Libre Graphics Meeting 2026

Carsten Hartenfels — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is supposed to be a blog post about Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM) this year, but since I haven't written about the previous ones I went to, I decided to write about those as well. So this post will have bits of 2024 and 2025 in them as well, as far as I remember them, along with the experiences from the 2026 edition. And also some small bits about what's planned for the upcoming ones!

I'm not much of a taker of photos, so I don't have much to show in that regard, but I got stories and links. Some of the conference talk links go to YouTube in absence of alternatives. At the time of writing, the talk recordings are still being moved from a Peertube instance that's going away to the Chaos Computer Club's excellent media hosting service. Presumably in the future, you will be able to find all the LGM talks categorized by year under the conferences/lgm category or under events/lgm or somewhere else on media.ccc.de.

I've also never had a personal blog, so I guess a brief introduction: I'm Carsten, I develop software. I'm involved in Krita, my main focus there being on Android. I'm also the maintainer of Drawpile. The two programs have plenty in common and so there's a good amount of cross-contamination.

With that out of the way, I'll start not at the beginning, but at the now.

Next Year: LGM 2027

Next year's Libre Graphics Meeting will be from May 5th to 8th 2027 in the city of Linz, Austria at the Kunstuniversität (art university). That's Austria the country in Europe, not Australia. The talks will probably be streamed again for online viewing. There is also some mulling about LGM 2028 going on already, with the idea of it being hosted in Montreal, Canada being floated about.

Since it's still very early in the organization, you probably won't be able to find those dates listed anywhere yet, but you can probably find them in the Matrix channel backscroll. That is also a good place to go if you want to listen in on the meetings and participate.

Otherwise, if you want to keep up to date with the event, you can also follow the Fediverse account. Otherwise, the website also has information, but at the time of writing, it is still in its 2026 state.

Two Years Ago: LGM 2024

This was my first Libre Graphics Meeting. It was also the first one in quite a while, it took quite the hit from COVID and the usual yearly cadence it had kept up for over 15 years had lapsed. 2020 and 2021 were online, 2022 and 2023 didn't have any LGMs at all. 2024 was the first year it came back. I don't remember it that way, but looking at the group photos from then, the crowd is definitely smaller than in the subsequent years. The venue for it were the ActivDesign offices, which is probably a comparatively tighter space, making it seem like it was more folks around.

I'd taken over the maintenance of Drawpile, having some more time for that kind of thing after quitting my day job. That also involved porting the program to Android, which is how I ended up on the Android side of Krita, and to the web browser using WebAssembly. The latter felt like something that few people had done before and I had stories to tell about it, which is why I gave a talk on the topic.

While this is probably my first publicly recorded talk, I've given enough of them before that this wasn't a new experience. However, it was the first one that had a good chunk of less technical people in the crowd, so I tried to have some lighter parts, at least as far as possible in such a techy topic. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out and people seemed quite interested in it, given the amount of questions and "hallway" conversations I had.

There was also a talk about Krita's new text tool by Wolthera, the primary author thereof. She couldn't be there in person, so that talk was given remotely. She's also got a blog post series on the matter. Today of course, Krita has this new text tool she was working on!

I don't remember every talk and so I don't want to go over each of them, but many of them I still remember fondly and it was nice seeing the people that held them at subsequent LGMs again. The folks from ActivDesign of course, like Elisa, Animtim or Cédric, who were involved in organizing the event. Tom Lechner's talks are always interesting and almost given in a conversational manner. This year's being one of hiking, foggy mountains in the Pacific North-West and default cubes in their natural habitat. It was also the first time I've really seen "live computer art stuff" through Jules Fouchy's Coollab. Well, what that stuff is really called is "generative art", but of course if you search for that nowadays, you just get slop instead. This is not that anyway, it is more about creating living installations created in real time and transforming them, like creating live visuals given an audio feed, manipulatable by a gyroscope from a performer's phone. There was also a bit of a conference talk with AMRO, the Art meets Radical Openness festival in Linz, Austria. Which is where next year's LGM connection comes from and some of the people involved with AMRO are also doing the organization of LGM 2027! You can find all the recorded talks in this playlist, unfortunately the lightning talks are not part of it.

Outside of the conference itself, there's also plenty of memories. Rennes was a nice city, my first experience with it being at the train station and desperately trying to find a ticket machine for the bus. After what must have been an hour of walking from the top of the station to the underground metro, I gave up and just got on the bus without a ticket - only to find that you just touch your bank card to a contactless pay terminal. Since the fees are a single, flat price no matter where you're going, that's all you need.

