 So, how was Plasma 6, did you...? Well, yeah, they are changing. I'm not entirely sure if it's better or worse yet. Hi everybody, and can you very quickly present yourself to say what you do? Hi, my name is Michael. I'm a content creator, just like Nico. I'm not working for the Plasma team or for KD. And I'm here to ask some questions about the new and upcoming release of Plasma. Let's find out what all the fuss is about. Oh, but there's a reason for it. It's gonna be good. It's gonna be good, hopefully. Hopefully. What sparked this video for me is I saw your video regarding Plasma, the latest one, and I actually went through it to see... I actually saw a lot of actionable feedback about it. I do have to say that I did watch it when it came out and now I completely forgot what it was about. Do you have a very quick summary about what it said, so if anybody missed it? Okay, so if I remember correctly, because it's been a while, yeah, I was talking about Plasma and the things that it does way better than the Thinknome does currently. Mostly about feature completeness in terms of new features. There's a blue refresh rate, fractional scaling and all that. A customization, of course. It's a huge part. And in general, how Plasma keeps itself more up-to-date than Thinknome does, or at least it seems to do so. And yeah, I did switch my daily rig over to Plasma because exactly of the reason, because I like playing games, I like to try out new things. And I'm trying to build a personal desktop environment for myself, what I really like. Yeah, I love how the summary is extremely positive and pins Plasma in a very positive light. I do remember some criticism as well. And I also saw, like, maybe it was a tweet or on Mastern that you said that the more you customize Plasma, the more it gets similar to GNOME, because that's the work. Same happens for me, actually. I do really enjoy the GNOME workflow, apparently. So we're apparently very close in that aspect as well. So if you have any Plasma related question. Yeah, to be honest, before we start off, I did try out Plasma 6 already in KD and Neon. And I gotta say, I love the new overview. It's actually insane what you pulled off. Speaking directly. I'm very happy to know that. No, it's really impressive. Yeah, it's not quite the same as GNOME, but it's very powerful in its own way. Like, I love the... I'm not sure how it's called. Like, when you cycle through it and you see, like, all of the desktops and... The grid view? Oh, the grid view, yeah. In the grid view, like, that is something that I really like when I have a lot of windows open. And... I am very happy to hear that. And really my idea there was just copying GNOME, because what they're doing is very good, in my opinion. I also tried for a certain amount of time to map that overview effect to the meta key on my laptop to see how it was. The main difference, of course, is that I don't have any way to launch applications in that. There's the search, but of course you don't have all the applications on the bottom, like GNOME does, which is cooler. But I was very happy that I managed to actually implement that. So I'm proud. That's very... Yeah, it's very good. But like you just said, the launching of applications is a bit tedious. But I guess it makes sense if you have several windows or several desktops open, then it's kind of hard to access like a sort of panel or something. And the thing is that Plasma is extremely modular and you can change everything. So just the idea of implementing something like a bottom bar to launch your applications in the overview, then we have to start thinking about, do we have like a widget in there, like it's on the panel, or do we do something custom? Because if it's a widget, then probably the user should be able to change it, like install third party widgets to replace it. So as soon as you start allowing this, a lot of complexity ramps up. So we just decided to keep it simple for now. But there are like ideas and designs on how to actually insert some of that stuff in the overview as well. Yeah, I suppose it's very challenging in that regard, especially customization. If you give the user too much power, then it tends to break way more frequent, I guess. Yeah, code-wise it makes our life very difficult. So how was Plasma 6? Did it work? It worked. So I didn't try it out on bare metal, but I ran it on my Proxmox server with everything GPU accelerated that was possible. So to get the basically bare bones experience, I guess. No, like initially impressions are really good. And I love the new floating panel. I'm not sure what it is exactly, but something about it makes it feel way more modern, even though the old Plasma panel was also very nice looking. No, it's interesting. I also took a look at the new settings, which were, yeah, they are changing. I'm not entirely sure if it's better or worse yet. Well, I guess it still takes some time to figure that out. Yeah, that's true. I'm not sure. So we spent a lot of time actually discussing how to put the categories in a way that makes sense for the user and such. And it's not like 100% complete because some technical reasons, obviously. I'm sort of happy about the categories. The only thing I'm not sold about is the order they are inserted, because when we discussed all of this, I thought we were just putting them in random order, but that was actually the agreed upon one. So I was a bit confused about that. But generally speaking, they are fine. And I do think that we made the search button in system