Nate Graham

I'm a big KDE fan and wish them well in this update. People complain about the papercuts, UI inconsistencies, and feature overload you find in KDE but if you follow Nate's blog on https://pointieststick.com, you can see that they are continually working to address all of these things. That KDE was Valve's chosen DE for Linux on the Steam Deck hopefully means yet more resources for additional polish and features.

I don't miss desktop progress the way it was done on Linux between 2000 and 2015 (ish). It was exciting but now, I'm happy with what I have with Plasma 5. It is a fast, stable, solid desktop environment. Plasma 5 is great and ages like good wine. The interface does not change much, but receives big improvements each version that don't break habits. Focus is on fixing usability bugs. See the weekly posts at [1] for instance. It gets refined instead of changed. [1] https://pointieststick.com/

This is why I believe Nate Graham does a fantastic job with weekly KDE updates[0]. He actually goes through the pain to condense every bugfix/feature addition to readable and grokkable single line, and it makes for great changelog read. Of course, not every project can manage to write such a thoughtful post for every release, but if Mr. Graham can do it for something as sprawling as KDE, then can sure at least try. [0] https://pointieststick.com/

I'm sorry to raise your blood pressure (;p), but this laptop (bought over 3 years ago) hasn't seen anything else other than KDE Plasma, the first couple of months with X, but with Wayland since then. I have seen none of the issues you've listed, nor did I notice any performance or battery life degradation with the switch, quite the opposite -- while the battery life seemed to have remaining pretty much the same, performance (specially with multi-monitor setups) is much better. My laptop also has dual GPUs (discrete Nvidia and integrated Intel) and I notice no differences between running with nvidia completely turned off and in optimus hybrid mode. My only issue is, ironically enough, also with multi-monitor setups, where the layout and main monitor selection seems unstable and sometimes changes when waking up from sleep. I've been following KDE's development (through Nate's incredible blog[0]) and I'm pretty sure these problems have been fixed with the new 6.0 release. But yeah, you seem to be particularly affected by bugs, sorry for the experience. What Nvidia card do you have? And driver versions? [0]: https://pointieststick.com

The "we know better than you" attitude unfortunately seems increasingly popular at KDE as well[1][2][3]. [1] https://pointieststick.com/2024/02/09/this-week-in-kde-inching-closer/ search "Active screen follows mouse" [2] https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=481069 [3] https://blogs.kde.org/2025/11/26/going-all-in-on-a-wayland-future/

This is my takeaway as well. Having brushed up against a few things like this, I assume there is more back-and-forth about reorganizing Tech Paladin than what is published. However, I am certainly not suggesting an escalatory exposé of communications, as it likely does nothing to change the two bottom line facts: Riddell was not included in the new company, possibly over their disagreement regarding company structure, but this isn't something we could know for certain. Following that, Riddell decided to end contributions to KDE. EDIT: Updated to reflect details from https://pointieststick.com/2025/09/16/a-few-corrections-about-the-tran… reflecting that "...at no point was [Nate Graham] or Techpaladin ever Jonathan’s employer."

This article is an awful lot of words for not much being said. I’m glad they like the improvements (I certainly do) but you’ll be hard pressed to extract what those actually are. This is kinda understandable, as plasma 6 is good because it’s a massive accumulation of lots of little fixes where usability was examined and adjusted rather than “major feature x and y”. But I don’t think most of us are here for feel good fluff for clicks. I instead recommend looking at this developer’s personal blog if you want to read something substantial: https://pointieststick.com/category/this-week-in-kde/ The official blog is a decent general overview of the status of releases. FYI they are currently cleaning up some issues from the recent user facing release that weren’t in unstable/testing: https://blog.neon.kde.org/

For more background in general I recommend the blog of one of the main developers, for this wayland news specifically this article: https://pointieststick.com/2023/11/10/this-week-in-kde-wayland-by-defa… This article from september goes into wayland (and KDE) much deeper and is worth a read: https://pointieststick.com/2023/09/17/so-lets-talk-about-this-wayland-…

My personal favorite is the This Week In[0] series of posts, if you want a simple way to keep track of notable changes. Technical blogposts are a pretty common practice among reverse-engineers, too; the Dolphin emulator has some great breakdowns[1], along with the people who reverse-engineered the Nintendo Switch's boot process[2] (and the rest of LiveOverflow's stuff). The Asahi writeups are great, but certainly not all there is. Tons of reverse-engineering stuff and Linux documentation gets submit to this website, it just doesn't generally do as well in the ranking system. [0] https://thisweek.gnome.org/ [0] https://pointieststick.com/category/this-week-in-kde/ [1] https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/ [2] https://youtu.be/Ec4NgWRE8ik

There has been indeed a lot of changes in the last three years since Nate Graham started doing weekly update about all the stuff going on each week: https://pointieststick.com/

Well put! I use KDE nowadays exclusively and all the tremendous progress they showcase here - https://pointieststick.com/ - is very real and exciting. They have made the development process easy and friendly and it really shows in terms of contributions they are getting. I enjoy reading the progress every week and digging into the bug fixes and review comments! One day I will have some free time to contribute.

