I write code
It s been a long time since I wrote here last time. I would like to share a few details about a feature that I m really excited about, which landed in KWin recently. Drop shadows are drawn either by the compositor or the application. For example, a good chunk of GTK applications employ the latter strategy, Continue reading Server-side Drop Shadows
Global objects are one of the core abstractions in Wayland. They are used to announce supported protocols or announce semi-transient objects, for example available outputs. The compositor can add and remove global objects on the fly. For example, an output global object can be created when a new monitor becomes available, and be removed when Continue reading Addressing global removal race in…
Animations Everybody loves animations. They make your desktop look more eye candy, and they also help with guiding or drawing the user s attention towards certain elements on the screen, for example a new window or a popup or a button, etc. An animation is a just quick series of images to simulate the movement of Continue reading Improving animations
Aurorae is a decoration engine that allows you easily using third party decoration themes from KDE Store. It s been around for quite a while and it has a plenty long history. However, in the recent years, it has been somewhat neglected. The UI trends changed, e.g. rounded corners are all the rage now, but there Continue reading What s next for Aurorae?
Dark mode has been available in Plasma for quite a while now but the next release explores new areas where it can be taken one step further, beginning from some behind the scenes infrastructure to more user facing features such as dynamic wallpapers and automatic day/night global theme switching. My journey to improving dark mode Continue reading Dark mode improvements in Plasma
One of the biggest behind-the-scenes changes in the upcoming Plasma 6.4 release is the split of kwin_x11 and kwin_wayland codebases. With this blog post, I would like to delve in what led us to making such a decision and what it means for the future of kwin_x11. Background KWin started as an X11 window manager Continue reading kwin_x11 and kwin_wayland split
Just a quick update: Recently, you might have heard that GTK 4 added support for the cursor-shape-v1 protocol on Wayland. The main advantage of the cursor-shape-v1 protocol is that it ensures consistent cursor look between apps. In Plasma, additional perks come with it, for example the cursor can look more crisp with fractional scale factors Continue reading cursor-shape-v1 support landed in GTK3
Screen magnification is an accessibility feature that enlarges the screen to make text, images, and other user interface components easier to see or read. It is not something that requires constant developer attention, however, in Plasma 6.3, the zoom plugin received some improvements that I d like to go over quickly. Pixel grid Arguably, it will Continue reading Zoom improvements
One of the quickest ways to determine whether particular application runs using Xwayland is to resize one of its windows and see how it behaves, for example While it can be handy for the debugging purposes, overall, it makes the Plasma Wayland session look less polished. So, one of the goals for 6.3 was to Continue reading Improving Xwayland window resizing
SVG cursor themes is a new feature in Plasma 6.2, which we are really excited about. In this blog post, I would like to provide more background behind what motivated us to add support for them, what they are, and how to build them. (Classic) cursor theme format A cursor theme is a collection of Continue reading SVG cursors: everything that you need to know about them