settings much more powerful. So if you need to find something that compensates a bit the amount of options that we have to provide in system settings. So, yeah, one thing, yeah, something comes to mind. I was going through the settings and what I did find, and I've been noticed before was a grid view. Is there a reason on why this was removed in Plasma 6? Yeah, so the grid view is a very early leaked of the past. So it is very old. And what we've been trying to do, are you familiar with the difference between Qt Widgets and QML? I don't think so, no. Okay, so basically, most of the older, we could say, Qt Applications are written all in C++ through Qt Widgets. Qt is the framework, the library that we use to actually draw anything on the screen. And previously, it was through Qt Widgets, so all C++. But for the more modern applications, we could say we now instead use QML, which is a declarative programming language that uses JavaScript inside of it. And it is much, much easier to actually write an interface in it compared to Qt Widgets, in my personal opinion, but we are switching to it. So I think it's not just me. But so right now, we have a lot of applications done in Qt Widgets, like Dolphin, like GwentView. And then we've also QML applications like Discover, like the new System Monitor. And slowly, some applications are switching from one to the other. Other applications like Dolphin probably are staying with Qt Widgets due to the complexity. And System Settings is very weird because currently it's half Qt Widgets and half QML, because some parts of System Settings have been ported over to QML. And our end goal is to have eventually all of System Settings in QML. Of course, the grid view that you found was very old. It was Qt Widgets only, and we were trying to get rid of it. And we would have done that much earlier. If it wasn't that apparently accessibility works much better in it. So there's one distro. I don't remember which one, which still uses it as a default, because the accessibility is better compared to the sidebar. But eventually for Plasma 6, we just decided to finally get rid of it, because we just prefer to have everything over QML with the design that we are going towards. So that is the future of System Settings. Quite interesting, because I found that, like I don't like a grid view to be clear. I prefer the current style, but I think from my personal experience working in IIT support that the grid view makes sense for some. If it should be a default or not, that's up for discussion. But if no one wants to use it anyway, then it doesn't really make sense. We are trying to move away from it. Also, it's a bit harder to maintain two different main views at the same time. We prefer to just have one that we think is the better one, in our opinion, and focus on improving that. I hope that makes sense. No, of course. Speaking of what makes sense and kind of making everything in the same style, there are still a lot of KDE applications, I guess mainly old ones that seem to kind of don't comply to the new guidelines. I was wondering, I didn't look it up, how old are the current guidelines? They can't be older than Plasma 5, I guess. The thing is, which guidelines are you referring to? The general hot host is called KDE Plasma. We do have human interface guidelines. Yeah, I think I mean those. Hold on. That's a very complex topic. There are some issues there. Part of those issues are my fault as well. The human interface guidelines, in my opinion, right now are very weak and quite useless in terms of KDE development, regardless of the field like we're developing in. When I do UI work, I never look at them and I barely even ever consider them. So, and that said, other people are maintaining them and trying to keep them up to date. I feel like they don't say a lot that is very useful and tells us how to design stuff. It's very basic stuff and colors, fonts. I feel like it's a weaker part of KDE currently, not having strong guidelines that actually tell you how to build your interface, which means that much of KDE is quite inconsistent with other parts of KDE. But it's very difficult to actually try to go ahead and solve that. Now, we did make an explicit effort towards that. I've been for three years the Gold Champion for consistency at KDE. The design now, I think, is much more consistent compared to some years ago. I think just a few days ago, one very cool thing that another developer, Carl Schoen, did, is that they ported the general look of the window of the new KML application to the older... older isn't fear, but to the QT widgets one. So now the interface is a bit more consistent and slowly we're making progress towards that. But it's very difficult when half of your applications are in one programming language, half of them are in a different programming language. So it's not easy. But I do understand where you're coming from and the guidelines should be improved generally speaking. I don't know how many maintainers are in comparison to KDE, but I believe that the whole philosophy on how everything is built is completely different. And I don't want to get too close to someone, but it feels me like the KDE Plasma just implements a lot of stuff, not necessarily as fast as possible, but way faster. And it doesn't really pay attention to any... Like you said, like it don't really pay attention to any guidelines. And I believe that that's one of Plasma's strengths, even though it's also one of its weaknesses. And striking a good balance is necessary in that