I was able to attend the talks at Akademy this year in Berlin! The last time I attended Akademy in person was in 2022, so it was really nice being able to come back and meet everyone again.
I was unfortunately not able to attend BoFs (development meetings) due to having to leave early. I did attend some meetings a few months earlier however, you can read more in my Plasma sprint recap post.
Akademy runs with two concurrent tracks of talks, and so sometimes there were two talks at the same that I both wanted to attend, I had a hard time deciding! Here are some of the ones I attended:
Harald released KDE Linux Alpha was to the public during the talk! I hadn’t followed the project super closely, but it was awesome getting up to speed learning about the state of the project and the inner workings of how the distribution works.
The Role of New Languages in the Future of the Qt Ecosystem 🔗
I was introduced to Qt Bridges, which is an effort to go beyond Qt bindings for other languages and tightly integrate with them (ex. Rust, Python). Once this is more mature, it will likely be an easy recommendation for others to start learning Qt with, who don’t want to use C++!
It was interesting to see all the work that had been done on the KDE Goals so far!
I am actually involved with one of them this time around (“We care about your input”) through my work on plasma-keyboard. Blog post likely coming in a few months, once that work is further along!
KDE’s reference API documentation has been a bit of sore spot for me, since it didn’t support QML very well. As a result, I usually go manually go through header files instead in the source code to figure out how to use libraries.
The talk went over Nicolas’s work on doing the mammoth task of porting all of KDE’s API documentation to QDoc from Doxygen, which properly supports QML. The new api.kde.org went live, and boy is it such an improvement! It’s much easier for me to point new developers to the Kirigami documentation now.
Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop Edition is Real, Now What? 🔗
I personally use Fedora on my workstation and laptops, and so it was cool to get some history about how Plasma on Fedora was revived in the past, and plans for the future. Neal also expressed some interest in a Plasma Bigscreen spin (similar to the one for Plasma Mobile), which could be pretty interesting once it becomes more mature!
Plasma Mobile Power Management: Reliable Sleep and Wake Ups 🔗
Bhushan gave an update on his work power management work across the Plasma stack! He obtained an NLNet grant recently for the project, detailed on his blog.
I was really happy to meet and discuss with quite a few people during the event.
I met Bart, Luca, Casey and Pablo from the postmarketOS project! As it is the main platform I test and develop Plasma Mobile with, it was really nice to finally meet some of their developers (I had met Bart and Luca at Akademy 2022)! I also was able to finally meet Florian, who has been collaborating with me in contributing to Plasma Mobile in the past few years!
I met Dorota, who has been working on Wayland input related things for the past few years, and is in the process of pushing through updates to text-input-v3, and Jakob who has been working on the KDE side pushing through the input related KDE goals! We discussed some input related topics, which was insightful as I worked on the client side through plasma-keyboard (and my limited Wayland knowledge).
I also discussed some Kirigami page navigation related topics with Marco. I’m doing a bit of investigation into how we can improve the way we navigate between pages in applications, and perhaps restricting the page left/right gesture into the side (similar to iOS).
I’m back from Akademy 2025 in Berlin, and what an experience it was.
At this point, I’ve gotten a reputation as a “big picture guy”, so that’s what I’ll focus on here, rather than the details of my experiences in specific events. Lots of other folks are starting to write blog posts you can find on https://planet.kde.org about their Akademy experiences that I’m sure will be full of juicy details!
But basically, to me this year’s Akademy felt like it had a theme: “KDE is on the cusp of something big.”
Here’s one example: at the very cool C-base hackerspace, I was talking with someone who mused that 15 years ago, Akademy was full of KDE hackers talking about the government one day using our software… and then fast-forward 15 years and our two keynote speakers are from the German government talking about using KDE’s software!
Then we had a talk from the “End of 10” crowd about KDE’s campaign encouraging people to upgrade to Linux rather than buying new hardware capable of running Windows 11. And then as if to reflect on the success of this initiative, Patrick Fitzgerald gave a talk about how to do massive migrations from Windows to Linux, with examples provided of cases where literally thousands of machines were migrated to KDE software at a small fraction of the cost of moving to Windows 11.
In the “hallway track”, I had a fascinating discussion about how KDE’s efforts to improve accessibility have the potential to be an industry-wide force multiplier.
And then I gave a talk myself about the big picture of all of these trends — that as the world falls apart around us, everything being on fire includes tremendous opportunities for change that KDE is well-positioned to benefit from.
