Submitted by jriddell on Sat, 2018/10/13 - 12:00am
KDE members in the impressive foyer at Escola del Treball
Meeting with Pablo of Catalan Generalitat distro Linkat
Last week developers from the KDE neon and Plasma teams visited Barcelona. We were there to meet with some KDE software projects we had heard about in the Catalan government and schools. Aleix Pol lives locally and works on Plasma and Discover. He invited Plasma release manager and KDE neon developer Jonathan Riddell, KDE neon continuous integration master Harald Sitter, and hardware enablement guru Rohan Garg to meet the teams evaluating our software and supporting our users.
We first met Pablo who runs the Linkat project for the Catalan government. Linkat is a Linux distribution they offer to schools, and it currently runs lightweight, simple desktop environments. As Plasma 5 now tends to use as little or less memory and resources than many lightweight Linux desktops, the Linkat team is interested in trying it. We met with the officials from the education department and discussed accessibility needs, looking at Mycroft for voice control and integrating with phones using KDE Connect.
The Escola del Treball is looking for ways to keep their IT infrastructure current, while at the same time cutting costs
The next day we visited the largest technical school in Catalunya, the Escola del Treball (school of the workers). Within their impressive Gaudí-inspired building, they run a few thousand computers on which they are trying to reduce the costs. They showed us the setup they had developed using thin clients with a simple Atom computer or Raspberry Pi. The thin clients use a remote desktop protocol to talk to virtual machines on a central server. The technically-minded teachers can customize what's running on the virtual machine with a range of distributions and operating systems available. Their server has hosted over 3000 virtual machine images just on the trial computers, all for the individual use cases of the teaching staff. Unlike with proprietary setups, this means they do not have to ask for a budget to install software.
They discussed some problems their virtual machine software was having with Plasma and tested some fixes made by Aleix. Rohan was also interested in finding the best machines they could use for their thin clients.
In the evening, we met with developer Angel Docampo and talked about the deployment he worked on for the Ajuntament (city council) of Barcelona. The Ajuntament is also interested in moving towards Free Software on their computers. This deployment is based on Kubuntu, and it is currently in trial by about 30 employees. Angel reported that they are happy with the setup; however, taking it further will likely depend on the politicians‘ will to drive the change forward.
As we were about to leave, we learned about a project called openUAB at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. They are making a KDE neon-based system for their own uses. We expect to find out more about this project after Aleix meets with them in the upcoming weeks.
This was an exciting trip that opened our eyes to the increasing number and variety of users and use cases of KDE software. The insights we collected will help us deliver better software, and strengthen the bonds between our community and the rest of the world.
Submitted by jriddell on Tue, 2018/10/09 - 12:17pm
KDE Plasma 5.14
Tuesday, 9 October 2018. Today KDE launches the first release of Plasma 5.14.
Plasma is KDE's lightweight and full featured Linux desktop. For the last three months we have been adding features and fixing bugs and now invite you to install Plasma 5.14.
A lot of work has gone into improving Discover, Plasma's software manager, and, among other things, we have added a Firmware Update feature and many subtle user interface improvements to give it a smoother feel. We have also rewritten many effects in our window manager KWin and improved it for slicker animations in your work day. Other improvements we have made include a new Display Configuration widget which is useful when giving presentations.
Browse the full Plasma 5.14 changelog to find out about more tweaks and bug fixes featured in this release: Full Plasma 5.14 changelog
New in Plasma 5.14
New Features
Display Configuration Widget
There's a new Display Configuration widget for screen management which is useful for presentations.
The Audio Volume widget now has a built in speaker test feature moved from Phonon settings.
The Network widget now works for SSH VPN tunnels again.
Switching primary monitor when plugging in or unplugging monitors is now smoother.
The lock screen now handles user-switching for better usability and security.
You can now import existing encrypted files from a Plasma Vault.
The Task Manager implements better compatibility with LibreOffice.
System Monitor Tools
The System Monitor now has a 'Tools' menu full of launchers to handy utilities.
The Kickoff application menu now switches tabs instantly on hover.
Panel Widget Edit Menu Old and New Style
Widget and panels get consistent icons and other user interface improvements.
Logout Warning
Plasma now warns on logout when other users are logged in.
