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Saturday, 14 September 2024

I attended KDE’s Akademy and the Qt Contributor Summit that happened this year. I also completed my personal goal of giving a talk at a conference! These conferences were back-to-back and were located in Würzburg, Germany during the 5th-8th of September.

Somewhere inside Würzburg.

Travel

I stopped in IAD before flying into FRA, and the journey was fortunately uneventful compared to last year. My IAD->FRA flight was delayed by an hour due to (another plane’s) mechanical issues and the ATC was backed up. When they announced that they were “sequencing” departures, I was surprised to find them actually putting all of the departing planes in a physical line on the runway.

On the IAD->FRA flight, they were having some troubles with the satellite connection and tried restarting the in-flight entertainment. While that probably did not please many of the people enjoying their movies and shows, it did reveal the in-flight entertainment system for United flights were running Android. Boo, that’s no surprise.

The trains I were on weren’t too late and I quickly arrived in Würzburg after a transfer to Frankfurt Central Station. To save some money, I purchased a Deutschland-Ticket which covered most local transportation, including the buses in Würzburg proper. The ticket was only 50€, which if I had paid for the trains separately would mean at least 65€! I didn’t bother calculating how much bus fares would’ve cost. So the D-Ticket was definitely worth it during my stay.

At one of the stations outside the airport. Yes, I did take the S-Bahn in the wrong direction…

On my returning overseas flight, the plane was half-empty. So I had a row with window seat all to myself, it was pretty sweet! Is this how flying first-class feels?

A full row to myself!

Hotel

I stayed in Hotel Amberger, close to the central station. It’s a cute little hotel, housed in a building that was clearly repurposed (my guess is some kind of hospital.) The hotel rooms are dead simple, but I didn’t really care. The first few days were really hot and the lack of a central air conditioning was really noticeable. Once the weather cooled off, the room was much more hospitable.

My hotel room.

The hotel room had a TV, but mine did not work. No German TV for me this time! There was multiple bus stops near the hotel, so it was very easy to get to the Akademy venue. The QtCS venue was within walkable distance, so I walked there each day.

Qt Contributor Summit

This being my first Qt event, I didn’t really know what to expect. The venue is hosted in this expensive-looking conference center (Congress Centrum Würzburg) near the river. There was catered food, which included lunch and coffee breaks. Dinner was served on the first day. I noticed the wait staff and looked young so I wonder if they were local culinary students.

The talks were a mixed bag of topics, but I still found value going there. Most of the non-Qt people there were either KDE or KDE adjacent, of course. One of the cooler things for me was meeting a bunch of Qt people in person. Of whom I only knew by name, mentioned in e-mails and Gerrit, so on. Lots of people recognized me by my work on qmlformat, so that was neat.

The talk that interested me the most was Vladimir Minenko discussing “QML Next”, plans to use languages other than C++ with QML. Some languages discussed were Swift, and C#. Curiously Rust was absent, which he did duly note. They did mentioned they were hiring a developer to work on Rust support later this year. The talk itself the concept was a bit vague, but that’s because they’re still in the exploratory stage.

If you’re interested in the other talks in this conference, there are notes and slides available from the Qt Wiki.

An unrelated picture of a tram, because I didn’t have any pictures of QtCS.

Akademy

Akademy was hosted in Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, which was much farther than the venue for QtCS. That necessitated travel by bus, but that was also covered by the D-Ticket. The talks were hosted in two identical-looking lecture halls. On a bus heading towards Akademy one day, I noticed one of the screens didn’t work. Of course, I had to take a picture…

The bus screen in some sort of debug mode.

My talk was about integrating C++, Qt, Rust (and KDE Frameworks.) For proper disclosure, this talk is on behalf of my company for spreading the word of our cxx-qt library which eases integration of all of these technologies. I think was a bit too rough structurally but lots of people seem to enjoy it. One of my goals was to raise awareness of the usage of Rust you can find in KDE today, and that seemed to be successful! I want to express my gratitude to my fellow colleague Leon Matthes for helping review my slides. Also thanks to Darshan Phaldesai for his KDE work featured in the presentation.