regard. Yeah, it's one of the differences between the projects. And it's hard for our KDE developers to try to find a balance between, you know, being super powerful, implementing everything, and actually stopping to fix bugs and make sure everything is stable. It is something that we've been focusing on a lot in the past few years, trying to make the default out of the box Plasma experience much more refined and stable, getting closer to agnomic experience, but still retaining all the advantages of being customizable and everything, obviously. Yeah, I think it pays off. Like this team deck kind of shows that GNOME is not really the best choice anymore for... Or it seemingly isn't by default. And a lot of developers of distributions are really considering moving away from GNOME in some sort of way, because it's development pacing. It's basically the Debian of desktop environments. So a bit slower, a bit more reliable, I guess. That's not really true, but in... I feel like a bit it here. It is a bit more reliable, I think. It might be very subjective. Yeah, it is subjective. So DaVinci Resolve crashes a lot more on GNOME, and I don't think... No, it didn't ever crash in Plasma yet. That's really good. Yeah, and that's on DaVion, by the way. So I don't even know what's happening with GNOME there. That's great to hear. Yes, there are some projects that are using KD Plasma like out of the box very recently. The Steam Deck is probably the biggest one. And that was a pretty... A given changer, really, for a lot of us. As an example, I can tell you that currently I'm working part-time on developing KD Plasma, and my work is sponsored by Valve themselves, because they use KD Plasma, so they want KD Plasma to be good. So they sponsor some work regarding to KD Plasma, and I'm part of that. And there's many developers that are working on KD Plasma thanks to Valve. So it actually helps a lot to improve it. And that goes for distributions as well. And of course, we, as KD Plasma, are happy and want distributions to switch to KD Plasma. We are quite friendly, I think, generally speaking, towards GNOME. We don't really like to insult each other or anything, quite the opposite. We've done some nice collaborations in the past. Our main goal is not really to try to eat, but to try to do something. To try to eat GNOME's market share, but Windows and Macintosh. So that's our end goal. No, it's an absolute right approach. Speaking of myth, if I'm too harsh on a desktop environment, I guess that's just how I like to look at things. It's not how I actually mean them. Trying to bring in new ideas from different perspectives. What perspectives? And I believe it's somewhat working. I mean, I'm speaking to people who work at desktop environments. No, but in all seriousness, I was actually wondering, how does development at Plasma or for Plasma work? Like how do you work together with your colleagues? Maybe even friends? Yes, surely. Well, we mainly organize through a chat. So it's some telegram chats. And then the official chats are on matrix. So you can just join. They're actually public, so anybody can get in, see. Actually, people discussing development and everything. And that's the general discussion. And then of course, we have our GitLab repository. Then people do merge requests and then people comment on the merge request. So the usual stuff. We do have some meetings once in a while. So as an example for Plasma, there is one meeting every Monday. And sometimes we do it as a video chat. Sometimes we do it just in the chat. And that's it really. So there is no strict way to organize things that you have to do. It's just things that make it easier for volunteers. Because the vast majority of developers are volunteers to talk to each other. And that sort of stuff. So no really hard deadlines, I guess. You have your topics for the week. Let's say it or your features you want to implement. Then you'll get to it. And once it's done, it's done, basically. Yeah, the volunteers, it's not even like topics for the weeks. It's like they're volunteers. They do whatever they want. And everybody has different approaches and different ways to do things. Different deadlines. The only hard deadline really is when we publish a new version. And stuff has to be ready unless you want to do it in the next one. So of course, when you actually, if you're like a sponsor to work on KDPLasma with a different company, then that company is going to give you a bit more rules and organization. But if you're a volunteer, you can just do whatever. And most KDP developers are volunteers. Do you have a touch device personally? I'm not sure if you do, if you run Plasma on. I have multiple touch devices. Before you said that transplasma, I was going to take my phone. But okay, that doesn't run Plasma. I do have somewhere in my bag over there XPS, Dell XPS 13 developer edition laptop, which is touch screen. So I do test stuff with touch screens. And I also have the Steam Deck, which is also touch screen. So I have two of them. I wanted to also buy a touch screen monitor. But sadly, I didn't find one that I liked enough in my budget. So, but one day I will have one. I do love touch screen just a lot. Okay. I just wanted to know your just a plain opinion, no matter what it actually does. Four finger gestures. Do you like those or not? Because I find them tedious for some reason, I don't know. Touchpad or touch screen gestures? It depends. Sometimes it's the same. Yeah, that's a good question, actually. Sometimes it's the same. No, the