A short but sweet note to say I am coming out of my short retirement to help with snaps again. My time is extremely limited, however we are working hard on getting snaps on CI and I have some newer snaps in –beta trickling in for testing. You must install kf6-core24 from beta as well to test them ( this will likely break older kde snaps in the process so beware. ) This is slow going as I work on them during my hour lunch at day job and spare stolen moments. KDE is coming up on its 30th birthday!!! How cool is that!
Almost all of these posts end with “KDE has become important in the world…” and I think this is a good reminder that it’s true, not just some empty platitude. KDE is important. And all of you building or using KDE’s software are important, too.
But KDE is not only important to cars; we’re incredibly important to computers! And on that subject, some really nice features and user interface improvements landed for the upcoming Plasma 6.6 release. The hard feature freeze is coming up soon, at which point we’ll move into full bug-fixing and polishing mode.
But until then, enjoy some juicy new goodies! Check it out:
Notable New Features
Plasma 6.6.0
You can now save your current visual settings as a new global theme! (Vlad Zahorodnii, plasma-desktop MR #6097)
Added a “Forget device” action to the Bluetooth system tray widget, allowing users to remove paired devices without opening System Settings. (Andrew Gigena, KDE Bug #434691)
You can now search for processes in System Monitor based on their full command-line invocation when the “Command” column is visible. (Alexey Rochev, KDE Bug #448331)
On supported systems, the logout screen now mentions when the system will restart into a different operating system or boot option after it reboots. (Nikolay Kochulin, plasma-workspace MR #5469)
Notable UI Improvements
Plasma 6.6.0
The Power and Battery widget now tells you what specific power management actions apps are blocking, instead of assuming that they’re all blocking both sleep and screen locking. (Jakob Petsovits, KDE Bug #418433)
System Settings’ Thunderbolt page now hides itself when the device doesn’t support Thunderbolt. (Alexander Wilms, plasma-thunderbolt MR #47)
When there are many windows open, the Task Manager widget will now scroll to the active one when you open its window thumbnail list. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bug #499716)
Notifications no longer waste space showing the same icon in two places. (Kai Uwe Broulik, plasma-workspace MR #6151)
Spectacle now remembers the size (and on X11, also the position) of its main window across launches. (Aviral Singh, KDE Bug #499652)
Made multiple UI improvements to the “Configure Columns” dialog in System Monitor. (Arjen Hiemstra, plasma-systemmonitor MR #405)
In the Weather Report widget, when a weather station isn’t reporting the current wind speed, the widget now says it doesn’t know the wind speed, rather than claiming it’s “calm”. (Tobias Fella, kdeplasma-addons MR #969)
The Kickoff Application Menu widget now does a better job of handling a huge number of favorite apps. Now the favorites column eventually becomes scrollable, instead of letting icons overlap. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bug #424067)
You can now find System Settings’ Wallpaper page by searching for “desktop background” and some other related terms. (Shubham Arora, plasma-workspace MR #6152)
Frameworks 6.23
Made it possible to see more items at once in the “Get New [thing]” dialogs. (Nate Graham, frameworks-knewstuff MR #380)
Open/Save dialogs now use relative-style date formatting for recent dates and times, which matches how Dolphin shows them. (Méven Car, frameworks-kio MR #2103)
Folders that show thumbnails of their contents now refresh the thumbnail immediately when any of those files are removed. (Akseli Lahtinen, KDE Bug #497259)
Notable Bug Fixes
Plasma 6.5.5
Fixed a strange issue that broke key repeat only in the Brave web browser. (Nicolas Fella, KDE Bug #513637)
Fixed an issue that could make the panel configuration dialog appear on the wrong screen with certain panel and screen arrangements. (Aleksey Rochev, plasma-workspace MR #6140)
Fixed two issues with the “Show Alternatives” popup: one that made it get cut off outside of the screen area for widgets positioned on certain areas of the desktop, and another that made it not disappear when it lost focus. (Aleksey Rochev, KDE Bug #511188 and KDE Bug #511187)
Plasma 6.6.0
Fixed an issue that made Plasma quit when you disconnected the last screen. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bug #513003)
Fixed an issue with the Applications table on System Monitor’s Overview page being blurry with certain scale factors. We had already previously fixed this, but it turned out there were more remaining cases where it still happened, so this should take care of the rest! (Arjen Hiemstra, KDE Bug #445759)
Fixed a hilarious issue that caused the wallpaper to bounce a tiny bit with certain fractional scale factors on secondary screens using direct scan-out while on a very recent kernel version. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bug #513277)
How You Can Help
KDE has become important in the world, and your time and contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we need your support to keep KDE sustainable.
