by multi-window apps being a bit weird. I understand what you mean. Yeah. In GIMP's particular case, that's an easy fix because you just put it into single window mode and then everything works just fine.

But yeah, you have to do that or your distro has to be forward thinking enough to realize that's a problem and then do it for you. Yeah. Although there was a recent Wayland Protocols issue that was trying to address this. It was mainly a problem with things like scientific apps where they don't have that extra recovery feature. Right.

And, you know, depending on what you're using, it could try to tile them. It could just put them on top of each other. It's like a really inconsistent experience depending on which compositor you're using. And that's just not what the user would expect. So this is a really interesting topic and it sort of gets into something I wanted to discuss, which is the theoretical advantages of Wayland. Most people have this experience of,

oh, well, something worked tolerably well on X11. Then I moved to Wayland and it works terribly. Oh my gosh, I hate it. It's awful. But the thing is that Wayland has a higher ceiling for how good things can be. So you're not stuck with working but mediocre forever. And I'm going to use an example of Windows being able to save their own positions because this is something I'm very familiar with. I've done development work on this on KDE's side.

So on X11, Windows are allowed to determine where they want to go. And the compositor basically can't do anything about it in an organized way. And so what this means is that you, the user, have a very fragmented experience of how Windows get their positions saved. If the app itself offers the functionality of saving its position, then it does that. If the app doesn't offer that functionality, and many don't, then you don't. And so when you, the user, open an app, the place where it gets opened is random. Like, if you're a technical expert, like, you figure it out, right? You learn the pattern. Like, oh, well, this app is going to save its position. It's going to go there. This app doesn't save its position so it's going to get placed by the window placement mode.

This is a really bad UX. I can't speak for Kwin, but a lot of window managers have the ability to do window rules as well that can sort of mitigate that problem. Right. And we have this on Wayland, too. We can do window rules, but that's also kind of a bad user experience, right? Because it's a DIY thing. You have to set up a rule for every app. So what Wayland allows you to do, theoretically, because the compositor is in charge of everything, we can have the compositor track the window positions itself. And we can have it identify those positions with Windows so that every single app window ever gets restored exactly where it was closed universally, no matter if the app itself does this. And then if you, the user, decide I want to change the window placement so that new windows get placed here, it only affects new windows.

And if you say I want it so that new windows are always placed here and then we don't restore the previous position, you get to do that. Those aren't things you can do on X11. And we don't have this feature yet on Wayland because it would have to be implemented by KWIN, but we have the ability to do that in the future in a way that we just did not before. Well, yeah, that sort of takes us into some of the showstoppers. There's a Wayland protocol being worked on

that is making progress, which is surprising compared to some of the protocol discussions I have seen going on. I think it's like XDG Session Restore or something? Yep. Yeah, so there's no Session Restore at the moment.

And that is something that's definitely going to need a new protocol, and then every app in the universe is going to need to opt into it. Yeah. So, so yeah. Yeah. Progress is being made. Progress is being made.

But so here's another interesting thing getting on the subject of, you know, it lets us do things ourselves. Um, we can implement a sort of fake session restore. Yup. And so we can simply say, okay, well, when you're shutting down the computer, you had these five apps open. Remember that. When you turn the computer back on, launch those five apps. Like that gets you about 80 or 90% of the way there. And if we eventually implement the ability to remember what virtual desktop they were on

and remember what position on the screen they were on and remember what position on the screen they were on, you basically have session restore, but simply letting the apps take care of the state themselves. And these days, my impression is that most apps that have state worth saving kind of do save their own state. Like some don't, right? But a lot of them do. And I think that's probably going to be a good stop gap until we get real session restore. And then after we get real session restore, it's still going to be useful

because not every app is going to opt into real session restore. I mean, they didn't on X11, right? Like people talk about how great we, you know, session restore was on X11. Session restore on X11 was terrible. LibreOffice didn't opt into it. Half the random apps that use different toolkits that weren't GTK and Qt didn't opt into it. Like it was super duper

inconsistent and never worked properly on X11. So yeah we don't have it on Wayland but like eventually we'll have something even better. Mm-hmm well that sort of reminds me of the KDE approach to dealing with global hotkeys where there is a portal that exists but then there's how does it work on on KDE because you've got the ability to like pass in keys to x Wayland applications that's as much as I've looked into it I'm not sure on the rest of the details yeah so we have a couple of different things um on Wayland of course the compositor itself has the ability to handle global shortcuts so if you were a kde app you can talk to the compositor set your global shortcuts

but if you're not a kde app then you probably don't want to link against k1 right so that's where this global shortcuts portal comes in and that lets wayland native apps set shortcuts in a sort of standardized way but then there's those are like two pieces of the puzzle, but then there's still the third piece, which is X-Wayland apps. And X-Wayland apps are, I think, what you're talking about, where if you have an X-Wayland app,

like Discord, for example, this is the classic example of Discord runs in X-Wayland. You want to set up push to talk in Discord and you want it to work when Discord is not the frontmost app because you're probably gaming in a different app that is not discord and so that doesn't work because discord wants to be able to sniff the x11 set of keys so we have this thing that allows you to determine how many of the keys x wayland apps are allowed to snoop so if you don't use discord then

you just don't turn it on right but if you do Discord, you can opt into one of the snooping modes. So you can say, allow X-Wayland apps to listen for modifier keys, for example. So if I set left shift as my push to talk key, or if I set like F25 as my push to talk key, then we can allow X-Wayland apps to listen for just those key presses. And we've still, in principle, preserved the security against key logging because we're not sending across every keystroke that you type, only the ones that can't be used to type a password. But let's say you don't care. You think that the security thing is overrated. You're in a trustworthy environment. You can let X-Wayland apps snoop on all the keys if you really feel like it. That's totally fine. We let you do that. So the idea there is to make it possible

for these apps that are not Weiland native to still work in some capacity until they get support for all the stuff that we've written for them. That's one of the things I really like about the KDE approach where you will bring in a solution that may not be the most optimal approach but it's better than having zero solution whatsoever. Yeah, I totally get how much it sucks to be told, well something perfect is coming in the future just wait five years, right? Like everybody hates this. Nobody likes this. And at least if we can ship something that's like maybe 80% good in the meantime, that can act as a bit of a pressure valve.

It shows people that we care, that we're taking that seriously, you know, because people use this stuff for real work, right? Like this isn't a science experiment. We're actually making a desktop for people to do things with. Well, that actually reminds me of something I saw a couple of months back with the changing of the KDE API that broke Bismuth and then the developer of Bismuth stepping away from the project and people being like, how do I use KDE without Bismuth? Like, what do I do here?

Yeah, I think the answer to that question was wait about a month and then somebody forks Bismuth, calls it Polonium, adapts it to the new API and then everybody uses that. So what was going on here was that KWin changed its scripting API. Now KWin does not have an API guarantee. So KWin scripts are in that sense kind of in the same boat as GNOME extensions, where we do not guarantee that they won't just randomly break at any time. Now widgets are different.

Widgets, we do have a stable API where we guarantee they're not going to break, at least in terms of API, for the whole lifetime of the release. But yeah, for KWin scripts, it's a bit of a Wild West over there. You've got to be tracking the release. But yeah, for K1 script, it's a bit of a wild west over there. You've got to be tracking the development. I saw some people being like, why would they break it at this point when 6.0

is just around the corner? I guess, yeah, that makes sense. If you have no API guarantees, hey. Yeah. I think... Of course, having no API guarantees doesn't mean you should just break API

whenever you feel like it, right? Because nobody likes that either. So I honestly don't have an answer for why it was decided to break it then. I wasn't involved in all of those decisions, so I can't really say why. I know that it had to do with the new tiling mode stuff.

I guess old stuff had to be ripped out and refactored in order to make it work. Something like that it had to do with the new tiling mode stuff. I guess old stuff had to be ripped out and refactored in order to make it work, something like that, I guess. But this sort of gets back to Wayland a little bit about one of the really good things about Wayland is that Wayland APIs are versioned. So you never have to break API on Wayland. If you discover that the old API sucks, you simply fork that into a new one, add v2 onto the end of it, or v2 sucked, you call the new one v3, and then you implement support for the new thing, and then that's it, right? Everybody goes on with life. So it provides a way for past mistakes to be corrected without breaking all the old things, which is really nice. Well, I think a lot

of people have been lured into this because of the state of X.org. This is a thought I had recently. A lot of people have been lured into this false idea that if you write something once it just works forever. Like there are 15 year old X11 applications that perfectly work. They might have a GTK2 interface, but they work perfectly. Because X11 really hasn't shifted that much in a long, long time. But with a lot of other things, like, BitRot is a totally normal thing to expect. Like, sometimes dependencies will change under you, APIs will change, and whilst you don't want to be changing constantly, you want some sort of like stable base to develop on.

