 Hello everyone, welcome to the first ever KD Academy workshop. Today we're here to give you a peek to the upcoming KD Academy event that will take place here at the University. We will also see how you can start your career in open source by contributing to the KD community. This workshop was organized by the University of Macedonia, the open source team of the University and the KD Academy. Now let's give a big shout out to our speakers, Nathus from Kontronis and Nate Rayard. Nathus has a ton of experience and love that he is very happy to serve for us and Nate's contributions have been crucial to the success of the KD project so we're super lucky to have both of them here. And today we'll give us some great insights about the KD Academy event that will happen in summer and how we can get involved with open source and make a difference to the KD world. So let's welcome Nathus and Nate. Thank you. Let's get this workshop started. Thank you very much for attending this presentation entitled Making a Difference, How to Contribute and Jumpstart Your Career in Free Software with the KDE community. So let's begin real fast. I'll start by introducing myself. My name is Nate Graham. I am a current KDE EV board member. For those who don't know, the KDE EV is the non-profit organization that helps to organize things behind KDE. I have been involved in KDE first as volunteer and now as an employed professional for six years now. And I feel very strongly that KDE is going to take over the world and make it a much better place. And now let me introduce my co-presenter, Neofitos. Thanks, Nate. So hi, everyone. My name is Neofitos Kolkotronis. As you might have guessed from that, I come from Cyprus but I currently live in Athens, Greece for the last five years. In my day job, I'm the Head of Product Services at the Management Consulting Company, specializing on topics like innovation and digital transformation. It's called foundations and foundation and it's based here in Athens. I have been a contributor to KDE for nearly six years now. Started contributing as a member of the promo team, soon switched to leading the goal of streamlining the onboarding process for the KDE users and new contributors. And I've been in the recent past part of KDE's bottom directors as well. I'm not a coder, if that means anything to you. I'm mostly involved in the community working on organizational and community topics within KDE. I guess you can bring it up now. Thank you. So let's get started here. Let's start by talking about what KDE is. Perhaps some of you in the audience have heard of KDE before and that would be amazing. But even those who have might not realize just how large and broad and deep KDE is in terms of its history and also in terms of its impact, both historically and also continuing today. So I'd like to talk a little bit about that so that we can all be on the same page regarding why at least why we think KDE matters. So first of all what is KDE? KDE is an international software community of people who make free software. KDE started in 1996 by building a desktop environment at the time called KDE, which has now been renamed and rebranded to Plasma, which is a graphical desktop environment. And since then KDE has branched out and also creates Plasma mobile for phones. KDE has an enormous suite of apps that it publishes, which can be used for any purpose under the sun practically, including some very large ones you might have heard of such as Krita, KadenLive and KSTARS. Krita is a professional painting app. KadenLive is a professional video editing app. And KSTARS is a professional astronomy and telescope driving app. We'll talk a little bit more about those later. In addition, KDE also publishes a set of development libraries that developers of C++ based apps can use to have an easier time doing development that are used in the industry. KDE also publishes the KDE Neon Linux distro, which makes it very easy to get KDE software and to use Plasma as a desktop environment. And this just kind of touches the very basics of what KDE has done over time, but I think it will suffice for the moment. So, Nate has already explained what KDE develops, the development wide variety of software. Maybe one question is why do we do that? What are we trying to achieve? Of course, it's global domination as Nate already mentioned, but maybe to answer this, you can have a look at our manifesto, our vision and our goals. All of these are things that help us define our values and how we work together. They give us, let's say, a path how we want to move forward. It's like a compass for us to follow if I can say that. So, if you look at our manifesto, you will see words like openness, like inclusion, like availability to everyone, innovation. We want and we try to do things in the open. We want to do things in engagement with our community and our users. We work collaboratively. And our vision is to change the world toward what we believe is important as KDE, but as also as individuals. And as you can see here in our vision on how we define it, it's a work in which everyone has control over their digital life and they enjoy freedom and privacy. Again, these are words that we are carefully and intentionally chosen by the community when we were working on our vision. So, we're doing this for everyone. We care about our digital lives. We care about freedom and privacy going forward. And the impact all of this will have in the humanities, if I can say