 So, welcome both. Thank you both for being here. I look forward to hearing what you have to say. Hello. Thank you so much, Alison. And thank you so much, Matthias, for joining us today as part of the 25th anniversary celebrations. This is our fourth fireside chat and the final one. And yeah, I'm really looking forward to this and apparently at least 40 people here are also really looking forward to this. And we're also recording this and more people can see it later if they want to. Yeah, 25 years. Matthias, when you started 25 years ago, what do you have expected to sit here today? I mean, at that time, come on, we were all young, nobody was thinking 25 years ahead. I think if we did, we would have done things slightly differently. No, that was definitely not the focus. But it's quite unbelievable that a project survives that many years and still attracts new young talented people and has a thriving community. I think that's quite fascinating. And the graphics got better all the time, I must say. That is true. And I would say the even more fascinating part for me is that it's not just attracting new people, but that people are sticking around. Just looking at the list of participants here, there are quite a few old timers from the beginning of KDE still. Yeah, right. I just don't know if they are still still around in the project and active or just just now coming back to see to see the fireside chat. I think it's a mix of both. Yeah. Okay, cool. So maybe we want to go back to the very start and can you maybe tell us a bit about how it was 25 years ago. What made you start this crazy endeavor and what would you like back then? Okay, I think Micha, Rena, who's also on the chat might probably remember better because my long-term memory is quite fuzzy sometimes about it. Of course, I was thinking before the talk, you know, what do I remember and how was the situation back then in the wide scope. And it was really, it was very odd times. I mean, for the younger ones on the chat, like there was an internet, but the internet was really very academic and still scientific. There was no broader community out there and all the social networking was news groups where you would go into a folder structure of topics and then you could have the same flame walls that you haven't tweeted today. So it was the same kind of style, but in the development area discussions were somewhat friendlier than it is today. So my feeling is like now everyone's on the internet and back then you had to be somewhere at the university. So there was a bit of a filter and there were not quite as many flame walls at the beginning or really personal attacks. You had special discussion groups for that. But in that time, this was, this was weird, but now think about a little materials, but then I was, I was really into computers when I was like 12 years old. I really got into computers and that was the time of the Commodore 64 and Armstrong war. So there's these two things and and I went with the with the Commodore started programming there and it was fascinating. You know, the assembler steps or by the way, I started doing this again a couple of years ago and try to write some some games and stuff and see how that compares to modern programming. And I must say it wasn't that far away. So even back then programming essentially was was was programming basically single threaded with the interruptions of just all like like all the JavaScript stuff today is the same same type of stuff. But then computers were cool. And then you had the Amiga's, which was kind of amazing. And then I stopped doing computers. I had to do my abitur. I was doing music, which was far more social than doing computers back then, of course, and but but I was I was settled on. Okay, when I come back from from the from the army back then we still have compulsory service military service. Then I would study computer science. And then I started computer science and got a new computer. And that was a DOS computer with windows on it. And I must say I was totally shocked. That is worse than the Commodore and far worse than the Amiga that was just a total piece of shit crashing all the time. The software was confusing. You couldn't do anything as a developer. And that was really irritating. And I thought, what the heck happened to the world. And I thought, okay, shit. If that's how it is, that's just how it is. And then I was at the at the university, one of the scientific assistants, I think it wasn't a professor, someone had a print out on a printer that said Linux, it was like, almost two meters long, printed out under these these matrix printed boxes, what they had back then, and was putting that up at the door of his office. And I don't know who who that was. And that was Linux. And I heard, okay, Linux is this kind of free thing and Unix type of stuff or PCs. And I thought if somebody puts the name of an operating system up there on a door, you know, this is like, like, like a pop group or rock group that that must be something fascinating. And why would anybody do that? Like, can you imagine somebody putting Microsoft there or Windows? You know, it's unthinkable. I thought, okay, let's try this thing. And I bought that cost a lot of money, but then I think I bought 60 discs and downloaded that stuff from the internet, and and I called it. Half of it because I bought the cheapest discs I could find floppy disks, half of it was broken so the system wasn't very functional at all, which helped me getting into it because I had to debug all the packages that didn't work. But then I have this thing running on my PC and it felt like it felt like totally strange because there was on one hand it was this old stuff from the 70s. And on the other hand, it was totally futuristic like like the future, you know, multitasking and networking and all these Wow. On the same computer that was running like Windows before 3.1. And so it felt like like this. Maybe in history if you go back the Renaissance guys, you know that discover the ancient ratings and the ancient art and the mosaics and and science and then Wow, compared with the shit they had to at that time and then they were renewing this and adapting it to the modern world. This is how how Linux felt. And, and I just thought, wow, this is amazing. Why isn't everybody using it. And so came the thought. Okay, maybe it's because of this, you know, lack of user friendliness, etc. And I got this idea. I can't we can't we make Linux so so everybody can can use it. That was the basic idea. So basically I was a fan boy of this unique system and thought, you know, how can we make this something for everybody. And how similar this is to when you say it felt futuristic. It's funny how similar this is to when I started using Katie software. But this was not at the beginning of Katie, but maybe Katie is 3.5. So quite a few years later, but still, it felt very futuristic. This sounds really cool. And especially this feeling of being able to to tinker with with your operating system and your software and so on. I think this resonates quite a bit with people who are attracted to Katie and who can who can change what the system they're working on every day. I would say I'm less of a file less of a tinkerer. So I'm kind of more lazy guy I prefer when things work for the tinkering I was always lucky that I was surrounded by people who like the tinkering and made things work. I mean I mentioned Michael earlier, who I shared a flat with and he was definitely the system administrator, among others and kept all things working and networking and made sure things work. The same with Katie, we had guys like Stefan Cullo and many others who got the whole machinery working around the release process and stuff. That's not really, that's not really my thing. I really like computers one day. When they work, I