Herp De Derp

In my last post , I made a solemn vow to not touch Kapsule for a week. Focus on the day job. Be a responsible adult. Success level: medium. I did get significantly more day-job work done than the previous week, so partial credit there. But my wife's mother and sister are visiting from Japan, and they're really into horror movies. I am not. So while they were watching people get chased through dark corridors by things with too many teeth, I was in the other room hacking on container pipelines with zero guilt. Sometimes the stars just align. Here's what came out of that guilt-free hack time. Konsole integration: it's actually done The two Konsole merge requests from the last post— !1178 (containers in the New Tab menu) and !1179 (container association with profiles)—are merged. They're in Konsole now. Shipped. Building on that foundation, I've got two more MRs up: !1182 adds the KapsuleDetector —the piece that actually wires Kapsule into Kons...

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...