KDE.news

Akademy 2024 Call for Hosts

aniqakhokhar — Wed, 06 Sep 2023 07:36:16 +0000

One of the biggest things you can do for KDE (that does not involve coding) is helping us organize Akademy.

Now is your chance to become KDE champions and help make Akademy 2024 happen! We are looking to host Akademy 2024 during the months of June, July, August, and September. Download the Call for Hosts guide, and submit a proposal to host Akademy in your city to akademy-proposals@kde.org by October 1, 2023.

Do not hesitate to send us your questions and concerns! We are here to help you organize a successful event and you can reach out at any time for advice, guidance, or any assistance you may need. We will support you and help you make Akademy 2024 an event to remember.

Calling All Artists! - The Plasma 6 Wallpaper Contest

Paul Brown — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 10:21:40 +0000

Plasma 6 release day is getting closer... and we still have no wallpaper to use! But we're going to change that with your help and this contest! We are calling on all artists to submit their original wallpaper designs and compete for the chance to win a brand-new laptop (see below). The contest will be open for three months, starting now!

The Contest

The winning entry will be used as the default wallpaper for KDE Plasma 6.0. Learn more about Plasma.

Theme

Wallpaper entries should somehow suggest the following themes:

Trustworthy (i.e. reliable, stable, dependable)
"A reflection of me" (i.e. personalized, familiar, comfortable, "fits like a glove")
Personal growth (i.e. independence, level mindedness, critical thinking)

You should not feel constrained by the themes. Quite the contrary: The goal is for them to inspire your design and maybe help evoke these feelings/thoughts in the viewer, but you should take the abstract nature of the ideas as a way to freely express your creativity in your design.

Style

KDE Plasma 6 is a whole new Plasma! Be bold with your design, and don't feel like you have to adhere to the visual style of Plasma 5 wallpapers. A unique style is fine, even more so if it can start a design trend for the following Plasma 6 versions!
Lean on the abstract. Representational and literal elements should be used sparingly.
We'd recommend avoiding text elements in your wallpaper, such as "Plasma" or even "6". However, this is not a strict rule: if it works with your style, then it works!
Similarly, we would recommend avoiding logos overlaid on top of the wallpaper; if you do decide to include a logo, it should integrate with the design and not be used for quick identification.

Some examples from past Plasma releases.

Rules

The wallpaper must be original, created specifically for this contest, and released under the CC-BY-SA-4.0 license. Therefore no submissions using AI art will be accepted.
The minimum required size for wallpapers is 3840x2160, though 5120x2880 is preferred. Vertical wallpapers should be at least 1080x2280.
You are allowed to submit up to 3 wallpapers. Entries can be made in public at in this Discuss category, but you can also submit them in private to niccolo.venerandi@kde.org
Each submission should include the following:

The wallpaper
The name of the wallpaper
A dark mode version of the wallpaper (not mandatory, but recommended)
A vertical version of the wallpaper (not mandatory, but recommended)

If asked, you should be able to provide the source files used to create the wallpaper in a non-proprietary format, like an Inkscape-compatible SVG, .blend, .kra, .xcf, etc.
Any submission containing racist, sexist, demeaning, or any other inappropriate content will be removed and disqualified immediately.
The organizers will be accepting submissions up to 11:59 pm of November 14, 2023.

Selection process

Judges for the competition will be selected from the KDE Visual Design Group and other esteemed community members. Wallpapers will be judged based on artistic merit, originality, and adherence to the design themes mentioned earlier. At the end of the submission period, six finalists will be selected for a second round.

Artists who make it to this stage will receive a small prize (e.g. a KDE t-shirt!) and actionable feedback from the judges. The artists will be able to upload different variations addressing the feedback. This stage will take between one and three weeks. At the end of it, a winner will be selected and announced. The winner will get a Framework Laptop 13!

While there will only be one winning selection, other submissions may be included as optional wallpapers in Plasma 6, or used in future releases. The judges' decision is final.

The Prize

The winner of the contest will receive a Framework Laptop 13 DIY Edition, featuring a 13th Gen Intel® Core™ i5-1340P. This laptop has a modular design and can easily be wholly disassembled and rebuilt, allowing you to replace any part or upgrade key components anytime.

The Framework Laptop 13 also features an Expansion Card system that lets you choose exactly the ports you want and where you want them; there are four available slots and a great variety of cards: USB-C, USB-A, HDMI, DisplayPort, MicroSD, Ethernet, Audio, ultra-fast storage, and more.

Of course, compatibility was tested with the most popular Linux distributions and Framework offers many step-by-step setup guides for them.

Join the competition here!

