KDE Success Story

Randa Report - unEyeCandy

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Randa greetings from the VDG - Hahmulookin?

The Randa Meetings are happening now in the Swiss Alps. More than 50 people are giving their time to improve KDE software and innovate new value for users. The theme of this sixth edition of the Randa Meetings is Bring Touch to KDE, and the KDE Visual Design Group (VDG) is making their contributions to the look and feel of KDE technology. Visual appearance has been a primary consideration for KDE from the beginning—"users [should be able to] expect things to look, feel, and work consistently".


Another KDE success story - the Incubator - Part 4

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Kdenlive is the leading video editor on Linux

To wrap up the KDE Incubator success stories, here's a bit from the Kdenlive folks.

Kdenlive, one of the rare free-as-in-speech video editors, started its life more than 12 years ago using KDE3 libraries. At that time, it was mostly the effort of a single person—coding, fixing bugs, publishing releases, managing the website. There was no real connection with the KDE Community. Good contributions came in from other people, but no team was built, a risky situation. In 2013, the main developer, Jean-Baptiste Mardelle, was not able to work on the project, so it was on hold for several months and had some technical problems. We tracked him down like a "Giant Spy" to get the project running until his return! That taught us a lesson. When Mario Fux presented the KDE Manifesto, it was the exact answer to our problem.


Another KDE success story - the Incubator - Part 3

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KXStitch at work - Be Batman

Continuing the series about KDE Incubator let's hear how KXStitch went through the process. KXStitch was incubated early and quickly.

As Steve Allewell tells us: "In May 2014 I was contacted by Jeremy Whiting, a contributing developer to KDE, to see if I would be interested in submitting the KXStitch application to the KDE Incubator. KXStitch is an editor for counted cross stitch patterns and had already been in development for more than ten years as an independent KDE application. It was hosted on Sourceforge and as the main developer I was supported by a number of people who had provided ideas, testing, bug fixes and some translations.

The KDE Incubator is an effort to help such applications to be migrated into the KDE infrastructure. This is something that I had already been considering, so it was an ideal opportunity to make that transition.


Another KDE success story - the Incubator - Part 2

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Proceeding with the next story about the KDE Incubator with the story of GCompris.

GCompris is a high quality educational software suite comprising of numerous activities for children aged 2 to 10. It started in 2000 using the GTK+ toolkit and was part of the Gnome project. In order to address users willing to run GCompris on their tablets, a full rewrite has been initiated in 2014 using Qt Quick.

GCompris had the chance to be accepted by KDE and followed the incubation stage for about a year. It has now been accepted as an official KDE project in its extragear section.

Being a community project, there was a need to find a new one focused on Qt technology to help us continue the development the way we like it. GCompris targets schools and parents all over the world and it is mandatory to provide it in the language they speak. Only a large community like KDE can manage such a daunting task in the long run. GCompris also benefits from many KDE developers.


Another KDE success story - the Incubator - Part 1

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Over the past year or so KDE has taken a new approach to projects joining our "Umbrella" Namely the KDE Incubator. This new program aims to help projects with similar ideals to our existing projects join us with all that that implies.

The incubator couples a sponsor from the KDE community with a plan to move/migrate a project into the systems that KDE provides as a community including mailing lists, websites, code repositories, etc. One of the main responsibilities of the sponsor is to help the project's members become part of the KDE community itself by guiding in any way required and helping with source code migration, mailing list migration and figuring out the other aspects of how the KDE community works.

One of the first projects to be incubated was Wiki2learn. It has also been one of the slower projects to migrate fully, but at this years Akademy has had some exposure that should help it grow further.


KDE wins Linux New Media Readers Choice Award 2014

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Last week at CeBIT, KDE won the Linux New Media Readers Choice Award 2014 (link to German language Linux Magazine) for the best Linux Desktop Environment. 46% of the readers of Linux New Media's global publications voted for KDE. Runner-ups were GNOME with 18% and XFCE with 13%. Other awards went to CyanogenMod, Raspberry Pi, Bitcoin, Puppet, Tor and Git.


ezgo - Free And Open Source Software In Taiwan's Schools

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Free and Open Source Software in Taiwan has made impressive strides thanks to the work of the 'ezgo' team. They have put together a pre-configured set of Open Source software which makes it easy for teachers and students to get up and running. The New Taipei City government has decided to install ezgo 11 on 10,000 PCs for elementary schools, bringing thousands of students in contact with Linux, KDE and educational Free Software. The ezgo team has written up an account of ezgo and how it came to be. Enjoy the read!


A Year of the Linux Desktop

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Around a year ago, a school in the southeast of England, Westcliff High School for Girls Academy (WHSG), began switching its student-facing computers to Linux, with KDE providing the desktop software. The school's Network Manager, Malcolm Moore, contacted us at the time. Now, a year on, he got in touch again to let us know how he and the students find life in a world without Windows.


KDE Software Powers New Consumer-Oriented Computer

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Xompu (website in German - some basic information in English) is a new German company whose goal is to provide an easy-to-use complete computer, backed up by service support. Xompu released their computer a few weeks ago. And guess what? It runs Plasma Desktop and other KDE software.

Damien Tardy-Panis interviewed Robert Konopka, one of the founders of Xompu, to find out more about the company and why they chose KDE software. Read on to find out more about Xompu, what they think of KDE and our software, and news on job opportunities with the company.


Jesús Torres Talks About Bardinux, Spain's Biggest Deployment of KDE Software

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Many of you will know that KDE is very active in Spain. After all, KDE Spain recently became the first regional KDE organization to officially affiliate with KDE e.V.

There is plenty more going on in Spain and today we present an interview with Jesús Torres about Bardinux and the biggest deployment of KDE software in Spain. Read on for the interview and news about some upcoming events.