 Thank you all. So my name is Neil Gampa, I'm from the Fedora Project, I'm here to talk about Fedora KDE. So let's get on with it. And a little bit before we kind of get into Fedora KDE itself, I want to talk a little bit about myself just to give you an idea of who I am. So I kind of call myself a professional technologist for whatever the hell that means. But I'm a contributor and a developer in Fedora, Magia, OpenSUSA, and OpenMendriva Linux distributions. I am a member of the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee. So that is the committee that runs, that essentially is the final arbiter of all of the major technical changes that occur in Fedora releases. I'm also obviously a member of the Fedora KDE SIG, otherwise I wouldn't be talking to you about it. And I'm a contributor to package management software, specifically RPM, DNF, and related projects, systems management, software management. I live a lot in the plumbing layers most of the time. And for my day job, I'm a DevOps engineer at Datto Incorporated, who's a business recovery disaster, business continuity disaster recovery company based in Norwalk, Connecticut. They don't really matter too much from the Fedora KDE perspective, but you know, that's where I work. And you can reach me generally via Twitter. There's my Twitter handle on screen. So now to the interesting stuff, Fedora KDE. So Fedora KDE spin is a curated collection of software that demonstrates the breadth and quality of the KDE ecosystem. So the whole point of this is that we're trying to show a Fedora, a KDE experience on Fedora that is relatively close to what KDE as a project aims for the Plasma desktop to look like. We retain as many of the upstream defaults as possible. There are some minor tweaks here and there. We look at paper cuts and stuff like that. For the most part, there's some minor branding and usability tweaks. We use Mozilla Firefox as our default browser. This is something that all the Fedora desktop editions do. And we use Firewall D for our firewall solution and it's configured and we have the applet and stuff like that as well as SE Linux as our mandatory access control system for security. We ship as a live media ISO for x86 systems and that's available from KDE.FedoraProject.org and we ship disk images for ARM systems and that's at the ARM.FedoraProject.org website. We don't yet currently, only because I didn't actually realize we didn't have this and we're going to hopefully, I brought it up for discussion, having ARM ARCH64 which is 64-bit ARM for systems like Pinebook Pro and so on to operate in full 64-bit mode that's hopefully going to come real soon now. Technically it should just work. It's just a matter of getting it switch flipped. So right now we have mostly 32-bit ARM. But you could of course do a 64-bit ARM from scratch and be able to get Fedora KDE that way as well because we do build all the packages for all of our architecture. So even power, even mainframes if you're so inclined, it's available for everything although I would be really interested in the use case for KDE on a mainframe. That'd be fun. So that's Fedora KDE spin itself and let's talk a bit about the Fedora KDE SIG. So the Fedora KDE SIG started originally as a little outside project called KDE on Red Hat. It was started by Rex Deeter in 2003. Many of you may know of Rex Deeter. He actually gave a talk several years ago talking about the Fedora KDE spin when it was first introduced back in 2000, I think in, what was it, Academy 2009-ish I think. I forgive me if I got the year wrong, but I know it was a very long time ago. So KDE on Red Hat started through him and like when the Fedora project started up and then started incorporating all of these external Red Hat oriented or Red Hat ecosystem projects into the main Fedora project, KDE on Red Hat merged into the Fedora project at around that time. The merge of Fedora Core and Extras brought that into focus as the KDE SIG and we were one of the first SIGs to be created. And in Fedora 7 along with the Core Extras merge, as it's been called, we also introduced live CD technology and so Fedora GNOME or the Fedora desktop as well as the Fedora KDE spins were the first two to actually do this. And so we rolled out with KDE 3.5 in Fedora 7 in 2007 and we introduced KDE 4 and a year later with Fedora 9. So today, you know, we produce a KDE spin based on Plasma 5. We switched to Plasma 5 with Fedora 22 in 2015. Some special purpose variants, so these are called Fedora Labs in our ecosystem are based on KDE. Formerly we had a scientific spin that was based on it. Today I believe the most notable one is Fedora Jam. We are in this mid-transition to a more active project management structure. We are starting to use a Packer IO project for doing project tracking and we are in the process of scheduling regular meetings in IRC. One thing that Fedora KDE does differently from virtually all the other variants in Fedora is that we update the desktop environment software. So Plasma, KDE, KF5, Qt, all of those get updated continuously throughout the latest Fedora release. So we wind up saying like maybe it will release launches with 514 or 515 and it will get 516 and 517 and 518 and 519 and then when the next Fedora release comes out then that chain starts forward. So we kind of maintain updated fresh Plasma essentially as the KDE project releases it, we pull it into Fedora and push it out. And so like right now Fedora 32 is on 518. It definitely didn't launch with 518. It will get 519 as soon as we are done packaging it up and pushing it out. And 520 will also be released for Fedora 32 along with Fedora 33. I didn't mention it in here but we've also taken over providing KDE Plasma for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Sentos users. Those folks get it through Fedora extra packages for Enterprise Linux or Apple as it's called for short. And so for REL 8 and Sentos 8 users they get the Plasma 5 experience. So next and I guess