This year, 2025, the KDE Community held its yearly conference in Berlin, Germany.
This makes me happy in various ways – I like Berlin, and visit the city more often
than, say, Amsterdam, which is a lot closer to my home. Here are some of my notes
(wall-of-text) from this year, posted on the day of KDE’s 29th birthday.
Travel and Lodging
As usual, I took a train to Berlin. The Deutsche Bahn (DB) Inter City Express (ICE)
is generally pretty fast. Not this time, as the first leg arrived 29 minutes and 30 seconds
late, for a change-over of 30 minutes. The announcer in the train already said “your
connecting train cannot wait” but that did not stop 20 Dutch people from sprinting
from platform 3 to platform 12 and then being annoyed as they watched the taillights
of the departing train.
Berlin is, as always, Berlin. Filthy and weird and wonderful. I smacked a man on
the U-Bahn with my pink whip, much to the amusement of his partner.
Hotel Les Nations is my regular place to stay, and remains a good – not particularly cheap –
place to stay.
Things Around Town
There’s a Square Dance club open every evening of the week.
I only visited one, the Honey Bears, at the south end of Lichterfelde,
and had a warm welcome there. Square is a little like KDE, you can show
up somewhere and find people with the same weird little hobby and spend
an evening just doing your thing.
Berlin being Berlin, the buses also run until late, which is nice when
trying to get back from Lichterfelde to Alt-Moabit.
The beer garden at the Zoo and the beer garden at the locks on the Spree
and other beer gardens – see the pattern? It was wonderful weather
for hanging around in the evenings with KDE friends. It’s about eight
years since my kids figured out that “Akademy” means “Dad goes out
drinking with his buddies”, when they saw that in Almeria.
The day trip was one of the most chill I’ve participated in and
I congratulate the team on picking something
to get a bunch of KDE people out of the building and into the park.
Venue
The TU Berlin is a huge building, built like a maze, with upstairs and downstairs and half stairs
and hidden levels and everything. It would make a great Doom level. The lecture halls for the conference
part could seat about 180, which is a good size for Akademy. Not over-crowded, not so large that we feel
lonely. A/V worked well, and the professional video / streaming folk were exactly that – professional.
Slightly less good were the BoF rooms the rest of the week. I kind of missed the nooks-and-crannies that
we had in Würzburg and in Thessaloniki. The acoustics in several of the BoF rooms were terrible.
That didn’t stop us from having a full schedule. And one of the attendees – Dominic, you got me
coffee, and you fixed up the room audio for my workshop – turned out to have amazing skills
at figuring out the multi-channel audio setup.
So there was good bits, and less-good bits. I’d hope for more small rooms in future.
Having small rooms means that the acoustics are a bit better, because there’s just less
hubbub to begin with. It also means that we could have a room with more quiet no-discussion-just-knitting
kinds of activities.
Soylent^W KDE Akademy is People
I had so much fun meeting new people – Aks and Tecsiederp and the audio guy Dominic and and and ..
even the security guy on duty on saturday who told me excitedly about how he uses KDE Connect
on his Steam Deck. It’s good for Akademy to move around a little and bring in
new people each year. People who need to hear the story of the pink whip™ for the first time.
I had so much fun meeting old people. Er .. I’m old enough to be plenty of attendees’ dad,
I mean “KDE people I’ve known for years”. People who were there when the pink whip™ was first used.
Faces returning to the community, like Sebas, and faces I see every year because
they are like a rock, like Cullmann.
KDE Akademy is Talks
For Reasons™ I missed the opening keynote from the state of Schleswig-Holstein. The second day
keynote from Paloma Oliveira was really good. It was about politics and power dynamics
and welcoming (under-represented) groups into a community. Of course it was politics,
because Free Software is politics, because all technology is politics, and choosing
who to welcome is a fundamental part of a Free Software project.
At Akademy itself I nodded along in agreement, but I don’t think the
message really hit home again until events in early October.
Separately, a study by the Dutch national “Social Cultural Planningbureau”
this month reports that diversity “leads to friction more than inclusion”,
in a buried-the-lede no-shit-Sherlock report that says that you actually
have to work actively on inclusion. Which is one of the things Paloma said.
I gave (part of) one talk, but that was the report of the board,
which is what the Dutch call “een moetje”. So I didn’t get my hair
cut for that one.
Talks I particularly enjoyed on the first day were Harald’s about KDE Linux
(I got a banana, and I did install KDE Linux, and did report a bug with the
partitioning-thing and UUID that it uses) and Cristián’s about
more and better language bindings for Qt. I might be 95% a C++ guy, but
I feel having a larger number of languages available for expressing
ideas is generally better (and many languages are
better than C++ in particular areas).
There’s an interesting piece by Felienne Hermans in the Dutch NRC of october 14th 2025
about how programming is possibly the wrong way to think about improving
the world through (digital) technology.
A talk I would very much have liked to see was Alexandra’s talk about
running business and Free Software together.
Day two I had signed up as a volunteer to act as session chair in room 2.
That reduced the choices I could make, but each track and each talk has
something cool to offer. Absolute banger talk by Joshua
about getting things right for artists. I’d like to thank Achilleas from Red Hat who
also chaired in that room for being a great team.
This year’s speakers were all really good as well at being on time, wrapping up on
time, and handling questions well. Audiences, too. I think I only shut down one “more a comment tha..”
KDE Akademy is BoFs
The BoF parts of the past few years have been rather hit-and-miss for me.
My regular technical involvement with KDE as a whole was either
very focused (on Calamares) or absent (because of work-work eating up all my C++ energy).
I had a nice time sitting down just to do some work on Calamares
this time, in one of the little-too-noisy BoF rooms, and because of
that I listened in on, for instance, the End-of-10 Campaign discussion.
A BoF I actively went to was the KDE Initial System Setup BoF, led by
Kristen. “KISS” isn’t necessarily a good acronym, but my suggestion
of Linux Initial Configuration of KDE was emphatically rejected.
Initial setup and Calamares are pretty closely related, and something I’d like
to do (see above, re: C++ energy)
is improve interoperability of the two.
KDE Akademy is Dance
Don’t get me started on American Country Square Dance, because I will
Be Tedious At You™ about it. At the welcome event Nicole asked me
about it and I went on at length and in the end I put a square dance
workshop on the BoF schedule.
Ten people showed up, that’s enough for one square! I can teach
a very basic workshop, and the people who showed up were perplexed
and amused – and followed instructions really well.
That’s programmers for you.
We gave a little demo at the end of the BoF wrap-up meeting,
although it was a bit chaotic because two of the dancers had
already left to catch the train back to Warszawa.
Next year I’ll be back (with more practice on my part on
the teach-people-to-dance thing) for another round^Wsquare,
and I hope other people will come with crocheting
or other arts and crafts. Because in the KDE community
you should be able to bring your whole self; programmer,
kolourpaint-expert, dancer, and eepy-sleepy person.
Takeaway
Akademy is the event that brings the KDE community together; the whole
breadth of people, as far as “in-person, and somewhere in the world” can bring everyone.
I know we missed people – who can’t travel, who won’t travel, who can’t
afford to be there for health or financial reasons. I had the privilege
of being able to attend – time and health – and to be supported by KDE e.V. for that travel.
It is worth it, every year, and I hope to see many new (and old) KDE contributors
next year, wherever it may be.
[ade]
@christoph-cullmann:matrix.org