typical ones that I use, it's the same on the touchpad and the touch screen. Yeah, currently they are the same. Because there are some touch screen gestures, I think in Gnomia, which are just very odd to use. And I was thinking, couldn't Plasma just keep it at three fingers and be done with it? Is there any considerations in that regard? Or the question is more like, what's your approach to usability in regards to custom devices? Like something, something weird? Yeah, so the thing is currently we are keeping the same gestures for touch screen and touchpad. Which are like three fingers up, three fingers down, left, right, four fingers up, down, left, and right. And then you have pinches and stuff. But the thing is, so firstly the main actions that we want to trigger through gestures are firstly a switching between virtual desktops. And I think almost all operating systems have like three fingers left and right to switch between virtual desktops. And then usually that gives you the ability to also do three fingers up and three fingers down to do different kind of things. However, in Katie Plasma, again customization, lots of things to think about, we have vertical desktops as well. And we cannot know whether the user is going to use vertical desktops, horizontal desktops, or agreed. So we need out of the box to provide gestures to switch in any direction for virtual desktops. So currently three fingers is up to switch desktop up, down to switch desktop down, left to switch desktop left, left and right to switch desktop right. And that already takes out all the three fingers gestures. So if we want to have any other kind of gesture like opening the overview or like the grid view, it has to be four fingers because the three fingers one are all in switching desktops. And because we cannot make any assumption on what the user desktop layout is going to be, we just have to provide them out of the box. And it's not like we can dynamically change the gestures depending on how you have virtual desktops because then nobody will actually remember them. So there are some considerations. And personally, I don't think that four fingers gestures are bad for touch pad. On touch screen, it's a bit worse, but Apple did five fingers gestures to close applications. So if they can do it, we can do it. Okay. So it's basically just more fingers for more features, essentially. Yeah. Instead of working, instead of, yeah, it's a bit tedious, I guess, to work around that in any other way. The best thing to have would be to be able to customize gestures that would be ideal. However, that takes a bit of time and skills to implement and nobody did it yet. We would like to have it. Speaking of gestures, that's actually, I'm trying to think of questions that haven't been asked before. Um, mouse, mouse keys and hotkeys. Currently, those don't work together. I believe it's because of the current hotkey backend. Is that correct? Like you cannot map mouse keys to the plasma hotkeys unless you do it through the desktop. Like mouse actions, I think it's called. What do you mean by desktop hotkeys? Uh, like the mouse actions, it's in the, I guess it's called the desktop settings. Like where you can scroll between desktops, where you can map the scroll wheel, or if you have more mouse buttons, then you can map those to certain actions on the desktop. But you cannot map mouse keys in the settings, like the default hotkeys. Uh, sir, I actually don't know about this topic. You cut me off guard here. Okay. I'm not sure. I would have to ask other developers. Sorry. Okay. Because like in GNOME, for example, you can scroll between desktops if you're like pressed a meta and you scroll through it. But I haven't found a way that I could configure as a similar way in emplasma because I cannot map the scroll wheel in the hotkeys. And I think that is a technical limitation. I'm not entirely sure anymore because like in Plasma 6, I think it changes or is it still the same system? I am not sure. I don't think it changes much. I just know that currently we got rid of K hotkeys in Wayland. Like mouse gestures, but those ones were like moving the mouse whilst pressing the middle button to activate a gesture. It was a weird thing. But other than that, I'm not sure. It's not a project I contribute a lot to, so I'm not sure about that. You cut me off guard. Yeah, I guess it's like the mouse actions in general are kind of hidden away in some sort of way because you don't find typical hotkeys in a desktop submenu. I think it's in the change wallpaper and then under actions. Yeah, I think it's a bit weird. I think those are even hard coded right now. I don't want to say something incorrect, but I think they're even hard coded and you can they don't change depending on what device you have, but I'm not sure. Yeah, they are a bit weird. Yeah, there's always room for improvement and certain. I will tell you as a I actually stopped using a mouse, a year ago or something. So I don't have a mouse anymore. I just using a drawing tablet for everything, which I find to be much faster and more effective. It's theoretically also healthier because like if you hold like a mouse, your your arm is basically like this and like the natural position would be like vertically and not flatten the surface. So it's it's actually healthier. I did that. No, it's a good idea. Actually, I was thinking about getting one myself, but then I was like, meh, can't be bothered. Yeah, yeah, yeah. House Plasma 6 coming along like currently there are a lot of bug reports