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?

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Kevin Ottens holds a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence, which led him to specialize in ontology engineering and multi-agent systems. As a student, he became deeply involved with the KDE community and has contributed for the past 20 years.

In addition to writing code, he has played a role in community stewardship, including participating in the creation of the KDE Manifesto.

Currently, Kevin works at Enioka Haute Couture, where he maintains a broad perspective on software engineering. His responsibilities include software architecture, coding, and open-source strategy development. Additionally, he dedicates time to coaching teams and mentoring engineers in leadership roles.

He resides in Toulouse, where he regularly attends C++ meetups.

What if we told you there is a company with hundreds of desktops running KDE Plasma? What if we also told you they have been using it for more than 10 years? Finally, what if we mentioned they are located in Australia and specialize in winemaking? Would you be curious to learn more about their experience with our software?

Fortunately, such a company does exist—De Bortoli Wines, an Australian winemaking company.

They have since become a client of Enioka Haute Couture, leading to a collaborative and insightful relationship. The projects they have brought to us have been both engaging and challenging, providing valuable insights into how KDE software is utilized in enterprise settings and the constraints these desktops may face.

Our work has involved examining application code such as Okular, exploring frameworks like KIO, and even investigating issues at the kernel level. These experiences may inform feature prioritization and testing strategies to better support such users.

If you are interested in enterprise desktop use cases or enjoy discussions about software bugs and wine labels, this talk will be of interest to you.

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I'll try to explain very roughly what color is, how it's represented in computers, why we need color management, and how color management works in Wayland.

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I have been a KDE contributor for many years, with code contributions to various projects like Krita, Plasma, and several frameworks. Most recently, I have been working on KRdp and maintaining Plasma System Monitor along with its various dependencies.

Over the years, the way we style our applications has become increasingly complex. Initially, we only had Qt widgets and a system to style them. Then came Plasma with SVG-based styling, followed by QtQuick, which introduced yet another styling system. At this point, we have several methods of styling, and most of them are quite challenging to use. This situation is not ideal for developers or designers.

In this talk, I will explore the history of how we arrived at this point, the issues it causes, and a potential solution called Union. Union is a new theme engine under development, which I hope will eventually replace the various styling methods within KDE with something that is easier for developers to maintain and more flexible for designers.

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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Kevin Ottens has a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence which led him to focus on ontology engineering and multi-agent systems. As a student, he fell in love with the KDE community and has been involved for the past 20 years.

Next to contributing code, he has also been helping with the community stewardship, for instance participating in the creation of the KDE Manifesto.

Nowadays, Kevin strives at enioka Haute Couture having a very wide view on software engineering. His responsibilities range from software architecture and code to Open Source strategies. He also spends time coaching teams and other engineers in leadership positions.

He still lives in Toulouse where he participates to regular C++ meetups.

There is a new Ubuntu variant in town, it is called Ubuntu Core. It's been thought for IoT uses first and is based on snap packages. It's made of snaps from start to finish. Lately there's been a push for an "Ubuntu Core Desktop" which goes beyond headless devices to have a full desktop session.

KDE Plasma couldn't be left out from such an effort, and this is how the "KDE Neon Core" idea came to be. Trying to get all the benefits of KDE Neon but on top of an Ubuntu Core base.

This makes for an interesting challenge which can help our community improve its interactions with the snap ecosystem.

In this talk we will show how KDE Neon Core is structured, what is does offer and its limitations. We will also cover the basics of how the snap confinement works. Finally we will explain the issues we encountered which led to patches in KDE software or in snapd itself. This will be an opportunity to reflect on the challenges to debug such an immutable system.

The talk should provide interesting insights for people curious about how the processes in a Plasma workspace session integrate, or about the interactions between snapd and applications.

If you want to hear battle stories on building this kind of systems and learn what we discovered along the way, this talk will be for you.

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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.

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Volker is the Chief Maintainer of the Qt Project.

The Qt 6.8 should be around the corner by the time of Akademy, and we'll just have had our Qt Contributors Summit. This is a great time to look at some of the things we are working on for the upcoming releases, and where we intend to put our focus in the Qt Project and Qt Company R&D teams.

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Javier is the creator of the QPrompt Teleprompter app, developed using KDE Frameworks, and used by professionals for live event productions both in and out of studios. He works as a Software Engineer consultant at KDAB and holds degrees in Computer Science and Mass Media Communications from the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo. Originally from Puerto Rico, Javier is fluent in both English and Spanish and has a passion for video editing.

The goal of this talk is to encourage people to create native Linux applications and help them use KDE Frameworks to build these applications. The talk is divided into two parts: showcase and examples.

The first part highlights what can be accomplished using KDE Frameworks, offering real-life examples inside and outside of KDE. The second part aims to assist developers who may not be familiar with KDE, C++, or the Linux ecosystem by helping them avoid common pitfalls when setting up the frameworks and preparing their apps for distribution.

Presentation Overview:

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The form in which Large Language Models (LLMs) entered the public consciousness in late 2022 was highly suggestive: as “chatbots” that seemingly could answer any question and fulfill any task, as long as it only involved written language. People who were unprepared for their first interactions with ChatGPT were highly impressed—it writes limericks! It can answer math questions! It can give me an outline for my term paper! What the universality cleverly concealed was the question of whether it is truly effective at any particular task. For principled reasons, these models are doomed to be generalists: given a prefix sequence, they will always predict the next token.

In my keynote, I will describe some recent efforts to use the framing of “LLMs as function approximators” to better understand what LLMs are doing, where their real generality lies, and how they can be transformed from multi-trick ponies into potentially useful system components. A panel discussion with KDE Treasurer and Vice President Eike Hein will follow the talk to explore how these components can be made useful to the KDE developer community.

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The KDE Community has proposed and chosen new goals for the coming years. Join us for the reveal of the new KDE Goals.