Last week was a great Akademy in Graz!

Welcome Event​

First up was the welcome event on Friday evening, which took place at a rooftop bar overlooking Jakominiplatz; this was lovely in the evening light, and spectacular at night with parts of the city lit up!

I had fun helping to prepare and hand out lanyards to everyone as they arrived. This was also where Nico introduced many of us to Sturm — young, lightly fermented wine; sweet and flavorful. This became a hit at the welcome event and indeed all of Akademy!

Conference Talks​

Saturday and Sunday saw a deluge of great talks; more than I could possibly cover in a little blog post!

A couple highlights briefly:

I am really happy that Scott Jenson accepted my invite to do a talk at Akademy, and I thought it was very well received! Has also created a fair bit of buzz online. Unfortunately did not manage talk much directly — Akademy is hectic and I lost track of him.. oh well, maybe he'll come again! :)

Tracey Clark gave a great talk about QA and testing.. superhero work! It was great stuff and I hope inspires more people to both submit good bug reports as well as to help with triaging.

Gerald Senarclens de Grancy told us about using KDE software to teach kids about computers, linux, programming, and much more. Really interesting stuff. I expect it makes a huge impact to reach people so young!

Markus Feilner told us the crazy tale of exposing how the Bavarian government tried to make a €1 billion+ contract with Microsoft without any sort of consultation, alternatives, bidding, etc.. wild stuff. I'd like to see such consideration for open source options in Canadian government back home!

Eike Hein told us all about how he's been exploring the great pyramids powered by KDE technology — wow that is so cool! That honestly sounds like a dream come true; it had never even occurred to me people like us were doing such things! I'd really love to hear more details on this. hint hint :D

So many other great talks! Only 2 downsides: I couldn't attend them all and had to catch up on some later (with this year's excellent recordings), and the schedule was so tightly packed that there was often only 5 minutes between talks to run to the bathroom; quite the fast pace when trying to keep hydrated! 😵‍💫

Social event​

So many people! Good times were had, many interesting chats with great people. Although, poor Konqi had a rough time…

BoFs​

Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday were the BoFs (Birds of a Feather) sessions — smaller and more informal talks/hackathons/brainstorming/etc.

Definitely far too much to cover, but we had good sessions with the Penpot folks and have some ideas how to help move things forwards there, we have hope for exciting updates to Bugzilla, we traded and talked about some really cool stickers... and a laundry list of other cool stuff, tons of work happening/planned.

Rocket lab​

We noticed some students working on rockets as we were leaving the venue one day, and they gave a few of us a little tour! So cool! Also, their launch computer runs Linux with KDE. 😎

Day trip​

On Wednesday the KDE folks took a short breather from the hectic schedule to do something fun together — visit a fancy Austrian chocolate factory called Zotter!

They started with a short film explaining some of who they are and how they work, which was shockingly well-produced; it looked and sounded amazing!

I really tried to pace myself because the tour includes apparently 300+ tasting stations, and even so by the end I was a bit sick of chocolate. 🤯 🍫 😵

It was super interesting though and very tasty. I ended up buying a bunch from the gift shop to bring home as souvenirs of course! My favorites were the white chocolates and the ones with coffee; specifically the coffee & dates one is amazing. 😋

After Zotter we all went to enjoy some food and drinks (no chocolate!), and the weather was being perfectly accommodating for us!

After we got back to Graz proper several of us ended up sharing some excellent Fella-brewed liqueur in the hotel lobby, and getting very loud and silly and generally having a fun evening together to wrap up an absolutely lovely day.

Wrap up​

Of course I got sick right at the end of Akademy, and after getting home have slept most of 3 days, feeling quite terrible. I am just grateful getting sick waited until after all the great work and fun day trip, conversations and socializing with lovely people!

This was the Akademy for KDE's 30th birthday, and it was appropriately amazing! Thank you to everyone for being such an amazing community. Extra special thanks to the many people that helped to organize everything and make this happen at all, you did such an fantastic job! 🤩 💙

The Challenge: Getting AI Agents to Draw Correct Canvas2D

Qt 6.12 introduces Qt Canvas2D. Its API echoes the HTML5 canvas and the older Qt Quick Canvas element, both of which developers and AI models have seen many times in training data.

Another Akademy attended, here's some photos!

Hello hello! It was that time of the year where I go to KDE Akademy, talk to fellow nerds, almost lose my voice due to socializing and eat a lot of nice food.

