News

KDE sprint focused on Plasma 6 During the last week, many KDE developers attended a sprint in Germany with the goal of shaping up the next Plasma release. Now that it has finished, we have many attendees publishing their work on their personal blogs, meaning we can some insight into what happened (especially since I, Niccolò, was also there). Such a week means there are a lot of new features and changes in KDE Plasma, so it’s worth looking at it in a longer section than usual: ...

Mastodon is bringing easier onboarding, quote posts, and more As you can see in the image above, Mastodon has decided to make it easier to join the Fediverse by suggesting mastodon.social as a default option (still allowing any custom server to be picked). This will make it easier for first-timers to join Mastodon, especially if it’s the first time they try a “federated” social network; there will surely still be time for them to understand that there are various different servers and switch between them, but the first step - making an account for the first time - has to be as simple as possible if we want more and more people joining. ...

GIMP has been ported to GTK3 The next major version of GIMP will be 3.0; to reach it, the team has a roadmap that tracks the changes they’d like to ship in that version. As you can guess by the version number, one of those things is switching from GTK2 to 3. The branch containing the remaining work on that front has been recently merged, completing the transition: GIMP (on the master branch) now uses GTK3, a big milestone. ...

This was a week packed with major releases of various projects. In this newsletter issue, I’ll cover the releases from Fedora, Proton by Valve, the Vivaldi browser, Deepin (though the release is 20.9 and not 23), and digiKam (KDE’s photo management application). Fedora 38 released, with new spins and packages The new version of Fedora comes with new wallpaper, a website redesign, new spins, up-to-date packages and an improved desktop, and more. Let’s go through all the changes; the new wallpaper is easy, as you can look at it just above this paragraph. The new website is of course not part of the OS itself, but it’s still a significant visual refresh aligned with the release and that required the collaboration of different design teams and the community. ...

Linux Mint introduces Styles and Color Variants Up until now, in Linux Mint you could only choose your theme and that was it. In March, the developers decided to introduce a more complex (and powerful) way to customize their system, which relies on three elements: “styles”, “modes” and “variants”. Quoting from their official blog post: A style has up to three modes: mixed, dark and light. Each of these modes can contain color “variants”. A variant is a combination of themes which work well together. ...

This week there’s a lot of Linux hardware news! We start off with Pine64 providing great news for three devices: the PineNote (e-ink tablet), the PineTab 2, and the new “PineTab V” (which is the PineTab 2, but with a RISC-V board). Then, there’s System76 announcing they’re working on an in-house manufactured laptop codenamed “Virgo”. Moving to phones, Ubuntu Touch has released its first version based on the latest LTS of Ubuntu, and Plasma Mobile also improved a lot whilst working for the Plasma 6 release. ...

Framework announces new 16" modular gaming laptop, revamps 13" one too Framework is a hardware company that makes “modular” laptops: very easy to take apart and with little blocks to attach on the sides to customize the IO of the devices. They’re either sold pre-built, or in a “DIY Edition” where you have to build it yourself and bring your own OS (including Linux). So, what’s new? Well, a new high-performance 16" laptop is coming, and it has an “Expansion Bay”: the back is detachable and allows for modular upgradeable graphics. This is all open source, meaning that mechanical drawings, 3D CAD, and electrical reference designs are available to the public. This makes it super-easy for customers or third parties to provide custom modules. ...

Hub 4 introduces AI Tools in Nextcloud We are currently witnessing a race by big companies to introduce AI tools in their “office” ecosystems. Microsoft, as an example, has announced a “Copilot” that will be able to generate text for Word and interact with other Office365 apps; Google also announced similar features in its Workspace applications. Two issues arise: firstly, these features are currently only available to a small selected number of partners; secondly, there is no interest by them - quite the opposite - to push for open and ethical AI models. ...

KDE has managed to port Konsole to Windows 11, and for a good reason; A GNOME Image Viewer application has refactored image decoding, with many user-facing improvements; Meta is considering joining the Fediverse through ActivityPub: there’s a lot going on! However, I’ll start with a major release (2.0) of a little tool that might come extremely in handy if you have an Android device… You can now mirror phone audio with scrcpy The project “scrcpy” has just released version 2.0! This little tool allows you to use your (Android) phone directly from your computer as if it was a normal window. It allows that both when the device is connected by a cable, but also if the phone in on the same network as your computer (and it works with tablets too). In some specific use cases, it can be a really handy tool! ...

This week is full of Distro news. Firstly there’s the announcement of the next version of VanillaOS, which will officially drop Ubuntu to be instead based on Debian. Which, by the way, is also working on their next release, called Bookwork, and which will include Plasma 5.27. The Nitrux has released version 2.7, now offering two different flavors, ditching KDE Plasma in one of the two in favor of Maui Shell. ...