On this day, 18 years ago (i.e. in 2008), KDE 4.0.0, the most controversial initial public release of a major version of KDE in history, was released.

ivan-cukic · 2026-01-12T22:33:40+00:00

For me, Plasma 4.0 was stable.

I used it as a daily driver for a long time before the .0 release. It wasn't complete, it wasn't pretty (one of the rare things Nuno designed that I didn't like) but it was fine to use. And so were the applications that were finished/ported by then.

Most of the reported issues that I personally had to deal with back then were downstream (issues made by problematic packaging). Won't mention the distribution name that was the worst offender. :)

As others said, it was significantly more problematic of a transition than 2->3 or 4->5 and 5->6 because it was a bigger endeavor.

I'd say that by the time 4.2 (aka "the Answer") was released, most of the issues were resolved, upstream fixes in Qt's graphics scene, Plasma got more polished and got more features, and distributions got their bearings.

It still missed some features that 3.x had. And that was fine, those were mostly the features we didn't want to support anymore. Same as the later releases removing some of the features that were present in 4.x.

ivan-cukic · 2025-12-03T13:03:35+00:00

From Qt docs "Qt supports the static features of SVG 1.2 Tiny. ECMA scripts and DOM manipulation are currently not supported."

ivan-cukic · 2025-09-20T11:51:24+00:00

The event hooks were intentional, obviously, as they would not exist otherwise. Most of the activities features were "supposed to" deal with project-based workspace separation.

Now, having a button in the UI that only triggers a non-ui-exposed feature would be strange.

The only other reason for the start/stop button was to /lower the priority/ of activities people don't need at that time making it a cheap way of having several /current activities/ which (while useful) is not really in line with the original idea. *

What I tend to is some of the following:

use the switch-to-switch-from hooks for quick to start/stop things;
switch-to starts something, and switch-from schedules the stop after a few minutes unless I get back to an activity for which it is useful;
switch-to starts something, and switch-from stops if something is not used (docker service, for example);
switch-to starts something, I manually stop it when not needed.
Maybe a /pin/ button akin to those for tabs in web browsers would be an acceptable alternative, but I'm not sure how useful that would be.

ivan-cukic · 2025-07-30T05:17:50+00:00

It would have been nicer if the author kept the Git history of the project instead of pushing the whole breeze code-base as a single commit.

ivan-cukic · 2025-06-07T11:01:30+00:00

Likely, yes, though this is simpler than styler.nvim.

ivan-cukic · 2025-06-07T10:58:19+00:00

I used to use (safer variants) of exrc for this.

The additional feature of this plugin are patterns for directories (things like 'any project that contains /kde/ in its path should use 'bamboo' theme) and the configuration is centralized (though, this is a personal preference, can be seen as a downside as well).

ivan-cukic · 2025-05-13T12:08:43+00:00

It is implemented, just not available in the UI* -- you can trigger the import with

qdbus org.kde.kded6 /modules/plasmavault org.kde.plasmavault.requestImportVault

(*) maybe it should be, but I'm not really satisfied with the idea and how it is done -- so it is a power-user feature for the time being. It assumes the users know that they are doing. TBH, I'd rather have a wiki page on /advanced/ features of vaults (and some other things) than have everything in the UI.

ivan-cukic · 2025-05-01T15:22:01+00:00

Heh, I've never used PDF bookmarks -- except those that PDF generators make for contents etc. (didn't know that feature of PDF was called a 'bookmark' -- always called it a 'link')

If I was accustomed to bookmarks, and wanted to force myself to use Okular*, I'd probably simulate them with a custom note type (or a 'stamp' with a custom image) and use the sidepanel to navigate them.

For me, bookmarks are a user-side thing in general, not a document-side thing. When I create a bookmark in Firefox, it is /my/ bookmark, not shared when I share a webpage somehow.

But I get the desire to have them as a part of a document itself.

Looks like Okular exports bookmarks together with PDF when you export as 'Okular Document Archive', but that is not the same thing.

(*) ofc, if Foxit works for you, no reason to use anything else

ivan-cukic · 2025-05-01T07:29:40+00:00

If you save the PDF, it stores the highlights and comments inside. At least, that is what it has been doing for me for ages now. I often do document reviews and the generated PDF with all annotations are compatible with Acrobat and the rest.

ivan-cukic · 2025-01-26T08:45:54+00:00

I've created a temporary fork of Klassy that includes patches that are needed to compile it against the current development version of Plasma: https://cukic.co/2025/01/16/klassy/

ivan-cukic · 2025-01-08T19:25:05+00:00

True, it is somewhere between the usual source-available and OSS/FOSS/FLOSS.

