A new release of Kraft, the Qt- and KDE based software to help to organize business docs in small companies, has arrived.

A couple of days ago version 0.82 was released. It mainly is a bugfix release, but it also comes with a few new features. Users were asking for some new functions that they needed to switch to Kraft with their business communication, and I am always trying to make that a priority.

The most visible feature is a light rework of the calculation dialog that allows users to do price calculations for templates. It was cleared up, superflous elements were finally removed and the remaining ones now work as expected. The distinction between manual price and calculated price should be even more clear now. Time calculations can now not only done in the granularity of minutes, as this was to coarse for certain usecases. The unit for a time slice can now be either seconds, minutes or hours.

• Qt 5.12 beta2 released

  We have published Qt 5.12 beta2 today. As earlier you can get it via online installer. Delta to beta1 attached.

• Qt 5.12 Beta 2 Brings Many Fixes

  Just two weeks after the Qt 5.12 beta release, a second beta is now available for testing of this forthcoming tool-kit update.

  The Qt 5.12 Beta 2 update is made up of bug fixes with changes ranging from build fixes for different platforms to disabling mouse tracking by default within the QtWebGLPlugin to fixed Ozone platform detection. There are more than 200 changes to Qt 5.12 that have been queued over the past two weeks.

  The complete list of the 200+ changes that are mostly fixes in Qt 5.12 Beta 2 can be found via today's release announcement with the attached change-log.

• Krita at the University of La Plata

  Sebastian Labi ha sido invitado para presentar Krita en el Laboratorio de herramientas de software libre de la Universidad de La Plata. Hablará sobre ilustración digital y usará Krita para dar una demostración de cómo usar Krita para el campo de la Ilustración Digital.

  El SLAD- FBA (Software libre para Arte y diseño) es una nueva unidad de de investigación y formación en la Facultad de Bellas Artes que promueve el conocimiento y uso del software libre en la capacitación académica de la Universidad de La Plata.

• LaKademy 2018 – Third and Fourth Days (October 13th and 14th)

  The third day of LaKademy 2018 was my last day participating on the event.

  During October 13th, we started the day with a promo reunion. This reunion was done to discuss about some plans and actions for the Latin American KDE community over the next year. Some decisions were made and topics were discussed involving KDE participation in some events, promotion of our own events in Latin America, including LaKademy 2019 and Kafé com Qt, and some details in general about our community.

Linux is much like the stock market. Moments of happiness broken by crises. Or is the other way around? Never mind. Today shall hopefully be a day of joy, for I am about to test Plasma 5.14, the latest version of this neat desktop environment. Recently, I’ve had a nice streak of good energy with Linux, mostly thanks to my experience with Slimbook Pro2, which I configured with Kubuntu Beaver. Let’s see if we can keep the momentum.

Now, before we begin, there are more good news woven into this announcement. As you can imagine, you do need some kind of demonstrator to test the new desktop. Usually, it’s KDE neon, which offers a clean, lean, mean KDE-focused testing environment. You can boot into the live session, try the desktop, and if you like it, you can even install it. Indeed, neon is an integral part of my eight-boot setup on the Lenovo G50 machine. But what makes things really interesting is that neon has also switched to the latest Ubuntu LTS base. It now comes aligned to the 18.04 family, adorned with this brand new Plasma. Proceed.

• Support KDE via AmazonSmile

  For quite some time, the KDE e.V. – KDE’s non-profit organization – is listed in the AmazonSmile program.

• The Last Day of the Krita Sprint and the Last Day of the Krita Fundraiser

  We fully intended to make a post every day to keep everyone posted on what’s happening here in sunny Deventer, the Netherlands.

• Who is Hiring?

  Just as quick info: For some time, there is a sticky thread on r/cpp about who is hiring C++ developers. This thread gets cleaned quarterly, so all the open jobs listed there are likely still open.

• KDE chalks up another year with cash to back community

  The KDE Project, a group that puts out a desktop environment that is used by numerous GNU/Linux distributions, has received two big donations that will enable it to do more to support the community, according to the president of the project, Lydia Pintscher.

  In a Twitter thread to mark the 22nd birthday of the project — which came to life on 14 October 1996 — Pintscher said over the past year the project had rallied behind the three goals that it cared about: privacy, onboarding and usability and productivity.

  KDE was started by German software developer Matthias Ettrich with the aim of providing GNU/Linux users with all the functionality that Windows had at the time.

• Screen reader accessibility for the Plasma desktop

  It’s been rather quiet when it comes to accessibility in KDE land for a while. But I’m very happy to see some movement and fresh energy, moving in a good direction.

  If you’re curious about making our software available to more users, improving it for everyone (for example keyboard usability), now is the time to join. We are talking on the accessibility mailing list. It’s still to early to say what the exact plan will look like, but there will be progress. Thanks to the last Randa meeting, we reached the point where a few things in Plasma do work with a screen reader, enough to let a few brave souls experiment with it. Now we’ll have to structure what needs improvements, I could imaging defining some workflows.