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Say Hello To KDE Eco by Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License Software is immaterial, but it determines the energy consumption of hardware. The ... [More] ICT sector is reported to contribute as much CO2 as the aviation industry, and the numbers continue to rise. Making software efficient is crucial. Let's build energy-efficient Free Software together! Dot Categories:  General [Less]

Falkon Falkon Our web browser Falkon has been quickly gathering new features, and this month saw the 3.2 release. It adds in-screen capture functionality so you can easily grab a screenshot, it now comes with a inbuilt PDF viewer, and downloads can ... [More] be paused and resumed. Best of all, you can Download themes from the KDE Store. Who wants to customize their browser? Falkon is available from the Snap store or your Linux distro. If you are interested in packaging or developing Falkon, please contact the devs to get involved. More contributions are always appreciated! Kalendar 0.4.0 Kalendar Kalendar is a new calendar application that allows you to manage your tasks and events. Kalendar supports both local calendars as well as a multitude of online calendars: Nextcloud, Google® Calendar, Outlook®, Caldav, and many more. Kalendar was built with the idea to be usable on desktop, on mobile and everything in between. There have been monthly releases recently each adding a bunch of new features and improvements, including drag and drop for calendar items. In the new 0.4 release, there are two new views: the three-day and single-day views. These are based on the week view, presenting events and tasks according to their times. These new views should make it much easier to check your calendars when the window is width-constrained, or when you have lots of overlapping events. In the prior release, Kalendar aligned with Plasma’s motto of ‘simple by default, powerful when needed’. The developers tweaked the default configuration to make the application as clean and simple as it needs to be. They also changed the month view so the weeks would not be numbered by default, and for tasks to be arranged in ascending date order. This should save users from fiddling around with the settings! The app comes on the PinePhone Pro or you can get it from your Linux distro. It will likely be added to Plasma Mobile Gear releases in future. Ruqola 1.6 Ruqola Ruqola (Italian for the salad leaf "rocket") is KDE's cross platform Rocket.chat app. Rocket.chat is a secure chat app and platform. Their slogan is: real-time conversations with your colleagues, other companies or customers. Rocket.Chat does everything other platforms do, but doesn't expose your data. Ruqola’s recent 1.6 release settles the UI on tranditional QWidgets, adds team support and includes the all important emoji support. Download it from your Linux distro or grab installers for Windows and Mac. GCompris 2 GCompris 2 Our comprehensive educational games app GCompris released version 2, adding a bunch of new activities and improving a bunch more. Baby mouse is for children learning to interact with a computer for the first time. Oware is a traditional African strategy game, it can be played against the computer or with a friend. In Path encoding (absolute or relative) children need to give a set of directions to follow a defined path in a grid. Path decoding (absolute or relative) is the opposite. Children have to create the path corresponding to a defined set of directions. In Learn quantities, the goal is to count how many items are needed to represent a quantity. In Learn decimal numbers, children cut units in pieces to learn the concept of decimal numbers. Learn decimal additions and Learn decimal subtractions use the same principles as Learn decimal numbers, but this time to practice these operations. With Ordering numbers, children can practice ordering numbers in ascending or descending order. With Ordering letters, children can practice ordering letters in alphabetical order or in reverse order. Ordering sentences is a step up in which children can practice reading and grammar by sorting out parts of a sentence. Positions is an activity to learn the terms describing the relative position of an object. You can get it for Windows Store, Android on the Play Store, Download Mac or Linux, Flathub, Snap Store or even Raspberry Pi. Heaptrack 1.3 Heaptrack One for the developers, Heaptrack is an app to monitor memory usage. It can attach to running apps and tracks all calls to the core memory allocation functions and log these occurrences. The Heaptrack v1.3.0 release is packed with quite some important new features. Most importantly, it is now possible to filter by time ranges. To do so, simply select a time range in one of the plots and right click to filter by time. Once analysis is complete, you will see the delta between the two time points; a very useful addition to the heap memory analysis workflow! You can get it from your Linux distro or just use the AppImage. Kid3 Kid3 on Android Version 3.9 of Kid3, a music file tag editor, brings new features. It is now possible to add custom frames to the quick access frames, which are always directly editable in the frame table. Standard frame values can now be edited directly in columns of the file list. Users of the command line version kid3-cli now have the possibility to run QML scripts. Customization of the quick access frames is now also possible on Android. It also comes with translations to new languages and bug fixes. Kid3 is available all over. Chocolatey for Windows, Flathub on Linux, Homebrew for Mac, F-Droid for Android and any Linux distro. BugFixes Tellico 3.4.3 Our collection manager app updated its Kinopoisk data source KGeoTag 1.2 updated its build system and now talks updated to GPX files Mime Type. KDiff 1.9.4 fixed DOS/Wndows line ending handling regression and a race condition during teardown. New Beta Software Kodaskanna Kodaskanna is a utility for reading data from 1D/2D codes (e.g. QR codes or bar codes) and making the data available for further processing. The long-term vision for Kodaskanna is to be a simple utility to integrate in workflows where some data processing expects a data blob (or a series of those) to be taken from a machine readable source by the user. It should have reusable general purpose extensions both for reading all kind of encoded data in all kind of sources (e.g. graphical, acoustical) or straight from dedicated input devices, as well as for validating and previewing the extracted data for the expected data format. The invoking instance should be able to filter/define what is possible. The utility should be usable both in-process and out-of-process, and ideally itself be replaceable by other solutions providing the same interface. ARM64 Coming to the Snap Store KBlocks KDE publishes over 100 apps on the Snap store, an app store for all Linux distros. In the last 30 days there are 181,750 machines using them in 209 territories. Launching today we have published the first Snap for ARM64 so you can use KBlocks on your Raspberry PI or PinePhone Pro. This architecture will become more important once laptops using the chips become more prominent, so it's great to see KDE becoming available on another platform. [Less]

