Around the turn of the century, smartphones came in many clever and innovative shapes and sizes. For about 10 years, we lost that innovation to rectangular touch screen slabs, but now some of that innovation is coming back. The Cosmo Communicator is a good example. It’s an Android smartphone with a real physical keyboard, a clam-shell hinge to open it up, and an external screen. It even allows you to partition the storage area and install full Linux for a dual boot experience.

The Cosmo Communicator is 171.4mm long, 79.3mm wide, and 17.3mm thick. It’s not a small device. The weight is 326g, so it’s not light either. It’s got a 4220mAh battery with fast charging, 5.99″ FHD 2160×1080 pixel main display, 1.91″ external OLED touch display, 24Mp external camera with LED flash, and 5Mp front-facing video call camera. It supports all of the GSM, CDMA, and 4G LTE radios and is also available in a Verizon version or Japan version for those different frequencies. You’ve got dual nano-SIM card slots and eSIM support as well. It comes with Android 9.0 installed, but now with recent updates, we can also install a special version of Debian Linux. Sailfish might work too.

KDE neon is our installable Linux with continuous integration and deployment. It’s based on Ubuntu who had a new Long Term Support Release recently so we’ve rebased it on Ubuntu 20.04 now.

You should see a popup on your install in the next day or so. It’ll ask you to make sure your system is up to date then it’ll upgrade the base to 20.04 which takes a while to download and then another while to install.

Afterwards it should look just the same because it’s the same wonderful Plasma desktop.

Also: KDE neon Is Now Based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

KDE Frameworks 5.73 is a monthly update to the open-source software suite, but it packs a lot of interesting changes. For example, the Kirigami UI builder received a new FlexColumn component and now supports action visibility in the GlobalDrawer, along with optimizations to the mobile layout and to the accessibility of the Kirigami input fields.

The Breeze icon theme saw a lot of changes too during the development cycle of KDE Frameworks 5.73, and it now comes with a bunch of new icons for Kontrast, kirigami-gallery, snap-angle, document-replace, SMART status, task-recurring, appointment-recurring, Overwrite action/button, and applications/pkcs12 mime type.

Wooo, summer... Hot weather and a quick computer reinstall right in the middle of the production of the books because my previous Kubuntu 19.10 was obsolete and reached end of life in July. Bad surprise for me this time in the process: no way to install Scribus 1.4.8 stable anymore and all my books are done with that. The package was savagely forced replaced by 1.5.5~Development and no way to reinstall the previous version flagged as stable by the Scribus team.

So, I'll have to move the book project to this development version (it will take hours of adaptation because the text-engine changed between 1.4x and 1.5x). If you are on Windows, Mac, 18.04 or CentOS no worry for you: the package still exists there. Sad to see that no Appimage, Flatpack or Snap are around to rescue this issue... But let's close for now this parenthesis with a taste of bitterness. I'll cope with that, I saw uglier situations of upgrade in my life and this Kubuntu 20.04 is −about all other aspect− a splendid distribution so far.