I've heard I've read and do you think that you'll be able to keep your their timetable more or less? Yeah, so we do have the soft feature freeze, which is when we have to stop adding features tomorrow. So all the features that are to be implemented in Plasma 6 are gonna be like either ready tomorrow or they will be as we switch to Plasma 6.1. So from tomorrow to the release date, which is three months, it's just debugging. And three months is how much time we usually spend on one entire release with features and everything. So we hope that three entire months of just debugging should be enough to end up with a good result that is stable and everything. That said, of course, we changed a lot of things even behind the scenes. So the first release is probably gonna be a bit buggy and but hopefully that's gonna be just a matter of a few weeks before everything is nice and ready. But I do think that three months should be enough to address all of the bugs that we are receiving now in the beta. Still, that doesn't mean that is gonna be perfect on day one. Yeah, of course. If it was done at one day, then we would all get bored and Well, it's been already like, I don't know, five months of development. I don't remember, but it's gonna be the longest Katy Plasma version ever. So I hope you can all wait for it. You aren't bored. Yeah, it seems really promising so far. One thing that I forgot when I mentioned the floating panel earlier. Thank you. Like margin errors that it doesn't get thicker anymore. That's like, was it before because it was essentially just a panel with a mask? Yes, it's still basically the same now, but it's much more complex. Because the floating panel has been very difficult to implement, much more than I initially thought, because initially I just wanted to make something simple and that worked. It had some issues, which were obvious. It didn't have any shadow. And when you maximized a window, the floating panel would become extra thick. And that was by design. I wanted something simple that worked. With time, we kind of had the idea to improve it and then use it by default. And to improve it, it was quite a journey. Initially, I didn't think it was possible. Like I just gave up on the idea. I tried many times. I couldn't find a way. Eventually I managed to and it uses a lot. It's not hacky, but I don't super like how it's implemented right now. Could be better. But I just couldn't find any other way to make it work. So right now I'm just hoping that it works nicely right now. It seemed to have not too many big issues, but I still have a lot of lagginess, the panel jumping around, some missing animations. So it does mean that in these three months, I'm going to spend at least a couple of weeks just trying to make sure it's perfect. It was quite difficult. You mentioned animations. That was actually something that I forgot. I found animations in Plasma are a bit inconsistent. I'm not entirely sure what it's called. Like it's not tiling. It's snapping a window to the side, I think. I think it's called snapping. Like the snapping doesn't have an animation, but then like resizing a window, making it fullscreen or minimizing it. Like that does have an animation. I'm pretty sure it does wait. Ah yeah, it doesn't. I'm not sure why, but I find that extremely distracting. And there isn't an obvious way to change it. Like there's probably a way to do it with K-Win scripts, but I didn't really find anything. I just noticed that it doesn't have an animation. That should probably get fixed. You're right. It should have one. I thought it had. Maybe it was taken off for some technological reason I'm not aware of. Actually, this snapping thing is implemented in K-Win, which is the window manager. It is rather technical in the window manager, so I don't touch it. I do other things usually. So maybe there's something I'm not aware of. But yes, it would be much nicer if we had animations. Again, it's not easy to think of a way to be certain, consistent animation throughout. We do have some standards, such as the easing curve of an animation is standard. So at least we have that. But then each animation, I feel like, is very different from the others. So it's different to have some rules to have a coherent animation thing is. And usually it's small issues, small missing animations, such as snapping a window that are missing. And we should just fix them. I agree with you there. It's a bit or at least I find it a bit off-rolling. I'm not even sure if it's probably just the inconsistency and not really the immediate snapping, because a lot of people do like it that way, because it's just fast. Yeah, but if you maximize it, there is an animation. Yeah, that's a thing that was a bit weird. Yeah, no, I agree with you. Usually everything has an animation, like if you minimize, if you open up, pop up, if you close a window, all of that stuff should have an animation. I am quite surprised by the fact that snapping hasn't. I don't want to ask questions that have already been answered by others. What else were there? Oh, no, that's the compositor. That's not really something. I don't know if you know the answer, but or maybe that's depending on the distribution. I've tried it on Fedora and I've tried it on Debian, but the compositor settings are forced to the smoothest animations. Is there the compositor? I think it's called compositor effects animations. Hold on. The effects animations. Yeah, they are forced to smoothest, essentially. And I was wondering why that is, because I think the