Minesweeper is a tragically underrated puzzle game. While I recall examining the mysterious array of gray squares as a child, it wasn’t until adulthood that I took the time to learn the rules of the game. Despite my late start, however, I still count minesweeper as a classic. These days, good minesweeper clones are hard to come by. I settled on GNOME’s Mines for a while, but as the look of GTK applications on my QT-based KDE Plasma Desktop sets my teeth on edge, I ditched it for KMines in short order. While I enjoyed the game, I found the themes shipped with KMines a bit dated, so I thought I’d make my own.
I didn’t quite know what I was getting into when I started working on my themes. I had expected there’d be a simple way to add themes through the KMines settings menu, or by dropping an SVG somewhere in your file-system. If only it were so simple. Adding a theme to KMines requires setting up a full-on KDE development environment, re-compiling KMines from source each time you want to test it, and then, of course, submitting a merge request to the git repository. Thanks to the help of some very patient souls in various KDE Matrix channels, I was able to work through all of this, but I found the process so tricky that I submited a second merge request, this time to the repository for develop.kde.org, for a page documenting the process. Now I realise that some developers out there are going to read through this and wonder if I was dropped on my head as an infant, but in my defense, when it comes to software development, I’m a humble designer and Jamstack web developer. This is all very new to me, and I was expecting a much more streamlined process for what I saw as simple visual tweaks.
When submitting my initial design, a KDE contributor who had been helping me via Matrix pointed out that they found the theme difficult to parse visually as the contrast was quite low. I hadn’t considered contrast ratios here, my thinking being that I didn’t need to; I was just making one theme among many, after all, and users could choose any theme that worked best for them. After some consideration, however, it dawned on me that my theme would likely be the only modern-looking theme in the release, so it would be ideal if it were as accessible as possible. With this in mind, thanks to the feedback of one helpful individual, instead of one pretty but low contrast theme, I decided to make two modern high contrast themes, one light and one dark, targeting the WCAG AAA standard for contrast.
With thanks to those KDE contributors who helped make it happen, the merge request containing these two themes scraped by the skin of its teeth past the closing door of a feature-freeze and will be available with Plasma 6 this February!
Disclaimer: I am not one of KDE's masterminds or spokespersons. I am a mere bystander with few unimportant commits. I follow KDE's ecosystem and other developments in the free software world. In the following, I share some thoughts and my personal opinion.
Talks about new programming languages
After 30 years of C code, the Linux kernel opens itself to a second high-level language: Rust. Since fall of 2022 the kernel mainly gained infrastructure work. Some experiments show promising results like a Rust-based network driver or a scheduler.
Recently, Git developers started to discuss how to allow Rust code in our beloved version control system. Far from having reached a consensus, its media coverage and heated discussions in forums show how interested the public is in this topic.
Other projects try to replace established software by rewritten from scratch Rust ones: uutils coreutils, sudo-rs, librsvg, Rustls. Heck, Rewrite it it Rust (RiiR) has become a meme.
We already have a new programming language!
KDE is close to its 6th Megarelease, with one major change being based on Qt 6. Qt 6 requires C++17 which -- as of today -- is perceived as modern C++ and is a leap compared to C++11. It is possible to write modern software with C++17. Still, additional tools like C++ Core Guidelines or Cppcheck are advised to keep the number of preventable bugs low.
Most of the projects mentioned in the introduction are using C. This inflicts more pain to the developers and thus using Rust is more attractive. For sure, a fair portion of RiiR arguments do not apply to KDE's C++ code base.
Problems with C++ remain
C++ cannot adapt to modern ways like including a borrow checker or a less complicated syntax, as this would break compatibility. As much as C++ improved as a language, its compilers, and its ecosystem, it is not enough to be considered a good choice for new projects. NIST and NSA advice to move away from C++.
Other problems like complicated tooling with variations on different platforms (build systems, compiler, linker, debugger, dependency management), mixed-in C-style code, difficult to parse C++ code, cannot be solved.
I fear that in a not to distant future, C++ might be perceived as an outdated choice to learn and people might less likely consider to join KDE as contributors.
What can be done?
In the past, GNOME adopted Vala as a new language to solve the short-comings of C. Vala seems to be dead. Going with Rust did not lead to a project-wide adoption.
