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After our final decision to adopt GitLab in November 2019, KDE started the work of tackling the many challenges that come with moving a whole development platform for a large open source community. KDE has now officially completed Phase One of the adoption and contributors have begun to use GitLab on a daily basis.

Why did we migrate to GitLab?

By switching to GitLab we will be offering our community one of the most popular and latest, fully-featured, actively developed, and supported DevOps platforms in existence today. This will contribute to boosting collaboration and productivity, and making our workflow more transparent and accessible to everyone who wants to contribute.

How will it benefit the wider community?

By using a platform offering an interface that most open source developers are nowadays familiar with, we will be lowering the bar for new contributors to join us, and providing a way for our community to continue to grow even faster in the coming years.

GitLab will also help us to achieve goals like "Consistency", as it will help our community members have a single solution to their needs. Now, we will be able to host and review code, manage projects/issues, communicate, collaborate, and develop software/applications on a single platform.

By adopting GitLab as a platform, we will be adding stability to our framework, as we will count on the support of GitLab as a company. GitLab, Inc. has nearly a decade of experience behind it, releases new versions on a regular basis and, apart from its in-house team, counts on an active community of third party contributors. This guarantees that our new development platform will be updated and maintained throughout the years.

KDE has migrated to GitLab and our instance is now live. Start discovering projects, groups and code on by visiting invent.kde.org.

You can read more about this migration on GitLab's blog.

Plasma 5.19 is out! If we gave alliterative names to Plasma releases, this one could be "Polished Plasma". The effort developers have put into squashing bugs and removing annoying papercuts has been immense.

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Plasma 5.19 video

In this release, we have prioritized making Plasma more consistent, correcting and unifying designs of widgets and desktop elements; worked on giving you more control over your desktop by adding configuration options to the System Settings; and improved usability, making Plasma and its components easier to use and an overall more pleasurable experience.

Read the full announcement to discover all the new features and improvements of Plasma 5.19

KDE Plasma 5.19 Beta

Thursday, 14 May 2020.

It's time to test the beta release for Plasma 5.19!

In this release, we have prioritized making Plasma more consistent, correcting and unifying designs of widgets and desktop elements; worked on giving you more control over your desktop by adding configuration options to the System Settings; and improved usability, making Plasma and its components easier to use and an overall more pleasurable experience.

Read on to discover all the new features and improvements of Plasma 5.19…

Plasma Desktop and Widgets

Rewritten System Monitor Widgets




Consistent System Tray Applets




Completely New User Avatars




More consistent appearance for switching the current audio device

• We have improved the panel spacer so that it can automatically center widgets
• The System Monitor widgets have been rewritten from scratch
• Plasma now has a consistent design and header area in system tray applets as well as notifications
• We have refreshed the look of the media playback applet in the System Tray and of Task Manager tooltips
• There are completely new photographic avatars to choose from
• You can now see the name of the creator of a desktop wallpaper when you go to pick one
• Sticky notes get usability improvements
• You now have more control over the visibility of volume OSDs during certain situations
• GTK 3 applications immediately apply a newly selected color scheme and GTK 2 applications no longer have broken colors
• We have increased the default fixed-width font size from 9 to 10
• More consistent appearance with less ugly UI for switching the current audio device

System Settings

Full System Settings App Is Now Launching




Redesigned Settings Pages

• Default Applications, Online Accounts, Global Shortcuts, KWin Rules and Background Services settings pages have all been overhauled
• When launching System Settings modules from within KRunner or the application launcher, the complete System Settings application launches on the page you asked for
• The Display settings page now shows the aspect ratio for each available screen resolution
• You now have more granular control over Plasma's animation speed
• We have added configurable file indexing for individual directories and you can now disable indexing for hidden files
• There is now an option that lets you configure the mouse and touchpad scroll speed under Wayland
• We have made lots of small improvements to the font configuration

Info Center

Redesigned Info Center

• The Info Center application has been redesigned with a look and feel that is consistent with the System Settings
• It is now possible to see information about your graphics hardware

KWin Window Manager

Icon Recoloring in the Titlebar

• The new subsurface clipping for Wayland greatly reduces the flickering in many applications
• Icons in titlebars are now recolored to fit the color scheme instead of sometimes being hard to see
• And in Wayland screen rotation now works for tablets and convertable laptops

Discover

Flatpak Repository Removal in Discover

• Flatpak repositories in use are easier to remove now
• Discover displays the application version for reviews
• Discover improved its visual and usability consistency

KSysGuard

More than 12 CPU cores in KSysGuard

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• Our system monitor KSysGuard has gained support for systems with more than 12 CPU cores

Full Plasma 5.19 Beta changelog

by Akhil K Gangadharan and Valorie Zimmerman

The KDE Community welcomes our students for Google Summer Of Code 2020!