Over time, things are going to be deprecated. Things are going to be changed. And somebody needs to be patching it. Yep. So that's a really great point. And there's sort of two aspects of that that I think are worth talking about. One is that people talk about how great and stable X.Org is today. Well, it's stable because it basically

doesn't get any development time. Anything that isn't being touched becomes stable, right? You get bug for bug stability. Bugs don't change, right? This is like the principle behind Debian. We freeze on something, get those same bugs for the lifetime of the release, boom. Maybe we freeze on something, get those same bugs for the lifetime of the release, boom. And so people like that, but maybe that's not what you're looking for. But the other aspect of this is that this hypothetical 15-year-old Xorg app that runs perfectly, it probably runs perfectly on exactly the same type of hardware and software that existed 15 years ago. But plug in a second screen screen and now it's always going to open on the wrong screen no matter what and a second gpu and it's going to have bizarre graphical glitches

buy a high refresh rate screen and suddenly everything is going to be two and a half times as fast as it's supposed to and so on and so forth so like this mythical stability requires that the entire world around it stop changing. And that doesn't happen, right? People buy new hardware. People demand new things of their software. Yeah, that's definitely true. And whilst most things right now are still, because drivers are still obviously intending to support X11, things are still fine.

to support X11, things are still fine. I think the real point we're going to see some actual change happen is after 2032, because that's when RHEL 9 is deprecated, and after RHEL 9, that's when Red Hat is, at least at this stage, completely stepping away from X.org. Like, they've given up entirely at that point. When that happens, that's a massive audience that just... It's taken away from, for any reason, for AMD, NVIDIA, and Intel to actually work on drivers. That, I think, by then, I have no doubt,

most things will be dealt with by then, but have no doubt most things will be dealt with by then, but by then, things need to be dealt with. Yeah, I think that's basically the death of X.Org. That's the endgame. What I think is going to happen with Weyland is it's going to be kind of an S-curve shaped adoption. This is the curve that you see for most technology adoptions. It's really slow at first first and then it picks up and once it starts accelerating it just rockets up really fast until you get to about 80 or 90 percent uptake and then the remaining 10 or 20 percent takes a couple of

years but once plasma 6 is released once gnome starts to really deprecate xorg once fedora is not shipping it anymore i think you're going to see a flood of distros that are all going to start going in this direction. And you're going to see a lot more noise and sound and fire from app developers saying, oh my God, Wayland breaks our stuff. What are we going to do? And then there's going to be a huge flood of development to get all that stuff fixed as fast as possible.

And then suddenly within like three years, everything will be Wayland. And we'll all have forgotten about X.Org, except for people using, you know, Debian 7. Well, yeah, it's the same with what happened with SystemD. Like, yeah, there's, like, Devlin, and Artex, and Gen 2

also offers things that are not SystemD, but Gen 2 offers everything, so it doesn't count. Yeah. But most people don't remember a time before systemd it's just what that's just what we do for linux now yeah right and it's similar with pulse audio and pipewire now as well yeah pipewire i don't think you'll ever be able to forget about pulse audio because i don't pulse audio is never going to go away because developers are just going to target pulse audio and because it's in pipeipewire, which is fine. That's great because it means

everything works. Exactly. If we tried the whole replace everything again, Pipewire wouldn't be here yet. That's just how it is. Pipewire would still be in the future. Well, you might be aware of this big change to the way printing on Linux is going to work soon. Have you heard about all the changes there? I know that there's, like, they want to focus on the Snap or something, on, like, Ubuntu, but I don't know if there's anything more to that. Right. So, basically, the development for um for cups the printing system is spearheaded by a

fellow who has decided that printer drivers suck and he's 100 right about this and so the idea for cups i think 3.0 um is to focus on driverless printers so we're going to basically have first class support for printers that don't need drivers that use, you know, air print, wireless printing, that sort of thing. And for printers that do still need drivers, the drivers will essentially be auto generated. They'll be like emulated with a translation layer. So that's the idea behind that. So that's like a big old change to the way our whole ecosystem works that's coming soon. And you know, if you don't do a lot of printing, maybe it's not going to affect you, but it's going to affect a lot of people and

probably businesses, which do do a lot of printing and tend to hang on to old printers for a long time. But that's going to be another big thing that's coming down the pipe soon. I don't know the last time I owned a printer. And the last time I used a printer, I couldn't get cups working. So I spun up a Windows VM and used that. Amazing. So you see, this guy was right. This data is so bad, it needs to be replaced and done over from scratch. I don't know anything about printing.

I'm assuming that what he's thinking of doing is a good idea, but I wouldn't have a clue. I have zero opinion on printers. All I care is does the file not only come out of the printer, does it come out of the printer in the way it's supposed to look? Are the colors right? Is all of that good? That's the real trick, right? Well, the interesting thing is that printing is one area where we are in general, at least we're not worse than Windows and Mac OS and we're often better, amazingly enough, because printers are so terrible and printing is kind of bad everywhere. So we have almost an opportunity to leapfrog everybody else with this. Look, if you just need to print something, don't own a printer.

Just go to a library. Just go to a library. Don't even think about it. Let the library deal with the printers. Yeah. Well, when you have kids, you start needing to print out school assignments and flyers and this and that.

Yeah, yeah, that's fair then. So I was going to bring it up before we kind of got sidetracked. We're talking about the Wayland Showstoppers. So what else was on that list? So we talked about the application don't save unsaved work causing data loss. No session restore for native Windows. Yes? Yes.

So, the unsaved data loss thing, that we are definitely hoping to have fixed by 6.0. At least for KDE apps. Because that's also probably going to require a new protocol. Worst case scenario, we can write a private protocol that looks exactly like we hope the standard protocol. We can opt all the KDE apps into it. Then when it's standardized, we just flip them over, right? Right. So we can do that for our stuff.

So the idea here is that when you log out, it just wouldn't prompt you for anything. It would just like, whoop, everything's gone. Yeah, exactly. Right. Which is not ideal. No. My presumption is that doesn't happen on X11 then. No, it does not. What happens is that the apps, there's a standard for apps to signal to the XOR server that they need input for something. Then they show a

confirm dialogue and ask you to save and so on and so forth. And you get that when you quit the app on Wayland, but for some reason, not when logging out. So, and I don't know all the technical details of this, but it's one of those, like we need a new protocol sort of things. Everything is a protocol problem. Everything. Everything protocols all the way down, right? So the protocols or portals

yeah verticals are portals and they're connected but you know at this point we pretty much have like 95 of the protocols and portals that we need like we're sort of in cleanup mode at this point we've got session restore we've got this uh this thing for apps saving their work we've got color management that's happening too uh one of our k-win guys is at uh the xdg hack fest right now and he's like madly getting color management working which is amazing that's awesome very cool stuff yeah so we're gonna have excellent color management on wayland for plasma 6.0 that's probably much better than it was on x11 too i feel like as i talk about wayland i end up creating more

people that complain about it but i don't know if it's more people or just the same people complaining about different things um yeah but outside of those people who just jump onto any new thing i talk about like oh multi-windows stuff doesn't work so that's a problem like you don't use multi-window shut up um or like any of these little things like i think the main issues that get brought up are gaming and color management like the whole you know not having tearing which that whole that the whole situation was a disaster to sort of sift through and get that protocol actually dealt with because there was a lot of people that were very very opposed to the possibility of tearing on wayland um right and then color management's also a big one because you just couldn't do color work like that's just a

absolute showstopper for a lot of people like if you are trying to do any professional work you just couldn't right you know and i think it's also important to distinguish between showstoppers and annoyances, right? Like a showstopper is I'm an artist. If I don't have color management, all my colors look wrong and I waste lots of money and my client gets mad at me and I lose my job. Like that's a showstopper, right? If you are saying I like to play video games and I would prefer getting two more FPS because I want the screen to be able to tear like that's not a showstopper maybe if you're in esports and this is literally your job then it's a showstopper but I'm pretty sure if you're in esports you're on windows like so it could be

a showstopper for you moving to Linux but that's much less showstopper-y than not having color management. I can understand that perspective from the desktop, but from the use perspective, if you are really big on gaming, you're going to want your gaming to work the way that you expect. It may not be a reason to stop the entire desktop and work on this as the core main feature, like color management might be, right i can understand for those people who really want

gaming to be a good experience that that for them is going to hold them back at least until it's done absolutely and that's it's for that reason that we have screen tearing now right like i'm not saying we shouldn't have it. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just explaining why maybe it took longer than some other things did. Yeah. It's not like a general showstopper for every single person.

