Right after my GSoC tenure ended, I took off to Austria for attending Akademy. This was my first time outside my country and also my first birthday in another country!

Meeting New People

I met Albert Astals Cid and Sune Vuorela who mentored and helped me during my GSoC tenure on Poppler and Okular.

I also got to meet Christoper Cullman who had merged my first contributions into KDE to the Kate editor.

Attending talks and BoFs

I attended some talks that I could mostly understand. For example, "Are we really going to use the same Desktop UX forever?" by Scott Jensen

Some talks of which I knew 50-60% of what's going on,

And then some talks, I had no idea about what's happening lol (but they sounded interesting anyways)

I also attended some BoFs like i18n, NFC (which sounded interesting), and one BoF which was about organizing Akademy. The "organizing Akademy" BoF was especially helpful because Bhushan Shah talked with me and other fellow contributors about doing a cki (conf kde india) so I learned some things there.

Chocolate factory experience

When they said in the movie that there are roughly 300 varieties of chocolates we can try, I thought I could try all of them. But I couldn't eat anymore than 30 -_-

Closing Remarks

It was a good event and I enjoyed my time there. Thanks KDE for making it happen.

As usual, crossing the Atlantic is tough for me. I'm just too tall, and the seats are, well... just too small. Not to mention the stress of receiving a message on the day of the trip saying that my flight had been moved four hours earlier! I dropped everything I was doing and ran to the airport, only to dicover that it was a mistake in the "system". Add to that the delays and the the risk of missing the connection... Lufthansa did not play well this trip but everything worked out in the end!

My second Akademy was simply amazing. It was also more special beacause it was the KDE 30th anniversary edition. Unfortunately I did not get to try the Konqi cake.

I am very proud to be part of the KDE community - a welcoming, friendly, diverse and free group of people who are making the world a better place. I you ask me what is KDE in one word, I would say hope.

Camille, from the Kdenlive team, asked us to document our trip, so I did a short edit.

Habemus Champions

One of the highlights of my trip was to announce the new KDE Goals. This cycle, the community voted for:

• KDE for Enterprise and Deployments - championed by: David Edmundson, Neal Gompa, and Kai Uwe Broulik
• Better documentation - championed by: Nate Graham, Thiago Masato Costa Sueto, and Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss
• Next Generation Styling for KDE - championed by: Arjen Hiemstra, Akseli Lahtinen, and Andy Betts

We are currently scheduling our kickoff meeting to get things organized. I am sure many of you are eager to contribute, so stay tuned for further news.

We also did a recap of the last cycle and handed the certificates of appreciation to the champions. Congrats to them, they really raised the bar!

My favorite accomplishments, in no particular order:

• Improved graphics tablet support. This made it possible to switch all the computers at our studio to KDE Plasma. We are a 100% KDE studio now. We Care About Your Input goal
• Plasma Keyboard. It was so cool to have seen this being born. We got a lot of community feedback and it will definitely be a cherry on top for Plasma. There are also many improvements and features coming. We Care About Your Input goal
• Ship Kirigami via pip. This is something that is still in a very initial state, but there has been recent progress by a community member. Streamlined Application Development Experience goal
• I love that KDE Mentorship now has a visual identity and it is getting a new website. KDE Needs You goal
• Beacon Program is a new mentorship program that I've been working to setup for ther last months. It is currrently entering a beta phase and will share more info soon. KDE Needs You goal

BOFs

I only got to participate in two BOFs.

The first was the Mentorships one hosted by Paul and Ansh, where I got to give a preview of the Beacon Program, the work that I've been building with universities for the last two semesters.

I also participated in Drunk KDE - Brand personality of KDE hosted by Aniqa and Kieryn. Boy that was a fun one! We got to think about KDE's branding and it contemplated lot's of issues that need to be worked on. Aniqa is compiling all our input and we'll hopefully get things moving afterwards.

Kdenlive at Akademy

The second highlight was getting together with the Kdenlive crew. Although it was a very quick, as most of the team stayed only for the weekend, we managed to get a lot done. We organized future sprints, started planning our upcoming fundraising campaign, discussed some promo tasks, and we even finally managed to merge the features section of the Kdenlive home page.

