K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Conf.kde.in 2014 - Knowledge. Power. Freedom.

  The primary goal of the conference was to encourage people to get involved with open source and to understand its power and its reach. We also wanted to help them get started by teaching them the basics and by getting them to know more about KDE. When the conference was over, it didn't matter how many lines of code anyone could understand or even actually write. If some people were convinced of the magic of open source and of KDE, and are now willing to be contributors to this noble cause even if only slightly, then the event accomplished its aim. Events, speakers and mentors like these add fuel to the fire inside. Students were inspired to reach out and experience the power of free and open source technology.

• “KDE5″ and Wayland

  As my readers probably know there won’t be a combined release as the software compilation used to be. There are independent ongoing projects around the libraries (frameworks or KF5) the workspaces (Plasma Next) and the applications. These projects have independent release cycles and are not one product. I know, I know, many people will disagree and say that it’s still one. But if we go for this strong simplification both “will support Wayland” and “will not support Wayland” are true.





• The State Of Wayland Support With KDE Frameworks 5, Plasma Next





• oldest krunner plugin ported to sprinter

  Today I ported the ~7.5 year-old "services" KRunner plugin to Sprinter and added support for some of the new Sprinter features in the process, which I show in the video below. It felt like something of a milestone to have the first plugin I wrote for KRunner now running on libsprinter. :)

• Not the monday report but some clarification

  "Community" why is that more important than "Design"? Because it is design. It is the basis of Open Source Design. One of my favorite distros and desktops (aside from Plasma Desktop) is Crunchbang. It's one of my first pure Linux Loves and will always have a certain place in my heart.Crunchbang got one huge chunk of design right: communication. Design is communication - it is not just "make pretty", its the ability to communicate goals, ideals and ideas to a group. In Open Source the benefit we have is that everyone can be a part - we use it in almost every aspect, from the Kernel up to Widget programming. But we tend to forget Design because design have a myth about it of the "Lone Genius" and that "Design by committee" it's supposed counterpart is somehow "bad for design".

• KDE Ships First Beta of Applications and Platform 4.13

• First beta of KDE Applications 4.13 is out

  It’s Christmas time for KDE Software users, the team has just announced the first beta of the 4.13 versions of Applications and Development Platform. This release also marks a freeze on APIs, dependencies and features so the team will now focus on hunting down bugs and polish it further.

• Replacing KDE4 with Xfce

  With these things in mind, I very quickly focused on two desktop managers that might provide the desired desktop: Xfce and Trinity. Since I prefer to use openSUSE as the underlying operating system and Xfce is one of the desktop manager options fully supported by openSUSE installations, Xfce was an obvious first choice for consideration. This article will consider the Xfce desktop manager from the perspective of a KDE4 user and it is addressed to all those KDE4 users who feel similarly frustrated with the development direction KDE4 has taken.





• Krita Lime: Localization Support

• Krita 2.8.0 Milestone Release, Steam [Ubuntu Installation]

  Krita 2.8.0 was released yesterday, and this version comes with quite a big list of changes. In addition to the new features that were implemented, Krita is also available for Windows with an installer available from here.

• Major new version of free Photoshop replacement Krita released for Linux and Windows

  
  
  

  The KDE Project has released a major new version of its Krita image editing software, with the latest version of the free and open source Photoshop replacement available for both Windows and Linux.
  
  The latest update, version 2.8, marks a significant milestone for the software, marking the first stable version of the software released for Windows.





• Krita 2.8 Provides Many New Features To Artists

  Krita 2.8 offers better tablet support based upon Qt's tablet code, a new high-quality scaling mode for Krita's OpenGL canvas, a new wrap-around mode, new brush presets, a layer picker, support for G'mic filters, and tons of new artist features and other improvements.





• Calligra 2.8 Released

  The Calligra team is proud and pleased to announce the release of version 2.8 of the Calligra Suite, Calligra Active and the Calligra Office Engine. This version is the result of thousands of commits which provide new features, polishing of the user experience and bug fixes.





• KDE Commit-Digest for 2nd February 2014

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Ubuntu Gnome wants to get LTS status

  Ubuntu Gnome team wants to join the elite club of Ubuntu flavours which enjoy the LTS (Long Term Support) status. 14.04 is going to be an LTS release and its apt for Ubuntu Gnome team to get extended support of 2 years and 3 months as an LTS release which will make it easier for those users to use Gnome who want to use stable LTS releases.





• GNOME Music 3.12 Beta 2 Arrives with Minor Improvements and Bugfixes

  Several other minor improvements have been added to this release, and various bugs have been fixed, including the removal of the “Now Playing” entry from the App Menu, songs are no longer being replayed when they’re paused, the current track is now restarted when the Previous button is clicked, and the position is greater than 3 seconds.

Mixed

• Why XFCE beats KDE and GNOME

  The sleeper desktop environment – which I didn’t even considered years ago – has been XFCE. I've found that XFCE offers more robustness than say, LXDE, which lacks much of XFCE's polish in its default configuration. XFCE provides all the benefits one may have enjoyed in GNOME 2, but with a lightweight experience that makes it a hit on older computers.

• Linux desktop environment Mate achieves 1.8 release

  Linux users do not like change. Well, actually, they do not like change for the sake of change. If something works, they typically hang on to it until something truly better comes along. A good example of this is GNOME 2. People love it and it works well. However, the GNOME Project moved to version 3 and radically changed how it works. GNOME purists were angry as version 2 worked just fine -- for them. And so, many hung onto the outdated version, shunning version 3.





• Totally Legal, LMDE Reviews, and R-E-S-P-E-C-T