Akademy 2023 - How it Happened

Paul Brown — Tue, 25 Jul 2023 07:04:59 +0000

Akademy is KDE's annual event where the community comes together in one place to meet in person, share ideas and hack on common projects.

This year's Akademy was held in Thessaloniki, Greece and started on July 15th and ran until July 21st. This year 150 people attended Akademy in person, and 220 tuned in online to attend chats and BoFs over video conference.

The first weekend of Akademy, as is tradition, was dedicated to talks, panels and fireside chats. The sessions, which were streamed live to the whole world, covered a wide variety of KDE-related topics, ranging from the hot topic of the road to Plasma 6, to how to hack off-the-shelf solar panels, and many things in between.

Day 1 - Saturday 15 July

09:45 Opening

Aleix Pol, president of KDE, opened the event and thanked all attendees and sponsors for making the event possible.

10:00 Empowering Open-Source Space Technologies

The first keynote of Akademy 2023 was given by Eleftherios Kosmas from the Libre Space Foundation. Eleftherios explained how the LSF is making inroads in space exploration and technology through the use of a wide range of open source technologies. He talked about how free software and hardware are carving out a niche in the ultra-competitive and cut-throat space industry, despite the fact that, as he reminded the audience several times, "space is hard".

11:15 KDE Goals

In the traditional Goals time slot, Nate Graham, leader of the Automate and Systematize Internal Processes goal, explained how they intend to preserve the knowledge from one generation of KDE contributors to the next; Carl Schwan listed the ways the Accessibility goal allows more people to use KDE software in more ways than one; and Joseph De Veaugh-Geiss highlighted the milestones of the KDE Eco goal.

At this point, the conference split into two tracks.

12:30 Measuring Energy Consumption

In room 1, and related to the above, Volker Krause took us on a tour of how we, the end users, can start contributing to greener computing by measuring consumption at home. Volker walked us through the available software and then told us about devices, some expensive, but some surprisingly cheap and effective, that everyone could use.

12:30 A Tale of Kleopatra

In room 2, Ingo Klöcker gave us a glimpse of how, over the course of a year, it was possible to push KDE's cryptography key manager Kleopatra from barely accessible to accessible with minor restrictions, often thanks to, sometimes in spite of Qt.

14:30 KDE e.V. Board Report

After lunch, the KDE e.V. board presented their annual report to the attendees. The board members have done a lot of work to support the KDE community over the past year. In this session, board members Adriaan de Groot, Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Lydia Pintscher, and Nate Graham (Eike Hein couldn't make it) told the audience about the things the e.V. has done, the work of the organization, and future endeavors.

Topics covered included contractors (we have more of them now), events (including external events), sprints, fundraising and sponsors, highlights of the past year, and future plans.

14:30 Over a million reasons why Snaps are important

In room 2, we heard from Scarlett Moore that there have been more than one million downloads of Snaps since the project began in 2015. This means that Snap is a packaging system to be reckoned with. Scarlett told us how she got into the workflow of building a huge amount of Snaps and how she managed to keep them updated using KDE's invent.kde.org platform and Ubuntu's launchpad.

15:15 KDE e.V. Working Group reports

Back in room 1, we attended a panel hosted by Lydia Pintscher on KDE's working groups. Neofytos Kolokotronis talked about the Community WG and how its main mission is to act as a mediator, ensuring smooth communication between community members and defusing conflicts. David Edmundson told us about the Finance WG and how we had deliberately overspent 2022 to reduce the accumulated funds in KDE's coffers, and the ways the extra expenditure is being used to help strengthen the community. Carl Schwan explained how the Fundraising WG has had several recent successes, but continues to look for new opportunities. David Redondo of the KDE Free Qt Foundation, responsible for protecting the free version of Qt, told us about progress in the relationship between KDE and the Qt Group. Finally, Bhushan Shah, representing the Sysadmin WG, talked about updates to KDE's hardware infrastructure.

15:15 Flatpak and KDE

At the same time, in room 2, Albert Astals talked about another way to distribute software, this time using Flatpaks. In his talk, Albert discussed what Flatpak is, why it's interesting for KDE, and talked about the different ways developers can build and distribute their software using Flatpak, Flathub, KDE's CI and binary factory infrastructures, and so on.

16:25 KF6 - Are we there yet?

Later, in room 1, Alexander Lohnau, Nicolas Fella and Volker Krause talked about the current state of KDE's frameworks and toolkits, and the progress and challenges of migrating to Qt 6.

16:25 Documentation goals and techniques for KDE and open source

In room 2, Thiago Sueto discussed what it is to be a technical writer, what he does, and what documentation goals and technologies are used to achieve them, focussing on KDE in particular, but also on open source in general.

