I’m pleased to share that my career transition has been successful! I’ve joined our local county assessor’s office, beginning a new path in property assessment for taxation and valuation. While the compensation is modest, it offers the stability I was looking for.
My new schedule consists of four 10-hour days with an hour commute each way, which means Monday through Thursday will be largely devoted to work and travel. However, I’ll have Fridays available for open source contributions once I’ve completed my existing website maintenance commitments.
Open Source Priorities
Going forward, my contribution focus will be:
Ubuntu Community Council
Kubuntu/Debian
Snap packages (as time permits)
Regarding the snap packages: my earlier hope of transitioning them to Carl hasn’t worked out as planned. He’s taken on maintaining KDE Neon single-handedly, and understandably, adding snap maintenance on top of that proved unfeasible. I’ll do what I can to help when time allows.
Looking for Contributors
If you’re interested in contributing to Kubuntu or helping with snap packages, I’d love to hear from you! Feel free to reach out—community involvement is what makes these projects thrive.
Thanks for your patience and understanding as I navigate this transition.
Today marks both a milestone and a turning point in my journey with open source software. I’m proud to announce the release of KDE Gear 25.08.0 as my final snap package release. You can find all the details about this exciting update at the official KDE announcement.
After much reflection and with a heavy heart, I’ve made the difficult decision to retire from most of my open source software work, including snap packaging. This wasn’t a choice I made lightly – it comes after months of rejections and silence in an industry I’ve loved and called home for over 20 years.
Passing the Torch
While I’m stepping back, I’m thrilled to share that the future of KDE snaps is in excellent hands. Carlos from the Neon team has been working tirelessly to set up snaps on the new infrastructure that KDE has made available. This means building snaps in KDE CI is now possible – a significant leap forward for the ecosystem. I’ll be helping Carlos get the pipelines properly configured to ensure a smooth transition.
Staying Connected (But Differently)
Though I’m stepping away from most development work, I won’t be disappearing entirely from the communities that have meant so much to me:
Kubuntu: I’ll remain available as a backup, though Rik is doing an absolutely fabulous job getting the latest and greatest KDE packages uploaded. The distribution is in capable hands.
Ubuntu Community Council: I’m continuing my involvement here because I’ve found myself genuinely enjoying the community side of things. There’s something deeply fulfilling about focusing on the human connections that make these projects possible.
Debian: I’ll likely be submitting for emeritus status, as I haven’t had the time to contribute meaningfully and want to be honest about my current capacity.
The Reality Behind the Decision
This transition isn’t just about career fatigue – it’s about financial reality. I’ve spent too many years working for free while struggling to pay my bills. The recent changes in the industry, particularly with AI transforming the web development landscape, have made things even more challenging. Getting traffic to websites now requires extensive social media work and marketing – all expected to be done without compensation.
My stint at webwork was good while it lasted, but the changing landscape has made it unsustainable. I’ve reached a point where I can’t continue doing free work when my family and I are struggling financially. It shouldn’t take breaking a limb to receive the donations needed to survive.
A Career That Meant Everything
These 20+ years in open source have been the defining chapter of my professional life. I’ve watched communities grow, technologies evolve, and witnessed firsthand the incredible things that happen when passionate people work together. The relationships I’ve built, the problems we’ve solved together, and the software we’ve created have been deeply meaningful.
But I also have to be honest about where I stand today: I cannot compete in the current job market. The industry has changed, and despite my experience and passion, the opportunities just aren’t there for someone in my situation.
Looking Forward
Making a career change after two decades is terrifying, but it’s also necessary. I need to find a path that can provide financial stability for my family while still allowing me to contribute meaningfully to the world.
If you’ve benefited from my work over the years and are in a position to help during this transition, I would be forever grateful for any support. Every contribution, no matter the size, helps ease this difficult period: https://gofund.me/a9c55d8f
Thank You
To everyone who has collaborated with me, tested my packages, filed bug reports, offered encouragement, or simply used the software I’ve helped maintain – thank you. You’ve made these 20+ years worthwhile, and you’ve been part of something bigger than any individual contribution.
The open source world will continue to thrive because it’s built on the collective passion of thousands of people like Carlos, Rik, and countless others who are carrying the torch forward. While my active development days are ending, the impact of this community will continue long into the future.
Partners holding big jigsaw puzzle pieces flat vector illustration. Successful partnership, communication and collaboration metaphor. Teamwork and business cooperation concept.
I write this in the wake of a personal attack against my work and a project that is near and dear to me. Instead of spreading vile rumors and hearsay, talk to me. I am not known to be ‘hard to talk to’ and am wide open for productive communication. I am disheartened and would like to share some thoughts of the importance of communication. Thanks for listening.
