A year ago I’d just finished my History degree and I had no idea how to code. This year, I’m taking part in Google Summer of Code! I’m super happy to get the chance to learn more about how KDE software works, and to finally contribute to a project I’ve been using for years. Over the summer, I’ll be working with KDE developers to create productivity-focused components for Plasma Mobile that work with Akonadi, KDE’s personal information management framework. Akonadi is a super useful piece of kit: it allows developers to tap into a user’s synchronised e-mails, contacts, calendars, providing a seamless experience in productivity tools. I’ll be working on this project with my mentor Carl Schwan, who also helped me during my time doing Season of KDE, and Devin Lin. ...

I wrote my first Season of KDE blog-post 3 months ago… and have since forgotten to write any updates. It’s time to address that! Since January, I’ve been working mainly on improving the documentation for Kirigami. Back then, the Develop wiki had some pages teaching newcomers how to create a Kirigami application, but these were a little disjointed and didn’t really lead readers towards any specific goal. There were also a lot of aspects and components of Kirigami that weren’t properly documented. Some of the existing materials also needed revising in terms of style, structure, and clarity. ...

Hello fellow KDE people! I’m Clau, one of the new Season of KDE students. I’ve been a Plasma user for a long time: it was actually the first DE I ever used, back in the early KDE3 days, and it has been my desktop of choice ever since. Needless to say, I’m stoked to be able to contribute to such a cool (kool?) project. I’ve written about FLOSS stuff for a while now, but recently I’ve been working on my coding skills too. I decided to help with documentation efforts as this would help newcomers and also allow me to learn more about how KDE’s best apps are made. I’ll be working under Carl Schwan, who will make sure that the upcoming content in the docs is the best it can be. Documentation is important for any project, and we have identified a few areas which I will be working on improving over the next few months. These include introductory tutorials, Kirigami’s docs, and more. My hope is that these efforts will ensure that the community of KDE developers keeps growing! ...

So you bought yourself a new gaming laptop. That’s great. But you were just about to install Windows on it. Not so great. Then you decided you would give this new OS everybody is talking about a try. Now, that’s even better. Unfortunately, certain manufacturers are a lot less inclined to make their hardware play nice under Linux than others. When I tried to install Manjaro on my 2019 HP Omen 15, I was immediately met with a host of issues. That’s okay though — with just a little bit of elbow grease (and a few quick terminal commands) you can get everything working even better than on Windows. ...