By Johnny Jazeix

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a global, online event that focuses on bringing new contributors into open source software development. Like every year, KDE applied and aimed to integrate more and more developers. In 2022, KDE's participation in GSoC covered nine projects to improve KDE, of which six were successfully completed.

Snehit Sah worked on adding Spaces Support to NeoChat. Spaces is a Matrix tool that allows you to discover new rooms by exploring areas, and is also a way to organize your rooms by categories. The code is still not merged to the main branch.

Suhaas Joshi worked on permission management for Flatpak and Snap applications in Discover. This allows you to change the permissions granted to an application (e.g. file system, network, and so on) and also makes it easier to review them. The code is in two separate repositories, one for Flatpak applications which is ready to be used, and one for Snap applications which is still work in progress.

This year we had two projects to improve digiKam. The first one is from Quoc Hung Tran who worked on a new plugin to process Optical Character Recognition (OCR). The code has been merged and allows you to extract text from images and store the output inside the EXIF data or within a separate file. The plugin is also used to organize scanned text images with contents.

The second project is from Phuoc Khanh LE who worked on improving the Image Quality Sorter algorithms. The code has already been merged into digiKam and improves sorting images by quality using multiple criteria, for example, noise, exposure and compression.

For GCompris, KDE's educational software suite, Samarth Raj worked on adding activities for for using the 10's complements to add numbers. The activity will be split into three activities. One was finished during GSoC, the other two are still work in progress.

Two students worked on the painting application Krita. Xu Che worked on adding pixel-perfect ellipses in Krita. The work is still in progress and, once it is done, it will be merged. This will allow pixel artists to use Krita effectively.

Meanwhile, Reinold Rojas worked on exporting Krita images to SVG. The project provides more options to share files with Inkscape, and will help create translatable images with text for Krita Manual without knowledge of Inkscape. The code is still work in progress.

GSoC has again provided our nine contributors the opportunity to exercise their programming skills in real-world projects, allowing them to improve not only their code, but also their communication skills. We would like to thank all the mentors without whom these opportunities would not have been possible. We would also like to extend our appreciation to all the coders who invested their energy and passion into these two months of coding.

From the notes by Aniqa Khokhar, Jonathan Esk-Riddell, and Paul Brown

Akademy 2022 was held in Barcelona from the 1st to the 7th of October. As usual, the weekend of Saturday 1st of October and Sunday 2nd of October was dedicated to talks, panels and presentations. Community members and guests laid out for attendees what had been going on within KDE's projects (and adjacent projects), the state of the art, and where things were headed.

Read on to find out in detail what went on during the conference phase of Akademy 2022:

Day 1 - Saturday, Oct. 1st

At 10 o'clock sharp, Aleix Pol, President of KDE, opened this year's Akademy before an audience jittering with excitement. The attendees were animated with good reason: this was the first major in-person event for the KDE Community in two years. Old friends were seeing each other after a long time, and we were also meeting many new friends that we had only ever talked to online.

During his introduction, Aleix remarked on how important this year's event was for the community, and especially for him, as Barcelona is Aleix's home town, and the Universitat Politécnica de Barcelona, the venue where activities were being held, his alma mater. After informing everyone about the logistics of the event, Aleix introduced the first keynote speakers: Volker Hilsheimer and Pedro Bessa from Qt Company.

Volker and Pedro kicked off the talks proper with Volker introducing what is in store for us regarding Qt6.5 and beyond. Pedro laid out the new plans Qt Company has to upgrade the engagement with the Qt community, including KDE developers and contributors.

Then it was time to talk about KDE's goals, the projects that become a top priority for the community for two years. The goals were started in 2017 program, and the first three goals set in that year covered improving the usability and productivity for basic software, enhancing privacy in KDE software, and streamlining the onboarding of new contributors. The second set of goals started in 2019 and finished now, with this Akademy. They covered solving visual inconsistencies in KDE's software and its components, promoting apps, and improving the implementation of Wayland in Plasma.

