KDE.news 

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.

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.

Today KDE released KDE Applications 15.08, the collection of more than 150 applications. This release features the Kontact Suite and Dolphin ported to KDE Frameworks 5.

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.

Modern life has become increasingly dependent on software systems. Many daily used devices rely on Free Software for their basic functionality or additional services. TV sets, ATMs, smartphones, media centers and in-flight entertainment systems are examples of how Free Software has been pushing the boundaries of current technology. This is achieved by using well-proven solutions, developed in a collaborative, open, and trusted way. The Workspaces, Applications, and Frameworks delivered by KDE are representatives of the empowerment Free Software provides to our lifes. Examples are educational applications of the KDE-Edu suite, lots of KDE technology deployments in public centers for digital inclusion and a full open software stack for mobile devices with Plasma Mobile.

Tuesday, 11 August 2015. Today KDE releases a beta release of the new version of Plasma 5.4.

The 5th edition of the Randa Meetings high in the Swiss Alps in August 2014 was a huge success, with many new features and major new additions to KDE technology, through the dedicated efforts of about 50 KDE developers taking a week out of their busy lives to bring great software to users.

For an overview of what happened in the BoFs, meetings and hacking sessions during the second half of the week, you can watch the wrap-up session video

Friday marks the end of Akademy as friends old and new return home, enthused and inspired.

Many of you already know that FISL (The International Free Software Forum) is one of the biggest FLOSS conferences in the world. From 8 to 11 July 2015, 5281 free software passionate people met in Porto Alegre (South Brazil) for the 16th FISL edition, enjoying activities such as talks, panels, hackathons, workshops, and community meetings. All kinds of FLOSS-related topics were in place: development, translation, artwork, education, robotics, entrepreneurship, audio-visual, women and gender, politics, academia and research ... Phew! that's tiring :) KDE has a long and memorable history at FISL and it wasn't different this year.

Video recordings of the Akademy talks are now available in a low quality version to enable them to be released quickly. Higher quality version will be available later.

You can find these linked from the talks schedule or look through the video files directly.