Three weeks ago, I attended KDE Akademy 2024 in Würzburg, Germany. It was pretty exciting to meet my KDE friends after one year since last Akademy 2023!

Travel drama

Ideally whole trip should’ve taken just ~18 hours door-to-door but thanks to Lufthansa whole travel turned out to be of 48 hours in total including layovers. Flight cancellation and rebooking caused by travel to start way earlier than planned (Thursday 5:00 AM instead of planned 07:00 PM) and had to spend insane amount of time in layover.

Anyway, I still managed to reach city of Würzburg at planned time. At Frankfurt I met with Justin and Nate and caught train to the Würzburg together.

Day 1

First day of akademy 2024 started with eye-opening keynote from Joanna Murzyn, Only hackers will survive. While first part of talk showed us grim reality of “Technological progress”, second part was quite positive and showed how KDE and open-source in general can be solution for this.

After a quick coffee break I attended two panel discussions on KDE’s goals,

First slot was a quick overview of previous goals selected by community 2 years back,

• KDE For All: Boosting Accessibility
• Sustainable Software
• Automate and Systematize Internal Processes

Second slot was Lydia revealing new goals voted by KDE community members,

• Streamlined Application Development Experience
• We care about your Input
• KDE Needs You! 🫵 Formalize and boost KDE’s processes for recruiting active contributors

There were several talks which I had attended during day,

• Looking back: What’s next?
• An operating system of our own - 🍌 OS
• Finding your way around Akademy - Venue maps and indoor routing in Kongress
• Getting Them Early: Teaching Pupils About The Environmental Benefits Of FOSS

Day 2

Day 2 started with keynote and panel discussion by David Schlangen on Towards a Pragmatic Understanding of Large Language Models.

After coffee break I attended Opt In? Opt Out? Opt Green! KDE Eco’s New Sustainability Initiative talk by Joseph, It is directly linked with one of previous KDE’s goal “Sustainable software”.

Just earlier this year my state had one of worst heatwave ever,

It was refreshing to know that as a KDE community we can do something about it and promote more sustainable way of doing software and hardware.

After that I attended talk from Aleix Pol, Embedded Linux is glorius lie!. At work KDE software is being used to power next-gen infotainment system for future generations of Mercedes-Benz cars., Aleix talked about challenges of using open-source software in embedded systems and how as a KDE community we can improve workflow for such an usecase.

After lunch I attended talk about Daily driving Plasma Mobile and what’s still lacking, and for once it was not me as a speaker! 😛

Talk was given by Bart Ribbers, who is one of developer for postmarketOS and the maintainer of the KDE packages for it and Alpine Linux.

Birds of Feather sessions

From Monday to Thursday there were several BoF sessions, I attended few of them,

• Opt Green / KDE Eco (Hybrid BoF)
• Using KEcoLab To Measure Software’s Energy Consumption
• Video tutorial for BoF best practice
• Plasma Hardware Integration (Power Management, Input Devices etc.)
• Wayland Text Input
• Sticker BOF

I and Bart Ribbers also organized Plasma Mobile BoF on Thursday and we talked about various topics related to Plasma Mobile:

• General direction / goals for upcoming few versions
• Application develoment workflow for both 1st party and 3rd party
• Major issues
• What is needed to reach basic “smart-phone” level

After BoF there was early test of Germany’s emergency alert systems. We wanted to capture cell-broadcast signals over ModeManager but unfortunately setup for it was not available but at least Volker managed to get it working with pushnotification based system!

During this days we also worked with Xaver Hugl to fix issue with KWin startup on Purism Librem 5. Merge requet 1, Merge request 2.

I also took opportunity to discuss some Plasma Mobile powermanagement improvements with Jakob Petsovits and Volker Krause.

Daytrip

On Wednesday we went to city of Rothenburg ob der Tauber. While weather was bit too cold for my taste, I thoroughly enjoyed guided tour of town!

Word of thanks!

My attendence for Akademy 2024 was sponsored by KDE e.V., KDE e.V. is a registered non-profit organization that represents the KDE Community in legal and financial matters.

If you would like to support KDE community, please donate to KDE e.V., both one-time and recurring donation options are available at KDE donations page.