KDE

With KDE 6.5.0, PowerDevil has broken forced its own set of suspend/hibernate inhibitors onto logind. And to my knowledge, there’s no way to disable them.

As a user, I’d prefer to set lid action as Do nothing and really expect KDE/PowerDevil to do nothing in that regard. But with KDE 6.5.0 PowerDevil forces those inhibitors whatsoever.

❯ systemd-inhibit  --list
WHO            UID  USER PID   COMM            WHAT                                                                       WHY                                                        >
ModemManager   0    root 3541  ModemManager    sleep                                                                      ModemManager needs to reset devices                        >
NetworkManager 0    root 3453  NetworkManager  sleep                                                                      NetworkManager needs to turn off networks                  >
UPower         0    root 4342  upowerd         sleep                                                                      Pause device polling                                       >
PowerDevil     1000 rrs  82735 org_kde_powerde handle-power-key:handle-suspend-key:handle-hibernate-key:handle-lid-switch KDE handles power events                                   >
Screen Locker  1000 rrs  4844  kwin_wayland    sleep                                                                      Ensuring that the screen gets locked before going to sleep >

5 inhibitors listed.

This essentially prohibits logind to act on the lid actions. And instead forces the user to depend on nothing else and other than PowerDevil. This assumes the wishful thought that PowerDevil is Solid.

Why is it so hard to have a proper download manager in today’s day ? We had it in the previous decade. Or do tech giants self-proclaim that the world lives only in their cloud.

At one point, there used to be great download managers for all major web browsers, either in-built, or external. Then came the latest trend with Chrome and Firefox, where they make it difficult to have an external download manager work proper. On either one’s extension store, I find it difficult to see a proper download manager.

KDE Impressions

These days, I often hear a lot about Wayland. And how much of effort is being put into it; not just by the Embedded world but also the usual Desktop systems, namely KDE and GNOME.

In recent past, I switched back to KDE and have been (very) happy about the switch. Even though the KDE 4 (and initial KDE 5) debacle had burnt many, coming back to a usable KDE desktop is always a delight. It makes me feel home with the elegance, while at the same time the flexibility, it provides. It feels so nice to draft this blog article from Kwrite + VI Input Mode

If I look back now, it must be more than 20 years since I got fascinated with GNU/Linux ecosystem and started using it.

Back then, it was more curiosity of a young teenager and the excitement to learn something. There’s one thing that I have always admired/respected about Free Software’s values, is: Access for everyone to learn. This is something I never forget and still try to do my bit.

When I bought my [Lenovo Yoga 2 13](http://www.researchut.com/blog/lenovo- yoga-2-13-debian), I had great plans. I wanted a device, that I could use both, as a laptop, and also as a tablet. The path hasn’t been easy. But then, no path in Free Software against Freedom and Privacy has been easy. The choice is left to us, the users.

I had been a long time KDE User. With KDE’s decision to have different UIs for different form factors (plasma active, plasma netbook, plasma desktop), it was now time to try something different. I had 2 choices to explore: Unity and GNOME. But given that Unity is not feasible in Debian, the obvious first option to explore was GNOME. And I guess my timing was perfect. I started with 3.14 which showed great promises about touch support, followed by 3.16 and now 3.18. There ’s still a long way to go, but GNOME definitely is in the right direction and improves impressively with each release.

In the 3.x days of KDE, there were some wonderful applications. One of them I still admire, is kscope. Recently, I stumbled upon this blog entry and thought of sharing my living with kscope.

The move from KDE 3 to KDE 4 was a big one. During that move, the kscope author decided to port kscope to a Qt only application. That is what we have as the latest kscope, 1.9x version. But, on personal taste, it is not as good as the 1.6x series.

Nokia has [announced](http://blog.qt.nokia.com/2011/03/07/nokia-and-digia- working-together/) that it is selling off its Qt business. This needed to happen given the change in the company’s strategy. Microsoft is a software vendor providing Mobile OS, with Nokia being one of its consumers. For Nokia, to have a tier 1 alliance with Microsoft, it would have been important for the company to show positive gesture. With this move, Microsoft and Nokia will strengthen their partnership. This move will focus on tighter integration in between the 2 company’s portfolios.

My recent experience with Mozilla ThuderBird, IceDove.

With KDE 4.x, the KDE team took a radical step of ripping apart most of the stuff and rethinking many of the designs. Quite a bold move. Many people appreciated KDE’s efforts to start afresh while others moved away from KDE. For some reasons, I decided to stick to KDE. Maybe it was because of the awesome flexibility KDE provided provides to customize the DE to one’s personal taste. Or maybe because I was too used to the KDE way of doing things. I stayed with KDE while 4.0 was released and stayed with it up till very recently.

I’ve been using KDE for a while now, probably 9yrs. I’ve also been an early adopter of KDE 4.x. While KDE 4 is still far way behind in proving its worth of the radical core changes it made (take for example: Nepomuk, Strigi, Phonon, Decibel - I still wonder when they are going to be ready for the user), I still find KDE apps far far ahead of GNOME.

Probably, many would disagree. Possibly, they might flame me too.I mean everyone supports GNOME as the default - Red Hat/Novell/Ubuntu. And I always wonder WHY.