Sandro Knau : Akademy 2024 in W rzburg
In order to prepare for the Akademy I started some days before to give my Librem 5 ( an Open Hardware Phone) another try and ended up with a non starting Plasma 6.
Actually this issue was known already, but hasn't been addressed.
In the end I reached the Akademy with my Librem 5 having phosh installed (which is Gnome based), in order to have something working.
I met Bushan and Bart who took care and the issue was fixed two days later I could finally install Plasma 6 on it.
The last time I tested my Librem 5 with Plasma 5 it felt sluggish and not well working.
But this time I was impressed how well the system reacts.
Sure there are some things here and there, but in the bigger picture it is quite useable.
One annoying issue is that the camera is only working with one app and the other issue is the battery capacity, you have to charge it once a day.
Because of missing a QR reader that can use the camera, getting data to the phone was quite challenging.
Unfortunately the conference Wifi separated the devices and I couldn't use KDE Connect to transfer data.
In the end the only way to import data was taking five photos from the QR Code to import my D-Ticket to Itinerary.
With a device with Plasma Mobile, it directly was used for a experiment: How well does Dolphin works on a Plasma Mobile device.
Together with Felix Ernst we tried it out and were quite impressed, that Dolphin does work very well on Plasma Mobile, after some simple modifications on the UI.
That resulted in a patch to add a mobile UI for Dolphin !826.
With more time to play with my Librem 5 I also found an bug in KWeather, that is missing a Refresh option, when used in a Plasma Mobile environment #493656.
Akademy is a good place to identify and solve some issues.
It is always like that, you chat with someone and they can tell you who to ask to answer the concrete question and in the end you can solve things, that seems unsolvable in the beginning.
There was also time to look into the travelling app Itinerary.
A lot people are faced with a lot of real world issues, when not in their home town.
Itinerary is the best traveling apps I know about.
It can import nearly every ticket you have and can get location information from restaurant websites and allow routing to that place. It does add many useful information, while traveling like current delays, platform changes, live updates for elevator, weather information at the destination, a station map and all those features with strong focus on privacy.
In detail I found some small things to improve:
- If you search for a bus ride and enter the correct name for the bus stop, it will still add some walk from and to the station. The issue here is that we use different backends and not all backends share the same geo coordinate. That's why Itinerary needs to add some heuristics to delete those paths.
- Instead of displaying just a small station map of one bus stop in the inner city, it showed complete W rzburg inner city, as there is one big park around the inner city (named "Ringpark").
- W rzburg has a quite big bus station but the platform information were missing in the map, so we tweaked the CSS to display the platform. To be sure, that we don't fix only W rzburg, we also looked at Greifswald and Aix-en-Provence if they are following the same name scheme.