This week Jonathan and Rob chat with Nate Graham about KDE! Why did Nate walk away from Apple, and how did he find Linux and KDE? And what does he see coming next? Watch to find out!
kde11 Articles
Now KDE Users Will Get Easy Virtual Machine Management, Too
If you work with virtual machines, perhaps to spin up a clean OS install for testing, historically you have either bitten the bullet and used one of the commercial options, or spent time getting your hands dirty with something open source. Over recent years that has changed, with the arrival of open source graphical applications for effortless VM usage. We’ve used GNOME Boxes here to make our lives a lot easier. Now KDE are also joining the party with Karton, a project which will deliver what looks very similar to Boxes in the KDE desktop.
The news comes in a post from Derek Lin, and shows us what work has already been done as well as a roadmap for future work. At the moment it’s in no way production ready and it only works with QEMU, but it can generate new VMs, run them, and capture their screens to a desktop window. Having no wish to join in any Linux desktop holy wars we look forward to seeing this piece of software progress, as it’s a Google Summer Of Code project we hope there will be plenty more to see shortly.
Still using the commercial option? You can move to open source too!
FLOSS Weekly Episode 826: Fedora 42 And KDE
This week, Jonathan Bennett chats with Neal Gompa about Fedora 42 and KDE! What’s new, what’s coming, and why is flagship status such a big deal?
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User Beware: The Fine Line Between Content And Code
Everyone loves themes. Doesn’t matter if it’s a text editor or a smart display in the kitchen, we want to be able to easily customize its look and feel to our liking. When setting up a new device or piece of software, playing around with the available themes may be one of the first things you do without giving it much thought. After all, it’s not like picking the wrong one is going to do something crazy like silently delete all the files on your computer, right?
Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened a few days ago to [JeansenVaars] while trying out a Plasma Global Theme from the KDE Store. According to their Reddit post, shortly after installing the “Gray Layout” theme for the popular Linux graphical environment, the system started behaving oddly and then prompted for a root password. Realizing something didn’t seem right they declined, but at that point, it was already too late for all of the personal files in their home directory.
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FLOSS Weekly Episode 771: Kalpa — Because Nobody Knows What Hysteresis Is
This week, Jonathan Bennett and Dan Lynch talk with Shawn W Dunn about openSUSE Kalpa, the atomic version of openSUSE Tumbleweed, with a KDE twist. What exactly do we mean by an Atomic desktop? Is ALP going to replace openSUSE Tumbleweed? Are snaps coming to Kalpa?
Shawn gives us the rundown of all the above, and what’s holding back a stable release of Kalpa, what’s up with Project Greybeard, and why Kalpa really doesn’t need a firewall.
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FLOSS Weekly Episode 763: Fedora Fixes Everything
This week Jonathan Bennett and Dan Lynch talk once again with Neal Gompa of Fedora, CentOS, openSUSE and more. This time the focus is Fedora, with sprinklings of Immutable Linux, KDE 6, and the new Linux stack of Pipewire, Portals, and Wayland. Neal gives us a rundown of what exactly makes Fedora Atomic so interesting, and why you probably don’t want it running on your desktop. But in a computer lab, or on a public machine? Fedora Atomic might be exactly what you need.
Up next there’s Pipewire, the userspace sound server that replaces Pulseaudio and Jack. Should we think of Pipewire as Jack 3.0? And what’s the secret to getting really reliable low-latency performance for Pipewire in Fedora? It might not be what you expect.
There’s a popular rant online, that Wayland breaks everything. And for years, that’s been a relatively accurate statement, in that Wayland hasn’t been ready for prime-time. Fedora 40 has gone all in on the belief that Wayland’s time has come, with KDE and Gnome no longer having an X11 native option. It’s Wayland all the way. And as one that has run Rawhide, I can say that the future there is bright. Literally, if you have an HDR capable monitor.
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Linux Fu: Easy Widgets
Here’s a scenario. You have a microcontroller that reads a number of items — temperatures, pressures, whatever — and you want to have a display for your Linux desktop that sits on the panel and shows you the status. If you click on it, you get expanded status and can even issue some commands. Most desktops support the notion of widgets, but developing them is a real pain, right? And even if you develop one for KDE, what about the people using Gnome?
Turns out there is an easy answer and it was apparently inspired by, of all things, a tool from the Mac world. That tool was called BitBar (now XBar). That program places a widget on your menu bar that can display anything you want. You can write any kind of program you like — shell script, C, whatever. The output printed from the program controls what appears on the widget using a simple markup-like language.
That’s fine for the Mac, but what about Linux? If you use Gnome, there is a very similar project called Argos. It is largely compatible with XBar, although there are a few things that it adds that are specific to it. If you use KDE (like I do) then you’ll want Kargos, which is more or less a port of Argos and adds a few things of its own.
Good News, Bad News
The good news is that, in theory, you could write a script that would run under all three systems. The bad news is that each has its own differences and quirks. Obviously, too, if you use a complied program that could pose a problem on the Mac unless you recompile.
