In February 2015 the Plasma developers met in the Blue Systems office in Barcelona to discuss and plan out where we would take Plasma over the duration of the next year. The sprint consisted of active Plasma developers and visual designers from around the world, from Canada to India.

The meeting consisted of equal parts hacking and group discussions about plans both in the near and far future in breakout sessions throughout the week.

Plasma Konqi

Tue, 24 Mar 2015. Today KDE releases a bugfix update to Plasma 5, versioned 5.2.2. Plasma 5.2 was released in January with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience.

This release adds a month's worth of new translations and fixes from KDE's contributors. The bugfixes are typically small but important and include:

• Translated documentation is now available
• Create gtk-3.0 directory before putting the settings file into it. Commit.
• KScreen: fix rounding error in updateRootProperties(). Commit.
• KWin: Fix installation of GHNS material. Commit.
• Muon: Wait to fetch the KNS backend until we have OCS providers. Commit. Fixes bug #344840
• Plasma Desktop: Extract UI messages. Commit.
• Plasma Networkmanager: Make sure SSID will be displayed properly when using non-ASCII characters. Commit. See bug #342697

Full Plasma 5.2.2 changelog

Attention prospective Google Summer of Code students: the student applications window has begun.

Linux.com interviews KDE e.V. president Lydia Pintscher. She talks about what KDE's legal body does and why it is important for open source communities to have a charity to represent them. She also discusses the difference between company and community supported projects and the status of women in open source.

The KDE student programs team is happy to announce that KDE has been accepted as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code 2015. This will allow students from around the world to work with mentors on KDE software projects. Successful students will receive stipends from Google.

digiKam is a mature open-source project (more than 14 years old now) that provides a digital asset management application oriented to photography post-production.

Building on the success of conf.kde.in 2014 at Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Community Technology (DA-IICT) in the land of Gujarat, the horizon of the KDE Community is broadening and shifting south. conf.kde.in 2015 takes place on the 17th and 18th of April at Amritapuri in Kerala, India. As in previous years of the conference, conf.kde.in 2015 will promote the spirit of free and open source software (FOSS) and offer ideas to build awareness about FOSS culture at the collegiate level, the time when most technology students have their first interactions with Open Source. There will be particular emphasis on KDE technology, and on Qt, the popular cross-platform application framework.

Akademy is the KDE Community conference. If you are working on topics relevant to KDE or Qt, this is your chance to present your work and ideas at the Conference from 25th-31st July in A Coruña, Spain. The days for talks are Saturday and Sunday, 25th and 26th July. The rest of the week will be BoFs, unconference sessions and workshops.

Akademy 2014 attendees

Kolab Systems has recently announced substantial improvements to their support for Kolab Groupware, today's release of Kolab 3.4, recently released Kolab Enterprise 14 and the upgrade of the hosted Kolab Now solution for Enterprise 14. Since the start of Kolab in 2002 as a Free Software project sponsored by the German Federal Office for Information Security, KDE people have played a significant role in its development. Kolab is enterprise-level software that includes group email, calendaring, contacts, file sharing, and task management. Its features also appeal to many individuals.

We are happy to announce the release of final version 2.9 of the Calligra Suite, Calligra Active and the Calligra Office Engine. This version is the result of thousands of changes which provide new features, polishing of the user experience and bug fixes.

What’s in the Box?

The 2.9 release is so far the biggest release for Krita, the award-winning free and open source digital painting application. Eleven out of twelve of the features were requested by users and funded by Krita’s first Kickstarter action and the twelfth feature will come in 2.9.1!

• Support for loading and showing multiple images in one window, and viewing any given image in multiple views and windows.
• Fully integrated the G’Mic set of image manipulation tools, enabling artists to, for instance, greatly speed-up their workflow.
• Greatly extended support for painting in HDR mode, making it a truly creative tool.
• New perspective painting assistants to new color selectors, improved transform tools and non-destructive transformation masks, brush engine improvements, workflow improvements, new filters, support for creating and installing resource packs (brushes, gradients, patterns) and many more.
• More details on krita.org