must say, but most of the time computers don't work. That's true. I think we all like it when computers work but sometimes you, I mean tinkering in the sense of I can make it do what I wanted to do as opposed to having to just use whatever whoever invented it. It's like an empowerment, but and sometimes, you know, I like to when computers do things like in the real world. That was so, that was so cool when like people write something with it or create content with it and now we have some software where you can edit videos and stuff so you do something outside just computing at some some point. So software felt a bit like, okay, we do software so others can do software. Like this was the thing. Most of the time when people ask me what are you doing for work when I was working at the troll tech. Like I'm like software so other people can write software and then there was what. Okay, so what exactly do you do and it's impossible to to explain but when you then saw what the customers did with it. It was just amazing. I mean we're talking about the likes of Disney and Pixar on the movie scene or synopsis, you know, somebody needs to design these chips in your computer and and for that they need software and the guys who write that software need other software so they can write that software and that's the software we all write. So it's a long chain I mean if you think about it what humans have created with with software. There's hardly, you know, we are amazed that when we see the pyramids in Cairo and think wow, thousands of people must have built this thing. Now you take any piece of item or something your phone and you wonder like, okay, how many people have contributed to that just in the last year. It's just totally amazing what we have created as humans this complex stack that so many people contribute on different levels and something comes out of it that actually works at least most of the time quite stunning. Amazing indeed. If we go back to 25 years ago, you sent this email announcing, can you maybe talk a bit about what happened before you sent that email because this wasn't how it really started right this was when you announce it. Yes. Oh, okay. So well, well I did I did a software project before there was the the licks document processor which is still still around quite niche market for scientific papers and with latte. So I had a bit of experience creating open source software and building a small community. And but as I said earlier I was a fan boy of Linux and and I had this machine at home. And I wanted to make other people in the student community use Linux and I said okay, you can do everything you know fully empower it. You take this when your manager and this panel and you set up this tool and this editor and stuff. So I was basically doing my own distribution and and I was doing the same for the university because people there wouldn't would log into Unix machines and they, they got basically nothing they got a standard axe window background, you know this mash pattern and a pointer. And I think if they're lucky they could get a right mouse button menu where they could start the next time that was what they got. And of course they were all confused and didn't know what to do. And so I tried to set up a system that had a panel and some standard applications that made it easier to use this stuff. And then I figured out it's actually quite hard to make something usable which is kind of consistent. I noticed that I was using like the apps I was using we're using five different toolkits all having different usage patterns like okay if the scroll bar looks like this use the right mouse if it looks like the middle mouse otherwise use left mouse. You cannot teach that to anybody, you know windows was crap because it was crashing, but at least it was kind of consistent in some ways. And so I was looking for technical solutions where we could do that and I was investigating toolkits and I think I tried. I tried four or five toolkits and was writing code with it and then I discovered these crazy Norwegians with cute and I was totally sold and that this might be the path forward, not being not aware of the license problems because at that time you know you had gpr software using motif and stuff and was in this linkage you are not a problem, etc. And of course I wasn't prepared for the for the shit storm that then was fired by by the redhead guys against it. So I thought I'd follow technical analysis which would be the best choice to move forward and ended up with cute and that's what I proposed in the in the email and I think I even had a small outline like what kind of applications would be the most important to create to get this little desktop system in place that is that is usable for people. Yeah, I also remember that in the email it said something along the lines of cute being really technically excellent product and that's why he was based on that. And of course, as you were saying, there was a lot of discussion or efforts around that. And after that with the kitty for cute foundation, for example, and the agreement between trial site back down and kitty to to ensure that kid is available for for kitty and free software as a whole. The KD free cute foundation it turned into the KD for cute foundation but the foundation, the idea for cute foundation is older than Katie Howard not who came to the Linux Congress in Wurzburg. That was the Congress where we first presented Katie. So we've had a little bit of code that was colored on me. At that time Howard not already talked about the, the necessity to set up a foundation to get this free software thing problem out of the way, because they had thought about this earlier. But when we then had Katie and that that brings us to why Katie at the beginning, we need an entity that could actually enter in a contractual relationship with troll tech. So was that the trigger to create Katie in the first place. Yes. So we thought if we had an entity we could have other assets with it like the trade marks and domains. And at the same time we maybe could even have a sort of a governance body that makes like official releases or stamps and these types of things, but that didn't go all that well. Katie on stamps. I like it. So you were saying that you like cute technically very much. Looking back at that decision today, would you still make the same decision? Not in a very difficult position. Yes, because All right, I was thinking about this question. Okay, let me check some some notes because I was wondering about that. And I think it's a tough one. It's really a tough one because cute cute has a lot of things going for it. And it made the life of many programmers easier. And many of the people who learn programming then with cute, they went into the market into companies and road like Windows Mac cross platform, Linux software and they had a much better life and could do fancy stuff. And if you see what's now happening the car industry on the embedded side there's a lot of many interesting things happening we also have the first Linux based phone with Motorola out of China that was using cute We had the PDA in the sharp sorrows in Japan and a couple of things within Nokia, which were quite amazing so cute did a lot of very good things and instilled us today. For Linux. I mean, first, okay look at C++ C++ also back then nobody loved it we did not love C++ it was just a very pragmatic choice and and also remember 96 97 98 C++ was not quite as as it is today. I must say I think the language developed in an in an odd direction and it became worse and worse and now I would not. I wouldn't have stopped using it to be frank and I went back. I'm doing most of my programming now on the back end with with go lang, which is basically you know you take all the learnings from C and you cut all that object oriented and