A picture of me hastily giving my presentation.

The results of my talk I think were really cool! Within the KDE community, there seems to be some interest in picking up Rust. Lots of KDE developers were in varying stages of Rust interest. No one told me how stupid it was to glue the two together, so the general vibe I think is “it’s pretty neat, let’s see how well this works.” Unfortunately due to technical issues my talk was not recorded properly. A colleague recorded my talk on his phone, and will hand that over to the Akademy organizers soon.

The talk is now available on PeerTube. The slides are also available online.

Oh yeah, and the KDE goal I’m championing “We care about your Input” was selected! I’m pretty excited to keep hacking away on graphics tablets in KDE Plasma. Thanks to NLnet for sponsoring us to work on that, along with Wayland accessibility improvements.

One of my favorite talks was Xaver Hugl’s “What even is color?”. The work he’s doing in KWin is excellent, and I think he did a really great breakdown to understand what color management is.

Day Trip

In the day trip we went to Rothenburg. It was rainy, cold and miserable most of the day but we still had fun. One of my favorite parts was climbing up the tower to get an excellent view of the town.

A picture of the tower. A view from the top of the tower.

That’s all I have to say about Akademy + QtCS, I had lots of fun this year! I’m happy that I was able to attend the talks this year, and meet a lot of people I missed last year. I hope everyone else were able to return home, and I’m excited to see what event I’ll attend next. See you!

Akademy is this yearly thing where bunch of KDE people go to talk about and work on KDE software. I had never been in one before, but this year I managed to make it there! This year Akademy was held at the city of Würzburg. This was also my first time in Germany, which is the furthest I've ever been from home.

I also had my wife Jenny with me, since if I had gone alone I would have gotten lost in some random mountain somewhere, or started a new life at the dark corners of Frankfurt airport, completely confused.

Friday, the day of flying (or so I thought)

On Friday the 6th, we left from Oulu to Helsinki first. Hop on plane at 14.30 and- Oh, a small delay.

Eh, it's fine, we hopped on the plane at 16.00 and-...

The flight was canceled.

So, we wait til like 19.30 or something to get to Helsinki. But of course, our flight from Helsinki to Germany had already left! No worries though, the next flight to Germany would leave soon.

Wait, what do you mean it leaves at 7.00?

Aaaaaaaaaahhhhggggggggggg....

Well, we got paid airport hotel room with paid dinner and breakfast. So we slept at Helsinki the first night. We were supposed to be at Würzburg at 23.55 or something, but of course not. Oh well, with some effort I might be able to make to the event, although I would miss the first few talks.

I had the most saddest (but still good) slab of lasagne at very sad and empty airport hotel restaurant. Very frustrated by everything. Sure it'll get better, right?

Saturday, the day of sleep deprivation

This time the airplane actually started to fly, instead of getting canceled for scandalous airplane activities, and we were on route to Frankfurt pretty soon. I spent some time in the airplane just working on my never-ending game project.

At Frankfurt, we got our luggage and went to the funny ICE train, which was a bit late. Apparently being late is some German train thing, I don't really understand it, but we have similar thing at Finland so it wasn't that shocking.

At the train, we were exhausted with our 4h of sleep due to stress not allowing us to sleep, so we just find some seats and sit down. Five minutes later some chap tells us to go away, so we stay up standing for the next 1h 30min next to the exit doors in some midcabin thing.

I wanted to watch some of the Akademy streams at this point, but I was mostly focusing on staying up.

Eventually, we finally reach the Burg of Würz. First impressions were that it looks really nice and.. What the hell is that? A.. mountain? Wow, they can be THAT tall??? (Authors note: Finland is very, VERY flat).

Also it was hellishly hot. The most I saw was 32 celsius. It was painful, I was sweating all the time and it was not fun.

