 Hello and welcome to yet another episode of what would you do if you were a KDE dictator? That is, if you could decide over anything that happens over at KDE, like any choice, any merge request, whether to accept it or not, anything. So this was actually a question that was asked in the subreddit of KDE, because of course I cannot know your answer and do a video about that, but I can know the answers that has already been given, so let's go through them. I'll talk about firstly all the answers that completely missed the question, in my opinion. Then I'm going to talk about the answers that do address the question, however, that I feel are terrible ideas. And then we go talk about all the ideas that could be actually interesting to apply just in case you were to become a KDE dictator. So we start off with something that in my opinion completely misses the question, and that is a giant list of feature requests that are incredibly complex. So we've got a new theming system, which to be clear is not like a bad idea inherently, it's just, you know, super complex. And on top of that, we have k-parts in plasmoids, also quite complex. Windows tabs, which was a feature, but then it was, you know, not ported to the latest version of KDE Plasma, because it was super complex to maintain. There wasn't anybody that was actually able to do that. And then Resurrect Empathy, also incredibly complex. And then Ask Telegram for Founding, that is, I can just tell you that is not going to work. But the question is, if you were a KDE dictator, what would you like change like in policies, in how we do things, not, I would just do everything that's so complex that people weren't able to do before? Because, you know, there's a reason we don't have that kind of stuff. And it's extremely complex. It takes time and effort. It's not like we haven't even tried. By the way, the list actually goes on and talks about making Falcon a top priority with what resources after you've put them to everything else. And this is the best Resurrect Carbon, which de facto is a pretty dead SVG application of KDE, and make it the de facto tool for designing SVGS. I don't even know how to address that. Like, do you know, like the insane amount of work that is needed to take something that is currently used by nobody, let's be honest, and make that the de facto tool for SVG is like the amount of work that would be required is insane. And then there's like, do something with aggregator and then also fix as DDM. I guess if we are at it, we can just do whatever. And by the way, reading from the comments, it seems like this person does not want pensers people to rely solely on Mozilla, which makes sense. Actually, however, this kind of implies that with make Falcon top priority, he means that Falcon should have its own browser engine because the alternative is to have just another browser that uses under the hood the same engine as Chromium, which I don't see how that is like any better than relying on Mozilla, honestly, like you either rely on Mozilla right now or you rely on Chromium. So do you want Katie to do its own browser engine? That is somehow even harder. OK, so let's just switch to the next one. This person says that he would step down as a dictator, fair enough, but you really don't get the point of dictatorship. So you don't just step down. You try to, you know, stay in power as long as possible, destroy the project rather than give it to anybody else. That's how dictatorship works. They're bad things. So this really I'm just kidding, obviously, but we also have another feature request, which is bring back tabbed windows again, which again, in a inherently is not a bad feature request is that if you become a dictator and you're only and the only thing you say is, please do that one feature, which is super complex and forget about everything else, like that's not going to work in here. We are expecting a full dictatorship plan and those are coming. Finally, in this category, we have sent everybody who's not maintaining their widgets into yet this guy gets the vibes of a dictatorship. I like him. I like him. Let's get into more serious stuff. That is all the comments that actually answer the question, in my opinion, and that do so in a not so good way. Firstly, we have the request to make a full feature phrase, like for everything, until somebody documents Kaywin theming code. This is the kind of things that looks like it's going to kill the project. But even said that, I try to actually understand what it means by Kaywin theming code, because Kaywin itself doesn't do that much theming. I guess he's talking about themes in general, or maybe themes that have something to do with Kaywin, such as, you know, doing blur, that kind of stuff. Now, it's not that bad documented as in my seems to say, but maybe I'm missing the point. Like if you're doing a plasma theme, there are a lot of things that you can say in the plasma theme file to control, you know, the blur, the contrast effect, this kind of things. And also, if you're doing an application, you can do a cue style. And maybe you're doing a window decoration that is a very Kaywin-esque thing. So maybe it's about that. But all of these things are not that badly documented. Maybe decorations are a bit less, but you do have documentation on how to deal with this kind of things. And weird enough, it says also make blur native. And that really confuses me because blur is native. Kaywin has a function to do blur out of the box, like it's implemented in Kaywin. And the cool thing is that we do use it by default for the plasma theme. We do have blur out of the box. So I'm really confused here. Maybe he means that we should implement blur out of the box for applications where we usually don't use blur. I guess that's what he's trying to say. I just really got confused here. Then we have the typical request that everybody does, which is a full feature phrase to fix bugs. And I've done an entire video addressing that. It's a bad idea, guys. It engards. Guys, it's a bad idea for a variety of reasons. First of all, you really think that, you know, you use KDE and you're going to be happy