On Friday Akademy 2023 came to a close. This was the second time I attended the conference physically after the online editions of 2020 and 2021 and I want to give short retrospective this blog post.

Talks

Akademy started with two days full of talks on Saturday and Sunday and I have to say sometimes it was hard to choose between the two parallel tracks. Overall it provided a nice mixture between what happens in the community, learning how people solved problems and learning from them (for example Ingo fixing accessibility in Kleopatra) and insight into new technologies (I had never heard of Slint before). Apart from the two standout keynotes about Kdenlive and the Libre Space Foundation I want to highlight Joseph’s talk about Internal Communication at KDE which it turns out also projects outwards for example to new potential contributors. The talk itself was well structured and presented and had engaged with the audience nicely as well.

This year I did not submit a talk myself but stood in for Albert for an update about what’s happening in the KDE Free Qt Foundation and in the KDE e.V. KDE Free Qt Working Group during the KDE e.V. Working Group reports. since he had a talk at the same time in the other room.

I also tried something new and held a panel in the “KDE Wayland Fireside chat” together with Aleix, David Edmundson, Vlad and Xaver which was intended to be an opportunity to interact for people with their favourite KDE Wayland developers. I think it turned out nicely with very good online participation - probably half of the question came from chat! The size of the physically audience was maybe less than what I would expected beforehand but we had very strong opposition with the lighting talks happening at the same time in room 1 while we were the last session in room 2. Speaking of them, I am looking very much forward to watch the recording of them and all the other talks that I missed because I was in another room.

BoFs and all the other things

After the talks come the BoFs, where people meet, discuss, plan, roadmap and workshop together. My personal self-selected schedule consisted among other things of a whole lot of KF6, Plasma 6 and to round it out more KF6. We discussed what is left to do, challenges left, and even potential roadmaps to release. Here the strong presence of people from the Qt Group proved valuable as they could help with some challenges we are facing and were interested in some problems we faced along the way. We even discovered that we share common interest into improving some areas of Qt.

Thursday was dominated by Wayland discussions. It started with a discussion on input methods and virtual keyboards where we recapped what’s happening upstream, how this fits to our needs and vision of Plasma. Afterwards we discussed some challenges of Qt on Wayland with regards to its QInputDevice API. This session showed again how useful it is to have Qt and KDE people in the same room as the discussion switched quickly from outlining missing features to making gestures and scrolling work nicely in Qt and for application developers in a Wayland world using existing infrastructure.

But Akademy is not only the things that are on the official schedule. It’s meeting familiar and new faces at the welcome and social events. It’s going on to the day trip together. It’s having a spontaneous Itinerary almost BoF in hacking room. It’s going to and having dinner together after an exhausting day. And of course it’s sometimes also just hanging out and chilling with cool people. So thanks to the KDE e.V, the Akademy team and all the volunteers who made this awesome event possible.