The goals voted on by the community this year cover the areas of accessibility, sustainability and ways of making internal KDE processes and workflows more efficient. Adam Szopa, KDE's Project Coordinator, will be going into detail about what each team intends to do and how they will carry things through in a separate article which will appear here next week. It is pretty clear that in the same way prior goals helped give the community focus and improved KDE and its software, these will do the same.

After lunch, the talks were split into two tracks and, in track one Tomaz Canabrava discussed Konsole, KDE's powerful terminal emulator, and what the future held for the project. Meanwhile, in room 2, Nate Graham covered his traditional Konquering the World - Are we there yet? in which he updates attendees on the progress KDE is making in tech markets and user adoption.

Later, Devin Lin and Bhushan Shah of Plasma Mobile told the audience all about the progress KDE's mobile platform has made throughout the year. In room 2, a panel made up of Joseph De Veaugh-Geiss, Nicolas Fella (via videoconference), Karanjot Singh (in a pre-recorded video), and Lydia Pintscher informed the audience about the progress made by KDE Eco and what were the next steps for the project.

After a short break, David Edmundson took to the stage in room 1 and told us all about the success of the Steam Deck, how the people at Valve were surprised at how popular KDE's Plasma desktop had become among users, and how they were using it in unexpected numbers and ways. David also revealed that the Steam Deck had already sold more than a million units and was still going strong. In room 2, David Cahalane tackled the difficult issue of accessibility and explained how improving it for KDE Plasma and apps would help more users adopt KDE, not only because it would facilitate the usage of the software itself, but also because it would make the desktop and apps compliant with accessibility rules in public institutions and companies across the world.

Back in room 1, Aleix explained how KDE's Plasma had transcended the concept of desktop, as it was now moving into the territory of mobile and smart household appliances, like phones, cars and TVs. In Room 2, Harald Sitter talked about Bugs and how frustrating it is when the system keeps crashing, how to identify the causes, and what tools were available to solve the issues.

For the final talk of the day, in room 1 Lina Ceballos of FSFE told us about the Reuse project. The Reuse project intends to relieve much of the confusion and tediousness of licensing software online. At the same time in room 2, both Nicolas Fella and Alexander Lohnau remotely had a discussion on getting applications ready for KDE Frameworks 6. They discussed the current status of KF6 and why it is better to port now.

Day 2 - Sunday, Oct. 2nd

The next morning, Hector Martín, the hacker that opened the Kinect, Play Station and Wii to the open source world, told us about his new project in his keynote "Asahi Linux - One chip, no docs, and lots of fun". Hector explained that the new M1 and M2 Macintosh machines built by Apple are made to run a variety of operating systems, but how the company does not provide any kind of indication on how that is done. Good job reverse engineering is what Hector and his team do best and now Linux (and Plasma) can easily live on the new ARM-based machines.

Afterwards, first David Redondo and later Aleix Pol tackled the topic of Wayland in two different talks. Wayland is a hot topic for developers, since it will allow Plasma and KDE apps to evolve, improve their performance, and work more safely and reliably.

Following a caffeinated and baked goods respite, again the talks were split over two locations. In room 1 Nicolas Fella, live from his studio, explained what really happens when you launch an app; while, in room 2, Neal Gompa told us about how the Fedora distro implements Plasma on Fedora, the advantages of Kinoite and the future of Fedora and KDE on mobile.

Later on, Aditya Mehra ran us through OpenVoiceOS, an operating system with a voice-enabled AI at its core. In room 2, Volker Krause explained how push notifications, used profusely in proprietary software, could be implemented using FLOSS.

After lunch, KDE's Board sat down with attendees and presented their yearly report, informing the community about what work had been carried out and how resources had been used. This was followed by presentations prepared by each of the active working groups: the Advisory Board, the Community Working Group, the Financial Working Group, the Fundraising Working Group, the KDE Free Qt Working Group, and the Sysadmin Working Group.

While this was going on, Shyamnath Premnadh was presenting his talk on how C++ and Python can thrive together in room 2.

