After two years of virtual conferences, the in-person on-site version of Akademy is finally back! This year you will be able to attend Akademy, meet KDE community members face-to-face, get to know the vibrant city of Barcelona, and enjoy interesting and intriguing talks, panels and keynotes. That said, even if you can't make it to Barcelona, you can still attend Akademy online as well. Let's see what this year's schedule has in store for you: Akademy will officially kick off with a Welcome event on Friday, September 30th, followed by several talks on Saturday, October 1st and Sunday, October 2nd and from Monday, October 3rd to Friday, October 7th there will be BoFs ("Birds of a Feather" sessions), workshops, meetings and training sessions.

Conference

The talks on Saturday will cover everything from KDE's official Goals, to Plasma products and gaming devices. Nate Graham will discuss his 7-step plan to spread KDE software and take over the world. Aleix Pol Gonzalez will walk us through the process of creating a new Plasma product. And David Edmundson will talk about Steam Deck, one of the most interesting and exciting KDE success stories of recent times. On Sunday, we'll be hearing about app development, Plasma integration in distros, and AI-powered KDE environments, among many other things. Nicolas Fella will kick off the day by showing us how launching applications can be trickier than it first seems and the pitfalls you have to look out for. We'll be hearing all about the future of the backends of KDE software and what the 6th generation of KDE Frameworks has in store for us. And Aditya Mehra will explore OpenVoiceOS and will explain how we are incorporating KDE into devices and powering them with AI-driven voice recognition technologies. And that is not all! Stay tuned for the announcement of our two keynote speakers coming soon, here, on the Dot.

BoFs, Workshops, and Hacking

During the week following the conference part of the event, KDE community members will attend BoFs and will meet up with colleagues with similar interests to work elbow-to-elbow, social distancing permitting, on their projects. They will also attend workshops, meetings and training sessions until the closing of the event on the 7th of October. With a program so full of exciting talks and activities, how could you miss it? Register now and check out the full schedule.

Dot Categories: Community and Events

Spanish manufacturer (and KDE patron) Slimbook has just released their new KDE-themed Slimbook ultrabook.

The KDE Slimbook 4 comes with a Ryzen 5700U processor and KDE's full-featured Plasma desktop running on KDE Neon. It also comes with dozens of Open Source programs and utilities pre-installed and access to hundreds more.

The KDE Slimbook 4's AMD Ryzen 5700U processor is one of the most efficient CPUs for portable computers in the range. With its 8 GPU cores and 16 threads, it can run your whole office from home and on the go, render 3D animations, compile your code and serve up the entertainment for you during down time.

The Slimbook starts Plasma by default on Wayland, the state-of-the-art display server. With Wayland, you can enjoy the advantages of crisp fonts and images, framerates adapted to each of your displays, and all the touchpad gestures implemented in Plasma 5.25.

Talking of displays, the USB-C port, apart from allowing charging, comes with video output, letting you link up another external monitor. Another nifty detail is the backlit black keyboard with the Noto Sans monographed keys, the same font used on the Plasma desktop.

Remember that with every purchase, KDE receives a donation from Slimbook and KDE Community members get a generous discount!

Check out here complete details, specs and benchmarks.

The summer sun is here and new apps come with it -- unless you live in the southern hemisphere, in which case, congratulations! You got past the winter solstice, and it's all longer days and new app releases from here onwards.

LabPlot 2.9.0

New worksheet elements to annotate curve data point and to show images
on the worksheet.

LabPlot is KDE's open source and cross-platform data visualization and analysis software. It is accessible to everyone, and Labplot 2.9 adds a bunch of new features, such as new worksheet elements to annotate curve data points and to show images on the worksheet.

You can also now plot the data against multiple and different axes. A new visualization type, box plot provides a quick summary of the basic statistical properties of the data set, and a collection of multiple well-known color maps and a feature that allows for conditional formatting of the data in the spreadsheet let's you obtain insights into the structure of your data and its statistical properties directly in the spreadsheet.

We added Hilbert transform to the set of analysis functions and LabPlot can now import and export more formats, having added MATLAB, SAS, Stata and SPSS to the list.

Labplot can be downloaded with your Linux distro package manager, through Snapcraft, Flatpak, as well as for Mac and Windows.

Haruna 0.8

KDE's Haruna video player.

Haruna is the KDE video player with YouTube integration. This new release has support for global menus, can be configured to pause playback when minimised and save the time position when shutdown. It also adds a "recent files" menu option, and useful actions to load the last file, restart playback and jump to your "watch later" list.

Install on Linux.
Download from Flathub

GCompris 2.4

GCompris provides kids with more than 100 fun educational activities.

