Amazingly I managed to go the whole trip this time without getting sick! 😊

We covered a lot of ground! Briefly, a few of the things off the top of my head:

Testing​

Improving reliability, ease of running locally, documentation, and ensuring that test failures are reported by the CI in merge requests. We have some work to do for all of these to improve our testing story, and we collectively came to important decisions on how to move forwards.

Gardening​

There is a lot, often not enough hours/energy to deal with it, and a lot of the time people just don't even know about the issue(s). Let's try: being more proactive about closing bad/stale MRs, creating a GitLab bot to help automate things that get people's attention, keep track of things by sending regular notices to the mailing list(s) similar to how the "failing ci" emails help people keep on top of things.

Gestures​

A complicated topic! We had a lot of good discussions about the user flow/UI/UX, and I think we came to a really good place that sets us up for some excellent custom gestures/bindings with the fantastic work by Jakob & Natalie.

This sort of work is a really great example of something that would have been very difficult to do online, that we broke through with a lot of back and forth conversation/explanation/design at the sprint — which is exactly why we get together to unblock these things and make quick progress together!

Plasma Keyboard​

We covered all of the large topics/issues that have been pending, for example: morekeys/full keyboard emulation, emojis, speech-to-text, Wayland protocols, testing, etc. So much that each could probably be its own blog post! We'll continue to see a whole lot of changes and improvements here; we really want plasma-keyboard to be a first-class experience for all sorts of input stories.

Graz​

We were once again in lovely Graz, and the weather was a very welcome change from the brutal winter we've had in Canada — still had ice and snow when I left home! In addition to the mostly sunny weather and chirping birds, the city and its people were just fantastic once again. 💙

I can't say enough just how lovely Graz is, and how glad I was to get to visit again. 🇦🇹 Special shout out to Kevin Krammer, our KDE local who did so much to make this sprint great for us!

The fact that Graz is a lovely place to go is good news, since this year we'll be hosting Akademy there — I am already looking forward to coming back! :D

Plasma Keyboard started out life as KDE's virtual / on-screen keyboard, and now it is evolving to also support tools and features for our physical keyboards.

FLOSS/Fund​

Plasma Keyboard was granted funding from the FLOSS/Fund program's second tranche, for which we are very grateful! This funding has ensured we will be able to put some sustained effort towards refining and improving the project — and I have been doing just that for the past couple of months.

I began by getting more familiar with the codebase, lists of open bugs, and feature requests. I also did some refactoring and cleanup, improved the CI and MR review process, etc.

Diacritics​

https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-keyboard/-/merge_requests/83

The first feature I tackled is the first one that is for physical keyboards rather than virtual/on-screen keyboards: diacritics — the variants of a character that indicate a difference in pronunciation, such as ç, ñ, or ü. Though it is more than just diacritics, because it also supports common/popular symbols, such as ™, — (em-dash), →, ¡, ‽, ¼, ≥, ≠, etc.

If you'd like an idea of which diacritics and symbols are currently included, you can check out the base mapping json. Further mappings are included depending on which language(s) you have enabled for Plasma Keyboard in your system settings.

This feature allows users to long-press a key on their physical keyboard to access a popup menu of diacritics and symbols related to that key, and select one to input it. This is a common feature on mobile keyboards, and I personally think this is a great improvement over using something like a compose key for the same purpose.

Selecting an option from the popup menu can be done multiple ways:

• Pressing the associated keyboard number key shown below the option
• Clicking on the option with the mouse
• Using the arrow keys to navigate to the option and pressing Enter

This was pretty challenging to implement; I previously had no experience with Wayland protocols or input methods, so it required a lot of research, reading, learning, and experimentation to figure it out. Difficult, but rewarding!

One of the really cool things about Plasma Keyboard is that it is available as a Flatpak — so if you are adventurous and want to try out the diacritics feature before it is released to the stable version, you can do so with the nightly Flatpak builds!

flatpak install --user --or-update https://cdn.kde.org/flatpak/plasma-keyboard-nightly/org.kde.plasma.keyboard.flatpakref

Then simply enable Plasma Keyboard in System Settings → Keyboard → Virtual Keyboard! 🤯 If you already have a version of Plasma Keyboard installed, a quick restart or log out/in might be needed for the new version to take effect.

Future Plans​

In addition to the diacritics feature itself, I also laid the groundwork with it for future features that will make use of the same overlay/popup system and physical keyboard integration — stay tuned for more news on that! 😉

There are a bunch of other plans for features and improvements that we'd like to work on, for example: swipe typing, voice typing, making the on-screen keyboard movable and resizable, adding tests and improving performance and reliability, etc.