that future. So, in addition to the above, for the last five to six years, we also choose selected goals every couple of years, which our community suggests and we all together vote upon them. So, we do this in order to help our community with, let's say, high level focus of what do we want to work on for the next years? What do we want to improve upon? Where do we want to put, let's say, our energy and efforts? So, this set of goals have been changing. We started back in 2018. We had a new set of goals in 2020. And now, our latest, let's say, goals, which were avoided at last year's academy in 2022, maybe I can quickly go through them. One is KD for all. And it's about boosting accessibility for so more people can enjoy what we do, no matter of any issues they might have. We want to increase our inclusion. It's about building sustainable software. We all know about the climate change being probably the biggest challenge that what is facing at the moment, and we want our software to be environmentally friendly to the extent possible as possible. And the third one is automation. We want to improve, let's say, our internal processes in order to increase the quality of our software and the products that we deliver to our end users. So, all these are things that help us drive us forward and hopefully they will inspire any of you that feel like they're potential contributors to what we do. Thank you. Oh, and let me mention something I briefly forgot earlier, which is if there are any questions, we're going to leave those until the end. We've scheduled some time at the end to answer questions from people in the local audience as well as the remote audience. So, if anybody would like to type some questions, we will be answering all of those. So, yeah, hold those until the end. So, moving on, I think we both briefly talked about how today has shaped how KDE has shaped today's world, but let's go into it in a little bit more detail now because it turns out that KDE has had quite a big impact over time. And I'd like to start with one interesting piece of history that folks may not know because this isn't as widely understood as I think it ought to be, but KDE has basically created the foundations of the entire modern web. And the way that this happened, it started way back in the late 90s with the creation of a web rendering engine called KHTML that was created by KDE, inside KDE, for KDE's web browser, which at the time was called Conqueror. This one down here in the top, in the bottom left, bottom right, excuse me. And Conqueror was a very successful early web browser, and KHTML as its rendering engine was also a very successful rendering engine. So much so that in the year 2001, Apple decided to use KHTML as the basis for its own web browser that it was developing at the time, which would later turn into Safari. For several years, Apple contributed to KHTML and upstreamed their contributions. And after a couple years of that, they decided to fork it, ultimately transforming it into something that they called WebKit, which continues today as the basis for Apple's Safari web browser and a lot of other ones. But this is all basically KDE technology under the hood. Later, after that, Google decided that they wanted to use WebKit for their web browser, which would later become Chrome, and they ended up forking WebKit into a new rendering engine called Blink, which is now used to power basically all Chrome and Chromium-based web browsers, not only Chrome itself, but tons and tons and tons of others all over the world, all over the software universe, including Microsoft Edge in a very interesting twist of fate. Microsoft has gone from being a major competitor in the browser wars to a consumer of Google technology, which is ultimately based on Apple technology, which is ultimately based on KDE technology. So in this way, every modern web browser, with the exception of those based on Firefox, are essentially built on top of KDE technology and so in that way, what KDE has done has an ongoing impact in shaping how the entire modern internet is rendered and displayed to people. Yeah, as you will see in the next slide, we're very proud for several things that our community has managed over there. I don't think we mentioned that KDE has been around for 25, probably 26 years by now. So it's been around for a while with thousands of competitors changing over the years, but you can see we're still here and very active and very proud for the things that our community has achieved over the years. So one of those things that is usually, let's say it puts us in the news and we're very honored as a community to have is that our software, the software that the community develops, is being used not only by the generic population, if I can say that, you know, from our users, but also from professionals that use it in their day-to-day workflows. KDE, as Kate mentioned, as Nate mentioned, develops a variety of apps that can be used in scientific research. Here you can see some examples. We made it easy for those interested to take a look and see what might be useful for them. So you can see there, we created a page, a dedicated one, where we showcase all the relevant products that we developed that can help scientists or academics. One big aspect for us that we're particularly excited about is the use of KDE software in professional science and research centers. You can see here, to be more specific, organizations like NASA are using Plasma, which