Tutorial

🦎 Hi geekos! On 14 October 1996 a student called Matthias Ettrich announced a “Kool Desktop Environment” for Linux. Thirty years later KDE is still going, so happy 30th birthday, KDE! The community collects the celebrations on the KDE at 30 page. Image credits: KDE logo from the KDE press kit (LGPL). KDE® and the K Desktop Environment® logo are registered trademarks of KDE e.V. This post is my birthday present: the tutorial I wanted when I tried to write my first Plasma widget and got lost in the docs. We will build a small Plasma 6 widget with a C++ model and a QML view, a button that counts clicks. It is about 100 lines of code, and it builds, installs, runs in your panel and has a unit test. On the way we meet four ideas that Qt and KDE developers use daily: signals, slots, the Observer pattern and MVC. The complete code is on GitHub: ilmanzo/plasma-hello-counter. ...

📦 That new package smell We’ve all been there: you see a shiny new app on GitHub and you want to “unwrap” it immediately. But in the traditional Linux world, opening a package often feels like opening a box of glitter in your living room—before you know it, dependencies are scattered everywhere, and you’re still finding weird library versions in /usr/lib three months later. This is why I’ve started reaching for the Flatpak. It’s like an unboxing experience where the box stays a box. You get all the “goodies” inside, but the mess stays contained. Let’s see what happens when we tear off the shrink-wrap. ...

🧂 Salt without the sudo Follow-up from the previous post, today we are going to put our systemd-managed containers to work and use them for some useful tasks. The idea is to set up an environment to learn how the configuration management Salt works, and play/hack around with it, without even needing root or sudo rights. After all, in the infra-world, the Salt must flow! So we will setup two containers, one as a salt server and the other as a salt “minion” (representing the machine that will be configured via salt). ...

🦎 Hi geekos! If you’ve been running containers on your Leap or Tumbleweed machine, you probably started with podman run commands. Maybe you moved to Docker Compose files to manage stacks. Those are great tools, but they have a limitation, as they don’t integrate natively with systemd, your operating system’s init system. When your server reboots, do your containers start back up automatically? If a container crashes, does it restart? How do you view its logs alongside your system journal? ...