We also did a lot of testing and UX brainstorming for the upcoming keyframe timeline.

Unfortunately, for most of the trip, Jean-Baptiste was under the weather, so Julius and I had to fill in for his talk.

Graz

I loved Graz, Austria's second largest city. It is so welcoming and chill. I bought a weekly transport pass but ended up using it so little... did a lot of walking.

I was happy that I got to do some last minute sightseeing before catching the plane back home. After all the clock tower and the mountains were the inspiration for this year's edition.

A nice surprise was the Steirisches Backhendl served at TU Graz was just delicious. Styrian fried chicken (in pumpkin seed oil) served with a tangy potato salad and lingonberry jam.

Behind the scenes

This was my second Akademy, not only as a participant but also part of the organizing team.

We've been meeting religiously every Tuesday to organize this edition. Each time with different background lights from Harald's streaming setup.

All the graphics of this edition were made using free software programs like Inkscape for the general graphics creation, Scribus to export the PDF for printing, Blender for the intro graphics animations, and Kdenlive for video editing.

Also a HUGE shoutout to the CCC Video Operation Center (C3VOC) team. I really hope that we have consolidated this partership with them and can continue partnering with them for future Akademies. Speaking of which, the call for hosts is still open.

Lot's of luv to the beautiful, lean, mean Akademy-making team who put together such a fantastic edition. Can't wait for the next one with you all.

Some of the team. <3

August 6th – 9th 2026

FOSSY was held in Vancouver, Canada this year on the University of British Columbia campus.

This was my first conference as a KDE representative sitting at the KDE sponsors table. I don’t know if we were the biggest sponsor at FOSSY, but we certainly had the most people and tables in the sponsors area. We also had the most things to play with. A drawing tablet, a surface table with drawing pen, a steam deck, a rpi4 with small touchscreen, as well a various types of laptops.

Tellico 4.3 is available, with some additional capabilities, improvements, and bug fixes. I’ve received several code contributions from new people in the last few months and I wanted to say thanks. Depending a little on how I count it, Tellico turns 25 years old next month. It’s always been a hobby; I’m not a programmer by trade or training, and so I’m always gratified when other folks find my little tool useful and provide feedback, bug fixes, and even code contributions.

Improvements:

• Added new data sources for Goodreads and Hardcover.
• Updated MusicBrainz (Bug 524735), IMDB (Bug 525019), Numista (Bug 474986), DarkHorse, Kino-Teatr, and Kinopoisk (Bug 525687) data sources.
• Added appropriate data rate limiting to many data sources.
• Added option to read composer during audio file import (Bug 524734).
• Added option to disable ISBN auto-formatting.
• Added option to include filters and loans when importing a collection.
• Updated file exporting to include default file extensions.
• Updated Number fields to allow 64-bit values.

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed bug with MusicBrainz keyword search (Bug 524735).
• Fixed bug when exporting HTML files for collection with no title.
• Fixed bug with restoring entry values after undoing a collection append or merge.

Recently Michael Tunnell interviewed Aleix and I on the subject of KDE’s 30th birthday, Wayland, LTS software, the new Union theming engine, and more! If you’re interested, you can check it out here. Note: if you work at Microsoft, please don’t watch and get any big ideas!

After a long week of working lots and making lots of connections, here is what happened this year during Akademy!

• Talk recap
  • Ocean is divided into two areas, Ocean Graphical Assets and Ocean Design System.
  • Ocean graphical assets refers to all currently-available theming elements that Plasma provides. This includes, color schemes, fonts, icon packs, Plasma styles, pointers, and window decorations. (The only one missing is application style).
  • Ocean design system has also progressed. We begun the migration of Ocean icon sources from Figma into Penpot. This is achieved by using a svg copy function and then we paste a flat version of the icon into Penpot. With this, at least, users will be able to create mockups using actual Ocean icons. The UI will look more adjusted to what we can offer. There will be a copy in Figma for redundancy but designers will likely not need any specific changes done to icons in Penpot.
  • When Penpot is able to support more of the complex boolean operations done in Figma, this will make it easier to store better sources in Penpot.
  • My talk focused on the progress we have so far with the various elements of Ocean.