By Johnny Jazeix Season of KDE, the program that helps people start contributing to KDE easily, kicks off with nine fascinating projects: Ayush Singh will be working on a Rust wrapper for KConfig. With this wrapper, and the existing ones for ... [More] qmetaobject and ki18n, it will be easier to develop KDE applications in Rust. More information can be found in the kde-devel mailing-list. Ayush will be mentored by Jos van den Oever. Pablo Marcos will add a new panel to show notifications on Tokodon, KDE's Mastodon client. Pablo will be mentored by Carl Schwan. Snehit Sah will help package more KDE applications for Flathub. Some packages are nearly ready for Flathub, but are missing information or manifest files, so they are not yet available on the platform. The goal of the project is to improve the existing packages and publish more apps on Flathub. Snehit will be mentored by Timothée Ravier. Suhaas Joshi will work on the permission management for Flatpak Apps in Discover. The aim is to allow users view permissions required by a flatpak before installation and also allow users to turn these permissions on or off. After the installation of a flatpak package, Discover will let users view and alter its permissions. Suhaas will be mentored by Timothée Ravier and Aleix Pol Gonzalez. Samarth Raj will add a new activity help understand the difference between left- and right-clicking using a mouse in GCompris. The activity will show two types of animals that want to go home. Left-clicking will move one kind, while right-clicking will move the other. Find out more about this activity here. Samarth will be mentored by Harsh Kumar and Emmanuel Charruau. Perspective Ellipse tool Srirupa will add support for a Perspective Ellipse feature in Krita. The aim is to create a tool that can adjust four corners of a mesh with an ellipse inside it. This will allow users to draw an ellipse in perspective with ease. Srirupa will be mentored by Halla Rempt. Soumik Dutta will document KDE Connect's communication protocol. Soumik will create comprehensive documentation covering the API contracts and the Event Action Pathways, validate the generated documentation, decide the layout, and merge the work into the existing documentation. Soumik will be mentored by Apollo Zhu and Lucas Wang. For the KDE-eco project, Karanjot Singh will prepare Standard Usage Scenarios for Energy Consumption Measurements. The first step will be to select an automatic tool to reproduce scenarios and then to define/write scenarios to test the energy consumption for multiple KDE/FOSS projects, such as Kate, KWrite, Vim, nano, emacs, etc. Finally, Karanjot will implement the scenarios. Karanjot will be mentored by Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss. Stefan Kowalczyk will improve the user experience for KDE Connect's iOS Internal Error and Alerts. iOS does not allow for multiple alerts at the same time, so the aim of the project is to queue alerts for KDE Connect if there are more than one, and display them one after the other. Stefan will be mentored by Apollo Zhu and Lucas Wang. We hope all participants have fun with their projects and look forward to your achievements! [Less]

