Akademy is the annual world summit of KDE, one of the largest Free Software communities in the world. It is a free, non-commercial event organized by the KDE Community.
A few things have happened in The Qt Project during the last two years. Volker Hilsheimer has taken over from Lars Knoll as the new Chief Maintainer, and Pedro Bessa joined The Qt Company as the new Community Manager. And after almost two years with Qt 6 we are now getting close to the feature freeze of the second Qt 6 LTS release, Qt 6.5.
In this keynote, Volker and Pedro will introduce themselves to the KDE community, and share their ideas, plans, and hopes for Qt as an Open Source project and community. Volker will share what he sees as the important drivers for Qt beyond Qt 6.5, and what he has learned from the Qt maintainers about their plans.
In this session, we will talk both about the Goals that were the focus of the
community for the last couple of years and the new ones selected by the
community.
Meet the new Goal Champions as we announce the results of the community vote
and learn what will be the direction of the community for the foreseeable
future.
We will also talk about the Goals process as a whole, why is it important and
how to make it better.
Terminal Applications are mostly the same for the past 50 years, since their conception in the 70's. I'll introduce some changes that makes konsole the most advanced terminal that there is, comparing it with other famous terminals, showing what we do right, and also showing what we do wrong (so we can fix it).
Four years ago I laid out a 7-step plan to spread KDE software far and wide. Learn how we're doing, what's changed since then, and what's cooking!
Thanks to our core values of transparency and user autonomy, Free Software has an edge to become the most efficient and sustainable software. This observation has been the motivation behind the KDE Eco project since its start in 2021. We aim both to quantify and drive down the energy consumption of KDE/Free Software, as well as to cultivate a culture of sustainability within the FOSS community. In this panel discussion we will present the (i) achievements, (ii) impact, and (iii) to-dos of the KDE Eco initiative. Specifically, we will address the following:
What are the achievements of KDE Eco so far? These include Okular receiving the Blue Angel eco-label, the official environmental label awarded by the German government; they also include research by KDE community members into methods of energy consumption measurements, setting up a community lab at KDAB Berlin, and developing tools for measuring software, among others.
What has been the impact of the KDE Eco initiative? From the developer side, this includes discussion of efficiency-related bug reports / MR requests and efficiency changes in software design; from the user side, this includes information related to community responses in (social) media as well as quantifying engagement and other metrics.
What are the to-dos going forward? Here we will present our ideas and wish lists as well as elicit input from the broader KDE community.
Plasma Mobile has seen surging interest in recent years alongside the growing community around mobile Linux devices. And during this time, the project has come a long way in becoming functional and usable for users.
Lots of work had to go into the software stack, adapting Plasma, KDE Frameworks and other core components for a mobile context.
New applications also had to be developed to suit the needs of the platform, as well as adhering to "convergence" where they would work regardless of the platform, whether it be on desktop or mobile.
During this talk, Bhushan will be going over recent developments in the underlying Plasma Mobile stack, while Devin will be presenting the work that has been done in the shell and UI.
We will also show the ways how community can contribute to Plasma Mobile project.
The handicap accessibility of KDE software has lagged behind both proprietary and open source alternatives. This represents a tremendous barrier toward expanding our enterprise presence, as both public and private organizations have a legal requirement to provide workers and users with software that meets a certain standard of accessibility. The purpose of this talk is to inform KDE developers of how they can directly improve the lives of disabled people while attaining compliance with both open source standards and legal mandates.
The issue of inadequate accessibility has already complicated the deployment of KDE software at organizations such as NASA, and will negatively impact the community's long-term ability to attract contributors. We must ensure KDE software meets modern standards for accessibility so that we can be a healthy, global, and inclusive community that elevates the lives of people through free software.
The Steamdeck is one of the most interesting and excitement big deployments of KDE in recent times.
In this talk I will share how Plasma fits into the Steamdeck and what aspects of KDE made us the right choice for their new userbase. I will then share some of the projects that contractors Blue Systems have been doing for Valve and how the work there benefits not just the Steamdeck but improves the ecosystem for all Plasma users.
Finally we look at what this could mean for KDE on the whole as more vendors gain the same confidence in Plasma.
In this talk we'll explore how KDE's software crash tracking works and how to make it more amazing using modern technologies like debuginfod, coredumpd, and Sentry.
We will go through the process towards the creation of a new Plasma product, showing what makes the different ones (Plasma Mobile, Plasma Big Screen, Plasma Desktop, Plasma Ink (!)) different in practice and the steps necessary were we to create a new one.
This talk attempts to demystify the process and show us how to run these products normally in any traditional distribution system rather than pushing for the need to create otherwise redundant ISO images.
At last year's Akademy we learned about the goals and plans for the next major version of KDE Frameworks. A lot has happend since then, including experimental support for Qt6.
In this talk we want to give a hands-on guide to preparing for and porting to what will become KDE Frameworks 6. We will discuss general porting strategy, build system adaptions, common deprecated API, and porting pitfalls.
If you want to grant users the freedom to use, study, share and improve your software, you have to grant those freedoms in the software licence. To encourage people to develop Free Software, we help developers to understand and apply Free Software licences. Since 2017, REUSE contributes to this goal. Any project that follows the initiative's recommendations makes copyright and licensing information readable for both humans and machines. In this way, we want to ensure that individuals, organisations, and companies that are reusing code are aware of the licence terms chosen by the original author.
REUSE does not "reinvent the wheel". On the contrary, it integrates seamlessly into development processes and other best practices when indicating Free Software licences. In addition, there are tools and documentation to help you get started. During this talk we will take a closer look at these tools and documentation, with the bonus of seeing a live demonstration of how to make a project compliant with the REUSE specifications.
