Last week’s updates to Tumbleweed brought several new packages to openSUSE’s rolling release like Kmail 5, KDE Framework 5.18.0 and updates to Perl and YaST.

This week’s snapshot has KDE Applications 15.12.1, which contains only bugfixes and translation updates, and the virtual globe and world atlas Marble updated to from 15.08.3 to the 15.12.1 version.

• Kdenlive: Café, Sprint and More

  And for the pleasure, here is a screenshot of Kdenlive's clip monitor where you can see several of the new features that are currently being worked on for the 16.04 release. The monitor looks a bit cluttered like this but it's just for the demo - everything is configurable.

• Creating a Qt 5 port to Apple tvOS

  Back in November, Apple released the latest generation of it’s Apple TV product. Besides the slightly improved hardware, the true new feature is the OS which is now officially based on iOS and comes with the dedicated SDK and App Store! So we started investigating what it would take to port Qt to tvOS and start writing some apps for the big screen.

• App Review of GCompris: Kids' Happiness

  If you have children, you know how hard it is to make a child happy and interested in something for a long time. But there is an easy way to do that: show them GCompris. It is a really great game set for children 2-10 years old and they surely will like it. You may ask, if GCompris is really so good, and I would answer you "Yes". And that is not a joke. Here are some proofs of that. But, you know, nothing is ideal, so I will also mention its bad sides (unfortunately, they are present too).

• KDE Ships Plasma 5.5.4, bugfix Release for January

• KDE Plasma 5.5.4 Lands with Notification Improvements for Multi-Monitor Setups

  Today, January 26, 2016, KDE proudly announced that the fourth maintenance release for the Plasma 5 desktop environment is now available for GNU/Linux distribution vendors to compile and push to their default repositories for users to update.

• Interview with Cremuss

  I grew a bit tired of it during high school so I stopped for a time and it’s only after finishing high school that I wanted to start digging into CG software again. I was fully converted to open-source projects and GNU/Linux at this moment so in my mind I obviously had to give Blender a try. I learned it, loved it and fall in love with video game art while helping with the development of an open source video game/engine, SpringRTS.

• Plasma tricks: custom title bars for apps and some consistency

  Plasma 5 comes with a very cool feature: KWin can set a different colour scheme for title bar of each app (basing on app identity or title of the window).

• In the Mansion House

  Here is deepest Padania a 4 story mansion provides winter cover to KDE developers working to free your computers.

• Goin’ to FOSDEM

  I’ve skipped a few years, but I’m looking forward to seeing some of the familiar KDE faces there, as well as finally meeting a couple of the KDE-FreeBSD folks. There’s a long list of familiar faces at the Legal Devroom. For once, I have a plan of talks that I want to see, even some that I can claim are work-work related (yay!). Whether I’ll be useful at the KDE booth, I don’t know: last time I was there there was Plasma-desktop to be demonstrated and me with still KDE4 on my laptop. I’m not a good poster child for the modern generation.

• Seasons of KDE (2)

  As mentioned in my earlier post, the KIOSK framework changed a lot between KDE3 and Plasma. So using the old code and simply port it to kf5 was not an option. My Mentor suggested, I start implementing profile support, which is one of the key feature of KIOSK.

• Next Kdenlive Cafés

  This is an opportunity for Kdenlive developers and users to exchange ideas, talk about how we want to see the Kdenlive project evolve and also discuss how you can help us on that way!

• Plasma tricks: start a torrent from another device

  Are you browsing the web with your Android smart-phone/tablet and suddenly you see that your favourite distro just release the ISO you are waiting? Do you want to tap on “download” and start the torrent but… do you want to use your PC instead of the current device? OK here KDE Connect and KTorrent are your heroes. Let’s see how to setup all.

• Wrapping up the Google Code-In

• Kicking off 2016 — the first Krita Sprint

  This weekend, we had our place full of hackers again. The Calligra Text Layout Sprint coincided with the Krita 2016 Kick-Off Sprint. Over the course of the sprint, which started on Wednesday, we had two newcomers to KDE-related hacking sprints, and during the weekend, we had an unusual situation for free software: actual gender parity.

• New Year Calligra Words Sprint

  When the streets are covered with snow and ice in many parts of Europe, it’s a good time to sit inside in front of our computers and to improve that software we are sharing here with each other.

In the meantime, I’d like to talk a bit about another foundation on which Plasma Mobile is built: Its vision. As I’ve already laid out in my blog post about creating a vision for the KDE PIM Framework, a vision is very important to align the work in a project towards a common goal, and to inspire those contributing it. Inspired by the talk Andrew Lake and I had just given at Akademy about product/ project visions, it did not take much convincing to get the Plasma Mobile team to start working on a vision.