We are so grateful to the GSoC program for offering this opportunity to the KDE Community and our students. By the end of the summer, we hope that each of these students will be a confident KDE Developer, happy with their summer of work, and looking forward to supporting their code and newfound friends far into the future.

Krita is KDE’s professional free and open source painting program. The Krita team will mentor four students this year: L. E. Segovia will work on adding dynamic fill layers, Saurabh Kumar will implement a storyboard feature, Sharaf Zaman will bring SVG Mesh Gradients to Krita and Ashwin Dhakaita will integrate the MyPaint brush engine.

GCompris is a high quality educational software suite which includes a large number of activities for children aged 2 to 10. This year GCompris will have two students with Deepak Kumar adding multiple datasets to several activities and Shubham Mishra will complete the multiple dataset task.

digiKam is KDE’s professional photo management software. This year digiKam will be mentoring two students: Nghia Duong will bring DNN based face recognition improvements to the app and R Kartik will make improvements to the face management workflow.

Cantor, which lets you use your favorite mathematical applications from within a nice KDE-integrated worksheet interface, will mentor Nikita Sirgienko. Nikita will extend the usability and feature set of Cantor and Shubham will be working on integrated documentation in Cantor.

Kirogi, a ground control application for drones, will have Kitae Kim improve MAVLink integration. Aniket Kumar will work with KDE Connect, which enables communication between all your devices, to improve MMS support to the SMS client. Paritosh Sharma will implement the Qt3D backend for Kstars, KDE’s astronomy software.

Anuj Bansal will work on replacing OpenLDAP based authentication with OAuth2 in KDE Websites. Jean Lima Andrade will add support to text annotation in marK, a machine learning dataset annotation tool. Prasun Kumar will work with KMyMoney, a personal finance manager, to integrate SQLite format support for bank data. Davide Briani will work to bring WikiToLearn 2.0 (collaborative textbooks) to life. For Qt, Agisilaos Kounelis will Port QtQuickControls Calendar component to QtQuickControls2 module.

Also, Sashmitha Raghav will work to bring basic subtitling support to Kdenlive, KDE’s video editor; ROCS, a Graph Theory IDE, will have Dilson Guimarães improving graph visualization capabilities; Shashwat Jolly will to bring EteSync sync backend to Akonadi, a database to store, index and retrieve personal information.

Detailed reports from our students will follow later this summer as the program progresses. We wish all of our students and mentors a safe, productive and a successful summer.

Akademy 2020 is getting closer and the KDE Community is warming up for its biggest yearly event. If you are working on topics relevant to KDE, this is your chance to present your work and ideas to the community at large.

Akademy 2020 will take place online from Friday the 4th to Friday the 11th of September 2020. Training sessions will be held on Friday the 4th of September and the talks will be held on Saturday the 5th and Sunday the 6th of September. The rest of the week (Monday - Friday) will be Birds-of-a-Feather meetings (BoFs), unconference sessions and workshops.

If you think you have something interesting to present, tell us about it. If you know of someone else who should present, encourage them to do so too.

Talk proposals on topics relevant to the KDE Community and technology are:

• Topics related to KDE's current Community Goals:
• Consistency
• All About the Apps
• Wayland
• KDE In Action: use cases of KDE technology in real life, be it on mobile, desktop deployments, embedded, and so on
• Overview of what is going on in the various areas of the KDE community
• Collaboration between KDE and other Free Software projects
• Release, packaging, and distribution of software by KDE
• Increasing our reach through efforts such as accessibility, promotion, translation and localization
• Improving our governance and processes, community building

Don't let this list restrict your ideas though! You can submit a proposal even if it doesn't fit in this list of topics as long as it is relevant to KDE. To get an idea of talks that were accepted previously, check out the program from previous years: 2019, 2018, and 2017.

Full details can be found in the Call for Proposals.

The deadline for submissions is Sunday 14th June 2020 23:59 UTC.

Dot Categories:

• Community and Events

KDE e.V. is very happy to welcome KONTENT GmbH as one of our supporting members.

We from KONTENT are Linux enthusiasts since our beginning, back in the 90s. So KDE was at anytime a well known, high quality brand for us. It was just a matter of time that we would get in closer contact to the community. This moment has come now, and we are very proud of it. Maybe in the future we can not just help in financial matters, but also in an inspiring way.

Uli Klinkhanner, CEO of KONTENT GmbH

Supporting memberships are very important because they help make KDE
sustainable. If you would like to become a supporter as well, you can find more information on our website.

The KDE Community will be hosting Akademy 2020 online between Friday 4th and Friday 11th September.

