Frank Karlitschek, the founder of Nextcloud, has won the Reinhard von Koenig award and will be donating the winnings, amounting to € 20,000, to start a fund called "Nextcloud Include".

The fund, set up in collaboration with KDE e.V., wants to encourage diversity in open source. It aims to help underrepresented groups participate in the global Nextcloud community and foster an inclusive and diverse space where the community can continue to collaborate and develop world-class software. Mentoring, travel support, and internships are provided as part of the program. The program is ran in collaboration with the KDE community under the umbrella of the KDE e.V.

Margit Stumpp, Member of the German Parliament (Bundestag) said:

Equal opportunities and diversity are very important issues for the future, especially in technical professions. I am pleased that Nextcloud Include is a new important initiative that is focusing on these issues".

Frank is of course very happy with the prize:

I'm extremely honored to be awarded this prize as a recognition of the incredible impact privacy issues have on our society and the importance of Nextcloud in providing a solution. By donating the prize money to a diversity goal, I hope it will help catalyze another transformation that society needs".

Lydia Pintscher, president of KDE e.V.'s Board was equally thrilled:

We'd like to congratulate Frank on winning this prize and his decision to put the money to a great cause in open source. For us, collaborating with Nextcloud in this way is a bit of a homecoming as it is one of the most successful projects to emerge from our community over the past decade".

It is worth remembering that Nextcloud started life as a KDE project.

Nextcloud, Frank and KDE would like to invite community members who want to get involved in Nextcloud but face significant social hurdles to get in touch with our Include team. You can find more information on Nextcloud Include page.

The Reinhard von Koenig award promotes excellence in progress and technology. Previous winners include notable staff members from Daimler AG and Atlatec GmbH for work on self-driving cars.

LaKademy, or Latin American Akademy, is the annual meeting of the Latin American KDE community - one of the biggest Free software communities in the world. The event takes place since 2012, and is open to all developers, artists, users, and everyone who wants to contribute in any way to the software created or maintained by the community.

As is tradition since 2012, the Latin American Akademy happened from 11th to 14th of October 2018 at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC) in the city of Florianopolis, Brazil. Members of the local Free and open source software community - mostly Brazilians - gathered at the event. (On a side note, if you are reading this and you are from South America, please join us next year).

It was a fantastic opportunity for everyone to work on KDE projects, but also on other unrelated projects that each person contributes to. The participants strengthened their friendship bonds and shared experiences about creating, using, and maintaining software. Finally, on Sunday (October 14th) everyone celebrated the 22 years of KDE with a cake. Konqui was there, too!

But let us start from the beginning. LaKademy 2018 officially opened on October 11th. More than 20 participants, including Karina Mochetti and six students of Computer Science from the Federal University Fluminense (UFF, Niteroi) started resolving the issues in translation scripts used by the localization team.

They also worked on the KDE Edu software - the educational suite for everyone from age 5 to 95. It was the first time that we had this kind of help - from a formal partnership between a university and its students - and also the first LaKademy with so many attendees from all corners of the continent.

Artists, enthusiasts, teachers... everyone focused on working hard on the projects during the event. The 3D artists created 3D models, translators translated, and developers developed. Many bugs where squashed, too. We would especially like to thank Nicolas Alvarez for breathing in a new life into the official LaKademy website that will be live in its final form soon.

On Saturday, October 13th, the traditional promo meeting took place, where the future of the Latin American KDE community was discussed. We covered a wide range of topics: from communication tools, our presence at Brazilian events, and the promotional materials to the proposal of migrating the KDE Brasil site to Wordpress.

We also considered potential host cities for LaKademy 2019, and shared some thoughts on making it happen outside of Brazil as a way of reinforcing the "Latin-American-ness" of the event.

We would like to thank everyone who participated in this year's LaKademy, and helped make it such a welcoming and productive event. Let's do our best to make it even bigger and better next year!

