Name: Akademy 2023
Start: 2023-07-15T09:00:00+03:00
End: 2023-07-21T18:00:00+03:00
Location: University of Macedonia (UoM)

Akademy 2023

from Saturday, 15 July 2023 (09:00) to Friday, 21 July 2023 (18:00)

Monday, 10 July 2023
Tuesday, 11 July 2023
Wednesday, 12 July 2023
Thursday, 13 July 2023
Friday, 14 July 2023
Saturday, 15 July 2023
09:45 Opening - Aleix Pol Gonzalez (KDE)
Opening
- Aleix Pol Gonzalez (KDE)
09:45 - 10:00
Room: room 1
10:00 Keynote: Libre Space Foundation - Empowering Open-Source Space Technologies - Eleftherios Kosmas (Libre Space Foundation)
Keynote: Libre Space Foundation - Empowering Open-Source Space Technologies (Main)
- Eleftherios Kosmas (Libre Space Foundation)
10:00 - 10:50
Room: room 1 The space industry is evolving rapidly, with open-source solutions playing an increasingly vital role. The Libre Space Foundation (LSF) champions this movement by developing open-source space technologies that make space exploration more accessible for everyone. In this talk, we'll introduce the Libre Space Foundation and discuss the relevance of free software in the space sector. Key points to be covered: - Introduction to Libre Space Foundation: A brief overview of LSF's, history, goals, vision, and its commitment to open-source space technologies. - The value of free software in space: The role of free software in promoting innovation, collaboration, and accessibility in the space industry. - Challenges and opportunities: A look at some of the unique challenges LSF encounters and the ways the free software community can help address them. - LSF and other free software projects: Commonalities and differences between LSF and other free software initiatives. - Insights for KDE from LSF: What the KDE community can learn from LSF's experiences and how collaboration can be fostered between communities. - Stories and lessons learned: A few anecdotes and takeaways from LSF's journey, highlighting the importance of community and shared vision. - Future prospects: A glance at the future of Libre Space Foundation, its projects, and opportunities for the free software community to contribute.
10:50 Coffee break
Coffee break
10:50 - 11:15
11:15 KDE Goals - a review and plans moving forward - Adam Szopa (KDE) Joseph De Veaugh-Geiss (KDE) Nate Graham (KDE) Carl Schwan (KDE)
KDE Goals - a review and plans moving forward (Goals)
- Adam Szopa (KDE)
- Joseph De Veaugh-Geiss (KDE)
- Nate Graham (KDE)
- Carl Schwan (KDE)
11:15 - 12:25
Room: room 1 As per tradition, each Akademy has a time slot for our Goal Champions to present what's been going on with the Goals, and plans for the coming months.
12:30 A Tale of Kleopatra - From Insufficient Accessibility to Minor Accessiblity Limitations - Ingo Klöcker (KDE)
A Tale of Kleopatra - From Insufficient Accessibility to Minor Accessiblity Limitations (Goals)
- Ingo Klöcker (KDE)
12:30 - 13:00
Room: room 2 In the beginning of 2022 an assessment of the accessiblity of Kleopatra was performed. Unsurprisingly, Kleopatra didn't score too well. In fact, the accessiblity for blind persons and for motor impaired persons was rated insufficient. Over the course of last year, I have fixed or at least improved many of the findings mentioned in the report. In the follow-up test, that was performed in the beginning of 2023, Kleopatra was rated accessible with minor limitations for visual impaired persons and motor impaired persons. In this talk I will give a short overview over the problems and how I addressed them with the help of Qt or despite of Qt.
Measuring energy consumption of software - Volker Krause (KDE)
Measuring energy consumption of software (Goals)
- Volker Krause (KDE)
12:30 - 13:00
Room: room 1 Software has a big impact on how much energy a device uses, and there are many reasons to minimize that, from battery life to climate change. But how can we optimize this, and how do we ensure changes we make are actually improvements?
13:00 Lunch break
Lunch break
13:00 - 14:30
14:30 KDE e.V. Board report - Adriaan de Groot (KDE) Nate Graham (KDE) Eike Hein (KDE) Aleix Pol Gonzalez (KDE) Lydia Pintscher
KDE e.V. Board report (KDE e.V.)
- Adriaan de Groot (KDE)
- Nate Graham (KDE)
- Eike Hein (KDE)
- Aleix Pol Gonzalez (KDE)
- Lydia Pintscher
14:30 - 15:10
Room: room 1 KDE e.V. has done a lot of work to support the KDE Community over the last year. In this session the board reports on the work of the organization and future plans.
