Åkademy, Okademy, in Berlinemy!
Akademy 2025 is history. What an Akademy it was - and it was grand!
Akademy is KDE’s annual conference. This year it happend to be in Berlin, so I hopped on a short 🤥 10 hour train to the north to meet friends - old and new - and discuss the latest ventures of KDE.
The biggest topic of them all was, of course, KDE Linux. Once again we sent the conference buzzing. This year with the news of it entering alpha status. There were bananas a plenty, inspired by the original codename of the distribution: project banana. We even had a self defense course against fruit: How to defend yourself against someone armed with a banana.
Talks were great all around. Well done everyone!
As is tradition the ad-hoc hallway track was well attended and yielded many useful results.
The weekend closed out with a great social bash on Sunday at c-base, a crashed space station in the middle of Berlin! We had fun, pizza, and discussed input methods as well as the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything, before ending the night at a Späti, Berlin’s characteristic late night one-stop shops for everything from cheap beer to expensive beer.
During the week we had Birds of a Feather sessions, our informal discussion format. Every day we had naturally something KDE Linux related to keep our fresh fruit intake up.
On Monday we mused on shared immutable distro topics and resolved to lean more onto kde-builder respectively our repo-metadata as original source of truth for packaging information. We discussed automatic data migration onto a different machine, considered the various types of data a user might want to migrate, and how to even implement this. Plasma’s solution for backups is a bit wanting. We think it’d be a good idea to double down on Kup, an existing backup solution, to produce a tidier, more integrated backup experience.
Volunteers welcome!
On Tuesday and Thursday we rendered a whole bunch of decisions on KDE Linux issues that were in need of decision making. No large changes from the status quo though. Well, the biggest change is that we now have manpages. For now 🥸
Wednesday was the traditional day trip. It took us on a scavenger hunt through Berlin in an attempt to secure as many scavenged points as possible. I regretfully don’t know which team won as I got distracted by lunch, but it was great fun all the same. In the afternoon Aleix and I took to a tea house for some Ostfriesentee and light afternoon hacking.
To close the event on Thursday, Eike, Aleix and I headed to a pub for tomfoolery and baby guinesses.
Thanks so much to everyone who attended, the Akademy team for organizing, the sponsors and the KDE e.V. for financing, and Techpaladin LLC for sponsoring my attendance.
Maybe next year we will learn how to defend yourself against a pointed stick.