In keeping with tradition of LTS aftermaths, the upcoming Plasma 5.9 release – the next feature release after our first Long Term Support Edition – will be packed with lots of goodies to help you get even more productive with Plasma!
Productivity++
Category: Planet KDE
Posts to be published on planetkde.org
Distraction-Free Workspace
Plasma’s mantra is to help you get stuff done faster, to not stand in your way. In past releases we added many small tools for you to achieve your tasks more quickly and spend less time fiddling with the desktop environment.
Global Menu’s Returning!
With Plasma 5.8 LTS out the door it’s time to look ahead at future Plasma releases. In our first long term support release we introduced “modifier only shortcuts” that allow you to open the application launcher with just the Meta key. Judging from feedback on the Internet this is one of the best features introduced in all of KDE’s history ;) I was quite surprised to find that the global menu is a close second.
KDE 20th Birthday Party in Karlsruhe
KDE is turning 20, let’s celebrate!
Date: Friday, 14 October 2016 (the actual birthday!)
Time: 19:00
Place: Der Vogelbräu, Kapellenstraße 50, 76131 Karlsruhe
Who: You! And fellow KDE developers and users
What we’re going to do: Have a few delicious unfiltered beers, a delicious dinner, talk, have fun, …
Please ping me and/or add yourself to the Wiki page, if you’re around and planning to come (contact info can be found in the Impressum, or tell kbroulik in #plasma on Freenode), so I can extend the reservation, if needed.
I’m going to Akademy 2016
In a couple of days Akademy will start and it’s co-hosted with QtCon in Berlin. This will be a super exciting event bringing together not just KDE folks but also enthusiast people from Qt, FSFE, and VideoLAN.
I’ll be giving a talk on what it’s like to use Qt to compete on the mobile app development market. See you all soon!
Getting Ready for LTS
Plasma 5.8 will be our first long term support release of Plasma 5 and together with Qt 5.6 also being an LTS release this makes for a rock-solid combo. Let’s have a look at some of the tweaks I did on the occasion.
Task manager drag and drop
I recently stumbled upon a feature request about the ability to drop files onto a task manager entry to have the associated application open them. You can pin applications to the task manager after all, so why would those launchers behave differently from other application icons?
Randa 2016 Coming to an End
When I arrived in beautiful Randa on Sunday, the week seemed like it would never end but it’s Saturday already and tomorrow I’ll be leaving again.
It’s been an extremely productive week – in the few days since my last blog post I managed to fix a tremendous amount of bugs and added lots of new features and improvements throughout the workspace.
Plasma in Randa
For the first time I managed to go to Randa, a beautiful quiet village in the Swiss Alps. Here at Randa we’re currently having a week of intense hacking sessions and cross-platform porting and planning efforts.
Taming the Beast
One of the lesser-known features in KDE Applications and Plasma is the Kiosk Framework, a means of restricting the customizability of the workspace in order to keep users in an enterprise or public environment from performing unwanted actions or modifications.
Unfortunately, it hasn’t seen much love lately. However, a couple of weeks ago, we received some feedback about the state of Kiosk in “40 classroom installations” of Plasma on our Enterprise mailing list which David Edmundson and I tackled immediately. Within a couple of days we could already remedy the majority of shortcomings revealed.
KDE at the Augsburger Linux-Infotag
On Saturday, 16 April I had the honor of representing KDE at the 15. Augsburger Linux-Tag, one of the oldest and largest Linux gatherings in southern Germany.