• Union BoF
  • Discussed all the areas that Union engine is working on and what is available for us to use at the moment.
  • Reviewed ways to test Union and provide feedback. Working on learning the structure and work for Ocean style.
• Desktop Icons Arrangement BoF
  • Discussed the need to revamp the way our icons are arranged in the desktop and the various workarounds that our implementation has.
  • I offered to help in bringing some good research into HCI and surfacing the most common ways that users would expect to arrange their desktops.
• Penpot BoF
  • Discussed the need to build a plugin that can export Penpot css code and turn it into Union css code so that components are more easily integrated into the style out of the design.
• Activities BoF
  • Discussed the need for a reviving of this misunderstood feature of our desktop.
  • I offered to work on building a research-based proposal

Goals

The Union + Ocean goal was selected for the next two years as a priority for the Community. “Yay for more work!”.

I am so excited and thankful to the Community that saw this work as important for the future. I am committed to doing a lot more for it and during Akademy, we communicated about what our combined development path will be.

I can’t wait for the work ahead!

Thank you @KDE!

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week about 200 KDE contributors and enthusiasts attended Akademy, but somehow people still found the time to be productive! Plasma contributors released the second beta of Plasma 6.8 and landed a bunch of user interface improvements and bug fixes.

As always, this is only a curated subset of everything that happened in Plasma over the week.

Check it out:

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.8

Click feedback for System Tray icons now works a lot better (even if it remains inconsistent with other things, which is also being worked on!). (Kamil Wolter, KDE Bugzilla #520915)

The focused tab in a Plasma tab bar now looks less like a link, which it isn’t. (Christoph Wolk, libplasma MR #1584)

You can now use the “Switch to Last-Used Keyboard Layout” keyboard shortcut on the lock screen. (Pavel Lunin, kscreenlocker MR #373)

Password fields throughout Plasma now show an explanatory tooltip when you hover over the little eyeball icon that shows and hides the characters of the password. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #525790)

Muting an app or window from its Task Manager entry no longer closes the preview tooltip for it. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #521174)

Dragging the QR Code of an item in the Clipboard widget now shows it visually attached to the pointer during the drag. (Kai Uwe Broulik, plasma-workspace MR #7108)

Plasma 6.9

KRunner-powered searches are now more flexible about currency conversions: you can now put the currency symbol on either side of the number and it will still recognize it as something that can be converted. (Alex Čižinský, KDE Bugzilla #446045)

Copying text in Info Center now shows some visual feedback so you know it worked. (Mradul Pal, kinfocenter MR #313)

You can now search for a weather station whose name includes punctuation without including the punctuation in your search. For example, you can search for “st louis” to find weather stations for “St. Louis”. (Bohdan Onofriichuk, KDE Bugzilla #515637)

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.7.6

Fixed a bug that could make logout, shutdown, or restart fail if there was already another attempt to do so running in the background. (Gregor Papez, KDE Bugzilla #525911)

Fixed a bug in the Weather Report widget that could make it get stuck after canceling a search that returned any results from the BBC. (Bohdan Onofriichuk, kdeplasma-addons MR #1133)

Fixed a regression that made CPU Information get cut off in Info Center. (Nate Graham, KDE Bugzilla #523197)

Plasma 6.8

Plasma no longer crashes when you delete a starred clipboard entry from the Meta+V popup. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #526007)

Long labels can no longer overlap on System Settings’ Shortcuts page. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #525725)

Fixed a bug in the Weather Report widget that could mis-report the night temperature for weather stations from the wetter.com provider. (Bohdan Onofriichuk, KDE Bugzilla #520315)

Queries in KRunner-powered searches longer than 63 characters no longer spam the journal log with hundreds or thousands of pointless messages. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #525983)

The Dictionary widget’s minimum size no longer breaks its layout. (Christoph Wolk, kdeplasma-addons MR #1138)

Notable in performance & technical

Plasma 6.8

Plasma’s Bluetooth setup wizard can now be used to find and pair Bluetooth Low Energy devices while something else on the system (such as KDE Connect) holds open a discovery session for other devices. (Robert August Vincent II, KDE Bugzilla #526178)

Plasma 6.9

The C.UTF-8 locale is now available on System Settings’ Region & Language page. (Nate Graham, KDE Bugzilla #438290)

How you can help

KDE has become important in the world, and your time and contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we need your support to keep KDE sustainable.

