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Meet KDE e.V.'s New Board

Friday, 27 September 2019  |  Paul Brown
Akademy 2019 brought the KDE community some exciting news and major changes. The new community-wide goals have been announced, and KDE contributors presented new ideas and projects they are working on. Read More

Plasma 5.17 Beta Out for Testing

Thursday, 19 September 2019  |  Jriddell
<figure class="topImage">
    <a href="http://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.17/plasma-5.17.png" data-toggle="lightbox">
        <img src="http://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.17/plasma-5.17-wee.png" height="342" width="600" style="width: 100%; max-width: 600px; height: auto;" alt="Plasma 5.17 Beta" />
    </a>
    <figcaption>KDE Plasma 5.17 Beta</figcaption>
</figure>

<p>Thursday, 19 September 2019.</p>
<p>Today KDE launches the beta release of Plasma 5.17.</p>

<p>We've added a bunch of new features and improvements to KDE's lightweight yet full featured desktop environment.</p>

<p><a href='https://kde.org/plasma-desktop'>Plasma's updated web page</a> gives more background on why you should use it on your computer.</p>

<figure style="float: right; text-align: right">
<a href="http://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.17/guillermo.png" data-toggle="lightbox">
<img src="http://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.17/guillermo-wee.png" style="padding: 10px" width="350" height="334" alt="Guillermo Amaral" />
</a>
<figcaption style="text-align: right">Guillermo Amaral</figcaption>
</figure>

<p>System Settings has gained new features to help you manage your fancy Thunderbolt hardware, plus Night Color is now on X11 and a bunch of pages got redesigned to help you get your configuration done easier.  Our notifications continue to improve with a new icon and automatic do-not-disturb mode for presentations.  Our Breeze GTK theme now provides a better appearance for the Chromium/Chrome web browsers and applies your color scheme to GTK and GNOME apps. The window manager KWin has received many HiDPI and multi-screen improvements, and now supports fractional scaling on Wayland.</p>
<p>You can test the Plasma 5.17 beta for the next three weeks until the final release in mid-October.  Give it a whirl with your favorite distribution!</p>

<p>The Plasma 5.17 series is dedicated to our friend Guillermo Amaral. Guillermo was an enthusiastic KDE developer who rightly self described as 'an incredibly handsome multidisciplinary self-taught engineer'.  He brought cheer to anyone he met.  He lost his battle with cancer last summer but will be remembered as a friend to all he met.</p>

<br clear="all" />

<h3 id="desktop">Plasma</h3>
<figure style="float: right; text-align: right">
<a href="http://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.17/unsplash-pic-of-day.png" data-toggle="lightbox">
<img src="http://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.17/unsplash-pic-of-day-wee.png" style="border: 0px" width="350" height="280" alt="<a href='https://unsplash.com/'>Unsplash</a> Picture of the Day" />
</a>
<figcaption style="text-align: right"><a href='https://unsplash.com/'>Unsplash</a> Pic of the Day</figcaption>
<br />
<a href="http://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.17/inches-to-cm.png" data-toggle="lightbox">
<img src="http://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.17/inches-to-cm-wee.png" style="border: 0px" width="350" height="159" alt="<a href='https://unsplash.com/'>Unsplash</a> Pic of the Day" />
</a>
<figcaption style="text-align: right">KRunner now converts fractional units</figcaption>
<br />
<a href="http://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.17/notification-widget.png" data-toggle="lightbox">
<img src="http://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.17/notification-widget-wee.png" style="border: 0px" width="250" height="230" alt="Improved Notifications widget and widget editing UX" />
</a>
<figcaption style="text-align: right">Improved Notifications widget and widget editing UX</figcaption>
</figure>

