This year’s Plasma Sprint is kindly being hosted by von Affenfels, a software company in Stuttgart, Germany, focusing on mobile apps. Let me try to give you an idea of what we’re working on this week.

Bundled apps

One problem we’re facing in KDE is that for Linux, our most important target platform, we depend on Linux distributors to ship our apps and updates for it. This is problematic on the distro side, since the work on packaging has to be duplicated by many different people, but it’s also a problem for application developers, since it may take weeks, months or until forever until an update becomes available for users. This is a serious problem and puts us far, far behind for example deployment cycles for webapps.

Bundled app technologies such as flatpak, appimage and snap solve this problem by allowing us to create one of these packages and deploy them across a wide range of distributions. That means that we could go as far as shipping apps ourselves and cutting out the distros as middle men. This has a bunch of advantages:

Releases and fixes can reach the user much quicker as we don’t have to wait for distros with their own cycles, policies and resources to pick up our updates

Users can easily get the lastest version of the software they need, without being bound to what the distro ships

Packaging and testing effort is vastly reduced as it has to only be done once, and not for every distro out there

Distros with less man-power, who may not be able to package and offer a lot of software can make available many more appliations,…

…and at the same time concentrate their efforts on the core of their OS

From a Plasma point of view, we want to concentrate on a single technology, and not three of them. My personal favorite is flatpak, as it is technologically the most advanced, it doesn’t rely on a proprietary and centralized server component. Unless Canonical changes the way they control snaps, flatpak should be the technology KDE concentrates on. This hasn’t been formally decided however, and the jury is still out. I think it’s important to realize that KDE isn’t served by adopting a technology for a process as important as software distribution that could be switched off by a single company. This would pose an unacceptable risk, and it would send the wrong signal to the rest of the Free software community.

How would this look like to the user? I can imagine KDE to ship applications directly. We already build our code on pretty much every commit, we are actually the best candidate to know how to build it properly. We’d integrate this seamlessly in Discover through the KDE store, and users should be able to install our applications very easily, perhaps similarly to openSUSE’s one click install, but based on appstream metadata.

Website work



We started off the meeting by going over and categorizing topics and then dove straight into the first topic: Communication and Design. There’s a new website for Plasma (and the whole of KDE) coming, thanks to the tireless work of Ken Vermette. We went over most of his recent work to review and suggest fixes, but also to get a bit excited about this new public face of Plasma. The website is part of a bigger problem: In KDE, we’re doing lots of excellent work, but we fail to communicate it properly, regularly and in ways and media that reach our target audience. In fact, we haven’t even clearly defined the target audience. This is something we want to tackle in the near future as well, so stay tuned.

But also webbrowsers….



Kai Uwe demo’ed his work on better integration of browsers: Native notifications instead of the out-of-place notifications created by the browser, controls for media player integration between Plasma and the browser (so your album artwork gets shown in the panel’s media controller), acccess to tabs, closing all incognito tabs from Plasma, including individual browser and a few more cool features. Plasma already has most of this functionality, so the bigger part of this has to be in the browser. Kai has implemented the browser side of things as an extension for Chromium (that’s what he uses, Firefox support is also planned), and we’re discussing how we can bring this extension to the attention of the users, possibly preinstalling it so you get the improvements in browser integration without having to spend a thought on it.

On and on…

We only just started our sprint, and there are many more things we’re working on and discussing. The above is my account of some things we discussed so far, but I’m planning to keep you posted.