functional programming crap in the middle and you find out what were the elements that were really important. And you try to bring this in and the model works with my aging brain really really nicely and I feel extremely productive. And with this knowledge, I think C is not that bad. And if we had taken the technology we had in in troll take or Katie at that time with generators like something like mock for C. We could have implemented a system that could actually work so so for for Linux as a whole it was a disaster that we were splitting the communities. We should have tried to make something together with see and maybe see cute as a commercial option for the cross platform and merge these effort. And that was just just a problem. I think it was wrong. And see could have been a better choice see with it like add on features for signals and slots and stuff with could have been a much better choice for the Linux system you see that with a Mac. It basically has objective say is basically just signals and slots plus plus see and and and and how effective that is still still still today for program. But having said that, I think them is the fault was not just with us with troll tech or with me personally I think redhead was not very nice back then. They, they had a lot of money. They were kind of giving out the message. Like if somebody's making money with Linux, it's us, the rest of the ecosystem should be free. There was no path for anybody else to get in there and also make business other than consulting with Linux redhead could easily have stroking a deal with with troll tech back then troll tech was five developers with super low salaries doing 50% consulting. You know, it would have been totally easy to set up something find any sort of agreement and get that going. But there was absolutely zero interest because that was also you know, there was this American Europe thing and people not communicating well and no internet for phone calls and video sessions and that was just extremely difficult. I think it was a disaster to have split this community. And I was thinking at some point maybe the competition helps us. You know, GNOME and KDE competition healthy ha ha call and we can agree on things. Maybe it's nicer, but to be honest, I think this competition had some good elements. But partially it turned into part of my fringe pissing contest when it came to features you know we have this feature we do this feature feature feature. And it was more like competing on the feature side with GNOME rather than trying to find out what the users really needed and wanted. And at some point, I think GNOME gave up on the feature race and and said, alright, let's cut it and we just make it super simple to the bones and really do the minimum and stuff and that was a successful strategy for them in the long run. And so in a way, we did help GNOME a lot getting them focused on their target market and getting something there. But it didn't help us too much. The path that KDE has chosen to have these super formidable, you know, configurability and choice and stuff and at the same time simplicity is super hard. It's hard and it's costly. Like when the when the code for the settings dialogues is larger than the business logic then then you know you're, you're having problems and all of that needs to be tested. And if you look at the competing offers, like the Mac OS, which is a, you know, my way or no way. Of course, a far easier proposition to make. Yeah, I would agree. We definitely haven't taken the easy way out. But I think we've learned a lot over the past years about how to to balance this complexity against what's really meaningful for for users. We're targeting, yeah, but it's not an easy trade off to make. And then there's quite some complexity that we're getting from that. Definitely. Interesting discussion happening right now on the chat, which I like to. So yes, Golang is a back end language. I think it would be a perfect language also for the front end, but somebody needs to do something about it. I think it would be possible to almost implement the Flutter style system where you have like a separate tree of widgets and a separate tree of your logic and you try to map these things similar to the DOM. And so you get a declarative style or maybe even a QML type of style would work with Golang. I was trying to convince last knoll to put the cute company on it, but but they are busy with many other things and it doesn't quite fit. There's a one man project somewhere that tries to do UI for for Golang, but it's, well it's a one man project doing this properly needs, you know, right now the bar is very high if you want to create something that can compete with Flutter. You know, these guys have so many resources and so talented people and you look out there, and it's not just the code. It's the examples, the documentation, the videos, the support that you get around it. The whole package is very, very hard to do. So what I'm doing right now, if I have to do a quick mobile app or something, I would, I'm using Flutter with Dart, which is an awful language because it's just a slightly fixed JavaScript. And Flutter is weird in terms of how you think about UI, but it's, but it's working. But on the back end, Golang is great. Now people bring up Rust. My problem with this is remember XPcom, I think was the name, remember GACO in all these things. I really, based on my experience, I wouldn't trust things coming out of the Mozilla Foundation to be the survivor and the winner in any technology race in the long. That's sad to hear. But, yeah. So we talked about cute as one of the things coming out of this announcement, people having strong opinions. Give me more comment on Rust because we get this. Sorry, Lydia. So, so I haven't tried Rust enough. I know great developers like like Simon Hausmann and stuff are in love with it. And many people love it. And maybe that's a, that's the thing. I'm most certainly applaud people who have a fresh thinking on programming languages rather than adding features and features and features that everything is there and nothing works properly. So, good. If Rust goes somewhere, that would be great. I, for myself, I'm currently in love with the, with Golang, because the whole tooling is just amazing that they've created around it. Which I also remember as one of the big selling points for cute. Cool. So, you sent this announcement message to the news group and people had opinions about cute as the chosen toolkit. What else happened? Like people approach you to join? What did they want to do? Well, in the announcement, there was this limit that if we get like 10 to 20 people or something, then we, then we can get started. The time was definitely right. And many people joined immediately the next day or couple of hours after the announcement. And we put over mailing this and then we got started writing code quickly. One of the first people to join was Matthias Kalle Dahlheimer from Star Division back then, who, of course, had already a name in the community. He was, he was an author of books and he worked with Star Division, gave talks, etc. So he came with a network of people that he knew and a name. And that attracted others as well and gave us a foothold. We quickly realized that if you want applications, Linux wasn't all that great to write desktop applications, because you had to do a lot of, it's not even boilerplate is, you know, you had to write a lot of cool functionality yourself that didn't exist in the system. So, so the first thing we created was Katie ellipse, I think was the first module and one of the first classes was cake conflict. So that applications could actually store state in the, in the file system. So Katie has always been about the development experience as well, rather than just the experience for the, for the