I'll show a little bit of my desktop here because who doesn't love seeing stuff? Share my screen, select window, there we go. So you know this is obviously kind of boring this is SDDM at the lock screen. And so here's my desktop environment. So this is Fedora 32 with Plasma 518, 5 and as I said earlier we've got Firefox here. This actually isn't exactly bone stock Fedora 32, I'm actually testing some user experience changes that have been suggested to the SIG and trying to see how things work. But you can see we've got applications and stuff. This is otherwise pretty much stock. We've got our firewall there, DNF Dragora, and also system stuff here, system settings and Discover. And yeah so we've got pretty much everything you would expect to see in the environment. Just nothing too exciting and just to kind of show DNF, wow, upgrade. That's why I'm clearly not doing, there we go. This is what I get for not being so, what is it, having all my marbles or whatever when it comes to this. So we've got updates for new Firefox, Podman, MariaDB and stuff. It's a pretty simple and usable experience in my view and since that's and also fairly quick. And also Delta RPMs which is cool. I could talk on and on about the kind of basic stuff. So it should be almost done there, transaction test, and write, that will take a little bit of time actually while that is happening. Also showing, I've also got some of the things that are kind of coming down the pipeline which, oh right, mount. So like my file systems on ButterFS and so on, and I'll talk about that in a minute. There you go. It's pretty much, aside from, you know, it being Fedora, it's a pretty straight KD experience. Stop sharing my screen and so we're back to this. And you know, there we go. So as for what we're doing for the future, we're looking at ButterFS by default as I showed. I've already got it running in my machine. I've been using it for five years now and I've been pretty happy about that. So Fedora Workstation and Fedora KDE are driving the change for all the desktop variants of Fedora to switch to ButterFS. We are also planning on switching to Plasma Wayland by default for the next Fedora release. I actually submitted the change proposal yesterday so we'll see it. It'll probably make news when it gets picked up onto the interwebs later. But yeah, so we're going to pull that off and I think that dovetails quite nicely from Alish's talk just earlier where he was talking about doing all this work to make Plasma Wayland awesome. And I mean, frankly, one of my laptops runs Plasma with Wayland and it works mostly fine aside from one minor thing, which is weird and still trying to figure out everything generally works. We're also looking at paper cuts in the Fedora KDE experience. We've got some issues filed from some folks and we're looking at those. But the other interesting thing that we're looking at is providing an immutable OS variant called Fedora Kinoite. So some people may be aware that in the past there was a... So not in the past, but like a few releases ago, Fedora made waves with this Fedora Silver Blue variant, which is an immutable OS variant shipping the GNOME desktop. When that effort came to pass and we started having this, there was some work by members of our community to actually move to offering a version of this system with KDE. And we have the stuff needed to kind of make that and like Silver Blue, it would be using RPMOS tree for the base OS and we'd start providing flat packs of KDE applications and such for applications and ship those into it and have the Fedora toolbox environment to give you a more mutable shell to run things like developer tools, install command line utilities and stuff in a containerized environment. And all this effort is being tracked in the Fedora KDE SIG Packard project issue tracker. If you've got ideas, feel free to like jump in there and help us out. So the big thing is that we are trying very hard to offer a solid experience. We're revitalizing our communications and our active development kind of stuff. And we've got our project issue tracker and we have our mailing list and our IRC channel looking at setting up a matrix room and things like that. If you want to come and help us, you know, come join us, we'd be happy to have more contributors on to this and we have cookies and we give them out pretty freely. So yeah, any questions from the group? Unfortunately, I timed this for 30 minutes and which means I made it about half as long as I normally did to leave room for questions and stuff that seems possibly been a mistake. I don't know. Thanks a lot for the talk. That was great to see so much enthusiasm. I think we have one or two questions in the notes. So yeah, first question, do you think that if this spin or other Fedora spins become more popular in the future, would it be possible to support PowerPC64LE? Of course. I think the only reason we haven't done it is because nobody's ever asked for it. We build all the packages for Power, for system Z, for ARC64, for 32-bit ARM. Every architecture that Fedora supports, we have Plasma software for it. So if you'd like us to offer PowerPC64LE, please just file an issue on the SIG and let us know. We can figure out getting that made. It's not that hard to add another ISO to be produced for those people. And I know that the TALIS 2 workstation is starting to become a favorite of some folks. So I'm totally happy to see Fedora KDE on those systems. Cool. Yeah, second question. If I remember correctly, Plasma is not provided as optional desktop environment when installing Fedora. Any plan on giving Plasma some love and proposing it by default as an alternative to GNOME? So I think this comes with a little bit of a misunderstanding compared to how I feel like this is probably something inspired by how OpenSUSA and Debian may actually be presenting the desktops. In Fedora, the primary deliverable for desktops is through live media images. And there we have the