Make sure you commit anything you want to end up in the KDE Gear 25.08
releases to them
Next Dates:
If you are a developer and your KDE project is still based on Qt5 you should really really start porting to Qt6 now.
https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-devel/2025-June/003742.html
This is the release schedule the release team agreed on
https://community.kde.org/Schedules/KDE_Gear_25.08_Schedule
Dependency freeze is in around 2 weeks (July 3) and feature freeze one
after that. Get your stuff ready!
We have moved the deadline for talk submission for Akademy 2025 to the end of the month. Submit your talks now!
https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2025q2/008217.html
These past two days I attended the Qt World Summit 2025
It happened in Munich in the SHOWPALAST MÜNCHEN. The venue is HUGE, we had around 800 attendees (unofficial sources, don't trust the number too much) and it felt it could hold more. One slightly unfortunate thing is that it was a bit cold (temperatures in Munich these two days were well below the average for May) and quite some parts of the venue are outdoors, but you can't control the weather, so not much to "fix" here.
The venue is somewhat strangely focused on horses, but that's nothing more than an interesting quirk.
Qt World Summit is an event for the Qt developers around the world and the talks range from showcases of Qt in different products, to technical talks about how to improve performance along others less Qt centric talks about how to collaborate with other developers or about "modern C++".
As KDE we participated in the event with a stand trying to explain people what we do (David Redondo and Nicolas Fella were more in the stand than me, kudos to them)
Talks for the videos will be published "soon" (or so I've been told). When that happens the ones I recommend you to watch are "Navigating Code Collaboration" by LAURA SAVINO, "QML Bindings in Qt6" by ULF HERMANN and "C++ as a 21st Century Language" by BJARNE STROUSTRUP, but the agenda was packed with talks so make sure to check the videos since probably your tastes and mine don't 100% align.
All in all it was a great event, it is good to see that Qt is doing well since we use it for the base of almost everything we do in KDE. Thanks to The Qt Company and the rest of the sponsors for organizing it.
Make sure you commit anything you want to end up in the KDE Gear 25.04
releases to them
Next Dates
March 13 2025: 25.04 Freeze and Beta (25.03.80) tag & release
March 27, 2025: 25.04 RC (25.03.90) Tagging and Release
April 10, 2025: 25.04 Tagging
April 17, 2025: 25.04 Release
https://community.kde.org/Schedules/KDE_Gear_25.04_Schedule
This is the release schedule the release team agreed on
https://community.kde.org/Schedules/KDE_Gear_25.04_Schedule
Dependency freeze is in around 3 weeks (March 6) and feature freeze one
after that. Get your stuff ready!
Make sure you commit anything you want to end up in the KDE Gear 24.12
releases to them
Next Dates:
This weekend "The KDE Alberts"[1] attended Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit 2024 in Sunnyvale, California.
The Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit is an annual
unconference that every project participating in Google Summer of Code
2024 is invited to attend. This year it was the 20th year celebration of the program!
I was too late to take a picture of the full cake!
We attended many sessions ranging from how to try to avoid falling into the "xz problem" to collecting donations or shaping the governance of open source projects.
We met lots of people that knew what KDE was and were happy to congratulate us on the job done and also a few that did not know KDE and were happy to learn about what we do.
We also did a quick lightning talk about the GSOC projects KDE mentored this year and led two sessions: one centered around the problems some open source application developers are having publishing to the Google Play Store and another session about Desktop Linux together with our Gnome friends.
All in all a very productive unconference. We encourage KDE mentors to take the opportunity to attend the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit next year, it's a great experience!
[1] me and Albert Vaca, people were moderately amused that both of us had the same name, contribute to the same community and are from the same city.
If you're using Plasma/KWin 6 i suggest you disable the Morphing Popups effect, it has been removed for Plasma 6.2 https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/commit/d6360cc4ce4e0d85862a4bb077b8b3dc55cd74a7 and on X11 at least it causes severe redraw issues with tooltips in Okular (and i would guess elsewhere).
This is the release schedule the release team agreed on
https://community.kde.org/Schedules/KDE_Gear_24.08_Schedule
Dependency freeze is in around 4 weeks (July 18) and feature freeze one
after that. Get your stuff ready!
If you're looking for an isolated and straightforward way to start contributing to KDE, you're in the right place. At KDE, we use fuzzing via oss-fuzz to try to ensure our libraries are robust against broken inputs. Here's how you can help us in this essential task.
What is Fuzzing?
Fuzzing involves feeding "random" [1] data into our code to check its robustness against invalid or unexpected inputs. This is crucial for ensuring the security and stability of applications that process data without direct user control.
Why is Fuzzing Important?
Imagine receiving an image via email, saving it to your disk, and opening it in Dolphin. This will make Dolphin create a thumbnail of the image. If the image is corrupted and our image plugin code isn't robust, the best-case scenario is that Dolphin crashes. In the worst case, it could lead to a security breach. Hence, fuzzing helps prevent such vulnerabilities.
