KDE.news

Time to Test Plasma 5's Second Release

Tuesday, 30 September 2014 | Jriddell

Put your testing hats on, Plasma 5 has a beta release. The second version of Plasma 5 is due out in under two weeks and now is your chance to test it for bugs which have crept in. It features a bunch of missing features which have been added back such as the much requested icon only task bar. The Visual Design Group have been hard at work over the last three months adding a Qt 4 Breeze theme to make all KDE applications fit into the desktop and many new icons as part of the Breeze icon theme. Check for packages for your distro and try it out. Read More

Akademy 2014 Talk Videos Available

Thursday, 25 September 2014 | Jriddell

Videos of all of the Akademy Talks are now available online to watch in your own time.

You can access them from the Akademy schedule. Follow the schedule to the talks for the links to the videos and the slides.

LaKademy 2014

Wednesday, 17 September 2014 | Sandroandrade

From August 27th to 30th, 2014, nearly sixteen KDE lovers met in the 2nd LaKademy - The KDE Latin America Summit. The sprint took place in the Free Software Competence Center (CCSL) at University of São Paulo (USP) in southeast Brazil. Read More

Akademy Wednesday and Thursday Wrapup

Thursday, 11 September 2014 | Jriddell

Akademy continues with hacking and BoF meetings. This wrapup meeting video covers sessions from Wednesday and Thursday including accessibility, release team, user information reporting, KDE applications websites, KDevelop and share-like-connect. Read More

Akademy Tuesday Wrapup

Wednesday, 10 September 2014 | Jriddell

Akademy is in full swing here in Brno in the Czech Republic. The days are now filled with BoF sessions to discuss given topics and make decisions in person much faster than would be possible online. Here is the wrapup session from Tuesday which covered the outcomes from sessions on Solid, Plasma Media Centre, Inqlude, UI design, Frameworks and more. Read More

Akademy 2014 Day 2 Talks

Monday, 8 September 2014 | Jospoortvliet

It was a cloudy morning in Brno.... luckily not as hot as the first day. The traces of fun from last night kept many participants similarly subdued but they were soon woken up by a truly inspiring keynote by Cornelius Schumacher, our fresh former president of KDE e.V.! Read More

Akademy Award Winners 2014

Monday, 8 September 2014 | Jriddell

The talks weekend at Akademy finished with the traditional announcing of the Akademy Awards, our recognition of the stars of KDE. The winners are selected by those who received the award the previous year. Read More

Akademy 2014 Day 1

Sunday, 7 September 2014 | Jospoortvliet

Who's new to Akademy?

Today, Akademy 2014 kicked off hard. As always, there is a lot of excitement. The first Akademy day is always overwhelming. Meeting old friends, making new ones, learning new things and sharing what you know. To keep things simpler, we started this year with a single track in the morning, with two tracks in the afternoon. With all attendees in one room listening to 10 minute fast track presentations, there are plenty of topics to talk about during the breaks.

Sascha Meinrath keynote

The opening keynote from Sascha Meinrath gave some perspectives on how democracy is broken. He showed a graph of the number of acts of Congress declining since the 1950s. This is a fundamental problem because there is massive change in society while legislation is slowing down, not keeping up with societal progress. Companies create products that harm privacy. Yet there are few legal limits to these activities; and they freely integrate their technologies in every product possible. Distribution and federation are the answers. Sascha set up a distributed network in Washington, D.C. which avoids the central mobile grid. Distributed production is also becoming viable: the maker space movement shows it's only 3 to 5 years away that we can produce goods without central manufacturing.

One of Sascha's projects is X-Lab, a future-focused technology policy and innovation effort that is building an alternative infrastructure. The issue they are addressing is not just about wireless access. Sascha asks, "What if we could repurpose unused TV frequencies for broadband? Less than 10% of available bandwidth is used." GNURadio and other projects make it possible for more of this unused capacity to be used. Distributed infrastructure for a variety of technologies is awesome; open hardware allows for participatory technology.

KDE PIM Newcomers

Sunday, 7 September 2014 | Jospoortvliet

With Akademy in full swing, we thought we'd treat you all on a conversation with a handful of newcomers to the KDE PIM team. The conversation took place both online over the last months and offline at Akademy yesterday. Let's start with introductions, in order of their replies.

Guy Maurel is French, almost 67 and retired. Having studied electrical engineering, he has seen the first coax cables forming an intranet and later managed DNS, mail and router systems following the growth of the IT industry. He's been using Linux for a while and when a student told him he should be contributing to Open Source, he decided to join KDE PIM.

KDE Arrives in Brno for Akademy

Saturday, 6 September 2014 | Jriddell

Yesterday KDE contributors from around the world arrived in Brno for Akademy, our annual meeting. Over the next week, we will share ideas, discover common problems and their solutions, and rekindle offline friendships for another year. We have traveled from around the world to work on free software in the spirit of community and cooperation. This year we can celebrate the success of the last 12 months when we released major new versions of our platform—KDE Frameworks—and our desktop—Plasma 5. This work has been well received by the press and our community of users, but we know there is much more to do to keep KDE Software relevant for the years to come in a world where desktops are only one way of using computer software. We'll be discussing and planning how to make the best desktop software for Linux and how to expand to new platforms.