This time Akademy was in Graz, Austria. I had never been in Austria before. This time I also had to travel alone due to my wife being busy with studying.

Traveling alone was nervewracking for sure, but somehow I managed to do it. Unless I am dreaming and wake up under a bench in Frankfurt airport or something.

Now I do not have a lot of photos, but I tried. I am bad at photos, many of them are super shakey or bad. But maybe these are interesting anyway.

Let me know if you want me to blur your face, I tried my best avoid those who had red lanyards!!!

Traveling to Graz

I spent first 6h in a midnight train from home to Helsinki and could not sleep. Then I went from Helsinki to Frankfurt on a plane, I slept like two hours maybe. And from Frankfurt I went to Graz on a plane, also managed to sleep a bit.

At airport I met fellow KDE people and we managed to figure out our way to the hotel together.

The moment I arrived there, there was a welcome event on top of some building with bunch of food and drink. I had good time though I was super tired and the place was fully packed so I had barely any energy or will to try to properly socialize.

I genuinely do not remember much, it was a lot of travel and brain fog due to sleep deprivation lol.

First day of speeches

Akademy finally properly begins and I go to the venue after good nights sleep. I didn't take much photos at the venue as I spent time just watching the talks, but I managed to take couple photos.

At evening we went for a dinner, and there was A LOT of people around Graz as apparently there was some festival. More chaos, I do not like crowds, but it was interesting.

Second day of speeches and goals

During day two I spent most of the time at the venue as well, and the new KDE Goals were announced: I am one of the KDE Goal champions now! Yay!

The goal I am champion of is Next Generation Styling for KDE.

See the youtube video of the goals, our little speech timestamped: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwv4SQSvx9g&t=2559

(I am the guy in full black with the Xenia shirt.)

So yes, make Union bug reports! :)

After the talks and goal stuff, we had a KDE birthday party! KDE is 30 years old now, so we had food and cake.

(The first image is just me being stupid dont mind me)

Konqi sadly did not survive the party....

BoF days

No photos from these, as I spent all my time in them. BoFs are tiny group hacking/discussion/etc sessions about stuff. I attended Union related BoFs but I also held my own: Desktop icons!

There will be it's own blogpost about the desktop icon BoF soon:tm:.

Otherwise I do not have much as I spent a lot of time just hacking on Union and less listening lol.

Daytrip: Chocolate

We went to a chocolate factory!!!

I've never been in one but it was very fun. And chocolatey.

There was like 300 tasting things for different processing phases of chocolate, from the chocolate beans to the full product.

I tried to taste it all. I really, really tried. At the end of it though I felt rather sick and did not want any more lol.

Despite feeling like I never want to see any more chocolate in my life, it was very fun. Apparently there was some other part of the place too that was like a zoo full of chocolate but I was so tired of it at the end I kinda skipped it and just drank water outside.

Yes, the theme of this trip is pretty much "i was very tired."

After stuffing ourselves full of chocolate, we went to another place nearby that was really pretty, on top of a hill, where we had a lunch. A lot of bread and cheese and ham and whatnot to put on the bread, and a lot of drinks too.

Last day(s)

Thursday I spent hacking on Union together with Arjen and Noah. We are still trying to get the widgets side work nicely, though it works rather well already.

After that, I said goodbye to Konqi (and other people) and had a weird pizza that was half regular and half calzone.

On Friday, we travelled together to airport and went eventually our separate ways to wherever we went.

I got home at midnight and finally could say hi to our snek Mochi again.

It was fun!

Akademy was really fun. I will make more technical post about the desktop icon stuff when I can. It was very great to meet fellow nerds and discuss all things KDE.

I had great time. Even as someone who really does not like traveling.

See you at Akademy 2027! Or KDE Goal sprints! :)

Right after my GSoC tenure ended, I took off to Austria for attending Akademy. This was my first time outside my country and also my first birthday in another country!

Meeting New People

I met Albert Astals Cid and Sune Vuorela who mentored and helped me during my GSoC tenure on Poppler and Okular.

I also got to meet Christoper Cullman who had merged my first contributions into KDE to the Kate editor.

