It’s been a month since my first post about my work as KDE Software Platform Engineer, so let’s have a look at what I have been doing since then.

The scope of what falls under “Software Platform” work is arguably quite wide. I like to describe it as “Taking care of everything needed so that people can build and enjoy awesome software”. Of course that often means hacking on source code, but that is by no means the only thing I do. A significant part of what I do is talking to other people, discussing ideas, reviewing code, making architecture decisions, documenting things, triaging bugreports, and just generally being useful to others. A lot of this work is strategic in nature and the benefits will only show in the long term, but some short-term improvements happend this month also.

My main area of focus was working on polishing the Plasma 6 and Frameworks 6 stability. This means staying on top of things that happen throughout the stack as well as squashing remaining issues. As a result several more projects now have CI builds against the latest development branches of frameworks. Furthermore, I fixed several places where coexistence of Qt5/KF5-based and Qt6/KF6-based software was causing issues.

Qt is an vital part of our software stack, so an important part of being KDE Software Platform Engineer is being involved in its development. Last month I submitted a patch to Qt, fixing a build issues affecting our code. Besides that I have also reported some bugs that were affecting KDE and participated in code review. Another important piece of our stack is our Qt5 Patch Collection that collects bugfix patches for Qt5. I contributed two such patches by backporting them from upstream.

In terms of documentation I have published two blog posts recently. The first explains how to build the development version of Plasma using kdesrc-build. While doing that I have also fixed some related issues in kdesrc-build to make sure building things is as smooth as possible. The second one is explaining some technical details about how theming and platform integration works in Qt/KDE apps. I hope this helps with some of the discussions around this topic that are coming up once in a while.

Besides these “Bigger Picture” topics I have also worked on some concrete enhancements for KDE software. With a series of changes various system windows no longer display an internal and technical application name like “Portal” or “KDE Daemon” in their window title. I have also restored the ability to configure the time interval for determining whether two mouse clicks should be interpreted as a double click. This was present in the legacy mouse settings, but got lost in the transition to libinput. Another thing that got improved was the VPN support in our network settings. When importing a VPN configuration fails Plasma now shows the relevant error message, giving you at least some indication about what’s wrong. Futhermore I fixed a crash when importing VPN configurations when the relevant NetworkManager plugin is missing.

Another area I was working on is our powermanagement settings. Currently they are quite complex, both in terms of UX and implementation. We are working on improving this, which involves quite a bit of technical ground work.

A month from now the Plasma team will meet in Augsburg, Germany for the first in-person Plasma Sprint since 2019. I have been planning and organizing this event. This will be an important opportunity to plan for an awesome Plasma future. However, such meetings are not cheap, so please consider donating to KDE e.V. to support it.