 Welcome back from the short break. Our next talk is by Alex Paul Gonzalez. It's on a laptop by KDE. How does KDE conceive a device? All right. So, well, thanks again for putting up with me once more. And, well, while I'm repeating, I'm still going to introduce myself because, well, this presentation is going to be possibly the weirdest presentation I've ever done. I've always been talking about code and programs and executing applications and, well, Android and KDevelop and stuff like that. This time we're going to talk about hardware, which is a subject that, well, as in KDE, we don't know a lot about and, well, me myself. I don't know a lot about either. But, well, I'm super happy to be here and to be talking about that. In general, in KDE, we make software, right? We program. We think a lot about how people are going to use our software. And we, well, try to make everything very flexible. But then in the end, we make software, right? And our software, without any exception, needs to be running on hardware. So I'm really, really sure that all of you in your trajectory in KDE, have faced this, well, awkward conversation where people are telling you. So I hear that you work on this Linux thing, this KDE thing. Well, what should I buy? I want to use it, this thing. In the beginning, I had these kind of questions from my family and my friends. And, well, well, you can always say, well, you just buy anything because Linux works everywhere. It's amazing. It's brilliant. Well, what you still have are telling them, well, to wipe their operating system, to wipe what the provider they bought their laptop from, well, worked on putting there. And, well, change it into something that, well, me and another group of geeks have been working on. Admittedly, thousands and thousands of geeks, but still geeks on our, well, free time. Free time or professional time. But in general, we need to have something that we can tell people to use, to love and to embrace. And at the same time, we need to get closer to the users. Like I said on my other presentation, if you were there, one of the specific problems that I've detected since I've been working in KDE is that we are a bit far away from our users. Sometimes we need to strengthen this feedback loop to make sure that if there's an issue, they can get back at us and that when we provide something, that they can leverage it as soon as possible. And, well, this kind of ties to this project that we're going to talk about, which is what we ended up calling the KDE Slimbook. So here, you know about KDE, maybe. You know about Slimbook because, well, it was launched this month ago, but for those of you who don't, I'm going to give a bit of an idea of how the story went and how we ended up here with me talking about this weird, weird project. So everything started with Baldasar, who is a very stubborn person. And, well, he needed a laptop. He doesn't consider himself a developer or even a very tech-savvy person. And he found this company who actually is founded very near where he is from. And, well, they were selling Linux laptops, so it was kind of related to what I was saying before. He was asking for a really long time, how do I do to, well, get this KDE you guys are doing on my laptop? It's not that he didn't know the answer, right? He already had a blog for years about KDE. He had been reviewing our applications, but he clearly knew that it was too complex and that it was awkward to get a laptop with an operating system to wipe. So, well, he fell in love with the product and started to poke me about it, but to be honest, I didn't really do much about it at the time because, well, it was too early. I always need, like, a couple of months to be convinced on something. Then I started pushing it like a maniac, but I need a couple of months. And it was Academy EAS in 2016 when it was in Madrid and Baltasar, because he's very stubborn, he dragged Alejandro to join the Academy EAS where he had the presentation. Alejandro is the slimbo guy, as I usually call him when I talk to you guys. And, well, he started showing us, well, the laptops that they're selling and telling us about how and why they love Linux, making products with it, and so on and so forth. And at that point, we started talking about how we could... Well, they were actually discussing whether it would make sense to have slimbo laptops shipping Neon by default. And at that point, well, I mean, they could install Neon if they wanted, because, well, Neon is free for anyone to use, so, I mean, we don't even need to give them permission or anything like that, right? But it felt like too easy and too short and narrow-minded what we could achieve. And, well, to be honest, it was something that we have discussed with many members in KD Spain from long ago, especially Alex, where we're talking about how, for example, how Apple can very well integrate with the hardware they make because, well, they know what hardware is going to be there, and we never have had this opportunity. And, well, we had some people interested in us using their hardware and giving it some love, so it was thought at least. And it wasn't until Academy 2016 when we gathered again where... Well, I sat down with Jens and Thomas, and we had a set of very long conversations about whether it would make sense to make such a project, whether it would make sense to put a lot of, or some effort into having such product happening. Actually, one of my concerns in the beginning was that we would, well, announce it, and maybe it wouldn't be a big deal, so I actually wanted at least to have some kind of consensus with my friends and not be working alone on it because it wouldn't have sucked, which is, well, also kind of a reason for doing things in KD, right? You