better approach would be balance between smoothness and responsiveness. I think that changed at some point. That's a very good question. This is another very technical K-Win thing. I do remember that some time in the past got to be one year or something. There has been a lot of work from the K-Win theme. I think it was mostly Vlad, but I might be wrong regarding actually making sure that when you draw a frame, it is put on the screen immediately. Something like that. I'm not very technical on K-Win, as you might guess. And maybe the setting changed back then, but I do remember that it was actually very difficult balancing this thing with actually having smooth animations and everything. I'm not sure how it was actually achieved eventually, I just saw that there were some complications and then I kind of stopped following. Yeah, the thing, what comes to mind in that regard is, it's always like people like to compare desktop environments on how light and how fast they are. And it's always, yeah, KDE is fast. It's not the lightest desktop environment, of course. It comes with a lot of features. And that setting was something that kind of threw me off in that regard, because it's a bit controversial. Like it's supposed to be fast, but it's also forced to smooth as animations. And I was just thinking if there was a main reason behind it, but as you said, you're not that familiar with K-Win, and of course. Right now, I don't know. If it was up to me, to be honest, I would prefer smooth animations to having the frame immediately on the screen. Like I think on the average user, that would be nicer, because most of the time it's like pressing a button and an animation happens. It's not direct interaction, with constant interaction with the window manager. But I guess it really depends, and I'm not sure how it's implemented exactly. But generally speaking, I found KDE Plasma to be very fast and quite lightweight on all of my machines. Even I had a Pinebook, which is very low hand and still Plasma was fine. No, it runs really great. Like I have like a weird one. I'm not sure if you've seen it. I have like a very old one gigabyte DDR3 or 2. I'm not even sure if it's DDR3 laptop. And oh boy, Plasma ran just fine. But other desktop environments, especially older versions of GNOME, like GNOME 3 or something, yeah, that was slaggy. Yeah, let me tell you. Yeah, one thing about Plasma on low-end devices is that it's, Plasma is usually slightly less fast the first time you open something that is QML, because it has a cache. I think it's called in English, a cache. Yes, and it just builds that up. So immediately it doesn't have the cache. So when you start at opening the dialogues, it just gets much faster. So that's interesting to know because like I didn't notice any slowdowns at all. So I guess it's really more of a low-end device problem, which is kind of impressive if it's actually shader caching, because I mean it's most noticeable during or when playing games, of course, because there are like a lot of shaders. But no, I didn't experience any stutters so far, at least that I'm aware of. That's great. So it works. And I think everything still renders with OpenGL that didn't change at all. And that makes it, or at least in my case, it makes it a really good candidate for using like a virtual GPU with 3D acceleration. I think it's called Proxmox called Virtual, which basically is where to OpenGL acceleration. And it just runs battery smooth. It's probably the smoothest test environment that I can run in a virtual machine with sort of hardware acceleration, I guess. It's not quite a pass-through, but it works. It works. So it's, yeah, I really enjoy using Plasma in virtual machines. Nice. Okay. I'm out of points, or at least I think I am. The rest was just backup of repetitive questions. You absolutely want to be 100% original. I respect that. Yeah, I kind of, I don't really like it when it's the same questions over and over again, maybe a bit updated. And I did watch, yeah, the video that you did with, yeah, Nick. With Nick, yeah. Yeah, makes sense. With Nick. And I was watching through it, was making notes like that was covered, and that was covered, and that was covered. And then I watched it again, and that was like, ah, and this needs to go. Now I am absolutely feeling guilty that I forgot to write down the notes on your video. No, all I really want to say is that Plasma 6 is going to be an interesting experience, and I truly can't wait when it's like in a very official stable state, no longer in development. So basically 1.0 version. That's going to be end of February. So there's a lot of time still. Yeah, a lot of time is not really. I think it's only how many more, 13 more weeks or something. Yeah, don't give anxiety to me. I'm already stressed enough about it, don't worry. No, it's probably going to be fine. Yeah, I'm sure that. I remember a teammate of mine a month ago or something that was like, well, by mid January, sorry, by mid December we're going to know if we have like Christmas vacation, or if we should spend all Christmas working on Kitty Plasma. Hopefully we can take some vacation. Stuff seemed to be working. That's good, yeah. Everyone should enjoy it. Yeah, a grind to release is not really the right approach, I think. Because it will only be rushed in the end anyway, then. It will only be rushed in any way. So better take the time, polish it in a, yeah, I don't want to say stress less, because a bit of pressure is probably beneficial, but like in a good pacing. We are