Monday was the first day of Akademy BoFs, group sessions and hacking. There is a wrapup session at the end of the day so that what happened in the different rooms can be shared with everyone including those not present.

Some of the tasks I had originally planned took a lot more time than expected. My last task was to add stats to games that track and store your overall game statistics. I’ve already began working on this and will get it merged after thoroughly getting it reviewed by my mentors.

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I had a wonderful time contributing to GNOME since I started this February. The amazing community and even more amazing mentors helped me learn new things and guided me all along the way which I would like to thank them for. I will surely keep contributing to GNOME.

Debian package builds with Clang were performed from time to time through massive rebuilds of the Debian archive on AWS. The results of these builds are published on clang.debian.net. This summer project aimed to automate Debian archive clang rebuilds by substituting the current clang builds in clang.debian.net with Open Build System (OBS) builds.

Our final product consists of a repository with salt states to deploy an OBS instance which triggers Clang builds of Debian Unstable packages as soon as they get uploaded by their maintainers.

So, my plans was always finish the full KDE1 port, and now on Akademy i have some time to get back to this pet project. Starting on Qt1 porting entirely to CMake because the experience on Qt2 was so good that i decided going back to that and do some of the same love on Qt1.

KDE 1 for that new port next. For now, i’m working on github, so https://github.com/heliocastro/qt1

With KDE Plasma 5 right now it turns out that if you have relied upon CPU-based software rendering, when hitting Plasma's lock-screen it would actually go CPU-wild -- as far as maxing out the CPU to 100% utilization, thereby consuming a lot of power and generating excess heat. That will be fixed for KDE Plasma 5.14.0.

Since May has been a bug report about the KScreenLocker greeter process going to 100% CPU usage and needing to wait 5~10 seconds after entering the user password before the screen would actually unlock. Several others also reported similar issues of this lock-screen managing to consume a lot of the CPU resources, including on ARM boards and older hardware.

As part of Google Summer of Code 2018, I worked on the project Pitivi: UI Polishing. This is my final report to showcase the work that I have done during the program.

If you have been less than satisfied with the user-interface of the Pitivi non-linear open-source video editor for Linux, you may want to try out their next release.

Student developer Harish Fulara spent his summer working on polishing the open-source video editor's interface as part of Google Summer of Code 2018.

Coming to the last week, the activity Note_names is finally developed and being tested on different platforms.

Principle: This activity aims to teach sight reading the musical notes and their position on the staff by presenting several notes one-by-one with animation from the right of the staff sliding to the right of the clef image. The user will get the combination of all the notes he has learned previously and the current targetted notes from the dataset. Only the reference notes are colored as red and the user is made to learn the notes around it using it as a leverage. One has to correct enough notes to get a 100% and advance to next stage.

As probably most of you already know, or recently found out, at the beginning of this week the GSoC coding period officially ended, and it is time for us, GSoC students, to submit our final evaluations and the results we achieved thus far. This blog post, as you can probably tell from the title, will be a summary of all of the work I put into modernising Five or More throughout the summer months.

My main task was rewriting Five or More in Vala since this simple and fun game did not find its way to the list of those included in the Games Modernisation Initiative. This fun, strategy game consists of aligning, as often as possible, five or more objects of the same shape and color, to make them disappear and score points.

After three months of hard work and a lot of coding the Google Summer of Code is over. I learned a lot and had a lot fun. GSoC was an amazing experience and I encourage everybody to participate in future editions. At this point I’ve been a contributor to GNOME for nearly a year, and I plan on sticking around for a long time. I really hope that other GSoC students also found it so enjoyable, and keep contributing to GNOME or other Free Software Projects.

For those that missed our announcements of last week’s Hackfest, you can watch it via the video embedded below. Most of this roundup will cover the work that has been done since the last roundup (in the specific sections in this blog) as well as the Hackfest, so if you don’t want to sit through the 10 hours of content, feel free to just keep reading.

The Solus Project has shared some of the work they've been engaged in this summer with their Linux distribution as well as their GTK3-based Budgie Desktop Environment.

If you are interested in community data analytics, you will have several opportunities to discuss them during Akademy.

Firstly, there will be my talk titled Bringing Community Data Analysis Back to KDE (why the hell did I use "Analysis" there... I only used "Analytics" everywhere so far, odd). It will happen on Saturday at 15:30 in room IE7. The slot is a bit small for the topic, but I'll try my best to create interest. Indeed you can catch me around talks to chat about it, and...

Secondly, there will be a BoF "Discussing Community Data Analytics" on Monday at 10:30 in room 127. We hope to see people coming up with interesting questions to explore or willing to lend a hand in those explorations. See you there!

Runtimes are a core part of the flatpak design. They are a way to make bundling feasible, while still fully isolating from the host system. Application authors can bundle the libraries specific to the application, but don’t have to care about the lowlevel dependencies that are uninteresting (yet important) for the application.

Many people think of runtimes primarily as a way to avoid duplication (and thus bloat). However, they play two other important roles. First of all they allow an independent stream of updates for core libraries, so even dead apps get fixes. And secondly, they allow the work of the bundling to be shared between all application authors.

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This runtime has the same name, and its content is very similar, but it is really a complete re-implementation. It is based on a new build system called BuildStream, which is much nicer and a great fit for flatpak. So, no more Yocto, no more buildbake, no multi-layer builds!

Additionally, it has an entire group of people working on it, including support from Codethink. Its already using gitlab, with automatic builds, CI, etc, etc. There is also a new release model (year.month) with a well-defined support time. Also, all the packages are much newer!

Gnome is also looking at using this as the basics for its releases, its CI system and eventually the Gnome runtime.