Kapsule: Completing the KDE Linux Extensibility Story
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...