KDE News: New Releases, Qt 5.3 Preview, Indian Event, End of Nepomuk, Steam Inclusion, and Success Down Under
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-03-05 13:05:44 UTC
- Modified: 2014-03-05 13:08:27 UTC
Releases
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Today KDE released updates for its Applications and Development Platform, the third in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.12 series. This release also includes an updated Plasma Workspaces 4.11.7. Both releases contain only bugfixes and translation updates, providing a safe and pleasant update for everyone.
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For those KDE users wishing to learn more about the forthcoming "Plasma Next" desktop work alongside KDE Frameworks 5 and Qt5, there's new information available.
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Today KDE released the second alpha of Frameworks 5, part of a series of releases leading up to the final version planned for June 2014. This release includes progress since the previous alpha last month.
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Ubuntu derivatives have announced the first beta for 14.04 release. Since ‘daddy’ Ubuntu releases only one beta before final release the images for Unity are not available. Being a KDE user I am definitely looking forward to Kubuntu which will come with KDE Applications 4.12.2 along with newest Muon Software Center. I did notice a bug in Kubuntu beta and that’s freezing of installer if you have more than one hard drive attached to the system. I hope developers will fix this ‘deal breaking’ bug before the final release. Other betas are from Lubuntu, Xubuntu, Ubuntu Gnome and other members of Ubuntu family.
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The official release of Qt 5.3 is tentatively planned for April but with the feature freeze coming up we already have a good idea for the features of this next tool-kit release.
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Some developers have been interested in seeing Qt go back to doing feature-based releases rather than being time-based. Right now the Qt5 tool-kit is released about every six months regardless of the number of features, but generally with the Qt5 releases thus far they have also been quite heavy on features. Six month release cycles is not good enough for some developers (in either direction) but Lars Knoll decided to chime in on the discussion Monday about changing the Qt release cycle and how branching is done.
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Packages for the release of KDE SC 4.12.2 are available for Kubuntu 12.04LTS, 13.10 and our development release. You can get them from the Kubuntu Backports PPA. It includes an update of kde-workspace to 4.11.6.
KDE at India
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My own talk was about where KDE, both technically and socially/organizationally, is going, also resulted in quite a few questions. They ranged from "what does RTFM mean" to discussions about involvement of startups and decision making processes. Much of what I talked about won't be new for KDE people who follow what is going on in our community quite closely. I mostly extrapolate from trends which have been visible for quite a few years. But for those who are new or less close to our community, I plan on putting it in a blog post or two over the coming days/weeks.
Development
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There is news for others Cantor backends too. Now script editor load default syntax highlighting for each backend – in old versions it did not happen. And, if you push New button, the new script editor will have the default syntax highlighting working too.
Krunner
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If you’re a KDE user, you’re probably familiar with Krunner, a launcher application. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s a small popup window that appears at the top of your screen when you press “Alt+F2ââ¬Â³, which is the default shortcut for it. Krunner allows Plasma Workspace users to perform a lot of simple as well as much complex tasks. So, if you are a KDE SC user, you must get familiar with this pretty awesome tool.
Commentary
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The story of KDE's user revolt is well-known. What is less well known is that, in the six years since then, KDE has been steadily regaining its user-share.
Summer of Code
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KDE is happy to announce that it has been accepted as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code 2014. This will allow students from around the world to work with mentors on KDE software projects. Successful students will receive stipends from Google.
Nepomuk
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For years, KDE software has included a semantic (relationship-based) searching infrastructure. KDE's Semantic Search was built around concepts previously developed in a European Union-funded research project NEPOMUK which explored the use of relationships between data to improve search results. Based on these ideas, KDE's implementation of Semantic Search made it possible to search for all pictures - taken in - a particular place. On top of that, it added text search and tagging.
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It appears there isn't much of a future left to KDE's Nepomuk framework. It's going to be replaced going forward in the KDE land.
Steam
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Krita becomes one of the first open source illustration software to be greenlit for Steam. They started their campaign on 7th this month and the Steam community approved it in less than a fortnight. The Krita team is planning to integrate Big Picture, the Cloud and workshop in Gemini version. It will take some time for them to be commercially available on Steam.
Success Stories
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A fantastic interview with Bernard Gray (the IT guy for a wine company) surfaced recently, detailing the exploits of De Bortoli Wines of Austrailia. The Dot interviewed Bernard about his experience, and how he utilizes KDE in his Wine making company. Gray pegs himself as “a tertiary qualified programmer, and has been involved in either core development or supporting development with a few Open Source distros/projects over the years”. With experience under his belt, the long standing wine company, started in 1928, has been using GNU/Linux since the late 90ââ¬Â²s. Being no stranger to Linux, Bernard accelerated his Linux efforts in 2003, developing Graphical Terminals to replace existing thin clients at the company. The secret sauce for the project laid in “the fact that it runs out of a ramdisk and on generously spec’d desktop hardware, we finally managed to nail the trifecta of Cheap, Fast AND Good.”
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Today we proudly feature an interview with Bernard Gray from De Bortoli Wines, an Australian winemaking company.We spoke with Bernard Gray who has worked for the company for over 10 years in an IT project management and development role. He is, in his own words: ""a tertiary qualified programmer, and has been involved in either core development or supporting development with a few Open Source distros/projects over the years"".