Following a brief coffee break, it was time for the lightning talks, and Volker Krause kicked things off by talking about what was happening with KDE Frameworks 6. Volker was followed by Lydia Pintscher, who talked about the new fundraisers for specific projects. Later, Albert Astals presented the KDE Security team, and Harald Sitter gave us advice on how to remain healthy and sane, while writing healthy and sane code.

As the event drew to close, it was time to show appreciation for our sponsors and host. Shells, KDAB, Canonical, MBition, QT Company, the Fedora Project, Collabora, openSUSE, Viking, Slimbook, Codethink, syslinbit, and GitLab took turns to explain their involvement with KDE and why they decided to support Akademy. PINE64 also received a round of applause for their support.

Finally, there was a round of applause for the Akademy Team, the members of Barcelona Free Software community, in particular Albert Astals, and all the other volunteers that organized the event and helped us enjoy our days with the KDE community in Barcelona.

The last act of the day was announcing the traditional Akademy awards. This year the award for the Best Application went to Jasem Mutlaq for his work on the phenomenal KStars astronomical program. The Non-Application Contribution Award went to Harald Sitter for his work on debugging and improving KDE's code across the board. Finally, the Jury Award went to Aniqa Khokhar for her work setting up the KDE Network across the world.

As the rest of the event, this part was a bit special, as the awardees of 2020 and 2021 joined the awardees of 2022 on the stage, as they had not had the chance to physically receive their award before now.

And with that, the conference part of the event was officially closed and KDE community members prepared themselves for a week of BoFs, meetings and hacking sessions.

Today we break ground. Today we launch the first of what will be many fundraisers for specific projects. Our goal is to get funds directly into the hands of the people who make the software.

Up until now, when KDE has run a fundraiser, or received donations, the proceedings have gone to KDE as a whole. We use the money to fund operational costs, such as office rent, server maintenance, and salaries; and to pay for travel expenses for community members, event costs, and so on. This has worked well and helps the KDE Community and common project to flourish.

But the fundraiser starting today is very different. For the first time KDE is running a fundraiser for a specific project: today we have the ambitious goal of raising 15,000€ for the Kdenlive team. The funds will be given to contributors to help Kdenlive take the next step in the development of KDE's advanced, free and open video-editing application. For the record, on the cards for upcoming releases are nested timelines, a new effects panel, and improving the overall performance of Kdenlive, making it faster, more responsive, and even more fun to work with.

The advantages for the Kdenlive team members are many, but mainly there is no need for them to worry about setting up and managing bank accounts, or, indeed, a whole foundation. KDE's financial, legal, promotional, and admin teams are there for Jean Baptiste, Julius, Camille, Farid, Massimo, and Eugen, and are helping make the process as streamlined and painless as possible.

There are also immense advantages for the KDE Community as a whole. This event will set the basis for similar future fundraisers for all KDE projects. Our aim is that contributors be able to work on their Free Software projects with the peace of mind that comes from having their financial needs covered.

Want to help? Head over to the Kdenlive fundraiser page and donate now.

Want to help more? Join KDE and contribute to building the future of KDE.

By Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss

On 20-21 August KDE's Promo team held a two-day Sprint in Saumur, France. I was fortunate to be able to attend along with 7 other participants and contribute to discussions about a range of topics. To give a taste, here I will focus on two of the topics discussed: a KDE-for promotional campaign and diversity initiatives at KDE.

KDE-for is an idea that existed prior to the Sprint. A KDE-for-kids website even exists, but we wanted to see how far we could take the idea. Our brainstorming generated numerous proposals, including KDE-for-creators, KDE-for-developers, KDE-for-researchers, KDE-for-teachers, KDE-for-students, KDE-for-gamers, KDE-for-activists, and so on. Each potential for-group gives us the opportunity to connect KDE products with end users and highlight the many communities within and around KDE. It also provides a place to showcase flagship apps while raising awareness about the sometimes lesser known ones complimenting them.

