Welcome and Introduction

My GSoC Journey: Hacking on KDE's Network Manager

If anybody had told me I'd end up working on the very Linux desktop environment I've been daily-driving for the past three years, I probably wouldn't have believed them.

This summer, I got to learn and work on the main Network Manager component used by default in KDE, the desktop environment relied on by millions of users worldwide (source). Looking back, this has been the most challenging, and by far the most rewarding, journey of my open-source career so far.

How It All Started

I started looking for open-source projects to contribute to way before GSoC even announced its list of participating organizations. Back in October, I began contributing to major projects like OpenTelemetry, Lima-VM, and WasmEdge, repos I'm still active in today.

Somewhere along the way, I decided to explore the KDE ecosystem and give it a shot. That decision changed the trajectory of my year. From that point on, my co-mentors and I were actively working through a number of open-source issues together, including bugs in KClock, the native clock application used across KDE, long before the official GSoC coding period even began. That early groundwork ended up being exactly what prepared me to take on Network Manager as my actual project.

The Project

My GSoC project is titled "Make network related KCMs feature complete with desktop equivalent," under Plasma Mobile, mentored by Carl Schwan and the rest of the Plasma Mobile team.

Here's the core problem: Plasma Desktop and Plasma Mobile each ship their own, completely separate networking settings modules. The desktop KCM (kcm_connections) is mature and feature-complete, with full Wi-Fi security support (WPA/WPA2/WPA3, 802.1x Enterprise, various EAP methods), VPN configuration, and more. Plasma Mobile's networking KCMs, on the other hand, are QML/Kirigami-based and touch-friendly, but only support the basics (WPA/WPA2 Personal, essentially). Because the desktop editor lives in libs/editor/ as Qt Widgets, it can't be dropped into the mobile UI as-is, Widgets and Kirigami don't mix, so mobile has ended up stuck maintaining its own thinner reimplementation instead of reusing the desktop's mature backend logic.

My project is to close that gap: pull the shared backend logic in libs/ out from underneath the Qt Widgets layer, rebuild the connection editor in QML (in a new libs/editorqml/) using Kirigami, and get both the desktop and mobile KCMs consuming the same backend through QML property/signal bindings. This way, a feature added once (say, WPA3 Enterprise or a new VPN protocol) works identically on both form factors instead of being implemented twice. The work is broken into phases: project setup, the Wi-Fi/security connection-editor foundation, additional connection types (wired, hotspot, VPN, bonds/bridges/teams/VLANs), refactoring the KDED popup dialogs (like the Wi-Fi password and PIN prompts) from Widgets to QML, and finally integration testing plus writing proper architecture documentation for plasma-nm, which currently has very little of either.

The Challenge

The biggest hurdle, by far, was getting a real grip on QML and the architecture of the broader codebase.

Coming in, I understood C++ reasonably well, but plasma-nm's UI layer is written almost entirely in QML, a declarative language that describes what the interface should look like rather than how to build it step by step. On top of that, plasma-nm isn't a single self-contained app, it's a plugin-based system that sits on top of NetworkManager (the system daemon), talks to it over D-Bus, and exposes that state through a KDED module and a Plasmoid applet that the QML frontend binds to. Understanding which layer owned a given piece of logic, the daemon, the backend plugin, or the QML view, took real time.

Some of the specific things I had to work through:

Key Contributions

Here is the list of MRs that are merged in upstream as of this date:

What I Learned

Beyond the technical skills, QML, Network Manager core concepts, and plugin architectures, this project taught me a lot about contributing to a codebase that real people depend on every day. KDE isn't a toy project, it's a software that is used by millions of people to connect Wi-Fi and manage their networks without thinking twice about it. That changes how carefully you write and review code.

Thanks

A huge thank you to my mentors, Devin Lin and Carl Schwan, for the patience and guidance through the pre-GSoC Phase. And thanks to the broader KDE community and Plasma Mobile for being as welcoming as it is to newcomers navigating a genuinely large codebase for the first time.