Episode: 958
Title: HPR0958: KDE Gathering - Plasma Active - THE Tablet
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0958/hpr0958.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 05:36:46

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Music
This is David and I'm talking again with Carl Simmons and John Blanford about the KDE
developers gathering in Bellingham and the KDE plasma active desktop.
Talking with two gentlemen here today from Hacker Public Radio about KDE, why don't you
introduce yourselves?
I'm John Blanford.
My name is Carl Simmons.
What's going on these days with KDE and what news do you have to tell us?
Well, I think the main thing here is that we're speaking to you, John and I are speaking to
you from Bellingham, Washington, which is the location of Linux Fest Northwest, which is coming up
the last week in in April, April 28th and 29th and one of the sub-events to Linux Fest Northwest
is original meeting of the KDE community in the United States and there have been in the past
national KDE meetings for the United States and including also North America, that is Canada
and Mexico. But the presence for KDE and the number of people who participate is certainly far
less than it is in Europe. So in Europe and actually the rest of the world, there's an annual
meeting, an annual KDE meeting called Academy that is being held this year in Tallinn, Estonia,
which is about 10 days of intensive open desktop and things around the user interface.
That's going to be held from the 30th of June to the 6th of July. Well, I'm on the organizing
committee for that, even though I'm sitting here, Clare on the other side of the United States
from that meeting and so we decided we would have a regional meeting of KDE,
regional to Northwest United States to attract and have a meeting place for users and
developers and businesses that use KDE. So for those people that don't know about KDE, it started
15 years ago last October and it was developed by a guy who thought that it would be good to have
a common interface for all these Unix programs. And so he came up with this thing called the
Cool Desktop Environment that now has been turned into KDE and I'm not going to go into all the
details of what the KDE community is about, but pretty much it's a, the main thing that people see
is the workspace and it's called a plasma workspace and this is what KDE users see when they
interact with their program, with their computer. And so the meeting that will be held with Linux
Fest Northwest is drawing attention to some high profile applications and some, there will
also be a presentation about the latest operating system for mobile devices and tablets that has
just been in the last year has been introduced. I'm going to say a little bit more about that in a
minute, but what we're trying to do is bring in applications like OwnCloud which came out of
the KDE community and CRETA which is an outstanding digital graphics application that really operates
like artists would use. So you can choose a particular kind of brush and a medium and then paint
with your computer as if you were a real artist. So there will be presentations that directly affect
or involve KDE and we will also reach out into the Northwestern part of the United States to
bring people from KDE in and continue to build the sense of community, sense of people working
together. Every time I read the KDE mission or the Code of Conduct, it just makes me, I just
am so proud to be part of this thing because these are people who work together, they respect each
other, it's a meritocracy, but they also are innovative, unbelievably innovative. I think the
biggest news day that will come out of KDE around this time is that there is a new operating system
truly openly developed called Plasma Active and this is an operating system that runs on tablets.
So I'm looking for instance right now at a 10-inch tablet that's running the KDE user interface
and it's been designed so that it fits with people's lives, it's not just a bucket to hold a
whole bunch of apps, it moves and changes the way it operates depending on how you want it to do
that. So if you're in school, you can have a particular kind of tablet. If then you move to your
office, you can change the entire format of the operating system so it fits with what you're doing
at the office. The news is that a company that John and I are involved with has been named the
United States distributor of that tablet and if you've been following Slash. or any of the news
about the tablet, this is a really big deal and what makes it a big deal is that the leadership
including ourselves are committed to developing a tablet operating system that's open that people
can contribute to that if somebody wants to privately brand it they can. Unlike the other tablet
operating systems that are out there that are that kind of lock down and you have to do what the
company says that you bought it from, this is really an open-source project and so we're I'm
really proud to be part of it and looking forward to what a community of open-source people can
produce with it. I think from my perspective that's probably the most exciting thing about plasma
active and the idea of having a truly open platform like that. Most of these systems,
they're very locked down, there's no alternative to the particular hardware. So the operating system
and the hardware sort of lock together and you buy it and you have it and very few people are
going to upgrade it and change it but this gives you a really open platform that you can create your
own versions of the OS and the user interface and customize it to whatever you wish you want.