We walk to our hotel room at Mercure hotel, which was really nice by the way. At this time, Akademy was having an incredible luncheon together, so me and Jenny decided to find something to eat. We found this place that was all about avocados, and I had something called powerbowl, which was brilliant.

After that, we began to study the incredibly complex thing that is the German bus system and started our trip towards the Akademy venue.

Aktually at Akademy

Me and my blurry sleep deprived brain walk to the venue and first off I meet familiar people. A lot of familiar people. Many hugs and "Oh you finally made it!"-s were shared. Jenny was with me there as well and it was fun to introduce her to my friends.

I honestly don't remember much about the day. It was quite a blur. But it was cool and I talked a lot.

I stole a lot of stickers and listened some talks, which I can barely remember... But I do remember which ones:

  • Arjen's talk about Union KDE styling theme thing, that is super cool.
  • Harald talked about of our own new possible shiny OS called KDE OS. Or 🍌 OS. I found this really exciting.
  • A lot of lighting talks, where Nicole's talk about teaching lil kiddos how to install Linux with KDE software on old PC's to bring them back alive.
    • I think this talk was my favorite. It was very wholesome, motivating and I'd like to have similar kind of teaching event at home. No promises, but.. Maybe!

During this day I also began to give out salmiakki to people, since I had been well prepared. It was kinda fun to see peoples reactions, especially if they had never heard of it before.

Then it was back to sleep at the hotel.

Sunday, I managed to do things

On sunday I was at Akademy pretty much the whole day. Again, I listened bunch of talks, met more people and we had many good chats about LTS distros, KDE PIM, Kwin, Flatpak... And many other things I can't remember.

I listened Carl's KDE Apps Initiative talk which was very motivating for me, since I've wanted to make a KDE app for a while. A gaming related lil thing.

After the fun group photo and delicious lunch, I chatted more and wandered about the venue.

There was a talk about daily driving Plasma Mobile and I found it very cool, and we had a chat about the Plasma Mobile afterwards. Apparently my Fairphone 5 could run PostmarketOS with Plasma Mobile pretty well already, but I am not yet ready to commit to such a change with my mobile device.

Last I listened Xaver's talk about what color is in computers. I learned that sRGB is a lie and gasped audibly, then heard a lot of words related to color systems I didn't really always understand.. But I found the talk still quite interesting and informative.

The evening was then again a bit of a blur, with sponsors lightning talks and Akademy Awards (congrats to winners btw).

Very interesting day, but I've always been bad when it comes to learning from listening. I learn by doing.

Of course the day wasn't complete without me going to wait bus with my t-shirt and shorts (since it was hot again), and it started pouring like heck. I was soaked when I got to the bus, then at the last stop I had to walk 1km to the hotel in the rain. Ah well, it was warm so I didn't mind too much.

Monday, I skipped the class

On monday I was so exhausted by Everything:tm: I decided to just chill with my wife and we went around Würzburg, buying food and chocolate.

I spent that day just recharging my social batteries. And I ate some Flammenkuchen, which was delicious!

At some point when Jenny is done editing and uploading her video, I will make separate post for it. Then you can see what Würzburg is like, and hear what she did during the trip.

Edit: Am lazy but heres the link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05qexeiHNeY

Tuesday, I flocked together with the birds

Like on monday, on tuesday as well Akademy had these events called "BoFs" which is abbreviation of Birds of a Feather. Because "Birds of a Feather Flock Together". I don't know why it's called that, but anyhow, I participated a few of them:

  • New design system bof
    • Very interesting discussions and ideas even I know nothing about design
    • I was mostly hoping to help people there with my programmer side of knowhow, as someone who has touched the Breeze styles codebases
  • Tiling in kwin bof
    • We mulled over what we could do to make tiling in kwin even better
    • I have this mini task for myself where I try to make tiles split automatically when a window is dragged on top of the other
  • Fedora KDE bof
    • I was just mostly curious whats up with Fedora KDE at the moment
    • I also wanted to give my praise for Fedora KDE, it's been my daily driver for many months now and it's been really good
    • Couple of my friends use it too due to my recommendation and they're having good time gaming on it! :)

To wrap up the evening, I had a fancy dinner with my friends. What was quite a culture shock to me was that after 22.00 the streets were practically completely empty. It was eerily quiet. At home we would have had few drunks about making noise, but at Germany there was just.. Silence.

