Apdatifier — Open Source Contribution

Apdatifier is a KDE Plasma widget that notifies about available updates across pacman, AUR, Plasma widgets, Flatpak, and firmware (fwupd). Widely used on Arch-based desktops.

Features

• Searching updates for pacman, AUR, Plasma Widgets, Flatpak, Firmware
• Notification for updates and news
• Two types of lists: compact and extended with additional information
• Button to initiate a full system upgrade in the selected terminal
• Option to refresh the mirrorlist with the latest mirrors filtered by speed

Screenshots

Compact / Extended list

Full system upgrade

Management

My Contribution

Mirror and network resolution failures were surfacing as silent errors — the widget would show no updates available when the actual problem was a transient network issue or a stale mirrorlist entry. The fix adds proper error detection and surfaces actionable feedback rather than swallowing the failure.

Submitted as a pull request to the upstream repo and accepted into the main release.

Installation

Available directly from the KDE Widget Store: “Get New Widgets” → “Download New Plasma Widgets”.