Basically, at age 29, KDE is all grown up now. Our software solves real problems for real people, at scale. It works for governments and big businesses. It saves or earns money for a lot of people. Our competitors are beginning to falter and look weak. But through it all, KDE remains healthy and strong, and grows in stature.
So I found Akademy 2025 to be an unexpectedly serious conference, full of heavy topics and sharing of priceless wisdom from hard-earned experience. There was of course also a lot of fun hacking and group gatherings and renewing of social bonds, but throughout everything was that underpinning that KDE isn’t just a fun little online community anymore, but rather a player with a growing significance on the world stage.
Pretty cool stuff, I think! Personally, I get energized by working on things that matter, and boy did Akademy 2025 leave me with the impression that KDE matters.
From the 3rd to the 5th of September, the Kdenlive team was reunited in Berlin for a sprint and to attend Akademy, KDE's annual conference. This was an occasion for us to meet in person since our team is spread across continents, and to join our forces to make Kdenlive better. And I must say this was one of the most productive sprints in Kdenlive's history!
We were kindly hosted by c-base for our Sprint so a big thanks to the team for welcoming us there!
Let's get into the details of what we did:
We started by reviewing and updating our roadmap, so it is easier to understand what we are working on, what we plan and when. Another important step towards improving our workflows is that we created issues for each of these goals where the details will be discussed, so everyone can follow and possibly help us on the road to success.
Dopesheet
Very exciting, I received a grant from the NGI Zero Commons Fund through NLnet to work on a dopesheet feature in Kdenlive. This will bring a much improved keyframing interface with powerful features. We discussed what core features we want in it and some drafts on how that would work. This feature won't be ready for the December release, but I will post updates on the progress of this task in the coming months.
We then reviewed specific parts of the UI that we would like to improve. All these ideas will be discussed in specific issues so that we can refine the implementation.
Menu reorganization
This task started two years ago but we never took time to finalize it. We progressed a lot on this and you can expect it to land in the December release. Among the changes, we decided to rename the Project Bin to Media, Render to Export, and reorganize the menus to make things more logical. We will make another blog to present these changes in detail once this is done.
Timeline toolbar
We want to cleanup the UI, make the timeline timecode display cleaner and get rid of the large Master button currently taking a lot of space.
Monitor UI
We plan to move the audio vu-meter to a collapsible vertical widget on the right side of the monitor to free some space in the toolbar, make the zone duration always visible and move the insert/overwrite actions currently in the timeline toolbar there.
Audio monitor
When selecting an audio clip, the Clip Monitor currently displays a huge audio waveform that is not that useful. We reviewed the UI to also display an overview at the top, making it easier to zoom and see where you are in the clip.
Monitor with audio before the SprintMonitor with audio a few days after the Sprint
Layout and docks
We have several open issues regarding docking. One of the frequent request we have is to save the layout per project file, since sometimes you want very specific layouts for a project. We discussed how to make it happen and are also evaluating switching the library managing the widgets docking to KDDockWidgets that would bring us some very nice improvements like being able to detach the timeline or group several undocked widgets together
Titler
Our current titler does the job for simple tasks but many users would like to be able to use some animation presets to make their titles more dynamic. We discussed the possible options to make this a reality. Among the ideas, we could use Lottie animations, since our video backend MLT already has support to play them through the Glaxnimate module. Another option would be to implement a Qml producer for MLT, allowing to play Qml files directly as a video. Any help on that topic is welcome.
Website
We have some planned changes to make our website look better and discussed some of the options.
And all the rest
We discussed tons of other things and even managed to shoot some interviews of our team members. Less relevant maybe for users but we also reviewed some of the administrative and trademark issues, and CI/CD issues
Akademy 2025
Akademy was also an occasion to have interesting exchanges, notably with Glaxnimate's maintainer, Plasma developers and more. We are now back home with tons of ideas and TODO's, and the next release of Kdenlive, to be launched in December, will shine with some of the improvements we prepared during this week in Berlin !
If you would like to help our small team, you are always welcome to contribute by giving some feedback, talk about us, create a merge request or donate.
Despite the lack of posts (which we apologise for) the builds have continued to happen on the neon build servers. Packages for Plasma 6.4.5, coupled with KDE frameworks 6.18, and KDE release service 25.08.1 built on top of Qt 6.9.2 have just been released to the neon user archives. Live Image ISO’s and containers are available for download from the usual location.