17:05 Plasma 6 is coming

Marco Martin and Niccolò Venerandi then took the stage in room 1 and showed us many of the new visual improvements we should expect to see in Plasma 6 (Niccolò) and the underlying technical parts, changing components and APIs (Marco).

17:05 UIs in Rust with Slint

At the same time in room 2, Tobias Hunger introduced us to Slint, a UI framework written in Rust with bindings to Rust, C++, and Javascript. Slint scales from microcontrollers with no OS and only a few KiB of RAM to desktop UIs supported by graphics accelerators. The presentation showed what slint is and how to build a small UI with it.

17:55 - KRunner: Past, Present, and Future

In room 1, Alexander Lohnau talked about KRunner and how he started developing for KDE three years ago, thanks in part to KDE's search-run-and-do-a-lot-more utility. In his talk, Alexander covered the changes needed to migrate KRunner to Plasma 6, and explored how to port and improve existing runners.

17:55 - KDE Embedded - Where are we?

Meanwhile, in room 2, Andreas Cord-Landwehr talked about the tools KDE has for easily creating embedded devices and how they work; which devices are most interesting at the moment; the concept of an immutable image; and the next topics and directions KDE community members should pursue in the embedded area.

Day 2 - Sunday 16 July

10:00 Kdenlive - what can we learn after 20 years of development?

Eugen Mohr, Jean-Baptiste Mardelle and Massimo Stella from the Kdenlive team took us down memory lane, from the very beginning to the present day. They told us about how the team came together, the hurdles they had to overcome, the current situation and the plans for the future of KDE's popular video editing software.

10:50 Make it talk: Adding speech to your application.

Jeremy Whiting believes that speech is an underrepresented but perfectly valid way to communicate with users. Jeremy proved his point with examples of applications that, if speech-enabled, would help people who are visually impaired (or just looking at something else), and went on to explain Qt technologies that could be used to integrate speech into KDE applications.

11:00 The Community Working Group - Keeping a Healthy Community

In this talk, Andy Betts presented the work of the Community Working Group, how it resolves conflicts between community members, and advice on how to get along within the KDE community.

At this point, the conference split into two tracks.

11:40 Internal Communication At KDE: Infrastructure For A Large And Diverse Community

In room 1, Joseph De Veaugh-Geiss took the stage and walked us through some of the problems that a community as large as ours has when it comes to communicating with each other and the outside world.

11:40 - An OSS Tool for Comprehending Huge Codebases

In room 2, Tarcisio Fischer talked about an OSS tool being developed by CodeThink to help developers understand large codebases. Although the tool is still under heavy development, he showed and explained the tool using KF5, Kate, Konsole as case studies.

12:25 The Evolution of KDE's App Ecosystem and Deployment Strategy

Back in room 1, Aleix Pol explored how the Linux application ecosystem has changed and the implications for KDE.

12:25 Matrix and ActivityPub for everything

At the same time, in room 2, Alexey Rusakov, Carl Schwan, and Tobias Fella talked about the Matrix IM platform and ActivityPub standards and how they can be used outside of their primary purpose. They gave a broad overview of the functionality provided by Matrix and how it fits into the ActivityPub protocols, which are primarily intended for real-time messaging and social networking applications.

During the lunch break, all attendees got together in the main conference hall, and later in the University's lobby for the all-important group photo.

14:30 Selenium GUI Testing

After lunch, in room 1, Harald Sitter told us about and demonstrated Selenium, a technology for testing GUIs of KDE software. Selenium can be used for regular testing, testing for accessibility problems, and also for energy efficiency.

14:30 Remote Desktop for KWin Wayland

In room 2, Arjen Hiemstra showed-cased how he was working to fix the lack of networking support in Wayland.

In X11, running graphical applications remotely was a core feature. Wayland does not implement this feature natively, but remote desktop control remains an important use case for a number of users.

Arjen showed how it is possible to use KDE's KWin compositor, combined with a new library called KRdp, to control any KWin Wayland session over a network.

15:15 Testing the latest KDE software

Later, in room 1, Timothée Ravier joined us virtually and discussed what, when and how non-developers can test the latest KDE software, including Plasma Desktop and Apps. He also gave a demo using Flatpak.

15:15 Entering a Wayland-only World

Meanwhile, in room 2, Neal Gompa of the Fedora Project analyzed how KDE is doing with its move to Wayland and what problems still need to be solved.