You can help KDE by directly getting involved. Donating time is actually more impactful than donating money. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE — you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to be a programmer, either; many other opportunities exist.
For example, helping out to write these posts is warmly appreciated. Anyone interested in getting involved should check out the evolving documentation on the topic.
You can also help out by making a donation! This helps cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors, and in general just keep KDE bringing Free Software to the world.
Email encryption is indeed still an open issue. There’s no fix in sight for it. It’s mostly a lack of political will though, so none of the big players are going to change anything.
Error handling is still not a properly solved problem in my opinion. At least the Rust community discusses the topic quite a bit. This is good inspiration for other ecosystems as well I think.
This looks like an interesting way to frame problems. It can give an idea of how likely they can be tackled with LLMs. It also shows that the architecture and the complexity greatly matter.
Indeed, the terminology has been greatly confused. I think I’ll die on this particular hill though. I think it’s important to name things properly. That said the trick of going through a verb might just work?
Stop Guessing, Start Improving: Using DORA Metrics and Process Behavior Charts
Tags: tech, processes, metrics, data
Interesting short article. Shows the use of DORA metrics and process behavior charts. This is a good way to test hypothesis and see the impact of processes changes or introduction of new practices. It needs to be done over time and be patient of course.
QtNat is a lightweight C++ library built with Qt 6 that simplifies NAT port mapping using UPnP (Universal Plug and Play). It is designed to help developers easily expose local services to external networks without requiring manual router configuration for users.
By leveraging UPnP, QtNat automatically communicates with compatible routers to create port forwarding rules at runtime. This makes it particularly useful for peer-to-peer applications, multiplayer games, remote access tools, and any software that needs reliable inbound connectivity behind a NAT.
QtNat provides a simplified API to do all steps automatically: discovery and mapping. This has been tested on my local device. Feel free to test it and improve it.
Use it
UpnpNat nat;
QObject::connect(&nat, &UpnpNat::statusChanged, [&nat, &app]() {
switch(nat.status())
{
case UpnpNat::NAT_STAT::NAT_IDLE:
case UpnpNat::NAT_STAT::NAT_DISCOVERY:
case UpnpNat::NAT_STAT::NAT_GETDESCRIPTION:
case UpnpNat::NAT_STAT::NAT_DESCRIPTION_FOUND:
break;
case UpnpNat::NAT_STAT::NAT_FOUND:
nat.requestDescription();
break;
case UpnpNat::NAT_STAT::NAT_READY:
nat.addPortMapping("UpnpTest", nat.localIp(), 6664, 6664, "TCP");
break;
case UpnpNat::NAT_STAT::NAT_ADD:
qDebug() << "It worked!";
app.quit();
break;
case UpnpNat::NAT_STAT::NAT_ERROR:
qDebug() <<"Error:" <<nat.error();
app.exit(1);
break;
}
});
nat.discovery();
We create the object (l:0)
We connect to statusChanged signal to get notified (l:2)
When status is NAT_FOUND, we request the description (l:11)
When status is NAT_READY, we request the port mapping (l:14)
When status is NAT_ADD, It means the port mapping request has been added, It worked! The application quits.(l:17)
When status is NAT_ERROR, Error occured and display the error text. The application exits on error. (l:21)
We connect to error changed in order to detect errors. (l:14)
We start the discovery. (l:28)
Technical explainations
The discovery
Basically, we need to know if there is a upnp server around.
To do so, we send an M-SEARCH request on the multicast address.