Some people are working on Qt bindings for Rust, e.g., CXX-Qt from KDAB. I am not sure if Qt itself is working on something similar. At least there is no go-to binding.
Beside the hot topic Rust, two big players invest in ways to have good interoperability with existing code bases and a modern language: Cpp2 / cppfront and Carbon.
Cpp2 is a new language from Herb Sutter, who chairs the C++ working group. The idea is to have a transpiler cppfront producing modern C++ code. Cpp2 is not backward compatible to C++ and thus not limited in introducing new ways or removing existing parts. Cpp2 promises to integrate seamlessly in existing C++ code bases as it is compiled into C++ code.
I do not want to whine about C++. I want to start a discussion on how KDE's future might look like. KDE was always driving innovations. We helped CMake to become one of the most important build systems for C++. KDE 4.0 introduced the semantic desktop. KHTML's code base was the nucleus for today's big browsers.
Probably we should have this discussion as a BoF at Akademy 2024 or other places where KDE's masterminds and people with a feeling for future trends come together and form/formulate future directions. In the meantime, I start a discourse thread.
Personally, I would like to see some push for Cpp2. More important, I want to see that we are actively shaping KDE's future.
Caused by a small discussion about how it is difficult to get from Berlin to Riga by train,
and in direct consequence a quick look at how the official app for trains in Latvia finds its connections, I added support for it in KDE Itinerary.
KDE Itinerary is KDE’s travel planning app.
After I understood how it works, adding support for new data sources seemed pretty doable, so I directly moved on to do the same for trains in Lithuania as well.
As a result of this, it is now possible to travel from Berlin to Riga with Itinerary and continue further with the local trains there:
The connection is still far from good, but fear I can’t fix that in software.
What still does not work, is directly searching from Berlin to Riga, as that depends on having a single data source that has data on the entire route to find it.
So it is necessary to split the route and search for the parts yourself.
Why you can’t always find a route even though there is one
The main data source for Itinerary in Europe is the API of the “Deutsche Bahn”, the main railway operator in Germany.
Its API also has data for neighbouring countries, and even beyond that.
According to Jon Worth their data comes from UIC Merits, which is a common system that railway operators can submit their routes to.
However that probably comes with high costs, so many smaller operators like the ones in Latvia and Lithuania don’t do that.
For that reason there is no such single data source that can route for example from Berlin to Riga.
What most of the operators in Europe do however, is publish schedule data in a common format (GTFS).
What is missing so far, is a single service that can route on all of the available data and has an API that we can use.
Setting something like this up would require a bit of community and hosting resources, but I am hopeful that we can have something like this in the future.
In the meantime, it already helps to fill in the missing countries one by one, so at least local users can already find their routes in Itinerary, and for Interrail and other cross border travel, people can at least patch routes together.
More countries
The next country I worked on was Montenegro. The reason for that is that it is close to the area that the DB API can still give results for, and also still has useful train services.
Getting their API to work well was a bit more difficult though, as it doesn’t provide some of the information that Itinerary usually depends on.
For example coordinates for stations. Those are needed to select where to search for trains going from a station.
Luckily, exporting the list of stations and their coordinates from OpenStreetMap was relatively easy and provided me with all the data I needed.
Thanks to that Itinerary can now even show the route on a map properly.
Now only the API for Serbia is missing to actually connect to the part of the network DB knows about.
The new backends are not yet included in any release, but you can already find them in the nightly builds.
Be aware that the nightly builds have switched to Qt6 and KF6 faily recently, which means there are still a few rough edges and small bugs in the UI.
This post is in part a response to an aspect of Nate’s post “Does Wayland really break everything?“, but also my reflection on discussing Wayland protocol additions, a unique pleasure that I have been involved with for the past months1.
Some facts
Before I start I want to make a few things clear: The Linux desktop will be moving to Wayland2 – this is a fact at this point (and has been for a while), sticking to X11 makes no sense for future projects. From reading Wayland protocols and working with it at a much lower level than I ever wanted to, it is also very clear to me that Wayland is an exceptionally well-designed core protocol, and so are the additional extension protocols (xdg-shell & Co.). The modularity of Wayland is great, it gives it incredible flexibility and will for sure turn out to be good for the long-term viability of this project (and also provides a path to correct protocol issues in future, if one is found). In other words: Wayland is an amazing foundation to build on, and a lot of its design decisions make a lot of sense!