List of LaKademy 2018 participants

UFF students who attended LaKademy with the mentoring of Karina Mochetti:

Carlos Henrique Domingos Correia Santos
Fernando Costa Rodrigues
Hugo Caetano Borges Carneiro
Luan Simões Cardoso
Lucas Henrique Tavares Monteiro
Maria Edoarda Vallim Fonseca

Other KDE Community members:

Ângela Cunha
Aracele Torres
Barbara Tostes
Bianca Oliveira
Caio Jordão Carvalho
Camila Moura
Dórian Langbeck
Eliakin Costa
Filipe Saraiva
Frederico Gonçalves Guimarães
Henrique Sant'Anna
Jamil Gleice
Nicolás Alvarez
Patrick Pereira
Pedro Arthur Duarte

Summary of LaKademy 2018 activities

Fixed bugs on many different levels of different applications

Updated the KDE Timeline

Restructured the translation process

Created a new Phabricator group for the Brazilian translation team

Prepared documentation for newcomers to the translation team

Translated various applications and documentation

Reviewed and updated tutorials on how to use Lokalize, the KDE CAT (Computer-Aided Translation) tool

Revised and updated the content on the LaKademy website

Overhauled Atelier Core compatibility and added support for new technologies

Added cryptography to Konsole History file

Discussed the implementation of new technologies in GCompris

Fixed many small papercuts in KDE-Edu software

Initiated the discussion about migrating the KDE Brasil website to Wordpress

Had many productive discussions about art and promo activities

Took photos and videos of the event

After a break in 2017, the KDE community is participating in the Google Code-in contest as a mentoring organization. This means that pre-university students aged 13 to 17 from all over the world will be able to contribute to the Free Software movement by helping KDE develop software products that give users control, freedom, and privacy.

Google Code-in is a global online contest with the goal of helping teenagers get involved in the world of open source development. Mentors from the participating organizations lend a helping hand as participants complete various bite-sized tasks in coding, graphics design, documentation, and more.

This year we have tasks from KDE Connect, a project that enables all your devices to communicate with each other; GCompris, an educational software suite; KDE Partition Manager, our disk partitioning utility; and the KDE Visual Design Group, our interface usability experts.

At the end of the contest, each organization will select 6 finalists and 2 grand prize winners. Students can earn prizes (digital certificates, T-shirts, hoodies) and grand prize winners will receive a trip to Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California for themselves and a parent or legal guardian for 4 nights in June 2019.

In 2016, the two lucky grand prize winners from the KDE community were Sergey Popov and Ilya Bizyaev. They seized the amazing opportunity to travel all the way from Russia to Google HQ in the US, where they met many students and professional software developers passionate about Free Software, and made new friends!

Both of them are still involved in KDE. As Ilya says, "contributing to KDE is an incredible opportunity to improve my programming, design and social skills while working on something that really matters".

This year, you could be the lucky one. To learn more about Google Code-in and register as a participant, visit the official contest website. We are waiting for your contributions! :)

We are excited to announce that the KDE e.V. received a donation of 300,000 USD from the Handshake Foundation. Quite appropriate for a birthday present, as the KDE project just turned 22 this last weekend!

Of the total donation amount, 100,000 USD will be specifically allocated to pursue the development of the Calligra office suite.

"Handshake is pleased to be able to support KDE's international community of dedicated volunteers and their continued commitment to a free desktop environment with the current release of KDE Plasma 5 and the Calligra office suite", says Rob Myers from the Handshake Foundation.

The fruits of this contribution will soon become visible and available to everyone. Meanwhile, don't hesitate to join the KDE Community and be part of our mission to help everyone protect their privacy and control their digital lives with Free Software.

Stay tuned for more updates, and tell us how you celebrated KDE's 22nd birthday!

Last week developers from the KDE neon and Plasma teams visited Barcelona. We were there to meet with some KDE software projects we had heard about in the Catalan government and schools. Aleix Pol lives locally and works on Plasma and Discover. He invited Plasma release manager and KDE neon developer Jonathan Riddell, KDE neon continuous integration master Harald Sitter, and hardware enablement guru Rohan Garg to meet the teams evaluating our software and supporting our users.

We first met Pablo who runs the Linkat project for the Catalan government. Linkat is a Linux distribution they offer to schools, and it currently runs lightweight, simple desktop environments. As Plasma 5 now tends to use as little or less memory and resources than many lightweight Linux desktops, the Linkat team is interested in trying it. We met with the officials from the education department and discussed accessibility needs, looking at Mycroft for voice control and integrating with phones using KDE Connect.