On November 2020, Apple released the M1 and sent shock waves through the mobile computing space. They also did something nearly unprecedented: while they officially support booting third-party operating systems, Apple had no plans to develop them, nor provide the documentation required.
We took them up on that challenge.
A year and a half later, Linux 5.19 was tagged from an Apple M2 laptop running Linux. This is the story of how Asahi Linux took Linux on Apple Silicon from zero to a usable Plasma desktop in just over a year.
There's still a lot of misconceptions about what Wayland is and how it in particular affects the user experience of interacting with the Linux desktop.
In this presentation I want to talk about the meaning(s) of the term 'Wayland' and outline how these fit together.
I also want to briefly discuss how the development of Wayland itself works and how this advances the Linux desktop ecosystem.
One of the repercussions of the switch towards Wayland is that extending the ecosystem's features happens through wording-centric standards rather than primarily implementations. Through my experience with the xdg_activation and the global shortcuts portal cases, I'll offer some perspective on what works best and suggest when and how to attempt such new features.
This presentation introduces Fedora KDE and talks about what the Fedora KDE community has been working on. This includes a status update on the Fedora KDE Spin, an introduction into Fedora Kinoite, the work we do to offer KDE Plasma for RHEL/CentOS users, and our ongoing work to bring Plasma Mobile into Fedora for an upcoming Fedora Mobile Edition in partnership with the Fedora Mobility SIG. We'll talk about how we're building bridges with KDE and helping to support the future of the KDE Plasma desktop.
Launching an application is something we do numerous times every day without sparing too much thought for. It appears simple on the surface, however there's a whole world of complexity in what actually happens under the hood.
This talk dives into the details of what actually happens to ensure everything works properly. This includes opening files, transferring window focus, and resource management integration.
Goal of this talk is to show application developers all of the details they don't have to care about when using the appropriate APIs in their software.
OpenVoiceOS is a community-powered Linux platform purpose-built to showcase the power of Open Source Voice Assistance.
The major graphical user interface elements powering up the OpenVoiceOS technology stack are built upon KDE Frameworks, Kirigami, and Mycroft GUI. OpenVoiceOS targets bringing the latest voice assistance improvements to a range of devices ranging from embedded headless devices, desktops, mobile platforms, big screen TVs, or single board computers with screens to build a do-it-yourself smart speaker.
This talk will explore the OpenVoiceOS technology stack, highlighting the core design, plugin system, goals of the platform, and how we currently incorporate and use KDE technologies on the OpenVoiceOS platform.
Push notifications are a relevant platform feature of the proprietary mobile ecosystems, and while sometimes abused they are essential for realtime communication or public alert applications for example. How can we bring this to FOSS platforms as well?
== Description ==
Push notifications avoid that applications waiting for important information from a remote backend have to be continuously running and keep their own network connections alive, which is particularly inefficient on battery powered or otherwise resource constrained devices. This is achieved by a platform service maintaining a single network connection and activating the responsible application when receiving a corresponding message.
This comes at a price though, in form of needing server-side infrastructure. On the proprietary platforms this is done centrally by Google and Apple, and using their services is practically mandatory for using push notifications. In the FOSS world on the other hand users that cannot host server-side infrastructure themselves are left without any viable option.
In this talk we are going to look at efforts to build FOSS push notification infrastructure, such as the UnifiedPush specification, already existing server components and KDE's client components for those.
Further we are going to look at some of the potential challenges of providing the necessary server-side infrastructure for our users.
The KDE e.V. does a ton of work to support the KDE Community throughout the year. In this session the board gives you some insights in the work of the e.V. and what we did over the last year to support the KDE Community.
It is common to see people - that is just starting to understand programming - ask questions like "What's the best language for ...?", "Should I use ... or ...?", among other questions related to really opinionated topics.
Besides the subjective nature of the answers, most people know that there is no silver bullet to solve all our programming-related problems. Even if you can solve a wide range of them, there might be situations where you are spending tons of time (and lines of code) to get something done that in other programming languages is no more than a couple of minutes of effort.
Maybe you are thinking already of some language combinations that get you covered for most situations, but I would like to focus your attention on the usage of C++ together with Python.
Including a new language into a framework ecosystem is no easy task, and moreover
is not only about "being able to use it", but there are also many other details about the added value one can generate by using a new language like Python. Additionally, adding a new language can be a good way of getting "new ideas" to consider in the development of future releases.
This talk will focus not only on the language's nature, or where they excel, but also on how their success is linked. More crucial to us, we will discuss how Python jumped into the Qt/C++ world to enrich the ecosystem, bring more use cases, and even better, expose Qt to a whole new generation of programmers.
Familiarization with C++ and Python is required to attend this talk, but newcomers are encouraged to participate as well.
The Working groups are a part of KDE e.V. and they support the KDE Community in various areas. In this session they will report on their work of the last year.
Where are we on the way to KDE Frameworks 6, what is still in our way and how are we going to proceed?
KDE e.V. and Kdenlive are working on a trial for dedicated fundraising for development efforts for Kdenlive. We will give some insights into how it will work and how that might change KDE e.V.
Quick summary of how the KDE Security team works and how you can help!
Let us explore ways to have a healthy relationship with free software work, and how to enjoy working in free software for decades.
We will hear a few words from our sponsors about their work within the KDE community and anything else they want to share with us.
Many teams and individual people in KDE are doing amazing work. In this session we are taking the time to recognize some of the ones who stood out.