Our educational activities app, GCompris, has made a number of new releases over the last few months and, among other things, has managed to reduce the space it takes up on disk by 30%. GCompris has also added new voices in Norwegian Nynorsk and Malayalam, and new, updated images makes it look prettier than ever.

You can find packages of this new version for GNU/Linux, Windows, Raspberry Pi and macOS on the download
page. It's also available from the Android Play store, the F-Droid repository and the Windows store.

Digikam 7.6

Digikam's new Flow View plugin.

DigiKam 7.6 has made their AppImage slicker by using ICU for full Unicode support and Qt 5.15 and libraw.

There's a new Flow View Plugin which uses the masonry layout. Masonry is a grid layout based on columns, but, unlike other grid layouts, it doesn’t have fixed height rows. Basically, Masonry layout optimizes the use of space inside the canvas by reducing any unnecessary gaps. Without this type of layout, certain restrictions are required to maintain the structure of layout, as with the main icon-view in digiKam album window. This kind of layout is used by the Pinterest social network for example.

DigiKam 7.6.0 source code tarball, Linux 64 bits AppImage bundles, macOS Intel package, and Windows 64 bits installers can be downloaded from this repository.

KStars 3.5.9

KStars

KStars is probably the most feature-rich free astronomy software around and the 3.5.9
release adds some exciting new features.

HiPS (Hierarchical Progressive Surveys) is a technology that provides progressive high resolution images of the sky at different zoom levels. KStars fully supports online HiPS where data is downloaded from online servers and cached to be displayed on the Sky Map.

A new simplified and powerful Mosaic Planner directly integrates in the Sky Map and greatly benefits from HiPS overlay to make your target-framing spot on. Toggle the Mosaic View from the toolbar, and select your equipment and the mosaic configuration. You can also use it as a very simple tool to frame a single 1 x 1 tile.

KStars also adds the ability to refocus after a meridian flip is complete. This is very useful for some optical train setups where the focuser might shift the duration the flip.

KStars can be installed on Microsoft Windows, macOS, and Linux.

RKWard 0.7.4

RKWard.

RKWard is KDE's R app for statistics and has improved the first use experience in its latest versions. RKWard devs have done that by reworking the "Welcome to RKWard" page entirely: it now serves as a "dashboard" with some of the most important tasks, including, among other things, several new options for importing data from other programs. Several unnecessary dialogs that used to greet new users have been removed.

Beyond this, almost all plugins now support a preview, helping you see results faster, and to send only intended output to the output window.

Download RKWard for macOS, Windows and Linux.

Bugfixes */

• The creators of the Krita painting app have fixed some crashes in version 5.0.6.
• Ruqola 1.7.2, KDE's Rocket.chat app, adds a Windows testing build and can be downloaded as Linux packages and from Flathub. Incidently Rocket.chat announced that they would add bridging to Matrix so they can talk to the rest of KDE's chat rooms.
• The Tellico project, creators of KDE's collection manager app, has released version3.4.4 and mended a bug that stops a nasty potential data loss when using emojis.
• Okteta 0.26.9 comes with more translations and fixes that help Okteta remember settings values. Grab Okteta from your distro's Linux package manager, FlatHub, Snapcraft or as a testing Windows build.
• KDE's diff tool for comparing files, resolved a major performance regression in handling Windows style line endings in version 1.9.5.
• RSIBreak 0.12.15, KDE's wellbeing app that helps prevent repetitive strain injuries from overusing your keyboard and mouse, adds an option to suppress breaks while full-screen windows are visible.

Pre-release betas

• Making its way closer to release, isoimagewriter has published a build for Windows.

Dot Categories: Applications

By Adam Szopa

I'm super excited to finally announce the start of the submission process for the brand new KDE Goals!

KDE sets goals that help the community focus on important things that need to get done in collaboration across many teams. Over the years, the community has set goals to tackle issues with usability, made it easier for new contributors to start working on KDE projects, implemented new tech that will serve us for years to come, and much more.

KDE Goals set a direction for the community and help concentrate efforts in areas deemed important by the KDE community itself. Every couple of years, new goals are selected to reflect the communities current priorities.

Jonathan Riddell and Niccolò Venerandi explain their ideas for the KDE goals during Akademy 2019.

To submit a new goal proposal, you can use the dedicated workboard and shape the future direction of the KDE community.

This stage in the process lasts until July 16th, but don’t wait until the last moment! Submit early, and use the remaining time to listen to the feedback, refine and update your proposal. Only submissions with good descriptions will move to the next stage: the community vote.

To make things easier, we provide a template ticket that you have to copy and fill out with your content. This way, none of the important parts of a good proposal will be skipped, and there will be consistency between the different proposals.

