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.

The call for papers will open soon, and the registrations shortly after.

Follow us on Twitter to keep up to date with Linux App Summit news.

--> About the Linux App Summit

The Linux App Summit (LAS) brings the global Linux community together to learn, collaborate, and help grow the Linux application ecosystem. Through talks, panels, and Q&A sessions, we encourage attendees to share ideas, make connections, and join our goal of building a common app ecosystem. Previous iterations of the Linux App Summit have been held in the United States in Portland, Oregon and Denver, Colorado, as well as in Barcelona, Spain.

Learn more by visiting linuxappsummit.org.

About Rovereto

Rovereto is an old Fortress Town in Northern Italy at the foot of the Italian Alps. It is located in the autonomous province of Trento and is the main city of the Vallagarina district.

The city has several interesting sites including:

• The Ancient War Museum
• A castle built by the counts of Castelbarco
• The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento

Rovereto's economy revolves around wine, coffee, rubber, and chocolate. The town was acknowledged as a “Peace town” in the 20th century and is also the location of important palaeontological remains, such as dinosaur footprints in the surrounding area.

We look forward to seeing you in Rovereto, Italy.

* The image “Rovereto” featured above is by barnyz and is distributed under a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license.

Community Planning for KDE's Eco Project

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.

We discussed the next steps in KDE's Eco project, and the day's conversation was varied, covering topics such as setting up a team space for the project (achieved), completing the Blauer Engel application for Okular (submitted), along with several technical issues related to energy-consumption measurements in the lab, including Standard Usage Scenarios, replicable reference systems, standardizing data output, budget vs. professional power meters, and more. See the minutes for details.

A more detailed summary of the discussion will be published at the KDE Eco blog (coming soon), so keep an eye out for updates there!

The online Sprint was a wonderful opportunity to bring the community together and move the KDE Eco project forward, especially as we prepare for the community measurement lab that will be held at KDAB Berlin and the first of many measure-athons (planned for early 2022)! The success of such events depends first and foremost on the community, so allow us to send a heartfelt thank you to everyone who joined the conversation. Moreover, we could not do what we do without the support of KDE e.V. as well as BMU/UBA, who financially support the BE4FOSS project.

Did you know?

Discussions similar to those at the Sprint occur monthly at our community meetups on the 2nd Wednesday of the month from 19h-20h (CET/CEST). Join us! We would love to see you there.

Tux, Konqi and friends bring you new fun GCompris activities these holidays.

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

GCompris is KDE's educational suite of more than 170 activities and pedagogical games. It is used by teachers, parents and, most importantly, children worldwide. GCompris is a fixture in classrooms and at home, giving kids the opportunity to practice a wide range of skills while having fun at the same time.

GCompris comes with more than 170 activities.

GCompris 2.0's educational value and the hours of fun and entertainment it provides children of all ages makes it the perfect present for these festive holidays.

Let's see some of the new and fun activities you will find in GCompris:

Baby Mouse is for children learning to use a computer for the first time. It presents them with a friendly environment with brightly colored ducks where they can use a mouse, a touchscreen or any other input device to move a duck, click on a blank part of the screen, or click on other elements in the screen and receive visual and audio feedback. This activity is great to help develop hand-eye coordination and dexterity.

With Ordering numbers and Ordering letters, children familiar with numbers and the alphabet can practice ordering within several ranges. A step up is Ordering sentences, in which kids can practice reading and grammar by sorting out the parts of sentences.

Children can practice ordering numbers, letters and sentences at different levels.

In Positions, another activity that helps children practice reading comprehension and spatial location at the same time, the player sees pictures of a child and a box and has to choose the word that best describes where they are relative to each other.

Getting back to numeracy activities, GCompris 2.0 includes a wide range of activities that mimic basic manipulation math games, allowing young players to experiment with elements, grouping them in sets of up to ten items. This helps them build a clear concept of the decimal system, and, as with many GCompris activities, an educator can gradually increase the difficulty level, allowing the activities to be used with children of ages between 3 and 10. Once they grasp the concept of the decimal system, the addition and subtraction activities, also based on math manipulation, help practice arithmetic.

Along with other classics, like chess, align four, and checkers, fans of strategy games will enjoy Oware, a game that requires forethought and, again, numeracy skills. Oware is originally a traditional African pastime and can be played against a friend or against Tux, offering unlimited hours of fun.

Oware is a traditional African strategy game that requires forethought and numeracy skills.

Talking about discovering things from around the world, let's not forget our the young globetrotters! For them, GCompris includes many reworked and new maps for them to explore and discover new countries. Not only will they learn the location of nations and regions, but they will also be able to visit and learn about famous locations and monuments.

Another way of finding your way around is by following directions. The four Path activities, Path encoding absolute, Path encoding relative, Path decoding absolute, and Path decoding relative, help kids learn to interpret abstract directions. Using arrows that can indicate a direction on a map (up, down, left, or right) or relative to Tux's orientation (forward, left, or right), the player must either direct Tux towards the flag, or pick the correct path following a given set of directions.

In a similar vein, young geeks interested in how computers work can learn the basics of programming with their very own graphical language. By laying out blocks with arrows on them, pupils can give instructions so Tux can reach his dinner. Related activities include learning about binary numbers using LEDs, building electric circuits, and using logic gates to build digital circuits.