Yeah so a little bit more about that David, people can go to plasma-active.org to get more
information. The company that has pulled all this together is called makeplaylive.com and there's
more specifications and like there and then of course people can go to kde.org and get more
information about any of these things that we've been talking about. With this sounds like a
real cool event and who is invited to the event or at cana 10? Anybody can attend. It is truly part
of Linux Fest Northwest. The idea is that we want to provide an opportunity for people who are
part of the kde community or who would like to be part of it, who want to be involved with
development. They can come and be part of what kde is doing which is in my view is some of the
most exciting stuff that's happening in technology right now. Right so this event will be
such as a co-located with Linux Fest Northwest so it'll be sort of mixed in with the
Linux Fest Northwest. We'll have the opportunity for kde people to meet together and there'll be
kde-oriented presentations as part of the fast so it is part of the open fast.
Okay that sounds real good. I have a question or two about the tablet and the tablet operating system
and myself I use an android phone and I know a lot of people use the ipad and these type of things
and they do seem sort of locked down and one thing that I find missing is having that sort of
office type applications and this and then being able to customize this plasma active then going
to be there's going to be office applications and this available for it. Yes.
One of the one of the families of applications that kde develops is called Caligra,
C-A-L-L-I-G-R-A. Well the Caligra team has been developing the interface for the Caligra suite which
includes a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation software, drawing software, it's a complete office
suite. They have been developing that so that it works well with touch. The thing about a tablet
is that the interface is touch, you touch it and move around and magnify things and shrink them
and so it's difficult to take an ordinary office suite and just launch it on a tablet. You certainly
can do it but you know your your finger is an awfully big mouse pointer so it helps to have big
buttons and to have only those things that you really need in this suite. The other thing that's
very important to understanding about this world of mobile devices and tablets is that they're
primarily consumption devices. You would not want to sit down with the tablet if you didn't have
an external keyboard. You wouldn't want to sit down and type a dissertation on it but to make
presentations or to read papers or to do calendaring or any of those sort of office kinds of things
it's a perfect environment. I should also mention that there is an extensive
calendaring personal information management aspect to KDE that also has been refocused to a touch
environment and that already is available even though this thing has only been out and really
in early form for about six months I'm going to say it already is perfectly usable for office
kinds of things. Yeah I think the my understanding of it I'm not a KDE developer I'm just a
a long time KDE user but if what I understand any KDE program will run and press my active
you know it's it'll be okay but not all programs yet have been optimized to work well in the tablet
environment but the exciting thing is you've got a bunch of existing applications we don't have
to start from scratch and create new applications necessarily. We can just take the existing KDE
applications and work on optimizing for this new platform for the touch environment so.
