The last several months had become amazingly painful with Kontact, however. Frequently folders would lock up and the caches would fall out of sync; switching folders would take forever; loading mail content was also often painful. Restarting Kontact became a multi-day affair, and dropping Akonadi caches was becoming increasingly frequent. I chalked this up to running bleeding edge master, but my patience was growing thin. I filed bug reports, I started looking through the code to see where problems might be and I even considered what I could migrate to. (Nothing really comes close to Kontact, however ...)

So the other week I decided to take a drastic measure before going any further: I blew away all of the configuration and data files related to Kontact (including the individual apps such as KMail and KOrganizer) and Akonadi, keeping only my local maildir folders and started from scratch.

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Some of your existing data will need to be migrated from the current Nepomuk backend to the new 'Baloo' backend. Running the nepomukbaloomigrator should take care of that. The old Nepomuk support is considered “legacy” (but it is still provided). The programs that have not yet been ported to the new architecture have Nepomuk integration disabled. One significant regression is file-activity linking, which will not work until KDE Applications and Platform 4.14. If you rely on this feature, we recommend not upgrading at this time. For the final release, distributions might choose to optionally have the old search (Nepomuk) available.

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The primary goal of the conference was to encourage people to get involved with open source and to understand its power and its reach. We also wanted to help them get started by teaching them the basics and by getting them to know more about KDE. When the conference was over, it didn't matter how many lines of code anyone could understand or even actually write. If some people were convinced of the magic of open source and of KDE, and are now willing to be contributors to this noble cause even if only slightly, then the event accomplished its aim. Events, speakers and mentors like these add fuel to the fire inside. Students were inspired to reach out and experience the power of free and open source technology.

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As my readers probably know there won’t be a combined release as the software compilation used to be. There are independent ongoing projects around the libraries (frameworks or KF5) the workspaces (Plasma Next) and the applications. These projects have independent release cycles and are not one product. I know, I know, many people will disagree and say that it’s still one. But if we go for this strong simplification both “will support Wayland” and “will not support Wayland” are true.

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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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