Over a million reasons why Snaps are important. - Scarlett Moore
Over a million reasons why Snaps are important. (Packaging)
- Scarlett Moore
14:30 - 15:10
Room: room 2 I will start out with the fact that snaps have had over a million downloads and with those kind of numbers, they cannot be ignored. I will continue on to describe here my journey in creating a vast amount of snaps, the automation of said snap building using invent.kde.org and Ubuntu lanuchpad builders. I will explain the hurdles I have overcome and what needs to be done to keep the snaps updated and how developers can help ensure the users are getting updates in a timely manner. The hard part is done, I have made it easy, just a few more minutes of your time at release.
15:15 Flatpak and KDE - Albert Astals Cid
Flatpak and KDE (Packaging)
- Albert Astals Cid
15:15 - 15:55
Room: room 2 In this session we will explain what Flatpak is, why it's interesting to KDE and talk about the various endeavors where KDE interacts with Flatpak, flathub, CI, binary factory, etc.
KDE e.V. Working Group reports - Lydia Pintscher
KDE e.V. Working Group reports (KDE e.V.)
- Lydia Pintscher
15:15 - 15:55
Room: room 1 The Working Groups of KDE e.V. support the organisation and larger KDE Community in various matters. Here they report on their work of the past year as well as upcoming plans.
15:55 Coffee break
Coffee break
15:55 - 16:25
16:25 Documentation goals and techniques for KDE and open source - Thiago Sueto
Documentation goals and techniques for KDE and open source (Documentation)
- Thiago Sueto
16:25 - 17:05
Room: room 2 Many resources exist detailing the ins and outs of technical documentation, yet most are concerned with practices done in enterprise environments, leaving open source—and its anarchic/do-ocratic collaboration style—in the background. This talk explains the different ways in which KDE handles documentation and summarizes the relevant content found in multiple technical documentation books to serve as a general metrics for what KDE should be striving for in its documentation.
KF6 - Are we there yet? - Nicolas Fella Volker Krause (KDE) Alexander Lohnau
KF6 - Are we there yet? (Frameworks and Toolkits)
- Nicolas Fella
- Volker Krause (KDE)
- Alexander Lohnau
16:25 - 17:05
Room: room 1 Spoiler: No. But how far are we on our way to full KF6 glory? And what challenges lay ahead? In this talk we are going to look at the current state of Qt6/KF6 porting in KDE. Application developers will learn how porting works in practice, how to approach it and what to look out for. We are also going to look at the remaining challenges for developing and releasing KF6 and a tentative release plan. This is going to be the last KF6 talk, I promise!
17:05 Plasma 6 is coming - Marco Martin (KDE) Niccolò Venerandi
Plasma 6 is coming (Apps and Plasma)
- Marco Martin (KDE)
- Niccolò Venerandi
17:05 - 17:45
Room: room 1 Plasma is being porting as well to Qt6 and KF6. Some things will change, some things will stay more "stable". This talk will go over what this will mean for the end user, but also what it will mean for the developer. It will be presented the VDG vision for the user experience, the current state of affairs and what will change for the plasmoid author, what api is different and why
UIs in Rust with Slint - Tobias Hunger
UIs in Rust with Slint (Frameworks and Toolkits)
- Tobias Hunger
17:05 - 17:45
Room: room 2 Slint is a UI framework written in Rust with hand-crafted bindings to Rust, C++ and Javascript. Slint scales from microcontrollers with no OS and just a few KiB of RAM all the way up to desktop UIs backed by graphics accelerators. This presentation shows what slint is and how to build a small UI with it.
17:55 KDE Embedded - Where are we? - Andreas Cord-Landwehr
KDE Embedded - Where are we? (Embedded)
- Andreas Cord-Landwehr
17:55 - 18:35
Room: room 2 Do you know this nervous feeling when powering on an embedded device for the first time? Not sure whether you will see smoke, an awesome Plasma desktop, or just a blinking bar on a serial shell followed by nothing? -- Embedded devices are fascinating! And in this talk I want to show what we have in the KDE community to get you favorite KDE software on them. In this talk I want to cover: - the tooling we have in KDE (our Yocto layers) to easily create embedded devices and how that works - which devices are most interesting at the moment, in my very subjective view, and which we use for our KDE demos (yeah, say "RISC-V"!) - the concept of an immutable image, which is created by a build system (like Yocto), put onto a device and updated by fail-safe steps, but also the topic of containerized apps and why we need to look into them for embedded devices - my ideas about next topics and directions that we should pursue in our embedded area and how easy it is to join this quest :)
KRunner: Past, Present, and Future - Porting, New Features, and Plugin Distribution - Alexander Lohnau (Member of EV, KDE developer)
KRunner: Past, Present, and Future - Porting, New Features, and Plugin Distribution (Apps and Plasma)
- Alexander Lohnau (Member of EV, KDE developer)
17:55 - 18:35
Room: room 1 KRunner is an essential part of Plasma, providing a fast way to access applications, files, and utilities on both desktop and mobile. In this talk, we will explore the evolution of KRunner and focus on the present state as well as future plans. Three years ago, an Akademy BOF was held to discuss KRunner and specifically DBus runners. Since then, KF6 refactorings and cleanups have significantly affected the API, resulting in important changes and new features. In this talk, we will summarize these changes and explore how to port and improve existing runners.
