Akademy 2023
(German version of this post: https://wordsmith.social/felixernst/akademy-2023)
37 °C were the average daily temperature heights during the Akademy week in Thessaloniki. When you walk outside at these temperatures, your first thought is that you would rather go back inside. This used to be a temperature that one would hardly ever see there. 38 °C has not been exceeded in Thessaloniki in the 5 year span 1980 to 1984. But actually we were lucky, because the real heat wave only came around when we already left with around 44 °C in Thessaloniki and forest fires everywhere. It is a shame that with the current global political landscape none of this seems likely to become any better (to put it mildly) within our lifetimes. The nature in Greece is very nice aside from that.
But I think I have already exceeded my doom quota for this report, so back to brighter topics like the KDE community!
Meeting Everyone
I usually throw myself into these events, talking to everyone I haven't met yet and doing my part in making sure everyone feels welcome. It was especially interesting to talk to the local Greek students attending the event. One of them is already making attempts at contributing to Dolphin. I don't want to praise and pressure him here by saying his name already, but if you see a new Greek name on “This Week in KDE” in the next few weeks/month, you will know.
Some of the Greeks were part of the key note presentation “Libre Space Foundation – Empowering Open-Source Space Technologies”. Their passion for bringing their open source software to space was contagious.
I, on the other hand, am still stuck on this planet that gets hotter by the day. Did I mention the heat already? Oh right, back to topic…
Since becoming a maintainer of the Dolphin file manager about a year ago, I try to look out for the long-term health of the project. In that regard, I had an idea about how everything could go horribly wrong at this years Akademy:
Meeting the Other Dolphin Maintainer
I had never actually met the Frenchman Méven Car, who I share maintainership of Dolphin with. We hardly sent any direct messages to each other ever and none of them before April this year. All of this might seem strange considering that we have worked on Dophin together for a while now, but it also shows that one doesn't need to work behind closed doors to bring software forward. The most important aspect is having an atmosphere in which the technical and UX merits of work can be discussed honestly and without fear.
So one possible way our first meeting could go was, that we loathe each other. The next logical step would then be that we don't trust each other to be good stewards of the Dolphin project. One of us then creates a competing fork, which follows a different but similar vision, and in the end Dolphin would be stuck in an unpleasant atmosphere of hostile accussations and bad stability, eventually leading to its demise into irrelevance. 😱
In actuality, this didn't happen though. Phew!
But the above paragraph was the first story I told him.
We actually get along very well and had much time to talk about matters pertaining to Dolphin. It doesn't really seem like we have different ideas about what work needs to be done for further world domination.
Speaking of which:
Dolphin's Strategic Position
At last year's Dolphin meeting I had already tried to figure out the biggest areas of improvement by making this the headline of the meeting. Read all about it over here.
By this time, it seems like we are aware of most aspects that are still lacking in some regard. I am not really encountering a lot of fundamental criticisms anymore that I am not already aware of or which we don't know a way forward with. Most of the time we are lacking the work force to fix the more long-standing issues soon™.
Some of these were discussed at the Dolphin meeting at Akademy.
Especially Dolphin's search functionality was a big topic. It is kind of sad that people can't always rely on the Dolphin search to quickly find their files. This is partially for technical reasons, but also for user interface design reasons. You can read all about it here: https://invent.kde.org/system/dolphin/-/issues/46 Currently we are looking for a clear direction when it comes to the Dolphin search UI. You can find a mockup I made when you follow the link, but as long as nobody else is commenting on it or bringing their own design, there is no consensus. There are a lot of more technical background topics that need work as well though.
I was also wondering what Dolphin can gain from trying to break out of the Linux/Unix eco-system. Projects like Krita and Kdenlive were successfull in finding a user base outside of Linux. Dolphin is already one of (or even) the most popular file manager(s) on Linux. How much room for growth might there be if Dolphin's Windows version were more polished and visible for Windows users? Currently we don't seem to have people who want to fix bugs for this proprietary platform in their free time. Similar things could be said about a Mac or potential mobile version of Dolphin.
In line with KDE's current goals we also talked about improving testing using Selenium and AT-SPI. There is already some progress on this. Next there is the accessibility goal, for which I can point to a merge request I started creating while in Greece: https://invent.kde.org/system/dolphin/-/merge_requests/577 There is however still a lot of room for improvement when it comes to accessibility in Dolphin. Most annoyingly the “Back” and “Forward” buttons can currently not be focused using the Tab key. More contributions are always welcome in that regard. After attending all the talks about accessiblity I could find at this year's Akademy I feel a lot more confident about being able to review such contributions.
Méven has covered some more Dolphin topics in his article, so I will refer you to it: https://www.bivouak.fr/dolphin-at-akademy-2023/
Aside from Dolphin
…there is a lot more to talk about. So much more actually that it is becoming very apparent to me that I should probably cut it short now. Many of the talks are available on Peertube.
One more talk I want to highlight is “Make it talk: Adding speech to your application” by Jeremy Whiting. That one was about using speech more often in applications. I liked that talk not necessarily because I think there was a good way to add more speech to Dolphin in particular, but because it encourages improvements to tried and old basics of application design. If there was a “Speak” button next to this text you are currently reading, you would be able to transform this reading exercise into a podcast-like experience and a five-year-old kid could have listened along (and be bored about the tech-speak). I think a similar talk could be made about using animations for improved clarity when the state of an application or some data changes.
Thanks to the people who made this possible
Akademy would have been a very lonesome experience if we didn't have donors, sponsors and volunteers allowing everyone to come together. I am not sure if an international community like us could function long-term without such meetings. It gives me hope when people from eight different nations can sit at one table, talk about politics and still have a good time.
After personally meeting the people who manage the donation money, I can say with full confidence that donation to the KDE e.V. are in good hands and spent with diligence and strategy to ensure the long-term existence and growth of the wider KDE community. If you would like to donate to this non-profit entity, visit https://kde.org/community/donations/.