<ul>
  • Do Not Disturb mode is automatically enabled when mirroring screens (e.g. when delivering a presentation)
  • The Notifications widget now uses an improved icon instead of displaying the number of unread notifications
  • Improved widget positioning UX, particularly for touch
  • Improved the Task Manager's middle-click behavior: middle-clicking on an open app's task opens a new instance, while middle-clicking on its thumbnail will close that instance
  • Slight RGB hinting is now the default font rendering mode
  • Plasma now starts even faster!
  • Conversion of fractional units into other units (e.g. 3/16" == 4.76 mm) in KRunner and Kickoff
  • Wallpaper slideshows can now have user-chosen ordering rather than always being random
  • New Unsplash picture of the day wallpaper source with categories
  • Much better support for public WiFi login
  • Added the ability to set a maximum volume that's lower than 100%
  • Pasting text into a sticky note strips the formatting by default
  • Kickoff's recent documents section now works with GNOME/GTK apps
  • Fixed Kickoff tab appearance being broken with vertical panels
    • <br clear="all" />

    <h3 id="systemsettings">System Settings: Thunderbolt, X11 Night Color and Overhauled Interfaces</h3>
<figure style="float: right; text-align: right">
<a href="http://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.17/night-color.png" data-toggle="lightbox">
<img src="http://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.17/night-color-wee.png" style="border: 0px" width="350" height="250" alt="Night Color settings are now available on X11 too" />
</a>
<figcaption style="text-align: right">Night Color settings are now available on X11 too</figcaption>
<br />
<a href="http://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.17/thunderbolt.png" data-toggle="lightbox">
<img src="http://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.17/thunderbolt-wee.png" style="border: 0px" width="350" height="344" alt="Thunderbolt device management" />
</a>
<figcaption style="text-align: right">Thunderbolt device management</figcaption>
<br />
<a href="http://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.17/settings-consistency.png" data-toggle="lightbox">
<img src="http://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.17/settings-consistency-wee.png" style="border: 0px" width="390" height="280" alt="Reorganized Appearance settings, consistent sidebars and headers" />
</a>
<figcaption style="text-align: right">Reorganized Appearance settings, consistent sidebars and headers</figcaption>
</figure>
    

    <ul>

  • New settings panel for managing and configuring Thunderbolt devices
  • The Night Color settings are now available on X11 too. It gets a modernized and redesigned user interface, and the feature can be manually invoked in the settings or with a keyboard shortcut.
  • Overhauled the user interface for the Displays, Energy, Activities, Boot Splash, Desktop Effects, Screen Locking, Screen Edges, Touch Screen, and Window Behavior settings pages and the SDDM advanced settings tab
  • Reorganized and renamed some settings pages in the Appearance section
  • Basic system information is now available through System Settings
  • Added accessibility feature to move your cursor with the keyboard when using Libinput
  • You can now apply a user's font, color scheme, icon theme, and other settings to the SDDM login screen to ensure visual continuity on single-user systems
  • New 'sleep for a few hours and then hibernate' feature
  • The Colors page now displays the color scheme's titlebar colors
  • It is now possible to assign a global keyboard shortcut to turn off the screen
  • Standardized appearance for list headers
  • The 'Automatically switch all running streams when a new output becomes available' feature now works properly
    • <br clear="all" />

    <h3 id="breeze">Breeze Theme</h3>
<figure style="float: right; text-align: right">
<a href="http://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.17/window-borders.png" data-toggle="lightbox">
<img src="http://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.17/window-borders-wee.png" style="border: 0px" width="350" height="250" alt="Window borders are now turned off by default" />
</a>
<figcaption style="text-align: right">Window borders are now turned off by default</figcaption>
</figure>
    

    <ul>

  • The Breeze GTK theme now respects your chosen color scheme
  • Active and inactive tabs in Google Chrome and Chromium now look visually distinct
  • Window borders are now turned off by default
  • Sidebars in settings windows now have a consistent modernized appearance
    • <br clear="all" />

    <h3 id="ksysguard">System Monitor</h3>
<figure style="float: right; text-align: right">
<a href="http://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.17/ksysguard.png" data-toggle="lightbox">
<img src="http://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.17/ksysguard-wee.png" style="border: 0px" width="350" height="157" alt="CGroups in System Monitor" />
</a>
<figcaption style="text-align: right">CGroups in System Monitor</figcaption>
</figure>
    

    <ul>

  • System Monitor can now show CGroup details to look at container limits
  • Each process can now report its network usage statistics
  • It is now possible to see NVidia GPU stats
    • <br clear="all" />

