KDE: Videos, Plasma and Itinerary

• So you want to make a KDE video...

  KDE is running a competition in search of the next great promotional video for KDE's Plasma desktop and KDE's applications. The prizes are two fantastic TUXEDO computers, one per category, which will undoubtedly boost your film rendering capacity. There are also 12 goodie packages for runner-ups, and who doesn't need more Linux shirts, caps and stickers? Although we have already received some interesting entries, we feel it may be time to help video artists out there with ideas from the judges themselves. Below, Julian Schraner, Ivana Isadora Devčić, and Paul Brown from the Promo team and Farid Abdelnour from the Kdenlive team give their views on what a KDE promotional video should look like, where to find resources, and which pitfalls may hurt your film if you fall for them.

• Learning about our users

  In a product like Plasma, knowing the kind of things our existing users care about and use sheds light on what needs polishing or improving. At the moment, the input we have is either the one from the loudest most involved people or outright bug reports, which lead to a confirmation bias. What do our users like about Plasma? On which hardware do people use Plasma? Are we testing Plasma on the same kind of hardware Plasma is being used for? Some time ago, Volker Krause started up the KUserFeedback framework with two main features. First, allowing to send information about application’s usage depending on certain users’ preferences and include mechanisms to ask users for feedback explicitly. This has been deployed into several products already, like GammaRay and Qt Creator, but we never adopted it in KDE software. The first step has been to allow our users to tune how much information Plasma products should be telling KDE about the systems they run on.

• [KDE] Itinerary extraction in Nextcloud Hub

  Nextcloud announced their latest release and among the many new features is itinerary extraction from emails. That’s using KDE’s extraction engine, the same that powers similar features in KMail as well.

Windows 7 Support Ended. Here’s You Should Do.

After a decade of service, Windows 7 finally retired, leaving millions of PC worldwide exposed to security vulnerabilities and hackers.

Debian: Stremio in Sparky Linux, Looking at Debian 10, and Package Usage Stats

• Stremio

  There is a new tool available for Sparkers: Stremio What is Stremio? Stremio is a one-stop hub for video content aggregation. Discover, organize and watch video from all kind of sources on any device that you own. Movies, TV shows, series, live television or web channels like YouTube and Twitch.tv – you can find all this on Stremio.

• Debian 10, the clean install

  Events have ended my upgrade procrastination. Last week my hard drive started having many errors. Fortunately it lasted long enough for me to copy all of its contents to my USB backup drive. (My /home/brad directory is automatically backed up daily, but I also have separate partitions for downloaded files, PDFs, Linux CD images, and archived photos from my digital camera...and those only get backed up now and then.) Then a quick trip to the store for a new SATA hard drive. I suppose I could have copied my old root partition over to the new drive. But I've been running 32-bit Debian 8 ("Jessie"), which is now two versions behind. And I've been noticing more and more applications that I want to run are only being distributed for 64-bit Linux. So I decided to do a clean install of 64-bit Debian 10 ("Buster"), with my preferred MATE desktop (now a standard option with Debian).

• gnu Linux Debian – top 1000 packages by install – popularity contest

  remember: only the installs are counted where the user said yes during setup to: „do you want to participate in popularity contest?“ (guess that many Linux users are privacy sensitive and a lot of them probably say „no“)