users, and that's what happened and then it went fairly fairly quickly. I mean, at the beginning it was, it didn't take too long before we had a version one. The problem with version one was still that we felt like a user desktop should have some documentation. So I remember I was in, it was before the book, we went to Frankfurt trying to pick up Tolben Weiss, who's now a professor for computer science in Frankfurt, and wrote the, the, the first version of, what's it called conquer at the beginning KFM, I think was Kate Katie file manager, and the first K HTML. And so we were in his room and have to have to prepare the release the first beta. And I remember I was still sitting there writing a lot of the user documentation myself and this is when I developed severe RSI this strain injury syndrome and I could hardly type so I had like sky. Scars around my hands and try to still read and which resulted in me taking a break of three or four weeks where I couldn't do any, any, any coding, which was total stupidity. But the break was nice, I guess. Yeah, unfortunately, that happens. Yeah. Okay. Am I the only one did the other guys. Like there's a lot of people in the chat I would like, you know, did any of you develop problems with your, with your, with your hands and. And what do you do. So I, I for myself, I'm using. This is the, the, the one piece of Microsoft that I really like, apart from the scope keyboard, which is currently the only keyboard I can use for more than half an hour without getting pain. While people are typing in the chat. And you were talking about many people being in the room. And I've heard stories about the founding of KTV and that happening in your dorm room. Is that true? Yes, it probably is. Yes. Yeah, yeah. That was in the apartment with, with, with me here. So he might, he might remember, I think we pulled him in as well, because we need to have a quorum. Yeah. Yes, that's, that's true. That's the humble beginnings. So it wasn't, it wasn't a garage, but it was a funky wonka mine shaft somewhere in tubing. I believe it was one of the old houses from the French army that they built there, but I'm not entirely sure. Yeah, including partners being brought in to have the quorum. Sounds like an interesting origin story for me. Yeah, the most fun thing I think, and that process took much longer, because we thought that would be easy. Like we thought, okay, look, none of us has a commercial interest. We write a lot of stuff that is highly valuable. And, and we give it away for free. So how can that not be, you know, kind of a charity and, and how can we not accept the nations without paying taxes for that and but the process to actually get this approved was very, very difficult because of course the financial authorities had no idea was what software was, nor what free software was. I think that process took a lot longer and luckily other people took to care of this. And afterwards. So when you look back at things and how you had imagined KDE software to develop and compare it to where we are today. What was that the direction you imagined or hoped for? Well, when we started this thing, you know, renaissance, wow, we discover the past, which is the future and this is so great and how can people not see this. And, and, and there was all this movement, and there was the distributors got there and we had the Deutsche Linux, we had Kader, we had Souza in Nuremberg, we had Rathead, of course, Mandrake in France, lots of companies were popping up and, and this thing seemed like an unstoppable train in our little bubble. But, but we knew we were the we were ahead of people, and we were ahead of people that we were in the internet doing social networking, working on a learning space system now everybody does that they just call it Android. And so we were ahead like we were part of a movement that notified the world. But it didn't quite turn out as, as, as we liked it. Back then, for sure, I had, I had thought like that universities and schools, public places, and many companies would eventually move to Linux with all that support from the distributors and that this is a given and we get more software for it. And that this, this windows thing will just just go away. And which, of course, didn't happen for various, for various reasons. And some of that is our fault. But I think in the end, users don't care the software is free, because they never pay for software or they don't see it. So that was not an argument. And if you look at what the macOS did macOS basically follow that story you take a unique system and you create an alternative UI system on top of it alternative to windows. What was necessary for the macOS to succeed. First of all, I mean, yes, you needed Steve Jobs, genius, and his total focus on user experience that that was one thing. Let's let's say we can do that by having long and heated email threats and discussions and we all agree and we make the right choices. But then what did they need the mac had dedicated hardware that can realize the strength of the system. Linux had to work on all sorts of shitty PCs, and when it was installed in schools, it was installed in schools right it happened. But it all of this was removed later but at that time, schools went out and installed Linux distributions, etc. But it was on crappy computers that can hardly. They couldn't even run Windows 95 properly. And so all of that died away. Okay back. Sorry, I'm confused now hardware dedicated hardware. The thing was, they had some great software that did not exist other places, and they picked a niche for that then each was music and video editing now we have video as well but that was the big thing. And then the making the computer the media hub of the life, you know now this is all in the cloud, but you had it, you know this is the machine where my music, and I have my photos and I have my videos that was the thing. Number three, they got Microsoft Office on the platform. And without if you remove any of this, you know the beach had for something the hardware support done by the hardware vendor and Microsoft Office you cannot establish an alternative platform. Just not possible. I think we're fighting an uphill battle there. And maybe that was not everybody's battle but that was certainly my hope that we could, we could somewhere go there and have a have a system established for most, most people with but of course that never happened you know desktop Linux was the people started joking like next year is the year of the Linux desktop right and that went on for a decade. But for me it was always the year of the Linux desktop. I have not used anything else for 25 years. You mentioned us having heated discussions on mailing lists. And I've got me thinking one of the things that I always found interesting about KDE as a community compared to other big projects. And then at the time I jumped KDE was that it didn't have this one kind of a dictator that said like this is how we're going to do it now, as opposed to for example open to or Linux kind of and so on. And I want to ask you was that an intentional decision by you was just how things happened is this your character or how did that come to me. You've been to think comes with the deep pockets you know if you have very deep pockets and you pay people it's easy to be a benevolent dictator. We with KDE. I think the project has a two to big scope to have one direction at all it doesn't suit itself to somebody controlling every single commit. Like like Linus would do on the on the kernel, but for sure it has to do with. I think it had to do with what's the purpose of KDE which was not defined it was always this project for developers and many different aspects and going broad in all directions, but of course also with personality. And I think mostly with with personality and somehow these these idea