Um, but in the same way, like when I talk about like color management, for example, people were like, oh, color management, such a big deal. Like you don't do professional color work. Shut up. Like, this isn't a problem for you. Like there are people who will latch on to every single problem that waylon has even though it doesn't affect them as like this is the reason why i'm not using it like no no it's not you're not using it because

you're a cinnamon user like yeah the cinnamon doesn't support waylon that's that's the only reason you're not using it i think think people get attached to what they're using and they build familiarity with it. We all have this experience of no matter what it is, whether it's your computer, your house, your car, anything, right? You find all the little annoyances, you get annoyed by them, and then you learn to live with them. And then when you face the prospect of switching to something else

with new annoyances, you're getting re-annoyed again. Right, right. And you've forgotten the annoyance that you are facing every day because it's faded into the background, right? So, like, when I started using Wayland, I was like, oh, man, my windows aren't remembering where I put them. And then I was like, wait a minute, I can just, like, use the super left and right keys to tile my windows. And this is like way faster than anything I did before. Oh, okay. Like that's slightly annoying, but now I have a better workflow than I had before. So I'm not annoyed anymore. Like you, you can kind of get used to anything. But when, when you feel like you're being forced to switch, and especially being forced to switch to something that's annoying, I think it's very natural and very human to have a negative reaction to be like i want everybody to roll out the red carpet for me so that it's perfect if they're gonna make me switch you know that's it's an understandable reaction frankly yeah no no i i get it um but i think there's a lot of people that have these opinions on wayland that you ask them when they last used Wayland,

and it'll be like three years ago. It's like, okay, that's good, but have you tried it recently on something that's not Debian? Like, try it on something that moves quickly, that has up-to-date software, and let me know what your experience is. Maybe there is a reason why you can't use it, but I don't, like, if your opinion is based on because i'll see here

people still bring up like video acceleration x wayland apps on a video like that's dealt with three years ago like that's not a problem anymore it's just natural for people to you know remember their old experiences right you see this all the time for KDE in general. People say, oh, KDE is slow. It's buggy. It's ugly. It uses all these resources. And it's like, well, when was the last time you used it? KDE 4.

10 years ago, right? Eight years ago. I used Plasma 5.2 and it was terrible. It's like, okay, I bet it was. Have you tried it again recently? My favorite. I'm not sure if it's any good. It's even better when they say something like KD4.

It's like, yeah. Oh, I remember the KD4 tobacco. It was so bad 15 years ago when I was a child. Try it again, please. We might be a little better now. It's hard. I really hope so. It also, it underscores the importance of making a good first impression. Yeah. Because

if you make a bad first impression, people have a bad experience and then they will parrot that experience for the next 20 years, whether it's fair or not. And you can complain about it and you can like make fun of them and say, well, this is stupid. People shouldn't do this, but like people do do this. So you have to make a good first impression or else people are going to be prejudiced against you forever. It gets to be one of the things that I'm very passionate about, which is getting KDE software on hardware. And one of the principles that I follow is you have to be ready when the opportunity

strikes. So when Valve went shopping around for an OS for their Steam Deck, right? They looked around and they found our stuff and they chose us because our stuff was ready. It was good. If our stuff had been crap, they would have said, well, let's keep looking. Let's go somewhere else, right? So you have to be ready. You can't let your software get into a state where it's like alpha quality for years where it's just broken it's no good like it has to be ready so that when people try you out you at least make a decent first impression yeah yeah okay so the rest of the issues next one is when the composite crashes non-Qt apps are killed. Wait, so do the Qt apps

come back? They do. As of Qt 6.6. Which was released a week ago. But we're targeting that for Plasma 6, so that's the minimum Qt version so every distro has to have that.

So all of your Qt apps will survive the compositor dying. And there are patches that David Edmondson and one of my colleagues, one of our colleagues, David Redondo, has written to extend this to GTK and to SDL, I think. Other toolkits. None of that stuff has landed yet, has it? It's just the QT stuff. I'm not aware. I don't think any of those things have landed yet. But they've been working on this stuff for years.

It will land at some point because it's a good feature. Well, yeah, no, it's really cool. There was some apprehension apprehension i remember seeing about on the gtk side about the possibility of memory leaks because you're not cleaning up applications um i i didn't fully read into it so i'm not really sure on the exact concerns um yeah i'm not familiar either but the, ignoring the complexities of actually getting it working,

if you just look at it from the user's perspective, this is simply a good feature. Like being able, because you don't want Plasma to crash. Like that, that's just a bad thing. You don't want that. But sometimes, sometimes there are problems.

Like even software like the linux kernel will crash so there was a recent bug um this is a really fun bug uh do you use any logitech wireless devices ah with the unifying receiver thing right yeah we got bug reports about that okay people always follow bugs in the wrong place, right? They find a kernel issue, like, oh, my system freezes when it comes out of sleep. Definitely a KDE issue. Yeah.

Well, someone reported over on the framework forums as well. Because, you know, from the user's perspective, it's unclear what in the world it could possibly be. Like, is it a hardware issue? Is it like a desktop issue um but for anyone who doesn't know what's going on the video just came out today as we're recording this but i don't know when you guys will see this um so the problem is when you plug in a logitech unifying receiver that little like usb dongle thing that logitech uses. Because of a race condition where...

So basically there are two separate threads that try to fight over connecting to the device, and when you unplug the device the first thread will finish everything successfully, but the second thread still thinks the device is connected, will try to access that freed memory, and the kernel just freaks out and dies. Because race conditions are fun. The solution to them is don't use multiple threads. But sometimes you can't get around that.

In this case, the solution was use the work queue, stop opening extra threads when you don't need them. It actually is just use one thread this time. Software is complex, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah.

Unless your name is Xorg where nothing changes, you're going to introduce new bugs as features are changed. It just makes sense. It is the truth. It is the truth. We have not all sticky key options work. What is that about? I've never used the sticky key. I don't even not all sticky key options work what is that about i don't i don't i've never

used the sticky key i don't even know it's some accessibility features um we have some of them working that's honestly not that hard we're going to be able to have that stuff done before six that doesn't sound like a major one anyway well these are showstoppers for people who use accessibility no i mean like it doesn't sound like a major feature to fix, is what I mean. No, it's not. It's, you know, a bit of work. Mm-hmm.

So, turning on stick keys in Wayland has no effect. Steps to reproduce. Turn on stick keys in system settings. Accessibility. Press and release shift. Press a letter key. Lowercase key is typed. Expect result.

Okay, that sounds like a pretty simple issue. Bounce keys. What is a bounce key? Honestly, I know what sticky keys are. I'm not sure what bounce keys are. But I'm sure they're very important to people who use them, and so

we will have them fixed. Bounce key settings under citizens and accessibility feature, obviously. Repeater keys do not get eliminated and the bell ring does not sound. I'm sure someone's going to tell me what bounce keys are in the comments. No color management talked about that. Unusably poor performance on external screens with video optimus. Now that's an actual showstopper right there for

NVIDIA users. That one is. I don't know the status on that one. I don't have an NVIDIA machine myself, but I know a couple of the KWin developers do. So I'm hoping that they manage to get some intellectual firepower on that.

Do you know if it's a KDE issue or an NVIDIA issue? Is it something that can actually be addressed from your side? You know, often it's a bit of both. It's very difficult to tell because the NVIDIA driver is closed source. We make a lot heavier use of hardware acceleration and video drivers than most other environments do. And so we tend to exercise the features in graphics drivers much more thoroughly than in other environments, which means when the drivers aren't any good, we run into more bugs.