The builds will continue to happen for the foreseeable future and hope that everyone enjoys the latest and greatest KDE created software, if that’s your cup of tea.
This year’s Akademy was in Berlin at the Technical University of Berlin. The experience, as usual, was amazing. Unlike in previous years, there was a huge emphasis on styling, unification, and graphical work. This whole wave of talks was invigorating.
As a side note, this year our A/V was vastly improved and this should make it much easier for our contributors and viewers online to see and understand what we did. As part of the organization, I will help process these recordings and make sure they are awesome.
Once again I spoke on the progress with the design system. This year’s talk focused on our progress on icons. Definitively, one of the lengthiest pieces of work coming from the Foundations portion of the design system.
One thing to note, and after much discussion during Akademy, we have aligned more properly on the way that we should work in light of the addition of the design system.
In our current process, we use GIT as the source for our icons. Anyone can download and apply the icons on their Plasma system. However, this process is not quite geared toward designers. After all, all icons located in the repo are exported icons. They are one-layer graphics that only function with node work. If a designer needed to work with these assets, they would have to likely recreate them to gain the appropriate shape control needed to make desired changes.
This leads to overhead work and style inconsistencies. Above all, it leads to a state where the real source of the icon doesn’t exist unless we dig through each individual computer where the icon was developed.
With the use of applications like PenPot or Figma, that question is resolved. Users are able to download an asset library owned by the design team at Plasma. The source is protected but it’s also distributed in away that doesn’t affect the master copies. If changes are needed, change requests can be submitted to master and the design team can decide to apply those changes or not.
Effectively, this means a change in the way that icons are stored. Moving the work from Git to PenPot/Figma seems like the best choice.
This requires communication, habit changes, risk management, etc. While I am speaking of this right now, we are “not” changing our current process to obtain Breeze icons from its repo. However, it means more information will come in the future as we develop a more effective way to work with a design system.
I am so excited to see the progress done in Union, and even more excited to start passing on design system components into Union to see how they fare against the newly created engine. Union is also under heavy development. I encourage you to watch Arjen Hiemstra’s presentation at Akademy when it’s published.
When this happens, this would be the second set of graphical controls that are executed via Union. I am sure many challenges lay ahead but I feel energized by it. I am sure we are on our way to resolving long-standing design and development issues that have slowed us down.
As a result of this year’s Akademy, I created a set of action items for myself that I have to review to be able to continue. One major item for me is to develop our master component source in PenPot. Even though Ocean icons are not 100% executable in PenPot, other assets like buttons, sliders, progress bars, inputs, etc are executable. I will dedicate the time to create these items and leave Figma for components behind, shedding also any legacy branding coming from the design system sources and only focusing on what we need for Ocean styles.
With that, Akademy has been a thrill. I go home energized and happy for what we have accomplished. All this while keeping a vibrant community and a vibrant free desktop system for all Linux users.
Once again, all KDE nerds had their yearly gathering around somewhere in the world.
We call this gathering Akademy and this year it was in Berlin.
I don't really have anything in-depth to share, except for my first talk I had.
I spent a lot of time listening to talks and chilling at BoFs. Since I was with my wife,
we also went around Berlin looking for fun things, such as the Aquarium at the zoo.
We arrived around ~13.00 at Berlin airport and spent some time getting to
our hotel. After a good nap, we went to the welcome event, where I
had a nice hotdog and chatted with various folks.
It was a bit of a blur, I was so sleepy. But I do remember having fun.
Also I was super happy that our planes were finally on time this year, unlike last time...
I arrived to Akademy venue around 9:30 and spent the whole day going to talks
and taking notes of said talks. I will share those notes later in the post.
I also had a lot of discussions with other KDE devs about Union and the like.
I rushed the talk a bit due to worrying it would take too long, I tend to go "hummmm" a lot..
So I forgot to mention two bits:
The cosplay in the intro slide is what I wish I wore for the talk.. :D
We should warn newcomers about any of the possible negativity their contributions may gather.
Other than that, it went fine I think.
Later in the evening we visited c-base and it was really
cool looking hackerspace. Though I was already out of any energy at that point, we left a bit early.
First we went to the aquarium, which was fun. We saw very cool sharks and other huge fish there.
I did not even know Koi fish could grow that big.
