By Benson Muite

This year KDE will mentor 9 projects in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC). GSoC is a program in which contributors new to open source spend between 175 and 350 hours working on an open source project.

Meet the projects and contributors for 2023:

Projects

Kalendar

• Improving Mail Integration in Kalendar - Aakarsh MJ will work on the mail integration in Kalendar. This will make it possible to use Kalendar as a full featured email client integrated with the already existing calendar and address book features.
• Implement calendar availability - Anant Verma will work on calendar availability in Kalendar. This will allow you to specify your working hours where you are available and can be invited to meetings and events.
• Calendar Invitations - Vansh K will work on adding support for calendar invitations to Kalendar, allowing you to send invitations to events and to also handle incoming invitations.

digiKam

• Add Automatic Tags Assignment Tools and Improve Face Recognition Engine for digiKam - TRAN Quoc Hung will develop a deep learning model that will be able to recognize various categories of objects, scenes, and events in digital photos, generate corresponding keywords that can be stored in digiKam’s database and assign them to photos automatically.
• Improve Items Properties Management Utkarsh Kumar will use machine-learning to improve the property labeling process for images in digiKam. At present, users are facing a host of difficulties when they try to transfer properties such as color, tags, and labels to numerous pictures. This is resulting in an extremely laborious and monotonous task of copying them repeatedly. This project will introduce a more seamless and efficient approach, which will enable users to execute these actions with a single click and drag of the mouse, thus significantly enhancing the user experience.

Krita

Improving the Bundle Creator - Sriruppa Datta will be working on improving and expanding the bundle creator in Krita. Bundles are packages of resources, like brushes or gradients that Krita users can add or swap out.

KDE Eco

Measuring Energy Consumption using Remote Lab - Karanjot will improve remote access to the KDE Eco energy measurement lab by:

1. automating the energy measurement process, including providing a summary of the results
2. setting up backend CI/CD integration
3. setting up a frontend upload portal

Tokodon

Adding moderation tool in Tokodon project under KDE - Rishi Kumar will work on implementing the admin APIs in Tokodon. This will make Tokodon suitable as a Mastodon client for instance moderators and admins.

Okular

Improve Okular For Android - Shivodit will work on improving Okular for Android, bringing in the much needed font rendering improvement when fonts are not embedded in the PDF file among other things. The work will primarily be in the Poppler Freedesktop repository.

Next Steps

Over the next few weeks, candidates will be learning more about the KDE community, after which they will start the coding phase of their projects. Contributors will report on their progress on KDE's Planet.

We look forward to welcoming our new contributors and making their experience with KDE pleasant and fruitful.

By Johnny Jazeix and Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss

For this year's edition of Season of KDE, 8 participants successfully completed their projects. Several of the projects push forward the work to achieve KDE's three goals, namely:

• KDE For All: Boosting Accessibility
• Sustainable Software
• Automate and Systematize Internal Processes

Congratulations to everyone involved and excellent work, SoK23 mentees!

Mohamed Ibrahim took on the task of improving the KdeEcoTest emulation tool. The idea behind KdeEcoTest is to provide a simple-to-use scripting tool for building Standard Usage Scenario scripts and then running them when measuring the energy consumption of software. Mohamed first focused on improving the documentation to install and run the tool, then made several improvements to add functionalities to the tool.

Nitin Tejuja also worked on scripting for energy consumption measurements, but with another approach using the WebDriver for Appium selenium-webdriver-at-spi. The advantage of this approach is that the Accessibility framework is also used so contributors will be adding "good" accessibility names -- multiple gains with one addition! Nitin created a script to test the consumption of the KDE educational suite GCompris.

Rudraksh Karpe furthered work on preparing KDE applications for Blue Angel eco-certification. At the moment only Okular has this certification, but Rudraksh continued work on the scripts for GCompris and Kate using the KdeEcoTest tool. Rudraksh also developed the "SUS Log Formatter" tool to provide an overview of the actions taken from a Standard Usage Scenario log file.

Rishi Kumar worked on improving the accessibility of the Mastodon client Tokodon also using the WebDriver for Appium `selenium-webdriver-at-spi`. Rishi added multiple tests using the Accessibility framework for various functionalities such as search and offline use and improved the accessibility of Tokodon's GUI.

Theophile Gilgien worked on improvements to AudioTube. AudioTube is a client for YouTube, and Theophile added multiple features such as removing songs from the history, adding a volume slider in maximized player, making the back-end for search history more efficient, and much more.

Neelaksh Singh setup Flatpak builds in the Continuous Integration workflow for KDE applications. Neelaksh built on the foundation laid in last year's SoK by continuing automatization for the packaging of multiple apps during Nightly builds. More info here.