Attending talks and BoFs

I attended some talks that I could mostly understand. For example, "Are we really going to use the same Desktop UX forever?" by Scott Jensen

Some talks of which I knew 50-60% of what's going on,

And then some talks, I had no idea about what's happening lol (but they sounded interesting anyways)

I also attended some BoFs like i18n, NFC (which sounded interesting), and one BoF which was about organizing Akademy. The "organizing Akademy" BoF was especially helpful because Bhushan Shah talked with me and other fellow contributors about doing a cki (conf kde india) so I learned some things there.

Chocolate factory experience

When they said in the movie that there are roughly 300 varieties of chocolates we can try, I thought I could try all of them. But I couldn't eat anymore than 30 -_-

Closing Remarks

It was a good event and I enjoyed my time there. Thanks KDE for making it happen.

As usual, crossing the Atlantic is tough for me. I'm just too tall, and the seats are, well... just too small. Not to mention the stress of receiving a message on the day of the trip saying that my flight had been moved four hours earlier! I dropped everything I was doing and ran to the airport, only to dicover that it was a mistake in the "system". Add to that the delays and the the risk of missing the connection... Lufthansa did not play well this trip but everything worked out in the end!

My second Akademy was simply amazing. It was also more special beacause it was the KDE 30th anniversary edition. Unfortunately I did not get to try the Konqi cake.

I am very proud to be part of the KDE community - a welcoming, friendly, diverse and free group of people who are making the world a better place. I you ask me what is KDE in one word, I would say hope.

Camille, from the Kdenlive team, asked us to document our trip, so I did a short edit.

Habemus Champions

One of the highlights of my trip was to announce the new KDE Goals. This cycle, the community voted for:

• KDE for Enterprise and Deployments - championed by: David Edmundson, Neal Gompa, and Kai Uwe Broulik
• Better documentation - championed by: Nate Graham, Thiago Masato Costa Sueto, and Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss
• Next Generation Styling for KDE - championed by: Arjen Hiemstra, Akseli Lahtinen, and Andy Betts

We are currently scheduling our kickoff meeting to get things organized. I am sure many of you are eager to contribute, so stay tuned for further news.

We also did a recap of the last cycle and handed the certificates of appreciation to the champions. Congrats to them, they really raised the bar!

My favorite accomplishments, in no particular order:

• Improved graphics tablet support. This made it possible to switch all the computers at our studio to KDE Plasma. We are a 100% KDE studio now. We Care About Your Input goal
• Plasma Keyboard. It was so cool to have seen this being born. We got a lot of community feedback and it will definitely be a cherry on top for Plasma. There are also many improvements and features coming. We Care About Your Input goal
• Ship Kirigami via pip. This is something that is still in a very initial state, but there has been recent progress by a community member. Streamlined Application Development Experience goal
• I love that KDE Mentorship now has a visual identity and it is getting a new website. KDE Needs You goal
• Beacon Program is a new mentorship program that I've been working to setup for ther last months. It is currrently entering a beta phase and will share more info soon. KDE Needs You goal

BOFs

I only got to participate in two BOFs.

The first was the Mentorships one hosted by Paul and Ansh, where I got to give a preview of the Beacon Program, the work that I've been building with universities for the last two semesters.

I also participated in Drunk KDE - Brand personality of KDE hosted by Aniqa and Kieryn. Boy that was a fun one! We got to think about KDE's branding and it contemplated lot's of issues that need to be worked on. Aniqa is compiling all our input and we'll hopefully get things moving afterwards.

Kdenlive at Akademy

The second highlight was getting together with the Kdenlive crew. Although it was a very quick, as most of the team stayed only for the weekend, we managed to get a lot done. We organized future sprints, started planning our upcoming fundraising campaign, discussed some promo tasks, and we even finally managed to merge the features section of the Kdenlive home page.

We also did a lot of testing and UX brainstorming for the upcoming keyframe timeline.

Unfortunately, for most of the trip, Jean-Baptiste was under the weather, so Julius and I had to fill in for his talk.

Graz

I loved Graz, Austria's second largest city. It is so welcoming and chill. I bought a weekly transport pass but ended up using it so little... did a lot of walking.

I was happy that I got to do some last minute sightseeing before catching the plane back home. After all the clock tower and the mountains were the inspiration for this year's edition.

A nice surprise was the Steirisches Backhendl served at TU Graz was just delicious. Styrian fried chicken (in pumpkin seed oil) served with a tangy potato salad and lingonberry jam.

Behind the scenes

This was my second Akademy, not only as a participant but also part of the organizing team.

We've been meeting religiously every Tuesday to organize this edition. Each time with different background lights from Harald's streaming setup.