The Linux App Summit (LAS) of 2022 will be held in Rovereto, a picturesque city at the foot of the Italian Alps. Whether you are a company, journalist, developer, or user interested in the ever-growing Linux app ecosystem, LAS will have ... [More] something for you. Scheduled for April, LAS 2022 will be a hybrid event, combining on-site and remote sessions, including talks, panels and Q&As. The call for papers will open soon, and the registrations shortly after. Follow us on Twitter to keep up to date with Linux App Summit news. About the Linux App Summit The Linux App Summit (LAS) brings the global Linux community together to learn, collaborate, and help grow the Linux application ecosystem. Through talks, panels, and Q&A sessions, we encourage attendees to share ideas, make connections, and join our goal of building a common app ecosystem. Previous iterations of the Linux App Summit have been held in the United States in Portland, Oregon and Denver, Colorado, as well as in Barcelona, Spain. Learn more by visiting linuxappsummit.org. About Rovereto Rovereto is an old Fortress Town in Northern Italy at the foot of the Italian Alps. It is located in the autonomous province of Trento and is the main city of the Vallagarina district. The city has several interesting sites including: The Ancient War Museum A castle built by the counts of Castelbarco The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento Rovereto's economy revolves around wine, coffee, rubber, and chocolate. The town was acknowledged as a “Peace town” in the 20th century and is also the location of important palaeontological remains, such as dinosaur footprints in the surrounding area. We look forward to seeing you in Rovereto, Italy. * The image “Rovereto” featured above is by barnyz and is distributed under a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license. [Less]

Community Planning for KDE's Eco Project By Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss On 11 December 2021, KDE Eco held the first of many planned Sprints. The Sprint was originally intended to be an in-person event to set up a community ... [More] measurement lab, but Corona had other ideas. Nevertheless, the community deployed its usual resourcefulness, and we met online instead. We discussed the next steps in KDE's Eco project, and the day's conversation was varied, covering topics such as setting up a team space for the project (achieved), completing the Blauer Engel application for Okular (submitted), along with several technical issues related to energy-consumption measurements in the lab, including Standard Usage Scenarios, replicable reference systems, standardizing data output, budget vs. professional power meters, and more. See the minutes for details. A more detailed summary of the discussion will be published at the KDE Eco blog (coming soon), so keep an eye out for updates there! The online Sprint was a wonderful opportunity to bring the community together and move the KDE Eco project forward, especially as we prepare for the community measurement lab that will be held at KDAB Berlin and the first of many measure-athons (planned for early 2022)! The success of such events depends first and foremost on the community, so allow us to send a heartfelt thank you to everyone who joined the conversation. Moreover, we could not do what we do without the support of KDE e.V. as well as BMU/UBA, who financially support the BE4FOSS project. Did you know? Discussions similar to those at the Sprint occur monthly at our community meetups on the 2nd Wednesday of the month from 19h-20h (CET/CEST). Join us! We would love to see you there. [Less]

