KDE.news 

By Johnny Jazeix

Season of KDE, the program that helps people start contributing to KDE easily, kicks off with nine fascinating projects:

• Ayush Singh will be working on a Rust wrapper for KConfig. With this wrapper, and the existing ones for qmetaobject and ki18n, it will be easier to develop KDE applications in Rust. More information can be found in the kde-devel mailing-list. Ayush will be mentored by Jos van den Oever.
• Pablo Marcos will add a new panel to show notifications on Tokodon, KDE's Mastodon client. Pablo will be mentored by Carl Schwan.
• Snehit Sah will help package more KDE applications for Flathub. Some packages are nearly ready for Flathub, but are missing information or manifest files, so they are not yet available on the platform. The goal of the project is to improve the existing packages and publish more apps on Flathub. Snehit will be mentored by Timothée Ravier.
• Suhaas Joshi will work on the permission management for Flatpak Apps in Discover. The aim is to allow users view permissions required by a flatpak before installation and also allow users to turn these permissions on or off. After the installation of a flatpak package, Discover will let users view and alter its permissions. Suhaas will be mentored by Timothée Ravier and Aleix Pol Gonzalez.
• Samarth Raj will add a new activity help understand the difference between left- and right-clicking using a mouse in GCompris. The activity will show two types of animals that want to go home. Left-clicking will move one kind, while right-clicking will move the other. Find out more about this activity here. Samarth will be mentored by Harsh Kumar and Emmanuel Charruau.




• Srirupa will add support for a Perspective Ellipse feature in Krita. The aim is to create a tool that can adjust four corners of a mesh with an ellipse inside it. This will allow users to draw an ellipse in perspective with ease. Srirupa will be mentored by Halla Rempt.
• Soumik Dutta will document KDE Connect's communication protocol. Soumik will create comprehensive documentation covering the API contracts and the Event Action Pathways, validate the generated documentation, decide the layout, and merge the work into the existing documentation. Soumik will be mentored by Apollo Zhu and Lucas Wang.
• For the KDE-eco project, Karanjot Singh will prepare Standard Usage Scenarios for Energy Consumption Measurements. The first step will be to select an automatic tool to reproduce scenarios and then to define/write scenarios to test the energy consumption for multiple KDE/FOSS projects, such as Kate, KWrite, Vim, nano, emacs, etc. Finally, Karanjot will implement the scenarios. Karanjot will be mentored by Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss.
• Stefan Kowalczyk will improve the user experience for KDE Connect's iOS Internal Error and Alerts. iOS does not allow for multiple alerts at the same time, so the aim of the project is to queue alerts for KDE Connect if there are more than one, and display them one after the other. Stefan will be mentored by Apollo Zhu and Lucas Wang.

We hope all participants have fun with their projects and look forward to your achievements!

The Linux App Summit (LAS) of 2022 will be held in Rovereto, a picturesque city at the foot of the Italian Alps.

Whether you are a company, journalist, developer, or user interested in the ever-growing Linux app ecosystem, LAS will have something for you. Scheduled for April, LAS 2022 will be a hybrid event, combining on-site and remote sessions, including talks, panels and Q&As.

By Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss

On 11 December 2021, KDE Eco held the first of many planned Sprints. The Sprint was originally intended to be an in-person event to set up a community measurement lab, but Corona had other ideas. Nevertheless, the community deployed its usual resourcefulness, and we met online instead.

GCompris 2.0 improves classic favorites loved by children of all ages, and adds even more activities for more fun and learning.

Skanpage

Skanpage is KDE's new image scanning app. It's a simple scanning application designed for multi-page scans and saving of documents and images.

TUXEDO Computers, a company known for selling Linux-powered computers and notebooks, now joins us as a KDE Patron!

"Our customized Linux notebooks (for work or play) are equipped with KDE Plasma, which leads to a positive response from our customers", said Herbert Feiler, CEO TUXEDO Computers. "Furthermore, we additionally do our own development work, which could benefit KDE as upstream as well. We are happy to share our knowledge and would like to secure as well as expand KDE's development work in the long run. Feedback that we receive from customers can also flow directly into KDE's development work."

We are happy to announce the winner of the Plasma 25th Anniversary Edition Wallpaper Contest!

Thanks to all those who submitted their artwork. The variety and quality of the submissions in this edition was simply astounding. As always, there were multiple great options and it was very hard to choose. It was a very close call! But at the end, we have a winner: Patak by Aron!

Akademy 2022 is on its way and, despite the continuing pandemic, we are aiming for some in-person aspect for our next conference.

For the upcoming Akademy, we are looking to host it later in 2022, as we expect travel to be a bit more attainable and safe by then. Ideal dates would be in late summer or autumn 2022, specifically late August through October.

All Akademy 2021 videos are ready for you to enjoy. Check out the previous summaries of talks on the dot for ideas on what to watch:

• Saturday, 19th June 2021
• Sunday, 20th June 2021
• Friday, 25th June 2021

A good place to start is with the Keynotes by Patricia Aas

The KDE community makes a vast array of apps which get shipped in Linux distros, on Linux app stores, for Windows and Mac and for Android too. Following the re-branding of our scheduled app releases to KDE Gear we are splitting out the app update into these separate articles which will cover the self-released apps where the projects themselves manage their own release schedule. Here's what we have released in the last few months.