is the desktop environment that KDE develops on their computers, sending missions to Mars or other planets, I don't know. Similarly, other organizations doing research on high-energy physics, astronomy, things like that are using it to power their systems. This is very, very crucial to us, as to an extent it validates the usefulness of the products we develop, right, and how they can be used in work environments and day-to-day workflows of professionals, improving the productivity and the efficiency of the people using it. All these organizations that I mentioned and many more, they require features and stability that the KDE software that we develop is in a position to offer that to them and we are very happy that they choose us. So just to mention here, as we mentioned scientists, we also have similarly similar pages. If you just use the KDE.org slash 4, then you will see that we have another webpage which is dedicated to creators, where we highlight applications that we develop that can be used by people in the creative industry or individuals doing production works or creating content. And we also have a page about children. This is actually one of our most popular apps that I use by children around the world. So if you're interested in that as well, there's a dedicated page for that also. Yeah, thank you for that. One other thing that I will just add to this, Neil Fitos mentioned that KDE has been there in NASA and maybe even in the Mars missions. We in fact just discovered confirmation a few days ago that KDE software was in fact powering the Mars missions, specifically the spirit and opportunity rovers, not the rovers themselves, but the mission control computers. So it's super-duper-duper exciting for our technology to be used to be really helping to advance the frontiers of science and human knowledge there. So there's another thing that we can look at regarding how KDE technology and software has had an impact, which is that it's increasingly being used to power tons and tons and tons of retail devices that regular people can go into stores and purchase. Maybe the most famous one these days is the Steam Deck up here in the top right, which is a handheld gaming computer made by Valve Corporation. And this has been a really huge smash hit selling over a million copies as of last year, maybe even 2 million now, I don't know, but it seems like it's doing very well. And I would like to imagine that at least one of the reasons for this is because it's running KDE software under the hood. The way that this product works is that it's first and foremost a gaming tablet, but you can turn it into desktop mode by docking it with your monitor and keyboard and mouse, and then it just turns into a normal computer. And in this mode, it's a normal computer that happens to be running KDE Plasma. So you get a full KDE software experience when you're using it in this mode. And we've gotten tons of feedback that this is a very nice ergonomic way to work. And so we're really very proud that our software has been used in this fantastic product. There are many more that you can see on this link that we have here, kde.org slash hardware. You can see a couple of the other examples of where KDE software has been used. A few others that I have highlighted on this page down here, we've got the PinePhone, which is a mobile phone, by the Pine64 company. This is a really interesting product too that showcases how mature KDE's mobile operating system is becoming. And it's something that is increasingly being used in other products too, that sometimes people have been basing their own software on. There was a unfortunately short-lived tablet iPad that was based entirely on Plasma Mobile and we expect that there will be many more in the future. And then down here in the bottom right, we have a couple of more conventional devices. We have some laptops in this case by Tuxedo Computers, which is a KDE patron. And they ship all of their devices with KDE Plasma at this point in time. So if you buy a computer from them, you always get KDE software. There are some Americans who also sell hardware with their software, a prominent one being SlimBook, which is based in Spain, Tuxedo being in Germany. And when you buy a computer from SlimBook, you also have the option to put KDE software on it. And the feedback that we get from these partners is that these products sell very well and customers like them. So we're really very honored that our software has been able to find such a useful and profitable niche in hardware. And personally, this is a topic that's very near and dear to my heart. Neil Feetos mentioned earlier where it's world domination, which is something that I talk a lot about, which is essentially the idea of getting KDE software to power every device on planet Earth. This is a moonshot goal of mine. And so every time somebody sells a device with Plasma on it or KDE technology in general, we get a little bit closer. And I think the reason why this is important is because unlike normal corporate goals by somebody like Microsoft or Apple, they of course want everybody to run their software too. But when you do so, ultimately your freedom is being diminished, not increased. And when you run KDE software on a device, your freedom is being increased. And so really our goal here is to increase the scope of human software freedom by making our software so accessible that everybody can use it, everybody can build on it, everybody can hack on