One of the issues with the idea is what to do when there are software gaps. Should KDE-for also promote non-KDE software when it fulfills a useful but missing function for a particular target group? KDE software is excellent bar none, but we may not offer everything to meet every group's needs. Personally I am for doing so -- when the source project supports it, of course. User autonomy and choice within a rich software eco-system are, for me, one of the undeniable strengths of FOSS. Although attempting a complete list of software options would not be helpful, why not support other FOSS developers and give users a curated list about excellent FOSS applications that may be useful to them? We are all on the same team after all!

Another topic which came up and one that I am interested in regarding the KDE Eco project is how to promote diversity within KDE. Unfortunately, I must admit that I know far too little about promoting diversity, a gap I need to address. As they say: One cannot expect diversity just to happen, one needs to cultivate it.

So I was happy to learn that over the past few years KDE Promo has been pushing a KDE networks initiative to build international communities. At the moment the networks include India, China, Brazil, and USA. One discussion at the Sprint centered around creating an additional Europe network -- or Europe:Spain, Europe:Germany, etc. networks -- to remove any implication of a default network. KDE is a world-wide community and it only makes sense that our internal and external structures reflect that. Another discussion was about expanding these networks, for instance, to Africa and Singapore and South Korea, among others. Perhaps you, the reader, can help build these networks where you live?

On a personal note, I am drawn to KDE and FOSS in general because Free Software can meet the needs of communities in ways that non-Free Software never can. With proprietary software, there is no guarantee that users have a say in the direction of software development. Moreover, it is arrogant to assume that what works for one community automatically transfers to another. Free Software entails that communities can influence technology so it truly works for them and their users ... for creators in Japan, for teachers in Taiwan, for activists in Africa. The KDE-for campaign and the expansion of KDE Networks will help communities make KDE software the best software it can be. And I am proud to be a part of it.

And, of course, in France we ate -- but not only that, we cooked! Our local host invited us to his garden with family and friends and made us Fouée in a wood-fired oven. All in all the Sprint was a great opportunity to push many important topics forward while having a wonderful time together. I look forward to the next one!

After two years of virtual conferences, the in-person on-site version of Akademy is finally back! This year you will be able to attend Akademy, meet KDE community members face-to-face, get to know the vibrant city of Barcelona, and enjoy interesting and intriguing talks, panels and keynotes. That said, even if you can't make it to Barcelona, you can still attend Akademy online as well. Let's see what this year's schedule has in store for you: Akademy will officially kick off with a Welcome event on Friday, September 30th, followed by several talks on Saturday, October 1st and Sunday, October 2nd and from Monday, October 3rd to Friday, October 7th there will be BoFs ("Birds of a Feather" sessions), workshops, meetings and training sessions.

Conference

The talks on Saturday will cover everything from KDE's official Goals, to Plasma products and gaming devices. Nate Graham will discuss his 7-step plan to spread KDE software and take over the world. Aleix Pol Gonzalez will walk us through the process of creating a new Plasma product. And David Edmundson will talk about Steam Deck, one of the most interesting and exciting KDE success stories of recent times. On Sunday, we'll be hearing about app development, Plasma integration in distros, and AI-powered KDE environments, among many other things. Nicolas Fella will kick off the day by showing us how launching applications can be trickier than it first seems and the pitfalls you have to look out for. We'll be hearing all about the future of the backends of KDE software and what the 6th generation of KDE Frameworks has in store for us. And Aditya Mehra will explore OpenVoiceOS and will explain how we are incorporating KDE into devices and powering them with AI-driven voice recognition technologies. And that is not all! Stay tuned for the announcement of our two keynote speakers coming soon, here, on the Dot.

BoFs, Workshops, and Hacking

During the week following the conference part of the event, KDE community members will attend BoFs and will meet up with colleagues with similar interests to work elbow-to-elbow, social distancing permitting, on their projects. They will also attend workshops, meetings and training sessions until the closing of the event on the 7th of October. With a program so full of exciting talks and activities, how could you miss it? Register now and check out the full schedule.