You can say, oh, this is our fault for using the drivers, right? Or you could say, well, it's the driver's fault for being crap, but maybe it's a bit of both. Who knows? At the end of the day, you're going to have to work with what's there. So if NVIDIA is going to be like NVIDIA is,

it's just a matter of trying to do whatever you can to work around it. It would be nice if Nova was great. It would be nice if NVK was done. All of these things would be nice if Nova was great. It would be nice if NVK was done. All of these things would be nice, but we're not there. So, you know.

It's also a situation where NVIDIA themselves won't be able to avoid putting work into it the more Wayland adoption accelerates. It's really easy to ignore Wayland when it's this tiny thing that nobody uses, right? This has been basically the experience of most app developers because Wayland itself was the initial thing was released in I think like 2008. So it's been around for age, the initial release was like 15 years ago, you know? And so there's been a decade and a half of people feeling comfortable ignoring Wayland. And that is something that's going to change once it stops being a science project, once it's something that everybody's using for production use. And, you know, NVIDIA is an

important player in the industry. Linux is important. NVIDIA plus Linux are important for machine learning. So once you've got mainstream distros shipping with Wayland, NVIDIA is going to start to field large volumes of support calls from users saying, hey, your hardware doesn't work on Debian 15. Fix it. and the engineering resources are going to as if by magic materialize and fix those problems well it's not just a matter of shipping it's a matter of shipping without a fallback because gnome's defaulted to whalen for god knows how long not even just on fedora like their project default has just been whaling for a long time now. It's the default on Fedora. It's the default on Ubuntu. It's the default on RHEL.

Like, right now, it's the default. But... I think it's fairly recent on Ubuntu, too, if I'm not mistaken. But... If, for whatever reason, you need to fall back to X11, you can. When... It goes back to what I was saying before. When Red Hat fully gives up on X,

that's the point where if NVIDIA has not got their shit together, that's when they're going to actually feel it. Because whilst it's one thing to say the desktop users, they're having issues. When you have these big GPU contracts and these big support contracts, that amount of money speaks a lot more than

just a couple of desktop users being angry on Reddit. When there's actual money involved here and there's a possibility that AMD or Intel could get a GPU contract instead of NVIDIA, that's when meetings start happening, problems start getting dealt with, and hopefully we don't get to that and it's dealt with before that. But... Which, and frankly, that happened for the Steam Deck. You know, Steam Deck shipped with an AMD GPU

and not an NVIDIA GPU, very prominently. So I would argue that we're already beginning to see that happening. The Steam Deck's a really cool device. I sadly don't have one. It is, isn't it? Because Australia, and then it shipped to Australia. I've had people offer to buy me one

and just ship it to me. Or I could buy it. There are third-party sellers that have bought them and imported them. And there are import services, like package redirection stuff. But I don't want one that much. If Valve decides to actually sell it here, I will buy one.

Well, fingers crossed. Yeah. What was it like from your perspective finding out that Valve wanted to do that with the Steam Deck, actually using KDU? It was very exciting. I was really very gratified to hear it because this is, I think I talked a little bit earlier about how important I think it is to ship our software and hardware. And this was maybe the most tangible example of a success that we've had in a very long time. So it was really nice to see that they decided to trust us and our platform and our community with this very significant piece

of hardware and products that they wanted to sell it's been really great valve is excellent to work with too um i'm part of the team that actually helped bring that out same with my colleague david edmondson so we've been working together for a while on it and it's it's a great collaboration because it's not like it's the first device that ships with kdu because there are like plenty of like little linux laptop companies and you've got the the mobile project as well and there are um companies that sell phones with uh their kd mobile like that's not the first time but it's the first i would say like consumer like a regular consumer facing product this is the product targeted towards like gamers outside of the linux space like if you're a one

of these little sellers that make laptops that only do linux and your logos are paying we're like you're not targeting the regular like windows users right yeah it's it's it's a product that regular people have heard of yeah yeah you know in the past when people ask me what i do for a living i would say oh i work on kde open source software and they're like uh-huh yeah yeah fine uh-huh and now i say oh i work on the uh steam desktop mode and they say whoa that's so cool amazing i've heard of it i have one i love it you know so people know this is a product you know now you have a really good way to explain what you do to normal people i when i try to explain like doing youtube stuff to someone who's a bit older i it's difficult

but at this point i've sort of i've shifted it to tech journalists and that seems to that seems to get the point across well enough or like independent tech journalist um but yeah like that it's really cool that it's it's uh it's really cool this is on the steam deck because yeah my understanding is last time Valve did this whole Linux OS thing, it was Debian and Gnome. Yes, that's correct. They really dropped the ball in the original version of SteamOS.

They really did. Well, they decided to have another bite at the apple, and I'm happy that it has worked out better this time. If they... I stand by the fact that if they had Proton back when it originally did SteamOS, it wouldn't have been a success, but it wouldn't have been as much of a failure. Like, that's... Could be, could be.

Yeah. So, I saw you put out a blog not that long ago. I guess it actually is a while ago. It's from May. Why is my overlay broken now? Give me one second. Why is it not showing me the browser? Plasma 6 better defaults.

I saw someone sharing this around recently because there was a section here about floating panel by default there's like a screenshot of the Windows bit where you're like, you're complaining that Microsoft is calling KDE I saw people sharing that around yeah, this one's pretty sad

but one of the things mentioned here I have to bring it up for every single person who uses KDE or works but one of the things mentioned here, I have to bring it up because I have to bring it up for every single person who uses KDE or works in KDE. Single click. How do you, what's your opinion? I know what the default is now, but what's your personal opinion on single click versus double click?

My personal opinion is it's amazing how many people love single click. We discovered after we changed the default very popular it turned out um personally I use single click I like it um I have changed the default back for myself however I do not believe that it is the best default for people who are just using the system um and i believe that i'm not a smart enough person to make that determination but distros who are much closer to users are smart enough and over the years most of our distros have changed to double click so by the time we got around to changing it upstream we were basically leading from behind here. We were adapting to what people had already done.

Ubuntu changed it. Manjaro changed it. Fedora KDE changed it. SteamOS changed it. There were not that many distros that were really big that still shipped with single click. So to a certain extent it became moot and and that for me was one of the biggest arguments was our distributors are already changing our default on mass so if that isn't a sign that it's a bad default I don't know what it is you know and a bad default doesn't mean a bad setting right I like single click I enjoy it I think's good, but I don't think it's the right thing for people who are just starting to use the platform. Because Windows also has single click and double click. The problem there is they don't properly support it.

So while single click is an option, a lot of apps just ignore it and it's just, it doesn't really matter. I think having the option there and it being well supported is the ultimate goal. Obviously the fault to what people

makes more sense to people, but just have the option there. And I don't think there's anyone who was like let's get rid of it entirely. That's the part people want to get out of. No, that's never happening. Not an option. I mean at the very minimum, a bunch of Plasma devs like it and are going to keep using it. And so if anything isn't working properly, they'll fix it, right? So it's going to stay properly supported.

But double click being the default means that's going to be properly supported too. So we'll have this. And I know there's always a lot of controversy and misinformation about there. People say, oh, we're copying Windows. We're copying macOS. macOS has never had single click, to my knowledge. It's always been double click. Let's have a look.

Maybe like System 7, like 1994 or something, but for at least the last 20 years, although that wouldn't be 20 years, there's my amazing math skills, for at least 19 years, I feel like there's been no single-click on macOS.

The close... It seems like at least at some point you could hold down a modifier key and single click. But I don't think it actually had normal single click. So what that's referring to is holding down the control key and clicking to do a right click. Oh, okay. That's left over from the times when Apple didn't have multi-button mice.

They supported them, but they didn't sell them and ship them. But to my knowledge, there has never been an ability on macOS to open files and folders with a single click. It's always been double click. But anyway, we're not copying macOS here. The first comment I see is just frigging double click. It's not hard. What we're doing is basically just following the industry standard here you know and maybe the industry standard is wrong and gives people carpal tunnel syndrome maybe that's fine and that's why it's an option but if you don't follow the industry standard you often annoy people enough that they never learn about your better options you just gave people a perfect clip if it gives you a cold, that's fine.

