At the end of March, we will be releasing Plasma Active 4. Since Plasma Active 3, We've made improvements to the Files, eBook reader (Okular), Settings and Alarms applications along with a large number of bug fixes and performance improvements. We're also in the middle of moving to the KDE Platform 4.10 release as well as getting closer in line with other Mer based efforts, such as sharing the description files with Nemo that are used when building images for different device targets and adapting to a systemd driven user session. These two changes introduced a relatively large number of regressions that are being ironed out. In fact, we paused on the feature development and turned focus to fit and finish work before continuing on.
Marco posted a really nice blog entry on how you can help Plasma Active 4 shine. There are many small and large things yet to do, so there are tasks that should fit just about everyone. The easiest way to find these tasks is to start using Plasma Active and find what you feel is missing. One developer did exactly that, appearing on the mailing list with a KSnapshot interface written in QML. We're around most of the time online helping others find their feet and start working on the code, so don't hesitate to visit us and ask questions or share ideas. You can find us on irc.freenode.net in #active and #plasma, the active at kde.org and plasma-devel mailing lists and even in the new Google+ Plasma Active community.
Which brings me to a very nice anecdote: A couple of people have been working on bringing Plasma Active to the Nexus 7 device. I noted this on the Google+ community page and a person responded saying that if there was documentation on how to have both Android and Plasma Active on the device that would make it a lot more attractive to them. Alan Pope from Canonical showed up and shared a link to a page in the Ubuntu wiki showing how this can be done. I shared that on irc with Ruediger Gad, who jumped on Google+ to respond directly saying that they will add this to the documentation when he has a chance. At which point Bill Newton popped up saying he has dual-booting working and by that evening he had updated the wiki showing how to accomplish this. I love that kind of dynamic in the Free software world: from problem to solution in a span of a day with the help of multiple hands.
2 comments:
The systemd driven user session sounds very interesting. Is the work something that could easily be extended to cover KDE on desktop too? Does it mean that the KDE startup script is broken to various unit files and how does it affect the startup speed of KDE?
Plasma Active itself is getting more and more interesting by the release.
We already had split the start up into unit files in Active as we had the startactive system. The startkde script used on the Desktop just isn't suited to devices, so we had to do something.
Now we have systemd at our side, and we're migrating there as we can. There are still some startactive units, but we'll get there. Not sure if we'll completely get rid of startactive for PA4, but we'll see.
Once solidified, I'd like to see this work made available to the desktop. Obviously, we'll need to keep startkde for non-systemd systems, but that's easy enough: it hasn't changed in forever. :)
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