Wednesday, to home again

Due to having two lizards and them needing a petsitter, and said petsitter not being able to be there the whole week, we left a bit early so we missed the daytrip and the last bof day.

Bit early being our flight from Frankfurt was leaving around 7.00. So we woke up at 5.00.

And when I wake up I saw a message in my phone saying: "Hi your flight is canceled"

Ah. Fun. If all had gone to plan, we would've been at home around 17.00. But instead, we were home at ~2.00.

We had to live at Frankfurt airport for ~7 hours, saw a lot of police with weapons (it was really scary to me, I've never seen weaponry like.. that openly), there was some suspicious luggage that got a whole McDonalds covered in "dont go here" tape and more police.

Urghgfhklfg. Scary.

Eventually we luckily made it to Helsinki and then back to Oulu and I didn't need to type out this blogpost from some corner of the airport.

Conclusions

Akademy was really fun event. I can hardly describe how fun it was. It's been quite a blur due to traveling issues and thus me being completely stressed and exhausted, but I still had many fun chats with everyone.

It was really nice to finally see who the people behind the internet names are and have talks with them, be it just random topics or KDE topics. I met people who I had never met before and shared many chats, laughs and information with them.

I learned quite a lot about what's going on in our KDE ecosystem and even outside of it, how we all interact. But I think the biggest thing I learned was that events like Akademy are crucial for the motivation and wellbeing of the KDE community. It helps us stay together, keep our bonds strong, be it KDE folk itself or people working with us, and keep us being awesome at what we do: Making computers do cool things, for free, for productivity and for fun.

Sorry about no photos, I have basically nothing: I am very bad at taking photos because I simply don't remember.

I love KDE and if you love KDE too, and if it's at all possible, visiting Akademy is well worth it!

See you at the next one, and apologies for the all-over-the-place-rambly-travel-post. Hope you find it a good read anyway.

Thanks for reading!

This year I went to Würzburg, which is a nice small German city famous for its wine. But I didn’t only go there for the wine, but also to attend Qt Contributor Summit and Akademy.

Qt Contributor Summit

The travel to Würzburg didn’t go as planned as Deutsch Bahn had some technical issues with their train and couldn’t reboot our train. We still managed to get in Würzburg on time and even had the change to get a small touristic tour from some locals.

Würzburg Residence and the Wine briget
Würzburg Residence and the Wine briget

The event itself was great and was the first time I attended fully a Qt Contributor Summit. Last year, I only attended a few session since the event was 20 min away from home.

There was many breakout rooms focused on some spcial topics, for me the most interesting sessions were about Qt for Python, how to hate QML, qt-project.org, Vector Graphics in Qt.

It was great to see how the KDE community still plays a big role in Qt and the Qt developers really appreciated what KDE finally moved to Qt6. They reported that the flow of contributors and bug reports increased.

Qt Chief Maintainer Volker Hilsheimer even stressed out how important it was for some of their customers to see KDE ported to Qt6, as it shows what Qt6 is stable and mature enough. Qt6 is indeed a hugo improvement over Qt5 and I am very happy how good the transition was.

Qt Contributor Summit
Qt Contributor Summit

I think it was a great idea to have Qt Contributor Summit just before Akademy. This allowed to have many KDE Contributor to the Qt Contributor Summit and many Qt developers to Akademy. It would be great next year to do the same next if possible and encourage more people from the Open Source Qt ecosystem to join too.

Akademy

Once the Qt Contributor Summit ended, we started a few hours later with the Akademy welcome event for some KDE beers. But before that, I had some bubble tea and spent some time with some friends exploring the city.

The weekend was full with a lot of great presentations. I presented a small report about the Accessibility Goal and the Fundraising working group. I also gave a bigger talk about the KDE Application Ecosystem, which I am really passionate about. The whole slides ware made with Calligra.

