Recent content on Bhushan Shah
Akademy is a special event for most of KDE people, it is opportunity for KDE developers, designers, users etc to meet and greet each other face-to-face. I have been attending most Akademies since year 2014. So of-course this year also I attended Akademy 2025 in Berlin. Last time I was in Berlin was right before pandemic happened, attending KDE Plasma Mobile Sprint in KDAB offices. It’s…
It has been quite a long time since I attended any KDE sprint, last sprint for me was Plasma Sprint in Valencia, Spain before pandemic and personal life got in a way. Last month I had chance to attend Plasma Sprint 2025 in Graz, Austria. This was good opportunity for me to meet some of long time contributors to Plasma Mobile like Devin Lin and Luis , as well as other Plasma contributors to discuss…
Earlier last month I helped organize conf.kde.in 2025 in the Gandhinagar, Gujarat. This was very exciting for me as it was apparently in same venue where I had attended my very first KDE event! 
 General structure of event 
 As of recent years, conf.kde.in has been three-day event, two days of conference followed by one day of un-conference sessions, those of who attend the Akademy or GSoC…
Professional update 
 I had joined MBRDI in June 2021, after almost 4 years, I decided to part ways with MBRDI this January 2025 and decided to pursue new adventure, more on that when time comes, but for now I am keeping it under wraps. I hope you can respect that! 🙂 
 However this is not the only professional update I want to talk about, I want to talk about another exciting opportunity,…
I am huge fan of obsidian.md and just other day I was trying to “convert” Akseli . One pain point he mentioned that it does not quite allow him to get reminders for the todo list created in obsidian. 
 I have been doing little bit of “hack” to workaround this, and I thought I’d write a blog post about this so that others can also make use of it. 
 How to use this 
 First of all,…
Three weeks ago, I attended KDE Akademy 2024 in Würzburg, Germany. It was pretty exciting to meet my KDE friends after one year since last Akademy 2023! 
 Travel drama 
 Ideally whole trip should’ve taken just ~18 hours door-to-door but thanks to Lufthansa whole travel turned out to be of 48 hours in total including layovers. Flight cancellation and rebooking caused by travel to start way…
I like to call myself git “expert”, but I failed pretty badly few weeks ago I needed to bisect the kernel source code to figure out one bug. 
 General git bisect process is, You have two known commits, one is good and one is bad, and you keep searching for bad commit by splitting history in two. Lets say you have following changelog (not the actual changelog I was debugging, but example):
Akademy 2023 was almost year ago and soon Akademy 2024 is coming. This is probably good time to talk about Akademy 2023 . I know it was in way too past but some of those who know me personally/professionally know that last year has been rollar-coaster for me emotionally and did not manage to write about event while recovering from it. 
 But since this post was sitting in draft from long time,…
We often get a complaint that Plasma Mobile is laggy. Today I wanted to debug it, one of the best way to debug this is to check if something is making use of system resources when it should not. 
 Running top on Manjaro Plasma Mobile dev images, I found that tlp is consuming 10-20% CPU constantly. 
 9099 root 20 0 5928 4568 2560 R 8.2 0.1 0:00.25 tlp
 tlp is a daemon to “Optimize…
I joined Bluesystems GmbH in August 2015 , over the course of ~6 years I had opportunity to work in some of most exciting projects (in no particular order). 
 
 KDE Plasma Mobile and Desktop 
 Plasma-bigscreen 
 Halium 
 KDE Neon 
 Several other hardware bring-up projects 
 
 I also had opportunity to work with some of nicest colleagues and most-skilled hackers,…
Just yesterday someone joined in Plasma Mobile matrix room, asking for help and support for developing a native Signal client . 
 The post was immediately responded by some of my fellow developers with the responses which were basically, 
 
 Why signal when matrix is available and superior to it 
 While signal is open-source it does not provide all freedom to modify/redistribute…
I was arguing discussing earlier today with some community members what is best practice regarding the updating systems. 
 