Learn programming logic and help Tux get to his dinner!

GCompris 2.0 also includes all the activities children throughout the world have come to enjoy and love, activities that cover natural science, physics, art, history, and more.

Help GCompris Become Better

GCompris is Free Software and thus belongs to all of humanity. Join us and help GCompris become even better!

It's easy: you can help with ideas, feedback, graphics, development and translations. In fact, translations are the best place to start. The translations for Galician, Slovak, Chinese Simplified, Irish Gaelic, and Czech, for example, just need a small push and we will be able to include them into GCompris. Other languages are included, but are still missing some texts, such as Russian, Turkish and Breton. If you are familiar with any of these languages, you can begin contributing to GCompris right now!

Find out how to get started here!

Skanpage

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.

It works for scanning from both flatbed and feed-through automatic document feeder scanners. It lets you configure options for the scanning device, such as resolution and margins, and you can re-order, rotate and delete scanned pages. The scans can be saved to multi-page PDF documents and image files.

Unlike our existing Skanlite app, this new program is written using Kirigami, our responsive interface toolkit which adapts to mobile and desktop devices.

You can get Skanpage from KDE neon now, and look out for it on other Linux distros soon.

KGeoTag 1.1

KGeoTag

KGeoTag released version 1.1. KGeoTag is KDE's stand-alone photo geotagging program.

To improve the workflow, there's a new main menu entry called Assign images to GPS data that triggers a configurable action (like "(Re)Assign all images") from the Automatic assignment dock. Also, you can now load images and GPX tracks, assign them, and save the coordinates without having to mark all images and having to use the context menu of the images list or using the Automatic assignment dock.

Additionally, some bugs have been fixed.

You can get KGeoTag from these Linux distros, and more download options are coming soon.

digiKam 7.3

Digikam

KDE's photo sorting and editing app, digKam, has released version 7.3.

The famous ExifTool is now officially supported alongside the former Exiv2 shared library to handle file metadata. ExifTool is a powerful utility that you can use in special cases to fix metadata dysfunctions that can't be solved using Exiv2. An ExifTool metadata viewer has been appended to the metadata sidebar everywhere in digiKam. ExifTool also supports a larger list of file formats than Exiv2.

The DNG Converter received a major update of the internal Adobe SDK and has improved the support of modern original RAW files features and Digital Negative targets.

The FITS and MPO formats are now fully supported in digiKam 7.3.0, including their metadata components. Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) is an open standard commonly used in astronomy. It defines a digital file format useful for storage, transmission and processing of data, formatted as multi-dimensional arrays, for example, 2D images or tables.

JPEG Multi-Picture Format (MPO) is a JPEG-based format for storing multiple images in a single file. It can contain two or more JPEG files concatenated together and various devices from Fujifilm, Panasonic, and Sony use it to store 3D images. digiKam can process MPO-formatted images thanks to an ImageMagick codec and the ExifTool parser working in the background.

iNaturalist

Also included is a new plugin that lets you export photos to iNaturalist. iNaturalist is a social network of 130K+ active naturalists, citizen scientists, and biologists built on the concept of mapping and sharing observations of biodiversity across the globe. iNaturalist receives observations of plants, animals, fungi, and other organisms worldwide.

Finally, the Find Duplicates has been improved as has the slideshow export.

The digiKam 7.3.0 source code tarball, Linux 64 bits AppImage bundles, MacOS Intel package, and Windows 64 bits installers can be downloaded here.

Beta: Subtitle Composer

Subtitle Composer

We love making videos, and, to make those videos accessible, it's great to have subtitles in them. Subtitle Composer is a new app from KDE that helps you add texts to your videos. You can set the timing, font, size and add multiple languages.

For translations and transcriptions, you can work with two subtitles side-by-side. Subtitle Composer lets you adapt the waveform to your liking, fit your subtitles to your needs and change the interface itself! The user interface is adaptable, so you can use whatever colours work best with the video and you can move panels to find a workflow that is the most comfortable for you.

It works with all the subtitle file formats, including text and graphical subtitle formats, formats supported by ffmpeg, demux formats, MicroDVD, and graphical formats supported by ffmpeg.

It does speech recognition too, so it can even add the subtitles for you. And you can quickly and easily sync subtitles by dragging several anchors/graftpoints and stretching the timeline, doing time shifting and scaling, lines duration re-calculation, framerate conversion then joining and splitting the subtitle files. Spell checking is included, of course, and it can even be scripted in multiple languages.

Download Subtitle Composer for your Linux distro, as an AppImage, Flatpak or for MS Windows. Version 0.7.1 is the latest beta release.

Bugfixes

• KDiff3 KDiff3 is a file and folder diff and merge tool which compares and merges two or three text input files or folders. Version 1.9.3 fixes multiple regressions in file comparison, including trailing new lines at the EOF that are not preserved, random line insertion during merge, as well as a crash and compile failure. Grab it for Linux, Windows or Mac.
• RSIBreak reminds you to take a break from working at your computer from time to time, so you don't strain your eyes or wrists. RSIBreak 0.12.14 has added more languages and you can install the new version now on Linux.
• Not technically an app but still cool, Latte Dock has released version 0.10.3 and one of the newest features is that indicators can now specify the background corner margin. Get it now for Linux.