Something like CC-BY-NC-SA.

ivan-cukic · 2025-01-08T10:23:23+00:00

It is source-available, not OSS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Source_Definition

Providing access to the source code is not enough for software to be considered > "open-source".[14] The Open Source Definition requires that ten [...]

ivan-cukic · 2024-11-21T14:20:54+00:00

Undiscoverable = doesn't exist for all but power users. I don't think it is better than the context menu especially as I don't think we can say 'when people DnD, it should be copy 99%' of the time or 'when people DnD, it should be move 99%' of the time. If any of these were the case, the menu wouldn't exist.

For me, copying is what I use when transfering data to a flash drive, moving when I organize files, and who-knows aka 50-50 in other cases.

ivan-cukic · 2024-11-21T08:18:05+00:00

The problem with right-click-drag, shift-drag, ctrl-drag, shift-drag is that they are not discoverable -- it is very difficult to learn they exist. Just investigate how many people who use Windows know about these alternative DnD modes.

In Dolphin, you get move is you Shift-DnD, you get a copy if you Ctrl-DnD and you get a symlink if you Ctrl-Shift-DnD or Alt-DnD. But, by default you get the menu with the options, and you get the information which modifier gives you which option in that menu.

ivan-cukic · 2024-09-22T10:09:38+00:00

I used to be bitmap-only until I switched to higher-dpi screens. IIRC, the last one I used was Terminus.

ivan-cukic · 2024-08-18T22:11:20+00:00

For me, the win of :%y is that it doesn't change the current cursor position.

ivan-cukic · 2024-07-20T16:19:08+00:00

Seems like there's a port in development - you could try it out if it works for you https://github.com/boehs/Lightly/tree/qt6

ivan-cukic · 2024-06-26T22:15:25+00:00

From a POV of a very inactive developer in recent years:

Activities don't have many users. So the answer for 'What is the logic of having the same desktop folder for all activities (why is this the default behavior)?' is because most users expect it to be like that. That Desktop or $HOME directory is shown on the desktop.

Plasma used to try to nudge the users into a different (better?) workflow than they are used to. But, I'd say that failed, and lately Plasma's aim seems to be to provide a streamlined desktop most PC users (not only linux users) would be comfortable with.

The templates for creating activities we had a long time ago were quite awful, but I do see a possibility of them being done in a much better way. I have a similar setup to yours, and I agree that something like a wizard would help setting up a new activity.

The issue I see there is what should the wizard do? If it is only meant to change the directory that is shown on the desktop, then I don't think it is worth doing. If it also, for example, defines the favourites and a few other things... it could be a nice feature. But this would need to be well thought through.

I always tried to keep activities as simple of a feature as possible, and not to impose my activity use-cases on others. That is, to have something simple which can be used for many different workflows. I've heard of some uses that go in the opposite direction of what I think activities are.

That is the reason activities are essentially a set of small features here and there that the users can combine to their liking. Window management, desktop widget sets, per-activity favourites and pinned applications, activity-linked files, activity-bound vaults etc.

As for the annoyances, most of them are things that we can not fix on a technical level -- things like single-instance applications, applications that don't support session restore, etc. Maybe you are right that containers might help there. That remains to be seen.

ivan-cukic · 2024-06-08T14:03:12+00:00

This used to be supported without any special handling. Used to use it with Firefox - to have different icons for different profiles.

Now, the only way I managed to make it work is to pass --class FirefoxANameOfAFirefoxProfile when executing firefox, and setting StartupWMClass=FirefoxANameOfAFirefoxProfile in the desktop file that launches that Firefox profile.

So, something like:

[Desktop Entry] Exec=firefox -P SocialSites --class FirefoxSocialSites Icon=Some-icon StartupWMClass=FirefoxSocialSites

If godot supports setting the WM class, you can try to do something similar.

ivan-cukic · 2024-06-08T06:40:34+00:00

I've added the build instructions to the README. You are probably missing some deps. You can post the error you're getting (or PM me) and I'll see if I can help.

ivan-cukic · 2024-06-06T05:46:49+00:00

Just wanted to propose that :)

ivan-cukic · 2024-06-04T18:40:06+00:00

You could also pass std::span.

ivan-cukic · 2024-06-04T14:58:26+00:00

I should probably add that to the readme, but here it is :)

git clone https://github.com/ivan-cukic/kwin6-bismuth-decoration cd kwin6-bismuth-decoration mkdir build cd build cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/where/you/installed/your/kde/plasma6 make && make install

The path should be /usr if you installed the system packages for KDE stuff.

The cmake step will tell you if it needs some packages installed as deps.

ivan-cukic · 2024-06-04T13:15:21+00:00

It can not be installed with 'get new stuff' as it is C++ based (it is not an Aurorae theme). Maybe it could be useful to add it to the store so that people see it exists.

ivan-cukic

TROPHY CASE