Would you like to help put together this weekly report? Introduce yourself in the Matrix room and join the team!

Beyond that, you can help KDE by directly getting involved in any other projects. Donating time is actually more impactful than donating money. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE — you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to be a programmer, either; many other opportunities exist.

You can also help out by making a donation! This helps cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors, and in general just keeps KDE bringing Free Software to the world.

To get a new Plasma feature or a bug fix mentioned here

Push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2026-39.

The Test

Tags: tech, culture, business, politics

Yes, the preposterous statements from the tech moguls have a use. They allow them to gauge how obedient you are. This is thus a political function and a way to check their power. Maybe it’s time we collectively start to say the Emperor has no clothes?

https://tante.cc/2026/09/24/the-test/

I asked 100 companies for my data. Some deleted it instead.

Tags: tech, data, law, privacy

Don’t be like those companies! I wish there’d be more responsible handling of such requests.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/i-asked-100-companies-for-my-data-some-deleted-it-instead/

Why I Love AI

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copilot, science, research

Since I’ve got my PhD in AI almost twenty years ago now, this piece strikes hard. This fellow kept doing research while I didn’t (the reasons to be told another time but it’s linked to this article). Clearly AI researchers who started around that time or before have a very different vision to what “AI” means as a field (although I’ve a few difference I’m fairly aligned with this article)… Clearly we’ve been robbed of the term by the industrial complex.

https://www.possibilityspace.org/blog/posts/i-love-ai/

Don’t be fooled by this summer of AI hype

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copilot, hype, ethics, ecology

The hype is very high right now indeed. This can lead only to misguided decisions. But really it’s mostly distraction from the massive ethical concerns this industry carries. It would require for policymakers to step up but I’m afraid it unfortunately won’t happen or they’ll come up with misguided attempts if they don’t first consult with field experts.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/09/22/1144867/dont-be-fooled-summer-ai-hype/

No Sloptober

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copilot

Interesting initiative. I wish it’ll be popular and many people will follow it. Maybe it’ll cure some of them of their AI psychosis…

https://no-sloptober.com/

How to talk about “AI” without adding to the anthropomorphization

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, linguistics

Goes maybe a tad too far in the opposite direction at times leading to clunky phrases. That said this effort of naming things properly is badly needed. I hope the media will seize it and report about those tools properly.

https://buttondown.com/maiht3k/archive/how-to-talk-about-ai-without-adding-to-the/

America is getting its AI race with China wrong

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, trust, business, law

So apparently the low adoption is due to the lack of trust in the systems and regulations could help? Who knew…

https://restofworld.org/2026/america-china-ai-race-trust/

ChatGPT now knows what you do on other websites via ad collector

Tags: tech, gpt, attention-economy, surveillance

It was only a matter of time I guess. Another vehicle of the attention economy. They’re trying to monetise through advertisements.

https://www.buchodi.com/chatgpt-now-knows-what-you-do-on-other-websites-via-ad-collector/

Laya — 33ms Multilingual System 1 Decision Engine with Calibrated Probabilities

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, decision-making

Now this look like a very interesting and useful model you can run locally. Definitely helps for classification tasks or assisting in decision making.

https://laya.convaiinnovations.com/

kev: tiny Jev-like family of decision models built on top of Qwen3.5 you can train and run on your own

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, decision-making

Looks like yet another interesting model to build decision assistance systems and classifiers.

https://github.com/jaredpalmer/kev

Linux programs look at things in /proc more than you’d expect

Tags: tech, linux, system

And most times as developers we don’t even realize it happens! It’s so conveniently hidden deep in most libraries or runtimes.