16:20 KDE Wayland Fireside Chat

Right after that, Room 2 was handed over to Aleix Pol Gonzalez, David Edmundson, David Redondo, Vlad Zahorodnii, and Xaver Hugl for a fireside chat with the attendees about Wayland...

16:20 Kyber: a new cross-platform high-quality remote control software

... And a round of 10-minute Fast Track talks began in room 1, with Jean-Baptiste Kempf of VLC fame kicking things off with an explanation and demo of his new project, Kyber.

Kyber attempts to provide a high quality, 0 latency video feed, with bi-directional input forwarding, providing a cross-platform application and SDK to control any type of machine, regardless of hardware and operating system.

16:30 Fun with Charts: Green Energy in System Monitor

The second lightning talk was given by Kai Uwe Broulik, who explained how he managed to get data from off-the-shelf solar panels (that originally used proprietary software) and visualize it in Plasma's system monitor, alongside things like CPU and network load.

16:40 What has qmllint ever done for us?

Then Fabian Kosmale explained the usefulness of qmllint, a command-line utility originally designed to check that QML files are syntactically valid. But it has evolved to cover more checks, has been integrated into CI pipelines, and has a plugin API on the way.

16:50 Wait, are first-run wizards cool again?

Finally, Nate Graham introduced the new Plasma Wizard and explained why it was necessary in this day and age.

Both tracks rejoined for the final leg of the conference section of Akademy.

17:05 Sponsors lightning talks

Akademy would not be possible without the support of our sponsors. Aleix Pol welcomed to the stage representatives from the Qt Group, Codethink, KDAB, Canonical, Collabora, openSUSE, enioka Haute Couture and Externly. The representatives, many of whom are also KDE members, explained what they do and received a round of applause from the audience.

Other sponsors who were not present at the event, but who were also applauded by the attendees, were Slimbook, TUXEDO, and PINE64.

The media partner for the event was Linux Magazine.

17:50 Akademy Awards

The Akademy Awards recognize outstanding contributions to KDE. Aniqa Khokhar and Harald Sitter, last year's winners, presented this year's winners:

In the category of Best Application, the winner was Heaptrack, maintained by Milian Wolff and the rest of the development team.
The award for Best Non-Application Contribution went to Hannah Von Reth for her work on KDE's *Craft* system.
The Jury Award went to Johnny Jazeix for his work organizing and supporting *Season of KDE* and *Google Summer of Code*.

Finally, the special award went to the local team representing the University of Macedonia, co-organizer of the event. The KDE community cannot thank the University and the organizing crew enough for the work they put into making Akademy 2023 a success.

18:10 Closing

Aleix Pol closed the conference part of the event and the five days of BoFs, hackathons and trainings began.

Celebrating 25 years of The KDE Free Qt Foundation

Paul Brown — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 09:04:24 +0000

On the 22nd of June 1998, the KDE Free Qt Foundation was founded and has accompanied Qt on its amazing journey to become the success story that it is today.

Qt has established itself as the go-to solution for UI development because of its high quality, consistency, ease of use, and broad cross-platform support. A key factor in this achievement is Qt's dual licensing strategy: Qt is available as free software for open source, but it is also available under a paid license for proprietary software development. A legal foundation ensures the continued availability of Qt as free software alongside the commercial licensing options.

At the time the KDE Free Qt Foundation was founded, Qt was developed by Trolltech--the company that originally developed the framework. The Foundation has supported Qt through its transitions, first to Nokia, then to Digia, and finally to The Qt Company. It has the right to release Qt under the BSD license if necessary to ensure that Qt remains open source. This remarkable legal guarantee protects the free software community and creates trust among developers, contributors, and customers.

The KDE Free Qt Foundation is a collaboration between The Qt Company and KDE. KDE is one of the largest Free Software communities for general-purpose end-user software, and has been around since 1996.

Qt is developed as a true open source project. People from many different backgrounds join The Qt Company to contribute to the framework. Many contributors come from The Qt Company, but many others come from other companies and from Qt-based Free Software projects, including the KDE community. They know that their contributions will continue to be available as Free Software because the Foundation protects and ensures that contributions to Qt will remain open.

Join us in celebrating 25 years of freedom and collaboration for Qt! Join us in knowing that the KDE Free Qt Foundation is protecting the future of Qt, both as open source and as a proprietary and commercially supported offering.

For more information visit: https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation/

KDE & Google Summer of Code 2023

Anonymous — Tue, 16 May 2023 10:15:57 +0000

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:

automating the energy measurement process, including providing a summary of the results
setting up backend CI/CD integration
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.

Season of KDE 2023: Conclusion

Paul Brown — Thu, 04 May 2023 09:24:57 +0000

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 here.