it, fork it, do whatever they want with it, because we believe pretty passionately that this is how the world of digital technology should go. It shouldn't be controlled by vendors and lockdown and hidden behind paywalls. We think that everything should be open and free. And personally, I think that the best way to achieve this is to make our software accessible to people via physical devices, because these are the kinds of things that normal people like to buy. Most people don't change out the operating system on a device that they purchase. And so I think it's very important that we be very friendly to vendors. And so far there's a lot of evidence that this star of this project is increasing and we have an increasing number of vendors who are interested in doing this. So yeah, if you're interested in buying a device that has KDB software on it, check out kde.org-slash-hardware and see what's over there. Good. So we mentioned several times that KDB develops many applications as part of our software line. So we want here to introduce quickly some of the most popular apps that our community develops. So maybe you can all start to understand the broadness of our products and the types of users we have. As we, I think we mentioned it but KD is an umbrella community and organization, right? So we don't develop one product for one particular set of users. We develop probably hundreds of four applications that might have different end users from children to designers to content creators and things like that. So first up you can see here Krita. Krita is a very successful painting application for professionals, and also enthusiasts. It's used by thousands of artists across the world in order to create digital paintings and artwork. The product itself and the people that contribute to it have managed to create a big community of artists that use it, that provide feedback, that help with its development. As we mentioned earlier, all this is done collaboratively and with engaging our community. So many of these artists that are using Krita, they make a living of the artwork they are developing exclusively with it or maybe in collaboration with other open source applications and tools that you might have here of like InScape or GIMP and similar ones. Krita as an application has a bunch of powerful features that many proprietary applications are lacking and we know that there are already universities where it's been used in teaching in fine art courses and developing the future painters. So if you are an artist or a creative type that you want to develop your own magic comic or some sort of visual art, I'm sure you will appreciate all the possibilities that Krita offers. We can move on to another very successful app of ours, Kaden Light. It's a very popular application. This is a professional video editing application that everyone including you can use in order to edit your videos either for your personal use or for something you want to do as part of your job. We're very happy that Kaden Light has very recently completed their very successful crowdfunding campaign. This will enable its developers to spend even more time on these projects, take some time off from their day job and move it into Kaden Light, which is very important for us as we want our contributors to work more on developing the apps that we are already using and put in more effort. So funding campaigns like this really help in that front. So these developers can now improve the application, offer more features, more stability to their users and increase their base as well. You can download Kaden Light now on your computer and for any of your video production needs, you might have, it probably has more features that you can use of. You can create a movie with it. You can edit a video to upload it on the side of your preference. You can maybe want to make a fun video compilation of your photos or whatever. In case you can't see it, Kaden Light can deliver on that front and we're very proud of Kaden Light and the team that is producing it. And then the third app that we wanted to present to you today is G-Compre. It has a completely different target group compared to the other ones that we mentioned. It offers free educational games for very young children. I think it's between 2 and 12 years old. It might not sound very impressive to you or you might see the picture here and see, okay, it's something simple but it's worth mentioning that this is one of the most downloaded apps across our lineup, both on desktop but also on mobile and tablets a lot. Personally, I have a 15-year-old son. I use it already daily for him to play, you know, turn some cards, play some son games on it. He learns lots of stats through it throughout the day and it's worth mentioning that the community there and the people developing are very open to feedback. So if I found the mistake or something in the application, I can quickly make a back report that it's very responsive and they are very quick to adapt and you'll find the fix or they improve them in the next version. Just a few years ago we learned by accident that G-Complete is being used in public elementary schools across several districts in India which were very excited. You can imagine learning about that. I think it was by accident because we saw some Instagram hashtags with the G-Complete hashtag and we didn't expect. And then we realized that there was this whole new world of people using G-Complete. You know India is probably