The next day we visited the largest technical school in Catalunya, the Escola del Treball (school of the workers). Within their impressive Gaudí-inspired building, they run a few thousand computers on which they are trying to reduce the costs. They showed us the setup they had developed using thin clients with a simple Atom computer or Raspberry Pi. The thin clients use a remote desktop protocol to talk to virtual machines on a central server. The technically-minded teachers can customize what's running on the virtual machine with a range of distributions and operating systems available. Their server has hosted over 3000 virtual machine images just on the trial computers, all for the individual use cases of the teaching staff. Unlike with proprietary setups, this means they do not have to ask for a budget to install software.

They discussed some problems their virtual machine software was having with Plasma and tested some fixes made by Aleix. Rohan was also interested in finding the best machines they could use for their thin clients.

In the evening, we met with developer Angel Docampo and talked about the deployment he worked on for the Ajuntament (city council) of Barcelona. The Ajuntament is also interested in moving towards Free Software on their computers. This deployment is based on Kubuntu, and it is currently in trial by about 30 employees. Angel reported that they are happy with the setup; however, taking it further will likely depend on the politicians‘ will to drive the change forward.

As we were about to leave, we learned about a project called openUAB at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. They are making a KDE neon-based system for their own uses. We expect to find out more about this project after Aleix meets with them in the upcoming weeks.

This was an exciting trip that opened our eyes to the increasing number and variety of users and use cases of KDE software. The insights we collected will help us deliver better software, and strengthen the bonds between our community and the rest of the world.

Tuesday, 9 October 2018. Today KDE launches the first release of Plasma 5.14.

Plasma is KDE's lightweight and full featured Linux desktop. For the last three months we have been adding features and fixing bugs and now invite you to install Plasma 5.14.

A lot of work has gone into improving Discover, Plasma's software manager, and, among other things, we have added a Firmware Update feature and many subtle user interface improvements to give it a smoother feel. We have also rewritten many effects in our window manager KWin and improved it for slicker animations in your work day. Other improvements we have made include a new Display Configuration widget which is useful when giving presentations.

Browse the full Plasma 5.14 changelog to find out about more tweaks and bug fixes featured in this release: Full Plasma 5.14 changelog

New in Plasma 5.14

New Features

• There's a new Display Configuration widget for screen management which is useful for presentations.
• The Audio Volume widget now has a built in speaker test feature moved from Phonon settings.
• The Network widget now works for SSH VPN tunnels again.
• Switching primary monitor when plugging in or unplugging monitors is now smoother.
• The lock screen now handles user-switching for better usability and security.
• You can now import existing encrypted files from a Plasma Vault.
• The Task Manager implements better compatibility with LibreOffice.












• The System Monitor now has a 'Tools' menu full of launchers to handy utilities.
• The Kickoff application menu now switches tabs instantly on hover.








   






• Widget and panels get consistent icons and other user interface improvements.












• Plasma now warns on logout when other users are logged in.
• The Breeze widget theme has improved shadows.
• The Global menu now supports GTK applications. This was a 'tech preview' in 5.13, but it now works out of the box in 5.14.

Plasma Discover

Discover, our software and add-on installer, has more features and improves its look and feel.

• Discover gained fwupd support, allowing it to upgrade your computer's firmware.
• It gained support for Snap channels.
• Discover can now display and sort apps by release date.
• You can now see an app's package dependencies.
• When Discover is asked to install a standalone Flatpak file but the Flatpak backend is not installed, it now offers to first install the backend for you.
• Discover now tells you when a package update will replace some packages with other ones.
• We have added numerous minor user interface improvements: update button are disabled while checking for updates, there is visual consistency between settings and the update pages, updates are sorted by completion percentage, we have improved the layout of updates page and updates notifier plasmoid, etc..
• We have improved reliability and stability through a bunch of bug fixes.

KWin and Wayland:

• We fixed copy-paste between GTK and non-GTK apps on Wayland.
• We fixed non-centered task switchers on Wayland.
• We have improved pointer constraints.
• There are two new interfaces, XdgShell and XdgOutput, for integrating more apps with the desktop.
• We have considerably improved and polished KWin effects throughout, including completely rewriting the Dim Inactive effect, adding a new scale effect, rewriting the Glide effect, and more.

