 Does Valve pay KDE? Why did Valve choose KDE? I went to Barcelona to find out. I'm currently at Academy, which is the largest KDE conference. All of the KDE developers who could attend are here. Super exciting. One in particular, David Headmondson, has held a talk about the Steam Deck, actually using a Steam Deck to do the presentation, which is super exciting by itself. Now in the presentation, it talked about many things, but what I think is most interesting, the relationship between KDE and Valve and how actually Valve contributed to KDE and to what extent. Let me start off by saying that technically Valve did not pay KDE as far as I know, but they did contract BlueSystem. BlueSystem is a company that is very close to KDE and that actually employs many developers that work full-time at this point at KDE. So they did that. Now BlueSystem was contracted to implement a variety of stuff. I'm going to go through them. Let me see if I can bring up the slides here. First of all, we have a lot of things regarding system settings, like the ability to highlight the settings that have been changed, making sure that the revert to default button actually works throughout system settings and actually the implementation of the firewall KCM, that is the system setting page for firewall. They also ask for better network resources monitoring and also a new backend for system monitor for GPUs and better system monitors that you can actually have as widgets on the desktop. The landing page of the system settings is also asked by Valve to BlueSystems and then we have a variety of power profile stuff. So switching, managing the app resources via C-groups, the foreground app boosting, there has been a Gwenn view overall and speed improvements, spectacle, streamlining, so making sure that it works nicely and console reflow, the ability to actually reflow the text when you change the size of console that came from this project too. They also help with startup performance improvements, more robust system de-managed boot, microphone volume indicators and some of key Iofuse and of course the Steam Deck only uses flat packs for apps to actually be installed because the root system is immutable. So improvements have been done there as well, such as partial support for drag and dropping outside of the file system, the KDE API for process spawning outside the sandbox, portal things, this kind of stuff. Also Wayland, the Steam Deck currently does not use Wayland, it uses X11 still, but they do want eventually, they know that Wayland is the next thing, so there has been work on Wayland as well. Now Wayland is a bit of a more big topic that goes beyond KDE so it wasn't, David didn't go too into details about this. What does this tell us about Valve and their involvement with KDE? All of these things actually go beyond the scope of the Steam Deck, which means that Steam Valve actually cares about the environment that they are creating around the Steam Deck, so SteamOS. And they also said that they were surprised by the popularity of the desktop mode, they did not expect people to like it so much, so that is something that KDE can pride themselves in actually making a good product that Steam Deck user owners actually wanted to use. David also talked about why did Valve choose KDE and his answer is that, well because they use KDE and they like it and they're making a product that is targeted to somebody that is similar in interest, if I understood this correctly, to the Valve developers themselves. This was for the Steam Deck. What else has happened to Barcelona Academy? There were actually some significant announcements, we have had the goals, we have conquered the world by need, I'm going to go through this talk so that just by watching this video you're updated on everything. However I do want to say something first and that is thanks to the sponsors of this video, which is Internext. They offer secure cloud storage and secure because they have end-to-end encryption, modern zero knowledge protocols and they are transparent, that is all of their code is open source on GitHub and you can actually check it out for yourselves. That way all of your files and photos are always 100% secure and private and you know what's going on and you are in control of it. Now why should you use cloud storage at all anyway? Well it's the best way to make sure that all of your files and photos are in the same place and you can access them regardless of your devices and they are in sync between your devices. 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So if you're interested they actually give up to 10 gigabytes to everyone starting from 2 and then reaching to them with the various tasks that you can accomplish and if that's not enough storage for you, you can actually use code NICO25 as in NICOLOPS Linux, NICO25 to get 25% off any Internext annual plan. So open source, private, try out Internext. Okay I'm actually losing the sun, I'm in Barcelona so I don't actually have my room with a green screen and everything so this is the only setup I can set up. So let's go through what I promised. First there's the talk by Nate which is called conquering the world. This is the second talk that he gives about this, it's an update, last time he talked about how to reach that goal and now he talks about whether we reached it. He talks about the fact that a KDE is now out of the box on many devices, he talks about Pine 64 but also SlimBook, KFocus, I've done a video on KFocus, I will do one video about SlimBook and also Tuxedo actually switched to Plasma for all of their computers out of the box with Tuxedo S which is great and Plasma is also out of the box on a variety of devices that are not just Linux desktops or laptops but are completely different form factors which is what's so exciting. We're talking as an example about the Steam Deck, obviously, but also the Pine Phone and the Pine Phone Pro and we also got the Microsoft AI Mark II which is something like Google Home but open source that actually