The shift towards people seeing “Linux” more as an application developer platform, and taking PipeWire and XDG Portals into account when designing for Wayland is also an amazing development and I love to see this – this holistic approach is something I always wanted!
Furthermore, I think Wayland removes a lot of functionality that shouldn’t exist in a modern compositor – and that’s a good thing too! Some of X11’s features and design decisions had clear drawbacks that we shouldn’t replicate. I highly recommend to read Nate’s blog post, it’s very good and goes into more detail. And due to all of this, I firmly believe that any advancement in the Wayland space must come from within the project.
But!
But! Of course there was a “but” coming – I think while developing Wayland-as-an-ecosystem we are now entrenched into narrow concepts of how a desktop should work. While discussing Wayland protocol additions, a lot of concepts clash, people from different desktops with different design philosophies debate the merits of those over and over again never reaching any conclusion (just as you will never get an answer out of humans whether sushi or pizza is the clearly superior food, or whether CSD or SSD is better). Some people want to use Wayland as a vehicle to force applications to submit to their desktop’s design philosophies, others prefer the smallest and leanest protocol possible, other developers want the most elegant behavior possible. To be clear, I think those are all very valid approaches.
But this also creates problems: By switching to Wayland compositors, we are already forcing a lot of porting work onto toolkit developers and application developers. This is annoying, but just work that has to be done. It becomes frustrating though if Wayland provides toolkits with absolutely no way to reach their goal in any reasonable way. For Nate’s Photoshop analogy: Of course Linux does not break Photoshop, it is Adobe’s responsibility to port it. But what if Linux was missing a crucial syscall that Photoshop needed for proper functionality and Adobe couldn’t port it without that? In that case it becomes much less clear on who is to blame for Photoshop not being available.
A lot of Wayland protocol work is focused on the environment and design, while applications and work to port them often is considered less. I think this happens because the overlap between application developers and developers of the desktop environments is not necessarily large, and the overlap with people willing to engage with Wayland upstream is even smaller. The combination of Windows developers porting apps to Linux and having involvement with toolkits or Wayland is pretty much nonexistent. So they have less of a voice.
A quick detour through the neuroscience research lab
I have been involved with Freedesktop, GNOME and KDE for an incredibly long time now (more than a decade), but my actual job (besides consulting for Purism) is that of a PhD candidate in a neuroscience research lab (working on the morphology of biological neurons and its relation to behavior). I am mostly involved with three research groups in our institute, which is about 35 people. Most of us do all our data analysis on powerful servers which we connect to using RDP (with KDE Plasma as desktop). Since I joined, I have been pushing the envelope a bit to extend Linux usage to data acquisition and regular clients, and to have our data acquisition hardware interface well with it. Linux brings some unique advantages for use in research, besides the obvious one of having every step of your data management platform introspectable with no black boxes left, a goal I value very highly in research (but this would be its own blogpost).
In terms of operating system usage though, most systems are still Windows-based. Windows is what companies develop for, and what people use by default and are familiar with. The choice of operating system is very strongly driven by application availability, and WSL being really good makes this somewhat worse, as it removes the need for people to switch to a real Linux system entirely if there is the occasional software requiring it. Yet, we have a lot more Linux users than before, and use it in many places where it makes sense. I also developed a novel data acquisition software that even runs on Linux-only and uses the abilities of the platform to its fullest extent. All of this resulted in me asking existing software and hardware vendors for Linux support a lot more often. Vendor-customer relationship in science is usually pretty good, and vendors do usually want to help out. Same for open source projects, especially if you offer to do Linux porting work for them… But overall, the ease of use and availability of required applications and their usability rules supreme. Most people are not technically knowledgeable and just want to get their research done in the best way possible, getting the best results with the least amount of friction.
KDE/Linux usage at a control station for a particle accelerator at Adlershof Technology Park, Germany, for reference (by 25years of KDE)3
Back to the point
The point of that story is this: GNOME, KDE, RHEL, Debian or Ubuntu: They all do not matter if the necessary applications are not available for them. And as soon as they are, the easiest-to-use solution wins. There are many facets of “easiest”: In many cases this is RHEL due to Red Hat support contracts being available, in many other cases it is Ubuntu due to its mindshare and ease of use. KDE Plasma is also frequently seen, as it is perceived a bit easier to onboard Windows users with it (among other benefits). Ultimately, it comes down to applications and 3rd-party support though.