can always work from home alone, but if you don't want to work from home alone, well, KD is a place for doing it. In any case, at that point, we started discussing what we wanted, what was the kind of thing we could offer with, well, a reasonable amount of work, and that could be directly be useful to both our, well, directly our users and to communicate the KD values and, well, the plasma features, right? So we started working on it. That was after QtCon, of course. Maybe it was between September and December. And when we knew what we wanted, we started talking about distributions, and as you know, at the moment, we've only been offering, or Slimbook has only been offering the KD Slimbook with Neon. We talked about this subject with managed distributions. Actually, it was kind of the intention to see if it would be possible to work with others, but we still didn't want to lose the grip of making sure that if our KD developer submitted a fix, submitted a new version of some software, this software would get into the devices that the users are using, which is kind of, I would say, the whole point of having a device that is provided by KD. If KD is providing some kind of quality, this quality should be on the user's computer. It shouldn't be sitting on a gift repository waiting for it to be packaged waiting for a release cycle to arrive, because our release cycle is our release cycle, and, well, it's the best we got, at least at the moment. But then, as soon as all of this was decided, we worked on the website. Actually, if you think about it, well, this website and the .news was mostly what we did. So this website was mostly Jens's work. He did most of the text and all of the graphics. And, well, if you go through it beyond the KD Slimbook anecdote, if you want, you can see a little bit the kind of things we were thinking about, the kind of things we believe that are useful and beneficial about Plasma, and the reason why we think that people should be purchasing products that are powered by, well, not only by Plasma or KD software, but by free software and open source. And, well, then there was the device. This is one of the specific things about the device is the engraved logo. It's something that we also really kind of wanted. It would have been rather weird if we didn't have our own, well, footprint somehow on the device and what we got to use this laser engraving. And I think it looks pretty cool. Also, it was done by Jens, of course. I wouldn't have been able to use our logo on a laptop. But I think it looks great. Actually, like, this is the case that the previous version of the Slimbook was using. The newer version didn't allow for laser engraving, but we actually really, really asked them if we could do something like that because we like putting our logo everywhere. But then we wanted to have good coverage. We had the product more or less defined ready. We had customized it somehow. We knew what software we wanted, right? So it was a matter of telling the world about what we were about up to. So, well, first thing, Thomas worked on the dot story alone. If you go through it, you can also see kind of Thomas' story in it and all of our thoughts at that time. But, well, it's kind of related, obviously, to what the KD Slimbook website says. And then we believe that one of the big successes of the whole enterprise has been the media response. One of the facts is that the most visited news article in the dot last year was the Slimbook announcement. And, well, in fact, not only the dot article was quite spread at some point, but lots of news sites in the business were also telling about the project. It's interesting to see also what kind of things they were, well, putting the accent on regarding the project, like whether it was a Linux laptop itself and how it was a contrast to Windows. Actually, I don't really have this impression that Windows is the laptop thing anymore. Actually, lots of people are using Apple, but, well, it looks like ZDNet do still have this impression. PC Wall, some more local news. Also, the fact that Slimbook is a Spanish company got some special trading by Spanish press, or maybe just because my Google is assuming that since I am in Spain, I look for things in Spanish, who knows. But, in general, it had a good deal of localized coverage, which is always interesting, because we cannot always get ourselves everywhere and, well, seeing others, well, being a speaker of our thoughts, it's always nice, right? And in the end, well, the conclusion, after this was announced in January, I think it was, let's see if we can see it on the dot article. Oh, yeah, 26 January. And since we've sold 44 devices, well, it's up to you to decide if it's a lot or not. I believe it's really cool. Actually, it's more devices than we've ever sold. So it's interesting. Well, technically, it's Slimbook, so those devices, right? But it's been interesting to see people not only interested in using our software, but to put their bugs and their interest on buying something that they're going to be using for the next two, three, four years or more, right? I don't know how many people, how many years. People use our laptops, but I think it's really cool. So the thing about the conclusion is that I am going to not be giving a lot of conclusions yet. I think that it's, well, more than a project itself, it's been a task by us. It's something that we have never done, and it's something that we should be thinking about whether we want to do it again, whether it was a good idea, and whether we should be doing it again, right? So one of the things I would ask you to do is to talk to those Slimbook guys that have been on the halls during the whole weekend and during Academy As as well. I hope all of