Kate

Maintaining Kate Podcast (German)

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 20:42:00 +0200

Early this year I got asked by Martin Wolf from Golem.de if I want to appear on their German podcast in respect to my work on Kate and the experience on maintaining it for 2 decades.

During the Akademy at Berlin the stuff got taped at the Golem office at Berlin and now it is online on the 'Besser Wissen' podcast site.

The podcast is in German like the text on the page. There is a full transcript of the podcast on the site, I guess your preferred browser can translate it, if you are interested :)

Comments?

A matching thread for this can be found on r/KDE.

Goodbye kwrite-devel@kde.org

Sun, 21 Sep 2025 20:33:00 +0200

The beginnings

Over 24 years ago, our kwrite-devel@kde.org mailing list started with:

From: Scott Manson

To: kwrite-devel@max.tat.physik.uni-tuebingen.de

Date: Wednesday, February 21st, 2001 at 21:47

Subject: [Kwrite-devel] I just wanted to be the first to post here )

Welcome to kwrite-devel

I hope this is an active list and we can attract some more developers Anyone have any ideas on coding style,enhancements problems please feel free to post your questions/comments here.

or, depending which mail arrived faster in your inbox:

From: Waldo Bastian

To: kwrite-devel@kde.org

Date: Wednesday, February 21st, 2001 at 21:50

Subject: [Kwrite-devel] Welcome to this mailinglist.

Hello,

Welcome to the kwrite development mailinglist. *test*test*

Cheers, Waldo

The journey

Like the first mail wanted, that list was very active for a long period of time.

The initial posters no longer are active in the project, but some people like me still stick around even after more than two decades.

A lot of important design decisions were discussed on the mailing list and many user questions got answered.

The end

The list traffic slowed down more and more over the last years even as the actual amount of contributions (and presumable the user base) did increase.

Reasons are for sure that for development, we use mostly our KDE GitLab instance for communication. It is just that easier to couple discussions with code there and link development issues to merge requests or commits. I can not remember any serious discussion on larger development topics outside our GitLab in the last years.

For users I assume mailing lists are just too arcane today. Perhaps that is a misconception I have, but at least from most people I know in real life, most of the online support questions went of to either websites or random other channels. Some people survive without any mail account beside the one needed to create some online accounts or install thei mobile phone.

I need to moderate away at least 10 to 100 spam mails for any real mail on the list, that is just a not needed overhead nobody should waste time with.

Therefore in the near future we will close that list, it will not get a 25 years birthday party :-)

But where to ask & discuss stuff now?

I already updated our documentation and web site to point to the current contact points.

In short:

Bug reports: like before - our KDE Bugzilla instance
User questions web site: use the Kate section on the KDE discourse server
User & developer questions chat: join our Kate Matrix channel
Development discussions and code: show up at our KDE GitLab instance

Many Kate developers and users are active on random social media and Co., too. But the above mentioned places are the ones that should be preferred.

Comments?

A matching thread for this can be found on r/KDE.

Kate & Co. in the Microsoft Store

Tue, 03 Jun 2025 19:34:00 +0200

KDE stuff and the Microsoft Store

Kate is in the Microsoft Store since 2019.

Since that time you can install it easily from here and the store will allow you to keep our application updated.

Kate is not the only KDE application there, other stuff uploaded under the KDE e.V. umbrella can be found here, this includes KDE Connect and Okular.

We have now better documentation and tooling for store submissions, the last update of Kate to 25.04 was, beside the local testing of the build if it is not broken in normal use, the press of one button.

Compared to my old guide from my first submission, that is really awesome, thanks a lot to all people that worked on that!

What if I don't like the Microsoft Store?

Naturally you don’t have to use the store (which implies some account you might not want and telemetry that you might want even less).

Alternate downloads are on our normal download page.

Or, if you want to be even more in control, and perhaps even willing to contribute, build it from source yourself, Craft makes that easy.

The Microsoft Store submissions are just a way to reach a larger audience. Some people might even not be able to install stuff from other sources, depending how locked down their Windows installation is.

Current Statistics

Below the current statistics of the published applications sorted by acquisitions, that means more or less means individual user installs.

Not that bad, over half a million installs for KDE Connect, close to half a million for Okular and a quarter million for Kate.

Current Ratings

The internal statistics of the store allow to see the ratings over the whole publishing time. They look good, too.

KDE Connect Ratings

Okular Ratings

Kate Ratings

The Future?

We will need to update the versions in the store, Kate is now on 25.04, more to follow hopefully.

We need help with fixing Windows only bugs, too. Just a random one for Kate can be found here.

Comments?

A matching thread for this can be found here on KDE Social or r/KDE.

Going to Akademy?

Fri, 30 May 2025 20:25:00 +0200

In September 2024, the annual KDE conference Akademy was held in Würzburg. I've been to all Akademies from 2004-2020 (except 2005). Then came Covid, private life, etc. So it was kind of special that I finally made it to Würzburg again, which was just a ~2h ride away by train. And it was a good decision: Since many KDE contributors (also those who stayed with KDE a for a log time) came to this Akademy. It was a good opportunity to meet old friends again.

And that remided me of a blog post I wrote 15 years ago: The Power of Developer Meetings. In that post I was highlighting the importance of face-to-face meetings. What I wrote back then is still relevant today, so I'll just repeat:

Social aspect: You get to know the other developers involved in the project in real life, which is a great motivation factor and simplifies communication a lot.
Productivity: Since you are sitting next to each other discussions about what to do and how to do what are very focused. It’s amazing how quickly a project can evolve this way. (I still haven’t seen such focused work in companies yet, even 15 years later).
Knowledge Transfer: Since participants are experts in different areas, discussions lead to knowledge transfer. This is essential, as sometimes developers have very few free time to contributes to a project. Spreading the knowledge helps a lot to keep the project alive.
Steady Contributions: New contributors always pop up, which is in particular very nice. Everyone is welcome to set a patch, get commit access and join development. Experience shows that participants joining developer meetings / conferences usually contribute for years to come.

I enjoyed meeting KWin developers (new and old ones), plasma developers, and Kate developers again (of course!). All in all I am very happy to see the lively community that KDE managed to be for over 25 years - well done!

Having said that, I am looking forward to Akademy 2025, that will be hosted in Berlin again. In case you are unsure to go there, I suggest to just do it! It's certainly going to be a very good experience, so go ahead and register now.

PS: Würzburg has one touristic spot, the "Alte Mainbrücke". Pretty much every tourist goes to this bridge and drinks a wine - I did so, too :-)