Brannon Aw improved the annotation tools in KDE's Spectacle. Brannon simplified the way for the eraser tool and clearing annotations, which was a tedious task before.

Ruoqing He improved holiday support in the digital clock widget in Plasma. Ruoqing added a sublabel used to display holiday events for better support.

g10 Code GmbH joins the ranks of KDE patrons! g10 Code provides custom development, enhancements, and audits of cryptographic software -- in particular for the popular GnuPG encryption and digital signature tools.

"The KDE Community supports us in providing professionally-designed, accessible desktop software to our users in many different languages," states CEO Werner Koch. "While we consider KDE's KMail mail client to have the best GnuPG integration, our main businesses case comes from Windows users in professional settings using our GnuPG VS-Desktop product, which is approved by Germany, the EU, and NATO for use with restricted documents. This allowed us to change from donation-based development. Our free-of-charge distribution Gpg4win has hundreds of thousands of downloads per month and is used by NGOs, journalists, and most "Tor-based" transactions. This is all only possible because we provide a KDE-based user interface to GnuPG with KDE's Kleopatra app."

Says KDE e.V. President Aleix Pol Gonzalez: "KDE has a well-established reputation for prioritizing privacy and security. For end-users, implementing effective security measures is important but also challenging. I'm looking forward to working further with g10 towards building great cryptographic solutions that are easy to adopt in organisations of all sizes as well as on our individual systems."

g10 Code joins KDE e.V.’s other Patrons: Blue Systems, Canonical, Google, Kubuntu Focus, Slimbook, SUSE, The Qt Company, and TUXEDO Computers to continue to support Free Open Source Software and KDE development through KDE e.V.

Kubuntu Focus is now generously supporting KDE as its newest patron!

Kubuntu Focus offers the best out-of-the-box experience for professional Linux users. All Kubuntu Focus systems come with the beautiful and intuitive Plasma desktop from KDE on top of industry-standard Ubuntu LTS. The hardware is designed to save time and hassle, thanks to its device optimizations, curated apps, Focus Tools, system-specific HOWTOs, and excellent Linux support.

“Our team has been active with the KDE community for years by contributing rigorous testing, reporting, and bug fixes,” stated Dana Roth, CEO of Kubuntu Focus. “We believe even deeper collaboration will benefit not only our customers but also the entire community, and we are especially interested in contributing solutions that enable professionals to replace their proprietary desktops with Linux and KDE's software.”

"Having hardware partners is crucial for KDE as they provide the means for our users to experience our products." said Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE e.V. President. "Extending our collaboration with providers is a step in the right direction towards solutions that truly help our society by putting products in people's hands and acting on their feedback. It's noteworthy that Kubuntu Focus is based in the United States of America, an area not covered by our current KDE Patrons who are focused on hardware. I'm looking forward to learning how we can improve our products to better serve the region."

Akademy 2023 will be a hybrid event held in Thessaloniki, Greece, and online from Saturday the 15th to Friday the 21st of July. The Call for Participation is open! Send us your talk ideas and abstracts.

Why talk at #Akademy2023?

Akademy attracts artists, designers, developers, translators, users, writers, companies, public institutions and many other KDE friends and contributors. We celebrate the achievements and help determine the direction for the next year. We all meet together to discuss and plan the future of the Community and the technology we build. You will meet people that are receptive to your ideas and can help you with their skills and experience. These sessions offer the opportunity for gaining support, and making your plans for your project become a reality.

How to get started

Do not worry about details or a slides 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 proposal:

• Helping new people and organizations discover KDE
• Working towards KDE's goals
• Granting people more digital freedom and autonomy through KDE technologies
• Developing new technologies
• Guiding new, intermediate and expert users to encourage participation
• Anything else that might interest the audience.

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: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, and 2015.

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

By Benson Muite

This year Season of KDE has several projects focusing on the accessibility and sustainability goals. There are three projects focused on accessibility, three on sustainability and three additional projects in other areas.

The sustainability projects had fifteen excellent applicants for just three projects, so selecting mentees was challenging. The time mentee applicants invested in applying is much appreciated, and any applicants who have not been selected are encouraged to continue contributing to KDE and open source. It is possible to make smaller contributions to KDE projects that allow possible mentors to see your work and then mentor you informally.

The projects and their mentees that were officially selected for SoK are listed below.

Sustainability Projects

These projects are related to the Blauer Engel (Blue Angel) for FOSS project, a certification for environmentally friendly open source software. The Blauer Engel project is part of the Global Ecolabelling Network, a non-profit organization that certifies eco-friendliness of products within a particular class, and thus allows users to make informed choices.