    <h3 id="discover">Discover</h3>
<figure style="float: right; text-align: right">
<a href="http://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.17/discover.png" data-toggle="lightbox">
<img src="http://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.17/discover-wee.png" style="border: 0px" width="350" height="255" alt="Discover now has icons on the sidebar" />
</a>
<figcaption style="text-align: right">Discover now has icons on the sidebar</figcaption>
</figure>
    

    <ul>

  • Real progress bars and spinners in various parts of the UI to better communicate progress information
  • Better 'No connection' error messages
  • Icons in the sidebar and icons for Snap apps

    • <h3 id="kwin">KWin: Improved Display Management</h3>
<ul>
  • Fractional scaling added on Wayland
  • It is now once again possible to close windows in the Present Windows effect with a middle-click
  • Option to configure whether screen settings apply only for the current screen arrangement or to all screen arrangements
  • Many multi-screen and HiDPI improvements
  • On Wayland, it is now possible to resize GTK headerbar windows from window edges
  • Scrolling with a wheel mouse on Wayland now always scrolls the correct number of lines
  • On X11, it is now possible to use the Meta key as a modifier for the window switcher that's bound to Alt+Tab by default
    • <br clear="all" />

    <a href="http://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.16.5-5.16.90-changelog.php">Full Plasma 5.16.90 changelog</a>
    

    <!-- // Boilerplate again -->
<section class="row get-it">
<article class="col-md">
<h2>Live Images</h2>
<p>
The easiest way to try it out is with a live image booted off a USB disk. Docker images also provide a quick and easy way to test Plasma.            </p>
<a href='https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Live_Images' class="learn-more">Download live images with Plasma 5</a>
<a href='https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Docker_Images' class="learn-more">Download Docker images with Plasma 5</a>
</article>
    

    &lt;article class=&quot;col-md&quot;&gt;
    &lt;h2&gt;Package Downloads&lt;/h2&gt;
    &lt;p&gt;
        Distributions have created, or are in the process of creating, packages listed on our wiki page.            &lt;/p&gt;
    &lt;a href='https://community.kde.org/Get_KDE_Software_on_Your_Linux_Distro' class=&quot;learn-more&quot;&gt;Get KDE Software on Your Linux Distro wiki page&lt;/a&gt;
&lt;/article&gt;

&lt;article class=&quot;col-md&quot;&gt;
    &lt;h2&gt;Source Downloads&lt;/h2&gt;
    &lt;p&gt;
        You can install Plasma 5 directly from source.            &lt;/p&gt;
    &lt;a href='https://community.kde.org/Guidelines_and_HOWTOs/Build_from_source' class='learn-more'&gt;Community instructions to compile it&lt;/a&gt;
    &lt;a href='http://www.kde.org/info/plasma-5.15.90.php' class='learn-more'&gt;Source Info Page&lt;/a&gt;
&lt;/article&gt;

    </section>
    <section class="give-feedback">
<h2>Feedback</h2>
    &lt;p class=&quot;kSocialLinks&quot;&gt;
    You can give us feedback and get updates on our social media channels:            &lt;a class=&quot;shareFacebook&quot; href=&quot;https://www.facebook.com/kde/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Post on Facebook&lt;/a&gt;
    &lt;a class=&quot;shareTwitter&quot; href=&quot;https://twitter.com/kdecommunity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Share on Twitter&lt;/a&gt;
    &lt;a class=&quot;shareDiaspora&quot; href=&quot;https://joindiaspora.com/people/9c3d1a454919ef06&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Share on Diaspora&lt;/a&gt;
    &lt;a class=&quot;shareReddit&quot; href=&quot;http://www.reddit.com/r/kde/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Share on Reddit&lt;/a&gt;
    &lt;a class=&quot;shareYouTube&quot; href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCF3I1gf7GcbmAb0mR6vxkZQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Share on YouTube&lt;/a&gt;
    &lt;a class=&quot;shareMastodon&quot; href=&quot;https://mastodon.technology/@kde&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Share on Mastodon&lt;/a&gt;
    &lt;a class=&quot;shareLinkedIn&quot; href=&quot;https://www.linkedin.com/company/29561/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Share on LinkedIn&lt;/a&gt;
    &lt;a class=&quot;sharePeerTube&quot; href=&quot;https://peertube.mastodon.host/accounts/kde/videos&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Share on PeerTube&lt;/a&gt;
&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;
    Discuss Plasma 5 on the &lt;a href='https://forum.kde.org/viewforum.php?f=289'&gt;KDE Forums Plasma 5 board&lt;/a&gt;.        &lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;You can provide feedback direct to the developers via the &lt;a href='https://webchat.kde.org/#/room/#cutehmi:kde.org'&gt;Plasma Matrix chat room&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href='https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/plasma-devel'&gt;Plasma-devel mailing list&lt;/a&gt; or report issues via &lt;a href='https://bugs.kde.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=plasmashell&amp;amp;format=guided'&gt;bugzilla&lt;/a&gt;. If you like what the team is doing, please let them know!
&lt;p&gt;Your feedback is greatly appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;