Here is the code:
#define HTTPMU_HOST_ADDRESS "239.255.255.250"
#define HTTPMU_HOST_PORT 1900
#define SEARCH_REQUEST_STRING "M-SEARCH * HTTP/1.1\n" \
"ST:UPnP:rootdevice\n" \
"MX: 3\n" \
"Man:\"ssdp:discover\"\n" \
"HOST: 239.255.255.250:1900\n" \
"\n"
void UpnpNat::discovery()
{
setStatus(NAT_STAT::NAT_DISCOVERY);
m_udpSocketV4.reset(new QUdpSocket(this));
QHostAddress broadcastIpV4(HTTPMU_HOST_ADDRESS);
m_udpSocketV4->bind(QHostAddress(QHostAddress::AnyIPv4), 0);
QByteArray datagram(SEARCH_REQUEST_STRING);
connect(m_udpSocketV4.get(), &QTcpSocket::readyRead, this, [this]() {
QByteArray datagram;
while(m_udpSocketV4->hasPendingDatagrams())
{
datagram.resize(int(m_udpSocketV4->pendingDatagramSize()));
m_udpSocketV4->readDatagram(datagram.data(), datagram.size());
}
QString result(datagram);
auto start= result.indexOf("http://");
if(start < 0)
{
setError(tr("Unable to read the beginning of server answer"));
setStatus(NAT_STAT::NAT_ERROR);
return;
}
auto end= result.indexOf("\r", start);
if(end < 0)
{
setError(tr("Unable to read the end of server answer"));
setStatus(NAT_STAT::NAT_ERROR);
return;
}
m_describeUrl= result.sliced(start, end - start);
setStatus(NAT_STAT::NAT_FOUND);
m_udpSocketV4->close();
});
connect(m_udpSocketV4.get(), &QUdpSocket::errorOccurred, this, [this](QAbstractSocket::SocketError) {
setError(m_udpSocketV4->errorString());
setStatus(NAT_STAT::NAT_ERROR);
});
m_udpSocketV4->writeDatagram(datagram, broadcastIpV4, HTTPMU_HOST_PORT);
}
The whole goal of the discovery is to get the description file from the server with all available devices and services.
The result is stored in m_describeUrl.
Your physical network device may act as several Upnp devices.
You are looking for one of these device type:
urn:schemas-upnp-org:device:InternetGatewayDevice
urn:schemas-upnp-org:device:WANDevice
urn:schemas-upnp-org:device:WANConnectionDevice
Those type are followed with a number (1 or 2), It is the Upnp protocol version supported by the device.
void UpnpNat::processXML(QNetworkReply* reply)
{
auto data= reply->readAll();
if(data.isEmpty()) {
setError(tr("Description file is empty"));
setStatus(NAT_STAT::NAT_ERROR);
return;
}
setStatus(NAT_STAT::NAT_DESCRIPTION_FOUND);
/*
Boring XML parsing in order to find devices and services.
Devices:
constexpr auto deviceType1{"urn:schemas-upnp-org:device:InternetGatewayDevice"};
constexpr auto deviceType2{"urn:schemas-upnp-org:device:WANDevice"};
constexpr auto deviceType3{"urn:schemas-upnp-org:device:WANConnectionDevice"};
Services:
constexpr auto serviceTypeWanIP{"urn:schemas-upnp-org:service:WANIPConnection"};
constexpr auto serviceTypeWANPPP{"urn:schemas-upnp-org:service:WANPPPConnection"};
*/
m_controlUrl = /* Most important thing to find the controlUrl of the proper service.*/
setStatus(NAT_STAT::NAT_READY);
}
Send mapping Request
Sending a request is just sending HTTP request with the proper data.
December was quite an eventful month for me, with over 4,000 km travelled by
train. This was in part caused by the holidays and visiting family, but also by the
KDE PIM sprint in Paris and the 39th Chaos Communication Congress.
KDE PIM sprint in Paris
From the 12th to the 14th of December, I was in Paris. It was actually my first time
there for more than a day trip, so I arrived a day earlier to explore the city
a bit. I went on a walk across the city with Tobias and Nicolas, and I took
some photos.
The weekend was also very productive. We advanced our goal of making
KMime a proper KDE Framework; made
Message-IDs in emails more privacy-conscious; and discussed various important
topics such as the retirement of the Kolab resource and the switch to SQLite as the
default backend for Akonadi.
The sprint being in Paris also allowed me to afterward go visit my grandma, 350 km
further south of Paris, so this was particularly convenient.
39th Chaos Communication Congress (39c3)
Another event I went to was 39c3, which is the third year in a row that I attended,
and this year again we had an assembly as part of the Bits und Bäume umbrella,
thanks to Joseph.
I love the vibe of this event. It’s not very dry or only tech-focused, but also has
a big artistic and political aspect to it. And while the number of attendees is
very large, at the same time it’s very chill and I don’t feel overwhelmed, unlike
at FOSDEM.
