The past week I spent in the lovely Austrian City of Graz attending the Plasma Sprint and Grazer Linuxtage 2025.

Sprint

After no Plasma Sprint in 2024 the attendance was massive, it was the biggest sprint I attended - if not the biggest in recent KDE history, the Nuremberg ‘Mega Sprint’ in 2019 may come close but that multiple sprints in one! The result was a lot of productive discussions, hacking and fun conversation during dinner and afterwards.

A subset of all the interesting discussions and things that happened at the sprint:

• We discussed sandboxing 3rdparty plasmoids which was talked about already a bit during last years Akademy. It involves interesting technical challenges and tradeoffs but would also enable for example distributing plasmoids through flatpak in the future.
• A new applet loading mechanism was proposed by Nicolas enable us to take advantage of the modern QML infrastructure and tooling
• We decided to do one more point release for regular Plasma releases (i.e. a .6) but no more LTS releases
• Streamlining the many repositories Plasma consists of
• Switching qdoc for documentation instead of doxygen (like Frameworks will do soon)
• Vlad presented his very impressive Dynamic Wallpaper Engine and how we could upstream parts of it to Plasma proper

…and a whole lot more, be sure to check out all the other reports by the other attendees over at the Planet

I also got some hacking in between session and on the train and managed to finish a very nice feature for Plasma 6.4. Systemmonitor will now be able to display the GPU usage of each process and how much VRAM it is using.

Grazer Linuxtage

On Saturday we had a booth at Grazer Linuxtage showcasing Plasma and KDE software such as Krita on various form factors such as laptop, phones, the Steam Deck and a graphics tablet with a built in screen (connected to a laptop). The interest was immense and it was very nice to see many children attending the event and being interested in Linux. After the event we even managed to pull an elaborate heist and smuggle the poster designating our booth curled up inside a roll-up banner outside the venue.

Epilog

Big shutouts to Harald and Kevin for organizing the Sprint. Thank you to Grazer Linuxtage for making it possible to have the Plasma Sprint there, my employer Techpaladin Software for sending me there, and the KDE e.V. that makes it possible for others to attend (donations always welcome).

Next week I will in Munich to attend Qt World Summit and Qt Contributor Summit, see you around!