with KDE even if there are no more features and it's just bug fixing. I respect that, but a lot of people don't work this way. If we go for an entire year, which is three releases of KDE without any new feature at all, that is going to get people worried, upset. And they would start spreading, you know, FUD. They would start saying, oh, no, is KDE dying? You would start to see these click baited titles. And people would actually find it very hard to be excited about KDE because take 5.25 as an example. That was a super cool release with a lot of new functions that were actually needed, like touchpad gestures. We actually need that. A new overview that was very much needed. A lot of refactorings that brought in new features. If we didn't do any of that for an entire year, people would stop being excited about KDE and less people would switch to KDE. I can tell you that. And it's not just that, but it wouldn't even work from a technical point of view. You literally cannot just go ahead and say, OK, stop the features. That's not going to work. I know you're a dictator. You can say we're not going to accept features, but people are still going to write new features and not just people inside of KDE that you can control since you're a dictator, but people outside of KDE usually do new features and then send merge requests to KDE. And yes, you can just say, no, we are not going to accept that. But for an entire year, it's going to be very hard to justify it. And at the end, after one year, you're going to get hundreds of merge requests for everything that was supposed to land before that during that year and that hadn't. So you're going to get a lot of bugs from the very first day you stop this feature freeze. It's not going to work. OK, so this one, we need to modernize KDE. OK, no features or even bug fixes. That's quite a feature freeze. OK, risky, but let's see. I still might be with you on the updating depths, but then you say migrate everything to QT quick. OK, you're you're trying to kill KDE. So migrating everything to QT to QT quick would either take years for five years, maybe more or it's infeasible, one of the two. And if you're telling me that you're not going to accept any feature request or bug fix until everything is ported to QT quick, that means that KDE will stay like it is right now, except for the porting for years to come. That's going to kill the project. That's going to kill all the motivation, all the excitement. That's going to kill everything. No, no, no, no. Sorry, that's not going to work. Good try, but no, no. Also update to the latest QT. OK, it's easy if you need to switch from five dot 12 to five dot 15. But if you need to switch from five to six, well, that's also quite a transition that takes months, if not again, years. So that would just add to the four to five years I already said to port everything to QT quick. So tough, very tough. OK, an interesting idea here. Audit the KDE Store. So I thought about it and there are two options. Either you're telling me, audit only the new things that are proposed and OK, very hard. You would need to hire somebody to do that full time because lots of things are proposed to the K Store. But I guess it could be feasible. But if you're telling me, let's audit everything on the KDE Store, everything that is currently on the KDE Store. That's not going to happen. Like that would require an insane amount of work. Like, again, we're talking years. So no, that's not going to happen. I guess we could talk about it if it's just for new things. But that kind of defeats the point. If you only have the new stuff audited, certified, and then the old stuff, you know, it's still there and it's not certified. I guess you could start certifying from the most downloaded stuff to the least downloaded stuff. But I guess you could create a complex system where some of the things that get audited gets like a badge and says this is verified. We could talk about that, but you really we really need to work on this proposal because as it is now, yeah, it needs work. This one is interesting. Give a raise to all KDE developers. Now, of course, I'm not inherently against this. Even though I'm not a KDE developer. Keep in mind that KDE developers usually aren't hired by KDE. Right now, I don't think there's any KDE, maybe one KDE developer hired by KDE. There are some employees, but those most they mostly work on like promotion, documentation, legal stuff. But yeah, still, it makes sense to give them a raise. Now, here's the thing. KDE doesn't have like that much money. So if giving a raise would mean either, you know, you would have to cut costs somewhere. So you either fire somebody or you stop offering services like stop paying tickets for people who attend like developer sprints. And that would be a real pity because it's very useful for the KDE to be able to pay expenses to actually make developers go into places to talk to other developers that's extremely useful. So OK, but how? Yes, let's pay more developers. How? Integrate, let the features to the plasma panels. So I've worked a lot on the plasma panels, I think, and the person that currently does most work regarding the panel, maybe. And please don't. Please don't make me do it. That would honestly be horrible for various reasons. Firstly, there is LATEDOCK. LATEDOCK is actually not bad. And even, you know, even if it was, it would be easier to just maintain LATEDOCK instead of porting everything from LATEDOCK to plasma panels. That would be so much easier. It's so much work to reimplement everything with a different idea in mind. It's not just like you can copy paste. You have to actually put in the work to redo the stuff and it's already LATEDOCK. Just pay somebody to work on LATEDOCK at this point. Please don't make the plasma panels terribly complex because they are supposed to be simple. Like users start off their OS. Maybe they don't know about plasma so much yet. They they try to see what they can customize. They shouldn't be greeted with something that is as complex as LATEDOCK, which really is meant for power users who know how to set up an app like LATEDOCK. So please, please