the biggest country by now in terms of population and we are very excited to see that G-Complete is being used in the schools. Teachers are using it to educate children and this means a lot to us. It means our software is helping people across the world. We have hundreds of children every day and they learn new things and improve their skills and move on. I see there's been a mistake here with the hidden live link. We can, I guess, send the direct link with G-Complete in the chat so if anyone wants to check that out. Sorry about that. Not the website for G-Complete. Yeah. Nate, back to you. Yeah, G-Complete is really great. My children have enjoyed playing it as well. It's used around the world in elementary schools so this is super impactful in a way that may not be obvious that people often don't think about. Moving on. Those three apps that were just mentioned are really just the tip of the iceberg here because KDE has, if you can believe this, over 200 apps that it regularly produces and distributes and develops. You can go to apps.kde.org to see the full assortment and hopefully find at least one KDE app that will meet your needs. We've got an absolutely enormous stable of apps here. A couple others that I will briefly mention which are very important and widely used. One is Ocular which is our document reader. Ocular is a very important app for several reasons. One because it is currently the only piece of software that we are aware of that is certified by the German government's Blauer Engel Blue Angel project for eco-friendliness. If you are looking for the most lightweight eco-friendly officially government certified document reader Ocular is the one. This brings me to the KDE ECO initiative which is something that's been going on for a while and it's also one of our goals which is to make our software eco-friendly. This is important not only in a global sense in the sense of saving energy and combating global warming but also in a personal sense because if your software uses less power and fewer CPU resources your system runs faster and your devices have much better battery life. So there are many reasons to go down this path and many advantages to it. Ocular we've seen is incredibly popular on Windows. It's an app that you can download from the Microsoft Store and we've seen that a lot of people like using it on Windows because of course Windows has historically not included its own PDF reader. So this piece of basic functionality for billions of users is something that KDE can help out with. So that's been a really impactful thing. Some other examples are the K-Mail and Cleopatra apps. K-Mail is KDE's venerable email app. Cleopatra is a digital certificate and signing management app and we have just learned fairly recently that KDE and Cleopatra are used by a KDE patron G10 code which develops the GNU PG software that you might have heard of and when packaged together in their bundle, this bundle is officially certified by NATO for use with restricted documents encrypting, decrypting and storing them. So that kind of blew my mind when I found out about this that we've... KDE software has helped humanity go to Mars and now it is also securing the most secret documents of NATO. So that's pretty crazy and there's tons more apps there. We could go on talking about apps forever because KDE has just so very many of them but I think we'll have to move on here. So if you're interested in this topic I would encourage you to check out the website over here apps.kde.org and see what KDE apps can do for you. So let's switch gears a little bit. We've been talking quite a bit about what KDE has done in an abstract way for people, for humans for the world but KDE isn't just a giant altruistic organization and of course if you participate in it there are many personal benefits. I know Niofi Joss and I have both had quite a bit of experience here and can share but it turns out that contributing to KDE can produce quite a lot of benefits for your own personal life as well. I'd like to start out with sort of a nuts and bolts topic which is skill building. So KDE is a volunteer organization first and foremost even though at this point KDE does have a small number of paid developers and there are some people who are paid and employed to work on KDE software most KDE activities are done by volunteers. And even those who are paid to work on KDE typically volunteer as well in their free time just because they love it so much I think that's definitely the case for a lot of people here. I know that's the case for myself as well I'm employed to work on KDE but I sought this out specifically because I wanted to do more of it I found that the volunteer time was not enough for me so I wanted to do more during my time in KDE the skills that I've built have been so much more than I imagined I could have done during that time because KDE uses industry standard tools and when you use them and interact with them you build industry standard skills. So a couple of examples are how KDE software in general is developed using C++ which is an industry standard at this point the build system that our software uses is CMake which is an industry standard so if you help to develop KDE software you will be either building or sharpening skills that are very much in demand and this will make you a much more competitive job candidate. Another thing is that because KDE is a volunteer operation in general the kinds of people who tend to volunteer tend