Monday, 8 December 2025
@jpetso:kde.orgThe attentive reader will note that yes, Akademy happened in September already. Not the most prolific blogger. Not the most prolific contributor either. But I had already drafted much of this post two months ago, so let's get it out the door. I'll cut all the paragraphs about fun social outings and focus on recapping stuff related to our Input Goal.
A special thank-you to Farid, of Kdenlive and KDE Goals coordination fame, who convinced me to take the trek when I thought perhaps I shouldn't cross the Atlantic twice in a year. I'm glad I went, tons of great sessions and conversations. Powered by your donations, KDE e.V. supported my travel costs and made it possible for me to coordinate with many KDE people in person. Thank you. Yes, you! Anyway.
Talking input
I met my fellow Input Goal co-initiator Gernot (Duha on Matrix) in person for the first time. Together, and alongside reports on the other KDE goals, we delivered our presentation summarizing one year of input improvements. The KDE community made some excellent progress since the goal was chosen, thanks to everyone who contributed towards it! At the same time, there is more work to do and we'd love to see further contributions. Watch the talk for more details.
Our third Input Goal champion, Joshua Goins, had so much to report on improvements for drawing tablet users that he held an entire presentation on that particular topic.
One particular highlight for me was running into Dorota. She has been pushing for improvements to Wayland's input method protocols and had joined our input handling community on Matrix over the past year. Listening to Dorota's cross-desktop experience and plans was super interesting, and I was happy to see her coordinate with KWin maintainers over the course of Akademy. In the time since, some of Dorota's work was included in the latest upstream release of Wayland Protocols as experimental addition. Hopefully this will be further refined and standardized over time.
Andy Betts sat down with me to discuss the UI designs for touchpad gesture customization, following earlier back-and-forth with Natalie and Nate over the summer. Xaver Hugl provided some great feedback at Akademy about my ongoing patch series to implement stroke gesture support in KWin. He also proposed a change that will help with integrating config file support for gesture customization into KWin. This is all still in the works - full disclosure, I've been having somewhat of a hard time recently for unrelated reasons. It now has path simplification (for performance reasons) plus a nice stroke drawing visualization, but still lacking tests and such. Christmas time seems as good a time as any to pick up some slack and push this forward.
In more exciting news, KDE's new on-screen keyboard has seen a significant amount of work in the last few months. Aleix Pol's initial prototype for Plasma Keyboard was supercharged by Devin Lin, who also made it to Akademy but had to take off early. We decided to release Plasma Keyboard independently first, then integrating it into regular Plasma releases in 2026. This 0.1 preview release is now available, you can check if your distribution already ships it, or you can grab the nightly Plasma Keyboard Flatpak to test its latest state. Yes, even input methods will run just fine as Flatpaks.
Meanwhile, somewhere far away across the ocean, a remote partipant was going full steam ahead on another important piece in the input handling puzzle.
GSoC project: Game controller support in KWin
For this year's Google Summer of Code, Yelsin Sepulveda was accepted to improve game controller support in KWin with mentorship by Xaver Hugl and myself. After a strong start, Yelsin was forced to delay the second part of his project due to personal circumstance and Google did not agree to a deadline extension. However! With an excellent work ethic, Yelsin still continued to work on the project and brought it to completion regardless of Google's official approval. The result is an opt-in KWin plugin that's close to getting merged, and will:
- Make KWin aware of game controllers in the first place,
- Prevent system sleep on controller actvity,
- Emulate mouse and keyboard input when no other game (or app) uses the controller,
- Deal with the Steam Controller's idiosyncratic "Lizard Mode".
- Provide the foundation for future game controller customization in Plasma.
From the KDE side, we consider this GSoC project a resounding success. If you missed Yelsin's own posts on Planet KDE, his blog posts from mid September and early October cover a lot more detail.
Other exciting developments
Edited for brevity but no less exciting!
[Thanks to Bhushan Shah](a lightning talk), Plasma now knows what made your system wake up from system sleep. Building on this, power management primarily for Plasma Mobile but also Plasma Desktop can improve even further, including the potential for scheduled background tasks and going right back to sleep.
Linux distros have been kind to KDE this year. Neal Gompa presented the Fedora KDE SIG's long-term efforts to ship a premium Plasma experience. Terrific work from these folks, this is now my current favorite distro suggestion for friends & family. Furthermore, Harald Sitter presented the Alpha release of KDE Linux, now happily chugging along on its way to becoming a Beta. This is what I hope to install on my parents' laptops one day. I took a banana from Harald in return for promising that I'll test it out myself. Didn't say when; nonetheless, the promise stands.
I was not expecting to find myself talking to GNOME contributors at Akademy, but Lorenz Wildberg from the GNOME Foundation's Board of Directors was a super interesting conversation partner. Long story short, both GNOME and KDE know about their respective shortcomings and are trying to learn from each other's experiences. Sometimes by adopting things that work, sometimes by taking a different route, sometimes just by focusing on our existing strengths and building on those. Either way, listening and reflecting will beat low-effort snark anytime. SDK evolution, contributor onboarding, governance, fun times.
Looking back and ahead
Yes, I lost a few weeks from getting a back injury soon after Akademy. The good news is that it's pretty much all healed at this point. But my contribution habits have remained out of whack since. I'm hoping to get this back on track asap, because I also really want to help KDE to reach the inflection point. Gamers, governments and many more people have something to gain if the Linux desktop breaks out of its niche into the mainstream. The tech industry has been disappointing to me on so many fronts. This here, though, is something I'm excited to see happening.
cullmann