Open source development thrives on collaboration, shared knowledge, and mutual respect. Yet sometimes, the very passion that drives us to contribute can lead to misunderstandings and conflicts that harm both individuals and the projects we care about. As contributors, maintainers, and community members, we have a responsibility to foster environments where constructive dialogue flourishes.
The Foundation of Healthy Open Source Communities
At its core, open source is about people coming together to build something greater than what any individual could create alone. This collaborative spirit requires more than just technical skills—it demands emotional intelligence, empathy, and a commitment to treating one another with dignity and respect.
When disagreements arise—and they inevitably will—the manner in which we handle them defines the character of our community. Technical debates should focus on the merits of ideas, implementations, and approaches, not on personal attacks or character assassinations conducted behind closed doors.
The Importance of Direct Communication
One of the most damaging patterns in any community is when criticism travels through indirect channels while bypassing the person who could actually address the concerns. When we have legitimate technical disagreements or concerns about someone’s work, the constructive path forward is always direct, respectful communication.
Consider these approaches:
Address concerns directly: If you have technical objections to someone’s work, engage with them directly through appropriate channels
Focus on specifics: Critique implementations, documentation, or processes—not the person behind them
Assume good intentions: Most contributors are doing their best with the time and resources available to them
Offer solutions: Instead of just pointing out problems, suggest constructive alternatives
Supporting Contributors Through Challenges
Open source contributors often juggle their community involvement with work, family, and personal challenges. Many are volunteers giving their time freely, while others may be going through difficult periods in their lives—job searching, dealing with health issues, or facing other personal struggles.
During these times, our response as a community matters enormously. A word of encouragement can sustain someone through tough periods, while harsh criticism delivered thoughtlessly can drive away valuable contributors permanently.
Building Resilient Communities
Strong open source communities are built on several key principles:
Transparency in Communication: Discussions about technical decisions should happen in public forums where all stakeholders can participate and learn from the discourse.
Constructive Feedback Culture: Criticism should be specific, actionable, and delivered with the intent to improve rather than to tear down.
Recognition of Contribution: Every contribution, whether it’s code, documentation, bug reports, or community support, has value and deserves acknowledgment.
Conflict Resolution Processes: Clear, fair procedures for handling disputes help prevent minor disagreements from escalating into community-damaging conflicts.
The Long View
Many successful open source projects span decades, with contributors coming and going as their life circumstances change. The relationships we build and the culture we create today will determine whether these projects continue to attract and retain the diverse talent they need to thrive.
When we invest in treating each other well—even during disagreements—we’re investing in the long-term health of our projects and communities. We’re creating spaces where innovation can flourish because people feel safe to experiment, learn from mistakes, and grow together.
Moving Forward Constructively
If you find yourself in conflict with another community member, consider these steps:
Take a breath: Strong emotions rarely lead to productive outcomes
Seek to understand: What are the underlying concerns or motivations?
Communicate directly: Reach out privately first, then publicly if necessary
Focus on solutions: How can the situation be improved for everyone involved?
Know when to step back: Sometimes the healthiest choice is to disengage from unproductive conflicts
A Call for Better
Open source has given us incredible tools, technologies, and opportunities. The least we can do in return is treat each other with the respect and kindness that makes these collaborative achievements possible.
Every contributor—whether they’re packaging software, writing documentation, fixing bugs, or supporting users—is helping to build something remarkable. Let’s make sure our communities are places where that work can continue to flourish, supported by constructive communication and mutual respect.
The next time you encounter work you disagree with, ask yourself: How can I make this better? How can I help this contributor grow? How can I model the kind of community interaction I want to see?
Our projects are only as strong as the communities that support them. Let’s build communities worthy of the amazing software we create together.
I’m reaching out during a challenging time in my life to ask for your support. This year has been particularly difficult as I’ve been out of work for most of it due to a broken arm and a serious MRSA infection that required extensive treatment and recovery time.
Current Situation
While I’ve been recovering, I’ve been actively working to maintain and improve my professional skills by contributing to open source software projects. These contributions help me stay current with industry trends and demonstrate my ongoing commitment to my field, but unfortunately, they don’t provide the income I need to cover my basic living expenses.
Despite my efforts, I’m still struggling to secure employment, and I’m falling behind on essential bills including:
Rent/mortgage payments
Utilities
Medical expenses
Basic living costs
How You Can Help
Any financial assistance, no matter the amount, would make a meaningful difference in helping me stay afloat during this job search. Your support would allow me to:
Keep my housing stable
Maintain essential services
Focus fully on finding employment without the constant stress of unpaid bills
Continue contributing to the open source community
Moving Forward
I’m actively job searching and interviewing, and I’m confident that I’ll be back on my feet soon. Your temporary support during this difficult period would mean the world to me and help bridge the gap until I can secure stable employment.
