Wednesday, April 16, 2014

KDE Applications 4.13 released

Today we've released 4.13 which is probably the best KDE Applications release ever :)

It also marks the second release we do with a four months schedule instead of a six month one. I think we've ended up with a pretty nice cadence in which we are faster delivering features and bugfixes to users, which at the end is what is important, since the earlier people get the features the earlier they'll find the bugs (let's accept it, all software has bugs) and the earlier the bugs are found the earlier they can be fixed. So basically it's faster progress :)

We have also made good our promise to keep our tests passing, as you can see everything from this release is green (kde-workspace is not green but is not part of the 4.13 release). So kudos to all developers for being awesome in that regard too.

Let's all celebrate on this release but not forget we need to keep working full steam ahead on the releases of KDE Frameworks 5, Plasma 2014.06 and KDE Applications 4.14.

Finally I'd like to remind you that most of the people doing KDE development are volunteers and they invest their time in making this awesome software for you to use for free.

Lots of them even spend time to travel abroad to meet each other in Sprints were they do concentrated hacking for a few days, so if you appreciate the work they do in those Sprints please donate some money so we can actually help them travel and we can make more Sprints happen :-) http://www.kde.org/community/donations/

As anecdote, I had the pleasure of meeting the guys from the KTP Sprint this Friday and after dinner they went back to hacking instead of joining some of us for some beers. That is dedication!