There already is a very active design team: https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved/design For progress in polishing stuff (not only visual), see the blog https://pointieststick.com/ for weekly updates.

Mid-august we had to vote on new KDE goals (I suppose I received the invitation to vote because I contributed a few bugfixes and features to some KDE projects). We had to chose and sort by priority six goals among these choices: — Enhancing control and automation: integrate KDE Plasma (and apps) with Smart Home Ecosystems — Freedom through Better Data and Workflow Organization and Management — KDE Needs You! - Formalise and boost KDE's processes for recruiting active contributors — KDE-based Text Snippet Expansion — Sandbox all the things! — Plasma - A Beacon for Open Design — Refining and Enriching KDE: Empowering Users with Convenient and Intuitive Features — Streamlined Application Development Experience — Unify the Plasma experience — We care about your Input I'm quite glad that the three goals which won the vote and thus are being prioritized are the "meta" goals. I see those as strategic investments that will ensure the other goals can then be accomplished, in the same vein as the recent news that KDE will starting asking for donations directly in Plasma through a once-a-year notification [1]. It's great that KDE is taking care of KDE itself so that it will be able to take an even better care of all the projects that it hosts (starting with the Plasma desktop environment, but not only). [1] https://pointieststick.com/2024/08/28/asking-for-donations-in-plasma/

Honestly, I was never convinced that concentrating all developer effort onto Wayland was the best idea. Wayland seemed like a massive over-correction from X11, where the protocol and core were "simple" in comparison to X11 which did everything. Being simple, by itself, is not a virtue -- Wayland basically forced all the essential complexity of the problem to the compositors (a la Waterbed theory of Complexity [1]). Given there are so many compositor implementations, they essentially end up reinventing the wheels all the time. This is a bit better now with wlroots, but unfortunately, the ecosystem is already fragmented. I'm not saying X11 is superior to Wayland or vice-versa, but frankly I would be surprised if we couldn't improve X11 if it got 0.1% of the amount of effort collectively gone into Wayland. I would highly recommend reading through some of these blog posts who expound upon the problems of Wayland more eloquently than I can [2,3,4]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterbed_theory [2]: https://dudemanguy.github.io/blog/posts/2022-06-10-wayland-xorg/waylan… [3]: https://pointieststick.com/2023/09/17/so-lets-talk-about-this-wayland-… [4]: https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/WaylandTechnicalMeritsIr…

If KDE and GNOME are stuck, it's not because they can't innovate with their UIs enough with traditional ways of interacting with a computer. In fact, I don't think innovating in a way that doesn't involve new ways to interact (such as VR/AR) is very desirable to most users. The truth is, most people don't want to install operating systems, even if they're free and easier to install than Windows. The only way to go further is to ship with hardware and for that combination of hardware and software to be in demand. On top of that, when the operating system/desktop environment has reached a decent baseline of general usability like KDE Plasma and GNOME have, the software ecosystem around the OS/DE is more of a limiting factor than the UIs of the OS/DE. The fact that System 76 sells laptops could actually give their DE a significant advantage over other small DEs if they ship their own DE. It's unlikely to overtake KDE and GNOME since System 76 doesn't sell tons of laptops like Dell or other big hardware companies, but I guess never say never. I don't expect instant world domination, but I hope the Steam Deck (which will ship KDE Plasma for its desktop mode) will greatly boost the popularity and developer community of KDE. With success, there is a chance at a snowball effect where new users who enjoy the product contribute and bring attention, which brings more new users, etc. All things considered, the share of people using the Steam Deck isn't going to be that big compared…

> a much better strategy is to first make the feature unavailable by normal means They started doing that in early 2024 with the release of KDE 6.0 by enabling KDE Wayland by default. The Wayland-only change won't happen til 6.8 which will be an early 2027 release. https://pointieststick.com/2023/11/10/this-week-in-kde-wayland-by-defa… > And only then, once we are confident that no massive unforeseen issue has surfaced, can the codebase be removed. Yes, that's the current step they'll be at with 6.8.

https://pointieststick.com/2025/03/10/personal-and-professional-update… for the sake of completeness here's Nate Graham version of events.