Here’s a dirty secret: In many cases, porting an application to Linux is not that difficult. The thing that companies (and FLOSS projects too!) struggle with and will calculate the merits of carefully in advance is whether it is worth the support cost as well as continuous QA/testing. Their staff will have to do all of that work, and they could spend that time on other tasks after all.
So if they learn that “porting to Linux” not only means added testing and support, but also means to choose between the legacy X11 display server that allows for 1:1 porting from Windows or the “new” Wayland compositors that do not support the same features they need, they will quickly consider it not worth the effort at all. I have seen this happen.
Of course many apps use a cross-platform toolkit like Qt, which greatly simplifies porting. But this just moves the issue one layer down, as now the toolkit needs to abstract Windows, macOS and Wayland. And Wayland does not contain features to do certain things or does them very differently from e.g. Windows, so toolkits have no way to actually implement the existing functionality in a way that works on all platforms. So in Qt’s documentation you will often find texts like “works everywhere except for on Wayland compositors or mobile”4.
Many missing bits or altered behavior are just papercuts, but those add up. And if users will have a worse experience, this will translate to more support work, or people not wanting to use the software on the respective platform.
What’s missing?
Window positioning
SDI applications with multiple windows are very popular in the scientific world. For data acquisition (for example with microscopes) we often have one monitor with control elements and one larger one with the recorded image. There is also other configurations where multiple signal modalities are acquired, and the experimenter aligns windows exactly in the way they want and expects the layout to be stored and to be loaded upon reopening the application. Even in the image from Adlershof Technology Park above you can see this style of UI design, at mega-scale. Being able to pop-out elements as windows from a single-window application to move them around freely is another frequently used paradigm, and immensely useful with these complex apps.
It is important to note that this is not a legacy design, but in many cases an intentional choice – these kinds of apps work incredibly well on larger screens or many screens and are very flexible (you can have any window configuration you want, and switch between them using the (usually) great window management abilities of your desktop).
Of course, these apps will work terribly on tablets and small form factors, but that is not the purpose they were designed for and nobody would use them that way.
I assumed for sure these features would be implemented at some point, but when it became clear that that would not happen, I created the ext-placement protocol which had some good discussion but was ultimately rejected from the xdg namespace. I then tried another solution based on feedback, which turned out not to work for most apps, and now proposed xdg-placement (v2) in an attempt to maybe still get some protocol done that we can agree on, exploring more options before pushing the existing protocol for inclusion into the ext Wayland protocol namespace. Meanwhile though, we can not port any application that needs this feature, while at the same time we are switching desktops and distributions to Wayland by default.
Window position restoration
Similarly, a protocol to save & restore window positions was already proposed in 2018, 6 years ago now, but it has still not been agreed upon, and may not even help multiwindow apps in its current form. The absence of this protocol means that applications can not restore their former window positions, and the user has to move them to their previous place again and again.
Meanwhile, toolkits can not adopt these protocols and applications can not use them and can not be ported to Wayland without introducing papercuts.
Window icons
Similarly, individual windows can not set their own icons, and not-installed applications can not have an icon at all because there is no desktop-entry file to load the icon from and no icon in the theme for them. You would think this is a niche issue, but for applications that create many windows, providing icons for them so the user can find them is fairly important. Of course it’s not the end of the world if every window has the same icon, but it’s one of those papercuts that make the software slightly less user-friendly. Even applications with fewer windows like LibrePCB are affected, so much so that they rather run their app through Xwayland for now.
I decided to address this after I was working on data analysis of image data in a Python virtualenv, where my code and the Python libraries used created lots of windows all with the default yellow “W” icon, making it impossible to distinguish them at a glance. This is xdg-toplevel-icon now, but of course it is an uphill battle where the very premise of needing this is questioned. So applications can not use it yet.
Firefox has a picture-in-picture feature, allowing it to pop out media from a mediaplayer as separate floating window so the user can watch the media while doing other things. On X11 this is easily realized, but on Wayland the restrictions posed on windows necessitate a different solution. The xdg-pip protocol was proposed for this specialized usecase, but it is also not merged yet. So this feature does not work as well on Wayland.