Tux, Konqi and friends bring you new fun GCompris activities these holidays. GCompris 2.0 improves classic favorites loved by children of all ages, and adds even more activities for more fun and learning. GCompris is KDE's educational suite ... [More] of more than 170 activities and pedagogical games. It is used by teachers, parents and, most importantly, children worldwide. GCompris is a fixture in classrooms and at home, giving kids the opportunity to practice a wide range of skills while having fun at the same time. GCompris comes with more than 170 activities. GCompris 2.0's educational value and the hours of fun and entertainment it provides children of all ages makes it the perfect present for these festive holidays. Let's see some of the new and fun activities you will find in GCompris: Baby Mouse is for children learning to use a computer for the first time. It presents them with a friendly environment with brightly colored ducks where they can use a mouse, a touchscreen or any other input device to move a duck, click on a blank part of the screen, or click on other elements in the screen and receive visual and audio feedback. This activity is great to help develop hand-eye coordination and dexterity. With Ordering numbers and Ordering letters, children familiar with numbers and the alphabet can practice ordering within several ranges. A step up is Ordering sentences, in which kids can practice reading and grammar by sorting out the parts of sentences. Children can practice ordering numbers, letters and sentences at different levels. In Positions, another activity that helps children practice reading comprehension and spatial location at the same time, the player sees pictures of a child and a box and has to choose the word that best describes where they are relative to each other. Getting back to numeracy activities, GCompris 2.0 includes a wide range of activities that mimic basic manipulation math games, allowing young players to experiment with elements, grouping them in sets of up to ten items. This helps them build a clear concept of the decimal system, and, as with many GCompris activities, an educator can gradually increase the difficulty level, allowing the activities to be used with children of ages between 3 and 10. Once they grasp the concept of the decimal system, the addition and subtraction activities, also based on math manipulation, help practice arithmetic. Along with other classics, like chess, align four, and checkers, fans of strategy games will enjoy Oware, a game that requires forethought and, again, numeracy skills. Oware is originally a traditional African pastime and can be played against a friend or against Tux, offering unlimited hours of fun. Oware is a traditional African strategy game that requires forethought and numeracy skills. Talking about discovering things from around the world, let's not forget our the young globetrotters! For them, GCompris includes many reworked and new maps for them to explore and discover new countries. Not only will they learn the location of nations and regions, but they will also be able to visit and learn about famous locations and monuments. Another way of finding your way around is by following directions. The four Path activities, Path encoding absolute, Path encoding relative, Path decoding absolute, and Path decoding relative, help kids learn to interpret abstract directions. Using arrows that can indicate a direction on a map (up, down, left, or right) or relative to Tux's orientation (forward, left, or right), the player must either direct Tux towards the flag, or pick the correct path following a given set of directions. In a similar vein, young geeks interested in how computers work can learn the basics of programming with their very own graphical language. By laying out blocks with arrows on them, pupils can give instructions so Tux can reach his dinner. Related activities include learning about binary numbers using LEDs, building electric circuits, and using logic gates to build digital circuits. Learn programming logic and help Tux get to his dinner! GCompris 2.0 also includes all the activities children throughout the world have come to enjoy and love, activities that cover natural science, physics, art, history, and more. Help GCompris Become Better GCompris is Free Software and thus belongs to all of humanity. Join us and help GCompris become even better! It's easy: you can help with ideas, feedback, graphics, development and translations. In fact, translations are the best place to start. The translations for Galician, Slovak, Chinese Simplified, Irish Gaelic, and Czech, for example, just need a small push and we will be able to include them into GCompris. Other languages are included, but are still missing some texts, such as Russian, Turkish and Breton. If you are familiar with any of these languages, you can begin contributing to GCompris right now! Find out how to get started here! [Less]

Skanpage Skanpage Skanpage is KDE's new image scanning app. It's a simple scanning application designed for multi-page scans and saving of documents and images. It works for scanning from both flatbed and feed-through automatic document feeder ... [More] scanners. It lets you configure options for the scanning device, such as resolution and margins, and you can re-order, rotate and delete scanned pages. The scans can be saved to multi-page PDF documents and image files. Unlike our existing Skanlite app, this new program is written using Kirigami, our responsive interface toolkit which adapts to mobile and desktop devices. You can get Skanpage from KDE neon now, and look out for it on other Linux distros soon. KGeoTag 1.1 KGeoTag KGeoTag released version 1.1. KGeoTag is KDE's stand-alone photo geotagging program. To improve the workflow, there's a new main menu entry called Assign images to GPS data that triggers a configurable action (like "(Re)Assign all images") from the Automatic assignment dock. Also, you can now load images and GPX tracks, assign them, and save the coordinates without having to mark all images and having to use the context menu of the images list or using the Automatic assignment dock. Additionally, some bugs have been fixed. You can get KGeoTag from these Linux distros, and more download options are coming soon. digiKam 7.3 Digikam KDE's photo sorting and editing app, digKam, has released version 7.3. The famous ExifTool is now officially supported alongside the former Exiv2 shared library to handle file metadata. ExifTool is a powerful utility that you can use in special cases to fix metadata dysfunctions that can't be solved using Exiv2. An ExifTool metadata viewer has been appended to the metadata sidebar everywhere in digiKam. ExifTool also supports a larger list of file formats than Exiv2. The DNG Converter received a major update of the internal Adobe SDK and has improved the support of modern original RAW files features and Digital Negative targets. The FITS and MPO formats are now fully supported in digiKam 7.3.0, including their metadata components. Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) is an open standard commonly used in astronomy. It defines a digital file format useful for storage, transmission and processing of data, formatted as multi-dimensional arrays, for example, 2D images or tables. JPEG Multi-Picture Format (MPO) is a JPEG-based format for storing multiple images in a single file. It can contain two or more JPEG files concatenated together and various devices from Fujifilm, Panasonic, and Sony use it to store 3D images. digiKam can process MPO-formatted images thanks to an ImageMagick codec and the ExifTool parser working in the background. iNaturalist Also included is a new plugin that lets you export photos to iNaturalist. iNaturalist is a social network of 130K+ active naturalists, citizen scientists, and biologists built on the concept of mapping and sharing observations of biodiversity across the globe. iNaturalist receives observations of plants, animals, fungi, and other organisms worldwide. Finally, the Find Duplicates has been improved as has the slideshow export. The digiKam 7.3.0 source code tarball, Linux 64 bits AppImage bundles, MacOS Intel package, and Windows 64 bits installers can be downloaded here. Beta: Subtitle Composer Subtitle Composer We love making videos, and, to make those videos accessible, it's great to have subtitles in them. Subtitle Composer is a new app from KDE that helps you add texts to your videos. You can set the timing, font, size and add multiple languages. For translations and transcriptions, you can work with two subtitles side-by-side. Subtitle Composer lets you adapt the waveform to your liking, fit your subtitles to your needs and change the interface itself! The user interface is adaptable, so you can use whatever colours work best with the video and you can move panels to find a workflow that is the most comfortable for you. It works with all the subtitle file formats, including text and graphical subtitle formats, formats supported by ffmpeg, demux formats, MicroDVD, and graphical formats supported by ffmpeg. It does speech recognition too, so it can even add the subtitles for you. And you can quickly and easily sync subtitles by dragging several anchors/graftpoints and stretching the timeline, doing time shifting and scaling, lines duration re-calculation, framerate conversion then joining and splitting the subtitle files. Spell checking is included, of course, and it can even be scripted in multiple languages. Download Subtitle Composer for your Linux distro, as an AppImage, Flatpak or for MS Windows. Version 0.7.1 is the latest beta release. Bugfixes KDiff3 KDiff3 is a file and folder diff and merge tool which compares and merges two or three text input files or folders. Version 1.9.3 fixes multiple regressions in file comparison, including trailing new lines at the EOF that are not preserved, random line insertion during merge, as well as a crash and compile failure. Grab it for Linux, Windows or Mac. RSIBreak reminds you to take a break from working at your computer from time to time, so you don't strain your eyes or wrists. RSIBreak 0.12.14 has added more languages and you can install the new version now on Linux. Not technically an app but still cool, Latte Dock has released version 0.10.3 and one of the newest features is that indicators can now specify the background corner margin. Get it now for Linux. [Less]

