David, Nate, Josh, Marco, Carl, and Niccolò are here ready to answer all your questions on Plasma (all versions), Gear, Frameworks, Wayland (and how it affects KDE's software), and everything in between.
Fire away, Lemmy!
We were expecting to be done in an hour and we have past the 2-hour mark already! Time flies when you are having fun.
Thank you for all the questions and the welcoming and friendly atmosphere, but the devs must get back to making Plasma 6 great.
Please keep the conversation going and KDE contributors will continue to answer over the next days as time permits.
Thank you all!!
How do you copy windows features before they are even announced?
KDE is easy to use and very powerful.
In your opinion, why do many people prefer GNOME over KDE? Do you agree with them? How are you planning to close the gap?
Actually Plasma is generally more popular than GNOME every time surveys are conducted. However we have to keep in mind that the direct consumers of a DE are actually not the end users, but rather the distributors who package and distribute it. There are a number of historical reasons why many distributors ended up picking GNOME over Plasma including accessibility, corporate sponsorship, an easier packaging experience, and the rocky KDE 4 rollout burning a lot of trust. So what you end up with today is many distros shipping GNOME despite pent-up desire for Plasma. It's a great illustration of how you need to keep your direct users happy.
And I think that pent-up desire is being unleashed these days due to various changes in our ecosystem. Plasma is better than ever and version 5 had a much less painful release compared to 4, with us aiming to do even better in Plasma 6. We also see an increasing number of hardware vendors shipping devices with Plasma on it (https://kde.org/hardware/), who had a strong financial incentive to listen to their customers by picking Plasma over GNOME. In addition, KDE's accessibility game is ramping up hugely, and we have more robust corporate sponsorship than we used to with Valve and Blue Systems putting tons of resources into KDE. Finally, GNOME seems to be becoming more hostile to their downstreams, causing them to need to do more of their own development or else migrate to be a fork or skin of Plasma. Interesting developments.
We do aim to improve our design and usability further as much as possible, however, one of the nice things of free software is really this big choice. There are different projects and one size never fits all, if some people find the software written by our friends over GNOME more suited with their needs, that's totally fine.
It would also be interesting hearing on the motivations for this choice tough, as it always help us improving
In your opinion, what is the most substantial change/addition slated for the megarelease?
It may be not user visible and technically not a Plasma but Qt change but I find the work so that apps survive the compositor restarting amazing. See http://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/qt6_wayland_robustness/
One of the most visible ones for me is that most common multimonitor workflows Just Work™ in the Wayland session now. There are still edge cases, but we've put a huge amount of effort into this.
For me personally, it's the updated breeze theme. But I might not be completely objective here, since I drove this effort quite a lot :)
Some screenshots to see the difference: https://invent.kde.org/websites/product-screenshots/-/merge_requests/51/diffs
There's been an undercurrent of discussion I've noticed (and tend to agree) that C++ is not the most friendly language for new/outside contributors, even the newer standard you use. Is there an effort to bring first class support/documentation for another higher level language as well? e.g dart/ruby/lua/python/javascript/C#/go (whatever is most feasible)
Something that's often not mentioned is that C++ with Qt is often a very different beast to use compared to C++ with the stdlib and other GUI frameworks. IMO Qt takes a lot of the pain out of C++, such that the criticism becomes blunted and mostly articulated by people looking in from outside who haven't tried it yet.
that suggests if nothing else, that point needs to be articulated more. But also then, C++ with QT is a very specific skill people now have to learn to help out, as opposed to stuff that would be more universally useful
Sure, but Qt is the largest C++ toolkit in the world with millions of developers, so it's not exactly a small niche thing that someone who knows C++ hasn't heard of. :)
I have some very, very, very, very WIP KDE widgets for Dart/Flutter in a project running. Currently it has almost nothing but it already automatically switches color theme when you switch color schemes in KDE for example 😄
Don't expect too much of that though, it's very unofficial and something I'm doing whenever I feel like it.
Thanks for all the great work on kde! I was wondering if the KDE theme refresh, (brise) and icon (app and plasma icon) proposals are going to happen in plasma 6.1? Or is that not on the table? Also, are there plans to have KDE connect support making your phone a webcam?
Edit: grammar
Also, is there plans to have KDE connect support making your phone a webcam?
That's an amazing idea! Currently I am using my laptop next to my desktop screens as a sudo webcam :D
Yeah the only way to do it right now is using droidcam, and I took one look at the documentation and gave up, and continued using my bad webcam. Also afiak the new pipewire video portals should make that feature easier to implement.
Edit: thank you for the reply!
offtopic, but why is this comment yellow? never seen that before.
EDIT: Oh wait, I think it's to mark unread comments. Haven't seen that before. Must be a new thing.
I have no idea, what client do you use? (Its not yellow for me on sync) Edit: yeah maybe I don't know to be honest
Thanks for the AUA! Really excited about the Mega Release and even more for the future after!
My question is regarding Nate's original proposal for the KDE goals "Professionalise KDE" if I remember well. Now, I know that the goal was changed and the scope reduced to "Automatization and Systematization" but I truly believe the original proposal's spirit could have a huge impact on the whole ecosystem.
For example I remember the proposal contained the plan to hire a person working "full time" on actively finding fundings and grants and applying to them. We got the Mega Release fundraiser but for example on the forum I found https://discuss.kde.org/t/formalities-for-stf-funding/9916 and it looks like a waste of potential to not apply for grants because no one has the time to do so.
Is there anyone at KDE, maybe among the Board, who is still trying to make the "Professionalise KDE" happen?
P.S. I know you guys just want to reach the biggest amount of people but maybe we could start having the AUAs/AMAs and similar, only on Lemmy and a post on Reddit saying that the event will be hosted on Lemmy. This would make the Lemmy community the official one and could convince people to make the switch for the "exclusive content". It's not a critic, just want to see Lemmy prosper.
As a Board member now, I'll answer this one. To a certain extent I ran for a seat on the Board because I realized that proposing this via a Goal was the wrong place to do it, and the more effective way to push for that change was by being on the Board. And now that I've been elected there, yes I do still want to do it and push for it internally where possible. However now that I have a fuller picture of the e.V.'s situation, I realize that there are budgetary concerns that must be met before we do more hiring, and KDE e.V. operates under extremely strict German nonprofit rules that make it not as simple as it might appear. Now, in an ideal world this person would be effectively self-funding, but we need to make sure we can afford them in the first place! It's a bit of a chicken-egg situation, really.
Note that we've already done a certain amount of professionalizing KDE inasmuch as it means "KDE e.V. hires professionals to work on KDE." KDE e.V. does indeed now employ multiple technical engineers to work on various areas of the software stack, and I want to see this grow even more. But, we need more money to make it happen, and until we do have that employed professional fundraiser, it's up to existing members of the Board and the community to improve the revenue side of the equation so that it becomes possible! That's why I'm so happy with the progress of the current fundraiser. 700 new members means at least 70,000€ of new recurring yearly income, which is enormous for KDE e.V. If we can keep up this kind of fundraising performance, we can do so much cool stuff in the next few years.
Thanks for the thorough answer Nate, can't wait for KDE world domination!
I'm someone that uses sway because I really like to keep my workflow as keyboard driven as possible. However, I do not necessarily need the minimalism of sway and sometimes miss the more polished experience of a full DE. Are there ways to configure Plasma to give me a sway-like keyboard-driven flow while still getting some of the other benefits of Plasma?
