Paul Brown 

Plasma 6 release day is getting closer... and we still have no wallpaper to use! But we're going to change that with your help and this contest! We are calling on all artists to submit their original wallpaper designs and compete for the chance to win a brand-new laptop (see below). The contest will be open for three months, starting now!

MBition becomes a KDE patron and supports the work of the KDE community with its generous sponsorship.

MBition designs and implements the infotainment system for future generations of Mercedes-Benz cars and relies on KDE's technology and know-how for its products.

Akademy is KDE's annual event where the community comes together in one place to meet in person, share ideas and hack on common projects.

On the 22nd of June 1998, the KDE Free Qt Foundation was founded and has accompanied Qt on its amazing journey to become the success story that it is today.

By Johnny Jazeix and Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss

For this year's edition of Season of KDE, 8 participants successfully completed their projects. Several of the projects push forward the work to achieve KDE's three goals, namely:

g10 Code GmbH joins the ranks of KDE patrons! g10 Code provides custom development, enhancements, and audits of cryptographic software -- in particular for the popular GnuPG encryption and digital signature tools.

Kubuntu Focus is now generously supporting KDE as its newest patron!

Kubuntu Focus offers the best out-of-the-box experience for professional Linux users. All Kubuntu Focus systems come with the beautiful and intuitive Plasma desktop from KDE on top of industry-standard Ubuntu LTS. The hardware is designed to save time and hassle, thanks to its device optimizations, curated apps, Focus Tools, system-specific HOWTOs, and excellent Linux support.

From the notes by Aniqa Khokhar, Jonathan Esk-Riddell, and Paul Brown

Akademy 2022 was held in Barcelona from the 1st to the 7th of October. As usual, the weekend of Saturday 1st of October and Sunday 2nd of October was dedicated to talks, panels and presentations. Community members and guests laid out for attendees what had been going on within KDE's projects (and adjacent projects), the state of the art, and where things were headed.

Today we break ground. Today we launch the first of what will be many fundraisers for specific projects. Our goal is to get funds directly into the hands of the people who make the software.

Spanish manufacturer (and KDE patron) Slimbook has just released their new KDE-themed Slimbook ultrabook.

The KDE Slimbook 4 comes with a Ryzen 5700U processor and KDE's full-featured Plasma desktop running on KDE Neon. It also comes with dozens of Open Source programs and utilities pre-installed and access to hundreds more.

By Johnny Jazeix

Season of KDE, the program that helps people start contributing to KDE easily, kicks off with nine fascinating projects:

• Ayush Singh will be working on a Rust wrapper for KConfig. With this wrapper, and the existing ones for qmetaobject and ki18n, it will be easier to develop KDE applications in Rust. More information can be found in the kde-devel mailing-list. Ayush will be mentored by Jos van den Oever.
• Pablo Marcos will add a new panel to show notifications on Tokodon, KDE's Mastodon client. Pablo will be mentored by Carl Schwan.
• Snehit Sah will help package more KDE applications for Flathub. Some packages are nearly ready for Flathub, but are missing information or manifest files, so they are not yet available on the platform. The goal of the project is to improve the existing packages and publish more apps on Flathub. Snehit will be mentored by Timothée Ravier.
• Suhaas Joshi will work on the permission management for Flatpak Apps in Discover. The aim is to allow users view permissions required by a flatpak before installation and also allow users to turn these permissions on or off. After the installation of a flatpak package, Discover will let users view and alter its permissions. Suhaas will be mentored by Timothée Ravier and Aleix Pol Gonzalez.
• Samarth Raj will add a new activity help understand the difference between left- and right-clicking using a mouse in GCompris. The activity will show two types of animals that want to go home. Left-clicking will move one kind, while right-clicking will move the other. Find out more about this activity here. Samarth will be mentored by Harsh Kumar and Emmanuel Charruau.




• Srirupa will add support for a Perspective Ellipse feature in Krita. The aim is to create a tool that can adjust four corners of a mesh with an ellipse inside it. This will allow users to draw an ellipse in perspective with ease. Srirupa will be mentored by Halla Rempt.
• Soumik Dutta will document KDE Connect's communication protocol. Soumik will create comprehensive documentation covering the API contracts and the Event Action Pathways, validate the generated documentation, decide the layout, and merge the work into the existing documentation. Soumik will be mentored by Apollo Zhu and Lucas Wang.
• For the KDE-eco project, Karanjot Singh will prepare Standard Usage Scenarios for Energy Consumption Measurements. The first step will be to select an automatic tool to reproduce scenarios and then to define/write scenarios to test the energy consumption for multiple KDE/FOSS projects, such as Kate, KWrite, Vim, nano, emacs, etc. Finally, Karanjot will implement the scenarios. Karanjot will be mentored by Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss.
• Stefan Kowalczyk will improve the user experience for KDE Connect's iOS Internal Error and Alerts. iOS does not allow for multiple alerts at the same time, so the aim of the project is to queue alerts for KDE Connect if there are more than one, and display them one after the other. Stefan will be mentored by Apollo Zhu and Lucas Wang.