Herbert Feiler, CEO TUXEDO Computers. TUXEDO Computers, a company known for selling Linux-powered computers and notebooks, now joins us as a KDE Patron! "Our customized Linux notebooks (for work or play) are equipped with KDE Plasma, which ... [More] leads to a positive response from our customers", said Herbert Feiler, CEO TUXEDO Computers. "Furthermore, we additionally do our own development work, which could benefit KDE as upstream as well. We are happy to share our knowledge and would like to secure as well as expand KDE's development work in the long run. Feedback that we receive from customers can also flow directly into KDE's development work." "For KDE, reaching and serving end-users is part of our reason to exist and TUXEDO can be a great ally in this endeavour." said Aleix Pol, President of KDE e.V. "Together, we will get to expand our frontiers and create systems and tools to further serve our users. It's especially encouraging to see TUXEDO's commitment to join our development communities and collaborate towards making KDE products better for everyone." TUXEDO Computers joins KDE e.V.’s other Patrons: The Qt Company, SUSE, Google, Blue Systems, Canonical, Enioka, Slimbook and Pine64 to continue to support Free Open Source Software and KDE development through KDE e.V. [Less]

We are happy to announce the winner of the Plasma 25th Anniversary Edition Wallpaper Contest! Thanks to all those who submitted their artwork. The variety and quality of the submissions in this edition was simply astounding. As always, there ... [More] were multiple great options and it was very hard to choose. It was a very close call! But at the end, we have a winner: Patak by Aron! Patak will make its official debut on October 14, when Plasma 25th Anniversary Edition is finally released. [Less]

Akademy 2022 is on its way and, despite the continuing pandemic, we are aiming for some in-person aspect for our next conference. For the upcoming Akademy, we are looking to host it later in 2022, as we expect travel to be a bit more attainable ... [More] and safe by then. Ideal dates would be in late summer or autumn 2022, specifically late August through October. If you are interested in hosting Akademy in your city, please send a letter of intent or interest before a full bid by the middle of October 2021. In addition, we ask that you assemble a team of at least 3 people before applying. Details of what to expect and what we are looking for are in the Call for Hosts[PDF] If you have any questions or concerns we will be very happy to offer advice and a helping hand, so feel free to reach out anytime! Please submit all letters of intents and bids to [email protected] [Less]