We also saw a lot of different lizards, toads and insects. I tried my best to
befriend the iguana in there... But I don't think they spoke Finnish.
We then also had a korean sandwich, I bought myself a pair of new cool pants and we visited
a Lego store.
Later in the evening, I went to a dinner with my coworkers, which was really fun.
Went to more Akademy BoFs. One of the more interesting ones was the BoF around KDE Linux
so we chatted about it and any related issues with it.
I also went to a BoF around KIO + Sandboxing, to see what we can do to make tools that depend on
KIO work better in sandboxed environment, such as Flatpaks.
Sadly I don't have much notes from either, since they were rather speedy and I missed parts of
them all because I was busy tinkering on my KomoDo app.
On the last day, we had a scavenger hunt in the morning and then went to a game museum.
I was so exhausted that I couldn't even think of walking around Berlin anymore, so I
just joined the game museum part. It was rather cool and I spent some time playing various
arcade games they had set up.
There was also some "PainGame" that was basically pong but with pickups that would cause
actual pain to the other player. The players had to hold their hand on some panel that would
heat up, cause electric shocks and whip the hand with some plastic bit.
Well I tried it and pulled my hand off the moment I felt it heating up. I already had enough
anxiety at the moment, didn't need to contribute more to it.
After a pizza at a nice little pizza place, we went back to hotel and slept.
The next morning we went to a plane at 5 am and were soon back home.
Berlin is not a good place for me to go to. It's very loud, uh.. fragrant and there's a lot
of things moving constantly.
My nerves were constantly shot. I kept constantly looking around for bad shit to happen,
I could not relax at all. I managed to mask
it to the best of my abilities, but that just drained me further.
So, uh, sorry anyone who thought I was rather hard to approach. I was just constantly anxious.
Akademy itself was really nice and people there were really friendly and fun, but Berlin
just was too much for me.
I also really enjoyed every single talk and BoF I went to!
I just can't deal with big cities well, I suppose.
Next year I will have to limit the time I'm traveling, preferably ~4 days or so.
Anything more is out of my limits.
Still, looking forward to where it will be next year. :)
Thanks for reading, I know there wasn't much actual knowledge in this blogpost, but maybe
you liked my talk and/or my notes.
Since the ninth of October 2025’s “Big Tent” comments by frame.work about how they don’t care whether the people they sponsor are racist and transphobic, my happiness with my 12 has dropped below zero. Don’t buy frame.work, people.
Since 2023 my laptop situation has been pretty awful… I had two laptops (okay, I admit, that doesn’t sound that awful), a Windows Lenovo Yoga laptop and an Apple Macbook Pro. Powerful machines, of course, but the Yoga has a ghastly keyboard that’s that prone to double registering single keypresses, and way worse touchpad. The touchpad was so bad that the touch screen was really necessary. The Macbook Pro is fast, has nice hardware, a nice screen (no touch, though…) but: it runs MacOS. And the Yoga runs Windows. First 11, now 10, because 11 is torture.
Also… The Yoga is my Windows Krita dev and test device, the Macbook is my macOS dev and test device.
I wanted a laptop for myself. For watching videos, doing some sketching, writing RPG write-ups, managing my own stuff.
So, when Framework announced the Framework 12 I started getting interested: small, cute, colorful, not a build system powerhouse, but nice enough specs, touch screen, pen enabled, enough memory possible. And cute. I pre-ordered on, in bubble-gum with a lavender keyboard. Yeah, it clashes. I love it, it’s so colorful. I also knew I would love the upgradability, repairability, extensibility, and the looks. ‘Cause it’s cute.
Some months after ordering, it arrived, last Monday. I was in hospital, after getting my SRS operation (succesful, recovery is going better than expected!), but today, I was home, and even groggy from recovery, I managed to put it together and install KDE Neon on it. It’s that easy to assemble the colorful, cute self-assembly version of the Framework 12. Fun, too.
And when I was installing Neon (I might switch later on, I don’t need to be too stable here, this one is mine, and it’s for fun!) I noticed something.
Something weird and unexpected.
The keyboard really is GOOD. It’s got good travel, it feels good, it invites typing. They keys have the right texture, and so has the palm rest. It’s the best laptop keyboard I’ve used in ages, and yes, that includes the Macbook Pro M2. If only for the keyboard, I’d buy it again.