There is a lot of work to be done, and we are excited to keep improving Plasma Keyboard and making it even more powerful and user-friendly — just like the rest of Plasma! 🚀

If you are interested in contributing, please check out the project on KDE's GitLab: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-keyboard

With Plasma Setup, the technical steps of operating system installation and disk partitioning can be handled separately from user-facing steps like setting up an account, connecting to a network, and so on. This facilitates important use cases such as:

• Companies shipping Plasma pre-installed on devices
• Businesses or charity organizations refurbishing computers with Plasma to give them new life
• Giving away or selling a computer with Plasma on it, without giving the new owner access to the previous owner’s data

This has been several months in the making, as it has been my primary focus ever since I was hired by KDE e.V. last year. The project has seen a ton of work, and we've collaborated with distros and other stakeholders to ensure it meets the needs of the community.

I am very excited to see Plasma Setup finally in the hands of users, and how it will make KDE (and Linux/FOSS in general) more accessible to a wider audience. This is a key piece that was needed in order for Plasma to be more viable and accessible to a whole class of users (non-technical end-users, businesses, governments, etc.).

There are still plenty of improvements that can be made, and contributions are very welcome! If you are interested in contributing, please check out the project on KDE's GitLab: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-setup

Although first off I think I maybe hadn't mentioned yet how the project was renamed.

Previously known as "KDE Initial System Setup" (KISS), the project has been rebranded to "Plasma Setup" and now sits nicely alongside other system projects like "Plasma Desktop", "Plasma Mobile", "Plasma Keyboard", etc.

Enhancing Security in Plasma Setup​

We received a notice of potential security issues from the folks at openSUSE, which have now been addressed.

This sort of thing is a great example of why it can be so difficult to provide ETAs and timelines for software development: unexpected issues often arise that need to be addressed before other planned work can proceed, and these issues can take time to investigate and fix properly; in this case, the security issues required careful review and testing to ensure that they were resolved without introducing new problems, and delayed our initial release by weeks.

I had very little experience with this sort of security-minded defensive programming before this, so it was a great learning experience for me personally as well. It required a whole lot of reading and research to understand the best practices and principles involved, and I definitely have a better feeling for how to think about defensive programming in the future.

It amazes me the kinds of things people will try to do to break software, and many of them (like path traversal attacks) are things I would never have thought of on my own!

I'd like to thank the openSUSE security team for responsibly disclosing these issues, and for their patience while we worked through them. Their help has made Plasma Setup more secure for all users, and I appreciate their dedication to improving the security of open source software.

A massive thank you specifically to Matthias Gerstner for the multiple rounds of detailed and thoughtful reviews and suggestions on the MR to address these issues. Your help was invaluable, and it was a pleasure working with you! 🙇‍♀️ 💙 🦎

Looking Ahead​

Plasma Setup is nearly ready for initial testing and adoption. There are a couple more items to wrap up, but (barring further unforeseen delays!) we are very close to being able to release it for early adopters to try out! 🎉

I was very excited both to see Berlin (and put my very shaky German skills to practice), as well as to attend our big yearly event and meet some more cool folks in person.

The trip out was fairly uneventful, if long (~17 hours of bus, planes, and train). The biggest difference compared to travelling to the Plasma sprint is that this time I had some good noise cancelling over-ear headphones -- what a lifesaver! Especially when you end up on a flight across the ocean sandwiched between 2 screaming, jumping, grabbing toddlers. 10/10 can recommend! The headphones, not the toddlers. 😂

As expected when I arrived at my hotel I crashed and slept for 11 hours straight.

I had a good time at the welcome event. I offered to help and spent the evening handing out food and drink tickets to everyone and chatting to a few people -- including an excellent conversation about the merits of QA & testing, which still surprises me not everyone is on board with!

We had a huge amount of talks and BoFs to attend. (Sidenote: "BoF" stands for "Birds of a Feather", and is apparently a more informal/less structured time for talk/discussion/hacking/etc -- I was lost on what these letters meant for a long time before now.)

I don't think I could hope to cover even a fraction of what went on, and indeed because the schedule is structured in such a way that there are multiple things going on at any given time, I had a lot of trouble choosing what to go to -- what if I want to attend them all?! Well, that is kind of what I am doing as I am catching up on the recordings of what I missed after the fact.

