Author: Nate

This week in Usability & Productivity, part 58

Week 58 for KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative is here! Hot on the heels of last week’s update, we’ve got lots of nice goodies to share:

New Features

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

User Interface Improvements

Next week, your name could be in this list! Not sure how? Just ask! I’ve helped mentor a number of new contributors recently and I’d love to help you, too! You can also check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved, and find out how you can help be a part of something that really matters. You don’t have to already be a programmer. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

If you find KDE software useful, consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

This week in Usability & Productivity, part 57

Get ready for a humongous monster week 57 for KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative and there’s a metric tonne of stuff!!! So go make yourself a cup of tea or coffee and settle in for a long list of improvements. 🙂

But first I want to mention that we’re working on fixes for Discover users in Plasma 5.14.5 who are stuck unable to update. We’ve pushed a fix into the 5.14 branch that should cause the stuck backend to time out after one minute, allowing everything else to work. We’ll be releasing a Plasma 5.14.5.1 bugfix release, inclusing this fix. Fear not, we won’t leave you out in the icy cold blackness of night… alone, hungry, and unable to upgrade your software using a GUI application?

Also it’s already fixed in Plasma 5.15. 🙂

We’ve also backported a number of other fixes onto the 5.14 branch and I hope we can ship one more bugfix release of 5.14 just to ensure that the quality is as high as possible for the upcoming Debian Stable freeze.

New Features

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

User Interface Improvements

Next week, your name could be in this list! Not sure how? Just ask! I’ve helped mentor a number of new contributors recently and I’d love to help you, too! You can also check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved, and find out how you can help be a part of something that really matters. You don’t have to already be a programmer. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

If you find KDE software useful, consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

This week in Usability & Productivity, part 56

Here are the results of week 56 of KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative. We’ve been working on Plasma 5.16 features and fixing old bugs in Plasma 5.12 and beyond.

One additional thing I’d like to mention is that we’re aware that many users of Discover in Plasma 5.14 are suffering from an inability to either check for updates or update their systems. This issue is fixed in Plasma 5.15 and beyond, but we’re working on a fix for Plasma 5.14 users that can be backported. Sorry for the breakage, everyone!

Anyway, onto the good stuff…

New Features

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

User Interface Improvements

Next week, your name could be in this list! Not sure how? Just ask! I’ve helped mentor a number of new contributors recently and I’d love to help you, too! You can also check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved, and find out how you can help be a part of something that really matters. You don’t have to already be a programmer. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

If you find KDE software useful, consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

This week in Usability & Productivity, part 55

First I have some exciting personal news to share: I’ve been hired by Blue Systems to work on KDE projects full time as QA manager!

This means I don’t need community sponsorship via Patreon and will be shutting it down after this month. I’ll be keeping the PayPal and LiberaPay links to serve as a sort of “digital tip jar”, but I don’t need longer looking for internet money to support my family. Blue Systems is seeing to that now. 🙂

I have a lot of plans for how to polish up KDE software 2019 and I’m super excited to get started with no distractions!

Anyway, let’s move onto week 55 for KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative. I want to give a shout-out to our Breeze icon team, whose members have been just knocking it out of the the park lately. For example Rafael Brandmaier just fixed a 14 year-old bug yesterday! A lot of the work will show up in Plasma 5.16, but some of it will be visible in upcoming Frameworks releases too. Check out the full Breeze Icons commit log! Of course we have more than just icons:

New Features

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

User Interface Improvements

Next week, your name could be in this list! Not sure how? Just ask! I’ve helped mentor a number of new contributors recently and I’d love to help you, too! You can also check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved, and find out how you can help be a part of something that really matters. You don’t have to already be a programmer. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

If you find KDE software useful, consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

This week in Usability & Productivity, part 54

This week in KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative, something big landed: virtual desktop support on Wayland, accompanied by a shiny new user interface for the X11 version too. Eike Hein, Marco Martin, and the rest of the Plasma hackers have been working on this literally for months and I think they deserves a round of applause! It was a truly enormous amount of work, but now we can benefit for years to come. 🙂

We’ve also kicked off the Plasma 5.15 beta period. Here’s how you can test it with KDE Neon or Kubuntu.

Bug reports have already started to come in and we’re fixing them as fast as possible to ensure a smooth release next month on February 12th!

New Features

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

User Interface Improvements

Next week, your name could be in this list! Not sure how? Just ask! I’ve helped mentor a number of new contributors recently and I’d love to help you, too! You can also check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved, and find out how you can help be a part of something that really matters. You don’t have to already be a programmer. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

If my efforts to perform, guide, and document this work seem useful and you’d like to see more of them, then consider becoming a patron on Patreon, LiberaPay, or PayPal. Also consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

This week in Usability & Productivity, part 53

I totally missed that last week marked the one-year anniversary of my documentation and guidance of KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative. I think we’ve achieved a lot over the course of that year!

Note that this is NOT an exhaustive log of everything that happened this week in the entire KDE community, or even in all of Plasma. The actual number of commits and improvements is always vast and enormous–too much to comprehend, really. The KDE Community is staggeringly productive.

Rather, this is always a curated list of only the user-facing improvements I believe are directly relevant to the Usability & Productivity initiative. And speaking of it, this week we got an interesting assortment of new features, bugfixes, and UI improvements–many of which I didn’t mention but will ultimately be appreciated when taken together. Check it out:

New Features

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

User Interface Improvements

Next week, your name could be in this list! Not sure how? Just ask! I’ve helped mentor a number of new contributors recently and I’d love to help you, too! You can also check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved, and find out how you can help be a part of something that really matters. You don’t have to already be a programmer. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

If my efforts to perform, guide, and document this work seem useful and you’d like to see more of them, then consider becoming a patron on Patreon, LiberaPay, or PayPal. Also consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

This week in Usability & Productivity, part 52

This week in Usability & Productivity, the KDE VDG worked very intensively on aesthetics. The Breeze icon theme gained a lot of attention, resulting in many improvements, and we now have a good number of icon designers diligently working through a backlog of issues. More is on the way too, with several enthusiastic new VDG members who combine an eye for design with strong technical abilities. Expect good things to come of this!

New Features

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

User Interface Improvements

Next week, your name could be in this list! Not sure how? Just ask! I’ve helped mentor a number of new contributors recently and I’d love to help you, too! You can also check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved, and find out how you can help be a part of something that really matters. You don’t have to already be a programmer. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

If my efforts to perform, guide, and document this work seem useful and you’d like to see more of them, then consider becoming a patron on Patreon, LiberaPay, or PayPal. Also consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.