Opening (Main)

• Akademy Team

Room: Room 1

Only hackers will survive (Main)

• Joanna Murzyn

Room: Room 1 In this talk, I'll explore how the hackers' ethos - defined by open knowledge sharing, bold experimentations, and collective problem-solving - is vital for tackling global challenges, especially those one related to lack of regenerative resources management. I'll take you on a journey from crucial mineral mining hubs to electronic waste dumpsters, uncovering the intricate connections between code, hardware, open source principles as well as social and environmental justice. You'll gain a new perspective and discover how the KDE community's work is shaping a more resilient, regenerative future, and explore ways to extend those principles to create positive impact beyond tech world. Watch: https://live.kde.org/playersite_ff95f429-9e2c-4de0-966e-c511db397c12.html

QML development with qmlls (Qt Con Continued)

• Fabian Kosmale (Qt Company)

Room: Room 2 In this short talk, you'll learn: - how the QML language server (qmlls) helps with development, - how it can be set up in Qt Creator and Kate, - which future improvements are coming next to qmlls watch: https://live.kde.org/playersite_0a5de95e-0f2e-4479-8d59-d0095df9daf0.html

KDE to Make Wines — Using KDE Software on Enterprise Desktops a Return on Experience (KDE Development)

• Kevin Ottens (enioka Haute Couture)

Room: Room 2 If we told you there is a company with hundreds of desktops running KDE Plasma? If we also told you they've been using it for more than 10 years? Finally, what if we told you they're in Australia and making wines? Wouldn't you be curious to know more about them and what they think of our software? Well, good for us they do exist: they are De Bortoli Wines, an Australian winemaking company. It turns out they became an enioka Haute Couture customer and we developed an interesting relationship. The work they pushed our way has been interesting and challenging. As such this gave us an interesting insight on how KDE software can be used and the constraint such entreprise desktops can encounter. We ended up looking at application code like Okular, to frameworks like KIO, or even dug deeper exploring issues close to the kernel. This might give ideas of features to prioritize or tests to carry to cater to such users. If you're interested in the enterprise desktop use case, or if you like to hear about funny bugs and wine labels, this talk will be for you. watch: https://live.kde.org/playersite_0a5de95e-0f2e-4479-8d59-d0095df9daf0.html

KWin Effects: The Next Generation (Main)

• David Edmundson

Room: Room 2 Plasma 6 saw the return of the desktop cube, but the underlying story is so much bigger. KWin gained support for an entire new infrastructure to tightly couple QtQuick with Kwin's own rendering and with Kwin's content available. In this talk we go through the problems with the current approach, what we created, and look at what this enables creative people (like you!) to do next. watch: https://live.kde.org/playersite_0a5de95e-0f2e-4479-8d59-d0095df9daf0.html

Finding your way around Akademy - Venue maps and indoor routing in Kongress (KDE Development)

• Volker Krause

Room: Room 1 With Akademy hosted in a venue with OSM indoor mapping we can explore first-hand what becomes possible when making use of this in conference companion apps. Watch: https://live.kde.org/playersite_ff95f429-9e2c-4de0-966e-c511db397c12.html

Lint all the things! (KDE Development)

• Albert Astals Cid
• Alexander Lohnau

Room: Room 1 QML is a great language to write fast User Interfaces but given its runtime nature it makes it a bit fragile to refactors. This lightning talk will try to convince you to enable qmllint in your compilation steps so that QML issues are found on compile time instead of runtime. JSON files play an important role in KDE's sources: We use them as metadata files for applets, embed them in plugin metadata. In order to avoid runtime problems or implicit type conversions, a CI job is added to all repos. But this is only a small benefit of the improved validation and schema efforts. This talk will highlight some benefits and show you, how you may utilize them. Watch: https://live.kde.org/playersite_ff95f429-9e2c-4de0-966e-c511db397c12.html

What's a Maintainer anyway? (FOSS Philosophy)

• Nicolas Fella

Room: Room 1 Maintainers play a critical role in Open Source projects and yet most KDE projects don't have one. Why is this not a problem? And what's a maintainer anyway? Watch: https://live.kde.org/playersite_ff95f429-9e2c-4de0-966e-c511db397c12.html

Getting Them Early: Teaching Pupils About The Environmental Benefits Of FOSS (FOSS Philosophy)

• Nicole Teale (KDE Eco Project Lead and Event Manager)

Room: Room 1 KDE Eco has a new project funded by the Umweltbundesamt (UBA) called "Sustainable Software For Sustainable Hardware". The goal of this project is to reduce e-waste by promoting the adoption of KDE / Free & Open Source Software (FOSS) and raising awareness about the critical role software plays in the long-term, efficient use of hardware. In this lightning talk, I will discuss the work I am doing introducing KDE/FOSS to pupils, with a focus on its environmental benefits. I will share ideas on how to get schools involved in teaching pupils about reusing old hardware with FOSS. Finally, I will present some of the projects that we have already implemented in schools in Germany. Watch: https://live.kde.org/playersite_ff95f429-9e2c-4de0-966e-c511db397c12.html

Towards a Pragmatic Understanding of Large Language Models (Main)

• David Schlangen
• Eike Hein (KDE)
• Lydia Pintscher

Room: Room 1 The form in which Large Language Models entered the public consciousness in late 2022 was a very suggestive one: As "chatbots" that seemingly could answer any question and fulfill any task (as long as it only involves written language). People who came unprepared to their first interactions with ChatGPT were highly impressed --- it writes limericks! it can answer maths questions! it can give me an outline for my term paper! What the universality cleverly hid was the question of whether it is actually usefully good at any particular task. For principled reasons, these models are doomed to be generalists: Given a prefix sequence, they will always predict some next token. In my keynote, I will describe some recent efforts in using the framing of "LLMs as function approximators" for understanding more precisely what LLMs are doing, where their real generality lies, and how they can be turned from multi-trick ponies into potentially useful system components. A panel discussion with KDE Treasurer and Vice President Eike Hein will follow the talk in order to understand how these components can be made useful to the KDE developer community.

Financial support for working on KDE (KDE Development)

• Jos van den Oever (NLnet)

Room: Room 2 The importance of Free Software for companies, governments and individuals is still growing. Instead of contributing code, these users make funds available for others to work on FOSS. This talk will give an overview of various sources of funding that developers can apply for. It will feature examples of projects and people that have been paid to work on KDE. At the end there will be tips on how to apply for funding and what to expect.

Daily driving Plasma Mobile and what's still lacking (Main)

• Bart Ribbers

Room: Room 2 The Plasma Mobile project has existed for quite a few years now with the goal to provide a FOSS, privacy-friendly, alternative to the duopoly on smartphones by leveraging the various KDE technologies out there. Even though this project is quite usable as it is and there are various options nowadays to run it on actual smartphones, actual developer interest seems low which results in all kinds of low-hanging fruit not being resolved and frustrating potential end-users causing them to look for alternatives in the Linux smartphone ecosystem. My talk is going to describe how I've personally started using Plasma Mobile daily (the smartphone I use, various apps, etc) and what I think is currently holding back the project from being used by more people. The goal is to get more KDE developers interested in the project and actually using it daily so they start developing for it. It will never be used by the general public if not even the developers themselves are using it.

Sponsors lightning talks (Main)

• Victoria Fierce (KDE)

Room: Room 1 In this sessions the sponsors of the conference get a chance to briefly talk about their work and their connection to KDE.

Akademy Awards (Main)

• Akademy Team

Room: Room 1

Closing (Main)

• Akademy Team

Room: Room 1

Trainings & BoFs (Main) BoF Info: https://community.kde.org/Akademy/2024/Thursday