Spanish manufacturer (and KDE patron) Slimbook has just released their new KDE-themed Slimbook ultrabook.

The KDE Slimbook 4 comes with a Ryzen 5700U processor and KDE's full-featured Plasma desktop running on KDE Neon. It also comes with dozens of Open Source programs and utilities pre-installed and access to hundreds more.

The KDE Slimbook 4's AMD Ryzen 5700U processor is one of the most efficient CPUs for portable computers in the range. With its 8 GPU cores and 16 threads, it can run your whole office from home and on the go, render 3D animations, compile your code and serve up the entertainment for you during down time.

The Slimbook starts Plasma by default on Wayland, the state-of-the-art display server. With Wayland, you can enjoy the advantages of crisp fonts and images, framerates adapted to each of your displays, and all the touchpad gestures implemented in Plasma 5.25.

Talking of displays, the USB-C port, apart from allowing charging, comes with video output, letting you link up another external monitor. Another nifty detail is the backlit black keyboard with the Noto Sans monographed keys, the same font used on the Plasma desktop.

Remember that with every purchase, KDE receives a donation from Slimbook and KDE Community members get a generous discount!

Check out here complete details, specs and benchmarks.

The summer sun is here and new apps come with it -- unless you live in the southern hemisphere, in which case, congratulations! You got past the winter solstice, and it's all longer days and new app releases from here onwards.

LabPlot 2.9.0

LabPlot is KDE's open source and cross-platform data visualization and analysis software. It is accessible to everyone, and Labplot 2.9 adds a bunch of new features, such as new worksheet elements to annotate curve data points and to show images on the worksheet.

You can also now plot the data against multiple and different axes. A new visualization type, box plot provides a quick summary of the basic statistical properties of the data set, and a collection of multiple well-known color maps and a feature that allows for conditional formatting of the data in the spreadsheet let's you obtain insights into the structure of your data and its statistical properties directly in the spreadsheet.

We added Hilbert transform to the set of analysis functions and LabPlot can now import and export more formats, having added MATLAB, SAS, Stata and SPSS to the list.

Labplot can be downloaded with your Linux distro package manager, through Snapcraft, Flatpak, as well as for Mac and Windows.

Haruna 0.8

Haruna is the KDE video player with YouTube integration. This new release has support for global menus, can be configured to pause playback when minimised and save the time position when shutdown. It also adds a "recent files" menu option, and useful actions to load the last file, restart playback and jump to your "watch later" list.

Install on Linux.
Download from Flathub

GCompris 2.4

Our educational activities app, GCompris, has made a number of new releases over the last few months and, among other things, has managed to reduce the space it takes up on disk by 30%. GCompris has also added new voices in Norwegian Nynorsk and Malayalam, and new, updated images makes it look prettier than ever.

You can find packages of this new version for GNU/Linux, Windows, Raspberry Pi and macOS on the download
page. It's also available from the Android Play store, the F-Droid repository and the Windows store.

Digikam 7.6

DigiKam 7.6 has made their AppImage slicker by using ICU for full Unicode support and Qt 5.15 and libraw.

There's a new Flow View Plugin which uses the masonry layout. Masonry is a grid layout based on columns, but, unlike other grid layouts, it doesn’t have fixed height rows. Basically, Masonry layout optimizes the use of space inside the canvas by reducing any unnecessary gaps. Without this type of layout, certain restrictions are required to maintain the structure of layout, as with the main icon-view in digiKam album window. This kind of layout is used by the Pinterest social network for example.

DigiKam 7.6.0 source code tarball, Linux 64 bits AppImage bundles, macOS Intel package, and Windows 64 bits installers can be downloaded from this repository.

KStars 3.5.9

KStars is probably the most feature-rich free astronomy software around and the 3.5.9
release adds some exciting new features.

HiPS (Hierarchical Progressive Surveys) is a technology that provides progressive high resolution images of the sky at different zoom levels. KStars fully supports online HiPS where data is downloaded from online servers and cached to be displayed on the Sky Map.