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Good Explanation of Why IBM Has Chosen to Conceal Mass Layoffs (of 'Expensive' Staff) as "R.T.O." (Even For People Who Never Worked at the Office to Which They're Ordered to "Return")
- Many remaining IBM (or Red Hat) workers in Europe are in "cheaper" places such as Brno
- Microsoft's Serial Strangler and Matthew J. Garrett Join Forces in Trying to Gag Techrights (for Exposing Microsoft Corruption and Crimes Against Women)
- Whose terrible idea was it?
- Free University of Bozen-Bolzano Proud to Host Free Software Talk by Richard Stallman
- ahead of Monday's talk
- Slopwatch: Anti-Linux Machine-Generated FUD (LLM Slop) From GBHackers, CybersecurityNews, and Guardian Digital, Inc (Google News Promotes Slop Plagiarism, Misinformation)
- Companies that lie try to drown out the signal with falsehoods
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- Politicians Ought to Invite Dr. Richard Stallman and Prof. Eben Moglen to Speak About Policies, Licensing, Digital Sovereignty
- Is there something in Europe other than RMS' talk this coming Monday (that we're not yet aware of)?
- Links 22/02/2025: Labour Department Investigates Microsoft Infosys Amid Mass Layoffs, Large Law Firms Caught Red Handed With LLM Slop (Defrauding Clients and Courts)
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 22/02/2025: Analog Stuff, Sigil, and SSGs
- Links for the day
- Microsoft's Market Share in Cameroon Falls to New Lows
- This means a lot of Android users (iOS is about 4 times smaller), but Android does not mean freedom
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, February 21, 2025
- IRC logs for Friday, February 21, 2025
- The Streisand Effect is Real
- So don't be evil. Also, don't strangle women.
- Links 21/02/2025: Linux Foundation Openwashing, Microsoft Copilot Goes Down
- Links for the day
- Links 21/02/2025: Doomscrolling and European Ham Radio Show
- Links for the day
- Links 21/02/2025: TikTok Layoffs, WebOS Software Patents in Bad Hands
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 21/02/2025: Web Browsers, Mechanical Shortcuts, and Internet Hygiene
- Links for the day
- Richard Stallman 'Only' Founded the FSF
- there's no reason to be upset at the FSF for keeping their founder in the Board
- Techrights Disconnected From the United States Two Years Ago
- Did people really need to wait for the US government to become this hostile towards the media before recognising the threat?
- Before Trying Censorship by Extortion the Serial Strangler From Microsoft Literally Begged Us to Delete Pages
- This is very clearly just a broad campaign of intimidation
- Hype Watch: Weeks After Microsoft Disappointed Investors With "Hey Hi" It's Trying Some "Quantum" Hype (Adding Impractical Vapourware to Accompany This Hype and Even LLM Slop in 'News' Clothing)
- Remember "metaverse"? What happened to media hype about "blockchain" and "IoT"?
- Report About February Mass Layoffs at Microsoft (Third Wave of Microsoft Layoffs in 2025) Comes Back From the Dead
- Yesterday we wrote about an article in CRN (reporting Microsoft layoffs) being removed without any reasons specified
- Links 21/02/2025: Myanmar Scam Centre and Disruptions at USPTO
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, February 20, 2025
- IRC logs for Thursday, February 20, 2025
- gbhackers.com is Not Hackers, It's LLM Slop Outputs (Fake 'Articles') That Attack 'True Hackers'
- A site called linuxsecurity.com keeps doing this and now we see the slopfarm gbhackers.com doing the same
- Gemini Links 20/02/2025: Law of Warming and Cooling, Health, and Devlog
- Links for the day
- linuxsecurity.com Continues to Spread Lies or Machine-Generated FUD (Microsoft LLMs Likely the Source) About OpenSSH and Linux
- this LLM problem is global
- Links 20/02/2025: Microsoft Infosys Layoffs and IRS Layoffs (Good News for Rich Tax Evaders)
- Links for the day
- IBM Layoffs in Europe Already Happening or Underway (UK and Spain). They Try Not to Call These "Layoffs".
- "CIO" in particular was repeatedly mentioned lately, as was Consulting
- People Who Came From Microsoft Demanding Removal of Articles About Them, About Microsoft, and About Microsoft GitHub is "Generous" (According to Them)
- Imagine choosing a law firm that borrows money in the same year just to avoid overdraft in the bank!
- Possibly a Third Round of Mass Layoffs at Microsoft in 2025 ("Cloud Solution Architects, Customer Roles"), Report Removed or Censored
- This is literally the top story for "microsoft layoffs" right now
- Instead of 'DoS Protection' Cloudflare is Allegedly Conducting 'DoS Attacks' on Users of Browsers Other Than Firefox and GAFAM's DRM Sandboxes (Chrome, Safari and Others)
- If you value the Web, you will avoid Cloudflare
- Mixing Real With Fake in One 'Article' (by "Director of Content, Help Net Security")
- From what we can gather, he got machines to generate some slop for him
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, February 19, 2025
- IRC logs for Wednesday, February 19, 2025