At the KDE assembly, we met a lot of interested users, some GNOME friends, and since
a bunch of KDE devs were there, we managed to work on a few productive things, like
switching the map backend from Itinerary to MapLibre.
And this year, I even managed to go on national TV for a few seconds to speak
about Nextcloud. My German grandma called me the day afterward, very happy to have
seen me.
With the start of the new year, I am very happy to announce the release of version Kraft 2.0.0.
Kraft provides effective invoicing and document management for small businesses on Linux. Check the feature list.
This new version is a big step ahead for the project. It does not only deliver the outstanding
ports to Qt6 and KDE Frameworks 6 and tons of modernizations and cleanups, but for the first time, it also does some significant changes in the underlying architecture and drops outdated technology.
Kraft now stores documents not longer in a relational database, but as XML documents in the filesystem.
While separate files are more natural for documents anyway, this is paving the way to let Kraft integrate
with private cloud infrastructures like OpenCloud or Nextcloud via sync. That is not only for backup- and web-app-purposes, but also for synced data that enables to run Kraft as distributed system. An example is if office staff works from different home offices. Expect this and related usecases to be supported in the near future of Kraft.
But there are more features: For example, the document lifecycle was changed to be more compliant: Documents remain in a draft status now until they get finalized, when they get their final document number. From that point on, they can not longer be altered.
There is too much on the long Changes-List to mention here.
However, what is important is that after more than 20 years of developing and maintaining this app, I continue to be motivated to work on this bit. It is not a big project, but I think it is important that we have this kind of “productivity”-applications available for Linux to make it attractive for people to switch to Linux.
Around Kraft, a small but beautiful community has built up. I like to thank everybody who contributed in any way to Kraft over the years. It is big fun to work with you all!
I've been writing for something like 50 years now. I started by scribbling letters on paper as a child because I was fascinated that these expressed meaning. I wrote a lot for school, for university, for work, and privately. I wrote letters, emails, posts on social media, articles, papers, documentation, diaries, opinion pieces, and presentations. I've been writing my blog for more than 20 years.
Writing always has been a way for me to connect to the people, to the community, around me, communicating with my tribe. It also has always been a way to express, refine and archive my thoughts, a bit like building a memory of insights. It also has been a way to record some of my personal history and the history of the projects I'm involved with.
My writing has changed over the last couple of years. I'm writing less publicly and more focused on specific projects. It feels like it has become less personal and more utilitarian.
Part of this is that the Internet has lost a good part of its strength as a neutral platform to reach the world. For a long time I knew where to reach the people I wanted to address and had control about my content and how it was distributed. Nowadays social media platforms act as distributors, but we are prey to their algorithms. So while publishing content is still simple, it's much harder to get it to your audience without compromising to the mechanisms which make the algorithms tick.
Another part is the disrupting advance of AI writing capabilities. While I have relied on humans to give me feedback in the past, to get into a conversation on the topics of my posts to refine the thoughts in them, now there is this all-powerful-seeming assistant in my editor who is eager to take over those roles. And it would even write for me in my own style. So what's the value of writing in 2026? Is it even worth bothering with trying to express your thoughts in writing, when a machine can produce content which looks the same, much faster and in much larger quantity? What does this do to readers, do they still care about what I would write?
My feeling is that it's still worth to put in effort to create genuine, trustworthy, truthful writing. The format, the tools, the channels might change, but the values don't. The challenge will be to figure out how to create a signal which transports these values.
I have always liked the format and style of a blog, as a stream of thoughts, coming from a personal perspective, but focused on topics of relevance to others. I enjoy reading this from others and I enjoy writing in this style. And I don't have to rely on a platform I don't control, but can use my own.
So it looks like this blog won't go away, but will channel my thoughts in 2026 as well.
Jonah Brüchert added a MapLibre-based backend to Itinerary maps views. This allows us to render vector-based tiles, which means they can be displayed at any size without visible pixels. Zooming in and out should also be much smoother. Another advantage is that the map now shows labels in the local language as well as English. This makes the map much more useful in case you cannot read a locally used script. In the future, we might even be able to use map tiles that can display labels in your preferred language. (26.04.0 - pim/itinerary MR #454)
Volker Krause added support for marking reservations as cancelled in your timeline, so that these reservations are not counted in your yearly statistics (26.04.0 - link).
