KDE Official News

KDE is a highly diverse community and every one of our contributors has his or her own motives, such as having fun, developing new skills and meeting nice people. However, a common desire unites all of KDE: to change the world for the better. This shared motivation, although the major driving force behind KDE, has never really been made explicit.

A survey conducted among KDE contributors and users last year showed that the respondents were missing exactly that: an explicit vision and strategy for KDE. As a result, we began working on a shared vision at last year's Akademy (KDE's annual contributor conference). After months of collecting ideas and holding open discussion across our community, we have united around a simple statement of what we want to achieve:

A world in which everyone has control over their digital life and enjoys freedom and privacy.

This is our vision.

Read on for details on what each part of the vision means to us.

The KDE e.V. report for the fourth quarter of 2014 is available (PDF). It features a compendium of all the activities and events carried out, supported and funded by KDE e.V. in that period, as well as the reporting of major events, conferences and mentoring programs that KDE has been involved in.

Today KDE released KDE Applications 15.08, the collection of more than 150 applications. This release features the Kontact Suite and Dolphin ported to KDE Frameworks 5.

Kontact Suite technical preview

Over the past several months, the KDE PIM team put a lot of effort into porting Kontact to Qt 5 and KDE Frameworks 5. In addition, data access performance has been improved considerably by an optimized communication layer. The KDE PIM team is focused on further polishing the Kontact Suite, and would appreciate feedback. For detailed information about KDE PIM changes, see Laurent Montel's blog.

Kdenlive and Okular

This release of Kdenlive includes fixes in the DVD wizard, along with many bug-fixes and other features, including the integration of some bigger refactorings. More information about Kdenlive changes can be seen in its changelog. Okular now supports Fade transition in the presentation mode.

Plasma Mobile offers a Free (as in freedom and beer), user-friendly, privacy-enabling, customizable platform for mobile devices. Plasma Mobile is Free software, and is now developed via an open process. Plasma Mobile is currently under development with a prototype available providing basic functions to run on a smartphone.

Plasma Mobile offers...

• Freedom. Plasma Mobile is Free and Open Source software. It can be acquired free of charge, with the power and licensed rights to change it in any way, to redistribute it and to understand how it works.
• User-friendliness. Plasma Mobile is designed via an open process, making sure that the requirements and wishes of users are heard and implemented in the best possible way. Ergonomy and integration across devices on top of a high quality software stack provides a stable, rich and reliable system that helps users get things done efficiently and effectively.
• Privacy. Plasma Mobile integrates with services trusted by the user. Instead of depending on claims from hardware or operating system vendors, trust is based on software that has been audited in an open development process, Free and Open Source software that can be combined with services from trusted sources, including those of one's own.
• Customization and personalization. Plasma Mobile has been built with modularity from the ground up. From the wallpaper and the Look and Feel to lower-level system components, almost every aspect of the system can be customized.

Today, the KDE Community is happy to announce the release of KDE Applications 15.04.2.

Today, the KDE Community is happy to announce the release of KDE Applications 15.04.1.

This minor update includes a number of bugfixes, focusing especially on Kdenlive, Okular, Umbrello, and Marble. In addition to software bugs, issues with translations have also been addressed in this release.

Beyond the core of KDE Applications, this update includes a long-term support update for the Plasma Workspaces (4.11.19), the KDE Development Platform (4.14.8), and the Kontact Suite (4.14.8).

To learn more about this release, refer to the full announcement.

KDE app dragons

Today KDE released KDE Applications 14.12, delivering new features and bug fixes to more than a hundred applications. Most of these applications are based on KDE Development Platform 4 but the first applications have been ported to KDE Frameworks 5. Frameworks is a set of modularized libraries providing additional functionality for Qt5, the latest version of the popular Qt cross-platform application framework.

This release marks the beginning of a new style of releases replacing the threesome of KDE Workspaces, Platform and Applications in the 4 series which ended with the latest KDE Applications update last month.

Releases of KDE Frameworks are now a monthly feature. The release of KDE Frameworks 5.3 brings many small, but important fixes including:

• KWindowSystem has added features needed for future versions of KWin,
• KTextEditor used in Kate fixes memory leaks,
• Frameworkintegration was fixed for Qt 5.4, and
• KActivities can load plugins at runtime.

A detailed listing of all Frameworks and other third party Qt libraries is at inqlude.org, the curated archive of Qt libraries. A complete list with API documentation is on api.kde.org.

The KDE Community has announced the latest major updates to KDE Applications delivering primarily improvements and bugfixes. Plasma Workspaces and the KDE Development Platform are frozen and receiving only long term support; those teams are focused on the transition to Plasma 5 and Frameworks 5. This 4.14 release is dedicated to long time KDE contributor Volker Lanz who passed away last April. The full announcement has more information and details.

KDE has released the third beta of the 4.14 versions of Applications and Development Platform. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing. Your assistance is requested!

A more detailed list of the improvements and changes will be available for the final release in the middle of August.