like, wow, can't we be like a brother and sisterhood of people working together. In addition, I had a conflict of interest at some point you know went with cute when I when I then decided to to work for troll tech, I still considered myself working. A lot for for KDE make enabling KDE to work better and getting cute to be totally free software, but I felt I have a sort of conflict of interest and I cannot make these decisions for the for the KDE project. So I felt okay just being one of one of many and working together and this is by the way also I think the biggest achievement for us all in the KDE project is we learned how to do complex software together. And what we have the systems that we had in place were far better than many commercial companies back then the whole development process and and what we did was, you know, we didn't have a scrum master or a manager or a can band board director wipers something processes tools stand up and rituals and we were just working together as software developers and of course testers and writers and designers. But no manager overhead whatsoever and that was just fascinating. If you, I mean I've been working as a consultant for some time and I've seen many things, but just something like KDE to or KDE threatened let get along KD three, if you let a modern software company develop that I mean that's thousands of developers and hundreds of managers, and a lot of time because modern developers spent 50% of their time in meetings, and the rest of the time they are planning their work and and they hardly get anything done and people think it's normal. So, maybe that's one of the things. There was heart for me then later that if you come from the free software community and the KD community, the quality of the people is so high that if you then enter the workplace, you're like, most of the time you're shocked. And you just want to go away. I think this mainly comes from a very good people who can work in on a complex system without all this. Yeah, I think it's twofold itself selected first of all you need to be curious to join a community like Katie, and then it once you do, you see so much that you learn quickly. That's not what they do and most companies hire somebody who has done a training course and front end or full stack or something and then they work on the same 5000 lines of code for a couple of years. And that's it. Wow. I mean, right. The KD project created a web browser. That's, that's like on a totally different, different level. Yeah, that's a, that's a very good point. Speaking of web browser. What would you consider some of the more technical achievements of Katie over the years. I think the biggest achievement of Katie is that we brought developers together that they can learn from each other and communicate. We also brought developers and users together in a wider community. So, so a developer needs somebody to to read to use that software so they get a feedback loop and we've created this community space where this can happen because right now it's impossible to attract people before Katie there was a time when the whole free software community was small and there was an FTP file transfer protocol for the younger guys. And then they just run at sun.edu. I think recall correctly, SunSight. Yes. And they had an open incoming directory. Everybody could write into that incoming directory and then they had moderators who would look into that and if it wasn't something nasty and problematic if it was then they would set the readable flag. And then you could download that from incoming or it was pushed into some some some other directory structure and that was that was the community. Right. You could upload code somebody could download the code and then send you an email when you put your email address there. And back then that work, there were people monitoring this directory for new software. Today it's impossible. You know, if you didn't have a community like KDE, if you want to write something and you're trying to get some users. I mean, how would you do that? Post on Facebook, you know, and pay ads for somebody. I mean, it's impossible to get any publicity right now for free unless it's a community like that. So that's for sure the biggest achievement. When we talk on technical achievements. I think I'm very proud still that we have a desktop communication bus that started with with decop and then then turned into into deep as because that's an interesting piece of of a distributed system architecture that is necessary for for the desktop to work. K HML K HML to later WebKit number last Knoll and friends, so I'm not many others. For sure is is a stunning technological piece. I think now it holds the whole world back because the this dawn and structure is like was limiting for for many 3D things and stuff. For the listeners who don't know about WebKit. It's the underlying thing that today most of the web browsers use. There's still elements of that architecture and some of that still holds us back in some ways. The web is also people talk about the year the Linux desktop, but the web was the same thing, you know, they've been saying that all software will will be web, which is only true for some of the consumer content heavy things. And on the on the mobile devices, you know, it's all native apps. And don't don't tell anything about react native because that's really just that. I think it's mostly like very simple or crappy apps that use it. All of the good stuff is native or using non web technologies and mobile, which is quite stunning so the app model does not go away, or did not, did not go away. Well, look at, I said earlier that you cannot establish an alternative desktop system, or you could not establish that without having Microsoft Office compatibility. So K office was for sure, and a very important and big technical achievement, but it's so difficult to do, of course, without a business around it, you cannot, you cannot sustain it. Because what was there was highly advanced and still much better than the alternatives you find today. The companies who try to compete with office or do something like Apple gave basically up, or they were forced to give it up or they didn't have to do it. Google Docs. I mean, look, K office could embed spreadsheets at the very beginning that was the big thing. It could embed diagrams and graphics into document. Try that with Confluence or Google Docs today. It's insane what you do there. You're happy with lots of authorization separate web app now update or I mean it's ridiculous. The quality that we have in document editing on web apps is, is, is horrible. People accept it because there's no, no, no choice really. So K office was great. I think also cute and QML. I see that as part of Katie. I think was it was a big technical. All right, we have about 13 minutes left. So I want to take some of the questions that people put in their shared notes. Someone is asking, how long have you contributed to Katie in which area? Whenever many back then. Which ones did you work on? Okay, which is the okay. Well, it was kind of funny at the beginning when we have the first Katie meeting in Innsberg and that was the first time there was no video conferences back then. The first time we met each other and there were like 25 30 people something around a big table and everybody was saying their name and what they've been working on their app. And then in the end it came to me and I said my name and I said, I'm basically working on the other apps. And at the beginning I was really doing a lot of different apps, mostly starting them and then handing that over to somebody else in the hope that this would then grow and I could do something else. I was starting a lot of things. I were the first terminal version, some editor, the window manager, the panel and the session manager