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Last day of the KF6 sprint at the MBition office in Berlin.

Yesterday evening we had a nice group dinner with all sprint members.

That is the starting state of our board today:

First we discussed about the larger things like kio, kparts and kxmlgui together in one large group (including remote David Faure).

Second day of the KF6 sprint at the MBition office in Berlin.

Kevin prepared a work board to structure what we do.

We split up in four groups that will tackle tier 3 frameworks and review them for wanted/needed changes. Stuff like cleaning up dependencies or API cleanups or even full deprecation for stuff that were porting aids already for KF5.

Today we started our KF6 sprint at the MBition office in Berlin.

Beside the people attending in person, we have David Faure joining us via web conference.

Thanks already to the people at MBition that spend time on making it possible to host the sprint there.

First stuff to be discussed were some high level things, like does the monthly release scheme work out well. Short answer: yes :) The short period works well, allows people to fix issues directly in frameworks and still have that reasonable fast provided to the users. And the overhead of release creation is low, thanks to automation.

Some weeks ago at the Open Source Summit & Embedded Linux Conference there was also a talk by David about using heaptrack and hotspot. Since these tools are extremely valuable, I thought I'd blog to make these tools a bit more visible in the KDE community. Have fun watching & happy debugging, and join the discussion on KDE's subreddit :-)

Resources:

• Video: https://youtu.be/HOR4LiS4uMI
• Slides: https://elinux.org/images/3/30/Tooling.pdf
• Heaptrack, a heap memory profiler for Linux
• Hotspot, a Linux perf GUI for performance analysis

To increase the visibility of KDE applications on Windows, the KDE e.V. has a Windows Store account to publish our applications there.

This is not the only way to get KDE application for the Windows operating system, you can e.g. directly grab installers or portable ZIP files from our Binary Factory.

There is at the moment no nice documentation how to submit some application to the store.

For many years planet.kde.org was the goto page for news around KDE. This is still the case nowadays - many KDE contributors have their blog synchronized to talk about all sorts of KDE related cool stuff.

However, what changed significantly is how these blogs are discussed afterwards.

In the old days each blog typically had its own comment section. Nowadays, blogs may still have this comment section, but most of the time the blogs are discussed in the respective reddit subgroup. For instance, a popular subreddit is reddit/r/kde. There, you can find many KDE developers as well as many KDE users, giving direct feedback, asking questions, sometimes mentioning bug reports. While KDE of course has a dedicated bug tracker bugzilla that should be used, discussing a bug or wish on reddit often reaches a broader audience, putting some focus on specific bugs.

Our Windows Store submission succeeded, we are now officially in the store.

Try out how the Kate text editor performs on Windows for your personal workflow.

If you see issues and want to help out, contributions are welcome on our GitLab instance.

Since a few years Kate is working well on Windows. You can grab fresh installers since then from our download page.

But the visibility of it was very low for Windows users.

Already last year the plan was made to increase the visibility of KDE applications by getting them into the official Windows Store.

Like always, Akademy is a great chance to get the last bits ironed out and the stuff done!