Automation of GUI tasks is a powerful feature, so is the ability to auto-test GUIs. This is being worked on, with libei and wlheadless-run (and stuff like ydotool exists too), but we’re not fully there yet.
Wayland is frustrating for (some) application authors
As you see, there is valid applications and valid usecases that can not be ported yet to Wayland with the same feature range they enjoyed on X11, Windows or macOS. So, from an application author’s perspective, Wayland does break things quite significantly, because things that worked before can no longer work and Wayland (the whole stack) does not provide any avenue to achieve the same result.
Wayland does “break” screen sharing, global hotkeys, gaming latency (via “no tearing”) etc, however for all of these there are solutions available that application authors can port to. And most developers will gladly do that work, especially since the newer APIs are usually a lot better and more robust. But if you give application authors no path forward except “use Xwayland and be on emulation as second-class citizen forever”, it just results in very frustrated application developers.
For some application developers, switching to a Wayland compositor is like buying a canvas from the Linux shop that forces your brush to only draw triangles. But maybe for your avant-garde art, you need to draw a circle. You can approximate one with triangles, but it will never be as good as the artwork of your friends who got their canvases from the Windows or macOS art supply shop and have more freedom to create their art.
Triangles are proven to be the best shape! If you are drawing circles you are creating bad art!
Wayland, via its protocol limitations, forces a certain way to build application UX – often for the better, but also sometimes to the detriment of users and applications. The protocols are often fairly opinionated, a result of the lessons learned from X11. In any case though, it is the odd one out – Windows and macOS do not pose the same limitations (for better or worse!), and the effort to port to Wayland is orders of magnitude bigger, or sometimes in case of the multiwindow UI paradigm impossible to achieve to the same level of polish. Desktop environments of course have a design philosophy that they want to push, and want applications to integrate as much as possible (same as macOS and Windows!). However, there are many applications out there, and pushing a design via protocol limitations will likely just result in fewer apps.
The porting dilemma
I spent probably way too much time looking into how to get applications cross-platform and running on Linux, often talking to vendors (FLOSS and proprietary) as well. Wayland limitations aren’t the biggest issue by far, but they do start to come come up now, especially in the scientific space with Ubuntu having switched to Wayland by default. For application authors there is often no way to address these issues. Many scientists do not even understand why their Python script that creates some GUIs suddenly behaves weirdly because Qt is now using the Wayland backend on Ubuntu instead of X11. They do not know the difference and also do not want to deal with these details – even though they may be programmers as well, the real goal is not to fiddle with the display server, but to get to a scientific result somehow.
Another issue is portability layers like Wine which need to run Windows applications as-is on Wayland. Apparently Wine’s Wayland driver has some heuristics to make window positioning work (and I am amazed by the work done on this!), but that can only go so far.
A way out?
So, how would we actually solve this? Fundamentally, this excessively long blog post boils down to just one essential question:
Do we want to force applications to submit to a UX paradigm unconditionally, potentially loosing out on application ports or keeping apps on X11 eternally, or do we want to throw them some rope to get as many applications ported over to Wayland, even through we might sacrifice some protocol purity?
I think we really have to answer that to make the discussions on wayland-protocols a lot less grueling. This question can be answered at the wayland-protocols level, but even more so it must be answered by the individual desktops and compositors.
If the answer for your environment turns out to be “Yes, we want the Wayland protocol to be more opinionated and will not make any compromises for application portability”, then your desktop/compositor should just immediately NACK protocols that add something like this and you simply shouldn’t engage in the discussion, as you reject the very premise of the new protocol: That it has any merit to exist and is needed in the first place. In this case contributors to Wayland and application authors also know where you stand, and a lot of debate is skipped. Of course, if application authors want to support your environment, you are basically asking them now to rewrite their UI, which they may or may not do. But at least they know what to expect and how to target your environment.