and these these type of things. Mostly it was I think panel and window manager in the end then when it became more mature. At that point I was shifting my focus completely to to cute, working on the underlying systems that a couple of years until cute then was sold for to Nokia. And that's, that was basically when I stopped contributing to Katie directly but I was doing to creator and QML these types of things. Sorry, please go ahead. Which next distro and desktop do you use. I'm currently, I'm running a slightly outdated you're going to version of this laptop, because it's a thing that works very well with the, with the hardware, and I've been using, I've been using unity for some time. I must say, I stopped. I started to use unity or looked at no partially because I had to get my mind of Katie, because when I see Katie. And there's something I don't like, I need to go my brain triggers me to go in and contribute and do a fix or something or change it or something. I don't know if I'm using this Ubuntu thing like this and it's just nothing I can change. And when like Ubuntu was using cute at some point I thought this is okay, I can, I can do that. But frankly, I noticed that I'm using the window manager to I'll tap between windows. And I'm using a terminal and some fellow Russian developer a couple of years ago, told me about terminal called terminator, which has a really bad name, but it's quite powerful. So I have this big terminal that I split and I zoom into terminal. That's what that's what I'm doing. And I'm using the window manager. I'm not using any visual apps anymore at all. And it's like, most of the stuff is just really the, the web browser, which happily is a descendant of Katie. Yeah. Cool. Then someone is asking, I don't know if you notice how much of the current code base has been written by you. Well, if kconfig still exists in some of the libraries and I think there are some elements that are still by me and and cute is a is a huge code base and there should still be a significant portion of code that I've contributed. At least I hope so. Someone should find out. It would be interesting to know. Cool. And then someone is asking, how has this philosophy of Katie changed since the beginning. I think, you know, I had a Katie philosophy and many people joined had their own philosophy. And so I don't know if it if it has changed. Before there was a conflict at some point, because I was far more on the side of the of the gnomes, like user centric, you know, simplify things, try to make something that you can give your, your mother your father your aunt and on your own and make this work. And we get the cool tools for the development side. Yes, but the desktop should be like these really slim simple system that was my thinking. Whereas many others said like, I want more themes I want more styles more configurability at some point the Katie team couldn't decide on anything and the standard answer was always okay we add a configuration option. And knowing what the cost is of doing that in maintaining that software in the in the long run. And, but we had nobody I was not that person, for sure. And we had nobody who could really have this vision could be the PO in modern, you know, culture, like you could define how would that experience be that we are trying to do and so at some point it became a. It became community that was a big change I think it has now changed a bit and it's not more focused on users again but at some point. It became a community and we said, you know what, let the world be the world and we do software for ourselves and we use it and we have a community and we are happy and we are learning about the things we are doing. We are having a good time which was perfectly well because he was quite big to do that but I think it became a project that was satisfied with itself, rather than being a force that tries to change society towards towards free free software, which was probably the issue because as I pointed out earlier, it's not possible to get free software without a business context out there in the in the world, people didn't want it they started the school started we have this on the chat earlier, but at some point all of that went went away. So that was a good point you're making about how then he started out as rather technical and focused on on building those applications and then today more shifting towards what I think you're after thinking much more about who is going to use our applications and what are they going to need and and how are they going to work with our applications and building something. Right, right. But you know, I think I had another chance in in having really something big happening and that was at Nokia. We used cute modern version like with qmail and we have the funding to create a new phone. And then Steven ill of killed symbion, and we had all these developers looking for like a way out and a new project to do. And we, we try to make a new phone, which was more like a low end phone. We said like it would be nice if we had like 100 people and maybe 200 and then we can do all sorts of things. And then we got all these teams and then we got like, I don't recall it was like among, I think it was around 1200 engineers so the same group you had for the original and we have them for over a year. And that was the total nightmare, because there was way too big and organizing that is totally impossible. But we have the chance to say okay, now mobile, you know, we built this complete new stack based on on on proper Linux and all cute based like absolutely stunning. And despite these huge amount of people we actually managed in the end to get something working which was a total nightmare I think I lost most of my head doing that project. And then when it started working it was killed, because even Nokia at that time still being a market leader said, There is no way to establish a third system. Microsoft also failed to establish a third system. There is no space for a third system. The third system is something you can only do with cross platform software. Two is the maximum number. You see that companies write software for Android and iOS and it's okay to have two teams to do that. It's okay, no matter if it is like some other Linux and Nokia Linux, or if it's Microsoft, nobody will write software for this just does not work. There is no space for third system. Speaking of Nokia. I was just asking if the steam deck from love could be the next Nokia. So for those who don't know a steam deck is the new device that love the game publisher is is bringing out to play games on similar to other gaming consoles and they are putting plasma on it completely is amazing for us. But could that be the next Nokia. I mean, we're not talking about a building devices that people carry in their pockets around and that lots of companies developed software for. But it's good to see these. You know, it's nice that you have real things out there that run the software that's just just amazing. I mean, there will be hundreds of thousands of users here. That's that's cool. I just think the phone is. Yeah, I think the phone is incredible admitted. I mean, how much time do we spend looking at the phone. And we do things there that we never did with the desktop computers before it's just it's a stunning device. And, and it's sad that free software plays so little role on the phone. If you think about it, you know, software. There was a time when Katie was started with that where you could actually sell software and people bought software. But I think that was an oddity in history. It wasn't like this before. And it isn't like this now. People don't buy software businesses can do that. Yes, they can license technology, but people just buy hardware and the software comes extra. This is what you see with these companies funding