Welcome to another edition of “This month in KDE Linux” — KDE’s in-progress operating system.This month was pretty smooth; we had no build delivery drama, and all OS images we shipped were of satisfactory quality. The project is maturing, and we’re 78% of the way towards completing the beta milestone.QA & testingBhushan Shah and Thomas Duckworth continued working on the project to build a robust and modern automatic QA system. It’s really really close to being integrated at this point, and will act as a full-stack integration test for all of KDE Plasma in addition to a test system for KDE Linux specifically.More user-friendly installationHadi Chokr did the huge amount of work necessary to transform KDE Linux’s .raw image file into a hybrid image that’s also a valid .iso file! This allows KDE Linux to be installed more easily using VM software that often expects to be given an .iso file.Remember that you’ll still need to turn on UEFI mode, as KDE Linux still intentionally doesn’t support the legacy BIOS system!Better audio CD rippingHarald Sitter, Jan Rathmann, and I completed a small project to get KDE’s Audex app up on Flathub as a replacement for the audiocd-kio software we had previously been pre-installing on the image.The problem with audiocd-kio is that it included two System Settings pages of questionable utility that offered a fairly old-fashioned UX. Now we don’t include those things, and instead we document how to download Audex and use it to rip CDs. And this way, you get automatic metadata lookup, too!Easier log collectionFelix Araújo built a tool to ease the collection of logs called collect-logs. It also does some data sanitization. This will be very useful for bug reporting purposes!Rudimentary “Developer Mode”I created a very simple system to show and hide developer tools, and they’re hidden by default until you run toggle-developer-mode, which is documented here.This reduces clutter in the launcher widgets of users who aren’t software developers. In the future we’ll add more to this script, and we might consider moving more tools off the base image and into Flatpak apps or even downloadable meta-packages, thereby coming full circle by re-inventing packaging. Go figure.DocumentationI wrote documentation for how to configure input methods for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese text input, in consultation with several speakers of these languages.And in the near future, we plan to pre-install some of these tools to make things easier for the world’s 1.7 billion people who use one of them to communicate on their digital devices.Grab bagThomas Duckworth made Plasma Browser Integration continue to be enabled by default with the latest version of Firefox.I fixed ydotool, which I had previously broken by trying to force to run as a systemd service. Turns out it can’t do that. So now it’s at least disabled by default.Yago Raña Gayoso enabled shell completions for kde-builder.Aleix Pol Gonzalez removed a few pre-installed GTK libraries that it turns out weren’t used for anything.Vishal Rao prevented the live session from writing to the system’s real-time clock, which could be a nuisance for people who don’t end up installing the OS and go back to their already-installed OS.Clément Villemur made the Calamares installer not bug you to connect to the internet, because it doesn’t actually need internet access.And that wraps up June! There are a lot of projects in flight right now, from finishing up the new QA system, to building moving the base OS with BuildStream, to hardening the kernel, to improving each image’s changelogs.So there’s still lots to do! If you’re a fan of the project, please help out; there are many ways:User support: help support people on discuss.kde.org using KDE Linux.Issue reporting: install KDE Linux and report issues.Documentation: improve docs; submit merge requests here.Flatpak: fix packaging or code issues in Flatpak-packaged apps.OS development: help build KDE Linux! There’s plenty to do.