You will need an account to create a new proposal, and then use the arrow in the “Not ready for voting” column to create a new task. Don’t forget to copy the description from the template!

Remember, by submitting a Goal proposal, you are also submitting yourself as the Goal’s Champion! A Goal Champion the face of the goal and the motivator of the initiative, but not necessarily the one that implements most of the tasks. After all, this is a community goal, so a good champion will motivate others to join in and help achieve amazing things.

If you want to learn more about the whole process, see the wiki for more details.

Don’t wait! Submit your proposal and, who knows? Perhaps your idea will be announced as one of the new goals during Akademy 2022!

Akademy 2022 will be a hybrid event, in Barcelona and online that will be held from Saturday 1st to Friday 7th October. The Call for Participation is still open! Submit your talk ideas and abstracts as the deadline has been extended until the 19th June.

Why talk at #Akademy2022?

Akademy attracts people from all over the world, not only from the global KDE Community, but also from companies, Free Software developers and pundits from other projects, public institutions, and more. We all meet together to discuss and plan the future of the Community and its technology. You will meet people that are receptive to your ideas and will help you with their skills and experience.

How do you get started?

You do not have to worry about details or a presentation right now. Just think of an idea and submit some basic details about your talk. You can edit your abstract after the initial submission.

All topics relevant to the KDE Community are welcome. Here are a few ideas to get you started on your talk:

• What KDE projects have you contributed to? Tell us about your work, and get feedback and support!
• Where do you think should KDE go next?
• How has KDE software impacted you/people you know in real life?
• Are there particular problems with KDE you think you can give us some insight on? How would you solve it?
• How can we improve KDE for people with disabilities?
• How can we increase the participation of women in our community?
• How can we accelerate full support on Wayland?
• What is next for Plasma mobile?
• What is the current state of the project you are working on?
• Have you used any KDE applications in ingenious ways or created something great with them? Tell us about your work!

These are just some ideas to get the ball rolling. However, you can submit a proposal on any topic as long as you can make it relevant to KDE. For more ideas for talks, check out the videos from previous years: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, and 2015.

For more details and information visit our Call for Participation page.

Dot Categories: Community and Events

By Johnny Jazeix

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a global, online program focused on bringing new contributors into open source software development. Like every year, KDE applies and aims to integrate more and more developers. This year, KDE's participation in GSoC kicks off with nine fascinating projects.

NeoChat will get support for Spaces.

Snehit Sah will be adding support for Spaces in NeoChat. Spaces is a Matrix tool that allows you to discover new rooms and also a way of organizing your rooms into categories. Snehit already successfully contributed to the Season of KDE 2022 where he improved the packaging of several applications of KDE for Flathub.

Suhaas Joshi will work on permission management for Flatpak and Snap applications in Discover. This will allow you to change the permissions granted to an application (e.g. file system, network, and so on) and also make it easier to review them. It is the continuation of his work during the Season of KDE where he implemented the display of Flatpak applications permissions on Discover.

This year we have two projects to improve digiKam. The first one is from Quoc Hung Tran who will work on a new plugin to process Optical Character Recognition (OCR). This will allow to extract text from images and store the output inside the EXIF data or within a separate file. The plugin will also be used to organize scanned text images with contents.

The second project is from Phuoc Khanh LE who will work on improving the Image Quality Sorter algorithms. This will improve sorting images by quality using multiple criteria, for example, noise, exposure and compression.

This is the second stage of the original project from GSoC 2021 and aims to classify photos by quality (e.g. global exposure, blur, compression, noise, etc.). The first stage was an algorithm based on computer vision classic, as well as image metadata (such as focus point). The second stage involves studying and implementing a more generic algorithm based on Deep Learning. This project will help simplify significantly the complexity of code and improve performance especially when running on a GPU, and will also pave the way for more generic usage in other KDE software. For instance, it can be useful to inspect the image and spot out where to enhance it, or how much it can be enhanced.

Smit Patil will work on Plasma System Settings, redesigning the different modules by porting them to QtQuick. This will help with the transition to Qt6 and clean some technical debts by better splitting the UI code from the core logic.

This year we have two projects working on the education software suite GCompris. Both Aastha Chauhan and Samarth Raj will work on adding new activities to GCompris. Aastha Chauhan will work on adding a programmable Tux, a comparator activity and the Guess 24 game in GCompris.

Mockups of Programmable Tux, Comparator and Guess 24 for GCompris.

Samarth Raj will work on an activity for grammatical analysis and another one for using the 10's complements to add numbers.

Two students will work on the painting application Krita. Xu Che will add pixel-perfect ellipses in Krita. This will allow to make it possible for pixel artists to use Krita effectively.