Sunday, 16 July 2023
10:00 Keynote: Kdenlive - what can we learn after 20 years of development? - Jean-Baptiste Mardelle Massimo Stella (Kdenlive) Eugen Mohr (Kdenlive core team)
Keynote: Kdenlive - what can we learn after 20 years of development?
- Jean-Baptiste Mardelle
- Massimo Stella (Kdenlive)
- Eugen Mohr (Kdenlive core team)
10:00 - 10:50
Room: room 1 Last year marked the 20th anniversary of the Kdenlive video editor, and the start of a shift in our development. Discover the team behind this very popular project, and what we learned during these years - what are our strengths, how we are organizing our roadmap and what we are planning to avoid past mistakes and keep growing. We will also talk about the future of the project and the exciting things to come!
10:50 Make it talk: Adding speech to your application. - Jeremy Whiting
Make it talk: Adding speech to your application. (Frameworks and Toolkits)
- Jeremy Whiting
10:50 - 11:00
Room: room 1 Games and Applications provide a few different methods of feedback to users. Flashy graphics and sounds are primary, but there's another method that can be added quickly and easily. Speech can add another layer of feedback to your users. In simple cases, a i18n("Well done!") spoken on speakers can be magical depending on your target audience. QtSpeech makes this easy but is also flexible enough to let users customize voice settings if you expose those to them.
11:00 The Community Working Group - Keeping a Healthy Community - Andy Betts Neofytos Kolokotronis (KDE) David Edmundson (KDE)
The Community Working Group - Keeping a Healthy Community (Community)
- Andy Betts
- Neofytos Kolokotronis (KDE)
- David Edmundson (KDE)
11:00 - 11:10
Room: room 1 - Origins of the CWG - Members in the CWG - Main objectives - Process of review and decision - Best practices to get along
11:10 Coffee break
Coffee break
11:10 - 11:40
11:40 An OSS Tool for Comprehending Huge Codebases - Tarcisio Fischer
An OSS Tool for Comprehending Huge Codebases (Code Quality)
- Tarcisio Fischer
11:40 - 12:20
Room: room 2 Maintaining large C++ codebases with hundreds of developers is a complex problem. In the KDE community, work is being undertaken to improve documentation, as well as to automate and systematize internal processes such as testing and QA (see current KDE Goals). Our tool, currently under development sponsored by Bloomberg, supports these processes, making it possible for developers to visualize and, therefore, better comprehend existing C++ architectures. This visualization, analysis, and development tool is based on the ideas from John Lakos' book "Large Scale C++ Software Design". Our presentation has two parts. In the first, we explain how the ideas from John's book are implemented in the tool; in the second, we demonstrate how we've been using the tool to understand KDE projects, improve their code quality, and fix architectural suboptimalities.
Internal Communication At KDE: Infrastructure For A Large And Diverse Community - Joseph De Veaugh-Geiss (KDE e.V.)
Internal Communication At KDE: Infrastructure For A Large And Diverse Community (Community)
- Joseph De Veaugh-Geiss (KDE e.V.)
11:40 - 12:20
Room: room 1 As reflected in the 'About' tab in KDE apps, i.e., "a world-wide community of software engineers, artists, writers, translators and creators ...", we are a large and diverse community. How does such a large and diverse group of people communicate? What infrastructure currently exists to support that communication? And where are there opportunities for improvement? In this talk I will (attempt to) map out the communication infrastructure at KDE. I will explore various roles (e.g., software engineer, artist, writer, etc.) at various stages (new vs. seasoned contributor) in terms of how a KDE contributor navigates that infrastructure. The goal of the talk is to spark a discussion about what works and where we can improve when it comes to internal communication -- and, most importantly, how that influences community cohesion.