don't, don't, please. We have yet another feature-freeze request. And this one also comes with the idea of cleanup bugzilla. So, yes, it's true that we have bugs since KD4. But here's the thing. Lots of those bugs, most of those bugs are still open. Like they are still valid bug robots. You cannot just clean them out. You would have to actually fix them. And usually, if you have a bug report that hasn't been fixed since KD4, it's because, hear me out, it's super complex to fix and nobody has the time or skills to do that. So, yes, you could say me, OK, let's clean up bugzilla by, you know, actually fixing bugs because that's really the only way to clean up bugzilla a lot. And at this point, I would ask you how because we are already trying to do that. We are already very much focused on fixing bugs. We are trying. So what should we change, actually, to clean up bugzilla from the bugs? Do we have like proposals? It's a bit too vague to just say, you know, solve all the bugs. Just do that. Go ahead. How? Also, some of the things here don't make any sense at all. Say so, like switching from patchwork to real bug fixing with testing. I could do an entire video about testing if you want to. But seeing that we should do switch from doing patchwork to real bug fixing. How do I say this? This sounds like an insult. You're just doing patchwork instead of trying actually to fix stuff. No, no, we are actually trying to do real bug fixing with testing. It's just that, you know, things are complex and it's easy to say, OK, let's test, like, I don't know, a framework. We have tests for frameworks. But if you have to test, I don't know, an entire desktop, which is UI. Then you have to you have to have some sort of program that finds the element automatically clicks on them, checks to see, like, if you have a reference screenshot, then you take a screenshot to compare the screenshot to that reference. That sort of stuff. It's super complex tooling to create to maintain. We kind of have some of that thanks to OpenSusa. There's some kitty testing done like this. But it also says that kitty is following an agile, agile, I don't know, I'd pronounce methodology with one week's prints. No, no, no, no, most of the work done in kitty is not done in sprints, as far as I'm aware. Like, the vast majority of things I see are implemented by developers in their own room, and then we chat on chats and merge requests. There's no clear, like, sprints and stuff. And when they are, they are a bit rarer about something very specific. And I don't know what else to say, because I've actually never been in a sprint and never had this chance. I was at the academy, but never at a sprint. So I'm not sold on this. Redesign everything, again, people. Yes, you're a dictator. Fine, you're not omnipotent. That's in English. You cannot just do anything and it magically happens. Redesign everything, going from icons to everything. Do you know how much work that is? Do you know how many years? Like, I think people sometimes very much underestimate the amount of work that something as big as a desktop is, like, takes to redesign everything. I mean, I don't know, give me a plan. How would you even address this? I have no idea if somebody made me the kiddie dictator at the sole request that I find a way to redesign everything. The iconic, I don't know. This one is just beautiful. We could. Sorry, I'm just laughing too much. We could hear me out, create a new version of KDE, taking off half of the options, like half of them, like that. And by doing that, I guess reaching 50 percent more stability, which raises a lot of questions like, first of all, how do you measure stability and also do you really think that just by taking off options you'll get 50 percent more stability? That's not how it works, believe me. And then just let people vote for which version they prefer. This sounds, I'm going to tell you, like a plot of an anime. You know, those anime you watch online that have some crazy plots that sounds like super cool and you would like, you're like, this would never actually work, but it sounds so cool. Like, I would so much want to try this. Just let's do KDE Plasma Lite and we take off half of the features. Like we have half of the stuff. Boom. And then we just release it and say, OK, now let's do a vote. I have no idea how, because we have to make sure, you know, that it's fair each person can only vote one time. That would be kind of complex, but whatever. Let's just do a vote and then we decide which version of KDE Plasma to kill. That's that's so much an anime. I'm going to watch that. And finally, we just cannot avoid the let's just revert everything that has been done after KDE 3. I mean, I mean, sure, sure. That's also an anime that I would watch, like watch the lives of the KDE developers who spent years and years implementing stuff. Watch all of the work be thrown away after this guy becomes dictator and I would watch that. I would watch that. OK, so congratulations. You actually made it to the interesting part of the video, which is the good ideas that I found in this thread that was quite a task. I think it's already been like twenty two minutes, but we got there. Here are the good ideas. So first of all, an overview that includes activities, OK, a bit of a feature request, but it's not a bad idea and we can do that. And in fact, if you see mockups for the overview, usually you do have activities as well there and I am with you. Let's do this. Of course, it takes time and skill to actually implement this, which is why it hasn't been done before. But sure, if you're a dictator, you can just go to Katie Plasma developer who's doing something else and, you know, make him implement this. I'm I'm fine. Let's do this. More full time stuff with a clear plan, designers and documentations. This comment is very interesting, covers a lot of stuff. It's very risky and not sold one hundred percent, but it's not a bad proposal. Like we could think about it, like we could discuss it at least. Then there is Improving Baloo, which I thought was a bit of a weird pick. Like you have the whole KDE and as a dictator, you choose