Bugfixes

We fixed many bugs, including:

• Blurred backgrounds behind desktop context menus are no longer visually corrupted.
• It's no longer possible to accidentally drag-and-drop task manager buttons into app windows.

Live Images

The easiest way to try out Plasma 5.14 is with a live image booted off a USB disk. Docker images also provide a quick and easy way to test Plasma.

Download live images with Plasma 5
Download Docker images with Plasma 5

Package Downloads

Distributions have created, or are in the process of creating, packages listed on our wiki page.

Package download wiki page

Source Downloads

You can install Plasma 5 directly from source.

Community instructions to compile it
Source Info Page

Feedback

You can send us feedback and get updates on Facebook
or Twitter
or Google+.

Discuss Plasma 5 on the KDE Forums Plasma 5 board.

You can provide feedback direct to the developers via the #Plasma IRC channel, Plasma-devel mailing list or report issues via bugzilla. If you like what the team is doing, please let them know!

Your feedback is greatly appreciated.

The KDE neon team is proud to announce the rebase of our packages onto Ubuntu 18.04 LTS "Bionic Beaver".  We encourage all users to upgrade now.  The installable ISOs and Docker images have also been updated to run on 18.04.

What is KDE neon?

KDE neon is a project to deliver KDE's wonderful suite of software quickly.  We use modern DevOps techniques to automatically build, QA and deploy our packages.  We work directly with the KDE community rather than staying far away in a separate project.

Our packages are built on the latest Ubuntu LTS edition and today we have moved to their new 18.04 release.  This means our users can get newer drivers and third party packages.  There is an upgrade process from the previous 16.04 LTS base which we have spent the last few months writing and running QA on to ensure it runs smoothly.

We have three editions for different use cases.  A user edition for those wanting to use the latest released KDE software updated daily but only released when it passes QA tests.  And two developer editions built from unstable and beta Git branches without QA checks for those wanting to test or develop our forthcoming software.

You can use our output via the .deb package archive, installable ISOs and Docker images.  We also have work-in-progress Snap packages which we can put more development effort into now that we have rebased on 18.04.

The Upgrade

Many people have been keen for the rebase onto 18.04, thank you for your patience.  We implement many QA tests in neon and are keen that they should all pass.  A number of bugs have been found in the initial upgrade process which we have fixed. These major upgrades can still break, especially if you have a lot of third party software, so do take backups before you start.  Please let us know on the bug tracker or forum how you get on.  Enjoy your updated neon!

Thursday, 13 September 2018. Today KDE launches the beta release of Plasma 5.14.

Plasma is KDE's lightweight and full featured Linux desktop. For the last three months we have been adding features and fixing bugs and now invite you to test the beta pre-release of Plasma 5.14.

A lot of work has gone into improving Discover, Plasma's software manager, and, among other things, we have added a Firmware Update feature and many subtle user interface improvements to give it a smoother feel. We have also rewritten many effects in our window manager KWin and improved it for slicker animations in your work day. Other improvements we have made include a new Display Configuration widget which is useful when giving presentations.

Please test and send us bug reports and feedback. The final release is scheduled for three weeks' time.

Browse the full Plasma 5.14 Beta changelog to find out about more tweaks and bug fixes featured in this release: Full Plasma 5.14 Beta changelog

New in Plasma 5.14 Beta

New Features

• There's a new Display Configuration widget for screen management which is useful for presentations.
• The Audio Volume widget now has a built in speaker test feature moved from Phonon settings.
• The Network widget now works for SSH VPN tunnels again.
• Switching primary monitor when plugging in or unplugging monitors is now smoother.
• The lock screen now handles user-switching for better usability and security.
• You can now import existing encrypted files from a Plasma Vault.
• The Task Manager implements better compatibility with LibreOffice.












• The System Monitor now has a 'Tools' menu full of launchers to handy utilities.
• The Kickoff application menu now switches tabs instantly on hover.








   






• Widget and panels get consistent icons and other user interface improvements.












