After a second release 5.1.0 published one month ago, the digiKam team is proud to announce the new release 5.2.0 of digiKam Software Collection. This version introduces a new bugs triage and some fixes following new feedback from end-users.

This release introduce also a new red eyes tool which automatize the red-eyes effect reduction process. Faces detection is processed on whole image and a new algorithm written by a Google Summer of Code 2016 student named Omar Amin is dedicated to recognize shapes and try to found eyes with direct flash reflection on retina.

The KDE and Xfce editions of Linux Mint 18 "Sarah" recently came out. Over a month ago, I had reviewed the MATE edition, and while I was generally happy with how it worked, there were a handful of minor usability issues and other niggles that detracted from the experience enough that I couldn't recommend that a newbie install it by him/herself. Given that, I wanted to see if maybe the KDE or Xfce editions could make up for the deficiencies that I observed in the MATE edition. Follow the jump to see what each is like. Given that the main base of Linux Mint 18 "Sarah" is common to all of these editions, I'm not going to spend too much time rehashing things like application installation for their own sake; instead, these reviews will be shorter, and will focus on the differences relative to the MATE edition.

• KDE Plasma Lock Screen

• KDE and FSF relationships

• Last chance for Randa Meetings 2017 date selection

• Day 7 and last at Akademy 2016

• I’ve been trying KMail and…

  Finally my experience with KMail is a good experience, and I think I won’t need to go back to Thunderbird. Guys, you did great job since KDE4 on this project. There is still some bugs and UX issues, but IMHO you are on the right tracks. Keep up the good work!

• Now Dock Panel & Plasmoid v0.3, is here....

• A circle closes…

• Releasing the 4.1.0 Ubuntu SDK IDE

  We have based the new IDE on the most recent QtCreator upstream release, which brings a lot of new features and fixes.

• To EGLStream or not

  The announcement of KDE Neon dev/unstable switching to Wayland by default raised quite a few worried comments as NVIDIA’s proprietary driver is not supported. One thing should be clear: we won’t break any setups. We will make sure that X11 is selected by default if the given hardware setup does not support Wayland. Nevertheless I think that the amount of questions show that I should discuss this in more detail.

• Interview with Danny

  I was looking for something like Photoshop but for drawing that wasn’t that expensive and had good tools. Then I came across Krita, which is a free program, that was one thing, and it has a lot of tools, which most free programs haven’t got.

• KDE 20th Birthday Party in Karlsruhe

• KDE at 20: Plasma 5.8 LTS Beta. Here for the Long Term.

• QtCon && Akademy 2016

• Breeze mimetype WIP

• Breeze icons got gnome support

• Mimetype updates

Thursday, 15 September 2016. Today KDE releases a beta of its first Long Term Support edition of its flagship desktop software, Plasma. This marks the point where the developers and designers are happy to recommend Plasma for the widest possible audience be they enterprise or non-techy home users. If you tried a KDE desktop previously and have moved away, now is the time to re-assess, Plasma is simple by default, powerful when needed.