Discover, our software and add-on installer, has more features and improves its look and feel.
Discover gained fwupd support, allowing it to upgrade your computer's firmware.
It gained support for Snap channels.
Discover can now display and sort apps by release date.
You can now see an app's package dependencies.
When Discover is asked to install a standalone Flatpak file but the Flatpak backend is not installed, it now offers to first install the backend for you.
Discover now tells you when a package update will replace some packages with other ones.
We have added numerous minor user interface improvements: update button are disabled while checking for updates, there is visual consistency between settings and the update pages, updates are sorted by completion percentage, we have improved the layout of updates page and updates notifier plasmoid, etc..
We have improved reliability and stability through a bunch of bug fixes.
Improved KWin Glide Effect
KWin and Wayland:
We fixed copy-paste between GTK and non-GTK apps on Wayland.
We fixed non-centered task switchers on Wayland.
We have improved pointer constraints.
There are two new interfaces, XdgShell and XdgOutput, for integrating more apps with the desktop.
We have considerably improved and polished KWin effects throughout, including completely rewriting the Dim Inactive effect, adding a new scale effect, rewriting the Glide effect, and more.
Bugfixes
We fixed many bugs, including:
Blurred backgrounds behind desktop context menus are no longer visually corrupted.
It's no longer possible to accidentally drag-and-drop task manager buttons into app windows.
Live Images
The easiest way to try out Plasma 5.14 is with a live image booted off a USB disk. Docker images also provide a quick and easy way to test Plasma.
Submitted by jriddell on Wed, 2018/09/26 - 10:00am
The KDE neon team is proud to announce the rebase of our packages onto Ubuntu 18.04 LTS "Bionic Beaver". We encourage all users to upgrade now. The installable ISOs and Docker images have also been updated to run on 18.04.
What is KDE neon?
KDE neon is a project to deliver KDE's wonderful suite of software quickly. We use modern DevOps techniques to automatically build, QA and deploy our packages. We work directly with the KDE community rather than staying far away in a separate project.
Our packages are built on the latest Ubuntu LTS edition and today we have moved to their new 18.04 release. This means our users can get newer drivers and third party packages. There is an upgrade process from the previous 16.04 LTS base which we have spent the last few months writing and running QA on to ensure it runs smoothly.
We have three editions for different use cases. A user edition for those wanting to use the latest released KDE software updated daily but only released when it passes QA tests. And two developer editions built from unstable and beta Git branches without QA checks for those wanting to test or develop our forthcoming software.
You can use our output via the .deb package archive, installable ISOs and Docker images. We also have work-in-progress Snap packages which we can put more development effort into now that we have rebased on 18.04.
The Upgrade
Many people have been keen for the rebase onto 18.04, thank you for your patience. We implement many QA tests in neon and are keen that they should all pass. A number of bugs have been found in the initial upgrade process which we have fixed. These major upgrades can still break, especially if you have a lot of third party software, so do take backups before you start. Please let us know on the bug tracker or forum how you get on. Enjoy your updated neon!
Thursday, 13 September 2018. Today KDE launches the beta release of Plasma 5.14.
Plasma is KDE's lightweight and full featured Linux desktop. For the last three months we have been adding features and fixing bugs and now invite you to test the beta pre-release of Plasma 5.14.
A lot of work has gone into improving Discover, Plasma's software manager, and, among other things, we have added a Firmware Update feature and many subtle user interface improvements to give it a smoother feel. We have also rewritten many effects in our window manager KWin and improved it for slicker animations in your work day. Other improvements we have made include a new Display Configuration widget which is useful when giving presentations.
Please test and send us bug reports and feedback. The final release is scheduled for three weeks' time.
Browse the full Plasma 5.14 Beta changelog to find out about more tweaks and bug fixes featured in this release: Full Plasma 5.14 Beta changelog
New in Plasma 5.14 Beta
New Features
Display Configuration Widget
There's a new Display Configuration widget for screen management which is useful for presentations.
The Audio Volume widget now has a built in speaker test feature moved from Phonon settings.
The Network widget now works for SSH VPN tunnels again.
Switching primary monitor when plugging in or unplugging monitors is now smoother.
The lock screen now handles user-switching for better usability and security.
