KDE Had A Very Successful Google Summer of Code 2018

Google Summer of Code 2018 is quickly reaching an end. We'll be featuring some of the interesting and successful work accomplished this summer by these students engaging in hundreds of different open-source projects. One of the open-source projects slotted with a lot of participants this year was KDE.

KDE had almost two dozen students contributing to their desktop efforts this summer thanks to GSoC 2018. Some of the work tackled the past few months included:

- The GCompris educational suite is now closer to reaching its 1.0 milestone thanks to various improvements.

- LabPlot progress on supporting JSON documents and web services as data sources, to complement its existing data source coverage.

- Optimized multi-threading for Krita's tile manager. Separately, but also on the Krita performance front, this digital painting program has been receiving some optimizations for different brushes with AVX via the Vc library.

- Support for developing extensions for the Falkon web-browser using JavaScript and QML as an alternative to its existing support for C++ and Python extensions. This is done by integrated QJSEngine and QQmlEngine into Falkon.

- Furthering along the LVM and RAID support within the KDE Partition Manager and Calamares installer framework.

- Usability enhancements to KStars.

- In-progress support for allowing digiKam to support Twitter and One Drive services within its exporter. Along similar lines, by a different student was work on OAuth2 authentication support within digiKam.

- Better handling of touchpads and mice with Libinput via the Touchpad/Mouse KCMs. Great to see!

Those interested in thorough details on each of the projects attempted can be found via the KDE Wiki. Kudos to all of the students involved and their initial contributions to open-source.