It’s a Plasma widget that visualizes what’s going on on your system, music-wise that is. I’ve started this project years ago but only recently found the motivation to get it to a somewhat acceptable state. It’s pretty amazing to have bars flying across the screen to Daft Punk’s Touch. https://store.kde.org/p/1953779

KDE is now evaluating Sentry, a crash tracking system. Who can get access? Everyone with a KDE developer account. But what is it? Since forever we have used Bugzilla to manage crash reports but this has numerous challenges that haven’t made any improvements in at least 10 years: Finding duplicates crashes is hard and in our case involves a human finding them When debug symbols are missing we need to ask the user to recreate the problem, which is not always possible Users need to worry about debug symbols (this is in part improved by the rise of debuginfod - yay! Read More

I’ve gotten annoyed with the inability to manage system files so I’ve made a KIO worker that enables Dolphin to view and edit files as root. This is dolphin viewing the system root with administrative access. The way this works is actually fairly exciting. It’s pulling off worker chaining: The admin worker itself contains gloriously little logic, all it does is translate all worker calls to dbus calls, and those dbus calls go out to a privileged polkit helper. Read More

Get some popcorn and strap in for a long one! I shall delight you with some insights into crash handling and all that unicorn sparkle material. Since Plasma 5.24 DrKonqi, Plasma’s infamous crash reporter, has gained support to route crashes through coredumpd and it is amazing - albeit a bit unused. That is why I’m telling you about it now because it’s matured a bit and is even more amazing - albeit still unused, I hope that will change. Read More

I’ve finally gotten annoyed enough with inotify failing randomly, because of resource exhaustion, that I’ve built a tiny app to deal with it. Introducing kde-inotify-survey. It features a CLI to inspect the inotify state, as well as a kded to warn and help with bumping the maximums. Assuming it turns out amazing for others I hope to progress it to kdereview soon.

For when you are using Feral Interactive’s GameMode and want some UI indication of its use. https://invent.kde.org/sitter/plasma-gamemode

It’s boring but important! Stay with me! Please! 😘 For the past couple of years Andreas Cord-Landwehr has done excellent work on moving KDE in a more structured licensing direction. Free software licensing is an often overlooked topic, that is collectively understood to be important, but also incredibly annoying, bureaucratic, and complex. We all like to ignore it more than we should. If you are working on KDE software you really should check out KDE’s licenses howto and maybe also glance over the comprehensive policy. Read More

As it recently came up I thought I should perhaps post this more publicly… As many of you will know SMB1, the super ancient protocol for windows shares, shouldn’t be used anymore. It’s been deprecated since like Windows Vista and was eventually also disabled by default in both Windows 10 and Samba. As a result you are not able to find servers that do not support either DNS-SD aka Bonjour aka Avahi, or WS-Discovery. Read More

Harald Sitter is a long-time KDE developer who previously also worked on the music player Amarok and the Linux distribution Kubuntu. He loves talking about the nitty-gritty details of technology and making things more automated and reliable. Also on: LinkedIn GitHub KDE Invent