I want to say one other thing that's that's pretty excited Dave exciting Dave that
the in the early days like going back there was some controversy because KDE used
the QT environment for widgets and the like and there was some controversy about how exactly
open that was and the like so over time that has been resolved QT is perfectly open it's a great
user interface set of tools and so we get a lot of support from companies that use QT well the
official group in Northwest Washington the user group and the developer group for QT is also
going to be at Linux Fest Northwest and I I can't promise right now but I I believe strongly
that we will have some Raspberry PIs of the new Raspberry PI available for people to code QT on
and we'll be if we can get them we'll be giving them away at the world famous Linux Linux
Fest Northwest raffle so it'll be there's there'll be a strong QT presence as well well that sounds
really exciting and I will have another question though about this tablet architecture and since I
have you guys on and we are talking on hacker public radio if there was an application someone
desired to have developed for this tablet architecture then there is there sufficient developers
available to or say a large corporation or company say they want to take inventory or use for
their sales force this type of a device is there developers available for getting that kind of
thing going and doing new and innovative things yes we are already talking with this is this is
one of the things that john and I see as a huge opportunity for for being the U.S. distributors for
this device we are already talking with a fairly large and actually one of the largest corporations in
the world that is prominent in the medical field I'm not going to say who they are because I don't
have approval to do that right now but I demonstrated a a medical application that uses a QT
based interface that allows for monitoring and dosages and all those sorts of things and so they're
interested and you know we will continue to pursue that conversation but the fact is that they
could take everything that's been developed they could use the tablet they could even come up with
their own tablet and use the operating system in the interface and the the user experience
parts of the of the interface to develop completely their own privately branded
device operating system look and feel put their own logos on it they could do anything with it
that they wanted because it's open source and what we want to do are everybody who's involved in
the project is encourage those kinds of companies to come on in tell tell what they want and if they
don't have the developers in house then yes there's quite a number of people available who do QT
development who do you know some of the more complex development and plus with QT there's some
very simple things that can be done without hardly knowing how to program at all so
this is a way that we can expose the developers who've been working in KDE and who have the skill set
to do these kinds of projects I expect that there will be some some fairly significant companies
that come out of the possibility that this that this tablet represents. So on a technical level there's
like two development environments for it one is QT and C++ so that's sort of the base environment
that you do more complex programming in and certainly C++ is a you know widely understood language
and widely widely used language QT is probably a little less compared to some other things but it's
certainly very well-reviewed amongst programmers is for very good design for that. The other
technical environment is something called QT Quick which is more of a quick application environment
development environment where you take components that are created in QT and then sort of animate
them using a scripting language to create simple applications that way too. So that's a environment
that I think has a lot of promise for doing application or excuse me business specific applications.
You know Dave there's another scoop that I want to tell you about and I don't want to get too far
off in the weeds about this but the underlying Linux distribution that this that this runs
is actually an extension of the MIGO project that Intel and Nokia worked on for quite a long time.
So some of the lead developers from MIGO continue that project and continue to refine it and
they've developed build services and some other utilities to be to provide the underlying
really thin mobile optimized operating system for tablets but it's not just tablets because
the same operating system is running on smartphones. Some of the high-end Nokia smartphones is
running this operating system and some of people have actually if they've taken devices like
perhaps you have and they will instead of running Android they'll install this complete operating
system on. So there's quite a number of people who have done that. So that's called
Merge? MERG.org. Really great people I mean they're really good technicians but they're also
committed to open source. So it's MIGO the guys from MIGO continued with MERG MERG. Their website is
merproject.org and it's yeah they're going great guns. So the stack here is like you know
merge the underlying Linux that's running on there and then plasma active is essentially the
desktop and the environment development environment for the tablet. Yes and then in addition to
that John there's another I would call it the user experience as called contour that was developed
by a German company called Basus KOM. B-A-S-Y-S-K-O-M.com and they're just they are lovely at design and
thinking thinking about how to use a device from the perspective of the user and so it's really
it's everything's been openly developed it's open source and we just want a whole bunch of
people to join in the fun and do something with mobile operating systems such as was done with
Linux itself. And come to the KDE meeting at Lines Fest Northwest to learn more. I guess we're
ahead. Well and that's going to be on the 28th and 29th of April in 2012 also. Yes that's right
correct. Yes and I just have to ask this and you guys seem very plugged into the open source and
software community in that. So you are saying that this operating system and platform is actually
going to be revolutionary and you expect something really big to happen with it is that correct?
Well I think so. I think so I think there's a real power to openness and you know there's a lot
of creativity in our community in the open source community and you know there are open source
projects that run on you know these like Android or iOS or what have you but it's not the quite
same quite the same thing is having a fully open stack from from the hardware to the operating
system to the desktop environment to the applications it's all open now the hardware is produced you
know to particular specifications but all the all the specs on are all open so it's an open
stack from top to bottom and I think that's that is revolutionary and you know there's so many
things that people can think to do with that type of freedom. This is David again at this point
of the interview the server crashed and we had enough information so I'll just say that's a wrap
thank you to Carl and John for sharing about KDE and the KDE gathering thank you
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