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Today KDE releases a beta for Plasma 5.2. This release adds a number of new components and improves the existing desktop. We welcome all testers to find and help fix the bugs before our stable release in two weeks' time.

Today KDE released KDE Applications 14.12, delivering new features and bug fixes to more than a hundred applications. Most of these applications are based on KDE Development Platform 4 but the first applications have been ported to KDE Frameworks 5. Frameworks is a set of modularized libraries providing additional functionality for Qt5, the latest version of the popular Qt cross-platform application framework.

Plasma 5.1.2 is the December output from our desktop team. It's a bugfix release which adds several dozen fixes and the latest translations.

Some highlights include:

• The Breeze icons licence has been clarified as LGPL 3+.
• The remaining battery time in PowerDevil now updates correctly.
• VirtualBox shell resizing fixed.
• The free space notifier icon hides correctly when space becomes available again.
• Dr Konqi updated for future proofing.

This is the final update to Plasma 5 for this year, we'll see you again next year with a new feature release at the end of January.

KDE today announces the release of KDE Frameworks 5.5.0.

KDE Frameworks are 60 addon libraries to Qt which provide a wide variety of commonly needed functionality in mature, peer reviewed and well tested libraries with friendly licensing terms. For an introduction see the Frameworks 5.0 release announcement.

GCompris has joined the KDE incubator. GCompris is the high quality educational software suite comprising numerous activities for children aged 2 to 10, and well known by parents and teachers all over the world.

It's been quite some time since the Randa Meetings 2014 and even this year's edition of the KDE Community Summit called Akademy has already happened, but it's still nice to look back and see what was accomplished at this KDE Tech Summit in the middle of the Swiss Alps.

KDE was one of about 50 exhibitors at the LISA (Large Installation System Administration) Conference November 12th and 13th in Seattle. The expo was part of the week-long conference for system administrators that has been held annually since 1986. Expo participants included big name tech companies and smaller niche organizations offering products and services to this audience of professional technical people. As we discovered, KDE is well known among this audience.

The Google Code-in is a contest to introduce pre-university students (ages 13-17) to the many kinds of contributions that make open source software development possible. The contest runs from December 1, 2014 to January 19, 2015. For many students the Google Code-in contest is their first introduction to open source development.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest:

• Marble can preview Geo Data files (GPX, OSM, KML, ESRI) in the file manager or file dialogs
• Plasma workspace introduce a list of apps that are limited to single notification only to limit the number of notifications the user sees
• KDE-PIM gains an initial implementation of native Gmail resource
• Krita allows global selection masks to be shown in the Layers docker to be used with other tools; implements drag & drop of multiple layers
• First approach to a KF5 port of KDE Connect.

Read the rest of the Digest here.

About a year ago, the Calligra community added a new application to the suite by the name of Krita Gemini, which combined the functionality of the Krita digital painting application with the touch optimised user interface of the tablet focused Krita Sketch, into a shell with the ability to switch between the two at runtime. The goal was to create a responsive user interface for Krita, and this is now a part of Calligra. In May of this year, Intel approached the team which produced Krita Gemini with the idea of doing the same for other parts of Calligra, by creating an application which would encapsulate the Words and Stage components in the same way as Krita Gemini did for the Krita component.