On Monday, KDE’s Plasma team held its traditional kickoff meeting for the new development cycle. We took this opportunity to also look and plan ahead a bit further into the future. In what areas are we lacking, where do we want or need to improve? Where do we want to take Plasma in the next two years?

Our general direction points towards professional use-cases. We want Plasma to be a solid tool, a reliable work-horse that gets out of the way, allowing to get the job done quickly and elegantly. We want it to be faster and of better quality than the competition.

With these big words out there, let’s have a look at some specifics we talked about.

Release schedule until 2018

Our plan is to move from 4 to 3 yearly releases in 2017 and 2018, which we think strikes a nice balance between our pace of development, and stabilization periods around that. Our discussion of the release schedule resulted in the following plan:

Plasma 5.9: 31 January 2017

Plasma 5.10: May 2017

Plasma 5.11: September 2017

Plasma 5.12: December 2017

Plasma 5.13: April 2018

Plasma 5.14 LTS: August 2018

A cautionary note, we can’t know if everything exactly plays out like this, as this schedule, to a degree depends on external factors, such as Qt’s release schedule. Here’s what we intend to do, it is really our “best guess”. Still, this aligns with Qt’s plans, who are also looking at an LTS release in summer 2018. So, what will these upcoming releases bring?

UI and Theming

The Breeze icon theme will see further completion work and refinements in its existing icons details. Icon usage over the whole UI will see more streamlining work as well. We also plan to tweak the Breeze-themed scrollbars a bit, so watch out for changes in that area. A Breeze-themed Firefox theme is planned, as well as more refinement in the widget themes for Qt, GTK, etc.. We do not plan any radical changes in the overall look and feel of our Breeze theme, but will further improve and evolve it, both in its light and dark flavors.

Feature back-log

One thing that many of our users are missing is support for a global menu similar to how MacOS displays application menus outside of the app’s window (for example at the top of the screen). We’re currently working on bringing this feature, which was well-supported in Plasma 4 back in Plasma 5, modernized and updated to current standards. This may land as soon as the upcoming 5.9 release, at least for X11.

Better support for customizing the locale (the system which shows things like time, currencies, numbers in the way the user expects them) is on our radar as well. In this area, we lost some features due to the transition to Frameworks 5, or rather QLocale, away from kdelibs’ custom, but sometimes incompatible locale handling classes.

Wayland

The next releases overall will bring further improvements to our Wayland session. Currently, Plasma’s KWin brings an almost feature-complete Wayland display server, which already works for many use-cases. It hasn’t seen the real-world testing it needs, and it is lacking certain features that our users expect from their X11 session, or new features which we want to offer to support modern hardware better.

We plan to improve multi-screen rendering on Wayland and the input stack in areas such as relative pointers, pointer confinement, touchpad gestures, wacom tablet support, clipboard management (for example, Klipper). X11 dependencies in KWin will be further reduced with the goal to make it possible to start up KWin entirely without hard X11 dependencies.

One new feature which we want to offer in our Wayland session is support for scaling the contents of each output individually, which allows users to use multiple displays with vastly varying pixel densities more seamlessly.

There are also improvements planned around virtual desktops under Wayland, as well as their relation to Plasma’s Activities features. Output configuration as of now is also not complete, and needs more work in the coming months. Some features we plan will also need changes in QtWayland, so there’s some upstream bug-fixing needed, as well.

One thing we’d like to see to improve our users’ experience under Wayland is to have application developers test their apps under Wayland. It happens still a bit too often that an application ends up running into a code-path that makes assumptions that X11 is used as display server protocol. While we can run applications in backwards-compatible XWayland mode, applications can benefit from the better rendering quality under Wayland only when actually using the Wayland protocol. (This is mostly handled transparantly by Qt, but applications do their thing, so unless it’s tested, it will contain bugs.)

Mobile

Plasma’s Mobile flavor will be further stabilized, and its stack cleaned up, we are further reducing the stack’s footprint without losing important functionality. The recently-released Kirigami framework, which allows developers to create convergent applications that work on both mobile and desktop form-factors, will be adjusted to use the new, more light-weight QtQuick Controls 2. This makes Kirigami a more attractive technology to create powerful, yet lean applications that work across a number of mobile and desktop operating systems, such as Plasma Mobile, Android, iOS, and others.

Online Services

Planned improvements in our integration of online services are dependency handling for assets installed from the store. This will allow us to support installation of meta-themes directly from the KDE Store. We want to also improve our support for online data storage, prioritizing Free services, but also offer support for proprietary services, such as the GDrive support we recently added to Plasma’s feature-set.

Developer Recruitment

We want to further increase our contributor base. We plan to work towards an easier on-boarding experience, through better documentation, mentoring and communication in general. KDE is recruiting, so if you are looking for a challenging and worthwhile way to work as part of a team, or on your individual project, join our ranks of developers, artists, sysadmins, translators, documentation writers, evangelists, media experts and free culture activists and let us help each other.