Herp De Derp

In my last post , I laid out the vision for Kapsule—a container-based extensibility layer for KDE Linux built on top of Incus. The pitch was simple: give users real, persistent development environments without compromising the immutable base system. At the time, it was a functional proof of concept living in my personal namespace. Well, things have moved fast. It's in KDE Linux now Kapsule is integrated into KDE Linux. It shipped. People are using it. It hasn't caught fire. The reception in #kde-linux:kde.org has been generally positive—which, if you've ever shipped anything to a community of Linux enthusiasts, you know is about the best outcome you can hope for. No pitchforks, some genuine excitement, and a few good bug reports. I'll take it. Special shoutout to @aks:mx.scalie.zone , who has been daily-driving Kapsule and—crucially—hasn't had it blow up in their face. Having a real user exercising the system outside of my own testing has been invaluabl...

After taking a 13 year hiatus from KDE development, Harald Sitter's talk on KDE Linux at Akademy 2024 was the perfect storm of nostalgia and inspiration to suck me back in. I've been contributing on and off since then. This blog post outlines some gaping holes I see in its extensibility model, and how I plan to address them (assuming no objections from other developers). The Problem KDE Linux is being built as an immutable OS without a traditional package manager. The strategy leans heavily on Flatpak for GUI applications, which (though, not without its problems) generally works well for its stated goal. But here's the thing: the Linux community has a relatively large population of CLI fanatics—developers who live in the terminal, who need $OBSCURE_TOOL for their workflow, who won't be satisfied with just what comes in a Flatpak. The OS ships with a curated set of developer tools that we KDE developers decided to include. Want something else? There's a wik...

Okay, this is a little late considering the list of accepted proposals was published on Tuesday (Monday for some), but I've been a little busy with Uni work lately. So, I think drdanz covered the official description of my project in his blog , which was to "...create a completely asynchronous modular and extensible system that enriches messages before they’re displayed to the user. These includes embedding images and videos from links, Translating messages, (re)-formatting them nicely, reading out loud etc." Let me go into a bit of detail on what that actually means. Let's take for example the the Image plugin in Kopete: when a user sends a link to an image it downloads downloads, scales and embeds the image directly in the chat window. Before my friends found out about this and abused it (and even afterwards when they eventually got bored of it), this was a very useful plugin. It made the conversation much more interesting to look at (instead of being a dull ...

Once apon a time, Instant messaging or 'Online Chat' was a primary task on it's own. That is, I remember the days when I would switch on my computer, sign in to 'MSN Messenger' (as it was called back then), have a voice conversation with my father (who was working in England at the time), and then be done with it. However, over the last few years, not only have we started to rely more on it, but it's also become more of a secondary (or even tertiary) task. For example, these days I keep in contact with the rest of the telepathy-kde (or is it kde-telepathy now, or just 'ktp' yet?) team on IRC while I'm developing; talk to my friends (with a steam voice call) while playing a game and so on. The thing is that, things like that need to be able to be done simultaneously while still maintaining maximum efficiency. Which becomes painfully impossible when you have to switch windows, or the way most IM clients are implemented these days. So, shortly befor...

Hi, This is my first post (ever) in a blog, so I really don't know what I'm doing here. Hopefully, one day it will contain loads of interesting stuff to read (especially for a KDE audience) but for now, just bear with me :) I'm a first year university student (still in the ZOMG UNI phase ;-) studying Software Engineering at the University of New South Wales. If you haven't heard of it, it's probably because it's in Australia - that place 'down under' that people keep joking about... involving a Crocodile Dundee, foster's beer (though I hadn't even heard of it until I went to the UK) and Neighbors. Yes Neighbors - http://neighbours.com.au/ while everyone I know hates it, I was recently informed that soap opera fans in England love it. :-/ Anywho, that's enough rambling for now, I created this blog due to the extreme peer pressure during the Woshibon sprint. But I had issues remembering who manged the DNS for my domain, and took a w...