Plasma Next is pretty darn stable

Today I wanted to share some of my experiences with using Plasma Next for the past couple of weeks. Since I had been working on some frameworks development (just a small bit here and there), I thought I'd try running Plasma Next a couple of weeks ago to see how things were coming along and to be able to work on and test some things I helped with back in KDE 4.0 days.

I have to say I'm very impressed with the stability.  I hit two issues since then, and one of the issues has been fixed. The issue I hit that has already been fixed was a crash in yakuake or konsole when closing a tab that caused the whole application to crash. I looked into the Konsole codebase with Eike Hein's guidance, but Argonel ultimately found the best patch to fix the problem.
The second issue I hit with Plasma Next has to do with disconnecting and reconnecting an external monitor. I don't do that very often at all, but when I tried last weekend I got a variety of issues. For example sometimes when disconnecting Plasma (or maybe KSmServer?) crashes and I am taken back to the sddm login screen. Other times when connecting my external screen my panel ends up floating on the external monitor but nothing on it is clickable.

I just realized this post probably sounds like a rant or complaining about Plasma Next, but that's not what I intended at all. The main point I wanted to get across is that I haven't used Plasma more than once in the past 2 weeks since Plasma Next is stable enough for my usage.

Now for the obligatory desktop screenshot:

So good job to all the people that have worked on this new iteration of the Plasma Desktop.

P.S. One other minor thing I miss from plasma is the ability to show multiple timezone's times in the clock's tooltip. I'll see if I can get that fixed though. :)

Qt5/KDE Frameworks porting steps

As I said in my last post I would elaborate about how porting of libkeduvocdocument (name pending currently) from Qt4 and kdelibs4 to Qt5 and KDE Frameworks happened.

Commits can be seen here but it went like this:
1. Change CMakeLists.txt to look for frameworks and Qt5 packages.
2. Try to build, fix any errors. All while checking the Porting Notes.
3. Port away from deprecated methods.
4. Port away from kdelibs4support.

I forget which part of the above involved each of these, but this is what was changed:
Ported from KUrl to QUrl.
Ported from KStandardDirs to QStandardPaths
Ported from KGlobal::locale() to QLocale
Ported away from other deprecated methods and classes.

So rinse and repeat until it's in a state where you are happy with it.
Note that step 4 above isn't strictly necessary, and is similar to porting Qt4 applications away from Qt3Support (Some kde4 applicationss never were ported away from Qt3Support sadly...) Yes KMouth, I'm looking at you.

Libkeduvocdocument Qt5/KDE Frameworks port

Hello all. Yes I'm still alive. Yes I'm still doing KDE stuff as I find time or make time. I'll report in the next few posts about what is happening and where we are going.

One of the things that happened recently was the port of libkeduvocdocument to Qt5 and frameworks. Vishesh started the effort, and I completed it with some review by Aleix Pol. It was decided as documented here that since libkdeedu only contains libkeduvocdocument it should be split up. Upon further investigation we realized that the other parts of libkdeedu are not used anymore. Besides the icons subfolder that are still looking for a home, the rest of the git repo is only libkeduvocdocument related, so we decided to just rename the git repository for the frameworks and going forward release. So the libkdeedu git repository holds the kde sc 4 codebase, while the libkeduvocdocument git repo holds the qt5 and frameworks based code. Both contain the history so all history is preserved. 

I'll write next time about the steps taken to port the library to Qt5 and KDE Frameworks.