doing stuff like selecting the wallpaper as well, which is going to be a major thing, because of course it's just the wallpaper, but it's never just the wallpaper. It actually affects the image of Plasma. So we got to choose carefully, and that is a whole another complex issue. I guess, you don't use the eye for that, do you? No, that is, I could talk hours about that. No, but we do not use AI. We couldn't even, if he wanted to, but we don't want. But of course there's all the copyright drama, and it changes, the copyright actually changes from country to country, so we can't use it. We don't want to. We even have like Krita, an application for artists, and we would lose all of our market share immediately. No AI at all. That's a positive way. Yeah, let's see. I'm actually happy that it's not as integrated yet as Windows tries it to be. Or have you seen Dipping? Dipping is trying a lot to integrate AI into the desktop. Not sure how it is. I haven't tried yet, but I was quite surprised by that. Yeah, so from my experience, everything text based works fine. If you give it enough context, you often have to talk with it and give it a certain role, like you are that person in that scenario. Can you do this for me? Everything image related or the triggers some actions in, I think we're with co-pilot, like in your operating system, it's messing up a lot. It's not ready yet. Okay, that's good to know. But let's see. I did experiment a bit with giving text models such as GPT a configuration file and then telling them to change a value in the configuration file given a user request. So it's going to be like change the wallpaper to something else. And then the model actually finds the correct key in an XML file to change that. It was interesting, but nothing that we can actually use. I don't have any more questions currently, or at least I can't think of any spontaneously. I answered all of the plasmatic question in an effective way. I'm sorry for the more technical K-Win stuff, but I don't work there. Yeah, but I was expecting that. Like I knew that already, of course. And I'm happy that you like the overview and the floating panel. I'm very happy to hear that. Yeah, those are especially the things that stand out, or if you use them, then it just stands out as something that is different from anything else, I guess. Like I'm not sure if there is any desktop environment that handles it in such a way. I was very sad to hear this, but apparently Windows 12 is going to use floating panels, so... Yeah, it's a room word, I'm not sure. Yeah, I hope they don't do that. It just needs to be released after, and it's fine. Yeah, but people are still going to come to Plasma and say, you copied Windows, that's gonna happen. I just know that. Yeah, of course. Yeah, I think you also mentioned, let me bring up one thing that I do remember in your video, Discover, and I don't... Yeah, why the hell is that not in my... I'm not sure, it feels a bit dated, but a lot of that has to do with it's default design. I don't know, like you can do a lot with theme colors. Like I might discover a bit more bluish, and it looks a bit more legible for some reason. I'm not sure, like the contrast is a bit better. Anyway, the settings are a bit odd when it comes to theming, but I think that that's also a relic of the past, like that you can download from the settings instead of Discover. Like it's currently both, but like with different user interfaces and everything. Yes, so initially you could download themes and such just from system settings, and then we thought of adding them as a different section to Discover as well, to have a unified way to find out all about the KD store. You can also literally go to, I think it's store.kd.org and see all the themes there as well. It's the same thing in three different places, just depending on what you need. And the thing is that design-wise we've been working a lot on Discover, and I say we, but I didn't do anything. So other people worked a lot on Discover, and the design should be much improved compared to previous versions, and it is improving at each release. And yes, design-wise there's always like little quirks here and there to fix. There is some blue text on white that doesn't have the necessary contrast and such. There's also, usually when we receive Discover complaints, and I think I did see some of this in your video as well, but again I don't remember exactly. It is stuff such as maybe some results aren't showing, or it's loading forever, this kind of things. And those aren't actually Discover's faults at all, because Discover just uses the backend to fetch for packages and such, and most of the time it is actually the distribution that incorrectly configured the whole thing, and we often have to try to communicate that to the user, like with a pop-up that says this issue is because of your distribution, actually it's not because of us, it's not our fault, but it's difficult as you can understand. Yeah, and I guess one thing that is also kind of odd in that regard is like integrations, like flat-pick support and snap support, those things that you have to integrate manually into Discover. I'm not really sure if those are perfectly working all together, because it's another thing that you consider when you update something in Plasma in Discover. A lot of things need to work somewhat together and it gets difficult. When you have to manage like three different stores working completely different ways. Yeah, but yeah, it was a side note. I believe that making a