free software. They have a model where they sell hardware or they sell you as a product like Google does and and Facebook does and that's why they can finance some free software development. But apps, people don't buy the apps. I think they they buy to get rid of the ads. That's that's what they do. And and payments you only get for services that you deliver. So nobody's interested in actually selling and buying buying software. That is a good point. And free software on on all these app stores and so on. We're making some progress, of course, with Katie software being put into Android and iOS and being published on those stores. Thanks to Q to model things, of course. But yeah, there's still a lot of work to be done. All right, we're getting close to the end of our session and I have one last question from the audience. We have a hard stop in 27 seconds or what happens if you have more time we can also take more people but we can go finish the questions. The question is, what do you currently do as your day job? Well, I was for the past three more than three years. I was running a consulting company with Daniel Rubio, who is now the city of of traffic. So you move back to Madrid. We're still doing a little bit of consulting but we are reducing this. I today was actually kickoff and I started a new company with three friends of mine. Rafael, young and Thomas still also from former Susie employee and troll take employee. And we are going to do something in the area of fitness. Actually, I started running a couple of years ago. And so Rafael is a professional coach. He runs a diagnosis company here in Berlin. And we think we can do something significantly better compared to other systems for ambitious hobbyist and slightly better runners with gear and stuff, which is quite, quite fascinating because there's a lot of signs around it and modeling of the body, etc. And there's a lot of IT technology watches and heart rate sensors and stuff and a lot of back and stuff and a bit of front end coding as well. So that's what we're trying to do. And yes, we got a Reginald Stahlbauer who wrote the first Cape pre-center and then was running a successful company doing testing technology for curated weapon and Java. He's also on board. He's like a good group. Yes. So it's very small, you know, I'm, I'm kind of I had, I had my, my share of big business and big teams and, but it's good to not hear about scrum masters and scrum scrums and all this. Sorry. Cargo called nonsense for a while. That's quite, quite nice. Yes, you make my heart as a product. Okay, look, Lydia. So, okay. You know, we are among friends here so we can, we can talk openly. The challenge right now you have in the business is because software is everywhere. Digital is everywhere. We are growing and we need more developers. The number of developers is still doubling like every couple of years. So it's clear that the most people in the workforce are unexperienced. And the big challenge every company has is, okay, I have relatively unexperienced people and I need to get something out of them. And we are really good in doing this. And with all these technologies and help and tools that there are in the, in the agile world and if, if a competent agile coach is organizing that and taking responsibility, then all works fine and you get something out. However, this is not the same experience as if you had really a people experienced, I do I same level working really close. And there's also the in large corporations there's also coaches. Look, you can go in and neither the scrum master nor the PO nor the engineering leader nor this or that feel responsible for the output. And then you come in as a consultant and you try to help and and you know, you don't even know where to start right and that's the cause of too much money and we have that at Nokia as well. If you are too successful because your business model is so super great, then it's then it's really problematic to do any changes and I and I like it when we have scarce resources. And, and, you know, we need to fix an optimization problem with you know what do we do and how do we focus I think that's that's much more fun. Yeah, I agree with you that it is a lot more fun to work with a team who is who knows what they're working on, why they're working on it and just know how to do it. And I was asking you to be happy as a consultant that the companies are working in the way that they need your help. Yeah, but, you know, I don't say I felt not like. Yeah, maybe it's a tough one. Yes, one way but but you want to, you know, I don't know the type of people we were we always bonding quite a lot with the with the company and we generally try to help and sometimes you succeed and something comes out of it and that's then really really good and great. Maybe I'm just trying to justify why I'm giving up the good income of a of a consultant for a really small risky endeavor in a very crowded market space. But yeah, I think everyone here can. Can understand that decision. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Do you have some questions or recommendations or last words for audience maybe something you think they should. I did not get the last question. Is there something you would like to ask or tell our audience here as some finishing words. Well, I'm quite interested is in. Is there anybody here like the who works with with cute and Katie also for for for work or is this mostly like a private, private fun. Yeah, this is nice. So this is good. So Katie generated some jobs, but you can work with good technology. Yeah. Nice. There are definitely more people in the list that I see that are working with. Look at what you're right. Right. Yes. Wow. Awesome. Very clever of them. You know, to standardize and have a system that that that works. Awesome really good. And Mercedes, I think it's also a great user of cute embedded and at least I hope I think so. Yeah, maybe I need to, I will, I will upgrade at some point, but then I lose a lot of time working with all the settings of the desktop and try to configure it in the just right right way. But isn't hardware. Somebody was asking about the form factors and TVs and stuff like this. It's difficult. I have a smart TV and, and the problem with the smart TVs is basically the input device right you have this horrible remote that is designed by a designer for the looks, you know, no very few controls and then you try to try to input something and then the microphones too far away for the boys input and it's really it's a it's a different smart TV is a difficult thing to do. I just feel that the tablet takes everything. So you guys using tablets. And Lydia, do you use the tablet to create content as well for like drawing writing, taking notes or just for for consuming web or. This is now an ad. I have a remarkable tablet here. And I kind of love it. It's really nice. Can recommend even if it's a bit expensive. So tablets is a cool thing, I must say. Yeah, for some reasons, I don't know why but it just feels because the tablet you can use in a very cozy sitting position on a comfy chair or something and then. Yeah. So you're saying you're not going to have some TV software in it right. Yes. And it's the boss of the company is even for my kitty person. I think we can probably share it show something show something. What do you want me to show. What's the name of the company and I couldn't quite see. And pine 64 has been playing the announcement card that they are also going to do something similar in the future. So let's see. Very, very nice. Yeah. Yeah, the pine note. All right. Do we have anything else. And I have one last question for the audience. How long have you been with kitty. Good one. We have one year, 20 plus years, four years, 20 plus 25. Very nice. Four months to some four, two years. I think we're