    Akademy 2019 Wednesday and Thursday BoF Wrapup

    Friday, 13 September 2019  |  Sealne
    Wednesday continued the Akademy BoFs, group sessions and hacking in the morning followed by the daytrip in the afternoon to Lake Como, to have some fun, get away from laptops and get to know each other better. Thursday was back to BoFs, meetings and hacking culminating in a wrapup session at the end covering the last two days so that what happened in the different rooms can be shared with everyone including those not present. Read More

    Akademy 2019 Talks: Here's What You Missed

    Tuesday, 10 September 2019  |  Unknow

    According to the now traditional schedule, Akademy 2019 started with two days of conference talks. Hosted by unixMIB at the University of Milano-Bicocca in Milan, Italy, the central conference of the KDE community attracted more than a hundred attendees during this past weekend. Many of them were attending Akademy for the first time ever, which is always a reason to celebrate.

    Read More

    Akademy 2019 Tuesday BoF Wrapup

    Tuesday, 10 September 2019  |  Sealne
    Tuesday continued the Akademy BoFs, group sessions and hacking. There is a wrapup session at the end of the day so that what happened in the different rooms can be shared with everyone including those not present. Read More

    Akademy 2019 Monday BoF Wrapup

    Monday, 9 September 2019  |  Sealne
    Monday was the first day of Akademy BoFs, group sessions and hacking. There is a wrapup session at the end of the day so that what happened in the different rooms can be shared with everyone including those not present. Read More

    KDE Decides the Three New Challenges: Wayland, Consistency, and Apps

    Saturday, 7 September 2019  |  Paul Brown

    Lydia Pintscher, Eike Hein, Ivan Cukic and Neofytos Kolokotronis discuss the results of the past goals.

    The KDE Community has spoken! On the first day of Akademy 2019, Lydia Pintscher, President of KDE e.V., announced the three new goals we will prioritize over the next 2 years.

    Read More

    Developers Italia and the New Guidelines: Let the Open Source Revolution Start! An Interview with Leonardo Favario

    Thursday, 5 September 2019  |  Unknow

    Leonardo Favario, Open Source Project Leader at the Italian Digital Transformation Team.

    Leonardo Favario is the Open Source Project Leader at the Italian Digital Transformation Team. Italy has an ambitious agenda to move government IT to open source. In principle, all software written by government should be published as open source. This is a big change from the past and requires many changes in how software is being developed.

    Read More

    Lars Knoll, CTO at Qt and Keynote Speaker at Akademy 2019

    Thursday, 29 August 2019  |  Paul Brown

    Lars Knoll at the Qt Company's headquarters.

    Lars Knoll has been working on Qt for a long time. It is now 20 years since he joined Trolltech and even longer since he started developing crucial pieces of the KDE ecosystem. In that time, he went from theoretical physicist to software engineer to project leader, and survived the many roughs-and-tumbles Qt went through, including the event that nearly killed the project brought on by a certain company from Redmond.

    Read More

    KDE Applications 19.08 Brings New Features to Konsole, Dolphin, Kdenlive, Okular and Dozens of Other Apps

    Thursday, 15 August 2019  |  Skadinna

    Can you believe we've already passed the half-year mark? That means it's just the right time for a new release of KDE Applications! Our developers have worked hard on resolving bugs and introducing features that will help you be more productive as you get back to school, or return to work after your summer vacation.

    Read More