good software store in general is something that is really hard, because it's a market, essentially. It needs to advertise applications, but it also needs to just work, essentially. For example, I like the Microsoft Store in terms of visuals, but anything else in terms of usability is really tedious to use, like how do I get to my installed applications? How do I effectively search for applications when filtering categories? You just need to move your mouse across your whole screen. Software stores are probably, just like settings, really difficult to get right. Yeah, that's probably true, especially when you consider just how many different pieces that are working together to actually provide you with that, because Discover really is just a front-end to something that's behind, and when you want stuff like, there's been a lot of work on implementing, being able to pay for applications in Flatback, and even Katie is doing a lot of it, not me again, but then you have to implement that, and that is completely separate from Discover, which is just the front-end, and then you still have the package manager from the distribution, and everything has to work together. It gets complex really fast, and when you see stores from other operating systems, they look as if they are just one monolithic application, but of course, behind the scenes, that's not how they work. Yeah, and it's really hard, especially if it's just a front-end, and of course, every application on different distributions has different ratings, sometimes they don't support a feature or a rating, sometimes they do have some. It's just really mixed, and well, it's part of the fragmentation, I guess. Flatback seems to fix a lot of these things, but also has a lot of disadvantages, especially sometimes in terms of performance, not always for some reason. Still better than Snaps. Those are weird in their own way. I don't quite get their philosophy. Me neither. It's true that stores are difficult, and especially with Discover, it was one of the very first applications to be using QML, so it was quite experimental, I think, at the very beginning, and it took a bit of time to iron out all the bugs, even just in the framework, like Kuri Gami, which is in the middle between QML and Discover, like fixing stuff there, so it took a bit of time, but now it's much better. One thing that I would like to see at some point, I'm not sure if it's planned, maybe need to take a look at this, filters in terms of looking for add-ons, like the current way, or especially in the install page, where everything is mixed together, like themes are mixed in publications, I was talking about filters on the install page in Discover. I think that would make sense, but I would need to take a look at that if it's already being worked on or not, because it's a bit confusing. I don't think there is currently ongoing work in that, especially given you have many more, many more, is that correct English? You have more filters if you try to use the online store, or get hot new stuff, it's called application directly within system settings, you click on get new themes and such, you do have filters, I think, and either filters or different ways to sort, like ratings or downloads and such, you do have options there, so Discover is a bit lacking in that, I think, because it's not really what it was meant to do, it was something that we added later on to have a unified store of all themes, but sure, I don't see why we wouldn't eventually, I don't think we're working on this right now, but eventually, sure. Everything at the right time. Plasma 6 comes first. Yeah, makes sense. And it's gonna take some time, like some good amount of work. Yeah, it's still a bit too late, but can't wait to check it out once it's fully released. It's gonna be awesome. Charlie, we're gonna be awesome. I hope. I hope. Me too, yeah. So if you don't have a further question on development, do you have any? No, I think that was everything. Nice. So definitely. We almost stayed in the one hour mark that we talked about, so that's good. Sort of, yeah. Sort of. Thanks for the interview. Thanks for contacting me. I would have probably never thought of that myself, to be honest. No, and thanks for the opportunity to actually talk about Plasma and what we're doing, because it's very nice to actually being able to show that the development is transparent. We are very happy to let people know what we're doing. I don't have a doubt about that at all. Even if you weren't talking to me about now, KD Plasma is transparent in any way. All that people really need to do is to just take a look at it, join Matrix or whatever. Yeah, that's more a challenge. We do have a lot of documentation on how to get involved. If anybody wants to help out a bit, just go into KD.org and clicking on Get involved brings you to a wiki page, which is like 10 pages long with 15 different ways to contribute. It's quite awesome. I don't know who written it, but it's awesome. There's also, let me very quickly mention currently a campaign to actually fund more development for Plasma 6, which is all about supporting members who are the people who donate at least 100 Euro each year to KD. It's like less than 10 Euros a month. We are trying to reach 500 supporting members. We're currently at 350 or something, so that's good, but we're very close to the goal. If you want to help out KD Plasma financially, that's a very good way to start. I have to do the marketing part as well. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you.