How You Can Help:
We need to update the build of KDE libraries in oss-fuzz to use Qt6. This task could be challenging because it involves static compilation and ensuring the correct flags are passed for all compilation units.
Steps to Contribute:
Start with karchive Project
Update build.sh Script:
build.sh script to compile Qt6 (this will be harder since it involves moving from qmake to cmake) and KDE Frameworks 6.Check karchive_fuzzer.cc:
karchive_fuzzer.cc, you'll find a comment with the three commands that oss-fuzz runs. Use these to test the image building, fuzzer building, and running processes.Need Help?
If you have questions or need assistance, please contact me at aacid@kde.org or ping me on Matrix at @tsdgeos:kde.org
Note:
[1] Smart fuzzing engines don't generate purely random data. They use semi-random and semi-smart techniques to efficiently find issues in the code.
A few weeks ago I attended the KDE Goals April 2024 sprint
I was there as part of the Automation & Systematization sprint given my involvement in the release process, the "not very automatized" weekly emails about the status of CI about KDE Gear and KDE Frameworks, etc. but I think that maybe I was there more as "person that has been around a long time, ask me if you have questions about things that are documented through oral tradition"
I didn't end up doing lots of work on sprint topics themselves (though I participated in various discussions, did a bit of pair-programming with Aleix on QML accessibility issues, inspired DavidR to do the QML-text-missing-i18n check that he describes in his blog); instead I cheated a bit and used the sprint to focus on some of the KDE stuff I had a bit on my backlog, creating the KDE Gear release/24.05 branches and lots of MR reviewing and more!
Thanks KDE e.V. for sponsoring the trip, if you would like such events to continue please we need your continued donations
And remember Akademy talk submission period ends in 10 days, send your talk now!
Akademy 2024 (the annual world summit for KDE) is happening in Würzburg, Saturday 7th – Thursday 12th September. (I hope you knew that)
First of all, if you're reading this and thinking, "Should i go to Akademy?"
The answer is [most probably] YES! Akademy has something for everyone, be it coders, translators, promoters, designers, enthusiasts, etc.
Now, with this out of the way, one of the many things that makes Akademy is the talks on the weekend, and you know who has something to say? *YOU*
Yes, *YOU*. I'm sure you've been working on something interesting, or have a great idea to share.
*YOU* may think that your idea is not that great or the things you work on are not interesting, but that's seldomly the case when someone explains me their "boring" thing they've been working on, i always think "Wow that's great".
Ok, so now that I've convinced you to send a talk proposal, when better than *TODAY* to send it?
Yes I know the Call for Participation is open until the 24 of May, but by sending it today you make sure you don't forget sending it later and also [more important for me] you help those of us in the Program Committee not to worry when the final date starts approaching and we don't have lots of talks yet because you all prefer sending talks on the very last minute.
So stop reading and send your talk today ;-)
We recently remove the Plucker/Palm support in Okular, because it was unmaintained and we didn't even find [m]any suitable file to test it.
If you are using it, you have a few months to step up and bring it back, if not, let's have it rest.
Make sure you commit anything you want to end up in the KDE Gear 24.02 releases to them
Next Dates:
https://community.kde.org/Schedules/February_2024_MegaRelease
This past weekend I attended the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit 2023 as part of the KDE delegation.
I have been a mentor for GSOC almost every year since 2005 but this was my first time attending the mentor summit.
There were sessions about the typical things you'd expect: how to get more diverse folks as students, how to make sure we onboard them correctly, sustainability, funding, etc. All in all nothing groundbreaking and sadly no genius solution for the issues we face was given, but to a certain degree it helps to see that most of us have similar problems and it's not that we're doing things particularly wrong, it's just that running a Free Software project is though.
Carl Schwan and me ran a Desktop Linux session together with Jonathan Blandford of GNOME (check his Crosswords game, seems pretty nice) and basically asked folks "How happy are you with the Desktop Linux", you can find the notes about it at https://collaborate.kde.org/s/HKn6BoNCRNezn3K Nothing we don't know about really, Wayland and flatpak/snap are still a bit painful for some folks even if there's a general agreement they are good ideas.
I also organized a little session for all the attendees from Barcelona (it was about 6 of us or so) to sell them talk about Barcelona Free Software
One thing that always pops up in your mind when going to events is "How useful was it for me to attend this" since traveling to California from Europe is not easy, it is not cheap and it means investing quite some time (which in my case included taking vacation from work).
Honestly, I think it's quite useful and we should attend more similar events. We get to know key people from other projects and we make sure other projects know about us. One of the most funny interactions was me sitting in a table, someone joining and saying "Woah KDE, you guys are super famous, love your work" and literally seconds after another person joining us and saying "Uh, KDE what is that?"
There's not much pictures because Google forbids taking pictures inside their buildings, the few exceptions include the chocolate table, it's quite a large quantity of chocolate we got to try, thanks Robert from Musicbrainz for pushing people to bring it :)
I'd like to thank Google and KDE e.V. for sponsoring my trip to the Summit, please donate at https://kde.org/fundraisers/plasma6member/
