• Coming up on Friday: first Bug Hunting Session for LibreOffice 6.0 Alpha 1

  The LibreOffice community has returned from a great conference in Rome (more on that later this week), and we’re now working eagerly on LibreOffice 6.0, which is due to be released at the end of January 2018. This version will include a large number of new features – and those already implemented are summarised on the release notes page.

• LibreOffice Is Getting New Look for KDE's Plasma Desktop Thanks to LiMux Project

  During the LibreOffice Conference 2017 event that took place in Rome, Italy, from October 10 to October 13, there were talks about the status the Qt 5 port of LibreOffice's VCL plugin for KDE Plasma.

  Every year, The Document Foundation plans and organizes a LibreOffice Conference event where developers, contributors, sponsors, users, and other members of the LibreOffice community can gather to talk about the future of the Open Souce office suite.

  And this year they planned the new features of the next major release of the cross-platform office suite, LibreOffice 6.0, which will arrive in late January 2018 with a new look for the KDE Plasma desktop environment, work that will be sponsored by the LiMux project.

• KDE still makes Qt

  A couple of years ago, I made a blog post, KDE makes Qt, with data about which percentage of Qt contributions came from people starting in KDE. Basically, how many Qt contributions are made by people who used KDE as a “gateway” drug into it.

• Krita 3.3.1 Best Alternative To Photoshop for Ubuntu/Linux Mint

  Krita is a KDE program for sketching and painting, although it has image processing capabilities, offering an end–to–end solution for creating digital painting files from scratch by masters. Fields of painting that Krita explicitly supports are concept art, creation of comics and textures for rendering. Modelled on existing real-world painting materials and workflows, Krita supports creative working by getting out of the way and with a snappy response.

• LibreOffice Conference 2017

  This week the annual LibreOffice conference was held in Rome and I had the pleasure to attend. The city of Rome is migrating their IT infrastructure to open software and standards and the city council was kind enough to provide the awesome venue for the event, the Campidoglio.

• More from the testing and fuzzing microconference

  A lot was discussed and presented in the three hours allotted to the Testing and Fuzzing microconference at this year's Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC), but some spilled out of that slot. We have already looked at some discussions on kernel testing that occurred both before and during the microconference. Much of the rest of the discussion will be summarized below. As it turns out, a discussion on the efforts by Intel to do continuous-integration (CI) testing of graphics hardware and drivers continued several hundred miles north the following week at the X.Org Developers Conference (XDC); that will be covered in a separate article.

• The NumWorks graphing calculator

  As the Internet of Things (IoT) becomes ever more populous, there is no shortage of people warning us that the continual infusion into our lives of hard-to-patch proprietary devices running hard-to-maintain proprietary code is a bit of a problem. It is an act of faith for some, myself included, that open devices running free software (whether IoT devices or not) are easier to maintain than proprietary, closed ones. So it's always of interest when freedom (or something close to it) makes its way into a class of devices that were not previously so blessed.

  In this case, the device is the humble scientific calculator. Many people now use their smartphones when they need to do sums, but others still find a calculator a useful thing to have at hand. Recently, NumWorks, a new scientific graphing calculator with an open-design ethos was released. Although it is far from fully free at this point, it is a major step forward from the user-hostile position most calculator manufacturers have taken, and it is interesting to see to what extent it fulfills its promise.

  [...]

  It also would not require NumWorks to try to make the in-browser support work on all the browsers that people use on their many Linux distributions; so Linux support may get better soon. For readers who want to get up and running now, the toolchain isn't all that painful to assemble.

Community voting has opened in the LibreOffice mascot competition.

The contest launched back in June, with LibreOffice inviting the community to submit their designs for use a potential project.

Four months on and the contest now moves on to the next stage: shaving the slew of submissions down to a succinct shortlist of only the strongest entries.

Also: Geary 0.12 Released, Here’s How To Install It on Ubuntu

I wanted to take a moment to remind people that 7 years ago the community decided to make the de facto fork of OpenOffice.org official after life under Sun (and then Oracle) were problematic. From the very first hours the project showed its effectiveness. See my post about LibreOffice first steps. Not to mention what it achieved in the past 7 years.

This is still one of my favourite open source contributions, not because it was sophisticated or hard, but because it as about using the freedom part of the free software:
Replace hardcoded “product by Oracle” with “product by %OOOVENDOR”.