The Plasma Mobile project was started by the KDE community with the goal of becoming a free, user-friendly, privacy-enabling and customizable platform for mobile devices. We are always on the look out for more contributors to help push Plasma Mobile forward. However contributions to Plasma Mobile has high entry barrier due to various reasons, among which are the lack of documentation and easily available open tasks for Plasma Mobile.

One of the goals KDE community has set itself is to streamline the onboarding of new contributors. With this goal in mind, we intend to solve the issue of the high entry barrier for contributors that affects the Plasma Mobile project and, along with KDE Promo team, we have set up various tasks:

• Grow the number of developers and community support for Plasma Mobile
• Grow Plasma Mobile: Collect data
• Grow Plasma Mobile: Goal: Onboarding of new contributors

While working on one of tasks to collect data we learned that users want an easy way to test Plasma Mobile and, to meet this requirement, we worked on the easily installable images which can be tested on either a virtual machine or on real hardware. Check out the two parts series we wrote about that. You can find out how to do this in part 1 and part 2 of our blog post on the subject.

Like the rest of the KDE community, Plasma Mobile is using Phabricator to track and manage the task list. You can find the following tasks on Phabricator:

• Plasma Mobile project board, which includes all tasks.
• Plasma Mobile PM 1.0 milestone which includes the tasks needed to be done to get Plasma Mobile to a basic 1.0 state.
• Plasma Mobile PM 2.0 milestone which builds upon the functionality provided in the 1.0 milestone.

We realised that for new contributors these tasks can be hard to find and difficult to navigate through. To help with this we created another task to help potential contributors easily find the tasks they can work on. Thanks to Dimitris Kardarakos, we now have a web-page on plasma-mobile.org which provides a set of question-answer nodes and leaf nodes pointing to various phabricator tasks. This system is based on the code used by Mozilla to power similar website.

You can navigate through various tasks and TODO items from https://www.plasma-mobile.org/findyourway/.

In addition to make the tasks easy to reach, we have also worked on revamping the existing Phabricator tasks. See T6942, for example, that asks that someone create a calendar app for Plasma Mobile. An earlier version of this task didn’t contain much useful information on how such an application could be created. The task was edited to include more information on which libraries you can use, references, knowledge requirements and system requirements for developing and testing such an application.

We hope this will make it easier for you to get involved in the Plasma Mobile project. In order to make it easier for you develop and test applications, we are also working on the developer guide. I will announce it here when the guide is completed (spolier alert: easy to use docker images to test your applications). You can send questions by contacting us on Matrix at #plasmamobile:matrix.org or over IRC at irc://chat.freenode.net/#plasma or over email at plasma-mobile@kde.org. We will be happy to listen to your feedback.

Looking forward to your contributions!

The Kubuntu and KDE team has been hard at work for the last 6 months, which has culminated into a rocking Kubuntu 14.04 release which introduces a whole bunch of new features, the most important of which are :

• A new semantic search framework for KDE SC 4.13, leading to faster email and file searches
• Automatic error reporting in order to improve the quality of KDE and Kubuntu
• A new driver manager to make it simpler to activate hardware that requires proprietary drivers
• Notifications for when additional drivers or language packs can be installed to improve your Kubuntu experience
• A new touchpad management app for laptops
• Misc. bug fixes and features that can be found here

Kubuntu 14.04 is a LTS release, so while introducing new applications, we’ve also taken into account personal and business users who would want to run it for extended periods of time, which is why the Kubuntu team makes the following promise :

• Kubuntu 14.04 will keep receiving security bug fixes when such fixes are available from KDE upstream for the next 5 years
• New releases of the KDE SC will be backported to 14.04 and be available via Kubuntu PPA’s for the next 2 years
• A long-term upgrade path to the next LTS release

Along with the above, the Ubuntu team also has plans to backport new Xorg and friends releases as well as new kernel releases as part of their LTS Enablement stack, making sure that your hardware performance keeps improving over the time of 5 years.

All of this makes Kubuntu the ideal distribution to use for enterprise rollouts, OEM’s and of course regular users who want a longer support cycle ( as opposed to the regular, 9 month, support cycle )

You can download your copy of Kubuntu 14.04 from here. We also have some Kubuntu swag that you can purchase over here!

Calligra sprint 2013 started today. The venue was Thoughtworks office Bangalore. I reached Thoughtworks around 10.45 AM. Shantanu had already booked a room at Thoughtworks for the sprint. There were 5 new faces for me in sprint. 4 were from DA-IICT College and Mani. We talked to each other for a while. Shantanu showed demo of calligra active. Fixed couple of bugs in active( more detail about them will follow in the next blog post). There was a major issue in sheets(when calligra active loads sheets) which we couldn’t resolve. Around 7.30 PM(IST),  team in Europe arrived at Linux hotel. The first session was Krita BoF. And we did with help of google hangout. It was nice to see most of them. By 9 PM we had to move out of Thoughtworks. That was the time limit given to us. I had uploaded snaps of today here.