If the answer turns out to be “We do want some portability”, the next question obviously becomes where the line should be drawn and which changes are acceptable and which aren’t. We can’t blindly copy all X11 behavior, some porting work to Wayland is simply inevitable. Some written rules for that might be nice, but probably more importantly, if you agree fundamentally that there is an issue to be fixed, please engage in the discussions for the respective MRs! We for sure do not want to repeat X11 mistakes, and I am certain that we can implement protocols which provide the required functionality in a way that is a nice compromise in allowing applications a path forward into the Wayland future, while also being as good as possible and improving upon X11. For example, the toplevel-icon proposal is already a lot better than anything X11 ever had. Relaxing ACK requirements for the ext namespace is also a good proposed administrative change, as it allows some compositors to add features they want to support to the shared repository easier, while also not mandating them for others. In my opinion, it would allow for a lot less friction between the two different ideas of how Wayland protocol development should work. Some compositors could move forward and support more protocol extensions, while more restrictive compositors could support less things. Applications can detect supported protocols at launch and change their behavior accordingly (ideally even abstracted by toolkits).
You may now say that a lot of apps are ported, so surely this issue can not be that bad. And yes, what Wayland provides today may be enough for 80-90% of all apps. But what I hope the detour into the research lab has done is convince you that this smaller percentage of apps matters. A lot. And that it may be worthwhile to support them.
To end on a positive note: When it came to porting concrete apps over to Wayland, the only real showstoppers so far5 were the missing window-positioning and window-position-restore features. I encountered them when porting my own software, and I got the issue as feedback from colleagues and fellow engineers. In second place was UI testing and automation support, the window-icon issue was mentioned twice, but being a cosmetic issue it likely simply hurts people less and they can ignore it easier.
What this means is that the majority of apps are already fine, and many others are very, very close! A Wayland future for everyone is within our grasp!
I will also bring my two protocol MRs to their conclusion for sure, because as application developers we need clarity on what the platform (either all desktops or even just a few) supports and will or will not support in future. And the only way to get something good done is by contribution and friendly discussion.
Footnotes
Apologies for the clickbait-y title – it comes with the subject ︎
When I talk about “Wayland” I mean the combined set of display server protocols and accepted protocol extensions, unless otherwise clarified. ︎
I would have picked a picture from our lab, but that would have needed permission first ︎
Qt has awesome “platform issues” pages, like for macOS and Linux/X11 which help with porting efforts, but Qt doesn’t even list Linux/Wayland as supported platform. There is some information though, like window geometry peculiarities, which aren’t particularly helpful when porting (but still essential to know). ︎
Besides issues with Nvidia hardware – CUDA for simulations and machine-learning is pretty much everywhere, so Nvidia cards are common, which causes trouble on Wayland still. It is improving though. ︎
With the rise of generative AI, businesses are trying to figure out how they can implement it in their environment to speed up one process or another. Perhaps the best place to start looking are existing pain points in any process, then working through ideas of how AI can apply to the situation.
(This blog post was written by a Real Human 😜)
Dall-E 3 image prompt: A futuristic, intelligent robot with a sleek design sitting at a computer, analyzing code diffs on a screen. The robot has a friendly, approachable appearance, and the screen shows complex code with highlighted sections. The environment suggests a modern, high-tech office space.
I have now been playing games only on Linux for a year, and it has been great.
With the GPU shortage, I had been waiting for prices to come back to reasonable
levels before buying a new GPU. So far, I had always bought NVIDIA GPUs as I
was using Windows to run games and the NVIDIA drivers had a better “reputation”
than the AMD/Radeon ones.
With Valve’s Proton seriously taking
off thanks to the Steam Deck, I wanted to get rid of the last computer in the
house that was running Microsoft Windows, that I had kept only for gaming.
But the NVIDIA drivers story on Linux had never been great, especially on
distributions that move kernel versions quickly to follow upstream releases
like Fedora. I had tried using the NVIDIA binary drivers on Fedora Kinoite but
quickly ran into some of the issues that we have listed
in the docs.
At the time, the Universal Blue project did not exist yet (Jorge Castro started
it a bit later in the year),
otherwise I would have probably used that instead. If you need NVIDIA support
today on Fedora Atomic Desktops (Silverblue, Kinoite, etc.), I heavily
recommend using the Universal Blue images.
Hopefully this will be better in the future for NVIDIA users with
the work on NVK
So, at the beginning of last year (January 2023), I finally decided to buy an
AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT
GPU card.
