A mainstay of KDE development news is about to change: Nate Graham wants to step back from his “This Week in Plasma” column and is inviting others to carry it forward.
For the past eight years, it’s been fairly easy to keep informed on developer activities at KDE through Nate Graham’s weekly online column, This Week in Plasma.
This has pretty much been true for folks who pay attention to open source news, even if they don’t follow Graham’s column firsthand. Every week you can count on Phoronix’s Michael Larabel reporting on some technical changes coming to the KDE-ecosphere by way of something reported by Graham in TWiP. The same is true for 9to5Linux’s Marcus Nestor as well as Linuxiac’s Bobby Borisov.
Oh, and I generally post links to the column each week on my Mastodon and Bluesky accounts.
In other words, if you follow Linux and open source at all, especially KDE, you probably get some of your news, directly or indirectly, from Graham’s weekly column.
That era, Graham announced Sunday on KDE’s blog, is coming to an end:
“I truly want to keep publishing this blog, but there comes a point where I have to face facts: my time and energy budgets are not as unlimited as I wish they were. In addition, my children are getting older; they’re 9 and 13, and they need their dad to do more than just work and work and work and work and work some more.
“So it’s time to begin the painful but necessary process of ensuring that those budgets remain big enough to cover my work and family responsibilities.
“In 2026, I’m actively looking for a person or team interested in taking over TWiP. Until then, I plan to reduce the frequency of posts, based on how busy my schedule is. Expect one every two weeks, or even every three or four weeks.”
Ouch! To some of us, that’s going to seem like losing an old friend.
The Handwriting’s Been on the Wall
For those of us who’ve been following — and depending on — Graham’s writings for a while, Sunday’s post doesn’t really come as a great surprise. About a year ago — November 2, 2024 to be specific — the column moved from Graham’s own personal website to KDE’s website. That move came without much fanfare (even though FOSS Force covered it), but with more than a hint of foreshadowing pointing to this day, with Graham noting, “I’ll remain the editor-in-chief for now.”
Although not directly tied to authorship of the TWiP column, more foreshadowing came this March when Graham announced that he and about a dozen others were leaving Blue Systems — a Germany-based company that’s long been a KDE sponsor and employer of KDE developers — for a New Mexico-based spin-off called Techpaladin, which Graham and David Edmundson, a longtime KDE software engineer and project lead, had co-founded.
Graham and Edmundson’s new company immediately became a player in KDE development space by dint of inheriting from Blue Systems a Valve-Steam Deck contract.
This Week in Plasma Going Forward
“If anyone reading would like to see TWiP remain a weekly fixture as much as I do, the best way to make it happen is to get involved and help out with it!” Graham wrote. “I would be thrilled to hand off TWiP to the next generation.”
He goes on to reassure anyone interested in taking the task that it’s not really all that hard of a job. That might be something of a relative assessment, however. Several times in my career I’ve attempted to hand off columns that I thought were cakewalks, only to discover that I evidently knew more than I thought I did. Graham appears to be ready for that eventuality too, however:
“I’m happy to teach, coach, or mentor anyone who wants to get involved. So if you’ve been wondering how you can get involved in something that matters without technical skills beyond basic markdown and git, this is a perfect way to do it. And if you are technical, I’m sure there are low-hanging fruit opportunities for automation that I never pursued (I did try AI a few times, but the results were always horrible).”
He added that if this sounds like something you’d like to do, you can contact him at nate@kde.org, “or any other relevant means of getting in touch that you might already know about.”
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
Be First to Comment