There was also much Brittany-typical stoat iconography in the city. After a picnic on the first day, we went out to eat on the second one. We had galettes, which are basically savory buckwheat crêpes. If I recall correctly, GIMP sponsored those for everyone that was there. I also had a bit of a talk with Lasse Fister, the lead organizer from the subsequent LGMs, about his attempts of having software recognized as being "for the public good" in Germany. Which informed that direction with Drawpile to instead focus on the artistic side of things, rather than trying to explain free software to the tax office, which seems like it was the right path because it lead to it having its public goodness recognized without a hitch. I unfortuantely had to leave on the third day, so I missed out on the rest of the meeting, a mistake I didn't repeat again.

And while I don't have photos, I still have my shirt, badge and official coffee cup! It's even signed, although that has faded a bit. Nonetheless a precious item.

Last Year: LGM 2025

The next LGM was in Nuremberg, Germany, which is quite a lot easier for me to get to. This time it was a larger space at the Karl-Bröger-Zentrum, which had more room available. Lasse put everything together despite plenty of hurdles and the support structures from one and a half decades of LGMs not being there anymore. During the event Simon Harhues also took on a good amount of organizational tasks, spontaneously if I recall correctly. The tech was done by folks from Chaos-West TV, who did a tremendous job despite the venues at times questionable tech. At times it felt like the recordings of the talks were already cut and online before the speaker stepped off the stage. And as the most important person of the event, Lasse's mother prepared the coffee.

Several people that were there at the last LGM were around once more, who were nice to see again. And there were several others that would come back the next year again. Krita also had a physical presence this time with tiar being there, myself not being a member of the core development team yet, although I'd already made some contributions to it. GIMP and Inkscape also had a presence again.

I gave a talk again this time around, with the lurid title of 3000% Faster File Saving With Time Travel. It's about a new file format for Drawpile, which turned out to have some very cool properties that I thought could be applicable to other programs as well. By now, a good chunk of the second part of the talk that goes on about future stuff has become a reality. A similar kind of format may be coming for Krita as well, although it will take some experimenting with what's doable in that regard.

This year also brings the continuing format of the State of Libre Graphics talk by MABarbe. It features a short overview of what's going on with various projects in the libre graphics world, even if they are not at LGM. If you know any free software projects that aren't represented in this but you think should be, it may be worth letting the project maintainer and/or the LGM groups know about it.

Once again, I don't want to retell every single talk since I don't remember all of them, but I'll give a brief survey again. Tom Lechner's talk this time was about waterfalls in Godot, which was another memorable one. Live computer art stuff had more of a presence this time, with Coollab once more, but also OPENRNDR and Processing being around. The talks about PDF were also interesting, one being a lightning talk on CapyPDF and the other on various kinds of flavors of PDF. And, most interestingly for my work, there was a talk on Inkscape's UI, on usability and UX evaluation and a workshop on the latter by Simon Harhues. During that, we went through Krita with someone unfamiliar with the software try to accomplish a task and document the issues. It was pretty eye-opening to see the things that a user tried first and having their thoughts spoken, since even if they did manage to accomplish the task eventually, they took some wrong turns or came to incorrect conclusions. A few of the experiences from this lead to features, such as hitting Escape to deselect in Drawpile. All recorded talks can be found in this playlist.

Since the schedule was pretty packed this time and my hostel bed was a small train ride away, I didn't end up going to too many evening events, although there were some concerted lunches. The last day had a big get-together with everyone who still had time, which was a nice end to the event. Looking back at it and comparing it with the LGMs before and after, it really does seem like the meeting is picking up steam again, becoming more organized and eventful.

No limited-edition plastic coffee cup this time, but I do have a shirt, a badge and stickers.

This Year: LGM 2026

Finally, the event this year. It was in Nuremberg again with the same organizer and tech team, but the venue was Zollhof. The internet was a lot better and the place was better equipped for this kind of conference matter. Coffee was provided without parental guidance this time. There was also a nice community room in the basement, although it didn't end up getting that much use since it was very far away from the conference hall on the very top floor, which is where most of the hallway conversations ended up being.

Krita-wise, tiar, Animtim and I were there. GIMP was also around to a degree, although Inkscape had less of a presence this time around. I also didn't have a talk this year, mostly because I didn't really have a single concrete thing to talk about among everything I'd been doing and the new work on the file format I'd already talked about in the last year.

The memories here are the freshest, so I'll go into some more detail here on talks where I have something to say. I won't go into every talk, since stuff like fonts, printing or live coding I simply don't have much to say about and I don't want this to just be a summary with no additional insights over just watching the talks. Which you can do via this playlist.

Once again, there was a State of Libre Graphics talk by MABarbe. Drawpile isn't featured this time around, which MABarbe and I blame wholly on Matrix failing to do its job of delivering messages.