You can now import existing encrypted files from a Plasma Vault.
The Task Manager implements better compatibility with LibreOffice.
System Monitor Tools
The System Monitor now has a 'Tools' menu full of launchers to handy utilities.
The Kickoff application menu now switches tabs instantly on hover.
Panel Widget Edit Menu Old and New Style
Widget and panels get consistent icons and other user interface improvements.
Logout Warning
Plasma now warns on logout when other users are logged in.
The Breeze widget theme has improved shadows.
Plasma Discover
Plasma Discover
Discover, our software and add-on installer, has more features and improves its look and feel.
Discover gained fwupd support, allowing it to upgrade your computer's firmware.
It gained support for Snap channels.
Discover can now display and sort apps by release date.
You can now see an app's package dependencies.
When Discover is asked to install a standalone Flatpak file but the Flatpak backend is not installed, it now offers to first install the backend for you.
Discover now tells you when a package update will replace some packages with other ones.
We have added numerous minor user interface improvements: update button are disabled while checking for updates, there is visual consistency between settings and the update pages, updates are sorted by completion percentage, we have improved the review section of the update notifier plasmoid, etc..
We have improved reliability and stability through a bunch of bug fixes.
Improved KWin Glide Effect
KWin and Wayland:
We fixed copy-paste between GTK and non-GTK apps on Wayland.
We fixed non-centered task switchers on Wayland.
We have improved pointer constraints.
There are two new interfaces, XdgShell and XdgOutput, for integrating more apps with the desktop.
We have considerably improved and polished KWin effects throughout, including completely rewriting the Dim Inactive effect, adding a new scale effect, rewriting the Glide effect, and more.
Bugfixes
We fixed many bugs, including:
Blurred backgrounds behind desktop context menus are no longer visually corrupted.
It's no longer possible to accidentally drag-and-drop task manager buttons into app windows.
We recommend starting with this year's keynotes, so make sure to watch Dan Bielefeld talk about how the Transitional Justice Working Group locates and uncovers sites for crimes against humanity committed by the Kim regime in North Korea:
Also, don't miss what Claudia Garad has to say about onboarding new contributors into an open community:
If you prefer a more KDE-specific topic, watch Nate Graham lay out a seven-point plan that will help KDE take over the world:
About Akademy
For most of the year, KDE -- one of the largest free and open software communities in the world-- works on-line by email, IRC, forums and mailing lists. Akademy provides all KDE contributors the opportunity to meet in person to foster social bonds, work on concrete technology issues, consider new ideas, and reinforce the innovative, dynamic culture of KDE. Akademy brings together artists, designers, developers, translators, users, writers, sponsors and many other types of KDE contributors to celebrate the achievements of the past year and help determine the direction for the next year. Hands-on sessions offer the opportunity for intense work bringing those plans to reality. The KDE Community welcomes companies building on KDE technology, and those that are looking for opportunities.
Submitted by jriddell on Wed, 2018/08/22 - 12:00am
Plasma running on a Pinebook.
In the last few years, smartphone hardware has become powerful enough to drive conventional desktop software. A developing trend is to create laptops using hardware initially designed for smartphones and embedded systems. There are distinct advantages to this approach: those devices are usually very energy efficient, so they can yield a long runtime on a single battery charge; they're also rather inexpensive and lighter than conventional laptops.
One such device is the Pinebook, created by a hardware manufacturer from China. The Pinebook is a low-cost laptop (at about 100 USD) with the full functionality one would expect. It is powered by a quad-core 64-bit ARM CPU clocked at 1.2 GHz, and comes with 2 GB of RAM, 16 GB of eMMC storage, and a 14" TN LCD at 1366x768.
Blue Systems has worked together with the manufacturer of the Pinebook to create a showcase test image that runs well on these devices. The team has adapted KDE neon and created a bootable and installable remixed live image that works on the Pinebook. Developers have also fixed many bugs - both minor and major - across the whole software stack, kernel, graphics drivers, Qt, packaging, and in KDE Frameworks and Plasma.
The result shows that Plasma is an excellent candidate for devices like this. The process has also yielded significant performance improvements in KDE Frameworks and Plasma; a result every user has enjoyed with newer Plasma releases.