What a delight. Nothing to setup, fully supported out of the box, works
perfectly on Wayland. Valve’s Proton does wonders. I can now play on my Linux
box all the games that I used to play on Windows and they run perfectly. Just
from last year, I played Age of Wonders 4 and Baldur’s Gate 3 without any major
issue, and did it pretty close to the launch dates. Older titles usually work
fairly well too.
Sure, some games require some little tweaks, but it is nothing compared to the
horrors of managing a Windows machine. And some games require tweaks on Windows
as well (looking at you
Cyberpunk 2077).
The best experience is definitely with games bought on Steam which usually work
out of the box. For those where it is not the case,
protondb is usually a good source to find the
tweaks needed to make the games work. I try to keep the list of tweaks I use
for the games that I play updated on
my profile there.
I am running all of this on Fedora Kinoite
with the Steam Flatpak. If
you want a more console-like or Steam Deck-like experience on your existing
computers, I recommend checking out the great work from the
Bazzite team.
Besides Steam, I use Bottles,
Cartridge and Heroic Games
Launcher as needed (all as Flatpaks). I have
not looked at Origins or Uplay/Ubisoft Connect games yet.
According to protondb, the only games from my entire Steam library that are not
supported are mostly multiplayer games that require some specific anti-cheat
that is only compatible with Windows.
I would like to say a big THANK YOU to all the open source graphics and desktop
developers out there and to (in alphabetical order) AMD, Collabora, Igalia, Red
Hat, Valve, and other companies for employing people or funding the work that
makes gaming on Linux a reality.
Cleaning up KDE’s metadata - the little things matter too
Lots of my KDE contributions revolve around plugin code and their metadata, meaning I have a good overview of where and how metadata is used.
In this post, I will highlight some recent changes and show you how to utilize them in your Plasma Applets and KRunner plugins!
Applet and Containment metadata
Applets (or Widgets) are one of Plasma’s main selling points regarding customizability.
Next to user-visible information like the name, description and categories, there is a need for some technical metadata properties.
This includes X-Plasma-API-Minimum-Version for the compatible versions, the ID and the package structure, which should always be “Plasma/Applet”.
For integrating with the system tray, applets had to specify the X-Plasma-NotificationArea and X-Plasma-NotificationAreaCategory properties.
The first one says that it may be shown in the system tray and the second one says in which category it belongs. But since we don’t want any applets
without categories in there, the first value is redundant and may be omitted! Also, it was treated like a boolean value, but only "true" or "false" were expected.
I stumbled upon this when correcting the types in metadata files. This was noticed due to preparations for improving the JSON linting we have in KDE. I will resume working on it and might also blog about it :).
What most applets in KDE specify is X-KDE-MainScript, which determines the entrypoint of the applet.
This is usually “ui/main.qml”, but in some cases the value differs. When working with applets, it is confusing to first have to look at the
metadata in order to find the correct file. This key was removed in Plasma6 and the file is always ui/main.qml.
Since this was the default value for the property, you may even omit it for Plasma5. The same filename convention is also enforced for QML config modules (KCMs).
What all applets needed to specify was X-Plasma-API. This is typically set to "declarativeappletscript",
but we de facto never used its value, but enforced it being present. This was historically needed because in Plasma4, applets could
be written in other scripting languages. From Plasma6 onward, you may omit this key.
In the Plasma repositories, this allowed me to clean up over 200 lines of JSON data.
metadata.desktop files of Plasma5 addons
Just in case you were wondering: We have migrated from metadata.desktop files to only metadata.json files in Plasma6.
This makes providing metadata more consistent and efficient. In case your projects still use the old format, you can run desktoptojson -i pathto/metadata.desktop
and remove the file afterward. See https://develop.kde.org/docs/plasma/widget/properties/#kpackagestructure for more detailed information. You can even do the conversion when targeting Plasma5 users!
Default object path for KRunner DBus plugins
Another nice addition is that “/runner” will now be the default object path. This means you can omit this one key.
Check out the template to get started: https://invent.kde.org/frameworks/krunner/-/tree/master/templates/runner6python.
DBus-Runners that worked without deprecations in Plasma5 will continue to do so in Plasma6!
For C++ plugins, I will make a porting guide like blog post soonish, because I have started porting my own plugins to work with Plasma6.
Finally, I want to wish you all a happy and productive new year!
This is a lighter month due to holidays (and also I’m trying not to burn out), but I tried to fit in a bit of KDE anyway. It’s all bugfixes anyway because of the feature freeze!