to focus on KDE on Baloo, but it's actually well written like the comment you can see the reasoning behind it. And I mean, why not? Baloo does have some issues. I don't fully agree with the idea of exposing too much to the user. This like Baloo should kind of be an implementation detail, but it's a good idea nonetheless. Touch screen support was actually a goal. Touch screen support was actually proposed as a goal, which was pretty cool. Sadly, it didn't get voted. Nonetheless, we saw a lot of improvements in the latest years, which is so cool. So that was very nice. But yeah, I totally agree. I do think that KDE Plasma should improve in its touch screen capabilities. Of course, the question is at the expenses of what? Because we have a limited amount of time to spend developing. Also, a nice idea with a beer. Sure, why not? More effort into advertising existing features to let people know that those exist. This is basically, I think, taken from the video from Nick, on which I also did a video. And I mean, it's not a bad idea. Like, we could totally do that. We probably should, of course, again, next time. So you would have to sacrifice something else to do this. But if you are a dictator, I would be with you in this idea. Yeah, simplify the project by dropping features and apps. Super controversial as soon as you start saying what those features and apps are, because it's very easy to say, let's remove some features and apps because people that hear you always think, ah, yes, those features and apps I don't use. And then when you actually start seeing which features and apps, people realize, oh, wait, I use that and they get angry. But yeah, I mean, I'm not necessarily against it at all. Actually, so yeah, you've got to be more specific. You've got to list what features and what apps. And then that will start a conversation, a very heated one. But sure, sure, why not? A web browser that does everything like the description covers everything. And that honestly was just conqueror. Do you know about conqueror? It did basically everything, not what you're asking for, but you're asking for like a more modern version of conqueror. And I don't know how to pronounce conqueror, so sorry about that. But I'm with you, like I liked the idea and never used it a lot. But, you know, it's kind of dead at this point. So yeah, I mean, you know, why not? Why not? Of course, it's a lot of work. But it's, I would say, within the realm of possible. I think that out of the box is more blurry and transparent. You know what? I'm with you. I don't have anything to say. I actually am a big fan of blurry transparent themes. And in fact, I have done merge requests to make the default Katie Plasma theme more blurry and transparent. So you can thank me. You can I would make you a happy dictator, but, you know, I'm I'm not like there are other developers who disagree. So, you know, and also there are a lot of technical details to address if we want to do this, but we could like sort them out. Refactor or the shortcuts? Yes, I'm with you, actually. Yeah, I totally agree that a lot of shortcuts on Katie by default are incorrect, in my opinion. As an example, the one that makes me most upset is Metatab. If you press Metatab, that's going to be the activity switcher. And hear me out. Metatab is actually a super important shortcut. And usually if you take like Windows as an example, Metatab that opens up how do they call the virtual desktop spew, I don't know, like open applications. That's very useful because it's a very important shortcut and they give it a very important meaning. Activity switcher on the other hand, not that many people use the activity switcher, basically anybody nowadays. So I would say that it would be fine if we made the activity switcher something less important, like, I don't know, Meta shipped tab and let's keep Metatab for something important. That's my take. But you also have some proposals like switching K-Runner to Meta space and then the spotlight inside of applications, applications to control space. That's a very good idea. I'm I'm with you. It's a very well written proposal. Why not make Katie ready for enterprise usage with stuff like being able to lock down certain components. This is kind of what Kiosk was meant to address. But not many know about Kiosk have never actually used it. I think it's not very well documented. I could be wrong, though. And in general, I do agree. These are very good proposals and things that would actually improve Katie for enterprise usage, which is probably important. So yeah, good one. Last one, having unofficial layouts that mimic other platforms. This was actually proposed by Nate. It turned out to be a bit controversial. So it was shut down, eventually. But it was a proposal. I don't see honestly why it shouldn't be accepted at all. You know, all of these are good proposals, not necessarily something that I would implement immediately, but something that we could discuss and that we could make something very useful out of it. The previous ones, in my opinion, of course, I'm just one person, but not so much. Now, of course, at the end, this is just a mindless third experiment. There's not such thing as a Katie dictator. There you cannot have Katie dictator, thankfully, that would be terrible. But, you know, it's still a good idea to discuss between users and developers what should be the future of Katie, really, because what we're actually talking about is what should Katie do to make their users appear. And some of the things are reasonable requests that we can act on. Some of them are not. And we can try to explain why. OK, I was a bit too aggressive in this video, but nonetheless, you can get the idea of why I do think that some of the things are not feasible. So that is the actual meaning to all of this. So thanks for following. And by the way, you can donate to me because, again, I'm not hired by Katie. And if you want to make Katie better, then maybe one thing is become my dictator and give me more. I don't know. I don't know. You can donate to me. I'll just say that. Thanks very much for following and see you in a couple of days, I guess.