 There are two approaches to this, 
 
 Updating system with software center provided by desktop/mobile environment like, GNOME software center, KDE Plasma Discover etc. 
 Updating system with distributions command line tools, apt, pacman, zypper etc. 
…
This is follow up to the initial post about the talks I found interesting in rc3, there are some more talks from schedule I found interesting to watch. 
 Rage against machine learning 
 We experience machine learning in all stages of life, be it recommendation for next movie to watch in streaming service like the Netflix or Amazon prime, or recommendation for next song to listen. This talk…
I did not manage to get a ticket for RC3, or well in other words totally forgot about it when tickets were available. It is possible to still watch talks through media.ccc.de . 
 There are some talks I quite enjoyed and would recommend people to watch as well. 
 Building less inaccessible websites 
 This talk covers some of really nice tips on “low hanging fruits” on how to…
Chess players in KDE community 
 Some of us have started a KDE community chess players team on the lichess.org. Mostly as a place to find people who are interested in chess and occasionally playing various variants of chess 
 If you want to join, KDE Chess Players on lichess 
 Knights animations 
 Personally I rarely use the knights, and instead use the online chess platforms like…
So today I did some housekeeping on my blog, 
 
 Moving it to new server, old server was based on Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus, which is quite old now (I still get security updates, but some packages are quite out-of-date and needs quite some PPAs to manage it) 
 Updating it to latest minima theme and removing some of custom templates I had 
 Removing disqus plugin, as I realized…
Last week I was in Bluesystems GmbH meeting in Germany, almost 7000 km away from home. While one would hope that this journey is smooth, of-course this was not case for my journey. I missed my phone in first segment of journey (which now is on route to my home as I write). In 4 hours of layover I tried to retrieve my phone but unfortunately it was already with Lost and Found team and getting that…
I am happy to announce the v0.1 release of the keysmith . 
 Keysmith is Two-factor code generator for Plasma Mobile and Desktop. 
 You can get first release from the 
 https://download.kde.org/stable/keysmith/0.1/ 
 It has been gpg signed by my personal key with fingerprint 
 0AAC 775B B643 7A8D 9AF7 A3AC FE07 8411 7FBC E11D 
 Please note that this is a v 0.1 release and…
Akademy 2019 was hosted in the Milan, Italy. I had opportunity to attend the event and meet the other KDE developers, designers and users. 
 Talks 
 There were many interesting talks, including use of opensource in government, flying drones, virtual reality and several community related topics. Honestly it is impossible to list all the awesome talks I attended here, so go and check…
In June month we gathered in Slimbook’s offices to work on Plasma. Along with Plasma developers, we were also joined by KDE Usability and Productivity team. 
 During the sprint I mostly worked to create up-to-date image for Plasma Mobile, as from last few weeks Plasma Mobile image was quite out-of-date and needed update. 
 
 Some of the bugfixes we did includes, 
 
…
Find your own way to help develop Plasma Mobile 
 The Plasma Mobile project was started by the KDE community with the goal of becoming a free, user-friendly, privacy-enabling and customizable platform for mobile devices. We are always on the look out for more contributors to help push Plasma Mobile forward. However contributions to Plasma Mobile has high entry barrier due to various reasons,…
Plasma Mobile reference images are based on halium , which uses the propietary binary blobs to make use of phone hardware. This requires the libhybris which allows us to use bionic based binary blobs in the traditional libc based environment. Halium based devices also use very old vendor-provided kernel trees, these vendor trees generally range from version 3.4 to 3.18, most of the kernel versions…
The first part of this series focused on testing Plasma Mobile on virtual machine and/or on a PC/laptop. In this second part we will focus on testing Plasma Mobile on actual mobile devices. 
 Currently there are two possible ways of testing Plasma Mobile on an actual mobile device, 
 
 Using postmarketOS 
 Installing Halium and a KDE neon-based rootfs 
 
 I will explain…
Last week we asked the Free Software community what they wanted to do to help us move forward with Plasma Mobile. These were the results from the poll on Twitter: 
 
 And this was what the poll on Google+ looked like: 
 
 As you can see, the results were similar with least 44% poll participants wanting to test Plasma Mobile on their device, and/or as a virtual machine, or on real…
If you want to develop for Plasma Mobile, but you don’t have a Mobile device, it is useful to emulate a Plasma Mobile on your desktop or laptop. Earlier this was not documented and has been asked multiple times on how to achieve this. 
 This blog post is intended to help install a Plasma Mobile on the qemu-x86. 
 
