KDE Goal: Make Plasma smart

Brainstorm
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What this thread is about

For this year’s KDE Goals, I am proposing to Make Plasma smart.

This thread serves as a discussion point for the wider community in it, I want to:

  1. have an early interest check, if it is indeed a worthy goal
  2. flesh out the proposal together as well as some more use cases that you can think of
  3. let the wider community have a discussion about it

(more info: KDE Goals - Call For Submissions - KDE Blogs )

What is the proposal: Make Plasma smart

I already filed a draft proposal to Invent KDE, but I feel it needs refinement, so I am turning to the collaborative wisdom of this wonderful community.

Plasma already handles a lot of individual sources of information – documents, calendars, contacts, bookmarks, source URLs, file tags, file metadata … but they are not working for the user in a coherent, orchestrated manner. Instead, they are essentially silos.

So the main idea is to that Plasma gets “smart” and finds a way to bind this data together and add meaning to it. Combining/linking individual information could contextualise it to make the information much more useful and organic for humans to use.

As an example, a human knows that the following are all the same person:

  • @hook in the address book and all the contacts (e-mail, XMPP, Matrix, blog, physical address, …)
  • @hook in a group photo from Akademy
    • and who the others are in the picture
    • and that Akademy is an event of the KDE community
  • @hook as the author of a document, stored on the laptop
    • and that if the document is a presentation tagged with Akademy this is the same event as the one in the picture
  • @hook as the author (see address book) of the blog at https://matija.suklje.name
  • @hook as the author of the code in the Git repository
  • @hook as the owner of /home/hook/ on this laptop

Currently, to Plasma those are all completely separate things.

We also live in a time, where information is very often cross-referenced, either through hyperlinks or otherwise. Many people rely on so-called knowledge management systems like Joplin, Obsidian etc., and from what I can tell KDE/Plasma is not far from achieving the same on a desktop-level by better leveraging the features it already has (Baloo, Akonadi, file tags, …) and improving it with more connections and some UI.

I imagine a world where Plasma would understand such and similar connections.

Whether that would mean adding (a) new application(s) or “just” improving Plasma, I think it is up for debate what is the best approach from the users’ – incl. your! – perspective.

Inspiration / further reading

A bit about “AI”

Let’s address the elephant in the room: AI/LLM.

First of all, I propose that this “Smart Plasma” should not** need** any LLM to work. (Personally, I don’t intend on using it with LLMs.)

But I also know that some KDE users use or want to use AI/LLM. And for those people, it would be best – and in line with KDE’s spirit – that Plasma enables a use that is privacy respecting and energy efficient. As such, a small local LLM/AI would be a good choice, but those work best if they can connect to structured data (see e.g. Retrieval-augmented generation - Wikipedia ). And this is what “Smart Plasma” would provide.

Please, let’s not forget, that if Plasma is easier to grasp for normal humans, it would also make it more accessible. Especially for people who may rely on computer assistants, such as people with disabilities and limitations.

Next steps

Please share your ideas, aspirations, concerns, suggestions etc. so we can create a good proposal together.

I think Plasma has great potential to be smart and be (even) more approachable to users :slight_smile:

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I think some of what you’re talking about is also covered in this great video. Some of the ideas could be very useful.

I should mention my original source: https://forum.manjaro.org/t/how-the-desktop-ux-needs-to-evolve/189336

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Thank you. There are some really great ideas and questions there and it seems the general “Smart Plasma” idea is timely too.

I did not see this video before, but I think I saw an earlier video by Scott Jenson. I think I saw an earlier talk (recording) of his.

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It is worth pointing out that AI does no begin and end with LLM and resource hungry data centers that need to raze a forest to produce a stupid image of your uncle riding a giraffe.

AI has been around and helping engineers and common folk since the 60s. The opponent you play against on you phone’s chess game? AI. The software that can recognise text in images? AI. Expert systems that figure out if a bridge will collapse or not? AI.

None of the above use LLM technologies and are frugal in their energetic requirements.

It may be worth making this point clear in your proposal.

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And for those people, it would be best – and in line with KDE’s spirit – that Plasma enables a use that is privacy respecting and energy efficient.

And for a clear conscience, it would be best – and in line with KDE’s spirit – that Plasma does not bake in means of generative slop production. It would be best, and in line with KDE’s spirit, not to further enable the antisocial techbro grift of “”“”“AI”“”“”.
“those people” can find themselves third-party integrations or vibe code their own thing if they want slop in their desktop so badly.

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Absolutely!

And TBH, KDE is not entirely bereft of AI (not in the genAI/LLM way). In DigiKam you could use local face-detection that you taught on your photos already for many years. And then there was the whole promise of Mycroft (now OpenVoiceOS) being an optional voice assisstant for Plasma.

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The casual aibro-placating aside, you should be more specific as to how exactly the desktop is meant to connect the data points you mention in any useful (and not counterproductive) way. Especially if plopping down an “agent” is ruled out, this is too vague to be actionable.

When an OS tries to be “smart” you usually get lots of unpredictable behaviour and a privacy & security nightmare’s worth of metadata, both hard to tame. People run in horror of Windows 11 for this reason. What execution on this idea do you have in mind that would keep out of the user’s way so as to remain a net positive?

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Do not conflate non-generative machine learning and generative “AI”, no gripes were to be had with the former before this current bubble and it remains just fine now, for the purposes of a productive conversation it is not “AI”

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I fully agree, but have the unfortunate bias that I was using NEPOMUK/Strigi before, so in my mind it is something between what NEPOMUK did, how (e.g.) Obsidian handles cross-references and knowledge maps and what Scott Jenson described in the video posted above. I can come up with some use cases, but they will be either very oldskool (i.e. was already state of the art 20 years ago) or completely outlandish (I’m not a coder really, nor a UX expert, just a user).

That is why I’m asking the general KDE community for ideas what they imagine a smart desktop would look like.

Ultimately, the goal should be to make the data connected and as such more useful.

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