KDE

We don't have a spy that's for sure!

inb4 floating taskbar in Windows 12

In fact there are already quite a few Wayland-only features. You can read about them on https://community.kde.org/Plasma/X11_Known_Significant_Issues.

on the side of our apps (or anything written with Qt) all of that (and most important seamless compositor restart/crash recovery with the application surviving) everyhting should be there for 6.0. with other toolkits the mileage might vary (depending when they include the required changes, when a given distribution packages them and so on)

@kellyaster @Bro666 Pretty hungry but I'm cooking a ratatouille right now to fix this issue :)

Feeling just fine. :)

just had dinner, therefore, great :D

Relaxed at the moment :)

For me it's definively the new overview effect, I already use it all the time on my Plasma dev session.

Plasma Vaults! It's the best implementation of having a little encrypted bucket to put your important files in that I've ever used, on any platform. It's very well integrated into Plasma as a 1st-party supported feature, and it works wonderfully.

Josh says: "Yes, we are always interested in making our applications mobile-ready and almost every new KDE application uses Kirigami our convergent framework. Some of our older applications such as Okular, Dolphin, etc need more work on mobile but this is something that's being worked on."

We sure do plan of moving more and more of our app to the new convergent ui toolkit made with QML and Kirigami, in the future more and more of our apps should become mobile ready

In addition to that Josh said, we have a list of mobile friendly first party applications here: https://plasma-mobile.org/ It's not completely up to date and is missing some newer additions.

Is there a dedicated page tracking updates specifically to KDE Connect?

It is part of KDE Gear, so generally in the gear release announcement. The last few releases were not that big in term of feature but the next one includes some goodies.

Does Connect use BTLE?

KDE Connect will have the Bluetooth backend enabled by default with the next gear release (24.02). I'm not sure if this is BTLE or normal Bluetooth.

Could you guys implement an auto tethering option between phone/PC?

No idea :(

How instant are notifications synced?

For me it is pretty instant. I never miss my Bereal notifications thanks to it :)

Do notifications disappear on one side or the other when viewed on one or the other platform?

Yes

Maybe implement a “link to KDE” notification toggle to mirror the “link to windows” functionality of Android?

No idea :(

Also, is there plans to have KDE connect support making your phone a webcam?

That's an amazing idea! Currently I am using my laptop next to my desktop screens as a sudo webcam :D

It may be not user visible and technically not a Plasma but Qt change but I find the work so that apps survive the compositor restarting amazing. See http://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/qt6_wayland_robustness/

For me personally, it's the updated breeze theme. But I might not be completely objective here, since I drove this effort quite a lot :)

Some screenshots to see the difference: https://invent.kde.org/websites/product-screenshots/-/merge_requests/51/diffs

One of the most visible ones for me is that most common multimonitor workflows Just Work™ in the Wayland session now. There are still edge cases, but we've put a huge amount of effort into this.

Actually Plasma is generally more popular than GNOME every time surveys are conducted. However we have to keep in mind that the direct consumers of a DE are actually not the end users, but rather the distributors who package and distribute it. There are a number of historical reasons why many distributors ended up picking GNOME over Plasma including accessibility, corporate sponsorship, an easier packaging experience, and the rocky KDE 4 rollout burning a lot of trust. So what you end up with today is many distros shipping GNOME despite pent-up desire for Plasma. It's a great illustration of how you need to keep your direct users happy.

And I think that pent-up desire is being unleashed these days due to various changes in our ecosystem. Plasma is better than ever and version 5 had a much less painful release compared to 4, with us aiming to do even better in Plasma 6. We also see an increasing number of hardware vendors shipping devices with Plasma on it (https://kde.org/hardware/), who had a strong financial incentive to listen to their customers by picking Plasma over GNOME. In addition, KDE's accessibility game is ramping up hugely, and we have more robust corporate sponsorship than we used to with Valve and Blue Systems putting tons of resources into KDE. Finally, GNOME seems to be becoming more hostile to their downstreams, causing them to need to do more of their own development or else migrate to be a fork or skin of Plasma. Interesting developments.

We do aim to improve our design and usability further as much as possible, however, one of the nice things of free software is really this big choice. There are different projects and one size never fits all, if some people find the software written by our friends over GNOME more suited with their needs, that's totally fine.

It would also be interesting hearing on the motivations for this choice tough, as it always help us improving

To just test out without any risk and not touching any running system i would suggest a live image such as KDE Neon Unstable which has dailiy updated snapshots of our software stack

as moving to Qt6 from a developer POV, It has been remarkably uneventful. there are api changes for sure (Especially on the QML side of things) but the changes are not as great as say, Qt4 to Qt5.