Hello Planet!

Hello KDE!

My name is Matthias Klumpp, I’m a student of Molecular Biomedicine in Germany and contributor to KDE, of course 🙂

I am one of these weird people who are really working cross-desktop, which means I am also involved in some GNOME stuff and I’m running GNOME-Shell, of course, as well as KDE 4.7, which is my primary desktop. (I like KDE better and I can work faster with it.) I think that GNOME and KDE can work together in many different aspects and I am really exited about the progress cross-desktop projects made the past years. Very good examples of KDE/GNOME collaboration are e.g. DBus, Telepathy, PackageKit or (very new) Zeitgeist (as well as the SecretService stuff) There are problems, of course, but nothing which can’t be handled.

My main field of interest is everything belonging to the question “How can we make software available to end-users easily?”. I am a PackageKit developer and great fan of this project (I very often encourage people to please, please use PackageKit if it makes sense). I’m also involved in the AppSteam cross-distro project and maintain everything belonging to PackageKit for Debian and Ubuntu. On KDE I will help Daniel Nicoletti with Apper, for example by implementing AppStream support in Apper (it uses an old implementation of AppInstall at time) or even by just writing documentation to get it out of KDE playground.

I am also the author of Listaller, a cross-disto software installer. For the people now thinking “oh no, not another installer”, just a few words: Listaller is different. It uses an app-dir-like approach and is far more secure than adding PPAs on Ubuntu and it provides seamless integration with PackageKit, which means you can e.g. update Listaller applications by just running Apper. Also tools like Apper or the USC will thread Listaller apps just like regular packages. I’ll write more about this project later, maybe.

I also do some stuff for Clementine Mediaplayer, fixing bugs for projectM and helping with some scientific apps for KDE. I also have a ready-to-use neuronal network simulator here, unfortunately I can’t publish it as OSS at the moment. (But I’m working on this) I do also fix simple bugs in other KDE software, so some people might know me from Bug Reports…

I also attended Desktop Summit 2011, which was my first Desktop Summit. It was great to meet so many people from KDE and GNOME at one place, and the atmosphere in Berlin was just fantastic. I hope there will be a third DS in two years, at least the statistics say that many people found this DS very useful.

Okay, I guess you know now what I do 😛 I will try to keep the Planet-KDE feed as KDE-centric as possible, but you might find some Listaller- or PackageKit related posts there from time to time. 😉

Cheers,

Matthias