We hope all participants have fun with their projects and look forward to your achievements!

The Linux App Summit (LAS) of 2022 will be held in Rovereto, a picturesque city at the foot of the Italian Alps.

Whether you are a company, journalist, developer, or user interested in the ever-growing Linux app ecosystem, LAS will have something for you. Scheduled for April, LAS 2022 will be a hybrid event, combining on-site and remote sessions, including talks, panels and Q&As.

By Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss

On 11 December 2021, KDE Eco held the first of many planned Sprints. The Sprint was originally intended to be an in-person event to set up a community measurement lab, but Corona had other ideas. Nevertheless, the community deployed its usual resourcefulness, and we met online instead.

GCompris 2.0 improves classic favorites loved by children of all ages, and adds even more activities for more fun and learning.

TUXEDO Computers, a company known for selling Linux-powered computers and notebooks, now joins us as a KDE Patron!

"Our customized Linux notebooks (for work or play) are equipped with KDE Plasma, which leads to a positive response from our customers", said Herbert Feiler, CEO TUXEDO Computers. "Furthermore, we additionally do our own development work, which could benefit KDE as upstream as well. We are happy to share our knowledge and would like to secure as well as expand KDE's development work in the long run. Feedback that we receive from customers can also flow directly into KDE's development work."

We are happy to announce the winner of the Plasma 25th Anniversary Edition Wallpaper Contest!

Thanks to all those who submitted their artwork. The variety and quality of the submissions in this edition was simply astounding. As always, there were multiple great options and it was very hard to choose. It was a very close call! But at the end, we have a winner: Patak by Aron!

All Akademy 2021 videos are ready for you to enjoy. Check out the previous summaries of talks on the dot for ideas on what to watch:

• Saturday, 19th June 2021
• Sunday, 20th June 2021
• Friday, 25th June 2021

A good place to start is with the Keynotes by Patricia Aas

After 4 days + 1 morning of BoFs, hacking sessions and meetings, talks at Akademy resumed in room 1 on Friday at 17:00 UTC. Kevin Ottens and Christelle Zouein from enioka Haute Couture kicked things off with the talk Community's Adventures in Analyticsland - Or the State of the Community Through New Analytics. Christelle and Kevin showed us the data analysis tools they have been working on to study information collected from KDE's development repositories and the surprising facts and trends they discovered.

First thing in the morning, Aleix Pol, president of KDE, introduced the event at and explained how Akademy 2021 was still "special" because we could still not meet in person.

Written by Blumen Herzenschein, David C. and Paul Brown

The first day of Akademy talks were varied and interesting, covering a wide range of topics, from managing project goals and technical advances in Qt and KDE technologies, to Open Source in dentistry and Linux in automobiles.

Akademy kicked off today with training sessions on several KDE-related topics.

In the morning, Nuno Pinheiro from KDAB conducted a class on UI/UX Design in QML for Desktop. This online workshop contained practical exercises on dos, don'ts, and integration; and tips on outside of the box UI design. The session started out with attendees relaying to Nuno the projects they were working on and how they hoped the lesson would help them.

Gina Häußge's biggest claim to fame may be OctoPrint, the most popular software for managing 3D printers from small, single board computers -- like the Raspberry Pi, Odroid, etc..

The updates to KDE apps released today are many, contain a wide array of changes, and cover an impressive number of applications.

Dolphin, KDE's file explorer, for example, adds previews for more types of files and improvements to the way long names are summarized, allowing you to better see what each file is or does. Dolphin also improves the way you can reach files and directories on remote machines, making working from home a much smoother experience. It also remembers the location you were viewing the last time you closed it, making it easier to pick up from where you left off.

Once again, KDE and GNOME are teaming up to bring you THE conference for people interested in establishing Linux as a great end-user platform. At the Linux App Summit we work on making app creation for users easy and worthwhile.

Today Slimbook and KDE launch the new KDE Slimbook.