Tuesday continued the Akademy BoFs, group sessions and hacking. There is a wrapup session at the end of the day so that what happened in the different rooms can be shared with everyone including those not present.
Monday was the first day of Akademy BoFs, group sessions and hacking. There is a wrapup session at the end of the day so that what happened in the different rooms can be shared with everyone including those not present.
Claudia Garad, Executive Director of Wikimedia Austria, reflects on the challenges of inclusivity.
Day 2 of Akademy started with a wonderfully insightful keynote by Claudia Garad, the Executive Director of Wikimedia Austria. She focused her talk on some of the challenges that organizations like hers face when trying to bring about more inclusivity and diversity within their communities.
She emphasized the importance of making underrepresented communities feel more welcome and heard within the organization, then went on to speak about how she perceived KDE as being quite ahead of Wikimedia in some aspects, especially when it came to reaching these goals.
One of the things she thought brought a positive vibe to the KDE community was that "KDE embraces cuteness", she said while displaying a slide with the "pile of Konquis" picture. On a more serious note, she said that through events such as Akademy, sprints and events around the world, you can bring together people from immensely diverse backgrounds and have them work towards building a stronger community.
Kai Uwe Broulik explained what is working (quite a lot), and how you will be able to control every aspect of your web browser with Plasma's integrated tools. Already working are controls for playback of videos and music on many popular sites using desktop widgets, including the likes of KDE Connect.
Talking of playing music, Camilo Higuita told us about the progress of VVAVE, a next generation audio player that is fully convergent (it integrates both with your Plasma desktop and on your mobile phone), and is but one part of Camilo's idea for an open audio streaming service.
Andreas Cord - Landwehr gave a talk on Yocto and how to use it to build images and SDKs and to create KDE-powered devices with Yocto. In a a similar vein, Volker Krause showed of a Raspberry Pi-based device running Plasma Mobile also on Yocto. The excitement of the KDE developers when it comes to running KDE software on mobile devices is electric and the audience was buzzing during these talks.
From left to right, Valorie Zimmerman, David Edmundson, and Aditya Mehra with their own awards and those that couldn't attend.
Finally, there were the Akademy Awards ceremony. The Akademy Awards are a way of honoring members that have done outstanding work for the benefit of the whole community.
The Application Akademy award went to Aditya Mehra for their work on the Mycroft integration providing KDE with a free speech assistant which is free as in freedom .
The Non-Application Akademy Award went to Valorie Zimmerman for for their work driving KDE's mentoring programs and the Community Working Group, and being one of KDE's good souls
There were three Jury awards this year they went to Sebastian Kügler for for their many years of relentless hacking and more (Plasma, KDE Marketing, years in the KDE e.V. Board), David Edmundson for their work on Telepathy, porting applications to Frameworks 5, Plasma, KWin, KWayland, and being the crazy guy around and to Mario Fux for supporting KDE over many years through organizing the Randa meetings.
The Akademy Team were thanked with the Organizational Award to Stefan Derkits and the whole team responsible for putting together Akademy 2018.
Congratulations to the winners and thank you for being so awesome!
Akademy 2018 got off to a wet start with rains accompanying all attendees pouring into Vienna for KDE's largest annual community conference. Although the Pre-Registration event was held on Day Zero (Friday the 10th) and it was a fun-filled affair, Akademy kicked off in earnest on Saturday, with talks, panels and demonstrations. Read on to find out about Day 1 of Akademy and all that transpired:
Dan Bielefeld, the Technical Director of the Transitional Justice Working Group, explained the work they do to map North Korean locations of mass burial and execution sites using mapping technologies. He also delivered insight into how North Korea and the Kim regime operates, and how his organization gleans information both from interviews with refugees and from studying satellite imagery.
Dan Bielefeld talks about how the Transitional Justice Working Group tries to shed light on North Korea's crimes against humanity. Photo by Paul Brown, distributed under the CC0 license.
Although the topic of the suffering of North Koreans is grim, there is a silver lining, says Dan: One day there will be a transition, there will come a day when the Kim regime will end and North Koreans will regain the freedom that they have been denied for over 70 years. The work of the Transitional Justice Working Group will also help with that. Finding out what happened to loved ones and bringing those responsible for the atrocities to justice will be a crucial part of helping the nation heal.