a pretty good mixer. But it's stunning how long software survives and the compatibility. You know, now, now KDE is some of the KD code. I can't fix just as all as the Linux that the Unix code was when we were starting KDE kind of in the middle. And it's quite amazing that this stuff still still works. That's quite nice. And it still has acquired a lot less technical depth than on the Windows platform. Isn't it still stunning, you know, when we started KDE, Microsoft was the big enemy. And mostly because their software was really, really awful. I mean, they struggled with it partially because of the history of Dawson, the long memory that was there, etc. But then it didn't get much better and it was getting worse and how with all their resources, they totally messed up the user experience and introduced widgets and now they had Metro and the traditional and everything was duplicated and it became even worse. Unbelievable, you know, and they never got around of doing it. And then I thought it was funny when Microsoft, for the first time in their history, made a consumer product that was actually good. That was Windows Fallon. It was actually good. I mean, the experience was good. Then they failed. And it's kind of sad, right? Whenever they produce crap, they are so successful and when they had good stuff, it was just totally failing on the market. But Visual Studio Code is actually a nice piece of software. I know you guys probably use KDevelop, but for Go development, it's quite nice to use Visual Studio Code. It's actually a nice piece of software. Maybe it's making a good point that a lot of KDeCode is older than many of its developers and you use it at this point. Yeah. The level looks like plasma. Yeah, that's true. But what is your thinking? Is anyone of you in touch with the GNOME community? Is it still flourishing? Is there still things happening outside the distributors or canonical? Comments there are some. And yeah, we're, for example, organizing together the Linux app summit, which is about getting more people to build apps for Linux distributions and also getting our apps outside. And Jeremy Rice, they're also like losing developers and stuff. I mean, look, when we started, there was, we all had the hope. I think the GNOMEs had that and we definitely had that. That Linux is going to take over the world, right? This will be the standard way to interact with computers. And that, of course, was very motivating for people to join. And now it has become maybe a bit of a sport and something elitistic. But everything good at some point turns into, you know, slightly elitey thing. I mean, look, it's just how it is. You know, when you use Linux, you have better computers, definitely. Just like when you listen to jazz, you listen to better music. Most people do pop stuff. So that's it. So I'm very happy that there's still young people and we see new people being attracted to it and enjoying. I think what you can learn in a community like Katie is just amazing. And all of us who were there, people wrote so much code and read so much code. If you compare this to most standard software developers, this is just like a magnitude of difference. And that brings you experience, right? You cannot be a good software developer if you haven't written a lot of code. You just need to do that at some point. That is very true. And I think one of the big things that a lot of us take away from Katie, right? Just learning, trying, doing, and then applying this in other parts of our lives too. Or making Katie stuff part of our day-to-day work. Lydia, sorry. I'm giggling about the K-pop, which is really funny. Yes. And somebody mentioned at the beginning somewhere, yeah. I still think the cool was not so bad a name. You know, there was cool in the gang and it was a misspelling and something. It was a bit edgy. It was okay. At least the letter K was available for all applications. And then I was looking at the... So you need a name because there was only one path variable in the shell. So we needed a name to start all these programs. And so there was often a shell program called foo. And there was an X program that caused X foo. And maybe a GNU version. There was G foo. And so, you know, we needed a letter. There was the K foo, which was good. The problem then was that the first use interface that we created, we had these desktop config files and there was a name there. And I wanted in the menu of the panel that there was no K term, but there was Unix. We could enter Unix commands. And there was no K ziscard, which is still there. But there was like system tools or something, you know, and you have a proper name. But at some point, the community was so geeky and nerdy that we wanted to have the command line executable names also in the UI, just with different spelling. And it's now system monitor. If you go to kd.org, I think you see K ziscard. You still see K ziscard in the menu right now. I was there before the talk. So maybe it's just an old screenshot. Hey, cool. Yes. K ziscard was done by, what's his name? Working for AWS in Dresden. Yeah. Yeah, so apparently that has now been superseded by system settings. Why was Dr. Konke named Dr. Konke? Well, Conqueror was Conqueror? Oh, the debugger thing here. Yeah, it's right with g-edit and text editor. But at that time when we did it, you know, there were no different choices. There was just one following the UI convention. So we thought it was better to give a generic name. But the generic names never took off because then we have the GNOME stuff and then we have the KDE stuff and then you had to prefix it with a K. And so the K became visible everywhere. But it was nice when we at some point had a conference in, I think, Cologne. And I remember Stefan Kullo went around and loved to photograph the car signs because everything was there. Like we had KWM, which was the window manager back then. And of course KDE and K this and K that. Most of the abbreviations were visible on the car signs. Someone in the chat is talking about KDE being derived from CDE, which was the other existing system before? Yes, yeah. That was why it's called desktop environment. Otherwise we wouldn't have, I wouldn't have named it. That was the closest thing people came up with. Because before I was talking about KDE and desktop environment, the community always referred to UI as window manager. And even at the beginning of KDE, the first couple of years, people always said, oh, that's just a window manager. And I said, yes, yes, a window manager for managing your files and your printers and writing office documents and stuff. People had no conception of what that was. Yeah, that was the window manager. So at the beginning we always had to explain, no, no, this is just a part of it. A part is a window manager. These little frames around the windows. And there was a lot more to it. There was a commercial thing called CDE, based on motif, which looked nice, but it had very, very little functionality. Someone is asking how kind of the wizard was born. Do you know that? No, don't remember. I'm a designer, I must have drawn something. So I was suggesting that it's derived from Gandalf the wizard. Pretty sure. Sounds pretty cool. All right, I think we wrap it up. Let's wrap it up. Thank you so much for doing this. This was super interesting. I hope you enjoyed it as well. I very much enjoyed it. To see some names and getting in touch with the project. I hope, you know, when this whole COVID thing is over and that there will be some real meetings as well in the future. I will have an interview again. And maybe a dinner in Berlin. That would be really, really nice. All right. Thank you so much. Thank you. Can I get this picture? Can you send me this anniversary picture slide that you're showing? Awesome. Yes, sure. All right. Thank you very much everybody.