 First of all create a qemu-image of 10GB size. 
 
…
Last week I had a chance to attend the Randa meetings 2017, my plan was to work on the Plasma Mobile during the sprint, improve the state of current images. A few things changed over the course of the week: 
 New shiny wallpaper and packages 
 Starting from 8 Sept, we started using the packages from KDE Neon buildsystem instead of building them on the Plasma Mobile CI , this provides few…
Last month I had opportunity to visit the Almería, Spain for Akademy 2017. Akademy 2017 is KDE’s annual world summit. Akademy makes it possible to meet the felow KDE contributors, some of whom you only know with their IRC nicknames (Yes, I am not old enough to know every contributors yet :p). Here is few things I did at the Akademy 2017. 
 Plasma Mobile 
 On the 2nd day I presented a…
This post is public service announcement regarding the KDE Neon infrastructure. 
 Earlier we KDE neon developers decided that we should build the armhf and/or arm64 packages on Neon CI itself instead of the different Plasma Mobile specific Jenkins Instance . First step to make this happen was the adding ARM architecture in the KDE Neon package archive . We are using the Aptly for serving the…
We are at almost end of 2016, unfortunately 2016 also took away great project with it, Cyanogenmod. However there is fork named LineageOS in pipeline . Given we switched our android base to CyanogenMod earlier , lots of people asked me how this will affect Plasma Mobile? 
 We used CyanogenMod source tree and kernel for generating minimal android system which is used in hammerhead port. All of…
Currently Plasma Mobile is supported by very small number of devices, for example Nexus 5, and One plus one. These devices uses Android 5.0 or CM12 as their base. Current libhybris upstream doesn’t have support for the devices running Android 6.0 (Marshmallow), however there are two different forks of libhybris which are proposed to be merged into upstream libhybris and supports the Android…

 QtCon starts on this Sept 1st and I will be traveling to Berlin on this Tuesday. This is second Akademy I am attending after Akademy 2014 in Czech Republic. During QtCon I am giving presentation titled Plasma Mobile: what we achieved in year in room A04 on 2nd September. And also I am going to moderate a Student Presentations where students taking part in various mentoring programs in KDE,…
Last Akademy, the Plasma team revealed the first prototype of the new Plasma Mobile. Plasma Mobile is designed to work on any existing operating system stack, and so far, our reference images were based on Ubuntu Touch. Ubuntu Touch runs the Android system inside an LXC container to make use of Android Hardware Abstraction Layer, binary drivers and other proprietary services required to make use…
Since last few weeks I was working on the Lockscreen integration with KWin Wayland session, this is most important bit of the Plasma on Wayland session. Currently in X11 lockscreen is managed by ksmserver (KDE’s session manager). It suffers from various security problems which are mentioned on blog post by Martin Gräßlin. This blog post also mentions that in Wayland lockscreen functionality…
Hello planet! 
 I am pleased to say that now I am sponsored by Blue systems GmBH to work on Plasma mobile and Plasma mobile applications full-time for next 4 months. 
 During this time period I will be mainly working on Plasma Mobile. I will develop the new Applications for Plasma Mobile as well as port existing ones to work in Plasma Mobile. 
 It is awesome opportunity for me, I will…
Hello Planet 
 This is first update of the my GSoC project TV optimized dashboard support in the Plasma Media Center. First let me tell you what this project is about 
 
 Exact usecase of Plasma Media Center is more or less watching your media files on your TV while sitting on the couch, and when we think of input devices for the TV first thing that comes to mind is Remote control. Any…
Hello Planet! 
 As you may have already read the blog post from Eike Hein about Building on new pillars: Activities and KPeople in Plasma 5.3 , activities can provide the useful information about the recent applications and resources used by them. 
 Plasma Media Center is going to use this awesome functionality of activities and will show recently opened media files from current activity…
Hola gente, 
 So all plasmoids are gathered in Blue Systems office in beautiful city of Barcelona, Spain for Plasma Sprint 2015. One of the points I wanted to discuss was future of Plasma Media Center. Plasma Media Center got ported to KDE frameworks 5 and Plasma 5 library during last GSoC and with the help of our great Visual Design Group we also revamped the user interface fro Plasma media…
SuperX, a relatively new distribution, just released beta for its upcoming 3.0 release. SuperX is a KDE centric distribution, and focuses on giving a polished KDE experience (a marketing statement, SuperX guys use). 
 