 

I was also very happy to see the new elected goals.

Sunday was also my birthday, thanks to everyone for congratulating me. I also received a super fancy special birthday sticker and some amazing cake.

Cake and stickers
Cake and stickers

Day Trip

We had our yearly day trip too, this time at Rothenburg ob der Tauber. A charming small town in south Germany.

Day trip Rothenburg ob der Tauber
Day trip Rothenburg ob der Tauber

BoFs

The next few days were filled with BoFs and many informal discussions. During the Promo BoF, we decided to create a “This Week in KDE Apps” blog posts. Paul volunteered Tobias, Joshua, and me as the initial team for this.

I also hosted a BoF about a future replacement of KWallet. There were some discussions about the scope of this effort. Should we just focus on storing OAuth2 tokens as a background service what the normal users should never interact with or do a full-blow password manager like macOS Keychain. I presented my work toward the latter around based on KeePassXC and the KeePass format (see my old blogpost) as it would allow to use a standardized file format that also work on other platforms. The KeePassXC developers are working on providing a reusable library, so we don’t need to fork their code. There will likely be more discussion about this in a separate gitlab issue. The lack of a good story around passwords is not unique to KDE but to the whole Linux ecosystem. If you have some opinions about this, feel free to reach out.

I discussed with Ben, Lydia and Aniqua the infrastructure for newsletters for our supporting members. Ben managed to get an instance of Listmonk in a matter of minutes and this seems to be the right way for us to manage a newsletters or at least way better than using a mailing list for this.

Kieryn hosted the best BoF: the Sticker BoF where we shared stickers and had a competition to see who had the best decorated laptop. I won!!! and received another special sticker. Thanks Kieryn for organizing this BoF and generally making Akademy this year such an awesome event!

Stickers
Stickers

I also ended up finishing a lot of work. I finally ported the last Drupal 7 website to Hugo: dot.kde.org which was a quite massive website with more than 20 years of history. I migrated the Hugo version used by KDE from 0.110.0 (which was more than a year old) to 0.134.0 and I am happy to report that the Hugo folks care a lot about stability and there was only some very small breaking changes. If you are working on some KDE websites, don’t forget to download the latest version of Hugo and to run the following command to update the KDE Hugo theme.

hugo mod get invent.kde.org/websites/hugo-kde@master

With Volker, we finally merged the status bar integration for Android apps so that KDE apps running on Android and now use breeze colors in their status bar, which looks much more integrated and like on Plasma Mobile.

Itinerary on Android with the new statubar
Itinerary on Android with the new statubar

I also got some improvements ideas during Akademy, and I already started implementing some of them: https://invent.kde.org/pim/itinerary/-/merge_requests/324

Finally I started rewritting the Calligra launcher to Kirigami based on the old Gemini UI. Still a bit far away from a being in a mergable state but it already looks quite good.

Calligra text document templates selection
Calligra text document templates selection

Calligra new document
Calligra new document

Conclusion

This was a great Akademy again. Thanks a lot for all the organizers for all their work. I hope to see some KDE contributors again soon at the Nextcloud Conference and Matrix Summit both in Berlin this month. And to the Linux Days in Dornbirn.

Friday, 13 September 2024

If you're using Plasma/KWin 6 i suggest you disable the Morphing Popups effect, it has been removed for Plasma 6.2 https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/commit/d6360cc4ce4e0d85862a4bb077b8b3dc55cd74a7 and on X11 at least it causes severe redraw issues with tooltips in Okular (and i would guess elsewhere).

This year’s Akademy (KDE’s annual conference) in Wurzburg, Germany was a success!

Yours truly had a chance to speak during the Akademy days and present our new design system to the community.

As previously reported in my youtube channel and in my posts, we provided a set of design system foundations to the community for their use in the future. This means, designers and developers will more closely work in the design process.

A few new faces also appeared at the venue. This was amazing! New contributors excited about our technologies is always welcomed.