Not mentioned is a bunch of really boring busywork like unbreaking the stable branches of Gear applications due to the CI format changing.
[Bugfix]
KScreenLocker CI now runs supported tests, see the KillTest fixes and pamTest fix. Failing tests also make the pipeline visibly fail, as it should. (Unfortunately, the pipeline as of writing fails to due some unrelated regression?)
[6.0]
[Bugfix]
Fixed a bunch of TextArea bugs that affected mobile form factors, such as Plasma Mobile and Android. This is mostly for Tokodon (because we abuse TextAreas a lot in scrolling content) but it can help other applications too! The selectByMouse property is now respected, the cursor handles should show up less.
[6.0]
[Feature]
When the Kirigami theme plugin fails to load, the error message will soon be a bit more descriptive. This should make it easier for non-developers to figure out why Kirigami applications don’t look correct.
[6.0]
I also went around and fixed up a bunch of other mobile applications with Android contributions too small to mention. Applications like Qrca, Kongress, etc.
Nagged for a new QtKeychain release due to a critical bug that would cause applications to never open KWallet5. Please also nag your distributions to package 0.14.2 soon! Anything using QtKeychain 0.14.1 or below won’t work in Plasma 6. This doesn’t affect people in the dev session, because QtKeychain should be built from git.
Helping the Gentoo KDE Team with packaging Plasma 6 and KDE Gear 6. I managed to update my desktop to Plasma 6 and submitted fixes to get it closer to working. I also added Arianna, PlasmaTube and MpvQt packages.
The ownCloud product Infinite Scale is going to be released in version five soon. The latest stable version is 4.0.5 and I am sure everybody checked it out already and is blown away by it’s performance, elegance and ease of use.
No, not yet?
Ok, well, in that case, here comes rescue: With the little script described here, it becomes really easy to start Infinite Scale to check it out on your computer. It makes it really easy and quick for you, without Linux super admin powers whatsoever.
To use it, you just need to open a terminal on your machine and cd into a directory somewhere in your home where you can afford to host some bytes.
Without further preparation, you type the following command line (NOT as user root please):
What it does is that it automatically pulls the latest stable version of Infinite Scale from the official download server of ownCloud onto your computer. For that, it creates a configuration and a start script, and starts the server. The script detects the platform on which your’re running to download the right binary version. It also looks up the hostname and configures the installation for that name.
Once the server was started Infinite Scale’s web client can be accessed by pointing a browser to the URL https://your-hostname:9200/. Since this is an installation for testing purposes, it does not have a proper certificate configured. That is why your browser is complaining about the cert, and you have to calm it. And indeed, that is one of the reasons why you’re not supposed to use this sneak peak in production or even exposed to the internet.
For the nerds, the script does not really do magic, but just curls the golang single binary of Infinite Scale down to the machine into a sandbox directory, chmod it to be executable and create a working config and a data dir. All happens with the priviledges of the logged in user, no sudo or root involved. You’re encouraged to double check the install script using for example the command curl -L https://owncloud.com/runocis.sh | less - of course you never should trust anybody running scripts from the internet on your machine.
If the server is stopped by pressing Ctrl-C, it later can be started again by the script runocis.sh that was kindly left behind in the sandbox as well.
The installer was tested on these three platforms: 64 bit AMD/Intel CPU based Linux machines, 64 bit Raspberry Pi with Raspbian OS and MacOSX. The flavour of Linux should not make a difference.
If you encounter a problem with the script or if you have suggestions to improve, please find it in my this’n that section on Github. I am happy to receive issue reports or pull requests.
@nathanu:matrix.org
JBB
– I think while developing Wayland-as-an-ecosystem we are now entrenched into narrow concepts of how a desktop should work. While discussing Wayland protocol additions, a lot of concepts clash, people from different desktops with different design philosophies debate the merits of those over and over again never reaching any conclusion (just as you will never get an answer out of humans whether sushi or pizza is the clearly superior food, or whether CSD or SSD is better). Some people want to use Wayland as a vehicle to force applications to submit to their desktop’s design philosophies, others prefer the smallest and leanest protocol possible, other developers want the most elegant behavior possible. To be clear, I think those are all very valid approaches.
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alex1701c