• Plasma now warns on logout when other users are logged in.
• The Breeze widget theme has improved shadows.

Plasma Discover

Discover, our software and add-on installer, has more features and improves its look and feel.

• Discover gained fwupd support, allowing it to upgrade your computer's firmware.
• It gained support for Snap channels.
• Discover can now display and sort apps by release date.
• You can now see an app's package dependencies.
• When Discover is asked to install a standalone Flatpak file but the Flatpak backend is not installed, it now offers to first install the backend for you.
• Discover now tells you when a package update will replace some packages with other ones.
• We have added numerous minor user interface improvements: update button are disabled while checking for updates, there is visual consistency between settings and the update pages, updates are sorted by completion percentage, we have improved the review section of the update notifier plasmoid, etc..
• We have improved reliability and stability through a bunch of bug fixes.

KWin and Wayland:

• We fixed copy-paste between GTK and non-GTK apps on Wayland.
• We fixed non-centered task switchers on Wayland.
• We have improved pointer constraints.
• There are two new interfaces, XdgShell and XdgOutput, for integrating more apps with the desktop.
• We have considerably improved and polished KWin effects throughout, including completely rewriting the Dim Inactive effect, adding a new scale effect, rewriting the Glide effect, and more.

Bugfixes

We fixed many bugs, including:

• Blurred backgrounds behind desktop context menus are no longer visually corrupted.
• It's no longer possible to accidentally drag-and-drop task manager buttons into app windows.

If you missed any of the talks, or couldn't make it to Vienna to attend this year's Akademy, now you can watch the recordings from the comfort of your home. You can find and download the videos from our repository, or browse and share them from the YouTube playlist we have set up especially for all Akademy 2018 videos.

We recommend starting with this year's keynotes, so make sure to watch Dan Bielefeld talk about how the Transitional Justice Working Group locates and uncovers sites for crimes against humanity committed by the Kim regime in North Korea:

Also, don't miss what Claudia Garad has to say about onboarding new contributors into an open community:

If you prefer a more KDE-specific topic, watch Nate Graham lay out a seven-point plan that will help KDE take over the world:

About Akademy

For most of the year, KDE -- one of the largest free and open software communities in the world-- works on-line by email, IRC, forums and mailing lists. Akademy provides all KDE contributors the opportunity to meet in person to foster social bonds, work on concrete technology issues, consider new ideas, and reinforce the innovative, dynamic culture of KDE. Akademy brings together artists, designers, developers, translators, users, writers, sponsors and many other types of KDE contributors to celebrate the achievements of the past year and help determine the direction for the next year. Hands-on sessions offer the opportunity for intense work bringing those plans to reality. The KDE Community welcomes companies building on KDE technology, and those that are looking for opportunities.

Plasma running on a Pinebook.

In the last few years, smartphone hardware has become powerful enough to drive conventional desktop software. A developing trend is to create laptops using hardware initially designed for smartphones and embedded systems. There are distinct advantages to this approach: those devices are usually very energy efficient, so they can yield a long runtime on a single battery charge; they're also rather inexpensive and lighter than conventional laptops.

One such device is the Pinebook, created by a hardware manufacturer from China. The Pinebook is a low-cost laptop (at about 100 USD) with the full functionality one would expect. It is powered by a quad-core 64-bit ARM CPU clocked at 1.2 GHz, and comes with 2 GB of RAM, 16 GB of eMMC storage, and a 14" TN LCD at 1366x768.

Blue Systems has worked together with the manufacturer of the Pinebook to create a showcase test image that runs well on these devices. The team has adapted KDE neon and created a bootable and installable remixed live image that works on the Pinebook. Developers have also fixed many bugs - both minor and major - across the whole software stack, kernel, graphics drivers, Qt, packaging, and in KDE Frameworks and Plasma.

The result shows that Plasma is an excellent candidate for devices like this. The process has also yielded significant performance improvements in KDE Frameworks and Plasma; a result every user has enjoyed with newer Plasma releases.

To find out more, get instructions, default passwords, tips and tricks, and so on, check out the forum post here. That post also contains links to the download.

You can also download the KDE neon Pinebook Remix images directly from here, but remember to check the forum for instructions.