In addition to the main session, our Visual Design Team put together an additional Birds of a Feather (BoF) session the following day. I have to say that I have never seen this many people interested in our presentation before and I am greatly appreciative of their desire to help.

We split our BoF in 3 sessions. The main session was an exploration of our export plugin for Figma and PenPot (Authored by Manuel de la Fuente), and also a review of the actions the VDG (Visual Design Group) needs to take to publish the work in the design system.

Our second hour was dedicated to reviewing our visual changes acceptance guidelines (led by Nate Graham). This session was intended to speed up the rate of response for visual design changes in Plasma and other areas. This should help us go faster and be more effective in our decision-making process.

The work is tracked here:
https://invent.kde.org/teams/vdg/issues/-/wikis/home

Our third hour was dedicated to Arjen Hiemstra’s new unified theme builder “Union”. Arjen showed us the source code and current capabilities of Union. It’s still early days but the progress is huge. There are a few new features that Arjen wants to add to the engine and we should see more of them in the near future.

Throughout the week, we dedicated time to testing and bettering the icons we produced. Our next objective is to address the latest round of feedback and then begin the process of editing our 16px icons to match our shapes in the 24px collection. Additional to that, we still need to find as many bugs as possible with the new icons.

During one of our sessions we noticed that some icons did not work properly in dark mode. This was a good test to do as some of the shapes didn’t recolor properly. Good thing that we were surrounded by Plasma devs and it was easy to spot the problem! This, however, does not mean the icons are free of issues. They still need a lot of work.

For now, I would like to invite all those who would like to provide feedback and/or test the icons. Please note that this is as alpha as it gets. There is a lot more to be done. Until all icons are finished, you can test the 24px collection.

Plasma Icons 24px collection:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/14oayQeHloyYJwL3WpjgoAQjR-Mnt-H8k/view?usp=drive_link

Figma link for icon feedback:

Soon enough, I will also edit a few of the images I took from the city and during Akademy. Needless to say, this one was by me! 😀

Aren’t we cool?

See you all soon!

“Heather, Heather, Heather; what did you do now!” and both me & Fenris started laughing with Till, as we’re discussing about the thunderbird snap during the conference dinner.

Yup, this is from UbuCon Asia, my

  • First conference
  • First flight journey
  • First travel out of my state
  • First solo travel out of my state
  • First solo stay at a hotel

Huhhh, a lot of first timers! I can’t think actually where to start with… I met so many people out there, got so many mentors! Thanks Till , for introducing me with so many mentors! I met Guruprasad sir (the launchpad guru 😄), Kierthana mam and Dimple didi (both are the documentation gurus). A lot of suggestions, tips, guides from them! Thanks a lot 🥹! BTW, How can I forget my OG Bhavani bhaiyaa!

Akademy 2024 in Würzburg - it was a blast

My second Akademy and has ended just yesterday. It was an amazing and productive time again! Apart from familiar faces I know from last year’s Akademy or the Plasma sprint last year in Augsburg, I met plenty of new faces. Some of which I of course had contact in KDE before, but only in the digital world.

One of the best parts was again the day trip with the KDE Community. While it was a bit rainy, we for sure made the best of it and saw the beautiful city of “Rothenburg ob der Tauber”. The view from the town hall tower was very beautiful:

The talks were also quite interesting and highlighted how many facades the KDE Community has. Apart from the lightning talks being great again, the “QML in Qt6” talk was quite valuable, because I did not manage to follow up closely on the latest improvements.
The talks and BOFs related to the KDE goals were also quite beneficial in getting a good impression in what direction we want to go.

Since we had so many interesting talks, it was not possible to join all of them. What I will follow up on later are the talks “Pythonizing Qt” and “C++, Rust and Qt: Easier than you think”.

Albert Astals Cid and I gave a lightning talk together about JSON linting (my part) and QML linting (his part). We were only able to touch the surface in the given time, but had some productive discussions and follow-up questions afterward. I will create a post about the JSON validation/JSON schema topic in the future, since I am still working on some aspects of this.

