KDE @ IndiaFOSS 25

Its been quite a while since I attended the IndiaFOSS 25 event late September. I have been meaning to write the blog post for a while but didn’t get time. A lot has happened since then, I have moved continents and am now in Germany pursuing my masters at Philipps University of Marburg. I’ll write lot more about my new experiences in Germany in upcoming blog posts but for now back to IndiaFOSS 25. This was a very exciting event for me since this was the first time I was representing KDE booth at a conference. This event occurs yearly in the city of Bangalore which is also known as the Silicon Valley of India. I discovered IndiaFOSS after watching a talk by Kovid Goyal, creator of Calibre and Kitty - two programs I have used heavily in my day to day life so regardless to say I was excited about the conference.

Day 0

I arrived a day before the conference in Bangalore and met with Bhushan at the airport as we continued our journey towards the city. The Kempegowda International Airport is located outside the city about 40km north of Bangalore’s city center. It took us around 2 hours to reach the airbnb I was sharing with the my friends who were also attending the event. After encountering the much dreaded city traffic jam I took a much needed rest and spent my rest of the day exploring the area of Jayanagar and Indiranagar.

Day 1

I spent most of my time at the booth and met a lot of people who were already using KDE software, specifically from the state of Kerala. It was made popular through the ICT initiative. I have to be honest here, I did hear about this initiative from Subin earlier this year at cki25 but didn’t know it was this widespread.

There was general amazement among the booth visitors when we showed them KDE powered Laptops, mobile phones, steamdeck and even a rasberry pi powering the giant tv screen at our booth. The steamdeck was the most popular device at the booth since its still not officially available in India. Some people already knew about the steamdeck while others who didn’t were amazed to find out that gaming on handheld that too on a linux powered device had come such a long way.

Some of the people who we met at the booth were also interested in helping us spread the word and gave us testomonials which I have forwarded to Aniqa. Additionally we were able to help few people with creating their invent profiles and there were others who showed interest in helping out with code contributions and translation support. Few also asked about India specific KDE events and we were happy to tell them about Conf KDE India (cki 25).

We also connected with James Reilly from AlmaLinux (can be reached on Matrix), who is looking for a KDE Community member to create a KDE bootc-image built on CentOS base and has also offered to mentor a new contributor in tackling this project.

Our booth was also located right next to Inkscape’s booth and seeing Rishi make Konqi on Krita led them to battle it out to see who can make a Konqi faster. It was a friendly battle ofcourse and all of us enjoyed the drawing contest complete with cheer and laughter. It was a pretty eventful day and we met a lot of users of KDE software at our booth.

Day 2

The second day of the conference saw the attendance dwindle a bit but this also gave me a chance to checkout the other booths. Some of the most interesting ones that I found were (in no particular order):-

Mecha Comet

It is a handheld modular Linux computer. It has a magnetic snap interface powered by a standard GPIO serial port which allows hardware extensibility. Additionally Its made up of repairable and recyclable parts. The particular distro that it runs is called Mechanix OS, which is based on Debian. It packs in a PCIe 3.0 M.2 B-Key, Wifi 6, a dedicated Secure Element (CC EAL 6+) for security with a 3.92 inch screen. The project is still in Kickstarter phase but its definitely one of the most exciting projects I found at the conference. You can find more about the project here.

SFLC India

Software Freedom Law Center, India is a donor supported legal services organization that promotes Open access to knowledge, Free Speech, Online Privacy, Innovation and Equality. It was because of them, I became aware of the dubious practices surrounding DigiYatra’s mandatory biometric data collection in India. Unfortunately, at the time I had already surrendered my data as I was forced to comply, otherwise the airport staff denied me entry. SFLC India at the time had started a huge social media campaign against this and had even gathered huge media attention to bring a change against this. Sadly, the DigiYatra gates still exist but are atleast no longer mandatory. If you wanna know more about them, you can visit them here.

Absurd Shop

I found their CoryDora DIY Kit to be an interesting project, a fully opensourced 3x3 macropad with hotswappable switches. You can use it to control media, set-up scripts and write macros. A nice project if your just starting with soldering and still getting the hang of things. You can find the CoryDora DIY kit here.

PCB CUPID

They provide opensource pcb and sensors at affordable prices and also have guides and tools for you to test and play with. Growing up I always wanted to tinker with pcb boards and build with them but always found the boards out of budget so seeing them change this, is definitely for the positive.

OpenstreetMap India

I was happy to see a thriving presence of openstreetmap indian community, I have volunteered in two of their Delhi meetups previously where I got to know how to map data and mapped areas around lesser known of parts of Delhi so it was nice to see some familiar faces.

and there were many more… unfortunately I can’t cover all the interesting booths that were there at the conference but regardless to say there were plenty!

Final Thoughts

All in all, I enjoyed my stay at Bangalore and was happy to meet the oss enthusiasts from all over India. I was lucky to get a chance to represent KDE at IndiaFOSS and meet with its diverse users and hopefully future contributors. I would also like to thank KDE for making this possible by sponsoring my travel for the event.