A new simplified and powerful Mosaic Planner directly integrates in the Sky Map and greatly benefits from HiPS overlay to make your target-framing spot on. Toggle the Mosaic View from the toolbar, and select your equipment and the mosaic configuration. You can also use it as a very simple tool to frame a single 1 x 1 tile.

KStars also adds the ability to refocus after a meridian flip is complete. This is very useful for some optical train setups where the focuser might shift the duration the flip.

KStars can be installed on Microsoft Windows, macOS, and Linux.

RKWard 0.7.4

RKWard is KDE's R app for statistics and has improved the first use experience in its latest versions. RKWard devs have done that by reworking the "Welcome to RKWard" page entirely: it now serves as a "dashboard" with some of the most important tasks, including, among other things, several new options for importing data from other programs. Several unnecessary dialogs that used to greet new users have been removed.

Beyond this, almost all plugins now support a preview, helping you see results faster, and to send only intended output to the output window.

Download RKWard for macOS, Windows and Linux.

Bugfixes

• The creators of the Krita painting app have fixed some crashes in version 5.0.6.
• Ruqola 1.7.2, KDE's Rocket.chat app, adds a Windows testing build and can be downloaded as Linux packages and from Flathub. Incidently Rocket.chat announced that they would add bridging to Matrix so they can talk to the rest of KDE's chat rooms.
• The Tellico project, creators of KDE's collection manager app, has released version3.4.4 and mended a bug that stops a nasty potential data loss when using emojis.
• Okteta 0.26.9 comes with more translations and fixes that help Okteta remember settings values. Grab Okteta from your distro's Linux package manager, FlatHub, Snapcraft or as a testing Windows build.
• KDE's diff tool for comparing files, resolved a major performance regression in handling Windows style line endings in version 1.9.5.
• RSIBreak 0.12.15, KDE's wellbeing app that helps prevent repetitive strain injuries from overusing your keyboard and mouse, adds an option to suppress breaks while full-screen windows are visible.

Pre-release betas

• Making its way closer to release, isoimagewriter has published a build for Windows.

By Adam Szopa

I'm super excited to finally announce the start of the submission process for the brand new KDE Goals!

KDE sets goals that help the community focus on important things that need to get done in collaboration across many teams. Over the years, the community has set goals to tackle issues with usability, made it easier for new contributors to start working on KDE projects, implemented new tech that will serve us for years to come, and much more.

KDE Goals set a direction for the community and help concentrate efforts in areas deemed important by the KDE community itself. Every couple of years, new goals are selected to reflect the community's current priorities.

To submit a new goal proposal, you can use the dedicated workboard and shape the future direction of the KDE community.

This stage in the process lasts until July 16th, but don’t wait until the last moment! Submit early, and use the remaining time to listen to the feedback, refine and update your proposal. Only submissions with good descriptions will move to the next stage: the community vote.

To make things easier, we provide a template ticket that you have to copy and fill out with your content. This way, none of the important parts of a good proposal will be skipped, and there will be consistency between the different proposals.

You will need an account to create a new proposal, and then use the arrow in the “Not ready for voting” column to create a new task. Don’t forget to copy the description from the template!

Remember, by submitting a Goal proposal, you are also submitting yourself as the Goal’s Champion! A Goal Champion is the face of the goal and the motivator of the initiative, but not necessarily the one that implements most of the tasks. After all, this is a community goal, so a good champion will motivate others to join in and help achieve amazing things.

If you want to learn more about the whole process, see the wiki for more details.

Don’t wait! Submit your proposal and, who knows? Perhaps your idea will be announced as one of the new goals during Akademy 2022!

Akademy 2022 will be a hybrid event, in Barcelona and online that will be held from Saturday 1st to Friday 7th October. The Call for Participation is still open! Submit your talk ideas and abstracts as the deadline has been extended until the 19th June.

Why talk at #Akademy2022?

