Akademy is a special event for most of KDE people, it is opportunity for KDE developers, designers, users etc to meet and greet each other face-to-face. I have been attending most Akademies since year 2014. So of-course this year also I attended Akademy 2025 in Berlin. Last time I was in Berlin was right before pandemic happened, attending KDE Plasma Mobile Sprint in KDAB offices. It’s always lovely to visit this beautiful city!
Pre-event
After arriving in Berlin, I decided to meet up with my ex-colleague from MBition since there was still time before check-in to my apartment was open. It was great to catch up with him face-to-face! Later after checking-in, I decided to meet with Shantanu Tushar Jha, (one of people responsible for me being in KDE! 😁) and Luca Weiss and head to venue for welcome party!
It was chill open-air restaurant, It was so great to meet some of people whom I had not met since years!
Talks
Unfortunately after welcome event, my health went downhill, I had a bad throat and basically was in pain for most of the event. It is still miracle that I was able to give my talk without drinking any level of water or coughing..
However I was able to still catch some of the talks in-person and/or watch recording later on, talks that I found interesting in no particular order,
Day 1
- KDE Linux: Banana Growth cycle
- Keynote: Open by Design: How Governments Can Lead the Shift to Digital Sovereignty
- From Misunderstood to CEO – Breaking Bias and Building Inclusion
- KDE Goals - One Year Recap
- Emergency and Weather Alerts
Day 2
- Handling Negative Feedback
- Maintainers don’t grow on trees
- Minding the Big Picture: Opportunity From Chaos
And of-course my own talk,
Plasma Mobile Power Management: Reliable Sleep and Wake Ups
This was talk about some of nlnet sponsored work done in KDE Plasma to improve power management and upcoming milestones.
I want to write a separate blog post about “upcoming milestones”, because that will be bit more technical and off-topic to this post.
Birds of Feather sessions
I also attended few BoF sessions as my health allowed, some of most interesting ones to me,
Cell broadcasts
There are already some projects implementing cellbroadcasts for Mobile Linux, but it was quite interesting to learn about how it works internally and what are common gotchas when implementing this from Shinjo. It was really insightful presentation and session!
We were also able to simulate cellbroadcasts with unicode characters
You can dance! KDE country square dance workshop!
This was really fun session scheduled by Adriaan de Groot, where he instructed group of few people on how to do country square dance! We also “tried” to present it at BoF wrap-up … if you know, you know! 🥲
Want to run Akademy? A retrospective/AMA with the team
This session was open table discussion with Akademy team, and some of board members also. While this was focused on Akademy only, as an organizer of conf.kde.in events in India, this was quite insightful for me, and there was quite some notes/ideas to implement also for conf.kde.in.
We also discussed ideas on how to make upcoming Akademy special, given it is KDE’s 30 year anniversery!
Ad-hoc discussions
I also took this opportunity to have some ad-hoc discussion with few people on some of topics that I was working on, like with Volker, I discussed push-notifications, with Jakob, I discussed open powerdevil MRs, and with Luca, I discussed some issues I was having on FairPhone 5.
Berlin scavenger hunt
On wednesday, Akademy team along with contributors from Berlin had organized scavanger hunt across city! It was quite fun to explore city!
Winning team 😝
Cutness
Street art in Berlin
Teddy bear having picnic in rose garden
Outro
I would like to sincerely thank KDE e.V. for sponsoring my travel and accomodation to event! Without their support such long international travel would not be possible! If you would like to support KDE financially and make events such as Akademy possible, please consider donating to KDE e.V..