workstation edition, which shifts GNOME. I am actually talking to the website's team about the idea of having Fedora KDE also be presented at the same level as the workstation edition. Some of the stats that Matthew Miller shared with us was indicated that despite the second-level marketing, like we're below the top-level fold, we are the most popular variant of Fedora outside of GNOME. And the most popular variant outside of the three editions compared to all the other ones combined. So we are popular enough that it is worth giving some stronger promotion. And we are a release-blocking variant. Like, Fedora does not make a release unless both GNOME and KDE are fully functional and working. So it matters to us quite a lot. So that's something that I would love to see. And I think we're hopefully going to see as we look at redesigning the Fedora websites and the marketing material as the rebranding for the new Fedora logo and all that stuff starts coming down the pipeline, which, yes, that's a thing. Maybe it'll happen as soon as everything is figured out with trademarks and stuff. Nice. So we have, yeah, even four more questions. That's great. So would it be possible to sync Fedora KDE releases with Plasma releases? No. Plasma releases too frequently. So the problem with it is that Plasma releases somewhere between three to four months. I don't actually remember the exact cadence, but it's more frequently than Fedora does. We do try to line up Fedora releases to the latest available Plasma release. And our compromise here is that we actually push updated releases of Plasma as they release to the latest Fedora release. So, for example, most likely either 519 or 520, hopefully 520, will actually be in Fedora 33. When 521 comes out, we will also push it to Fedora 33. That is we try to make the latest Plasma desktop available to the latest Fedora stable release so that this slight out of sync nature doesn't hurt us too badly. Yeah. All right. Then, oh, people like being on the bleeding edge. Do you think it's possible to have a repo with KDE packages from Git like OpenSUSA Krypton? Yeah, actually, yes. I think this would be a possibility. So it actually might even be easier than how it's done in OpenSUSA, which is a super convoluted process the last time I looked. Because Fedora's packaging is actually built in Git repo. So we have SRC.FedoraProject.org, which is where all of the packaging lives. And those are all Git repos. It'd be relatively straightforward to build some automation so that we can trivially take those packaging spec files, shimmy the latest Git commits or Git snapshots or whatever we want to do, and put that together, make a nightly, weekly, monthly, something composed that produces a beta image or something with the latest KDE stuff. We also already do, I think it's monthly re-spins of Fedora KDE. So whenever we do a rebase of KDE, that gets included in a monthly re-spin. Or is it weekly? I forget what the cadence is. But we do re-spins of all the media for all the variants on a fairly regular basis. And so updates get included through that as well. Nice. Okay. And two more questions at the moment. Is there a plan to offer Fedora KDE to hardware providers? I don't see. We don't currently have any plans per se, but that's also because I don't know how we would do it. Not that I'm not interested or the SIG may not be interested in it. But I literally do not know what that process would be to work with a hardware, with an IHV who makes computers to do that sort of thing. If someone wants to ship Fedora KDE on a laptop, like maybe the Slim Book folks want to do it for another KDE community version or Tuxedo or whatever, I really don't have a problem with that. And I think the rest of us would be fine with it as well. I think the main condition we would have is that we don't want installed versions to deviate too much from Fedora, the Fedora official image. I mean, this is what we're doing with Fedora Workstation with Lenovo. They don't deviate from our image much if at all, aside from providing a few legal documents that they're required to ship onto hardware. And I think we'd basically want the same kind of arrangement. Maybe we could talk about some other customizations. I don't know. But that's basically where I would see it would go for that. Nice, yeah. So last question for now. Is there plan to make spins more visible on the website? So it says currently it's basically just one square surrounded by lots of others. So it's easy to miss it. Yeah, I think this is definitely something we should look at for when we redo the website. So a lot of the work that we want to do to rejigger the branding, the websites, the marketing has been kind of holed up in the new Fedora logo that is still undergoing the legal process of getting trademark, getting the validations, getting all the crossing the T's, dotting the I's. I think with that, we will probably also look at making spins and labs more prominent in some way. I don't know explicitly how we're going to do it. But I think that we are definitely going to have to look at making this more visible and more prominent because it's unfair to the spins and the labs who put a lot of work into supporting their variants that they can't really get any users to see it unless they already know it's there, which is an horrible catch 22. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for the talk. Oh, in the chat, there was some back and forth about ButterFS. I've been happy with it personally. Well, thank you for that. Yeah. So some people had bad experiences and burned their fingers. Some love it. Oh, well, I guess time will tell how that goes. Thank you so much for your presentation. It was really fun. Yeah. Thank you. It was my pleasure. Yeah. So applause in the chat. Yay. Thanks, Neil. All right. We're staying with our new updated schedule, 10 minutes behind. So we have about a six minute break now. Thank you so much. Yeah. It was my pleasure. Thank you all.