runs Plasma under the hood and uses Kuri Gami for the interface so it is very much a KDE product and there's also the Plasma device, very new, which is the Minis Forum, a light mini, elite mini, I don't know how it's as that pronounced from Manjaro. So there's a lot of devices that even go beyond the traditional form factors that actually use Plasma out of the box and that is awesome. There are however some challenges obviously. He talks about how the Plasma LTS, that is the long-term support version, is not as good as it could be and right now it should be either improved or dismissed entirely depending on you know what's our goal and the reasons for the long-term support to be dismissed this way is because it's not that used by devs themselves and when developers don't use something it's hard to notice that it has some bugs or some things that could improve and also there's not enough backporting of backfixes from the latest versions to the LTS one. Finally there's no LTS frameworks or applications which means that those have to be freezed at a certain version that aligns with the Plasma LTS version and that means no backfixes whatsoever backported to frameworks and apps which is an issue. Then there's also a lot of reinventing the distro wheel so SteamOS, OpenVoiceOS, TuxedoS, Kubuntu, Manjaro, KD Neon, all of these distros are built on Plasma, they use it, they customize it a bit, they're all different in packaging and that of course is a lot of packaging work that has to be done every time you need to bring something to each of these distros. So there's talks of maybe doing a reference KD distro to unify a bit them, that was one of the proposed solutions and there's also a discussion of bug fixing, sorry, responsibility. So one solution that was proposed that I really like is having a KD channel where you can go and actually pay for targeted developer work. So a company like Kefaucus and as an example or SlimBook could go to this channel say okay one of my machines that runs Plasma has this back, I need it to be fixed very urgently and actually pays for this dev work which is prioratory for them. He hands the talk talking about how you should please use the long-term support versions to actually check out whether they work or not, which is okay for enough important and that was actually it, like that was the last slide. Then there's what has happened in Plasma Mobile in 2022, another very exciting talk, all of this is from Saturday and there's actually a lot that has happened, there's a new home screen very recently also there's support for gestures when sliding from the bottom and one cool thing is that there's a lot of focus on convergence meaning that the panels that are on the phone at the top and at the bottom under the hood are the same exact panels that are on Plasma desktop and applications as well there's a variety of application discoverer, Lisa, Coco casts, NeoChat that are actually convergent and my camera is actually suffering to make, there's not enough light anymore, let's finish this. All of these applications are convergent, they work on your phone, they work on your laptop with the same exact code base which is awesome. There's also of course a variety of apps that are meant to be used on phones such as Angelfish which is the browser, QML console which is console but for the phone and built-in QML and Index which is the file manager by Maui. All of these applications are released in three different cycles which is Plasma mobile gear for the fastest ones because stuff like the dialer is back fixed a lot so it needs a lot of updates then there's the kitty gear which is slightly slower and of course Maui for Maui apps has its own release schedule. Finally, Kurgami has been proved now there's new components like navigation tab bar, dialogues, form components and challenges that we should face in the future are the fact that vendors lock in their phones a lot so you can't really try to change the operating system but there's projects like post market twice that supports devices such as OnePlus 6 to make as an example. There's also a big fragmentation of open mobile communities the plan for the future of Plasma mobile is better stability and performance, KDPM that is the personal information manager, calendars, emails, get that to Plasma mobile, tablet support and convergence that is supporting multiple displays and multi-window mode. They ended the talk saying that Plasma mobile currently needs more contributors so if you're interested in the project what are you waiting for? Finally I'll probably do a bit about that in Charlie because it's just so important we have new goals and the goals are kitty for all accessibility by Carl Schwann, automatize everything by Nate Graham and sustainable software by if I understood this correctly Cornelius. What are they about? Well accessibility explains itself I think. Automatize there are a couple of examples that were done as an example GitLab as a CI that could be improved you could make sure that in order to merge a merge request you have to make sure that all the tests pass that is something that could be done and also sustainable sorry and also having the documentation directly in the repository with the code would actually allow this is a very specific example to ask merge request please change the documentation as well as the code in the same merge request so that I can actually accept this which is very nice sustainable software instead talks about an environment and the sustainability from an environmental point of view of kitty software making sure that he doesn't use more resources that needed so this is Saturday of kitty academy there's still Sunday today is Sunday I'm recording this what can I say the kitty academy is so exciting I've also done a podcast talking about the goals but you know it's actually shorter that this video this video is more in depth so you're up to date don't worry and hopefully see you tomorrow with another video I hope this was useful hi from Barcelona