Again, I like single click. I do think it's better. I had this interesting experience a few years ago when my kids were just starting to learn to use computers. What did they do? They single clicked. They click on the file in the folder. It doesn't open. What happens? They just sit there. And then I had to teach them about double clicking and then they learned it. But like, it's definitely true that single click is more

intuitive, saves your mouse, saves your hands. You know, the problem is most people who are going to switch to Plasma are not using using plasma for the very first time yeah yeah that's just not our demographic right like maybe once we achieve world domination and every computer on the world is running plasma then we can go back to single click and we can preach the gospel of single click but that's not where we are right now yeah if your first computing experience is using a phone and doing stuff in a browser, it makes sense why single click would be the thing that, like, you're used to. Yeah.

Same reason why there's so many people that, you know, can't leave a terminal file manager. Like, if you were using computers back in the 90s and you had a terminal file manager, like, it makes sense why that's what you're comfortable with. And if you started with Windows XP, DoubleClick is probably what you know. Or macOS, because they have DoubleClick. Everybody does. Or Gnome.

Or Cinnamon. Or XFCE. Or everybody else. I do feel kind of worried about projects like Cinnamon, projects like XFCE with this whole shift towards Wayland because they, XFCE doesn't have a roadmap Cinnamon

I don't know what they're doing I'm really not sure what's happening on their side with getting Wayland's support and then there's all of the little window managers as well that you know, whilst there are some crazy devs out there, like single devs who are writing massive whaling compositors themselves, a lot of people just don't have the time to actually build something like this. So this idea of, you know, whilst having the window manager and compositor being the same thing is good for these big projects, and it makes it very easy to adapt things that just couldn't have been done on Xorg where everyone's using that same base.

It also does have that drawback where it kind of does raise the barrier to entry for some of these smaller projects. Yes, I agree with you. I think one of the big solutions for this challenge is going to be WL roots. You've probably heard about this. Maybe David even talked about this recently. I think you're absolutely right to articulate this challenge here because the small projects are going to need to do a lot of a lot more work than they're accustomed to doing um but to a certain extent the writing

has been on the wall for a long time uh one of the reasons why i chose kde when i decided to move into the linux world was because i felt fairly cognizant of the danger of relying on a project that sits on top of other projects because you end up beholden to the technical and social decisions that they've made. And so when we look at something like Cinnamon, for example, you know, Cinnamon is basically built on a whole bunch of forked GNOME technologies. And so their relationship with the GNOME people is not amazing. They use their stuff, but they don't really contribute back to it too much they have a different architectural vision they have a different ux vision and all that's fine right but it's a risk because they

risk having their development roadmap being affected by choices outside of their ecosystem um so i think it is it is a big challenge and a big risk for them you know and a lot of these projects that have existed as soft or hard forks of somebody else's work are going to need to either find the resources to adapt or they're going to need to get a lot better at justifying their need to exist at all like i'm not going to try to sugarcoat this it's a situation. If you don't have a Wayland roadmap and you're relying on a project that's moving to Wayland, you got to get on that boat or else you're going to fall off the boat and drown. And then all the people who are riding on top of you are going to drown too. Maybe that metaphor is a little bit too severe, but that's technologically what's

going to happen. I mean, you can't keep your head in the sand when it comes to this stuff. So either maybe rebase on something else, find the manpower, contribute to WL roots, find a way to collaborate with other projects and make some kind of a shared compositor. But doing nothing is not going to be an option, really. And I agree with you. It's going to be tough for them.

But at this point, nobody can say they didn't see it coming, right? Whilst you were mentioning all that, I had that, I'm sure you've seen it before, the XKCD of all modern digital infrastructure, where it's just this giant tower of nonsense and these tiny little piece made by some dude in Nebraska in 2003. Yeah. Yeah.

It's so true. It really is. When it comes to these window managers, I know that Qtile has a they've got a whaling compositor right now. Xmonad are looking to do something, but and then obviously i3 and Sway are like one in the same.

But for the others, I think a lot of them are just going to be left behind. I... I don't know, like, I would... It's tough, because I like a lot of these projects, but like, yeah. Yeah, your impression matches mine, you know? And I think this sort of gets back to what I said before, that projects need to justify their existence. It's really easy to fork a project, make a couple of changes and say,

boom, I have a new project, right? And then your project adapts and it grows and it moves in a different direction but ultimately we we live in a very small corner of the world here you and i are talking when we've got our social groups and we've got our friends but then when we go out to our non-tech friends nobody knows what the heck we do right so when you're talking about like tiling window managers you're looking at a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of computer users. And so when you're looking at such a small project, resources are correspondingly going to be small, too. And I think if you have a project like this, if you run one or if you use one, it's going to be really important to find those resources, to join with another project, maybe to accept that you'll need to move to another project that's 97% the same but maybe has 3% difference. Maybe you can learn to accept that 3% difference.

You can pool your development resources, have twice as much manpower, and then the project can survive instead of two projects dying in obscurity right this is hard we're nerds we like talking about code we don't like collaborating about stuff but that's going to be really important frankly because small projects with small resources they've always been on thin ice frankly you know and i think we we can't tiptoe around that i think a lot of developers understand this and they're wary about it, but I think when it comes to the users, there are a lot of users,

I don't know what the best term for it would be. Entitled? Yeah, we'll go with that one. There is a lot of users out there who feel like they are sort of entitled to something working. This is what I've always been using you know you've probably seen this in bug trackers for KDE where people feel like you know why is this not working this should be working and it's just like that's great but like most of the people

like you've got a job doing stuff like involved in KDE but I'm, most of the people, like, you've got a job doing stuff, like, involved in KDE, but I'm sure most of the people on the project are not employed by anyone, you know, to do KDE work. Like, they are just doing this as volunteer work. They are improving things because they are using the project themselves and they want it to improve. and sometimes things are going to sort of be left around for a while and not get dealt with and that's not because no one cares about the problem it's because right now it's not affecting any of the developers and other things are more important to them it and that's not to say that, you know, you, like, because I know a lot of people don't like to hear, like, just go and open the merger question shelf and fix it. Because there are a lot of people out there that just don't have the programming knowledge to fix it. Most people don't, right? But if you don't have the knowledge yourself, you have to just accept that you're at the whims of the developers they will get to the problem when they get to the problem and sort of constantly pinging

a bug tracker whilst it might show that people want it may not get the problem fixed any quicker no it's in fact it's going to be counterproductive because it's going to annoy developers who will silence their email for that thread. You know, what you're talking about is totally a real issue. And it's always very tempting when you see one of those to fire off a snarky reply that says, you know, well, feel free to apply for a refund for all the money you paid for the software, right? Something like that. But that doesn't help. I think part of the problem here is that we often do a very bad job of communicating just how resource-strapped these projects are. People often come from the proprietary world, and even if they're not explicitly thinking it, there's an implicit assumption that there must be a big team behind this, right? There must be

some resources. How does this project exist? It's free. Well, I don't know. But so amazing that somebody must be funding it, right? Well, maybe it is just that guy in Nebraska. But how do you know, right? When you go to your package manager and you download a package, and maybe you're even amazing and you read the description of the package before you download it. You're already in the 1% if you do that, right? But the description- No, I read every single line of code.

Does the description tell you the warranty? No. Does the description tell you how many users this project has? No. Does the description tell you how many developers it has? No. Does it tell you where the funding sources are? No.

Does it tell you what level of support resources exist? Like you can forgive people for not knowing this stuff, right? We don't make it very obvious. And so I think improving that communication is really a very important part of telling this story, helping people to understand just how amazing it is that all this software is free. understand just how amazing it is that all this software is free and free means we don't have a team of 30 paid developers working on it right um just a couple weeks ago i got somebody on my my blog who left a comment he said you know i was talking about finances um in kdev the foundation behind kde because i'm a member of the board of this foundation. And somebody said something suspicious is going on.

I'm not surprised that you got in trouble with the German tax authorities because it looks like you're embezzling funds. And I talked with them a little bit and I said, well, why do you think that? And he said, well, I looked up your financial information and it looks like you're reporting that kde's revenue was only 284 000 euros a year that's so low that's only enough for like two full-time developers how could that possibly be kde this must be a fake number and you're just concealing the real number and it's all a big money laundering operator. Like this person could not conceive of the notion that the nonprofit foundation behind KDE only takes in 284,000 euros a year. Like, so I very gently explained, yes, that's the foundation. Most people are volunteers.