you have talked to them, and, well, before Alejandro is going to tell us something because, yes, yes, yes, yes, you're going to. Thank you. Well, it's a pleasure to be here being able to meet the KD members. We have been talking with, for the last few months, VML. We are happy to see our customers who bought our laptops a few months ago are still enjoying and use it. The event also, sorry, the event also being a good experience to meet new people who have shown interest on the laptops. KDE is a powerful yet simple desktop that we are proud of it with our laptops because we think it has a necessary to be used for new Linux users and more advanced developers. The best part of Linux is the community and we think truly believe that KDE is the best one. Well, I hear that they're leaving really soon so if you have something that you want to tell them, just run to them. Alejandro and Tesar, who I believe is still there, you can talk to them there. Really nice people and very passionate about their products. Also, talk to Jens, Harald, Thomas and Jennifer and myself who are the people who have been working the most on the project. I think that after this academy it will be the right time to start thinking about what are around conclusions and what we want to make of this laptop project, laptop enterprise. So talk to them, tell them your feelings, tell us your feelings, and well, there it will be where we will use them to make up our minds. And well, from here, thanks to all of them as well for all of this work. It's been not super rewarding work. We didn't really know what would happen, but well, in the end, I think it's been really fun. We've all learned a lot of it, a lot about, well, things that are not software itself. And well, my personal thanks to you guys. And now, if you have any questions, you can tell me, because well, I don't really have anything else more specific to say. Thanks, John. Any questions? Do you have ideas on how to turn that 44 devices into more like 440 or 44000? Sorry again. Do you have ideas on how to turn that 44 devices into something more like 440 or 4400? Is that even our job, do you think? Well, there's definitely ways. I mean, for marketing, I don't know, different device, more newer device, there's definitely ideas. The question is whether it's up to us or not, right? It's up to us to make sure that Linux and pre-sovere are viable on personal informatics, right? On professional informatics as well. And we need to make sure that we are capable of being there. That's the main point from my point of view. That doesn't mean that it's our responsibility to actually be the ones selling these laptops or actually pushing them. I would be the most honored though if all of those 44 million devices are running Plasma, Kiri Software, or even pre-software, right? But we need to make sure that we're doing the best. And actually, this is an enterprise to make sure that we're doing the best and to be able to define if we're not doing the best what we should be doing to be doing the best. How come you're not using one? That's a good question. I do have one, but I use it for testing mostly. One of the things we wanted to make sure is that when a new customer got one of these laptops, if he had a problem, we would be able to react properly, right? And, well, my system setup is crazy, and it's definitely not what we want to put on, well, a delivered laptop. So I thought it would be fine. The laptop, the delivered laptop I have, the password is one, two, three, four. If any of you still said you already know the password, right? And the idea is that if somebody finds a problem, I can give it to him and test it. That doesn't mean I couldn't have two of them, but, well, my budget is limited. You got time for one more, Christian? I was just going to ask, do you know what sort of people the 44 purchases are? Are they developers? There's a similar Dell program, but I think that's really just targeting developers in enterprises. So have the people who bought these KD laptops, are they developer software developers, or are they people who are going to just use a word processor, say, because maybe there's much more advantage in it being a developer machine than a thing for word processing, I don't know. Definitely, and it's actually part of the discussion. Something that I was literally discussing with Alejandro before is whether, like, who are these kind of laptops for, if it's more of a professional kind of user. Have you asked them to do a survey, because they're probably enthusiastic. They would respond. I don't really have the names of people because laws don't allow me to have such names. I know that many of the people who bought them are, they bought it specifically because it was something by KD and they're passionate about KD. Well, some developers, you can see some people around here and people on the outside. I don't really know if I know 44 people, right? So we don't really know all of the people who bought it. But definitely, having more information is one of the things that KD has to be doing for the next few years, not only coming from the laptops we might have sold, but on all of the projects and products we want on ourselves. We need to know more about Plasma users. We need to know more about Who Buys Limbooks. We need to know more about Contact users or KD Editor users. Are we going to see soon some kind of blog post or report about the experience of productizing KD? Yes, yes. I've thought about making a blog post. I probably want to do that, but I don't want to do it before I have, well, I have a conclusion, right? I think there are no more questions. Thanks, Alex, for the talk, for sharing the story of Slamebook. It's very nice to hear that. Thank you. Thank you, everyone.