Akademy

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.

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.

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Andy Betts is a long-time KDE contributor who leads the Visual Design Team at KDE and is also a member of the Community Working Group. Additionally, Andy has served as a KDE Board member and currently assists in various capacities related to graphical design.

Andy’s work involves reviewing graphical changes to the system, providing improvements, maintaining visual conventions, and developing new concepts for Plasma.

In his professional life, Andy is a Manager of User Testing for a large cloud services provider. He resides in the United States.

Soon after the launch of Plasma 6, many contributors requested updates to the visuals in the new Plasma Desktop. Initially touted as a stability release, Plasma 6 evolved to be more consistent and bug-free than its predecessors. However, the one aspect missing from the release was a refreshed style.

Taking this feedback into account, a small team of designers from the Visual Design Team reviewed and created a few exciting changes for the current visual style.

The team worked on creating:

We would like to provide a preview of all these changes to the community and gauge interest. We also seek help from the developer community in implementing these elements.

Additionally, we plan to follow up with a couple of Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions to explore how we can execute these elements within our constraints.

Above all, we are committed to advancing our visual style. Our goal is to offer users a consistent look that helps them maximize their productivity while using our systems.

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Volker joined KDE more than 20 years ago and has since contributed to KDE Frameworks, KDE PIM, Akonadi, ELF Dissector, the digital travel assistance app KDE Itinerary, and three major version transitions of KDE’s software stack.

Originally developed for KDE Itinerary’s train station maps, the client components and server-side infrastructure enable the display of up-to-date indoor maps of buildings based on free OpenStreetMap (OSM) data. Recently, client-side routing support has also been introduced.

Integrating this functionality into KDE’s conference companion app, Kongress, is a logical continuation of this work. However, progress has been hindered by the lack of conference venues with detailed indoor mapping data. Akademy 2024 presents a rare opportunity to demonstrate how this technology can enhance conference accessibility for all attendees.

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