Kubuntu Vivid is the development name for what will be released in April next year as Kubuntu 15.04.

The exiting news is that following some discussion and some wavering we will be switching to Plasma 5 by default. It has shown itself as a solid and reliable platform and it's time to show it off to the world.

Andy, thanks so much for picking up the topic of color pickers (pun intended).

I'd like to discuss cases when accuracy is not as important at results. In this case there's a problem of abundance of choice. You don't have time to quickly and correctly pick one from the 16777216 colors. Plus alpha value? Come on! Whenever you're confronted with a photoshop/gimp-like color picker you either choose random color, or single color that's globally predefined in a palette. I also understand that very few 'casual' users maintain own palettes for consistency.

Last month I posted about packaging and why it takes time. I commented that the Stable Release Update process could not be rushed because a regression is worse than a known bug. Then last week I was pointed to a problem where Baloo was causing a user's system to run slow. Baloo is the new indexer from KDE and will store all your files in a way you can easily search for them and was a faster replacement for Nepomuk.

That was my first Akademy after a while, I've been following previous two with kids on my lap. I think Brno turned out to be both a pretty destination and decent host for all KDErs.
A new Kexi contributor Wojtek Kosowicz came with me. You can read about him here and his recent story here. Recently in Kexi there is a trend of new contributors coming from Poland, and specifically from Warsaw. I've heard they're a bit regretting afterwards they didn't join the Akademy too but I trust that will improve next year :)

Best thing about Akademy Brno

Hacking hard in the hacking room

Blue Systems Beer

It's not a secret that reasonable explained and mentored junior jobs attract new great contributors.

Based on a popular request, here's massive list of 10 new Junior Jobs for Kexi. Now they are mostly related to Kexi Report Designer, which receives a lot of love recently as an unique Free Software solution of this kind.

https://community.kde.org/Kexi/Junior_Jobs/Small_report_improvements

Be sure to ask for details or request different kind of junior jobs... there are basically thousands of them :)
Enjoy!

SQL car by jepoirrier, CC BY-SA 2.0

Some of the Kubuntu Devs

Talking and hacking in the corridor

Sebas celebrates the release of Plasma 5

Welcome to Czech, it has beautiful sunsets

Welcome to Akademy at the Brno University of Technology

There were quite a few Kexi releases since my last blog entry. I tell you, the focus in this work was on improving stability. As an effect, reportedly, there can be a whole day of work without stability issues. Not bad.

Kexi is in fact a family of 5 or more apps integrated into one environment. Given the scope and ambitions it can be easily stated that we miss 20 to 30 engineers! Encouraging and educating new ones is a neverending activity. Out of the possible approaches these are well known: Google Summer of Code, Junior Jobs, non-coding contributors.