The conference is expected to draw hundreds of attendees from the global KDE Community. Participants will showcase, discuss and plan the future of the Community and its technology. Members from the broader Free and Open Source Software community, local organizations and software companies will also attend.

Akademy 2020 Program

Akademy 2020 will begin with virtual training sessions on Friday 4 September. This will be followed by a number of talk sessions held on Saturday 5 Sept. and Sunday 6 Sept. The remaining 5 days will be filled with workshops and Birds of a Feather (BoFs).

A Different Akademy

Due to the unusual circumstances we are living through and the need to keep the KDE Community healthy, thriving, and safe, the Akademy Team have decided to host Akademy 2020 online. During the program organization period for this year's activities, we took into consideration multiple timezones to ensure that, regardless of physical location, every member of the KDE Community can participate in as many conference activities as they like.

Despite not being able to meet in person this year, KDE members will be able to reach an even wider audience and more people will be able to attend and watch the live talks, learn about the workings of the technology and the Community by participating in Q&As and panels.

Registrations and Call for Papers will be opening soon!

Dot Categories:

• Community and Events

Plasma Bigscreen main menu.

Plasma Bigscreen is KDE's user interface for big TV screens.

Plasma Bigscreen powers the interface on a Single Board Computer and uses the Mycroft AI voice assistant to provide a Smart TV platform. Plasma Bigscreen will deliver not only media-rich applications, but also traditional desktop applications redesigned to fit the Bigscreen experience.

Advantages of Plasma Bigscreen

• Free (as in Freedom) and Open Source: One of the most important goals of this project is to hand control over to the people and the industry so they can build and power smart devices without the limits of other closed TV environments. Plasma Bigscreen is completely Free and Open Source and gives everyone the freedom to use, acquire, change and redistribute the software how they see fit. It also gives people the freedom to create, innovate and improve on top of the Plasma Bigscreen and share their work with the world.
• Innovative: Plasma Bigscreen transforms the traditional plasma workspace experience into something that is controlled with a regular TV remote control. This is new territory for KDE interface designers and requires a new thinking of how to layout applications and how to make it easy for people to interact with Plasma from their couches.
• Voice Control: Talking of interacting from the couch, voice control provides users with the ultimate comfort when it comes to TV viewing. But most big brands not only do not safeguard the privacy of their customers, but actively harvest their conversations even when they are not sending instructions to their TV sets. We use Mycroft's Open Source voice assistant to solve this problem.

  For the current beta img, the team connects to Mycroft's Home server, which by default uses Google's STT (Speech to text) which sends anonymized utterances to Google. This, of course, is not ideal, but being Open Source, you can switch out the back end and use whatever you want, even self-hosted systems like Mozilla Deepspeech. Or you can de-activate voice recognition altogether. Your choice.

  With Mycroft AI, the Bigscreen team intend to give users all the comfort of a smart voice controlled assistant with the advantages of the control over you privacy you can only achieve with Open Source software.

• Easy to Expand: Mycroft's AI uses what are called "skills". Skills allow the assistant to learn about and perform different tasks. A weather skill, for example, lets Mycroft know about the weather and tell you what the day is going to be like; a cooking skill retrieves recipes and instructions and you can then ask Mycroft to help you make a delicious meal. There are already many skills in Mycroft's library and Mycroft AI's graphical framework for skills is built on top of Qt and Kirigami, two mature development frameworks. This allows third-party developers to use Python and QML to develop rich voice skills for the platform, which means features on KDE Bigscreen will multiply and provide even more functionalities to viewers.

  Simple settings make Bigscreen easy to tweak.

• Community Supported: Plasma Bigscreen was created and is being maintained by KDE developers. KDE is one of the oldest, largest Free Software communities in existence and builds and maintains literally hundreds of projects, spanning from a full-featured desktop environments and development frameworks, to educational software and creativity apps. With the support of KDE, Plasma Bigscreen will develop quickly and grow to have as many features as users require.

Coming to a Screen Near You

The upcoming beta release for Plasma Bigscreen is already working on the Raspberry Pi 4. It's targeted to run on a TV screen, but will also work fine on a regular monitor.

The interface is largely designed to be easy to use with a remote control. There is experimental support for HDMI-CEC in the beta image, so anyone with a TV that supports HDMI-CEC can choose to use their TV remotes.

The YouTube app.

As one of the key features of Plasma Bigscreen is Mycroft's voice-controlled applications/skills, it's recommended to use a USB/Bluetooth remote with a microphone to try it out. Some recommended generic USB remotes are the WeChip G20 / W2 remote controls. It can also be used with a keyboard / mouse and any USB microphone.

For a more in-depth look at Plasma Bigscreen, check out Marco Marin's and Aditya Mehra's write ups on this new project.