Plasma (Mobile) Sprint and Grazer Linuxtage 2025

Last week I attended the Plasma (Mobile) Sprint and the following Grazer Linuxtage 2025 in Graz, Austria.

Plasma (Mobile) Sprint

There’s detailed notes in the Wiki, I was mostly involved with mobile related topics and how those align with our Android support.

• Power management and device sleep for the push notification server.
• Common infrastructure for alarms and “long-distance” timers, which is another power-management related topic. While we have some parts of the backend implementation here already, there’s no cross-platform API for applications yet.
• Supporting display cutouts/notches. There’s basic application-facing API in Qt 6.9 for this, which we yet have to make use of in Kirigami and/or applications. It’s however only backed by actual display data on Android and iOS, so we also have to build up the entire infrastructure behind this on Linux.
• Unifying (manual) location selection. We have an increasing number of features depending on an (approximate) position (night light, timezone switching, weather and emergency alerts, etc), all with their own and sometimes very different UIs for choosing how the location is determined.

We also looked at a few implementation details:

• Using XDG portal APIs for camera and location access in Qt, to make this transparent for applications.
• Localized sorting issues due to the wrong or incomplete collate APIs being used.
• Possible ways to deal with date and date/time formatting in QML without losing timezone information.

On Thursday we even got a thunderstorm for testing the weather warnings, a nice touch by the organizers.

In person meetings are extremely productive, as you can see here and by reports from others on Planet KDE. They often involve travel cost though, that’s where your donations to KDE e.V can help!

Itinerary Sprint

And of course every KDE sprint is implicitly also an Itinerary sprint:

• The live status view can now also use the OpenRailwayMap infrastructure, signaling, electrification, speed and gauge map styles.
• Improved support for importing tickets from ÖBB NightJet and local transport in Graz, as well as a&o Hostels Apple Wallet files.
• Improved applying live updates to multi-ticket trips.
• Improved geo coding and address editing, including a fix for QtLocation not forwarding Nominatim house numbers correctly.
• David R looked into simplifying and improving the horrible journey progress bar code.
• Moved more UI components from Itinerary to KPublicTransport, for sharing with KTrip.

Bhushan discovered a hotel that apparently provides key cards as Apple Wallet passes. That’s something we of course would want to support in Itinerary, but we lacked actual test cases so far. Good to know for the next visit to Graz.

Grazer Linuxtage

As the Plasma sprint was not only directly before Grazer Linuxtage but also essentially in the same venue at TU Graz, we could conveniently participate there as well.

KDE had a booth with Plasma and KDE applications running on a variety of devices, including laptops, mobile phones, drawing tablets and gaming consoles, with Krita, HDR video playback and Plasma Mobile drawing particular attention.

Attached to the booth we had an improvised hacking area where sprint work continued.

Outlook

The setup and combination with Grazer Linuxtage worked great, and being able to do a sprint for a bit longer than just a weekend makes this a lot more effective. Thanks for everyone who helped organizing this!

There might be the possibility to repeat this, and I’m certainly looking forward to return to Graz for an event or two next year :)