KDE Archive

The PinePhone – KDE Community edition includes most of the essential features a smartphone user would expect and its functionalities increase day by day. You can follow the progress of the development of apps and features in the Plasma Mobile blog. Plasma Mobile is a direct descendant from KDE’s successful Plasma desktop. The same underlying technologies drive both environments and apps like KDE Connect that lets you connect phones and desktops, the Okular document reader, the VVave music player, and others, are available on both desktop and mobile. Thanks to projects like Kirigami and Maui, developers can write apps that, not only run in multiple environments but that also gracefully adapt by growing into landscape format when displayed on workstation screen and shrinking to portrait mode on phones. Developers are rapidly populating Plasma Mobile with essential programs, such as web browsers, clocks, calendars, weather apps and games, all of which are being deployed on all platforms, regardless of the layout. This seems like a really interesting combination, and I really want to see if I can get my hands on a review unit.

A big update for the venerable KDE desktop. Everyday utilities and tools, such as the Panels, Task Manager, Notifications and System Settings, have all been overhauled to make them more usable, efficient, and friendlier. Meanwhile, developers are hard at work adapting Plasma and all its bits and pieces to Wayland. Once done, Plasma will not only be readier for the future, but will also work better with touchscreens and multiple screens with different refresh rates and DPIs. Plasma will also offer better support for hardware-accelerated graphics, be more secure, and enjoy many more advantages. Although still work in progress, 5.20 already offers users many of the benefits of Plasma on Wayland. This is a substantial release that’s pretty much a must for every KDE user. I can’t wait until Wayland can truly be used as the default, and I feel that moment is actually quite, quite close now.

KDE and Slimbook, a Spanish Linux laptop manufacturer, have announced the third iteration of the KDE Slimbook. The KDE Slimbook runs KDE Neon, and sports the latest and greatest AMD technology. Inside the svelte body, you will find the AMD Ryzen 7 4800 H processor — another first, as currently no other manufacturer offers Linux laptops with Ryzen 4000 series CPUs, with 8 cores and 16 threads, up to 64 GBs of DDR4 RAM that runs at 3200 MHz, and three USB ports, a USB-C port, an HDMI socket, a RJ45 for wired network connections, as well as support for the new Wifi 6 standard. The KDE Slimbook comes in two sizes: the 14-inch screen version weighs only 1.1 kg, and the 15.6-inch version weighs 1.5 kg. The screens themselves are Full HD IPS LED panels and cover 100% the sRGB range, making colors more accurate and life-like, something that designers and photographers will appreciate. This is looking like a great offering, and the KDE team has put me in contact with Slimbook to see if I can receive a review unit. This would be a great alternative to the System76 Lemur Pro, which we reviewed a few weeks ago.

Plasma 5.19 is out! If we gave alliterative names to Plasma releases, this one could be “Polished Plasma”. The effort developers have put into squashing bugs and removing annoying papercuts has been immense. In this release, we have prioritized making Plasma more consistent, correcting and unifying designs of widgets and desktop elements; worked on giving you more control over your desktop by adding configuration options to the System Settings; and improved usability, making Plasma and its components easier to use and an overall more pleasurable experience. It’s been a joy to follow the focus on fixing papercuts in KDE and its applications, and now’s the time to give it a go through something like KDE Neon.

There’s a storm brewing in the world of Qt and KDE, as the parent company of Qt, The Qt Company, is contemplating restricting new Qt releases to paying customers (i.e., not releasing them as open source) for twelve months. This obviously affects the KDE project considerably, who have been negotiating with The Qt Company for years now. An announcement made by The Qt Company in January derailed said negotiations, however. As KDE’s Olaf Schmidt-Wischhöfer explains: They announced that LTS releases of Qt will only be available for paid license holders. It is still unclear what this implies for contributions to Qt and for the sharing of security fixes between the various parties (including The Qt Company, the many Qt experts contributing, the KDE community, and Linux distributions). It seemed the two parties were working on a path forward acceptable to all parties involved, but then came the announcement earlier today that The Qt Company was contemplating restricting all releases to paid customers for twelve months. It seems bad blood has been brewing for a while, as Schmidt-Wischhöfer states: The Qt Company says that they are willing to reconsider the approach only if we offer them concessions in other areas. I am reminded, however, of the situation half a year ago. We had discussed an approach for contract updates, which they suddenly threw away by restricting LTS releases of Qt instead. All software changes in Qt will still be available at as Open Source as required by our contract – maybe with a delay of 12 months if the company decides to part ways with the communities. We will continue to work on a contract update that helps all sides. But even if these negotiations were to be unilaterally stopped by The Qt Company, Qt will stay Open Source, and KDE will be able to use it. I am also absolutely sure that the Qt + KDE communities will continue cooperation on new features, bug fixes, and security fixes, even should The Qt Company decide to forgo the benefits of cooperation. Luckily for the future of KDE and Qt, there is an agreement in place between KDE and The Qt Company that states that “ should The Qt Company discontinue the development of the Qt Free Edition under the required licenses, then the Foundation has the right to release Qt under a BSD-style license or under other open source licenses.” This is a serious issue that I hope can be resolved, as nobody will benefit from a serious rift between The Qt Company and the KDE project.

Some very nice performance fixes landed this week, which should substantially boost move and copy speeds for local transfers and transfers to and from Samba shares in particular. But that’s not all, and there’s more on the menu… Every week, there’s a blog post highlighting the various changes, bugfixes, small new features, fixed paper cuts, and other small changes within KDE and its associated projects and programs. They’re a joy to read, and I would love it if more major software projects did this.

KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative is now almost two years old, and I’ve been blogging weekly progress for a year and a half. So I thought it would be a good time to take stock of the situation: how far we’ve come, and what’s left to do. Let’s dive right in! This initiative has been a lot of fun to follow. If you always update to the latest KDE release – for instance by using KDE Neon – you’ll see the weekly fixes and polishes highlighted in the blog posts appear on your machine very quickly.

From the 22nd to 26th of March, members of the KDE Privacy team met up in Leipzig, Germany, for our Spring 2019 sprint. During the sprint, we floated a lot of different ideas that sparked plenty of discussions. The notion of privacy encompasses a wide range of topics, technologies and methods, so it is often difficult to decide what to focus on. However, all the aspects we worked on are important. We ended up tackling a variety of issues, and we are confident that our contributions will improve data protection for all users of KDE software. Quite a few ideas became reality for upcoming KDE releases. Good work.

A user by the name of grem75 has uploaded two screenshots of KDE 0.1 to imgur, and they offer a very intriguing look at just how far we’ve come. I’ve only found this RPM, no source unfortunately. This is installed on Red Hat 4.1 with Qt 1.33. Impressive amount of progress for being so early in development. The project had been announced in October 1996, this package was built in February 1997. There really were no complete desktop environments available for Linux at the time, most distros shipped with FVWM and some assortment of applications from various toolkits. Gnome didn’t start until August of 1997. XFCE existed, but was just a panel for FVWM. I’ve recently made the jump from Windows 10 to KDE Neon on my laptop, and after so many rocky years through KDE 4.x, I have to say the KDE desktop environment currently exists in an incredibly polished and attractive state, striking a perfect balance between attractiveness, usability, and customisability. KDE is currently an absolute pleasure to use for me, and I can’t wait to see what else they’ve got coming up (preferably a lot of work on either reworking or replacing Kmail with a smaller, more focused email application). In any event, this is the first time I’ve felt at home on a desktop environment on Linux since the glory days of GNOME 2.x and KDE 3.x, and I couldn’t be happier. These two KDE 0.1 screenshots remind me of just how far we’ve come.