Stuart Jarvis A troll's eye view

KDE contributors get battered now and again, whether it’s abuse in bug reports, on Dot articles or on the wider interwebs.

Many of you may not keep such an eye on the Dot comments as us editors do, so I thought I’d share with you a comment from the latest Commit Digest article that made me smile:

Simply, KDE is great.

3 months I’ve been using openSUSE and KDE … And I must say I’m excited, proud and completely satisfied with KDE.

I can not believe that being an environment as configurable, customizable, useful, without distraction, powerful and stable, not as major distros default…

Hopefully KDE never change. You are at least 10 years ahead to be so, that I can tinker all you want and that will not change.

I know things still had not seen before and each time I find myself more…

Thanks for providing all this, the KDE team. A greeting.

Keep on doing awesome. People care and they appreciate it, even if they do not always take the time to say it as 1antares1 did.

I’m very pleased to say that:

I'm going to the Desktop Summit

If you would like to come too then you need to do a couple of things:

1. Register on the website
2. Find yourself somewhere to stay

Cheap accommodation offers expire from 24 June

The Desktop Summit team has kindly negotiated reduced rates for you at a number of local hotels. However, these have reservation deadlines that vary from 24 June to 8 July (most are around 24 June) so if you want to enjoy these offers you do need to move quickly. Otherwise you’ll have to compete with all the other tourists for accommodation at a busy time in Berlin.

See you there!

Well, I’m back home now from the WebWorld sprint (which took a while due to storms between Germany and England delaying flights). There will be a full report shortly in a Dot story, but in the meantime here are a few pictures:

Well, here we are towards the end of day three and therefore towards the end of the WebWorld Sprint. We’ve achieved quite a lot.

WebWorld continues, but not for much longer...

UserBase

The UserBase team has been doing great stuff, fixing issues, working with Eugene on a new logo (that should make it more obvious that UserBase is a user-editable wiki). They’ve also been working on improving the translation infrastructure and little issues like making it easier to insert oxygen icons into content. The visbility of help information has also been improved, hopefully encouraging users to take their first steps as contributors by adding their knowledge to the wiki or by translating existing content.

Will you start contributing at UserBase today? If not, what can the team do to change your mind?

Websites

As Tom already blogged we have been comparing some CMS options for the KDE website – Tom has been researching those and looking at the impact using each different backend.

Eugene and Ingo have meanwhile done some work on the design aspects, in particular the menu navigation, leading on from intial work reviewing the main site navigation that was done at the Promo Sprint.

I’ve been playing a bit with the test WordPress install and also doing some interviews with the sprint attendees. Those will appear on Behind KDE at some point.

Group Discussion and Socialising

We’ve also been able to get everyone together to discuss the issues and get fresh viewpoints on the things we are looking at. It’s all too easy when you have worked intensively on something for a couple of days to begin to miss obvious issues that are clear to someone taking a fresh look. It’s also a chance for everyone to chat some more and get to know each other even better – although several of us stayed up into the early morning yesterday, enjoying a beer or two and chatting about KDE, free software in general and comparing cultures.

The sun is still shining, so we’re enjoying one last barbecue this evening before people have to start heading off tomorrow. It will be a shame to leave.

So it’s not all work at WebWorld. We find the odd moment to relax. Here, Eugene urges you to use KDE software.

Please use KDE software. You wouldn't like to upset me, would you?

And here we see some action from the ongoing Fussball tournament.

Tom and Hans 4 - 0 Ingo and Eugene

I’ll have to keep a bit of an eye on what these are doing to my traffic usage, so enjoy them while they’re hot/still here.