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/ProcGetsUsedByPrograms

About alignment, struct layout and the cache…

Tags: tech, c++, memory, caching, performance

Need to mind the memory layout of your structs to get good performance. Often overlooked but that also includes the padding.

https://meetingcpp.com/blog/items/About-alignment–struct-layout-and-the-cache—.html

How did AMD Ryzen get 50% faster in two years?

Tags: tech, hardware, cpu, amd, performance

There’s really something brewing at AMD. They’re on a roll performance wise.

https://lemire.me/blog/2026/09/18/how-did-amd-ryzen-get-50-faster-in-two-years/

How many strings can you create per second?

Tags: tech, memory, performance, c++, rust, go, python, javascript

Probably more than you think in this setup. And even more in C++ with the STL having years of smart tricks behind it.

https://lemire.me/blog/2026/09/25/how-many-strings-can-you-create-per-second/

Why CAFEBABE?

Tags: tech, java, funny

So many weird magic numbers to consider… Funny conversation around the one of Java class files.

https://www.artima.com/insidejvm/whyCAFEBABE.html

Union vs sum types

Tags: tech, type-systems

Wondering about the differences between union types and sum types? This gives a good idea about what they are.

https://viralinstruction.com/posts/uniontypes/

The Engineering Manager’s Guide to Emotional Tolerance

Tags: tech, management, emotions

This mostly fine advice. Managing requires acknowledging emotions otherwise you can’t lead effectively. Don’t get dragged too far into it though, you’re not a therapist.

https://thrivinginengineering.substack.com/p/the-engineering-managers-guide-to-emotional-tolerance

Bye for now!

It's been a hot minute since my last blog post, mostly because I was focusing on finally finishing my studies - while I'm not quite done yet (still missing one exam), I have a good reason to come out of hiding: KDE Akademy 2026 just happened and I was there!

Talks

While I was already at the Plasma Sprint in Graz last year, this is my first other KDE-related event I attended and oh boy was it ever an event. So many talks ranging from educational and thought provoking to simply silly fun and plenty of opportunities (for frequent and extended coffee breaks leading to even more education, thought provoking and simply silly fun conversations!

BoFs

If it was just that I would have already called this amazing, but the "talks" part of Akademy was just the first two days (not counting the "arrival day" + evening welcome event which I could unfortunately not attend myself), but the following days were equally amazing, if not even more so. A bunch of lively discussions in plenty of BoF rooms (and, which I have learned there, the famous hallway BoFs) around so many topics I can't even hope to mention them all here. I attended some conversations around how to better get in touch with stakeholders to reduce the general society's reliance on big tech, the technical intricacies of theming systems in general and KDE Union in particular, implementation details for the new XDG Intents, ... I could go on forever, really, but I shall restrain myself.

In short: Tons conversations and planning that works best in-person was done as well as a lot of networking and putting-faces-to-names.

The C word

Now unfortunately not everything was sunshine and roses - Wednesday was a day of unspeakable, chocolate-based torture for all of us. We toured the Zotter factory near Graz which included the ability to taste-test their chocolates at various steps during production process (yes, this includes up to as early as whole dried cocoa beans!) as well as a wide selection of their final products. It was much more interesting than I thought it would be and such a great experience to do all this with so many kool (with a K!) people.

However... let's just say mistakes have been made and I misunderstood the Zotter employee's statement that there are "roughly 300 taste testing stations" as a promise and not a threat. I definitely purchased a number of chocolate bars in their shop at the end but I don't think I'll be eating any of them any time soon after my complete lack of self control during the tour and the ensuing (and entirely predictable!) consequences.

And the worst part: After that we went to a Buschenschank for a good old "Brettljausn" (not sure how to translate, but essentially a meat and cheese buffet) where I also ate way too much since it's been way too long since my last proper Brettljausn.

And with that I think I covered everything I wanted to talk about - Thanks so much to everyone organizing and attending to make this such an unforgettable week! If you'll excuse me, I'll now fall into bed and sleep what feels like for several days straight