Switching to Open Source is more than a technical migration – it's a strategic, political, and cultural shift.
This keynote provides a practical perspective on what it actually means for a government to transition towards Open Source and digital sovereignty. Schleswig-Holstein has been one of the trailblazer in this field for some time and is committed to further strengthening its role as...
KEcoLab is an automation tool that allows KDE developers to remotely measure the energy consumption of their KDE software through GitLab CI/CD. Instead of obtaining measurements manually and in person in a lab such as the one at KDAB, Berlin, KDE developers can trigger the process through GitLab CI/CD, wherever they are. This enables developers to effortlessly assess their software's energy...
Plasma's reputation has gone through a series of ups and downs over the years, the reasons behind that are as much philosophical as they are technical.
This talk looks at the mistakes we've made over the last 10 years and the mindset we need to look into the upcoming years and deliver a product that we can share confidently to millions of users.
In this talk I will provide a list of all the updates and implementations made since the last design system announcement last year at Akademy.
This includes a review on variables availability for designers and developers. I will detail the preferred method of use for these variables and how to submit any issues.
Banana plants typically take between 9 to 12 months to produce fruit after planting.
KDE Linux® - better known as 🍌 - was planted a year ago! Where are we today? What has been accomplished? What has not gone so well? What's next?
A retrospective on the past year and a look at the next.
User Interfaces (UI) are an essential part of our lives, we use them every day, in all our devices, everywhere we go. At the same time, we see new technologies and programming languages enriching our tech scenario, but in some cases, they don’t have the necessary modules to produce those UIs.
Qt is currently a widely used framework, that has proven to be mature enough to be a...
Windows 10 security updates end on 14 October 2025 [0], which also just happens to be KDE's 29th birthday as well as International E-Waste Day [1] -- what is more, International Repair Day follows shortly after on 18 October. The irony is deep, but what is not ironic is that hundreds of millions of functioning devices [2] could end up discarded as e-waste. This means manufacturing and...
KDE e.V. supports the KDE Community in organizational, legal financial and other matters. In this session the Board will talk about the work of the organization over the past year and what is coming next.
Last year during Akademy I presented the Union styling system, which is a
project to create a styling engine that is intended to unify the various
styling methods we use in KDE.
Now, about a year later, I will talk about what kind of progress has been made
to achieve this goal. I will discuss some of the new major features that have
been developed, the state of adopting Union within KDE...
Last year we covered the "KDE Neon Core" effort to bring Plasma on Ubuntu Core. We focused on the work required and the challenges we encountered along the way. We concluded on an upcoming radical change in the system architecture.
This time, we will focus on what changed during the past year. It will be a status update on the system architecture change from a technical perspective.
We...
The Working Groups of KDE e.V. are helping the KDE Community in various areas such as fundraising, community management and running our infrastructure. In this session the Working Groups will give an overview of their work over the past year and their plans for the future.
This cycle of the KDE Goals is a foundation for the future of the KDE community. We’ll take a brief look at what we’ve achieved over the past year, what makes this cycle so special and also how can you help.
Through real experiences and lessons learned, the talk highlights the challenges, small wins, and internal grit required to claim space in a male-dominated industry — and offers encouragement to anyone who's ever felt underestimated.
Over the last year many KDE libraries have gained bindings for Python and Rust, enabling developers using these languages to create KDE applications.
In this talk we are going to look into why this is important, how the binding generation works under the hood, how to use them in applications, and what their existence means for KDE as a community.
In this BoF we’ll go over the latest in Qt learning.
You’ll learn about:
- Qt Academy and the future plans
- Official Qt Developer Certifications and how to get one
- Qt’s University and Talent Network
KWallet is getting near its retiring time: its C++ API is marked as deprecated in order to be replaced by a new DBus API, called Secret Service. Although KWallet can provide a Secret Service API, its technical implementation is quite old and different people have different preferences about what Secret Service to use. It's also a good occasion for trying to use a common backend between...
Being able to receive weather and public emergency warnings can save lives, and we don't want people using FOSS to be at a disadvantage compared to proprietary platforms when it comes to that.
Clazy, KDE's static code analyzer for Qt and C++, keeps evolving. In this talk, I’ll cover the features of clazy including its first-class support for Qt6.
We'll explore how Clazy can boost your workflow, helping you write cleaner, faster, and more reliable code. It will also provide some hints on how you can contribute to clazy to make it even better!