• Preparation of KDE apps for Blue Angel eco-certification
• Mentor: Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss
• Mentee: Rudraksh Karpe
• Improve KDE Eco Test emulation tool
• Mentors: Karanjot Singh, Emmanuel Charruau, and Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss
• Mentee: Mohammed Ibrahim
• Measurement of energy consumption with Selenium
• Mentors: Emmanuel Charruau and Harald Sitter
• Mentee: Nitin Tejuja

Accessibility Projects

These projects aim to allow eveybody to use KDE software and KDE websites by improving their accessibility.

• Rishi Kumar will be working on the accessibility and UI testing of Tokodon. This is based on theAT-SPI/Selenium bridge created by Harald Sitter.
• Mentor: Carl Schwan
• Mentee: Rishi Kumar
• Improving the accessibility of KDE’s websites
• Mentor: Paul Brown and Aniqa Khokhar
• Mentee: Victoria Chen
• Plasma accessibility widget
• Mentor: Fushan Wen
• Mentee: Brent Mackey

Additional Projects

• Automate Flatpak checks in GitLab Invent CI
• Mentors: Timothée Ravier and Aleix Pol
• Mentee: Neelaksh Singh
• Brannon Aw will be working on improving the annotation tools in Spectacle (KDE's screenshot app). They will be adding features such as cropping, an eraser tool, and so on. Spectacle: Improving the annotation tools.
• Mentor: Bharadwaj Raju
• Mentee: Brannon Aw
• Plasma: Better holiday support in the digital clock widget.
• Mentor: Fushan Wen
• Mentee: Ruoqing He
• Théophile Gilgien will be working improving Audiotube. He will be working on multiple small features like KRunner integration, ability to play favorite songs as a playlist and more!
• Mentor: Carl Schwan, Devin Lin & Jonah Brüchert
• Mentee: Théophile Gilgien
• Arpit Jain wil be working on the new epub reader, Arianna, which is based on epub.js and QtWebEngine. His knowledge of web-based technologies will be helpful to achieve his goals of syncing the application color scheme to the webengine content, adding settings and adding a table of content.
• Mentor: Carl Schwan
• Mentee: Arpit Jain

Good Luck and have Fun!

KDE thanks the mentors and mentees for improving the KDE ecosystem and wishes them a good experience. The KDE community looks forward to learning about the mentees progress through their blog posts.

Akademy 2023 will be held at the University of Macedonia (UoM) in Thessaloniki, Greece, from Saturday the 15th to Friday the 21st of July.

Akademy 2023 will be a hybrid event, combining on-site and remote sessions, and will include talks, workshops, Birds of a Feather (BoF) meetups, training and coding sessions. The conference is expected to draw hundreds of attendees from the global KDE community to discuss and plan the future of the community and its technologies. Many participants from the broad Free and Open Source software community, local organizations and software companies will also attend. The call for papers will open soon, and the registrations shortly after. We will soon update Akademy's website, in the meanwhile follow us on Twitter and Mastodon to keep up to date with Akademy’s news.

About Thessaloniki

Thessaloniki was founded in 315 BC and has a population of over 800,000. It is Greece's second major economic, industrial, commercial and transportation hub. It is renowned for its rich history, festivals, and events, and is considered to be Greece's cultural capital.

About the University of Macedonia (UoM)

The University of Macedonia is a modern state university that provides education in a wide range of disciplinary fields. UoM’s Department of Applied Informatics makes software, especially free software, the main focus of a large part of the university's studies and research. The university is located only a short walk from the centre of the city, close to cafés, restaurants, and other historical and cultural spots.

About Akademy

For most of the year, KDE, one of the largest free and open software communities in the world, works online communicating over email, instant messaging, video-conferencing, forums and mailing lists. Akademy provides all KDE contributors with the opportunity to meet in person to foster social bonds, work on concrete technology issues, discuss new ideas, and reinforce the innovative, dynamic culture of KDE. Akademy brings together artists, designers, developers, translators, users, writers, sponsors and many other types of KDE contributors to celebrate the achievements of the past year and help determine the direction for the next year. Hands-on sessions offer the opportunity for intense work bringing those plans to reality. The KDE community also welcomes companies building on KDE technology to Akademy, as well as those that are looking for opportunities.

By Benson Muite

Season of KDE is an opportunity to contribute to KDE, while at the same time improving your skills with guidance from experienced mentors.

Apart from code, software projects require artwork, translations, documentation, community management, and funds acquired through fundraising campaigns. With Season of KDE, you too can get the chance to hone your skills in one or more of these areas over a 12-week period. Participation is open to people of all ages with an interest in learning about open source.

