It’s Christmas time for KDE Software users, the team has just announced the first beta of the 4.13 versions of Applications and Development Platform. This release also marks a freeze on APIs, dependencies and features so the team will now focus on hunting down bugs and polish it further.

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With these things in mind, I very quickly focused on two desktop managers that might provide the desired desktop: Xfce and Trinity. Since I prefer to use openSUSE as the underlying operating system and Xfce is one of the desktop manager options fully supported by openSUSE installations, Xfce was an obvious first choice for consideration. This article will consider the Xfce desktop manager from the perspective of a KDE4 user and it is addressed to all those KDE4 users who feel similarly frustrated with the development direction KDE4 has taken.

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The KDE Project has released a major new version of its Krita image editing software, with the latest version of the free and open source Photoshop replacement available for both Windows and Linux.

The latest update, version 2.8, marks a significant milestone for the software, marking the first stable version of the software released for Windows.

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The Calligra team is proud and pleased to announce the release of version 2.8 of the Calligra Suite, Calligra Active and the Calligra Office Engine. This version is the result of thousands of commits which provide new features, polishing of the user experience and bug fixes.

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This release is dedicated to the people of all nations living in Ukraine. We are no fans of political messages in software announcements, but we also cannot remain silent when unmarked Russian troops are marching over a free country. The Trojitá project was founded in a republic formerly known as Czechoslovakia. We were "protected" by foreign aggressors twice in the 20th century — first in 1938 by the Nazi Germany, and second time in 1968 by the occupation forces of the USSR. Back in 1938, Adolf Hitler used the same rhetorics we hear today: that a national minority was oppressed. In 1968, eight people who protested against the occupation in Moscow were detained within a couple of minutes, convicted and sent to jail. In 2014, Moscowians are protesting on a bigger scale, yet we all see the cops arresting them on Youtube — including those displaying blank signs.

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Today's news scan turned up several interesting entries. First up is Linux.com's piece highlighting three key moments in Linux history. A new Scientific Linux review is out. Two KDE release announcements were posted. OMG!Ubuntu! has a list of seven features you're going to love in Ubuntu 14.04. A new Linux bug is wreaking havoc. And finally, friends don't let friends operate Windows.

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Today KDE released the second alpha of Frameworks 5, part of a series of releases leading up to the final version planned for June 2014. This release includes progress since the previous alpha last month.

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Today KDE released updates for its Applications and Development Platform, the third in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.12 series. This release also includes an updated Plasma Workspaces 4.11.7. Both releases contain only bugfixes and translation updates, providing a safe and pleasant update for everyone.

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My own talk was about where KDE, both technically and socially/organizationally, is going, also resulted in quite a few questions. They ranged from "what does RTFM mean" to discussions about involvement of startups and decision making processes. Much of what I talked about won't be new for KDE people who follow what is going on in our community quite closely. I mostly extrapolate from trends which have been visible for quite a few years. But for those who are new or less close to our community, I plan on putting it in a blog post or two over the coming days/weeks.

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In early 2013, it was established that "Osnabrück is not a place". Meaning that the KDE PIM spring sprint, which traditionally takes place in Osnabrück, could happen at a different location and still be a continuation of the tradition.

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conf.kde.in happened 2nd time in India after huge success in 2011. conf.kde.in 2014 was a 3-day conference held in DA-IICT college was even more successful, rocking, inspiring and motivational for all attendees. Attendees were very active and enthusiastic throughout the conference which was proved by asking as well as answering different questions with speakers.

One of best things was that there were no parallel talks, all talks including Qt workshop were scheduled in one conference room. This way all attendees were able to attend all talks without any rush for switching places.

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There is news for others Cantor backends too. Now script editor load default syntax highlighting for each backend – in old versions it did not happen. And, if you push New button, the new script editor will have the default syntax highlighting working too.

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Ubuntu derivatives have announced the first beta for 14.04 release. Since ‘daddy’ Ubuntu releases only one beta before final release the images for Unity are not available. Being a KDE user I am definitely looking forward to Kubuntu which will come with KDE Applications 4.12.2 along with newest Muon Software Center. I did notice a bug in Kubuntu beta and that’s freezing of installer if you have more than one hard drive attached to the system. I hope developers will fix this ‘deal breaking’ bug before the final release. Other betas are from Lubuntu, Xubuntu, Ubuntu Gnome and other members of Ubuntu family.

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The story of KDE's user revolt is well-known. What is less well known is that, in the six years since then, KDE has been steadily regaining its user-share.

In fact, for the last few years, KDE has registered as the most popular desktop among experienced users. Despite the obvious limitations of reader polls, they show KDE's popularity consistently well ahead of Xfce, the usual runner up, in2011, 2012, and 2013 in LinuxQuestions' Members Choice Awards and in Linux Journal's 2013 Readers' Choice Awards. Even assuming a wide margin of error in the polls, the consistency makes KDE's recovery hard to question.

What are the secrets behind KDE's comeback? I count at least nine design guidelines, some of which may be unofficial, and others that are at least working guidelines, if not official policy, for the development team.

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The official release of Qt 5.3 is tentatively planned for April but with the feature freeze coming up we already have a good idea for the features of this next tool-kit release.

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Manjaro 0.8.9 review is a review of the latest KDE and Xfce editions of Manjaro, a desktop distribution based on Arch Linux.

Manjaro is one of just a handful of desktop distributions that are trying to make all the goodness of Arch Linux available to new and seasoned users alike. It’s matching along with Antergos and Chakra Linux in this regard, though it seems to be further along than Chakra Linux and running neck-and-neck with Antergos.

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It was hard to pick out just a few stories to relay today. ComputerWorld says folks with Linux skills get paid really well. Big changes may be afoot over at Fedora and a new distribution is on the drawing board. Finally, Datamation.com has "Nine Lessons Other Desktops Can Learn from KDE."

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Some developers have been interested in seeing Qt go back to doing feature-based releases rather than being time-based. Right now the Qt5 tool-kit is released about every six months regardless of the number of features, but generally with the Qt5 releases thus far they have also been quite heavy on features. Six month release cycles is not good enough for some developers (in either direction) but Lars Knoll decided to chime in on the discussion Monday about changing the Qt release cycle and how branching is done.

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For years, KDE software has included a semantic (relationship-based) searching infrastructure. KDE's Semantic Search was built around concepts previously developed in a European Union-funded research project NEPOMUK which explored the use of relationships between data to improve search results. Based on these ideas, KDE's implementation of Semantic Search made it possible to search for all pictures - taken in - a particular place. On top of that, it added text search and tagging.

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Packages for the release of KDE SC 4.12.2 are available for Kubuntu 12.04LTS, 13.10 and our development release. You can get them from the Kubuntu Backports PPA. It includes an update of kde-workspace to 4.11.6.

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