What if open source is not about collaborating to create code, but a tool against asymmetry?
This talk draws from Diversifying Open Source: An Open Standards Playbook for Inclusive and Equitable Tech Projects, as a kind of mirror, one that invites us to reflect on the systems we build and the values we embed within them. It's less about ticking the diversity box, and more about raising...
CppCheck is a static code analyzer that is easily integrated into KDE's CI workflow on invent.
As with all static code analysis tools, code needs some initial grooming to be useful.
We will here go over some of the things needed to get properly started and also showcase some instances of where CppCheck has been helpful in KDE code.
In this talk I would go over various negative and positive feedback I've gotten during my time of being KDE contributor.
Notable examples are window outlines, rounder corners to items and KUrlNavigator changes.
I've gotten both "hatemail" and seen "redditors" trash my work publicly. However, I will also remind the audience that there's good feedback too, and it's why I keep doing what I...
Historically, we have developed our applications locally together with the system libraries and someone else has been taking care of the distribution of the application. With the introduction of Flatpak amongst other tools we have been breaking that barrier, thus allowing KDE to ship the apps to fellow Linux users.
While that works for the most part, there is still a last mile part of the...
There's a billion talks on how to get new contributors into a project, what's less covered is how to grow these new contributors into maintainers. This requires a completely different set of skills and a bit of manipulation.
This talk covers how to spot future maintainers from the crowd and how to give them space to grow.
In QML, you generally use the model/view/delegate pattern to expose data. In the last few years, several features have been added to the QML language to help you do this in a type safe and predictable way. Required properties have been around since Qt 5.14, but only since Qt 6.10 you can actually write through required properties into the underlying model. Also in 6.10, Synchronizer has been...
For many contributors to FOSS projects it is a dream to get hired to work full time, or even part time, on their favorite project and get paid for it. And companies love hiring motivated, skilled developers with a history of contributions to successful projects.
This dream can come true, and has, for many in KDE, at least for a while, but it can also turn into a disappointment and has...
We all know that Windows 10 is end of life this year. The prospect of that alone should be enough to motivate change to Linux desktops - but the current US administration is providing a lot more reasons - tariffs, annexation and questionable attitudes in defense partnerships to name a few.
I've been part of migration projects most of my career, so in this talk I'll present some of the big...
By the time Akademy happens api.kde.org will have completed the transition away from Doxygen to using QDoc for documentation generation.
In this talk we are going to look at how and why this is happening and how we can leverage QDoc to make our documentation even better in the future.
Fedora KDE has had an exciting few years with a growing community and significant efforts between Fedora and the KDE project, with the latest milestone of Fedora KDE becoming a recognized flagship offering in the Fedora Project as the [Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop Edition][1].
This presentation will briefly cover the recent history and contextualize it for the future developments emerging to...
During normal times, change is hard and slow. During abnormal times, change is easy and fast.
Whatever else is happening, there are opportunities for KDE to be seen as a source of stability and improvement in these times of great disruption.
In this talk, learn about efforts to do just that, and how we can boost them and KDE in general by focusing on the big picture.
A big focus for KDE in Plasma 6 has been making our Wayland session usable for artists. It has been ready for general computing for some time, but these users have special requirements that require extra care - from drawing tablets to remotes to color management. The KDE community also happens to maintain popular software like Kdenlive and Krita - so we also need to help our own developers as...
One of the most important and underrated parts of creating software in a team is communication, and yet we don't tend to talk as much about that.
While most computer science graduates went through a course in theoretical computer science they usually know very little about the theoretical underpinnings of talking to each other.
In this talk we are going to take a brief look at various...
The commit message is as important as the code patch that goes along with it. It sets the tone for the rest of the merge request.
In this thinly veiled rant, we go over what makes a good commit message for both maintainers and future archeologists.
It is quite an important for Plasma Mobile to go into sleep mode and wake up device when user needs to interact with it, for example:
- Receiving Call or SMS
- Push notification or cell broadcasts
- Hardware events such as battery low or button presses
We will talk about recent development in this area.
I will share our experience working with external developers funded through our fundraising campaign.
I'll also present the contacts we've made to best manage the project's growth, as well as our thoughts and plans to address upcoming challenges ahead: how to perpetuate the funds, maintain the project's vision, keep the community active and engaged, and increase the project's visibility.
