By Benson Muite

This year KDE will mentor 9 projects in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC). GSoC is a program in which contributors new to open source spend between 175 and 350 hours working on an open source project.

Meet the projects and contributors for 2023:

Projects Kalendar

• Improving Mail Integration in Kalendar - Aakarsh MJ will work on the mail integration in Kalendar. This will make it possible to use Kalendar as a full featured email client integrated with the already existing calendar and address book features.
• Implement calendar availability - Anant Verma will work on calendar availability in Kalendar. This will allow you to specify your working hours where you are available and can be invited to meetings and events.
• Calendar Invitations - Vansh K will work on adding support for calendar invitations to Kalendar, allowing you to send invitations to events and to also handle incoming invitations.

digiKam

• Add Automatic Tags Assignment Tools and Improve Face Recognition Engine for digiKam - TRAN Quoc Hung will develop a deep learning model that will be able to recognize various categories of objects, scenes, and events in digital photos, generate corresponding keywords that can be stored in digiKam’s database and assign them to photos automatically.
• Improve Items Properties Management Utkarsh Kumar will use machine-learning to improve the property labeling process for images in digiKam. At present, users are facing a host of difficulties when they try to transfer properties such as color, tags, and labels to numerous pictures. This is resulting in an extremely laborious and monotonous task of copying them repeatedly. This project will introduce a more seamless and efficient approach, which will enable users to execute these actions with a single click and drag of the mouse, thus significantly enhancing the user experience.

Krita

Improving the Bundle Creator - Sriruppa Datta will be working on improving and expanding the bundle creator in Krita. Bundles are packages of resources, like brushes or gradients that Krita users can add or swap out.

KDE Eco

Measuring Energy Consumption using Remote Lab - Karanjot will improve remote access to the KDE Eco energy measurement lab by:

1. automating the energy measurement process, including providing a summary of the results
2. setting up backend CI/CD integration
3. setting up a frontend upload portal

Tokodon

Adding moderation tool in Tokodon project under KDE - Rishi Kumar will work on implementing the admin APIs in Tokodon. This will make Tokodon suitable as a Mastodon client for instance moderators and admins.

Okular

Improve Okular For Android - Shivodit will work on improving Okular for Android, bringing in the much needed font rendering improvement when fonts are not embedded in the PDF file among other things. The work will primarily be in the Poppler Freedesktop repository.

Next Steps

Over the next few weeks, candidates will be learning more about the KDE community, after which they will start the coding phase of their projects. Contributors will report on their progress on KDE's Planet.

We look forward to welcoming our new contributors and making their experience with KDE pleasant and fruitful.

By Johnny Jazeix and Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss

For this year's edition of Season of KDE, 8 participants successfully completed their projects. Several of the projects push forward the work to achieve KDE's three goals, namely:

• KDE For All: Boosting Accessibility
• Sustainable Software
• Automate and Systematize Internal Processes

Congratulations to everyone involved and excellent work, SoK23 mentees!

Mohamed Ibrahim took on the task of improving the KdeEcoTest emulation tool. The idea behind KdeEcoTest is to provide a simple-to-use scripting tool for building Standard Usage Scenario scripts and then running them when measuring the energy consumption of software. Mohamed first focused on improving the documentation to install and run the tool, then made several improvements to add functionalities to the tool.

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Nitin Tejuja also worked on scripting for energy consumption measurements, but with another approach using the WebDriver for Appium selenium-webdriver-at-spi. The advantage of this approach is that the Accessibility framework is also used so contributors will be adding "good" accessibility names -- multiple gains with one addition! Nitin created a script to test the consumption of the KDE educational suite GCompris.

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Rudraksh Karpe furthered work on preparing KDE applications for Blue Angel eco-certification. At the moment only Okular has this certification, but Rudraksh continued work on the scripts for GCompris and Kate using the KdeEcoTest tool. Rudraksh also developed the "SUS Log Formatter" tool to provide an overview of the actions taken from a Standard Usage Scenario log file.

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Rishi Kumar worked on improving the accessibility of the Mastodon client Tokodon also using the WebDriver for Appium `selenium-webdriver-at-spi`. Rishi added multiple tests using the Accessibility framework for various functionalities such as search and offline use and improved the accessibility of Tokodon's GUI.

Theophile Gilgien worked on improvements to AudioTube. AudioTube is a client for YouTube, and Theophile added multiple features such as removing songs from the history, adding a volume slider in maximized player, making the back-end for search history more efficient, and much more.

Neelaksh Singh setup Flatpak builds in the Continuous Integration workflow for KDE applications. Neelaksh built on the foundation laid in last year's SoK by continuing automatization for the packaging of multiple apps during Nightly builds. More info can be found at .

Brannon Aw improved the annotation tools in KDE's Spectacle. Brannon simplified the way for the eraser tool and clearing annotations, which was a tedious task before.

Ruoqing He improved holiday support in the digital clock widget in Plasma. Ruoqing added a sublabel used to display holiday events for better support.

g10 Code GmbH joins the ranks of KDE patrons! g10 Code provides custom development, enhancements, and audits of cryptographic software -- in particular for the popular GnuPG encryption and digital signature tools.

Werner Koch, CEO g10 Code

"The KDE Community supports us in providing professionally-designed, accessible desktop software to our users in many different languages," states CEO Werner Koch. "While we consider KDE's KMail mail client to have the best GnuPG integration, our main businesses case comes from Windows users in professional settings using our GnuPG VS-Desktop product, which is approved by Germany, the EU, and NATO for use with restricted documents. This allowed us to change from donation-based development. Our free-of-charge distribution Gpg4win has hundreds of thousands of downloads per month and is used by NGOs, journalists, and most "Tor-based" transactions. This is all only possible because we provide a KDE-based user interface to GnuPG with KDE's Kleopatra app."

Says KDE President Aleix Pol Gonzalez: "KDE has a well-established reputation for prioritizing privacy and security. For end-users, implementing effective security measures is important but also challenging. I'm looking forward to working further with g10 towards building great cryptographic solutions that are easy to adopt in organisations of all sizes as well as on our individual systems."

g10 Code joins KDE e.V.’s other Patrons: Blue Systems, Canonical, Google, Kubuntu Focus, Slimbook, SUSE, The Qt Company, and TUXEDO Computers to continue to support Free Open Source Software and KDE development through KDE e.V.

Kubuntu Focus is now generously supporting KDE as its newest patron!

Kubuntu Focus offers the best out-of-the-box experience for professional Linux users. All Kubuntu Focus systems come with the beautiful and intuitive Plasma desktop from KDE on top of industry-standard Ubuntu LTS. The hardware is designed to save time and hassle, thanks to its device optimizations, curated apps, Focus Tools, system-specific HOWTOs, and excellent Linux support.

Kubuntu Focus family of products: from left to right, the XE GEN 2, M2 GEN 5, and the NX GEN 2.

“Our team has been active with the KDE community for years by contributing rigorous testing, reporting, and bug fixes,” stated Dana Roth, CEO of Kubuntu Focus. “We believe even deeper collaboration will benefit not only our customers but also the entire community, and we are especially interested in contributing solutions that enable professionals to replace their proprietary desktops with Linux and KDE's software.”

"Having hardware partners is crucial for KDE as they provide the means for our users to experience our products." said Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE e.V. President. "Extending our collaboration with providers is a step in the right direction towards solutions that truly help our society by putting products in people's hands and acting on their feedback. It's noteworthy that Kubuntu Focus is based in the United States of America, an area not covered by our current KDE Patrons who are focused on hardware. I'm looking forward to learning how we can improve our products to better serve the region."