Luca Weiss updated the KLM boarding passes extractor to also extract the boarding group (25.12.1 - pim/kitinerary MR #205). Thomas Arrow added an extractor for KLM's "Ticket for your trip" emails (25.12.1 - pim/kitinerary MR #206).
Tobias Fella added support for extracting GOMUS annual tickets (25.12.1 - pim/kitinerary MR #207).
Thanks to Prayag Jain, KDE has a new whiteboard app called Drawy! It combines a simple interface with an infinite canvas, giving users the freedom to think and draw without limits.
Some of its features are:
An infinite canvas with no drawing constraints
Support for drawing tablets and touchscreens
Tools to group and ungroup items on the canvas
A text tool for typing notes
Drawy is still under development, but you can already download a nightly flatpak. You are invited to test the app and share feedback to help shape Drawy as your handy, infinite brainstorming tool!
Since the incubation started, Prayag Jain has been fixing various performance issues (graphics/drawy MR #108 and graphics/drawy MR #115), and Laurent Montel did a lot of code cleanup to follow KDE best practices more closely (link).
Leonardo Malaman added a new "Force New Tabs" option to Konsole. This forces Konsole to open a new tab in an already open Konsole window instead of opening a new window (utilities/konsole MR #1112).
Laurent Montel released KAiChat 0.6.0. This release introduces Wikipedia and weather integration, the capability to copy block code to the clipboard, and a quick search widget.
Károly Veres unified the space selection logic, so that using the quick switcher or clicking on a notification to jump to a room will now switch to correct space (26.04.0 - network/neochat MR #2551).
Nate Graham improved the hamburger menu button. Now the menu opens right beneath the button, the button has a pressed state while the menu is open, and the menu will close when clicking on the button again. (26.04.0 - network/neochat MR #2553)
Azhar Momin added a button to cycle through unread highlights (26.04.0 - network/neochat MR #2552).
Joshua Goins re-arranged the profile dialog and grouped similar actions together (26.04.0 - network/neochat MR #2544). And he made it possible to view the profile dialog when receiving an invitation (26.04.0 - network/neochat MR #2548).
Tobias Fella added some fixes for the new version of Matrix rooms (26.04.0 - network/neochat MR #2550).
Melvin Keskin released Kaidan 0.14.0. This release allow you to resend failed messages via the context menu, cancel and restart uploads, join group chats or add contacts by their XMPP URIs, and improves compatibility for servers using LDAP.
Alexander Wilms fixed running commands containing spaces in their path (26.04.0 - system/kcron MR #46).
…And Everything Else
This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! If you’re hungry for more, check out This Week in Plasma, which covers all the work being put into KDE's Plasma desktop environment every Saturday.
For a complete overview of what's going on, visit KDE's Planet, where you can find all KDE news unfiltered directly from our contributors.
Get Involved
The KDE organization has become important in the world, and your time and
contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we're going to need
your support for KDE to become sustainable.
You can help KDE by becoming an active community member and getting involved.
Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE — you are not a number or a cog
in a machine! You don’t have to be a programmer either. There are many things
you can do: you can help hunt and confirm bugs, even maybe solve them;
contribute designs for wallpapers, web pages, icons and app interfaces;
translate messages and menu items into your own language; promote KDE in your
local community; and a ton more things.
You can also help us by donating. Any monetary
contribution, however small, will help us cover operational costs, salaries,
travel expenses for contributors and in general just keep KDE bringing Free
Software to the world.
To get your application mentioned here, please ping us in invent or in Matrix.
Itinerary was a frequent discussion topic for me, both with the KDE team and attendees in general.
The MapLibre-based vector tile map integration got pushed over the finishing line (see also Jonah’s report).
Reaching the end of the year and people being interested in their travel wrap-up, a few issues regarding handling of cancelled reservations
in the statistics got fixed. And as people’s trip lists are growing longer and longer that also got a better grouping.
We talked about possible ways to improve the stop picker, in particular the country selector which is becoming increasingly annoying to use
as it gets longer and longer as Transitous coverage keeps expanding.
I also had the opportunity to talk to developers of F-Droid and other FOSS Android applications, who share a lot of the pain
we are also dealing with in bringing KDE applications to Android.
A big concern especially for people not associated with a bigger umbrella organization is the upcoming
requirements by Google for developer verification.