12:25 Matrix and ActivityPub for everything - Carl Schwan (KDE) Tobias Fella Alexey Rusakov (Matrix.org)
Matrix and ActivityPub for everything (Frameworks and Toolkits)
- Carl Schwan (KDE)
- Tobias Fella
- Alexey Rusakov (Matrix.org)
12:25 - 13:05
Room: room 2 In this talk, we will explore the Matrix and ActivityPub standards and how they can be used outside of their primary purpose, by powering everything from comment systems to calendar invitations, coordinating itineraries, and synchronizing data.
The Evolution of KDE's App Ecosystem and Deployment Strategy - Aleix Pol (KDE)
The Evolution of KDE's App Ecosystem and Deployment Strategy (Community)
- Aleix Pol (KDE)
12:25 - 13:05
Room: room 1 Historically KDE has not been involved with how our software is deployed. Nevertheless, this model has shown its limits and it's time we make sure we are still ahead of the wave as we are aiming to support different software stores as well as hardware shipping our software. This presentation will explore how our ecosystem has changed and its implications by taking a look at how linux distributions have evolved and discuss where KDE fits in there, concluding in some ideas on how KDE can adapt its deployment strategy to ensure that it remains relevant and accessible to users.
13:05 Group photo
Group photo
13:05 - 13:20

13:20 Lunch break
Lunch break
13:20 - 14:30
14:30 Selenium GUI Testing - Harald Sitter (KDE)
Selenium GUI Testing (Code Quality)
- Harald Sitter (KDE)
14:30 - 15:10
Room: room 1 In the past year we've seen the advance of selenium-based infrastructure to conduct GUI testing of our software. I'll show you how it works and why it's amazing.
Spooky Action at a Distance: Remote Desktop for KWin Wayland - Arjen Hiemstra (Blue Systems)
Spooky Action at a Distance: Remote Desktop for KWin Wayland (Wayland)
- Arjen Hiemstra (Blue Systems)
14:30 - 15:10
Room: room 2 While the X11 Display Server had network transparency as a core feature, Wayland compositors are not required to implement things the same way. In fact, the Wayland protocol itself has not been designed as a protocol for network use. Yet remotely controlling a desktop remains an important use case for a number of users. For KWin, we have been working on several features over the past years that together allow us to implement remote desktop support within KWin Wayland. Together with a new library called KRdp that implements the RDP protocol we now have a solution that allows controlling any KWin Wayland session over a network connection. Moreover, this includes some features we were not able to offer before. In this talk I will go over some of the history of remote desktop support in KDE. I will also talk about some of the features within KWin that we make use of to get all this working. Finally I will talk about implementing the RDP protocol layer and the other parts needed to get all this together.
15:15 Entering a Wayland-only World with Plasma 6.0 on Fedora - Neal Gompa (Fedora Project)
Entering a Wayland-only World with Plasma 6.0 on Fedora (Wayland)
- Neal Gompa (Fedora Project)
15:15 - 15:55
Room: room 2 This presentation revisits Fedora KDE to discuss one of its major initiatives: removing the dependency on the classical X11 server. Over the past few years, the [Fedora KDE SIG][1] has been working toward eliminating the usage of the X11 server in the default session setup. With Fedora Linux 38, we now rely on Plasma Wayland from login to shutdown! In this talk, we'll discuss how Fedora is preparing to only offer Plasma Wayland as Plasma 6.0 looms over the horizon, and what that means for users and developers. [1]: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/KDE
Testing latest KDE software, from Plasma desktop to Apps - Timothée Ravier (Red Hat)
Testing latest KDE software, from Plasma desktop to Apps (Code Quality)
- Timothée Ravier (Red Hat)
15:15 - 15:55
Room: room 1 One way to find bugs is to have users test changes as early as possible after they are commited, or even better, before they are committed, during the merge request process. With Flatpak builds in Invent GitLab CI and Fedora Kinoite Nightly, we are making that possible respectively for KDE Apps and KDE Plasma. KDE Apps are now distributed as Flatpaks via Flathub and we are setting up GitLab CI in KDE Invent to build Flatpaks for each merge request. This lets users test fixes for KDE Apps directly by downloading the Flatpak bundle produced as part of the merge request. Feedback on bug fixes can thus happen before the merge request is merged. Fedora Kinoite is an immutable or image based version of Fedora that is built with rpm-ostree and includes the KDE Plasma desktop and KDE Apps. Kinoite Nightly is a variant of Fedora Kinoite based on the latest stable release of Fedora but includes nightly builds of KDE Plasma packages instead of the stable ones. With Fedora Kinoite, users can update their system as a whole like an image and rollback any update if they hit a major bug. This capability lets them try out upcoming changes in KDE Plasma without fear of ending up with an unusable system as they can always go back to the previously working version. With both those changes, we are working on making testing development versions of the KDE Plasma Desktop and the KDE Apps more accessible for non technical users.
