The virtual KDE Akademy 2021 conference kicked off on Friday and runs through the 25th. This annual summertime event of the KDE desktop community is attended by hundreds but again carried out online due to the pandemic.

Even with the warm summer weather and many municipalities loosening pandemic lockdown restrictions, KDE developers remain quite busy this summer with a variety of improvements to this open-source desktop.

Announced last year was KWinFT as a fork of KDE's KWin to focus on improving the Wayland support more rapidly and incorporating other modern technologies. KWinFT has been making progress on advancing its code-base while in recent months it was seemingly more quiet. However, it turns out KWinFT is alive and well and has been going through some code refactoring while preparing for the next wave of feature work.

KDE developers didn't spend much time basking over their Plasma 5.22 release this week as they have already begun lining up changes for the first point release, new feature work for Plasma 5.23, and other improvements to this open-source desktop environment.

KDE's big Plasma 5.22 desktop release is now available with maturing its Wayland support continuing to be one of the big ongoing focuses for the project.

Next week will mark the release of the Plasma 5.22 desktop with its Wayland support now much more mature alongside various performance improvements and a variety of other enhancements. Plasma 5.22 is a big step forward while already some feature work is going into Plasma 5.23 and the next round of KDE application updates.

KDE developers are wrapping up May with more performance optimizations and bug fixes in tow.

Following the introduction of KHamburgerMenu, the latest KDE user-interface element being introduced is KCommandBar for expert-focused, HUD-style pop-ups.

With word this week that KDE's Dolphin file manager has adopted a hamburger menu that has re-ignited the discussion once more over client versus server-side decorations for the KDE desktop.

While the Plasma 5.22 beta was released this week, it's not game over yet for still getting more fixes into this next KDE desktop release, especially as it concerns their maturing Wayland support.

KDE developers this week have issued the much anticipated Plasma 5.22 beta for testing, which is exciting this time around largely for bringing its Wayland support up to par for daily use with quite a lot of polishing and optimizations.

KDE developers remain very active polishing up the KDE desktop and addressing various bugs ahead of next month's Plasma 5.22 feature release.

For those still having fond memories of the KDE 3.5 desktop, the Trinity Desktop Environment continues to be maintained in 2021 as a long-running fork from KDE 3.5 with security/maintenance fixes and other minor enhancements to the desktop environment.

KDE developers certainly closed out April on a high note with some big ticket additions.

KDE developers continue polishing up their Wayland support and making other improvements to their desktop stack.

It's been another busy spring week in KDE land.

More KDE KWin Wayland improvements are coming down the pipe.

It's been another week of fixes and feature work for the KDE desktop as the march continues toward the Plasma 5.22 release this summer.

The KDE project and the open-source Linux community has been in a sticky situation with The Qt Company having moved Qt 5.15 LTS to its commercial-only phase while most free software hasn't even been ported yet to Qt 6 let alone a number of modules and other features still missing from the Qt 6 tool-kit. So until the KDE project has fully transitioned to using the Qt 6 tool-kit, the project has taken up maintaining their own collection of Qt 5.15 patches.

The pandemic is still not showing any signs of slowing down KDE development but with the new month brings more changes and improvements to this open-source desktop.

KDE developers are finishing the month of March strong with a number of new features and bug fixes for their open-source desktop stack.

As we get ready for spring, KDE developers continue polishing up their Wayland support for the Plasma 5.22 cycle.

One year into the pandemic the KDE developers remain as busy as ever advancing their free software desktop solution.

KDE developers have been off to a busy March so far with working on adaptive panel opacity support for Plasma 5.22. Another pleasant improvement with that next Plasma release is to avoid rendering work when the screen is off.

Exiv2, the widely-used C++ metadata library / tools for dealing with image metadata via EXIF / IPTC / XMP standards and ICC profiles is looking to join the KDE project.

KDE developers have been wrapping up February with a number of new command line tools being worked on for applying various cosmetic changes to the desktop. There have also been many crash fixes addressed in recent days.

Following the recent major rewrite to KDE's KWin compositor code there are more exciting improvements likely to come for KWin in improving its Wayland compositor support.

Earlier this week saw the release of Plasma 5.21 while KDE developers have been busy working on fixes/improvements to that for the first point release as well as moving forward in other areas like integrating Git support into Kate.

The KDE community today released Plasma 5.21 as the latest major release of this open-source desktop.

Plasma 5.21 is due for release on 16 February and as such developers have been busy working on bug fixing for the final stretch of development.