While KDE might be less affected by this directly, any negative effect on the larger FOSS ecosystem is of course also bad for us.
The continuous close-down of AOSP development is also not helping,
making it significantly harder for Google-free Android variants.
None of that is entirely surprising, and it increases the pressure on fully open Linux systems becoming a viable
alternative on more mobile devices. Both that as well as collaboration on adjacent infrastructure such as
fully open push notification infrastructure has been making good progress in 2025 fortunately.
Transitous
We had a Transitous meetup on the last day at Wikimedia’s assembly,
hosted by Jonah, Julius and myself. We should organize and announce this earlier next time, but the space was nevertheless full.
Meeting notes are in the wiki.
We had quite a few conversations around Transitous beyond this as well:
It looks like we should be able to get SIRI-FM data
for a number of operators in Germany in Q1 2026. That’s facility monitoring information such as current or planned elevator outages,
something highly relevant for wheelchair routing.
We talked about finding better ways to maintain data augmentation than the currently used
MOTIS Lua scripts.
While there’s options on where to store such information (e.g. Wikidata or OSM),
the main challenge is matching GTFS data lacking stable identifiers to such an external data set.
We met with the team behind esel.ac, a community-run bike sharing system in Aachen. It’s using
OpenBike
and produces a GBFS feed that we now also have in Transitous. Community-run mobility services and a community-run
routing service are of course the perfect match, and I’d like us to use those cases to showcase what the whole stack
of open standards, open hardware and open software can do together. We discussed possible extensions to the GBFS feed such as booking
links, geo fencing zones and return constraints for this.
There was some prototyping towards using Wikidata as a source of “temporary POIs” for Transitous. That’s events
that are tied to a specific location (e.g. a conference) which then can be used as a destination for routing. We managed to
produce an abomination of a SPARQL query that resulted in a technically valid set of events. However we haven’t found a proper
solution yet for reliably excluding events we would not want in there, such as those of fascist parties.
There’s people working on implementing deck layouts in NeTEx. While motivated by
accessibility and seat booking, this could provide us with train coach layouts as a byproduct as well. There’s public transport
operators involved, so this is hopefully not just theory but also going into production in the not too distant future.
It also looks like we might have another iteration of the
Transitous Hack Weekend in Berlin, next weekend
already (January 9-11). That’s very short notice and not entirely finalized yet. If you are interested in joining
please get in touch in the Transitous Matrix channel.
OSM
The OSM assembly was conveniently directly next to the KDE one, so I could easily drop into conversations
about indoor mapping, indoor routing or indoor positioning there. Interest in all parts of this seems to be increasing,
we probably should improve the introduction material for this a bit.
There’s also a plan to have an (offline) meeting in the next months to get some of the pending tagging proposals
and open questions e.g. around “thick” walls, stairs and fractional levels sorted out and over the finishing line.
We also had the opportunity to discuss the FOSSGIS e.V. becoming a possible umbrella organization
for Transitous and/or the Open Transport Community Conference.
Especially the latter is becoming slightly more pressing as we got a few sponsorship offers while looking for a venue,
and that’s something we can only make use of with an organization behind us that can actually handle money.
Better monitoring to notice system failures, task queue backlogs, source feed outages,
increasing parser or push notification submission error rates, or suspiciously large subscription areas.
As a byproduct this might also provide interesting insights in the alert data.
Better ways to deal with rate limits on push servers. This needs to be ultimately resolved at those servers,
as public alerts are very prone to produce notification bursts. This is also a blocker for scaling this up further
and e.g. deploying this in a default KDE Plasma installation.
Performance improvements for the alert area vector tile generation. That wasn’t a focus initially as this was meant
purely as a diagnostic tool, but it has become popular to the point that FOSSWarn wants to integrate this directly into the app.
This will probably require geometry simplification on ingested “inline” CAP
geometry, which would benefit everyone by smaller and cheaper to parse/render CAP data.
You can help!
Events like Chaos Communication Congress are enormously useful for bringing together,
connecting and enabling collaboration between people from different areas or initiatives.
The sheer size and diverse set of attendees help a lot with that.
Attending events however incurs cost for travel, accommodation and entrance. Your donation to organizations like
KDE e.V. or FOSSGIS e.V. support such activities.
