Akademy

https://media.ccc.de/v/kde2026-36-license_all_the_files_o

Find out why it's important to license all your files from the get-go.

Harald Sitter

#kde2026

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

https://media.ccc.de/v/kde2026-2-how_to_cut_a_tree

Trees need regular maintenance to stay healthy and productive.

In this talk we are looking at how to take care of a tree, and what it can teach us about software and community.

Nicolas Fella

#kde2026

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

https://media.ccc.de/v/kde2026-11-what_has_been_brewing_in_kde_pim_land

In 2026, the Sovereign Tech Fund commissioned work to bring KDE software closer to readiness for large enterprises and public institutions. As part of this work, KDE PIM infrastructure had to be improved.

In this talk, we will cover the bug fixing and improvements we did around Akonadi resources and their protocol libraries. This will help all the applications using Akonadi to be at the forefront in term of protocol updates.

To get there, we also setup an end-to-end tests suite using Python. We will thus do a detour on how we structured those tests for better test data management and reduced flakiness. It will also show the bugs you can catch this way but not with unit tests.

If your life is stored in an IMAP and a DAV server, if you'd like things to be easier to configure, or if you'd like a better Flatpak experience for KDE PIM applications, then join us and rejoice! We'll tell you what you can expect to see in the next release.

Dominique Michel, arnaud chirat

#kde2026

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

https://media.ccc.de/v/kde2026-29-how_we_hacked_the_bavarian_state_with_an_open_source_open_letter

In September 2025, a few of us Open Source nerds heard that the Bavarian government wanted to "sneakily" "invest" another billion Euro in Microsoft Cloud, Teams and 365 – without a tender, and before the year ends (Base contract)

I talked to friends, and we created an open letter. Soon we were like ten initiators. We found support among many Bavarian Open Source companies and NGOs, only weeks later > 160 companies and institutions had been signing the letter.

When larger German NGOs like the Gesellschaft für Informatik (Society for Informatics) and the Bund der Steuerzahler (Tax Payers' Association joined, the Bavarian Government could not stay silent any more. Leading up of today, two secretaries and the minister president have engaged in a public blame game. At first they were angry about the unwanted, additional publicity - and publicly said so.

The goal of sneakily accomplishing the deal until end of 2025 failed and it is still not finalized. But now - four weeks before an election, secretaries of state for digital and finance are fighting publicly, accusing each other of "fake news" and are saying silly things.

"OSS is too expensive" or "We needed something federated, decentralized and secure, thus we had to go for MS 365" and similar. It's fun.

What we can learn from this? PR for OSS works, timing is helpful, topics are important and claims like "ONE BILLION!!" are valuable. No one knew Trump, Greenland and Davos would come to help us, but they did and made it hard for the conservative Bavarian government to keep doing what they had always been. And we were a bunch of people that stuck it out.

Markus Feilner

#kde2026

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

https://media.ccc.de/v/kde2026-48-what_should_you_expect_when_contributing_to_kde

This talk shows you what sorts of problems you might encounter while attempting to contribute to KDE and how to address them: whether they are a normal part of the onboarding experience, unexpected issues, or indicative of flaws in our onboarding that need fixing.

This specifically targets beginner contributors.

Thiago Sueto

#kde2026

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

https://media.ccc.de/v/kde2026-8-rethinking_kde_builds

In this presentation I would like to discuss the work we have done over the last few years towards getting closer to our users and how it culminated in my work embracing BuildStream as a solution for our builds.

We will cover why it is a good idea, why it's an area that is important to put a lot of care on and how we will do to make sure that it remains a good idea and, most importantly, which possibilities BuildStream enables once everything is in place.

Aleix Pol Gonzalez

#kde2026

Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Our manifesto calls us to have an "end user focus". Among other things, we set up the Visual Design Group to take care of this. Unfortunately the effect of their work is limited by our knowledge about our users. We act ethically, respect privacy, but as a result do not know even most basic things about our user base.

In this talk we present a proof of concept that we have created together with KUserFeedback to cut this Gordian knot. It allows users to store personal data locally, while we as KDE can generate statistics about our users' distributed data pool. We can do this without compromising our ethical standards or ever touching users' privacy.

KDE is an open-source community developing free software for desktop and mobile, including the powerful Plasma desktop environment. Join the KDE community to contribute, learn, and shape the future of open-source software!

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While actual source code is at the heart of what makes our software work, there is so much more you can do to help us create phenomenal software that helps millions be more productive.

This is the story of how the donation of an external DVD drive unlocked a massive performance boost in Solid, KDE’s cross-platform hardware abstraction framework.

KDE is an open-source community developing free software for desktop and mobile, including the powerful Plasma desktop environment. Join the KDE community to contribute, learn, and shape the future of open-source software!

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About David: David is a long-standing #KDE contributor to Plasma, currently working with Blue Systems.

Adapt or Die How new Linux packaging approaches affect wider KDE

Everyone is familiar with #Flatpak, or #Snaps, as an another way to get software. The traditional way of software through the distribution is slowly on its way out.

But distributing applications is just the tip of the iceberg. This new world changes how we approach security, it changes how we approach plugins, it changes how we approach styling, it changes how we provide a development setup it changes our approaches to libraries in general, it changes ...everything!

This talk dives into what we need to truly embrace a Flatpak/Snap world, the challenges we'll face and the lesser talked about advantages we're going to see.

KDE is an open-source community developing free software for desktop and mobile, including the powerful Plasma desktop environment. Join the KDE community to contribute, learn, and shape the future of open-source software!

KDE is an open-source community developing free software for desktop and mobile, including the powerful Plasma desktop environment. Join the KDE community to contribute, learn, and shape the future of open-source software!

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A Look on the Bright Side of Life

Let us explore ways to stay positive even when things are dragging us down.

KDE is an open-source community developing free software for desktop and mobile, including the powerful Plasma desktop environment. Join the KDE community to contribute, learn, and shape the future of open-source software!

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