Install presence

[Ian Wadham]

Hi Jeremy,

It’s nice to see you again. Welcome back.

> On 21 Jun 2021, at 12:53 pm, Jeremy Whiting <jpwhiting at kde.org> wrote:
> 
> Just to throw in my 2 cents too. I recently used KMyMoney on mac while I was waiting for a new laptop to arrive in the mail. The dmg from the build factory worked well during the week I was using it on macos, but it definitely didn't look as native as many other Qt applications do on MacOS. Likely for the same reasons listed earlier.

BTW, what is the “build factory” and how do I access it? As you infer, building KDE apps on Apple OSX is only part of the battle. Getting some KDE apps to run and look the same as on a Plasma desktop is not so easy. In their raw state on KDE 4, apps would not load any kind of plugin, some messages and text would appear in black on a black background and Dr Konqi never worked (until I fixed it), so bug reports to KDE from Apple Mac never came with the required backtrace, meaning that reports from Mac users were ignored by KDE developers. René and I fixed a lot of those things and René has continued that work on into KF5. 

> It's also not very dependent on other libraries/systems to work. I don't think it uses kparts or kio or anything like that.

Here’s the rub. Although I worked as a KDE developer for 14 years and tried many times to find out what “kparts” and “kio” are and what they actually do, but was never able to find out (i.e.no definitive documentation).

> And yes, running anything on Big Sur that isn't signed, notarized by apple, etc. is non trivial for regular users. Apple is making it harder and harder to put whatever you want on these machines.
> 
> In years past (many years past when the QSP discussions were going on, early kf5 days) I used to build kde stuff myself on mac with kdesrc-build, and had tweaked userbase/techbase articles with hints to get it working, but haven't tried that in quite a while. I did try with craft a bit a couple years ago, but the builds on the build factory are just as good, so I haven't bothered lately.

Yes, I remember (back in February 2015) you tried to help me build Qt5 and KF5. I was very grateful for your help, but my efforts ended in nothing after three solid weeks of trying. You were one of the few KDE developers who helped any of us with Apple Mac.

> The way I see it macos is a few things:
> 
> A) It's a platform, like linux, but like linux there are a few distribution channels that can be used. Namely
>   1) Self contained applications
>   2) homebrew
>   3) macports
>   4) craft built (same as 1, but built locally)
>   5) Probably many others that I'm not even aware of.

Correct. Cross your fingers and pick one.

> B) Qt5 from any of the above is a mess, or at least has been in the past. I agree with Rene, if we want our applications to work well on macOS (in any/all of the above distributions) we need to fix that first. Maybe if the homebrew qt5 packages can be fixed the macports people will see it can be done and become more approachable. I haven't dealt with MacPorts devs in quite some time myself. Barring that maybe the issues could be fixed upstream in Qt6 itself. I remember the efforts that went in to trying in Qt5, but times change, maybe it would be more approachable now. I'm not sure.
> 
> All of the above is based on the idea that yes, we want KDE applications to work well on MacOS.

Yes, we do. But it won’t happen until there is much more co-operation between KDE developers and Apple Mac experts. We need a small, multi-disciplinary team to hammer away at the problems for a few months.

Cheers,
Ian W.

> I’m not sure if that's the consensus or not. I find it awesome that I can run Kanagram on windows (natively, or with wsl2) linux (in the many variants) and MacOS. But I do find it overwhelming to start to figure out how each platform works and what needs to be done to make things work better on each platform. I tried putting the qml and sound files in resources at one point, thinking that would make it work better on MacOS, Android, Flatpak, etc. But then found that the upstream qml it depended on would also likely need to be embedded in the resources to ensure it's available and had no idea how to go about finding and embedding those, etc. If someone knows a good set of "Best practices" for making stuff work well on many platforms that would be awesome. Especially if it's in a tutorial form or has examples.
> 
> And, this went much longer than I had planned it to be. I'll stop there and start another thread later as needed for these side topics.
> 
> BR,
> Jeremy
> 
> On Fri, Jun 18, 2021 at 7:16 AM Adam Szopa <adam.szopa at kde.org> wrote:
> Adding Aleix back to the thread.
> > Hi guys,
> > 
> > As for Homebrew-KDE (macOS), we have upstreamed some frameworks to
> > homebrew/core, you can see their names in this recent PR[1].
> > 
> > Then you can search for them in brew analytics[2]. But they were recently
> > renamed by removing `kde-` prefix and brew doesn’t handle this well in
> > report.
> > 
> > For year interval, our very basic dependency for all KDE apps, ECM, has
> > 3,835 installs before rename (as kde-extra-cmake-modules) and 1,476
> > installs after rename (as extra-cmake-modules). This gives not much info
> > about other apps, but we can say that there were about 5,311 KDE users in
> > Homebre-KDE at macOS.
> > 
> > 
> > [1]https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/pull/79211
> > [2]https://formulae.brew.sh/analytics/install/365d/
> > 
> > > 16 черв. 2021 р. о 12:19 Christoph Cullmann <christoph at cullmann.io>
> > > написав(ла):> 
> > > On 2021-06-16 10:44, Ben Cooksley wrote:
> > >> On Wed, Jun 16, 2021 at 12:31 PM Aleix Pol <aleixpol at kde.org> wrote:
> > >>> Hi Mac, Windows,
> > >> 
> > >> Hi Aleix,
> > >> 
> > >>> I'm preparing the Akademy presentation for the "KDE is All About the
> > >>> Apps" goal and I'm looking to explain a bit the state of things.
> > >>> I don't have direct information about both KDE apps's Mac and
> > >>> Windows
> > >>> user base. Would you be able to give me some information or give me
> > >>> access to it? It would help me paint a picture of the state of
> > >>> things.
> > >> 
> > >> While we don't capture any analytics on this ourselves (as the KDE
> > >> Telemetry stuff is fairly limited in use at this stage) we do have
> > >> access to Telemetry information captured by Microsoft for the Windows
> > >> side.
> > >> To my knowledge, Apple don't capture much in the way of analytics (or
> > >> if they do, they don't make it available) so there won't be anything
> > >> available for macOS i'm afraid.
> > >> Please file a Sysadmin ticket to request an account on our Microsoft
> > >> Partner centre account and we can go from there.
> > > 
> > > Hi,
> > > 
> > > I think the Windows Store is a good place to take a look at.
> > > If you have no time to do so (with the account), I want to post something
> > > about the state of current install numbers in the next days anyways,
> > > Okular and Kate are now over the 100,000 installs.
> > > 
> > > For macOS I think there is not a lot of data (and users).
> > > 
> > > The UserFeedback of Kate tells there are a "handful" of users on macOS
> > > that
> > > have turned in on (at least I see some minimal macos part in the graph
> > > there).
> > > 
> > > Greetings
> > > Christoph
> 
> 
> 
>