KDE Ni! OS is a custom flavour
(configuration, not a separate distribution) of NixOS that showcases KDE software. It
builds on NixOS with the aim to reimplement the same features other
popular immutable distributions have, while providing a first-class KDE
Plasma setup.
This post will show the NixOS way of adding a custom package
and explain the benefits of this approach in the context of system
immutability.
Plasma Pass
KDE Ni! OS recently got a new package installed by default – Daniel
Vrátil’s Plasma Pass applet.
Plasma Pass is a Plasma applet to access passwords from
pass, the standard UNIX password manager. You can find more
information about the applet in Dan’s blog post.
As NixOS doesn’t currently offer Plasma Pass in its repositories, the
package is installed in Ni! OS from the sources as in some other
BTW, I use … distributions.
In NixOS, this is easily done via overlays. We can create an overlay
that defines the plasma-pass package so that it can be
installed as if it were a real NixOS package.
self:prev:{kdePackages= prev.kdePackages.overrideScope (kdeSelf:kdeSuper:{plasma-pass= kdeSelf.mkKdeDerivation rec{pname="plasma-pass";version="1.3.0-git-59be3d64";src= prev.fetchFromGitLab {domain="invent.kde.org";owner="plasma";repo="plasma-pass";rev="59be3d6440b6afbacf466455430707deed2b2358";hash="sha256-DocHlnF9VJyM1xqZx/hoQVMA/wLY+4RzAbVOGb293ME=";};buildInputs=[ kdeSelf.plasma-workspace kdeSelf.qgpgme self.oath-toolkit];meta=with prev.lib;{description="Plasma applet for the Pass password manager";license= licenses.lgpl21Plus;platforms= platforms.linux;};};});}
Most of this file is self-explanatory (except for the strange looking
syntax of the Nix language :) ).
Since Plasma Pass is a KDE project, we want it visible as a part of
kdePackages collection, and as it uses the common build
setup that all KDE projects use (or should use), it uses
mkKdeDerivation to define the plasma-pass
package. This defines some basic dependencies, commonly used by KDE
projects and adaptations needed for them to work properly in NixOS. For
non-KDE-friendly packages, you’d base your package on the standard
mkDerivation instead.
The project sources are located on the KDE’s GitLab instance at invent.kde.org, therefore the package
definition uses fetchFromGitLab to retrieve the sources. It
is also possible to clone repositories on GitHub, fetch and use source
tarballs, etc. All fetchers are described at NixOS Manual >
Fetchers.
The rev field in the fetchFromGitLab
command is the GIT revision that you want to install, and
hash you can get by using the nix-prefetch-git
command:
The buildInputs part defines additional dependencies
needed by Plasma Pass, and meta defines some meta
information about the package such as the description and the
license.
Using the definition
After defining the package, we have to add it to
nixpkgs.overlays in any of our NixOS configuration files.
In the case of Ni! OS, this is done in ni/modules/base.nix which
defines the UI software that Ni! OS installs by default.
With this overlay, plasma-pass can be used as if it was
a normal NixOS package.
environment.systemPackages = with pkgs;[ ... kdePackages.plasma-pass ...];
When plasma-pass gets added to the nixpkgs
repository, the only action that will be needed in Ni! OS to switch to
the official version is to remove the
import...plasma-pass.nix from the overlays (this is the
reason why we explicitly placed it in kdePackages
collection – otherwise, we could have just put it top-level).
Custom packages and
immutability
The main point of this post is not really to announce that a single
new package is added to the Ni! OS setup. Even if it is a cool one like
Plasma Pass.
The point is to show how a custom package that is not available in
the vast collection of nixpkgs can be added to a
NixOS-based system.
The custom package becomes a proper regular Nix package and gets all
the benefits of Nix’s particular approach to immutability. If Plasma
Pass gets broken after an update (either if new Plasma version breaks
Plasma Pass, or if the new version of Plasma Pass no longer works as
expected), you can always boot into the version before the bad
update.
With distributions with immutable core and custom applications
installed as Flatpaks, downgrading is possible, but a bit more involved
and relies on 3rdparty keeping the old package versions still available
for download.
With NixOS, all the previous versions remain on your system until you
decide to remove them.
P.S. Patches welcome. If you like the merge operator in Nix and
think the overlay definition would benefit from it, … :)
@sgmoore:kde.org
KDE
Donate
ngraham
obiwan_kennedy
With the start of the new year, I am very happy to announce the release of version 
