My Conf KDE India 25 Experience

I had an amazing opportunity to attend Conf KDE India this year. It was hosted in the wonderful city of Gandhinagar, Gujarat known for its well planned modern architecture and Khadi exports. I was really looking forward to see some familiar faces from last year’s cki and meet new ones.

Day 0

I arrived a day before the conference in Gandhinagar. I really appreciate Bhushan for picking all of us from the airport, that was a very warm gesture. I had an early morning flight from Delhi so by the time I reached my hotel room I was really tired and dozed off for quite a while. Thankfully I woke up by evening, around the time when few of us decided to meet up for dinner. I also met Joseph for the first time in person, we have been working together on KEcoLab, a KDE Eco project so I was looking forward to meet him in person and suffice to say he is as warm and kind a person irl as he is when remote. After dinner, I worked on my slides and wrote a bit of qml code for my workshop. Rishi arrived later that day or rather early morning next day and we spent a bit of time tinkering with his Steamdeck before we dozzed off.

Day 1

The first day of Cki 25 started with Bhushan introducing what KDE Community is, what we do and why we do to the crowd which comprised mostly of eager local college students. This was followed by Vishal talking about “Embracing FOSS in Edtech” a pretty interesting talk about the widespread use of open source software in various Indian schools and state governments.

After the lunch break, Shubham talked about how he self hosts everything using open source softwares and encouraged achieving digital independence through it. It was a pretty interesting talk for me considering I am pretty close to using up my free storage I get with my google account so this was a nice motivating step for me to break away from google. This was followed by a remote talk by Soumyadeep about using GhVmCtl to test GUI applications directly with ci runners. I think this project is quite similar to selenium-webdriver-at-spi that KDE maintains so it was interesting to know gnome is also working on something similar. After the coffee break Ravi talked about using Prav an XMPP based free chat software as an alternative to Quicksy. He covered a lot about the importance of federated ecosystems, data privacy and how Prav is playing a crucial role in this. The last talk of the day was by Subin where he talked about using Malayalam language (a popular language from the State of Kerala wirh roughly 37 million speakers worldwide) on Ubuntu through maintaining the Varnam Project, which is an open source cross platform transliterator for Indian languages. I enjoyed his talk a lot personally because I also speak Malayalam (although I am not a fluent in it) and it was interesting to know the progress he made on making Malayalam language having first party support on linux.

Afterwards for dinner we had punjabi style north indian kulche and lassi, pretty delicious indeed 😋

Day 2

I started the second day by giving a workshop on “Building your first QML Interface”. The idea was to build a small mvp of Whatsapp web interface (one of the most widely used chat application in India) in qml, although we werent able to completely build it but the feedback I got was that many were excited about qml and actively following along the workshop so I consider that a mild success. After this Shivam gave a talk about Clazy, its architecture, real world usage in KDE ecosystem and technical challenges faced in implementing static analysis. I am ashamed to admit I not used this tool much before but the talk definitely sparked my interest and I am keen to test it out and maybe integrate it into my workflow as well. This was followed by Joseph talking about End of 10 upcycling campaign also highlighting its importance in the Indian context, again another interesting talk.

After the lunch break, I enjoyed Rishi’s talk a lot about using nix and integrating it into your workflow. I have used nix os in the past and my spare laptop still runs it so I was happy to see it being mentioned in a kde conf. After this Keith talked about the widespread use of open source software in Australian schools, the talk had quite the parallels to the widespread use of Linux in the Indian state of Kerala so it piqued my interests again. The last talk of the day was given by Sahil where he shared his experience running various mirrors for KDE, VLC, Libreoffice, Blender and many other open source softwares and how we can also do that, another pretty intriguing talk. I have had to battle with Qt mirrors in the past so to know what all goes behind the scene to host these mirrors made me appreciate it a lot more than before and you never know maybe I might host a few mirrors for Qt some day.

After the conference all the speakers met together for dinner and we had pretty delicious south indian food.

Day 3

The third day was more about Workshops and Unconference sessions. I started the day by giving a workshop on KEcoLab, how anyone can use our infrastructure (or rather KDAB’s) to test their application’s energy consumption and optimise it. This was followed by Advaith conducting a workshop on writing plugins for Suse’s Cockpit, a web administration tool for linux machines. Afterwards we had an unconference session by Joseph on End of 10, it was a pretty engaging session by him and focussed a lot about the campaign’s outreach in India. We had another unconference session on HackMud by Advaith, Hackmud is a text based multiplayer hacking simulator and was proposed by him as an alternative way to learn programming. This was followed by demo with steamdeck and plasma mobile on pinephone, and suffice to say everyone were excited to try out the devices. SuperTux was especially the fan favourite game 🐧

After the conference ended, we visited the Adalaj Stepwell, a stepwell located in the nearby small town of Adalaj Gujarat.

We ended the day by having dinner at one of the traditional gujrati thali place which had unlimited servings, this was my first time having a gujarati thali and I was blown away by its taste, specially the mango purée.

Day n/n

This was the last day of my stay in Gujarat and I ended my trip by visiting the local landmarks with Bhushan. We visited the Sabarmati Ashram, the main residence of Mahatma Gandhi and saw many artifacts from his time. I got a few souvenirs for my family from this place and We visited the Sabarmati Riverfront after this.

Regardless to say I had a blast attending the conference and it will be one of my best memories.