All the graphics of this edition were made using free software programs like Inkscape for the general graphics creation, Scribus to export the PDF for printing, Blender for the intro graphics animations, and Kdenlive for video editing.

Also a HUGE shoutout to the CCC Video Operation Center (C3VOC) team. I really hope that we have consolidated this partership with them and can continue partnering with them for future Akademies. Speaking of which, the call for hosts is still open.

Lot's of luv to the beautiful, lean, mean Akademy-making team who put together such a fantastic edition. Can't wait for the next one with you all.

Some of the team. <3

August 6th – 9th 2026

FOSSY was held in Vancouver, Canada this year on the University of British Columbia campus.

This was my first conference as a KDE representative sitting at the KDE sponsors table. I don’t know if we were the biggest sponsor at FOSSY, but we certainly had the most people and tables in the sponsors area. We also had the most things to play with. A drawing tablet, a surface table with drawing pen, a steam deck, a rpi4 with small touchscreen, as well a various types of laptops.

Tellico 4.3 is available, with some additional capabilities, improvements, and bug fixes. I’ve received several code contributions from new people in the last few months and I wanted to say thanks. Depending a little on how I count it, Tellico turns 25 years old next month. It’s always been a hobby; I’m not a programmer by trade or training, and so I’m always gratified when other folks find my little tool useful and provide feedback, bug fixes, and even code contributions.

Improvements:

• Added new data sources for Goodreads and Hardcover.
• Updated MusicBrainz (Bug 524735), IMDB (Bug 525019), Numista (Bug 474986), DarkHorse, Kino-Teatr, and Kinopoisk (Bug 525687) data sources.
• Added appropriate data rate limiting to many data sources.
• Added option to read composer during audio file import (Bug 524734).
• Added option to disable ISBN auto-formatting.
• Added option to include filters and loans when importing a collection.
• Updated file exporting to include default file extensions.
• Updated Number fields to allow 64-bit values.

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed bug with MusicBrainz keyword search (Bug 524735).
• Fixed bug when exporting HTML files for collection with no title.
• Fixed bug with restoring entry values after undoing a collection append or merge.

Recently Michael Tunnell interviewed Aleix and I on the subject of KDE’s 30th birthday, Wayland, LTS software, the new Union theming engine, and more! If you’re interested, you can check it out here. Note: if you work at Microsoft, please don’t watch and get any big ideas!

After a long week of working lots and making lots of connections, here is what happened this year during Akademy!

• Talk recap
  • Ocean is divided into two areas, Ocean Graphical Assets and Ocean Design System.
  • Ocean graphical assets refers to all currently-available theming elements that Plasma provides. This includes, color schemes, fonts, icon packs, Plasma styles, pointers, and window decorations. (The only one missing is application style).
  • Ocean design system has also progressed. We begun the migration of Ocean icon sources from Figma into Penpot. This is achieved by using a svg copy function and then we paste a flat version of the icon into Penpot. With this, at least, users will be able to create mockups using actual Ocean icons. The UI will look more adjusted to what we can offer. There will be a copy in Figma for redundancy but designers will likely not need any specific changes done to icons in Penpot.
  • When Penpot is able to support more of the complex boolean operations done in Figma, this will make it easier to store better sources in Penpot.
  • My talk focused on the progress we have so far with the various elements of Ocean.

• Union BoF
  • Discussed all the areas that Union engine is working on and what is available for us to use at the moment.
  • Reviewed ways to test Union and provide feedback. Working on learning the structure and work for Ocean style.
• Desktop Icons Arrangement BoF
  • Discussed the need to revamp the way our icons are arranged in the desktop and the various workarounds that our implementation has.
  • I offered to help in bringing some good research into HCI and surfacing the most common ways that users would expect to arrange their desktops.
• Penpot BoF
  • Discussed the need to build a plugin that can export Penpot css code and turn it into Union css code so that components are more easily integrated into the style out of the design.
• Activities BoF
  • Discussed the need for a reviving of this misunderstood feature of our desktop.
  • I offered to work on building a research-based proposal

Goals

The Union + Ocean goal was selected for the next two years as a priority for the Community. “Yay for more work!”.

I am so excited and thankful to the Community that saw this work as important for the future. I am committed to doing a lot more for it and during Akademy, we communicated about what our combined development path will be.

I can’t wait for the work ahead!

Thank you @KDE!