Part-time KDE sabbatical, feedback or guidance appreciated (but no pressure)

[Martin Steigerwald]

Hi Jakob.

A sabbatical! Wonderful.

I am not contributing right now, except for the occasional bug report or 
bug triage and helping a tiny bit here and there in the Debian Qt/KDE 
community. And I never managed to fully dig into contributing for 
development, just did a maildir related performance fix – with a huge lot 
of help of other developers way more skilled than me – and some CRM114 
spamfilter thing for KMail/Akonadi a long time ago… but let's see for 
yourself, what you can make out of my feedback for one idea you have.

Jakob Petsovits - 08.05.23, 03:44:23 CEST:
> An alternative to the above project might be a game launcher in the
> style of GNOME's new Cartridge app, but designed as a plasmoid.
> Cartridge shows that one can list and start games from different game
> launcher apps without reimplementing their Wine integrations and
> library management. No reason why I should have to open a separate
> app just for launching stuff though, when a plasmoid can put the
> launcher directly into a secondary "start menu" in the panel, or as
> desktop widget on a dedicated virtual desktop. KDE integration may
> furthermore provide useful stuff such as switching from regular
> monitor settings for productive desktop use to temporary high refresh
> rates, VRR, HDR (in the future), custom key/button mappings,
> performance overrides, and whatnot.

There are similar apps like Lutris for this kind of use case. But as far 
as I see Lutris is GTK based, so it seems there may really not yet be a 
Qt/KDE Frameworks style approach to it yet. What I found with Lutris is 
that quite some of the few game launchers I tried simply do not work 
correctly. Sometimes they fail to install a game, sometimes they fail to 
run a game. It is a very wide scope. Linux FLOSS games packaged for 
distributions, Linux FLOSS games packaged as Flatpak, GOG games, Steam 
games, Itch.io games, Proton/Wine based games, Amiga FS-UAE based games, 
DOSBox based games, probably games that run in QEMU and in whatever 
other emulators are out there. To me it seems it would be good to 
evaluate and probably in some part reuse what is already there, as its a 
huge undertaking. Or it may be an idea to limit the scope of the game 
launcher to FLOSS games for example. At least initially.

Another idea, but I bet it may not strike as much an emotional chord in 
you as the one you had, would be to do something similar like GNOME 
Boxes for KDE. I.e. have a KVM based virtual machine launch thing like 
AQEMU. AQEMU, a Qt5 based launcher for QEMU/KVM based virtual machines 
does not seem to receive much development effort anymore¹. I really liked 
it, but I found the version in Debian/Devuan to use some obsolete 
arguments for KVM/QEMU. I liked the minimal approach there. Just compile 
the right arguments for the kvm/qemu process and be done with it. It 
does not use any of the new stuff like Kirigami, I think it does not use 
any KF stuff at all, pure Qt. So there is room for a more integrated 
approach.

Actually I am not so much a fan of the libvirt based approach with XML 
based configuration files, but it would also be an option to make a QT/KF 
based thing like Virt Viewer.

This other idea VM starting may be easier to accomplish as it is more 
limited in scope than a (full blown) game launcher. But whether it 
strikes an emotional chord in you… you would need to feel for yourself.

As for your ideas for Skanpage: I like them! At the moment I find myself 
using either Skanpage or Skanlite depending on use case. I'd love to 
have it all in one app, but that may not be feasible.

[1] https://github.com/tobimensch/aqemu

Ciao,
-- 
Martin