Most full-time developers work elsewhere. In fact, we do have employees. They're part-time. They're not like getting rich off of this. like there's not a lot of money in this. So if the number seems crazily low, please see the actionable path as donating because that's where the money comes from, right? There's no support contracts, there's no EULAs, there's no point of sale system where you buy a CD and take it home. There's no download, there's no eulahs there's no no point of sale system where you buy a cd and take it home there's no download there's no dll sadly that you know there was at one point and that there's

there's a whole i i've heard a lot of uh fun stories about the death of the uh linux cd uh and basically being caused by a specific distro that I think we can all guess around 2003. You guys can work it out. But at that point, there actually was a reason to pay for distros. Now that's here. You know, yeah, we won't get into that one.

But I think we all know which distro I'm talking about. We may. But still, it's incumbent on us to find a funding model for this stuff that works. Because having everything be based on volunteers, it's unstable. Because volunteers come, volunteers go, volunteers get burned out. If you start treating your volunteer hobby as a job, you're going to get fired from your real job and end up begging for spare change on the streets, right? Like this ultimately is not really sustainable. We can't assume that open source is driven by retirees and, you know,

financially independent early retirement millionaires. Like that doesn't work. And it's why getting sustainable funding is so important. It's why I think it's so important for us to get hardware out there, because hardware is where the money is. People don't like to buy software, even when you force them to by making it in the cloud, and it's a monthly subscription, they complain about it, and they hate it. But people love buying stuff. People love buying products. And so that's where the money is. And that's where I think the funding model ultimately has to come from is a slice of the money from buying products that involve that ship our software has to ultimately go back to the people who make it. We're working on that in KDE. We have, you know, a bunch of partners, KDE EV has who ship hardware, who are very generous patrons of us. And it's a great situation that is getting greater all the time. But this is something that not every project has the luxury of, right?

KDE is huge. We're a giant presence in the open source world. You're just one person working on a GitHub project and you have the misfortune of becoming popular and you get 500,000 downloads, like, this is actually paradoxically a terrible thing for you, not a good thing. Because then you get a flood of bug reports and entitled people say, oh, you broke my multimillion-dollar production workflow. Fix it right now. So, you know, I think it's easy to blame entitled users, but like, we really need to make sure that we're sustainable ourselves. We can't assume that money's going to show up. We can't assume that resources and sustainability take care of themselves.

It's up to us to make that happen. I think one thing people also need to remember is just because someone is employed at a company, one at a company and two at a company that does open source does not mean they are paid to work on that project like I have no doubts that you have a lot of red hat employees come through the KDE project doing various things red hat employees a lot

of people but that doesn't mean that they were specifically being paid to do that work like they they may have some other you know focus and then also happen to like kde as well like right those are not always the same thing a lot of fedora uh packagers are in fact red hat employees who happen to like kde and they package stuff for fedora KDE on the side, right? They don't do it for their job. That's the day job. And then they go home and package KDE stuff as their hobby. And the lines can get kind of blurry, but it's very common for this situation to arise.

So you talked about the KDE EV there. What is the purpose of the Kdev like what what is their actual role the kdev's actual role is to essentially ensure the financial sustainability of all kde activities that involve money and to act as a legal umbrella for kde as an organization um kdev is actually super duper boring it's a lot of administration stuff, things like filing for trademarks so that people can't call their software K-mail, reimbursing travel and hotel expenses for people who go travel to development spreads,

paying for server hardware for all of our websites, organizing academy or yearly conference, which is huge and not cheap, things like that, right? And in the last couple of years, we've dipped our toes into actually employing members of the community to work directly on KDE software. We have, I believe at last count, nine contractors and employees now.

One, yeah, it's pretty good, isn't it? And like I said, nobody's getting rich off of open source here. You know, all of us would probably all be off developing missile guidance systems for Raytheon if we wanted to be rich, but instead we want to be able to sleep at night. So we work on open source and accept less money. KDEV is a very financially limited organization. I mean, if I had my way, we'd employ a thousand people, But we don't have the budget for that. So I'm always looking for getting that budget up so that we can make sure that we hire more people because I want there to be a career path for KDE. I don't know if you and your viewers are familiar with Thunderbird's financial situation. Thunderbird hired a new fundraising person

and they did a whole big fundraising blitz and their fundraising went up from like 800,000 US dollars a year to like 7 million. I'm sorry, they had that much? Wait, wait. I'm not even joking. It's a crazy amount of money.

I didn't know they already had that much. Yeah. Like seriously, they went up from about $800,000 to $7 million in the course of one year. Basically just by putting a banner ad in Thunderbird that said, hey, if you like it,

please throw some money our way. I did see when they shipped the new UI, I did get a notification to donate, and I used Thunderbird all the time, like, hey, have some money, whatever. Right. That is insanely successful. And it added up to last year, $7 million.

So there's evidence that open source can make money, right? Like, I think, okay, if KDEV hit 7 million euros or 6 million 500 euros, how many people could we employ? What could we employ? What could we do with that? I mean, it would be absolutely game changing. So if you like the sound of that, please donate to KDEV via our Plasma 6 fundraiser right now, which hopefully the link to that will show up in the description below.

Yes, I will make sure to add that. One thing I will say about KDE EV is it's a horribly awkward name. I know it's really, really awkward. And EV is a German term. It's Eingetragene Verein, which stands for registered club. That is technically the legal entity under which KDE EV is organized. We have members. We are legally required to act for the benefit of the

membership. So when you sign up for one of these 100 euro yearly donations, technically you're becoming a member. And we are legally obligated to do things for you because you are now a member of our club. It's the big KDE club. If I had my way, I would drop

one of those E's. it'll be a lot less awkward of a name kdev flows much better yeah well you know maybe someday it will become more appropriate if kde ev ever decides to get into the hardware game we can start selling electric cars and then there can be a KDE EVEV. Someday. Just saying. When you have not 7 million funding, but 70 million funding. Yeah, 70 million.

We can make the KDE EVEV. How long have you been a board member for? I've been a board member for a little over one year at this point. Wow. Yeah, I was elected at the previous academy, which was in October. Why did you want to get involved in the board? I wanted to get involved in the board mostly because I wanted to do fundraising and hiring activities. KDEV had already been involved in a lot of expanding via hiring, but this was a topic

that I was very passionate about. And I said, I really like doing this. I've been involved in the KDE community for a while. I think that by being on the board, I can help accelerate this. And I basically ran on that platform and was fortunate enough to be elected. And so now we have hired a couple more people in the last year.

Unfortunately, we have to put the brakes on it right now because we have reached our budgetary level where we feel this is sustainable, right? We don't want to overshoot and then have to fire everybody because we run out of money. That would not be good. And that's one of the reasons why we're hosting this fundraiser right now is so that we can make sure that our income stream remains predictable and sustainable so that we can continue to hire people that continue to employ the people we've already got. Because we want it to be a career for them, right? We want people to stay in the community. be. Something that happens so often in open source is that people become really passionate when they're students, they have lots of free time, they work on it, they get employed, and then boom, no more open source for 10 years, right? That's what we don't want. Because when that happens,

essentially, the free software community is doing free job training for the private sector. Whereas if we can keep people inside the free software world by hiring them, then they can grow with us. They can stay in that community. Their skills remain embedded there and they can train other people. We don't become a free job training agency for somebody else. It drives me crazy how many people we lose because they graduate from college and then all of a sudden, you know, start to need money and there's no time and then boom, more open source contributions from them. It happens all the time and it's not sustainable. It gets back to what I was saying before about open source projects need to be made sustainable. We have to think about

this, right? It matters because if it's not sustainable, it dies. It's understandable. I can't fault anyone for, you know, getting like, you know, maybe I can fault you for getting a job at Raytheon. But I can't fault anyone for, you know, going to like some dev studio, being like, oh, I'm going to make some proprietary applications. Because, you know, you need to pay bills. Like, that's totally fair. But I do agree with you.

