Porting Muon Discover to KF5

Muon has been a project that I’ve been very eager to port and iterate for a longtime. I’m happy with the 2.0 series, lots of changes were made and it has served us well. More importantly though, we have a solid technology to keep pushing our work on.

Porting

Now the first change has been the port to Qt5 and KF5 and adoption of QtQuick 2. This has been one of the few projects that have suffered from it, especially because we did a couple of hacks so that Muon Discover would integrate with the rest of applications’ look and feel. In any case, it’s sorted out now, we adopted the new QtQuick Controls and it works quite good, only problem being the usage of QQuickWidget, but that will be solved eventually, when we have everything we need in place to take the next step towards better integration between KXmlGui and QtQuick.

What to expect?

The most important news is that it will be as good and fresh as it used to be, integrated with the newer look and feel themes, capable of offering different sorts of data, such as applications, wallpapers and plasmoids.

Furthermore, some new features will be introduced with the forthcoming Muon 3.0 that will change how we integrate Muon on our systems. First of all, Appstream is being adopted for good. Now it will be possible to get a useful PackageKit backend, which has been adopted recently.

• Additionally, for the ArchLinux fans, I did some fixing on the PackageKit libalpm backend so now it can be used again. 😀 Still, work on the Appstream set up is needed and help is very welcome.
• Since I wanted to use a good PackageKit reference implementation, I looked into Fedora. I’ve been trying to get it working, but haven’t succeeded that much yet. I expected Appstream to be a first class citizen there, and things keep falling apart. We’ll have to work more in this area.
• Kubuntu will remain using QApt for now. It seems to be working properly and there’s no intentions to change. Debian has also been ported to use use the same backend, we are pending though on some decisions to be taken with regards of metadata sources, that is, Appstream again.

**shrug** Looks like we’ll have to give a good push to Appstream!

Future

I would like to see different Plasma-oriented distributions embracing Muon as a resource management front-end. So far, resource management hasn’t been part of our user experience, with the exception of KNewStuff.

Additionally, there’s a forum thread where a new graphical design is being worked on so it doesn’t look all that clunky (especially managing to make QtQuick Controls applications look good).

All this is already available on our Git repositories. A final version will be released early 2015 together with Plasma 5.2, although I’d like to roll a stable version first, so distributions can start adopting it.