The third generation of this popular ultrabook comes in a stylish sleek magnesium alloy case that is less than 20 mms thick, but packs under the hood a powerful AMD Ryzen 7 4800 H processor with 8 cores and 16 threads. On top of that runs KDE's Plasma desktop, complete with a wide range of preinstalled, ready-to-use Open Source utilities and apps.

Plasma 5.19 is out! If we gave alliterative names to Plasma releases, this one could be "Polished Plasma". The effort developers have put into squashing bugs and removing annoying papercuts has been immense.

Plasma Bigscreen main menu.

Plasma Bigscreen is KDE's user interface for big TV screens.

Plasma Bigscreen powers the interface on a Single Board Computer and uses the Mycroft AI voice assistant to provide a Smart TV platform. Plasma Bigscreen will deliver not only media-rich applications, but also traditional desktop applications redesigned to fit the Bigscreen experience.

Something that may have slipped you by: Back in November, the German Federal Office for Information Security approved Gpg4KDE and Gpg4win for the transmission and processing of national classified information.

A brand new version of the Plasma desktop is now available.

In Plasma 5.18 you will find neat new features that make notifications clearer, settings more streamlined and the overall look more attractive. Plasma 5.18 is easier and more fun to use, while at the same time allowing you to be more productive when it is time to work.

Microsoft will stop providing updates for Windows 7 on January 14 2020.

There won't be any more patches that correct bugs or even dangerous vulnerabilities. This will leave Windows 7 users exposed to all sorts of bad stuff. But that is not a huge concern for Microsoft. With this move, Redmond hopes to encourage users to upgrade to Windows 10.

KDE launches the new version of its acclaimed desktop environment, Plasma 5.17.

Plasma 5.17 is the version where the desktop anticipates your needs. Among many new features and improvements, your desktop now starts up faster; Night Color, the color-grading system that relaxes your eyes when the sun sets, has landed for X11; your Plasma desktop recognizes when you are giving a presentation, and stops messages popping up in the middle of your slideshows; and, if you are using Wayland, Plasma now comes with fractional scaling, which means that you can adjust the size of all your desktop elements, windows, fonts and panels perfectly to your HiDPI monitor.

The KDE Community has spoken! On the first day of Akademy 2019, Lydia Pintscher, President of KDE e.V., announced the three new goals we will prioritize over the next 2 years.

Lars Knoll has been working on Qt for a long time. It is now 20 years since he joined Trolltech and even longer since he started developing crucial pieces of the KDE ecosystem. In that time, he went from theoretical physicist to software engineer to project leader, and survived the many roughs-and-tumbles Qt went through, including the event that nearly killed the project brought on by a certain company from Redmond.

Say hello to Plasma 5.15, the newest version of KDE's acclaimed desktop environment.

This February release of KDE Plasma comes with a wide range of new features and improvements. The main focus of developers has been stamping out all minor problems and papercuts of the desktop, aiming to make Plasma smoother and easier to use.

Akademy 2018 is less than a week away. Apart from meeting up again with friends and colleagues, the KDE community has another reason to be joyful: this year we have broken the record for the number of sponsors for the event. Although there have been many sponsors of Akademy over the years, never have there been so many at one time.

The Kdenlive project is calling on their users to test a refactored version of their full-featured and Free Software video-editing application.

If there is one document you want to read to discover what KDE has been up to and where we are right now, this is the one.

Optimized and less resource-hungry, Plasma 5.13 can run smoothly on under-powered ARM laptops, high-end gaming PCs, and everything in between.

Feature-wise, Plasma 5.13 comes with Browser Integration. This means both Chrome/Chromium and Firefox web browsers can be monitored and controlled using your desktop widgets. For example, downloads are displayed in the Plasma notification popup, so even if your browser is minimized or not visible, you can monitor the download progress. Likewise with media playing in a tab: you can use Plasma's media controls to stop, pause and silence videos and audio playing in any tab – even the hidden ones. This a perfect solution for those annoying videos that auto-start without your permission. Another Plasma-browser feature is that links can now be opened from Plasma's overhead launcher (Krunner), and you can also send links directly to your phone using KDE Connect.

Claudia Garad is the Executive Director of Wikimedia Österreich, Wikipedia's Austrian chapter. Claudia will deliver Akademy's second keynote on Sunday, 12th of August.

Dan Bielefeld is an activist that works for a South Korean NGO. Dan worked in the Washington, D.C. area training young activists in the areas of politics and journalism before going into researching atrocities committed by the North Korean regime. He is currently the Technical Director of the Transitional Justice Working Group and helps pinpoint the locations of mass burial and execution sites using mapping technologies.

Did you know you can install an AI personal assistant on your Plasma desktop?

