Users 

The end of the joint Kate/KDevelop Sprint 2015 is coming closer, half of the people already have left to get home.

It was a good thing to have this sprint sponsored by the KDE e.V. and organized by Milian Wolff directly after the Qt World Summit 2015 here in Berlin. I think that made it easier for people to attend both events, like myself ;=)

I came to the sprint to work on getting our bugs sorted and fixed and to improve the state of the Mac port. I must confess, the bug fixing session worked out well, but I didn’t take a shot at Mac at all.

This week is really busy, first three days of Qt World Summit and now hacking away at the Kate/KDevelop sprint in Berlin.

This year my personal goal will be to get our bugs & wishes back into shape.

One major decision I as the maintainer did take was to close all wishes that not got changed since two years. Our team is very small and we have plenty of real bugs to take care of (and their number is rising) such that we will never be able to implement random requests.

To get started with KDE development, newcomers usually first sent patches. Having sent several patches, the newcomers are typically encouraged by us (the reviewers) to apply for a KDE contributor account. This application includes the question of “who encouraged you to apply for a KDE contributor account”.

Then, the KDE sysadmins contact the mentioned developers to make sure the application is valid and trustworthy.  Hence, you, as someone who encouraged others to apply for an account, get a mail with the subject “Developer account application approval […]”.

At this year’s KDE conference Akademy, I was working on a small plasmoid to continuously track the disk quota.

The disk quota is usually used in enterprise installations where network shares are mounted locally. Typically, sysadmins want to avoid that users copy lots of data into their folders, and therefor set quotas (the quota limit has nothing to do with the physical size of a partition). Typically, once a user gets over the hard limit of the quota, the account is blocked and the user cannot login anymore. This happens from time to time, since the users are not really aware of the current quota limit and the already used disk space.

Today, I will travel back home from Akademy 2015.

I must say, it was really a nice KDE meeting and I had a lot of fun ;=)
The first day the KDE e.V. general assembly did take place, then two days of actually interesting talks (including the great announcement of Plasma Mobile). After some more days with interesting BoFs and hacking, Akademy is now ending for me.

I didn’t do that much work on Kate, I mostly did small bugfixes for the applications bundled with the KDE Applications releases regarding their HiDPI support, finally no Konsole that can’t redraw correctly on scrolling on a HiDPI screen with scaling activated!

The yearly KDE conference Akademy is currently being held with lots of interesting talks and workshops. One big thing that was announced yesterday is Plasma Mobile, a free mobile platform.

The presentation of Plasma Mobile was quite impressive: A video of using Plasma Mobile on a Nexus 5 showed a nice  visual design, smooth transitions and quite some usable functionality already. This impression was confirmed later when I was playing around with Plasma Mobile on the Nexus 5 myself.

I reinstalled my home machine last week with openSUSE 13.2 and installed their latest 15.04 packages from the KDE repos ;=)

That is the first time that I use a distro-shipped Kate that is based on KF5 (and no other Kate 4.x is installed any more as escape route).

I think I already have seen 1-2 glitches (like not needed questions for reload and some repaint issue on reload), still, overall, I am happy with what is shipped as 15.04.

Given that the KF5 based Kate works OK on Windows, I would like to get the Mac version up and running, too.

As virtualization of MacOS X is kind of “forbidden” and not that nicely usable anyway, as no nice accelerating drivers are available for the standard vm solutions, I just went out into the world and bought some Retina MacBook.

I followed the nice guide on https://github.com/haraldF/homebrew-kf5 (thanks Harald :=) and got some installed Kate/KWrite (after patching kio to skip X11 detection).

Recently, there were some thoughts on where KDE is going, and  related to that what’s the driving force behind it in terms of the pillars of KDE. Albeit it is true our development model changed significantly, I’m not convinced that it’s all about git.

No, I rather believe that it is the excitement about the KDE that makes it stand out – KDE as a community if you wish, but also KDE as a software project.