I am very happy that the audio and video quality of the recordings appear to be massively improved over last year's! Paired with the auto-generated captions on YouTube it actually makes for an excellent way to consume the talks, and is valuable even for the talks I attended in person since my auditory processing disorder means that I have trouble understanding what people are saying (massively worsened with low volume/echo/noisy environment/etc). If we can figure out the infrastructure to also record the BoFs for next year that would be another great step up for accessibility and allowing a wider audience to participate & benefit. 💙

We had a BoF about the KDE Out-Of-Box-Experience (OOBE), where Neal Gompa and I went through some of the history of the project (a lot, Neal has been championing it forever!) and its current state (nearly ready for early testing and adoption). There were some good questions, and I am consistently gratified to see the interest and excitement there is for the project.

The schedule for Akademy was a lot for me. On a normal day my available energy is already quite limited, and the venue had a few challenges for me such as the only restrooms and the elevator we were using being on the other side of the building, which meant a whole lot of walking & standing to wait on hard floors so I was feeling more fatigued and in pain than usual.

To top that off my anxiety was sky high, and I have no idea how much I was masking but I think I may have ended up seeming like an unapproachable wallflower.. I promise I am very friendly, just extremely anxious and awkward! Despite that I ended up having a bunch of great conversations during the conference with a bunch of people, and it was amazing to get together with so many other Linux / FOSS / KDE nerds. 🤓

Around the end of Tuesday it was becoming apparent that I had caught a cold or something from one of the many sneezes or coughs I had attempted to dodge during this trip, and I missed out on the social activities on Wednesday and the last day of activities of Thursday. I enjoyed watching the progress on Matrix anyway! I am only now just starting to improve (I always struggle to fight off infections like this).

Several people had said they wanted to talk to me at some point, and we didn't get the chance before this cold knocked me out. Wie Schade! It isn't the same, but feel free to reach out to me on Matrix! @merritt:kde.org

It was really awesome to get together in Berlin, to meet so many new great people and to see familiar faces again, to work on so many interesting things together. I wish I had more energy after a long day to do more social stuff, because I loved getting the chance to interact with everyone in a more relaxed and informal way. Maybe we can figure out some more relaxed / quiet / sensory friendly social & food options next time for those of us who struggle with the loud, crowded, and chaotic environments that are often the default for social events.

Thanks Berlin for having us, even if the city is a bit noisy and has a surprising number of smokers, it was very nice to visit! Tschüss!! 😀 💙

After a bunch of research and discussions we settled on continuing / fixing up the KISS project (KDE Initial System Setup) for the new First Run Experience (FRE) / Out-Of-Box Experience (OOBE). It was in a sort of half finished state.

Since then has been a bunch of work on it such as:

• Getting it to compile and run
• Whole bunch of fixes, cleanup, and polish to the UI, UX, and code/developer experience
• Implemented the ability to actually create the new user (you could enter a name and password, but it was all basically placeholder GUI previously)
• Added language selection front/back ends
• Added basic build / run instructions to the README
• Added ECM logging
• Cleaned up the debug output which made changes more difficult
• Added basic CI (thanks Nico!)
• Added keyboard layout selection front/back ends

That last one was more difficult than expected.. turns out keyboard layouts can be quite complex!

First came some refactoring of the keyboard layouts KCM from plasma-desktop so we could reuse some of the existing, complex functionality. Then adapting a UI/UX appropriate for the FRE. Investigating things like keyboard models, detecting defaults, mapping language to keyboard layout, etc..

Then taking the results of the user choice and figuring out how to apply that both to the system as a default (systemd-localed dbus call) as well as to the running Plasma session (setting the value manually in the kxkbrc keyboard settings file).

As is often the case with software development, that succinct summary belies the massive amount of work it took to get there! 😅 💪

With that work completed, we have most of what is needed for a minimum viable product!

Next up:

• Granting authentication without a user prompt
  • Plan: special user with sysusers.d and a polkit rule
• Running automatically on first boot & in live sessions
  • Plan: systemd unit seems promising, but more research is needed
• Improve documentation
  • Especially related to building & running without kde-builder
• Think about the name
  • I am not thrilled with the KISS acronym personally 🤷‍♀️

There is also obviously a lot of improvements and polish that can be made, but for now here is a preview of the FRE:

I say that because previously we had a hack that simply allowed notifications to display over top of fullscreen windows, and do not disturb was only ever used if:

• Screens are mirrored
• During screen sharing
• The user invoked it manually

This was a little odd, and led to some inconsistencies. Plus only Plasma knew about the user's preference to see notifications in fullscreen, and despite notifications being inhibited reading org.freedesktop.Notifications.Inhibited would return false.

I changed this to actually use do not disturb when a fullscreen window is focused. This is more predictable and in-line with what the user would expect, enhancing the UX and communication with other parts of the system and apps.