Mycroft is running through the last 24 hours of the crowdfunding campaign for its Mark II assistant. The machine looks awesome and offers similar functionality to other proprietary alternatives, but with none of the spying and leaking of personal data.

KDE e.V. is announcing today it has received a donation of 200,000 USD from the Pineapple Fund.

With this donation, the Pineapple Fund recognizes that KDE as a community creates software which benefits the general public, advances the use of Free Software on all kinds of platforms, and protects users' privacy by putting first-class and easy to use tools in the hands of the people at zero cost. KDE joins a long list of prestigious charities, organizations and communities that the Pineapple Fund has so generously donated to.

There is a new KDE Slimbook on sale as from today. The KDE Slimbook II is svelte and smart on the outside, but powerful and fast on the inside.

To start with, it comes with a choice between an Intel i5: 2.5 GHz Turbo Boost 3.1 GHz - 3M Cache CPU, or an Intel i7: 2.7 GHz Turbo Boost 3.5 GHz with a 4M Cache. This makes the KDE Slimbook II 15% faster on average than its predecessor. The RAM has also been upgraded, and the KDE Slimbook now sports 4, 8, or 16 GBs of DDR4 RAM which is 33% faster than the DDR3 RAM installed on last year's model.

Remember to donate to our End of Year fundraiser and support our community and its work.

It's the time of year for recaps. We already talked about the advancements in KDE's software, and it makes sense we talk about that first. To many people and for many years, "KDE" was synonymous with a desktop environment and its applications. That is, KDE was its software.

The KDE community has spoken and it has chosen the proposals which will define the general direction of the KDE project over the next three or four years.

Artist's impression of what Plasma Mobile
would look like on the Librem 5.

"This was the plan all along", said Todd Weaver during a conference call we held with him last week. He was referring to building a free, open, and privacy-respecting smartphone.

Kdenlive will be easier to use by the end of the sprint.

Our intrepid developers are getting ready to make their way to Randa, the location for KDE's autumn coding sprint, and we are gradually finding out what they will be doing up there in the Swiss mountains.

Randa 2015 was about bringing touch to KDE apps and interfaces. At Randa 2016, developers worked on building frameworks that would allow KDE apps to work on a wider range of operating systems, like Windows, MacOS and Android.

The 2017 edition of Akademy was held in Almería, Spain. Starting officially on the 22nd of July and ending on the 27th, the weekend was dedicated to talks, as is customary. The rest of the following week, from Monday to Thursday, was dedicated to workshops and BoFs — Birds of a Feather — sessions in which community members interested in the same things meet and work together.

Antonio Larrosa kicked off Sunday with his talk on The KDE Community and its Ecosystem. He expressed concern about what he perceived as an increase in the isolation of certain communities and laid out the advantages of working on intra-community relationships.

During the first day at the Akademy, everything went according to plan and nearly everything was on time. Kudos to the organisers.

The weather was balmy at the beginning of the day and, although Aleix Pol said it was not hotter than a hot day in Barcelona, many of the Scandinavian and Scottish attendees were visibly wilting under the sun. Fortunately for them, the venue is equipped with air-conditioning.

Antonio Larrosa is the current president of KDE España and he and I have been friends for quite some time now. It may seem logical, since we both live in Málaga, are passionate about Free Software in general, and KDE in particular. But in most other respects we are total opposites: Antonio is quiet, tactful, unassuming and precise. Enough said.

Robert Kaye is definitely a brainz-over-brawn kinda guy. As the creator of MusicBrainz, ListenBrainz and AcousticBrainz, all created and maintained under the MetaBrainz Foundation, he has pushed Free Software music cataloguing-tagging-classifying to the point it has more or less obliterated all the proprietary options.

Kirigami UI lets you easily design and create convergent apps that work on desktop and mobile environments. Platforms supported by Kirigami UI include Windows, Android, and Linux. Kirigami is especially indicated for KDE's Plasma Desktop and the upcoming Plasma Mobile platform, KDE's graphical environment for mobile devices. Apps developed with Kirigami will probably also work on MacOS X and iOS with minimal tweaking, although these platforms are not officially supported yet.

Q: With some free software phone projects ending, what does Plasma Mobile's future look like?

A: The future is rosy. While it is true that Plasma Mobile used to be built on the Ubuntu Phone codebase, that was superseded some time ago. The recent events at Ubuntu and other mobile communities have not modified the pace of the development (which is pretty fast) or the end goal, which is to build frameworks that will allow convergence for all kinds of front-ends and apps on all kinds of devices.