Post-MegaRelease projects

[Carl Schwan]

On Thursday, February 22, 2024 10:57:07 PM CET Nate Graham wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> 
> Congrats to the entire KDE community on the impending launch of the KDE
> 6 MegaRelease! I'm so impressed with how folks came together to make it
> amazing. It's a very impressive release and I think people are gonna
> love it.
> 
> I've started pondering post-megarelease projects. We've spent so long on
> porting and bugfixing that I think it might be useful to shift gears to
> feature work, and I'd like to brainstorm potential large-scale projects
> and gauge the level of interest in putting resources into them soon.
> 
> Here are some ideas of mine to get the creative juices started:
> 
> * David's input method playground stuff [1] is amazing and needs to be
> developed and productized

Same with http://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/qt6_wayland_robustness/

> * GNOME's Libadwaita app platform has been a runaway success for them;
> evaluate our offerings in comparison and see what we can do better

I see multiple reasons:

- Libadwaita apps are beautiful. They look modern and super clean, they also 
have excellent UX and are super simple to use.
- Libadwaita deliver on the promise of working on mobile and desktop. We can 
do it too but it requires so much boilerplate in every apps, using Kirigami 
Addons, it's not at all so well documented and it's missing a lot of 
polishing.
- Libadwaita has binding for many programming language. I think if we could 
have at least a good stories for Python, it would help. I added a GSoC idea 
about this
- Libadwaita has tons of example in their Workbench app
  https://apps.gnome.org/Workbench/  I started working on something similar 
here https://invent.kde.org/carlschwan/kirigami-workbench but I think the app 
should be rewritten with KtextEditor and QtWidgets because the QML text editor 
is just to bad.

Also their developers are super active on Mastodon and post all the time about 
their progress on new components, we really need to be more pro-active there 
too.

> * Unified theming infrastructure for KDE apps, GTK apps, and Plasma.
> ** Relatedly: QML/JS in themes is dangerous; move away from it
> * Start adding release notes to our apps' AppStream metadata [2]

We can already add release notes to our apps and some apps are doing it
https://apps.kde.org/itinerary/ but it's only in English

That we need to improve:
- extract the text, translate it and then publish the translation online for 
the new AppStream 1.0  (ideally on apps.kde.org)
- Stop removing old release notes by default for our apps. Apps can opt-out of 
this mechanism but really they shouldn't have to do this...

> * Finish up and ship the new Breeze icons
> * HIG is outdated and mostly ignored, and needs an overhaul to make it
> useful
> * Telemetry system has not proved to be very useful and needs an overhaul
> * store.kde.org is full of low-quality or broken content; make a push
> for KDE people to take ownership of content moderation, QA, etc. Also
> any relevant and needed tech improvements
> * Our virtual keyboard situation is not great and needs focused work
> * KWallet needs an overhaul

I think forking KeepassXC and adding a Kirigami UI to it might be a good way 
forward with this task. The format used by Keepass is supported on a lot of 
platforms and they implement quite a few security features (e.g. yubikey). We 
just need to make sure that we have a migration path.

Alternatively we could use the new gpgpass app, but I fear the gpg workflow is 
not ideal for new users.

> * Have KWin (optionally) remember window positions on Wayland
> * Build a "System misconfiguration detection hub" app [3]

* Add a Spiel backend to Qt Text to Speech module

Spiel is the successor of speech dispatcher, see
https://blog.monotonous.org/2024/01/10/Introducing-Spiel/

* Rework our online account integration

An idea I have is to move away from KAccounts/signond/account-sso since it's a 
standard that is used only by anyway and instead provide Qt Plugins that setup 
Akonadi/NeoChat/Nextcloud/Tokodon/GDrive/<insert your favorite KDE app 
here>/... and are provided by the app themselves so that we don't have to 
duplicate all the login logic in the app and in the online account KCM.

Cheers,
Carl