Finding a Project

The first place to look for projects is on the KDE SoK page. If a project listed there interests you, contact the mentor. If you are looking for something different, other open source projects are hosted on KDE's development platform. To find interesting projects, you can list them by:

• the number of stars
• how they are trending

You can also try out applications listed on the KDE applications website and see if you can find something in the application that needs improving. If you are a programmer, have a look at the bugs listed for that application. Once you have found a project you find interesting, and have ideas for improvements, contact the project leads to see if they might be supportive of your ideas and, if you find at least one mentor, post your idea on the KDE SoK wiki before the 15th of January 2023.

Timeline

Date	Event
15 Dec 2022	Start of Season of KDE
15 Jan 2023	Deadline for Participant and Mentor Applications
22 Jan 2023	Projects Announced
24 Jan 2023	Start of Work
15 Apr 2023	End of Work
20 Apr 2023	Results Announced
20 May 2023	Certificates Issued
1 Jun 2023	Merchandise and SWAG Sent Out by Courier

Past SoKs

If you would like to know more about SoK projects and learn what to expect, check out SoK 2022 and read some of the outcomes from last year. While much of the work is focused on programming, projects in all areas related to the KDE ecosystem are welcome.

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You too make KDE possible! Check out our End of Year Fundraiser!

We’re happy to announce that Linux App Summit 2023 will take place in Brno, Czech Republic on April 21–23, 2023. For 2023 Linux App Summit (LAS) will again be held as a hybrid event, allowing attendees and speakers to join virtually or in person at our venue in Brno. Linux App Summit (LAS) is a conference focused on building a Linux application ecosystem. LAS aims to encourage the creation of quality applications, seek opportunities for compensation for FOSS developers, and foster a thriving market for the Linux operating system. Everyone is invited to attend! Companies, journalists, and individuals who are interested in learning more about the Linux desktop application space and growing their user base are especially welcome. The call for papers and registration will be open soon. Please check linuxappsummit.org for more updates in the upcoming weeks.

About Brno

Brno, the second-largest city in the Czech Republic, is a technological hub in Central Europe and the wider region. Several universities specializing in Information Technology give Brno a large source of IT talent and as a result, many companies have opened research and development facilities in the city. With around 90,000 students residing in the area, Brno is a vibrant university city and home to many museums, theatres, festivals, and cultural events. It is a member of the UNESCO Creative Cities Network and in 2017 was designated as a "City of Music". Alongside the urban areas, visitors will find traditional Moravian folklore preserved in some districts and can experience traditional Moravian costumes, wines, folk music, and dance.
View of Brno. SchiDD, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

There are lots of sights to see in Brno! Some of the most popular attractions are:

• Špilberk Castle
• Cathedral of St. Peter and Paul
• Veveří Castle
• Villa Tugendhat

We hope to see you in Brno!

About the Linux App Summit

The Linux App Summit is co-organized by GNOME and KDE. It brings the global Linux community together to learn, collaborate, and help grow the Linux application ecosystem. Through talks, panels, and Q&A sessions, we encourage attendees to share ideas, make connections, and join our goal of building a common app ecosystem. Previous iterations of the Linux App Summit have been held in the United States in Portland, Oregon, and Denver, Colorado, as well as in Barcelona, Spain, and Rovereto, Italy.
Attendees at LAS 2022.

Learn more by visiting linuxappsummit.org.

KDE's End of Year Fundraiser is officially live! Your donations will help us reach our goals, support our community, fund our events, and show the world how everybody can benefit from KDE software.

Today we have the ambitious goal of raising 20,000€ for KDE. Your donation allows KDE to continue developing the spectacular Plasma desktop and all the apps you need for education, productivity, and creative work. Here are some of the things we have managed to do over the last year thanks to the generosity of donors:

Reaching the World

• We have welcomed 2785+ people worldwide who have contributed code, art, translations and more.
• We added/maintained support for 40+ languages for apps and frameworks.
• We organized and attended 18 community events/sprints.

Building the Products

• We hosted 1000+ projects and repositories.
• We continued developing 260+ applications and addons.
• We pushed out 11+ updates for KDE's Plasma desktop and related environments, such as Plasma Mobile and Plasma Big Screen and applications.
• We supported 12 hardware platforms.
• We continued to develop 83 frameworks.

The work of KDE is made possible thanks to the contributions from KDE Community members, donors and corporations that support us. Every individual counts, and every commitment, large or small, is a commitment to Free Software. Head to the KDE's End of Year fundraiser page and donate now.

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