Month: August 2025| blog.broulik.de
The other day I finally replaced my trusty Thinkpad T480s I bought 6½ years ago. Overall, I was still pretty happy with it and even gave it a little refresh early last year (RAM upgrade, bigger SSD, new keyboard) but the CPU was really starting to show its age when compiling. I’m almost as picky as Nate when it comes to laptops but the P14s Gen 5 AMD (what a mouthful) checked more boxes than most laptops I looked at in recent years.| blog.broulik.de
You click a link in your chat app, your browser with a hundred tabs comes to the front and opens that page. How hard can it be? Well, you probably know by now that Wayland, unlike X, doesn’t let one application force its idiot wishes on everyone else. In order for an application to bring its window to the front, it needs to make use of the XDG Activation protocol.| blog.broulik.de
You may have read about my new-found fondness for Plasma’s Clock app. Following the development of a “Picture in Picture” protocol for Wayland, I remembered how I once saw someone put up a little timer window during a lunch break while screen-sharing a presentation. I figured, I wanted that, too!| blog.broulik.de
KIO (KDE Input/Output) is what allows KDE applications to transparently and asynchronously access files, both local and over the network. It also provides many of the user interfaces for manipulating files, such as the Places panel, Open/Save dialog, folder properties, new file menu, and many more. The other day I went through some of its … Continue reading KIO Goodies| Kai Uwe's Blog
Back in ye olde days there was a running gag that Plasma was all about clocks. With its then-new widget system you could add as many as you wanted, after all. Plasma included not only an analog and a digital clock, there was a binary clock, too, and my all-time favorite fuzzy clock that shows the current time in a colloquial textual way, such as “Quarter to seven”.| blog.broulik.de
Qt Contributor’s Summit 2025 is taking place in Munich in May. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to make it this year, so let’s talk about some of my recent contributions to our favorite cross-platform UI toolkit.| blog.broulik.de
The M is silent. In computing this stands for the underlined letters in menus that can be triggered using an Alt+Letter key combination, one that you can remember and apply later to navigate around more quickly.| blog.broulik.de
Like every year I take a couple of days off at the end of the year to wind down and spent time with the family. The year has brought many major changes, both to KDE and to me personally: We did the KDE MegaRelease 6, the next major update to KDE’s software suite. Plasma 6 further made Wayland the default graphical session. I also spent a lot more time in Qt itself, particularly Qt Wayland, rather than KDE code. Anyhow, between family visits and feasts there’s always some time for quality ...| blog.broulik.de
(originally titled “On Dead Trees”)| blog.broulik.de
While I do have a Qt git build on my machine that I use for development, I usually only test individual applications and functionality but hardly ever run my full Plasma session on it. This means that for day-to-day use I typically only get to enjoy new Qt features once they have actually been released.| blog.broulik.de
One of the key components to using a Plasma Wayland session is obviously the Qt Wayland Client module for running Qt applications in a Wayland environment. While it has been successfully deployed to millions of devices over the years, there’s still a few areas that feel like they haven’t been touched much since its inception as part of the Qt Lighthouse project, what turned into QPA, the Qt Platform Abstraction.| blog.broulik.de
The new year has just begun and we have six weeks left before the final release! The most noticeable change since my last post is obviously that we have decided on the wallpaper to be used in Plasma 6.0! But of course there’s more going on under the hood than just that.| blog.broulik.de
I’m pleased to announce the immediate availability of Plasma Browser Integration version 1.9 on the Chrome Web Store. This is a maintenance release shipping a couple of important changes as well as the usual translation updates. The extension now ships 46 different localizations and will of course continue working just fine under the upcoming Plasma 6!| blog.broulik.de
One of the the less apparent omissions in Plasma’s Wayland session compared to X was the lack of a prompt for terminating an unresponsive app. Of course, you should never see one because any decent app will just crash and quit rather than get stuck. Nevertheless, over the course of three evenings I spent way too much time making the “KWin Killer Helper” work on Wayland and while at it revamped its user interface entirely.| blog.broulik.de
Another month, another Plasma 6 update. I’ve been pretty busy during the past weeks, mostly further improving the Wayland session, fractional scaling, and dealing with Qt bugs. Working under the hood like this is tremendously important albeit somewhat ungrateful when there aren’t any pretty pictures to show.| blog.broulik.de
Sometimes while using my computer I notice random slowness when launching a certain application or some feature that just doesn’t run very well. That’s always reason enough for me to take a deeper look.| blog.broulik.de