If you’re able to contribute, GoFundMe . If you’re unable to donate, I completely understand, and sharing this request with others who might be able to help would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you for taking the time to read this and for considering helping me during this challenging time.
Fixed an issue in apparmor preventing QT6 webengine applications from starting.
Beta testing!
KDE Snaps:
Updated Qt6 to 6.8.2
Updated Kf6 6.11.0
Rolling out 25.04 RC applications! You can find them in the –candidate channel!
Life:
I have decided to strike out on my own. I can’t take any more rejections! Honestly, I don’t blame them, I wouldn’t want a one armed engineer either. However, I have persevered and accomplished quite a bit with my one arm! So I have decided to take a leap of faith and with your support for open source work and a resurrected side gig of web development I will survive. If you can help sponsor my work, anything at all, even a dollar! I would be eternally grateful. I have several methods to do so:
Sorry my blog updates have been MIA. Let me tell you a story…
As some of you know, 3 months ago I was in a no fault car accident. Thankfully, the only injury was I ended up with a broken arm. ER sends me home in a sling and tells me it was a clean break and it will mend itself in no time. After a week of excruciating pain I went to my follow up doctor appointment, and with my x-rays in hand, the doc tells me it was far from a clean break and needs surgery. So after a week of my shattered bone scraping my nerves and causing pain I have never felt before, I finally go in for surgery! They put in a metal plate with screws to hold the bone in place so it can properly heal. The nerve pain was gone, so I thought I was on the mend. Some time goes by and the swelling still has not subsided, the doctors are not as concerned about this as I am, so I carry on until it becomes really inflamed and developed fever blisters. After no success in reaching the doctors office my husband borrows the neighbors car and rushes me to the ER. Good thing too, I had an infection. So after a 5 day stay in the hospital, they sent us home loaded with antibiotics and trained my husband in wound packing. We did everything right, kept the place immaculate, followed orders with the wound care, took my antibiotics, yet when they ran out there was still no sign of relief, or healing. Went to doctors and they gave me another month supply of antibiotics. Two days after my final dose my arm becomes inflamed again and with extra spectacular levels of pain to go with it. I call the doctor office… They said to come in on my appointment day ( 4 days away ). I asked, “You aren’t concerned with this inflammation?”, to which they replied, “No.”. Ok, maybe I am over reacting and it’s all in my head, I can power through 4 more days. The following morning my husband observed fever blisters and the wound site was clearly not right, so once again off we go to the ER. Well… thankfully we did. I was in Sepsis and could have died… After deliberating with the doctor on the course of action for treatment, the doctor accepted our plea to remove the plate, rather than tighten screws and have me drive 100 miles to hospital everyday for iv antibiotics (Umm I don’t have a car!?) So after another 4 day stay I am released into the world, alive and well. I am happy to report, the swelling is almost gone, the pain is minimal, and I am finally healing nicely. I am still in a sling and I have to be super careful and my arm was not fully knitted. So with that I am bummed to say, no traveling for me, no Ubuntu Summit 🙁
I still need help with that car, if it weren’t for our neighbor, this story would have ended much differently.
Another loss last week of a friend. I am staying strong and working through it. A big thank you to all of you that have donated to my car fund, I still have a long way to go. I am not above getting a cheap old car, but we live in sand dunes so it must be a cheap old car with 4×4 to get to my property. A vehicle is necessary as we are 50 miles away from staples such as food and water. We also have 2 funerals to attend. Please consider a donation if my work is useful to you. https://gofund.me/1e784e74 All of my work is currently unpaid work, as I am between contracts. Thank you for your consideration. Now onto the good stuff, last weeks work. It was another very busy week with Qt6 packaging in Debian/Kubuntu and KDE snaps. I also have many SRUs for Kubuntu Noble .1 release that needs their verification done.
Kubuntu:
See Debian for the qt6 Plasma / applications work.
Thankfully no tragedies to report this week! I thank each and everyone of you that has donated to my car fund. I still have a ways to go and could use some more help so that we can go to the funeral. https://gofund.me/033eb25d I am between contracts and work packages, so all of my work is currently for free. Thanks for your consideration.
Another very busy week getting qt6 updates in Debian, Kubuntu, and KDE snaps.
Kubuntu:
Merkuro and Neochat SRUs have made progress.
See Debian for the qt6 Plasma / applications work.
Debian:
qtmpv – in NEW
arianna – in NEW
kamera – experimental
libkdegames – experimental
kdenetwork-filesharing – experimental
xwaylandvideobridge – NEW
futuresql – NEW
kpat WIP
Tokodon – Done, but needs qtmpv to pass NEW
Gwenview – WIP needs kamera, kio-extras
kio-extras – Blocked on kdsoap in which the maintainer is not responding to bug reports or emails. Will likely fork in Kubuntu as our freeze quickly approaches.
