At the Akademy (2024)
While I've been part of the KDE community for quite some time (almost a decade now!), Akademy is still a relatively new experience for me. This is only the second Akademy I've been to in person, with the last one was Akademy 2022 in Barcelona, Spain.
This time around, Akademy was in Würzburg, Germany at the University of Würzburg. As a lot of KDE contributors are based in Germany, I was excited to have the opportunity to meet so many more than I did last time.
Talking Fedora to KDE
This is the first Akademy I've attended where I did not have any talks, which meant I was free to attend talks and BoFs to give feedback directly.
Carl Schwan's retrospective on KDE's accessibility goal and the new goal about improving Plasma's input features led to great conversations with Carl Schwan and Jakob Petsovits about experiences in Fedora with these aspects of Plasma and how to move forward on making the experience great. In particular, we discussed the state of the Maliit Keyboard and the inability to have IMEs and on-screen keyboards working together. I attended a session about Plasma Discover to talk more about our needs with Discover related to customization of featured applications.
Nate Graham led a great discussion on the release schedules of KDE software. In that, the merits of aligning KDE Frameworks, Plasma, and Gear schedules was heavily debated. It was probably one of the most exciting discussions I was in all week!
Timothée Ravier and I ran a small Fedora KDE meetup at Akademy, where we reviewed what has been going on at the Fedora level and had a small discussion about the interaction between Fedora and KDE.
I'm very excited by the steady progress being made across the board.
Wicked Ways with Wayland
I wasn't just at Akademy to do Fedora things. I was also there to meet up with the KWin folks and figure out the strategy of Plasma Wayland. Xaver Hugl, Vlad Zahorodnii, and I talked a lot about this and wound up meeting up with Matthias Klumpp to discuss the needs of scientific applications from Wayland. This led to us working together to develop a protocol to support "warping" pointers (to reposition a pointer in a given location in an application space).
Through this, I also started looking at some of the other protocols we use in KWin that are candidates to stabilize and started on the protocol used by clipboard managers.
Depending on how these go, I have more on my list to look at. 😉
And more...!
There was a lot more that I did and attended, as the opportunity to meet up with so many people could not be wasted! There's so much going on that I somewhat lost track of things too! 😅
Akademy was awesome, I'm energized and hopeful for the future of the KDE community and I look forward to next year!
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