Password management is a critical task one should perform about daily. As a former KDE user, I have all of my secrets stored in a GPG-encrypted KWallet. I’m quite familiar with that piece of software, and I even maintained it for several years when I got acquainted to the existing code-base. As a matter of fact, I’ve added that GPG backend to KWallet.

The KDE environment is an excellent piece of work, it greatly supported my first steps to the Linux world. But this is now an old story, and later I’ve grown desktop environment agnostic. I strongly believe less is more and not using a desktop environment helps one stay focused on the daily work. I won’t debate pros and cons of the desktop environments here, though.

The freedesktop.org’s Secret Service API was defined in an attempt to enable users to become desktop environment agnostics. Using it looks like a logical step for any desktop-agnostic Linux user. Problem is, current implementations are still depending on a desktop environment:

  • KDE’s KWallet now offers this API (NOTE: that was not implemented by me)
  • GOME’s Keyring also offers this API

Both desktop environments are offering that API for the sake of completeness. Problem is, when I want to install just KWallet on my system, I end-up with whole bunch of software packages I never use even while launching KWallet. This kind of problem is induced by the very complexity modern DE have. This is something that cannot be undone.

Another alternative could be Keepassxc. I remember having cloned that repo, in an attempt to start using it. However, that piece of software suffers from the plagues GUI applications usually suffer: hopeless complexity induced by unneeded abstractions. Contributing to free software, at least in my case, means taking on my own free-time. I needed to be able to add Yubikey support to it, but I eventually stopped doing it as it looked to me impossible to grasp the internals of that piece of software in a timely manner. I remembered the KSecrets service API implementation attempt in the process, as that also was a hopeless wander into many layers of useless async abstractions using Qt.

Considering the above, I was growing concerned that I’ll end-up being stuck with my now quite old FSFE GPG Card deciding to fail on me, leaving me without an elegant way to store and retrieve my passwords. Then other factors came into play, like me having more time for free-software stuff and the Rust language becoming the second language used by the Linux Kernel.

So here I am starting-up the next desktop agnostic password management tool. That being said, I reserve the right to use my KDE knowledge and eventually help that community get rid of KWallet once for all.