And it makes sense, says Dan, for the Transitional Justice Working Group to work with both Free Software and Free Software communities. The software offers the group a degree of security and control they cannot find in closed source applications; and Free Software communities uphold the same values Dan's group is fighting for, that is, the right to privacy and personal freedom.
Quite appropriately, after Dan's keynote, Adriaan de Groot ran a panel where members discussed the matter of privacy. Developing privacy-respecting software is one of KDE's main goals and the panelists explained how developing free and open Personal Digital Assistants like Mycroft was crucial to protecting users from snooping corporations.
Another thing we rarely think about but is a source of concern with regard to personal information is trip planners. In actual fact, the amount of sensitive information that we unwittingly share by letting opaque apps tell us when and where to catch our flight is staggering. Since the 2017 Randa sprint, there are KDE developers actively working on a truly open and private solution that will help solve this problem.
The other thing the panel discussed was the state of GnuPG in Kmail. GnuPG is the framework that allows users to encrypt and decrypt email messages that, otherwise, would be sent in clear text -- a big privacy concern. At this stage of play, GnuPG is tightly integrated into Kmail and, is not only convenient for end users, but has also proved to be immune to recent vulnerabilities that have affected other email clients.
Combined with the underlying policy of all KDE apps of never collecting data subvertly or otherwise, KDE is sticking strictly to its goal of preserving user privacy.
Neofytos Kolokotronis talked about the progress of another of KDE's main goals, namely the onboarding of new users. Neofytos explained to attendees the progress the working group had made so far and where they wanted to go to. He had some advice on how to help new users join KDE, such as having good and clear documentation, mentoring new contributors, and building connections outside your immediate niche.
More Highlights from Day 1
Wrishiraj Kaushik in his talk titled Winds of Change - FOSS in India spoke about the current scenario of FOSS in India and his experience leading SuperX and integrating KDE with it.
The Indian union government has a nation-wide recommendation in place for the use, promotion and development of Free and Open Source software. Despite this, FOSS adoption has remained low in the country. The decision taken by some state governments to not adopt these recommendations in conjunction with the aggressive marketing carried out by proprietary software vendors in India has seriously hindered the use of Free Software. SuperX, however, has managed to find a place within the government and a few Indian universities thanks to its user-centric approach. SuperX has deployed 30,000 KDE shipments -- one of the largest deployments in the world, and there are 20,000 more in the works.
This was followed by a panel discussion by Lydia, Valorie and Bhushan in which they told the community about our KDE student programs and how to contribute to their running and up-keep. It was a talk of high relevance, given our KDE Community goal to streamline the onboarding process for new contributors and the fact that a large part of our new contributor base comes through our organized mentoring programs, namely Google Summer of Code, Google Code-in and Season of KDE.
Mirko Boehm presented a talk on the genesis of Quartermaster, a toolchain driven by Endocode and supported by Siemens and Google. Quartermaster implements industry best practises of license compliance management. It generates compliance reports by analysing data from the CI environment and building graphs for analysis, primarily performing a combination of build time analysis and static code analysis.
Lays Rodrigues talked about Atelier, a cross-platform program designed to help you control your 3D printer. It supports most printers with open source firmware and Lays demoed the various features of Atelier during her talk, including video monitoring of the printer, 3D preview of the print design, temperature graphs and more.
Zoltan Padrah gave a talk on KTechLab and explained how he discovered it as a student of electronics engineering in 2008. KTechLab is a program that helps simulate electronic circuits and programs running on microcontrollers. It was migrated to the KDE infrastructure and joined KDE in 2017. The developers' upcoming plans are to release KTechLab for Qt4 and Qt5 and to port it to KDE Frameworks 5, as well as add new features like support to simulate automation systems for mechanics and have KiCad import/export.
Wrapping up
Day one was so full of content, it is hard to summarize everything that went on here. This has just been a summary of a few of the talks and demonstrations we enjoyed. There were many more talks on all topics, ranging from containerizing KDE's graphical apps, to an end users' perspective of using Kontact in a professional environment.
As we write this, already on day 2, it looks like today is shaping up to be equally exciting.