Jules Fouchy, the primary developer of Coollab, held a talk about something we've chatted about at LGM 2024 already: UI frameworks. My own research and experience was that the choices that could be taken seriously - i.e. runs on Linux, Windows, macOS, Android, iOS/iPadOS and in the browser with possibility of hardware acceleration - were basically Qt, web view (Electron and friends) or an immediate GUI on top of OpenGL (Dear ImGui and friends.) While Coollab has different requirements, he kind of comes to the same conclusion. It is worth the watch.

Also on the first day there was a kind of crazy talk by Øyvind Kolås about ctx, a rasterizer, and its vector desktop, which is a whole desktop environment around it. The whole thing is pulling itself up on its own bootstraps, which is kind of wild to see, it is worth watching the talk.

After having held a talk on PCB design the last year, Simon Budig held a soldering workshop. Since I have some experience in that regard I ended up joining it to help out a bit, everyone there put together a small board with a few components: resistors, a battery compartment, a switch and blinkenlights on a printed circuit board with the LGM logo on the front. This gets slotted into a 3D-printed case with a magnet inserted into a very tightly fitted recess via a lot of force applied. Turning it on lights up the logo in different colors that shift over time, see the photo below.

In the lightning talks on the second day, Krita contributor Animtim held a talk about GCompris, a tool for children with different activities, of which several of the creative ones are quite interesting to play with for adults as well. There was also a talk on palettes appropriate for different color visions by Øyvind. I also talked very briefly about animation in the ORA format to see if there was anyone except Krita folks interested in it, but we didn't have anyone present at the time.

Jehan held a talk about GIMP's community, which is worth a watch if you're involved in a free software project. It could probably have been twice as long to go more into depth on the topic, but it gives a good history and some insights on how to handle such a long-running project. In particular, their experience with Google Summer of Code students is very different to Krita's: theirs usually turned into long-time contributors, while ours usually disappeared after they were done. While Krita is sitting out on this year's GSoC for various reasons, it'd probably be worth looking deeper into it next year.

I didn't quite wrap my head around it during Jean-Michael Celerier's talk on ossia score, but there was a workshop later where I understood it a bit better. It is a program that lets you orchestrate various kinds of input sources, processing steps and output sinks together with nodes and a timeline. For example, you can read sensor data from a phone, denoise it and then output it into a shader program to make visuals during a live performance. Or you can connect a sound source with a light installation. While I would probably have to use it more to wrap my head around the connection between the timeline and nodes, it is an interesting combination of the two.

Speaking of timelines and nodes, MABarbe held a talk about representing a timeline as nodes, which is another way to look at the matter, although this one is a UX design experiment, not something available to try and feel out. Still, it's worth watching the talk in combination with the ossia score one above.

Lila Pagoda's talk about putting design students in front of free software is also a good watch. It reminds me quite a lot of the UX experiments we did in 2025 and I would really like to read the students' reviews that were mentioned, but haven't found them publicly released. It is also an insight on technical awareness to a degree, where students never even look at alternatives that may even be better than proprietary solutions. But that's probably a marketing matter more than anything, which I don't understand much of.

Tom Lechner held a talk again this year, this time about imposition, which is how you cut, fold and arrange papers to produce their eventual "bound" form. It's not something I've ever thought about, so actually seeing it in action is fascinating. Right afterwards, Alexander Lehmann's talk about their Frag den Staat game is in a similar direction, being taken along with the experience of making that game.

And as the final talk, flabbet from PixiEditor held a talk about their node-driven editor. Particularly interesting is the use of a node graph for their brush editor, since it makes the flow of information more apparent than the "fixed-function pipeline" in other brush engines. Whereas those tend to accumulate a lot of special knobs and switches, having a node editor allows for easier stacking of primitives. A particularly interesting part thereof being the ability to have user input nodes, which means that an artist that just wants to tweak the brush a bit doesn't need to dive into the node graph, but can instead just adjust some sliders and curves on the frontend.

The conference ended with a get-together outside this time, which was a bit less comfortable due to the lack of seating opportunities in the hills of the old city. Still, we talked about nodes, crash reports and optimization, some of which has conjured ideas on implementing them into Drawpile and/or Krita. Although they haven't yet manifested due to being busy on other matters in that regard.

So for the spoils this year. I got a shirt again, badge, stickers and the aforementioned soldering project.

And since I already looked at next year's LGM above, that concludes this post! If it's reachable for you, consider coming as well, the attendance is free. Otherwise, save the date to watch the streams and participate from online!

Carsten Hartenfels on KDE Blogs

Libre Graphics Meeting 2026

Next Year: LGM 2027

Two Years Ago: LGM 2024

Last Year: LGM 2025

This Year: LGM 2026