Akademy attracts people from all over the world, not only from the global KDE Community, but also from companies, Free Software developers and pundits from other projects, public institutions, and more. We all meet together to discuss and plan the future of the Community and its technology. You will meet people that are receptive to your ideas and will help you with their skills and experience.

How do you get started?

You do not have to worry about details or a presentation right now. Just think of an idea and submit some basic details about your talk. You can edit your abstract after the initial submission.

All topics relevant to the KDE Community are welcome. Here are a few ideas to get you started on your talk:

• What KDE projects have you contributed to? Tell us about your work, and get feedback and support!
• Where do you think should KDE go next?
• How has KDE software impacted you/people you know in real life?
• Are there particular problems with KDE you think you can give us some insight on? How would you solve it?
• How can we improve KDE for people with disabilities?
• How can we increase the participation of women in our community?
• How can we accelerate full support on Wayland?
• What is next for Plasma mobile?
• What is the current state of the project you are working on?
• Have you used any KDE applications in ingenious ways or created something great with them? Tell us about your work!

These are just some ideas to get the ball rolling. However, you can submit a proposal on any topic as long as you can make it relevant to KDE. For more ideas for talks, check out the videos from previous years: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, and 2015.

For more details and information visit our Call for Participation page.

By Johnny Jazeix

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a global, online program focused on bringing new contributors into open source software development. Like every year, KDE applies and aims to integrate more and more developers. This year, KDE's participation in GSoC kicks off with nine fascinating projects.

Snehit Sah will be adding support for Spaces in NeoChat. Spaces is a Matrix tool that allows you to discover new rooms and also a way of organizing your rooms into categories. Snehit already successfully contributed to the Season of KDE 2022 where he improved the packaging of several applications of KDE for Flathub.

Suhaas Joshi will work on permission management for Flatpak and Snap applications in Discover. This will allow you to change the permissions granted to an application (e.g. file system, network, and so on) and also make it easier to review them. It is the continuation of his work during the Season of KDE where he implemented the display of Flatpak applications permissions on Discover.

This year we have two projects to improve digiKam. The first one is from Quoc Hung Tran who will work on a new plugin to process Optical Character Recognition (OCR). This will allow to extract text from images and store the output inside the EXIF data or within a separate file. The plugin will also be used to organize scanned text images with contents.

The second project is from Phuoc Khanh LE who will work on improving the Image Quality Sorter algorithms. This will improve sorting images by quality using multiple criteria, for example, noise, exposure and compression.

This is the second stage of the original project from GSoC 2021 and aims to classify photos by quality (e.g. global exposure, blur, compression, noise, etc.). The first stage was an algorithm based on computer vision classic, as well as image metadata (such as focus point). The second stage involves studying and implementing a more generic algorithm based on Deep Learning. This project will help simplify significantly the complexity of code and improve performance especially when running on a GPU, and will also pave the way for more generic usage in other KDE software. For instance, it can be useful to inspect the image and spot out where to enhance it, or how much it can be enhanced.

Smit Patil will work on Plasma System Settings, redesigning the different modules by porting them to QtQuick. This will help with the transition to Qt6 and clean some technical debts by better splitting the UI code from the core logic.

This year we have two projects working on the education software suite GCompris. Both Aastha Chauhan and Samarth Raj will work on adding new activities to GCompris. Aastha Chauhan will work on adding a programmable Tux, a comparator activity and the Guess 24 game in GCompris.

Samarth Raj will work on an activity for grammatical analysis and another one for using the 10's complements to add numbers.

Two students will work on the painting application Krita. Xu Che will add pixel-perfect ellipses in Krita. This will allow to make it possible for pixel artists to use Krita effectively.

Meanwhile, Reinold Rojas will work on exporting an image to SVG in Krita; a project that will provide more options to share files with Inkscape, and will help create translatable images with text for Krita Manual without knowledge of Inkscape.

There is more about Krita's GSoC projects in their blog.

We would like to welcome the new contributors and hope they will have a wonderful summer within KDE and become part of the community.

Follow their progress through their blog posts on KDE's Planet.