I don't think it's true that anything is architecturally or fundamentally broken in Wayland (though if you disagree, I'm very curious what you think is so deeply broken). Most of the issues and slow adoption were because the core protocol was deliberately kept extremely minimal, and agreeing on all the needed extensions took a long time. Don't take it from me, but rather from KDE developer Nate Graham: https://pointieststick.com/2023/09/17/so-lets-talk-about-this-wayland-… As such, anyone who tried it early probably had to deal with a pretty large amount of non-working stuff, but by now the platform is capable of most features people require and the biggest remaining bottleneck is that software needs to use these new APIs.

Yeah it's an especially bizarre remark because the pop-up isn't a nag, it literally only shows up once per year. It's also demonstrably worked to increase donations to KDE: https://pointieststick.com/2024/12/02/i-think-the-donation-notificatio…

> KDE looks different enough to windows in its default Uhhhh it does? https://kde.org/content/plasma-desktop/plasma-launcher.png https://laptopmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/win10-start1-940x52… https://pointieststick.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/hebrew-calendar.… https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/chorus/upload… I like KDE a lot, and yes you can configure it to look and act just abut any way you like, but it's default definitely has a lot in common with Windows.

I think I got confused by your "release channels" bit in the original comment, because I thought you were asking for distros which ship and support the Plasma LTS release, but I guess you're asking more whether we have an LTS release? We did in fact have versions marked as LTS in the Plasma 5.x generation, but the concept never quite worked that well practice (e.g. because distros generally shipped newer versions based on user demand and didn't really adopt the LTS releases, even for their own LTS distro releases, so the benefit calculation for them was different from your expectation) and we haven't kept them for the Plasma 6.x series. You can read some background here: https://pointieststick.com/2025/05/01/notes-from-the-graz-plasma-sprin… It might come back some day in some form, but the discussion is ongoing.

This story need some context. Who are Nate and Dave? Why the deal with Steam went automatically to Nate? UPDATE: Apparently it was a deal done months ago with the Blue Systems owner: https://pointieststick.com/2025/03/10/personal-and-professional-update…

Your framing seems somehow backwards. Based on the other article[0] Nate and David bought out the business from Blue Systems. Jonathan (previously employed by Blue) proposes a co-op model, the new owners say “no thanks, we’re good”. Jonathan is surprised at this, storms out, detonating all the bridges on the way. [0] https://pointieststick.com/2025/03/10/personal-and-professional-update…

this bit is a no-go for me. they've decided what goes in the immutable base os and allowed a set of kde apps citing subpar experience flatpak versions. I'm guessing they haven't tested all flatpak apps as they tested their apps. "Well, we’re kind of cheating a bit here. A couple KDE apps are shipped as Flatpaks, and the rest you download using Discover will be Flatpack’d as well, but we do ship Dolphin, Konsole, Ark, Spectacle, Discover, Info Center, System Settings, and some other System-level apps on the base image, rather than as Flatpaks. The truth is, Flatpak is currently a pretty poor technology for system-level apps that want deep integration with the base system. We tried Dolphin and Konsole as Flatpaks for a while, but the user experience was just terrible." https://pointieststick.com/2025/09/06/announcing-the-alpha-release-of-…

> to disprove a claim made by uninformed people KDE developer wrote recently: > X11 isn’t able to perform up to the standards of what people expect today with respect to .., 10 bits-per-color monitors,.. multi-monitor setups (especially with mixed DPIs or refresh rates),... [1] Multi-monitor setups are working since 20+ years. 10 bits are also supported (otherwise how would the PRO versions of graphic cards support this feature). > chose to put its energy into bringing it all together in I cannot recall, was there any paper analyzing why working and almost working X11 features do not fit, few additional X11 extensions cannot be proposed anymore and another solution from scratch is inevitable. What is a significant difference of a X11 and a wayland protocol extension. [1] https://pointieststick.com/2025/06/21/about-plasmas-x11-session/

KDE, starting with Plasma 6.2, shows a notification once per year[1] and indeed it works[1]. They make donating[3] very easy. [1]: https://pointieststick.com/2024/08/28/asking-for-donations-in-plasma/ [2]: https://pointieststick.com/2024/12/02/i-think-the-donation-notificatio… [3]: https://kde.org/donate/

It's not a Gnome specific thing, it happens on nearly all wayland conpositors, it's just that KDE applies some fixes https://pointieststick.com/2022/06/17/this-week-in-kde-non-blurry-xway…

In recent years, a huge amount of effort went into UI polish, simplification and bug fixing for KDE Plasma. Nate Graham championed community goals such as "usability and productivity", "consistency", while also focusing developers on high-priority bugs and blogging weekly about the progress: https://pointieststick.com/category/this-week-in-kde/

Funnily enough, Plasma 6 brings back the cube effect[1]. [1] https://pointieststick.com/2023/10/27/these-past-2-weeks-in-kde-waylan…

Dolphin has "selection mode" for a while now. I like that in combination with single click open. https://pointieststick.com/2022/08/19/this-week-in-kde-dolphin-selecti…