Meanwhile, Reinold Rojas will work on exporting an image to SVG in Krita; a project that will provide more options to share files with Inkscape, and will help create translatable images with text for Krita Manual without knowledge of Inkscape.

There is more about Krita's GSoC projects in their blog.

We would like to welcome the new contributors and hope they will have a wonderful summer within KDE and become part of the community.

Follow their progress through their blog posts on KDE's Planet.

By Johnny Jazeix

Another year, another successful Season of KDE!

In Season of KDE 2022, seven candidates took on and completed projects that helped them learn about Open Source and also expanded their knowledge of how software is created, managed, packaged and distributed; how to create features to applications aimed at end users; about the ever-pressing need for more efficient and eco-friendly software; and much more.

The Projects

Ayush Singh worked on writing a Rust wrapper for the KConfig KDE Framework. KConfig simplifies the process of writing values to, and reading options from an app's configuration file. Ayush's project will allow developers to use KConfig in Rust projects without having to write C++ code. Ayush wrote several posts explaining which bindings and features are now complete and can be used directly in Rust.

Talking of writing apps, Samarth Raj added a new activity to GCompris. GCompris is a suite of educational activities for children from the ages of 2 to 10, and is used widely in schools and homes all over the world. Samarth's activity helps kids differentiate between the left and right mouse click. It does so by encouraging the child to click on 2 different animals (a horse and a monkey). By using either the left or right button on the mouse, the child can then make each of the animals go to their respective homes (a stable and a tree).

A new activity in GCompris helps toddlers learn to use the mouse.

Samarth relates his journey in his blog and says that, although he had previous experience with HTML, CSS, and Javascript, he thought SoK was a great opportunity to learn about open source, and gain some confidence using Qt/Qml.

Another new feature in an existing application is the Perspective Ellipse Assistant tool Srirupa Datta worked on for Krita. Krita is KDE's design and painting program and the ellipse assistant tool will help artists draw ellipses easier.

The tool is still a work in progress, and you can follow up on how it is going on Srirupa's blog.

The ellipse assistant tool will help artists draw ellipses easier.

KDE apps are not only available for Linux. In fact, many projects are making an effort to reach all users regardless of the platform they are on, and Stefan Kowalczyk worked on improving KDE Connect on iOS, Apple's mobile phone and tablet operating system.

iOS has the particularity that it can only display one alert at a time. This means that when KDE Connect raised multiple alerts at the same time, only one was being shown. Stefan's project aims to queue the alerts and avoid the user from losing information.

The code has been merged. If you are an iOS user and would like to use KDE Connect on your phone, you may want to read more about this SoK, and follow the progress of the project.

For Stefan "[...] it has been a great opportunity to learn more about iOS development and work with a community-driven open source project. [...] SoK was the thing I needed to finally contribute to the Open Source community".

Building new applications and new features into applications is fine, but then comes the problem of delivering them to the users. Flatpak is becoming an increasingly popular way of distributing software to users and Snehit Sah packaged several KDE applications for Flatpak and is implementing continuous integration for Flatpak packages.

Snehit says "I almost jumped to the ceiling when I saw the word "packaging". [...] I've never worked with Flatpak before, but I have a basic understanding of packaging, and it is in fact one of the things I take a lot of interest in". Snehit also remarks on how Season of KDE was a great booster to his experience.

To find out about all the applications that Snehit updated, check out his blog.

In similar news, Suhaas Joshi has been working on displaying the permissions for Flatpak applications in the Discover interface. This will tell users what they can expect the application to require, like read/write permissions to access the storage, or location data, and so on.

Flatpak package permissions in Discover.

Apart from guaranteeing users' freedom and privacy, KDE strives to reduce the carbon footprint of its apps by improving their energy efficiency. Karanjot Singh worked with the KDE Eco team to prepare Standard Usage Scenarios for measuring the energy consumption of various text editors and developed a script for Kate.

Karanjot Singh remarked on how he learned a lot about working with different automation tools, and creating standard usage scenarios for different applications and frameworks, a skill that will come in handy in the future.

About Season of KDE

Season of KDE allows everyone to participate in the KDE ecosystem, and helps newcomers from all backgrounds, students or not, to start contributing to the open source community. To encourage a wide range of skills, the tasks candidates carry out are not limited to coding, but can also cover graphic design, documentation, systems administration, workflow optimization, packaging and distribution, promotion, etc.

Starting to contribute to an open source project is not easy, and organizations like KDE, with its thousands of contributors and a long list of products, may seem intimidating. That is why Season of KDE exists: to make this step easy.

Through Season of KDE, we welcome newcomers and help them become part of the community, while providing them with a mentorship that will help them learn and improve new skills. SoK participants carry out meaningful tasks that elevate our software and services and have an impact on millions of users.