Especially given the creation of KDE OS, how are you supposed to develop KDE Applications on an atomic distro?
Since I began trying to make Qt/KDE applications, I have been unable to do even basic things, such as following the tutorials for Kirigami and KDE Builder, because following them step-by-step in a distrobox results in errors. The best I have been able to do is make use of the Python bindings, and those have their own set of limitations.
There should be an official distrobox image you can download with the sole purpose of being excellent for developing KDE applications. If this already does exist, it needs to be made extremely apparent that you should use it, even if the steps should in theory work in any distrobox (because in every case I have experienced, they don’t).
On Fedora Atomic systems I’m pretty sure most development is done within toolbx.
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What errors did you get, what distro did you use, and did you ask for support in any of the development rooms on Matrix?
It’s a fairly hot question that to be honest, we’re still working out in KDE Linux land.
There’s Team Distrobox, and they make great points. The challenge is integration; lots of KDE tools and projects still require quite a bit of manual setup and work with containers.
There’s also Team Flatpak, and this is easily the best approach for individual apps. But it doesn’t work well (or at all) for library development or Plasma development.
Do you know if there is any guide for developing within Flatpak? I want to make one very simple app (four buttons and a text area that link to a terminal) and I have spent almost a week trying to get anything to build. The only other things I haven’t tried yet are developing in a virtual machine and dualbooting a normal distro.
We have https://develop.kde.org/docs/packaging/flatpak/, though I want to change the two first sections to make them clearer in the following month(s).
The thing with Flatpak though is that it still requires you to at least have a properly set up CMake. This means that, before you can switch to a full flatpak workflow:
- if you’re trying to build your own project, you need your project to be at least buildable with either kde-builder or manually
- if you’re trying to build an existing project, you’ll need to switch the manifest sources to a local directory instead of a git repo (which is not too bad)