 It is one of the early and few Linux distributions from India, and arguably the most active in development. It has made a mark in Government domain and universities in…
Akademy 2014 was my first ever akademy that I attended and I must say that was nice experience for me. I got to meet many people whom I only know with their IRC nicks or just identity usernames. Our pre-registration event took part in the Redhat office, Brno. I reached there at evening and there I meet plasma developers as well as KDE-India people whom I alredy meet once at conf.kde.in, they gave…
Hello KDE community, 
 This is second update to my GSoC 2014 project. Previously I ported homescreen and mediabrowser part of the plasma-mediacenter. My next task is to port mediacontroller and mediaplayer components of the plasma-mediacenter. To port mediacontroller and mediaplayer I also wrote runtimeData class which acts as a bridge between libs and qmlcomponents. 
 So here is…
As you already know, Plasma mediacenter 1.3 beta is released on 3rd June. 
 Many distros like Fedora, openSUSE, KUbuntu have already packaged this beta in their repositories 
 So to make life of Archers easier, I have uploaded PKGBUILD for Plasma mediacenter 1.3 beta on AUR. 
 to install use your AUR helper, 
 packer plasma-mediacenter-git 
 If you get any bugs please report on…
Hello planet! This is first report for my GSoC project porting plasma mediacenter to Qt5/KF5 and Implementing shell package. 
 So far I have, 
 
 With help from sebas ported away plugin loading code from deprecated methods and macros 
 Ported Plasma mediacenter welcome screen and media browser to QtQuick 2.0 and Plasna Next components. 
 Cleaned source code of autotests and…
Hello planet! Okay, that’s not even a word, GSOCer..! but I am selected in Google Summer of Code 2014 with KDE. My project is Integrating Plasma mediacenter with Plasma Next and porting it to KF5 and Qt5. My mentors are Sinny Kumari and Shantanu Tushar Jha. 
 This project involves various task, 
 
 Porting plasma mediacenter library, plugins, and backends to Qt5/KF5 
 Porting…
Hello planet! KDE India team is going to organize a KDE India conference 2014 in DAIICT, Gandhinagar. In KDE India conference there are many awesome talks. In fact every talk is interesting but I find this talks more interesting. 
 
 Baloo - Metadata and Search by Vishesh Handa 
 C++11: A Language Renaissance by K�vin Ottens 
 KDE unlike a coconut by Smit Shah, Let me find out…
Hello planet! Happy New Year 2014! With the year 2013 Season of KDE has come to an end. This was great experience for me. Under guidance of Sebastian Kügler (sebas), I ported some of the DataEngines to KDE Frameworks 5 and libplasma2, Some applets to Plasma2 and QML2 and also killed some bugs. 
 List of things that I ported to Plasma2 includes Icon (Generic Icon), Device notifier, ksgrd module…
Hello planet! Just a quick note that CFP form for KDE India conference 2014 is going to end in 2 days (3rd December 2013). So if you are interested in giving lightning talks, tutorials, tech demos please fill the form early. 
 As Shaan7 (Shantanu Tushar Jha) says, 
 
 KDE contributors wanting to share knowledge/experience 
 People who have participated in GSoC, SoK, OPW or similar,…
As a part of SoK project, I am currently porting device notifier applet to Plasma2. Device notifier applet was already ported to QML by Viranch Mehta so it was somewhat easy task for me. In a Plasma2 port first task is to change versions of imports and some other modifications. Result was awesome, I got Device Notifier applet in working stage. 
 
 After that I ported config.ui file to…
Hello planet! This is Bhushan Shah. I am 18 years old, will be 19 years on this 13th sept. I am from India. I am using Linux and KDE from last two/three years. I started KDE development by porting KGet widget to QML, well not yet merged to master due to some bugs. After that I started to explore some other parts of the KDE like kde-workspace. 
 Recently I made into SoK, Season Of KDE. My…