KDE Snaps:
Updated QT to 6.7.2 which required a rebuild of all our snaps. Also found an issue with mismatched ffmpeg libraries, we have to bundle them for now until versioning issues are resolved.
Made new theme snaps for KDE breeze: gtk-theme-breeze, icon-theme-breeze so if you use the plasma theme breeze please install these and run
for PLUG in $(snap connections | grep gtk-common-themes:icon-themes | awk '{print $2}'); do sudo snap connect ${PLUG} icon-theme-breeze:icon-themes; done
for PLUG in $(snap connections | grep gtk-common-themes:gtk-3-themes | awk '{print $2}'); do sudo snap connect ${PLUG} gtk-theme-breeze:gtk-3-themes; done
for PLUG in $(snap connections | grep gtk-common-themes:gtk-2-themes | awk '{print $2}'); do sudo snap connect ${PLUG} gtk-theme-breeze:gtk-2-themes; done
This should resolve most theming issues. We are still waiting for kdeglobals to be merged in snapd to fix colorscheme issues, it is set for next release. I am still working on qt6 themes and working out how to implement them in snaps as they are more complex than gtk themes with shared libraries and file structures.
Please note: Please help test the –edge snaps so I can promote them to stable.
This week our family suffered another loss with my brother in-law. We will miss him dearly. On our way down to Phoenix to console our nephew that just lost his dad our car blew up. Last week we were in a roll over accident that totaled our truck and left me with a broken arm. We are now in great need of a new vehicle. Please consider donating to this fund: https://gofund.me/033eb25d . Kubuntu is out of money and I am between work packages with the ‘project’. We are 50 miles away from the closest town for supplies, essentials such as water requires a vehicle.
I have had bad years before ( covid ) in which I lost my beloved job at Blue Systems. I made a vow to myself to never let my personal life affect my work again. I have so far kept that promise to myself and without further ado I present to you my work.
Kubuntu:
Many SRUs awaiting verification stage including the massive apparmor policy bug.
sddm fix for the black screen on second boot has passed verification and should make .1 release.
See Debian for the qt6 Plasma / applications work.
Debian:
qtmpv – in NEW
arianna – in NEW
kamera – uploading today
kcharselect – Experimental
Tokodon – Done, but needs qtmpv to pass NEW
Gwenview – WIP needs kamera, kio-extras
kio-extras – WIP
KDE Snaps:
Please note: for the most part the Qt6 snaps are in –edge except the few in the ‘project’ that are heavily tested. Please help test the –edge snaps so I can promote them.
Elisa
Okular
Konsole ( please note this is a confined terminal for the ‘project’ and not very useful except to ssh to the host system )
Kwrite
Gwenview
Kate ( –classic )
Gcompris
Alligator
Ark
Blinken
Bomber
Bovo
Calindori
Digikam
Dragon
Falkon
Filelight
WIP Snaps or MR’s made
KSpacedual
Ksquares
KSudoku
KTuberling
Kubrick
lskat
Palapeli
Kajongg
Kalzium
Kanagram
Kapman
Katomic
KBlackBox
KBlocks
KBounce
KBreakOut
KBruch
Please note that 95% of the snaps are free-time work. The project covers 5. I am going as fast as I can between Kubuntu/Debian and the project commitments. Not to mention I have only one arm! My GSOC student is also helping which you can read all about here: https://soumyadghosh.github.io/website/interns/gsoc-2024/gsoc-week-3-week-7/
There is still much work to do in Kubuntu to be Plasma 6 ready for Oracular and they are out of funds. I will still continue my work regardless, but please consider donating until we can procure a consistent flow of funding : https://kubuntu.org/donate/
I am still here, busy as ever, I just haven’t found the inspiration to blog. So soon after the loss of my son, I have lost my only brother a couple weeks ago. It has been a tough year for our family. Thank you everyone for you love and support during this difficult time. I will do my best in re-capping my work, there has been quite a bit as I am “keeping busy with work” so I don’t dwell to much on the sadness.
KDE Snaps:
Trying to debug the unable to save files breakage in the latest Krita builds without luck.
KisOpenGLCanvas Renderer::reportFailedShaderCompilation\[0m: Shad er Compilation Failure: "Failed to add vertex sh ader source from file: matrix_transform.vert - Ca use: "
I have implemented everything from https://snapcraft.io/docs/gpu-support , it has worked for years and now suddenly it just stopped. I have had to put it on hold for now, it is unpaid work and I simply don’t have time.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/tellico/+bug/2065915 Several applications no longer work on architectures that are not amd64 due to hard coded paths. All fixed in git. Several uploaded to oracular, several sponsorship has been requested. Noble updates rejected despite SRU, going to retry.