It would be nice if... Red Hat does a great job having a lot of people. They've fired a lot of people, obviously, recently. But they have a lot of employees. And a lot of people they employ do get to work on open source. But that's just... Even that is kind of just a drop in the pond compared to how many people are actually in

this space who would like to get paid for what they do that's right but the money isn't there yeah and the money isn't there because we don't ask our users for it um this is what thunderbird did they essentially decided to do the bold yet obvious thing of asking their users for money, and their users said, here's some money, right? So I think that's a good model. You were mentioning before about how it can be very frustrating when a person using the software files a bug report, and the answer is, well, submit a merge request, right? What if they're not a developer? Right. What if they're not a developer? There was a talk that I was watching recently from an Inkscape developer who talked about this, how it feels very unfair to be told that, you know, because there's a certain level of sort of privilege and entitlement involved in saying, oh, we'll just submit a merge request because clearly you're a programmer like me, well, not everybody's a programmer, right? And how he was talking about how users can essentially be more empowered by being allowed to make financial contributions, because that's a way that a non-programmer can contribute. And it's not perfect because money is different. You know, if you live in India and you're being asked to contribute in euros, those euros are much more valuable to you

than a person in Germany who's being asked to contribute in rupees, right? Just due to currency exchange rates and economic strengths. But still, the point is, if you don't have programming skills, making a financial contribution can be empowering. Even more so when you can make a financial

contribution for a specific feature. Instead of pinging the bug report and saying, is this done yet? Is this done yet? Is this done yet? You can say, I'm willing to pay 100 euros to get this feature fixed. Somebody will show up and say, all right, 100 euros isn't nothing. I think I can do that. And 100 euros isn't nothing. But if you live in a first world country, even a second world country, you can probably find a way to scrape together 100 euros and then boom, your issue is fixed. So it can be empowering to be told, if you don't have development skills, try contributing or sponsoring a feature, right? We've dipped our toes into this recently

by offering to facilitate feature sponsorships in KDE. Just a simple thing. We have a forum category where people can say, hey, I want to put some money into this feature. And so far, several have been done. A couple, like just in three weeks, several people have successfully sponsored features and bug fixes. So it works. It totally does. All you're describing is a crowdsourced bug bounty. A couple, like just in three weeks. Several people have successfully sponsored features on BugFixes.

So it works. It totally does. All you're describing is a crowdsourced bug bounty. Yeah. And bug bounties work great. The low-tech primitive version, because we don't do like escrow or anything. There's no system behind this.

It's basically just like a private contract between two people. But yeah, it's just like a one-on-one bug bounty thing. Now that's actually really cool. I was gonna, I was gonna say something like completely slipped my mind. Oh, when Katie wants to do like a fundraiser. So Thunderbird, when they, they did theirs, like, you know, they had the pop-up there, like a thing opened in my browser when I like upgraded to the new UIi when katie wants to do a fundraiser like they wanted to like not just you know casual hey guys you know we have fundraising stuff open if you want to go and do it like actually wants

to do a fundraising campaign what is the approach that is taken so we have a whole promotion team that is involved in this sort of thing. I'm peripherally involved in this, but I am not personally making the fundraiser happen. But basically what they do is they create a web page and then they work with the visual design people and the web people to make sure that it looks nice. And then they start promoting the heck out of it all over social media. KDE has, we have a presence on Facebook, we have a presence on Twitter and Instagram and all sorts of other social media platforms that I am not on, so I don't think about them. And we also promote it internally.

I've blogged about our fundraisers and stuff. So, you know, we end up doing a pretty decent job of talking to the people who are listening to us. Um, I personally think the next step is for us to do what Thunderbird does and start talking to people who are not listening to us because they're, they're users, right? They're not on KDE subreddit. They're not on KDE's Twitter. I personally do think that like, if we do once a year, we show a little banner or a little notification in Plasma

that says, I don't know, near Christmas time, right? That says, hey, if you love it, please donate. If you don't want to, 100% fine. We won't bug you again for another year. And if you really hate it, you can disable the KDE module

that shows the notification. Yeah, yeah. bug you again for another year and if you really hate it you can disable the kiged module that shows the notification yeah yeah i think if that approach is taken you need to be very careful about it because there is so i don't know if you remember um a lot of people getting very annoyed with ubuntu because when they were opening up their terminal they had the message of the day it was promoting ubuntu pro which is free for regular users. So I don't know who were complaining. But there's been other things they've done. They had the Amazon Lens a couple of years, a real long time ago now.

So it has to be done tastefully for sure. I think there's a big difference between asking for a donation for a nonprofit versus advertising a paid service for a for-profit company. You know, that feels very much like an upsell, like it's intrusive, especially if it's in your terminal prompt, right? You can see this every day for the rest of your life. whereas if we show one notification per year that says hey freedom isn't free please donate not like for you know kde plus some subscription service or something like that just like please donate if you want to keep us financially sustainable if you can we'd love it if you can't that's fine keep using us i can't, that's fine, keep using us.

I think it's different. Again, you have to word it properly, but I think there's a big difference and people notice that difference, right? Like you're not selling them on a product that they probably don't want. You're asking for people's generosity in allowing you to be financially sustainable

and continue to offer the software that they like. No, that's definitely understandable, but it's just... It's a really weird line to cross because a lot of people are very... I think there's a way to do it, but it needs... Yeah, you are right.

It needs to be done... It needs to be really thought out, but considering what was done with Thunderbird, like it's clearly very, very successful when it happens. Like, because if you do it right, it really works.

That's sort of a problem that it's probably a lot of things in the fast forward have where it's like, we, this is actually a big problem with the, the whole a lot of the free software message people talk a lot to the people that already agree with them

and KDE will get donations from the people that already donate to KDE you need to or the people who are at least attuned to us who are power users I'm sure it's the 1% of users who check, you know,

5%, pick some like, some low number, that go to the KDE website. I guarantee most people have never been to any of the KDE, maybe they've been to the wiki, but that's probably as far as they've gone. Like, most people are not, you know, reading

release notes notes going to the website doing that sort of stuff it's true yeah yeah so we are it's kind of a general principle in communications though like you know the conversion rate is going to be like one percent most of the people who see your message are going to delete it or ignore it and some of the people who see it are going to think maybe i might want to do something and then they won't act on it. And they'll get to the web page. They'll get distracted. They'll go there, forget where their credit card is.

So it's always going to be a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of people who end up doing it, which is why communicating widely and broadly is so important. Yeah, you want your poll to be big, even though it's a small fraction. Undoubtedly, we will end up pissing off some of the people who say, oh my god, ads and KDE, you're now Microsoft. Literally Microsoft. I'm sure we'll get those complaints. Not true,

but that'll happen and those voices will be loud, but hopefully it will be offset by the other people who will argue with them and say, look, Katie is being super tasteful. They're being upfront about why they want this. You don't have to. You can disable it by installing this package or like unchecking this checkmark over here. Like the way I have it thought out in my head is we would have basically a module for our daemon and all of those are disableable. So if you don't like it, you disable the daemon and then you never see the message again. If you're a distro and you don't like the idea of KDE advertising itself to your users, you disable the daemon module in your distro and then boom, it's gone forever.

Like we support this stuff in KDE. We let you customize the experience. And if you don't like a part of it, like just change it we're not going to change that that's the way we are no i i completely agree that makes a lot of sense um well we are getting fairly close to when kde 6 supposed to at least planned to be released February next year. Mm-hmm. Um, is everything on track from what you're seeing? Yes. Uh, I would say that everything is on track.

If you look at our Plasma 6 wiki page, you can see, um, where we are basically, uh, how many of the planned features are in progress versus not even started. So if you look at the list of features, the list of features that are already merged is quite large. There should be, I think, four or five things that are in progress. And then there's maybe five or six things that haven't been started yet. Maybe a couple of those will end up being punted, but it's quite a feature filled release already, and it promises to be even bigger with things like Wayland color management. Feature-wise, I think we're definitely on track. In terms of stability and bugginess, we haven't yet hit that convergence area yet.