As a result, we've discovered several bugs that had gone unnoticed! So far:

• Notifications not being marked read
• Showing a summary for unwanted notifications
• Showing a summary every time the user leaves DND
• Not showing critical notifications in DND when we should
• Disabling app-specific notification history also prevents it from participating in DND summaries

My impression is that these bugs were not evident before because few people were actually using the do not disturb feature, thanks to the way we previously handled notifications with fullscreen applications. Everyone has been hard at work getting these fixed and hopefully DND will be more useful, predictable, and reliable! 🎉 😄

It was really great to be in the same room with so many talented and knowledgeable people. The amount of expertise gathered together was fantastic. The usual difficulties with remote communication were gone, and suddenly we could have easy back-and-forths, go sit next to someone to ask their expert opinion, and big group discussions could flow freely in a fraction of the time it would normally take.

Some of the cool things we talked about and worked on are: sandboxing (including things other than apps, like Plasma widgets and runners for KRunner), KNewStuff (where we can download new widgets/themes/etc), Activities, Telemetry, and oh so much more! We covered so much in such a short time it had my head spinning.

We also discussed the first-run experience (FRE) or out-of-the-box experience (OOBE) that is my current main focus. For those who are unfamiliar, this is the flow that happens when a user first turns on a new computer where it asks them to create the first user. Currently this doesn't exists for KDE (outside of some hacks that have significant drawbacks), and the user has to be created during system installation. For technically inclined users doing their own system install this is no problem, but it is a big problem for other scenarios; think for example about…

• Government organizations or large businesses who want to image computers with the system software
• OEMs who need to pre-install an operating system
• Used computer shops saving those millions of PCs that can't run Windows 11

For all of these scenarios and more, the operating system needs to be installed but the user account should not yet be created. Rather once the intended end-user has opened up the box and turned on their shiny new computer, only then should they be prompted to "Choose your username and password" (among other things).

It was great to be able to present the vision for this, and I got great feedback, questions, suggestions, etc. Working together we came up with a solid plan to proceed, and I've started the work of implementing all of these ideas!

On the personal front, the whole experience was pretty challenging for me. Right off the bat my pre-existing medical condition means that I don't have much energy to work with on a daily basis, and that I get sick worse/more easily than most people do.. and wow did I ever get hit with the whole shebang!

After being hired on as the new Plasma Software Engineer, I had just under 2 weeks notice to try and arrange to attend the sprint. This started with needing my passport; I already had an appointment to get it, but not until just after the sprint (I was getting it originally for use to attend Akademy!). So I had to go down and spend the entire day at the passport offices, to ask for it to be issued expedited - which thankfully I got! Then was a whirlwind of things like...

• Research (do I need a visa? what can I/can't I bring? what should I bring? Is there any potential issues bringing my meds? (yes), travel insurance, mobile service, etc)
• Booking travel & lodging, and trying to do so at a semi-reasonable price while booking last minute
• Buying supplies for travel (toothbrush, laptop bag, water bottle, travel umbrella, climate appropriate clothing (we just had snow/ice storms in Canada before I left, and it is still getting down near freezing at night!), etc, etc)

Though I will say it is pretty lucky I had been casually learning German for the fun of it the past couple years. I definitely need more speaking practice though!

I am very happy I managed to attend, but generally I would not recommend trying to arrange one's first international travel with only several day's notice haha! 😂

Yeah, that's right.. first. I've rarely been away from my hometown before, and I've actually never left my native timezone previously! So travelling to the other side of the planet was a bit of a change, to say the least. The travel was more than I expected: ~2 hr bus ride to the airport, waiting for hours to get on the plane, ~10 hrs across the ocean, ~2 hr layover, ~1 hr additional to Graz, then ~1.5 hrs figuring out the train/tram from the airport to the venue (I had to ask for help figuring out how to get to the train station).

With all of this, the jetlag, as well as working 9 to 10 hour days I was feeling incredibly exhausted to put it mildly. Then I thought I was having a massive attack of allergies (I did just come from the land of ice and snow to a place where everything is green and blooming after all…), alas sadly I did catch a cold or something quite nasty that I am still trying to shake off. 😷🤧🤒😴

I learned a whole lot about travelling, there are a bunch of things I would do differently, and I am confident that my next trip will go much more smoothly as a result!

I am so glad that I got to attend, because we got some great work done and I met lovely, friendly people. It was a very nice atmosphere, and everyone was very kind and welcoming. It is really good to be able to put faces to the names of people I've been working with for years in some cases!

I am really looking forward to seeing everyone again at Akademy~ 🎉 Tschüss!