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 Becomes a KDE Patron

Paul Brown — Tue, 25 Apr 2023 09:47:28 +0000

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 e.V. 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 Becomes KDE Patron

Paul Brown — Tue, 11 Apr 2023 08:35:37 +0000

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."

Akademy 2023 Call for Proposals is Now Open!

aniqakhokhar — Mon, 13 Feb 2023 12:45:49 +0000

Akademy 2023 will be a hybrid event held in Thessaloniki, Greece, and online from Saturday the 15th to Friday the 21st of July. The Call for Participation is open! Send us your talk ideas and abstracts.

Why talk at #Akademy2023?

Akademy attracts artists, designers, developers, translators, users, writers, companies, public institutions and many other KDE friends and contributors. We celebrate the achievements and help determine the direction for the next year. We all meet together to discuss and plan the future of the Community and the technology we build. You will meet people that are receptive to your ideas and can help you with their skills and experience. These sessions offer the opportunity for gaining support, and making your plans for your project become a reality.

How to get started

Do not worry about details or a slides 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 proposal:

Helping new people and organizations discover KDE
Working towards KDE's goals
Granting people more digital freedom and autonomy through KDE technologies
Developing new technologies
Guiding new, intermediate and expert users to encourage participation
Anything else that might interest the audience.

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: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, and 2015.

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

Dot Categories:

Community and Events

Season of KDE 2023: Mentees and Projects

Anonymous — Mon, 23 Jan 2023 12:29:37 +0000

By Benson Muite

This year Season of KDE has several projects focusing on the accessibility and sustainability goals. There are three projects focused on accessibility, three on sustainability and three additional projects in other areas.

The sustainability projects had fifteen excellent applicants for just three projects, so selecting mentees was challenging. The time mentee applicants invested in applying is much appreciated, and any applicants who have not been selected are encouraged to continue contributing to KDE and open source. It is possible to make smaller contributions to KDE projects that allow possible mentors to see your work and then mentor you informally.

The projects and their mentees that were officially selected for SoK are listed below.

Sustainability Projects

These projects are related to the Blauer Engel (Blue Angel) for FOSS project, a certification for environmentally friendly open source software. The Blauer Engel project is part of the Global Ecolabelling Network, a non-profit organization that certifies eco-friendliness of products within a particular class, and thus allows users to make informed choices.

Preparation of KDE apps for Blue Angel eco-certification

Mentor: Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss
Mentee: Rudraksh Karpe

Improve KDE Eco Test emulation tool

Mentors: Karanjot Singh, Emmanuel Charruau, and Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss
Mentee: Mohammed Ibrahim

Measurement of energy consumption with Selenium

Mentors: Emmanuel Charruau and Harald Sitter
Mentee: Nitin Tejuja

Accessibility Projects

These projects aim to allow eveybody to use KDE software and KDE websites by improving their accessibility.

Rishi Kumar will be working on the accessibility and UI testing of Tokodon. This is based on theAT-SPI/Selenium bridge created by Harald Sitter.

Mentor: Carl Schwan
Mentee: Rishi Kumar

Improving the accessibility of KDE’s websites

Mentor: Paul Brown and Aniqa Khokhar
Mentee: Victoria Chen

Plasma accessibility widget

Mentor: Fushan Wen
Mentee: Brent Mackey

Additional Projects

Automate Flatpak checks in GitLab Invent CI

Mentors: Timothée Ravier and Aleix Pol
Mentee: Neelaksh Singh

Brannon Aw will be working on improving the annotation tools in Spectacle (KDE's screenshot app). They will be adding features such as cropping, an eraser tool, and so on. Spectacle: Improving the annotation tools.

Mentor: Bharadwaj Raju
Mentee: Brannon Aw

Plasma: Better holiday support in the digital clock widget.

Mentor: Fushan Wen
Mentee: Ruoqing He

Théophile Gilgien will be working improving Audiotube. He will be working on multiple small features like KRunner integration, ability to play favorite songs as a playlist and more!

Mentor: Carl Schwan, Devin Lin & Jonah Brüchert
Mentee: Théophile Gilgien

Arpit Jain wil be working on the new epub reader, Arianna, which is based on epub.js and QtWebEngine. His knowledge of web-based technologies will be helpful to achieve his goals of syncing the application color scheme to the webengine content, adding settings and adding a table of content.

Mentor: Carl Schwan
Mentee: Arpit Jain

Good Luck and have Fun!

KDE thanks the mentors and mentees for improving the KDE ecosystem and wishes them a good experience. The KDE community looks forward to learning about the mentees progress through their blog posts.