People are still getting their features in, so there's a lot of churn. era yet. People are still getting their features in, so there's a lot of churn. There are a lot of API changes, a lot of updates to Qt that cause regressions here and there. So we're going to really start focusing on reliability starting in November, which, oh my gosh, that's next month. Wow. So yeah, maybe time really creeps up on you, doesn't it? So, yeah, we're going to have a soft feature freeze next month, which is basically you really need to get your features in and you need like a justification to get anything in, which will be followed by a hard feature freeze. And then it's just going to be stability work and betas. We're going to have at least two months of betas. because we're going to have at least two months of betas. I'm hoping three months,

and we'll be doing pretty much nothing but bug fixing and polishing during that time to try to get it to be as stable and reliable a release as possible. So what I often hear about Plasma 6 is this isn't like a revolutionary change on what Plasma was already doing. Like we're not talking,

you're not talking four again. We're not talking five again. Like this is more of a take what you already have and polish it. Yep. Now it's not to say that it's a small release because it's full of features and it's full of a lot of really great user interface changes but you are correct that these are mostly evolutionary rather than revolutionary changes and that's by design because we've gone through a couple of stages now where we had very big changes to the core underlying technology and i think there's a desire in the kde development community

to convince people that we can do a big, boring, stable release that nonetheless has features in it. We don't need to tear everything out and redo the world in order to make a new major Plasma release. So that's what we're shooting for. We don't have major styling changes planned. We don't have giant technological changes planned, like the move to QML, for example, which was in Plasma 4. We don't have, you know, a giant new thing like activities. But what we do have is everything that's already there works a lot better together. There's been a big focus on this release on making it feel more cohesive and less like

a semi-random grab bag of features that people merged at different times without talking to each other, which frankly is the way things are a lot of the time. That's why it feels that way. So we've done a lot of user interface polish to make sure that features that were adjacent to each other talk to each other better, right? And features that half worked some of the time for some people have been removed because they're not worth keeping because they're just like sitting there

semi-broken being landmines for people. We're improving the default settings so that it's an easier time to switch. Like we're trying to make this a really easy home for people so that it feels natural. It feels cohesive. It feels more like a designed experience and less like a toolbox full of tools that you build the experience from yourself. Under the hood, it is still a toolbox of tools. So if you want to, you can disassemble it and rebuild it however you want. But the point is, we want to make it really clear that you don't have to.

But that's like, if you're an expert, you customize it to high heaven. But if you're just like a regular person, you just use it and it's cool and it works. And you hopefully don't experience so many sharp edges. Right. Well,

considering how long, you know, considering how long plasma five was around is like i don't know if there's been any discussions about like how long plasma 6 is going to be around for or like is this going to be another 10 year saga or like is is nothing really sort of discussed that far into the future at this point? So what we've done so far is we've tied the major Plasma version to the underlying version of the Qt toolkit. So, you know, I think usually these are like every seven, eight or nine years. We've delayed a little bit for Plasma 6 because we wanted Qt 6 to mature a bit. But Plasma 5 was around for almost 10 years, nine and a half years from day one to the last day. So we have discussed decoupling the Plasma major release version from the Qt version so that maybe we can do Plasma 7 in like two years and then Plasma 8 in two years after that.

like two years and then plasma eight in two years after that and then we can just migrate to a new version of the qtoolkit whenever we feel like it's ready rather than having that dictate the cycle there isn't agreement on this yet but it's being discussed as a potential option okay huh because i i know you on one of the blog posts you did mention like a change to sort of... To the release schedule. Yeah, release scheduling. Yeah, I don't remember which blog it was in. Yeah, so the plan right now at the moment is once we converge Plasma 6,

that is to say after we do like the initial bug fix release, maybe another bug fix release, we are tentatively planning to go down to two releases a year rather than three in the hope that this allows us more time for QA for each particular release. It allows each release to be bigger and more exciting. It makes our promo team not have to work so hard writing so many release notes all the time. And it hopefully will allow each release to make more of a big splash, essentially. So that's the plan of record at the moment.

But beyond that, like I said, we may end up doing like Plasma 7 a few years later and tying that to Smooth 7. Maybe we might do that. Personally, I'm rooting for that. I think that would be a good idea for us to be able to determine our own release schedule rather than having it be based on you know something that's below us well being able to spend more time on qa i think is going to help one of the things that i hear often is plasma is not a stable environment it's buggy or like this is a reputation it's had on it for a very very long time and whether that's justified or

not now is sort of it doesn't matter because that's that's the reputation it has and i think being out of show that we are spending more time on QA we are slowing down that's going to help with that reputation if you know you can do a couple of like you know you can do like a year or two of releases where they're like rock solid releases that reputation you know will fade away and I think we've already been building that reputation, but what it comes down to is for a long time, KDE has been kind of in move fast and break things mode. Starting with Plasma 4 when everything was rewritten from scratch for QML, which was very new and immature and KDE was pushing it forward at the time.

We've had to iterate very quickly just to kind of get things running the way we want but now we've been doing that for 15 years and so i see an opportunity for us to move more slowly and deliberately you you said earlier that it seems to you like plasma 6 is going to be you know less of a change everything release and like i said that's deliberate um I think that is a harbinger of things to come, which is we've got our technology stack generally pretty solid at this point, which means we can focus more on QA. We can focus more on smoothing out those rough edges. I agree with you that we've had a reputation for being very buggy in the time that I've been involved in KDE. I've seen that reputation change and I

triage all Plasma's bugs. So I have personally witnessed the number of open bug reports like fall by a factor of two. My perception is that several years ago, Plasma kind of was generally buggy. Now we're no longer generally buggy. We're specifically buggy. We have bugs in specific features that are like known yet not fixed yet. Like we've still got too many multi-monitor bugs. We've been trying to fix it for years, still got multi-monitor bugs, you know. We've still got a bunch of annoying bugs with like panel auto-hide. Like weird edge cases when you have like auto hide panels between

screens and you have four screens and eight virtual desktops like it's gonna break terribly in that case yeah we've got to fix that you know but the bugs are specific now they're not like touch the system the wrong way and it will break it's more like use the system in an extremely intensive way and maybe one of the wheels might fall off at 200 miles per hour right right well that's you know that's good to hear because i i've said this before i'm planning to actually try out plasma when six comes out so thanks uh david recommended maybe wait for the first release just give it some time make sure nothing's wrong yeah 6.1 maybe

before you do the big video that says I tried Plasma 6 and it sucked look I'm sure that no matter what when I talked to David about it he was like oh it's not a very exciting release like I've not used Plasma literally anything you show me is an exciting release everything is new here it's not a very exciting release. Like I've not used Plies. Literally anything you show me is an exciting release. Everything is new here.

It's pretty cool, honestly. I think it all works well. Well, that's good to hear then. You said you need to finish off sometime soon. So. Oh. I do. I do, in fact, need to go fairly soon.

Yes. Okay. Well, we can start wrapping this up then. Let people know where they can find your stuff, where they can find KDE stuff, anything you want to sort of shout out. Yeah, so obviously there's KDE.org. I would encourage people to donate at the Plasma 6 fundraiser, which is, let's see, that is kde.org slash fundraisers slash Plasma 6 member. Hopefully there will be a link there as well. Yeah, check our stuff out.

It's pretty cool. I hope you like using KDE software. And if you do, give us a shout out, file bug reports when things are not good. Please be gentle in bug reports. Please help other people. Spread the word. Be awesome. Because everything's great. And life is amazing for giving us the opportunity to work on this software and give it away for free.

Not have to worry about commercial incentives and managers breathing down our necks and technology upgrade schedules ruining everything. We live in an incredible time and we have the choice of running our computers how we want and it's amazing. So help us keep that flame alive. And we can't forget about your blog. Yeah, that also exists. There's that one too.

Pointieststick.com That was one where I couldn't get pointedstick.com So the stick has to be pointier. Do you know what is pointedstick.com? Have you checked it? Gosh, I don't even know. Let's take a look. I bet it's just the parking page. Probably.

Or a Monty Python website. A place for my stuff. Something has to go here. It's some other random guy's vlog. Well, hey, at least it's being used. Yeah, exactly. Better than a parking page. Yeah, that's true. Okay, well, as for me, my main channel is brodie robinson i do linux videos there six-ish days a week i've got my gaming channel right now i'm playing through armored core 6 i'm probably in new game plus unless i am still stuck on the final boss um also playing through kingdom hearts dream drop distance so be sure to come and check that out if you're listening to the audio version of this you can find the video version on youtube at tech over t if you're watching the video you can find the

audio version pretty much any podcast platform uh search tech of a t it's on spotify it's on apple whatever they call their thing i don't know what's called it's there there's an rss feed put in your favorite app and you're good to go uh give you the final word what do you say bye everybody be awesome see you guys later and you're good to go. Give me the final word. What do you say? Bye, everybody. Be awesome. See you guys later.