15:55 Coffee break
Coffee break
15:55 - 16:20
16:20 KDE Wayland Fireside Chat - Aleix Pol Gonzalez (KDE) David Edmundson David Redondo Xaver Hugl Vlad Zahorodnii
KDE Wayland Fireside Chat (Wayland)
- Aleix Pol Gonzalez (KDE)
- David Edmundson
- David Redondo
- Xaver Hugl
- Vlad Zahorodnii
16:20 - 17:00
Room: room 2 Here we don't stand in front of you and talk about amazing things are and how things work. This is the opportunity to ask KDE Wayland developers your burning questions. It doesn't matter if - you are an app developer that has a question about how your app is impacted, - or there is something unclear to you in this whole Wayland machinery - or you want to know how a specific part of KDE's Wayland effort is coming along - or you are wondering if client or compositor developers are more sensible - or tell people what an amazing job they did, this is your chance to do it, anything Wayland related goes!
Kyber: a new cross-platform high-quality remote control software - Jean-Baptiste Kempf
Kyber: a new cross-platform high-quality remote control software (Apps and Plasma)
- Jean-Baptiste Kempf
16:20 - 16:30
Room: room 1 We're doing more and more things remotely, and will continue doing so. There are multiple tools, open source and not, doing remote conferencing for people-to-people interactions. However, there are few tools and libraries to do remote control of machines. And by machines, we speak about normal machines *(think TeamViewer or VNC)*, Virtual Machines *(think Citrix or Cloud Desktop)*, Cloud Gaming, Drones or Robots. In all those use-cases, we need a high-quality, 0-latency video feed, and bidirectional input forwarding. This is what we've done with the Kyber project, which provides a cross-platform application and SDK, to control any type of machines, independent of the hardware and the Operating System, using different video codecs tuned for the best latency. In addition to those high-bitrate video feed, we've developed the infrastructure to forward every type of inputs *(Keyboard, Mouse, USB, Gamepads...)* and virtually replug them on the distant machine. I plan, during this talk to explain how it works and go into the technical details.
16:30 Fun with Charts: Green Energy in System Monitor - Kai Uwe Broulik
Fun with Charts: Green Energy in System Monitor (Goals)
- Kai Uwe Broulik
16:30 - 16:40
Room: room 1 In this talk I am going to show you how over the course of just a few evenings I managed to feed live data from my solar installation into Plasma’s System Monitor. *How cool is that? You can have both CPU load and photovoltaic energy production side-by-side!* It’s a perfect example of how simple it is for a project hosted outside of KDE to make use of their libraries and how versatile and high-quality they are. While this project is nowhere near a fully integrated Smart Home solution, it’s here to serve as an inspiration for the KDE Community of what lies out there beyond *localhost*.
16:40 What has qmllint ever done for us? - Fabian Kosmale
What has qmllint ever done for us? (Frameworks and Toolkits)
- Fabian Kosmale
16:40 - 16:50
Room: room 1 qmllint started its life as small command line utility checking whether QML files are syntactically valid. However, it has evolved to to be much more. This talk will tell you about the various checks it can do nowadays, how to integrate into CI pipelines, mention perquisites to make the most out of it and tease its upcoming plugin API – all in 5 minutes! Curious and inspired minds are then invited to join a BoF session about improving qmllint later during Akademy.
16:50 Wait, are first-run wizards cool again? - Nate Graham (KDE)
Wait, are first-run wizards cool again? (Apps and Plasma)
- Nate Graham (KDE)
16:50 - 17:00
Room: room 1 For the first time in many years, Plasma once again includes a first-run wizard, called "Welcome Center". In this talk, learn the reasons behind this addition and whether it's part of a secret plan to bring back Kandalf.
17:05 Sponsors lightning talks - Aleix Pol Gonzalez (KDE)
Sponsors lightning talks
- Aleix Pol Gonzalez (KDE)
17:05 - 17:50
Room: room 1 Our sponsors will have a few minutes to talk about something they want the KDE Community to know.
17:50 Akademy Awards - Aniqa Khokhar (KDE) Harald Sitter (KDE)
Akademy Awards
- Aniqa Khokhar (KDE)
- Harald Sitter (KDE)
17:50 - 18:10
Room: room 1 The Akademy Awards recognize outstanding contributions around KDE. Last year's winners will this year's winners.
18:10 Closing - Aleix Pol Gonzalez (KDE)
Closing
- Aleix Pol Gonzalez (KDE)
18:10 - 18:15
Room: room 1