It has been great again to also do some hacking together and discuss ideas in-person. I will miss being able to say “Let’s discuss this at Akademy?” on merge requests ;).
I did quite a bit of hacking on KRunner, linting/formatting related tooling and also Clazy.
This can also be seen on my GitLab history that has turned a bit more blue and thus active:
GitLab activity

What was a great improvement over the last Akademy were the chicken noises to make sure people stay within the time of their talk! To better improve on that, we should maybe get some real chicken next year 🥚🐣🐔. The talks on how to apply for funding in KDE might contain useful info when working towards this ;) PS: My life-long profile picture on GitHub/GitLab is of the super cute chicken I had 🥰.

Chicken picture

Part of the Kdenlive team attended this year’s Akademy – KDE’s annual conference in Würzburg, Germany. Since we don’t have so many occasions to meet in real life, we also used the event to make a Kdenlive team sprint.

So here is a report of what happened during these busy 4 days !

Documentation

We first discussed how to better integrate our great documentation inside the Kdenlive app. We already have a kind of hidden link in the effect list that redirects the user to the documentation website, but decided to make the feature more visible and you will now (to be released in 24.12.0) find a small info button redirecting to our doc. In the process, we fixed and improved many links so that you now directly access the correct page.

Roadmap

We discussed our roadmap, moved the tasks that were completed in a dedicated column. We also reviewed the remaining tasks and reorganized them to better align with our priorities.

Fundraising

We reviewed the tasks planned in our fundraising, what has been done and what is left, more on this will be announced in an upcoming post soon.

Kdenlive Café

We decided to go for one online user Café every 2 months. This is a great way to stay in touch with the community, and we plan to have themes for these events, for example creating content with Kdenlive, Development news and coding introduction, How to contribute (documentation, testing, etc). Next one will be in November, focused on the next December release. Stay tuned for the date.

Render Test Suite

Last year, we worked on a rendering test suite that is aimed at automating rendering and comparing the result with a reference video file. The goal being to detect and prevent regressions in our pipeline. Unfortunately, since it still requires a local install and manual triggering, we are not really making use of it. During the sprint, we worked on making it run on our current CI infrastructure for full automation. Some good progress was made, there are still a few things to debug. Website

We discussed possible changes regarding our website, more to be announced later this year.

LV2 Audio Effects

With the recent introduction of an LV2 module in our video backend MLT, we made tests with some LV2 audio effects. Some effects that don’t require a specific UI work but session state (saving and restoring the effect data, for example with the noise repellent plugin) is not yet implemented in the MLT module, so its usability is currently very limited.

AI Effects

We discussed and tested a few models providing AI effects. Some work has to be done to make the way we integrate python scripts more modular, we will soon start working on this.

Bugs

We didn’t have enough time unfortunately to do much work on the bugtracker but still managed to tackle a few issues. Among them, we found the reason for missing notifications on Windows, found 2 regressions in our video backend causing affecting playback smoothness, and various smaller bugs.

Akademy

Between our Sprint sessions, we also attended several of the Akademy talks, and met great people there. Julius made a talk about his work on the CI regarding packaging and notarization. Some of us also attended a translation workshop so that we can better guide interested contributors.

Busy week-end, and you will hear again from us soon!

Thursday, 12 September 2024

I reverted my name back to Jonathan Riddell and have now made a new uid for my PGP key, you can get the updated one on keyserver.ubuntu.com or my contact page or my Launchpad page.

Here’s some pics from Akademy

KDE Akademy is meeting this week in Würzburg.

We just had a BoF session where we discussed..

  • The current progress to rebasing on Ubuntu 24.04
  • The current state of KDE neon Core our amazing forthcoming Snap based distro
  • Fixing up broken and bitrotting infrastructure
  • Moving to KDE invent
  • Issues with Plasma 6 upgrades and looking at integrating more QA tests
  • How the proposed KDE LinuxTM distro fits into the mix