The touchpad, too. Colorful, clearly demarcated from the palm rest, giving good feedback — it’s in every way that counts better than the Yoga’s touchpad. And there’s still a touch screen for when my four year trained reflexes take over. The screen is bright, clear and sharp. The resolution isn’t the highest, but then, this is 12″, so it is fine.
The plastic casing feels very solid, too. Sure, it’s not thin enough to shave with, like the Yoga or a Macbook Air, but then, I’ve already had laser treatment, so shavability isn’t an issue anymore.
Such a relief from all the black and grey hardware that has been surrounding me for years.
The Ars Technica reviewer said “Sure, it’s cute and functional, but for the money you can get better specs”. Look… “Cute and functional” is a unique selling point if there’s ever one: is there any other laptop on the market that provides that? Better specs might mean faster whatever, but… It is perfectly functional. And cute, that too.
During this year’s Akademy in Berlin, I gave a talk about the awesome features & usecases of Clazy.
Afterwards, I also talked with Ivan Čukić and the topic of maintainership. Sérgio Martins was the original author and long
time maintainer. Ivan took over the role for a while, but since I became quite active in the project, he thought it would be a good idea for me to be the official maintainer.
I am very honored that he transferred maintainership of Clazy to me. I’ll do my best to continue pushing the project forward.
Also thanks to Sérgio and Ivan for their previous work and KDAB for supporting it. Also thanks to all the other people who have contributed so far!
In case you want to get started in Clazy development, your contributions are welcome! Feel free to reach out to me if you have issues with getting started :)
I’ve just returned from this year’s Akademy in Berlin. Unfortunately, I couldn’t attend the entire conference that is still ongoing but the weekend of talks and welcome and social events have been magnificent. I’ve also meet a couple of fellow KDE hackers that I haven’t seen in a decade.
Lichthof at TU Berlin, just outside our conference rooms
Friday afternoon I arrived at Berlin Hauptbahnhof on an ICE that was, I kid you not, punctual to the minute. That of course meant there wasn’t much interesting to collect for KDE Itinerary. Nevertheless, I took an ODEG regional train to the hotel and tried to gather as much data from its onboard Wifi portal as I could from my phone between Hauptbahnhof and Alexanderplatz. Turns out: they use GraphQL for their live status website. While KPublicTransport has facilities for GraphQL, any other operator we support just polls a URL that yields a JSON feed. Therefore, a lot more work and testing is needed in order to support ODEG in KDE Itinerary’s live status page.
The welcome event at Schleusenkrug was fun and the weather was a lot better than anticipated. I was very glad I did pack a pair of shorts after all! Saturday the conference started with an interesting keynote on digital sovereignty. As always it was quite difficult to choose which of the parallel tracks to attend. I enjoyed Saturday’s “Lessons Learned” presentation on Plasma. Next, I was skeptical about the use of CSS in the Union styling effort (particular with me having had to deal with Qt CSS in Qt Widgets and GTK 3 CSS lately) but the current state looks fairly promising. The lightning talks on KPublicAlerts and Clazy were another personal highlight.
Don’t forget your room number with Itinerary
During every conference, there’s some real world improvements to be made in our software stack. For instance, annoyed by the fact that I couldn’t just right-click a Wifi network in order to change its settings, I added functionality in ExpandableListItem to also show its expandable actions in a context menu. There was also an issue with the network connectivity monitor (what tells you that you need to log into a captive portal) sending spurious notifications about limited connectivity when in fact it was just losing connection before the laptop went to sleep. Finally, KDE Itinerary now lets you add a description to a hotel reservation so you can note down your room number and/or door key code. Unfortunately, Schema.org has no dedicated fields for that yet.
Sunday, I attended a talk on how to deal with negative feedback. I think many of us have unfortunately been in the situation where we were proud about a change or feature we made and then were almost burnt out by negative feedback and harassment on the internet. Another important presentation put emphasis on the fact that maintainers don’t grow on trees and how to make sure a project remains alive even when the original author had to move on with life. This evening’s social event took place at c-base. It’s a hacker space that cosplays as a fictional crashed space station. How cool is that?! While we were down low near the Spree, I could still grab a glimpse of the lunar eclipse that happened that evening. I hope you could, too.
On Monday, I made my way back home. Thanks to everyone involved in organizing this conference and the sponsors to make this event happen! I am looking forward to seeing you all again soon!
ngraham
alex1701c
@kbroulik:kde.org