to be the best and the brightest, the cream of the crop so when you're working on KDE software and when you're volunteering in the KDE community you have the opportunity to learn from the best in the industry. You essentially have a free pipeline to some of the brightest minds in the entire contemporary tech field and it's easy to underestimate how important this is but when you find yourself hanging around with and spending time with people who are truly exceptional some of that rubs off on you as well and I like to think that when people spend time volunteering for KDE it really helps them to become better skilled and better employees, better people in general. Another thing is that because we're here at a university I know there are many different models of learning but one thing that you really can do in KDE is you can learn by doing learning in a sort of a classroom setting that can work too but when you're working on KDE stuff you're actually working on specific projects you're not doing something that is sort of abstract and academic you're really applying skills that you have and that you're learning through specific projects and when you do this you get real world feedback from people because those projects matter, those projects are used and consumed by others they are used by others and when you do this there's always a way to improve every single time and so you can get feedback from actual users in a very concrete way where people can say well this worked for me this didn't work for me you know this this can be done better next time this was really wonderful and personally I found that that very direct feedback that you often have in KDE is something that's super duper impactful in helping you to build skills but another final thing is that you can also go at your own pace because since it's a volunteer operation there is no boss breathing down your neck telling you to have something done there's no professor giving you deadlines for projects you get to go at your own pace so if you have a lot of free time and you find a project that you really love you can put as much time into it as you want it's more limited or you lose interest you can work on something else or take a break for a while and we've seen that throughout KDE's history this cycle has recurred where we have people who volunteer a lot as young people and students then they take a break for a while to establish their career and then they often come back to KDE later and can bring some of their job skills with them to really help amp getting up to the next level and so there's always when you're doing things on a volunteer basis there's always no pressure basically so you get to determine how exactly you want to do it and we talked earlier just a moment ago about jobs and job skills it turns out that KDE is also a really good way to get a job in the industry I think a lot of people here in KDE have had this experience which is really true of myself as well but when you spend time in KDE and you do work on stuff everything that you do is public and so it's really easy to see what you do what you're capable of doing this makes things a lot easier for a prospective employer because instead of having to guess oh can this person do the work is this person actually any good they can just look at your demonstrated history of work it's all public right this kind of person who's pre-existing work fits well into our organization and so working in open source in general and KDE specifically has historically been a really great driver and predictor of having a successful career if you look at this slide over in the right side you can see just a few companies that have historically employed KDE contributors or have sponsored KDE contributors in some way you've got the Qt Company which is a very important one KDE software is all based on Qt in the end and so there's sort of a natural pipeline here GNU PG is something that I mentioned earlier GNU PG is the company that works on GNU PG itself they use KDE software all over the place both of these companies are KDE patrons Slimbook which I mentioned earlier in the hardware slide sells computers that run KDE software they also are a patron Tuxedo as well Blue Systems is my own employer and we are a software consultancy working on exclusively KDE topics it's another KDE patron there's SUSE which also has people working on KDE another KDE patron and then there's KDAB Bazazcom and Inokia who are KDE supporters and they have employed people who work on KDE as well and then finally we have Valve over in the corner whose work is super impactful to KDE so you might recognize some names here I assume some of these companies might be new some of them might be recognizable but there's a very rich ecosystem of employment opportunities surrounding KDE and all of these companies being in KDE's orbit means that there's sort of a natural jumping off point so if you decide that your work in KDE is really fulfilling and you enjoy it and you want to take it to the next level and you want to do it as more than just a volunteer there are always ways to make that happen and your time in KDE can become a very seamless transition into professional employment that can personally enrich you make the world a better place and hopefully you pay time to work on KDE software so that you can keep doing it as a passion project as well Just to note before I continue with the next slide Nate one thing that came into my mind one is to share my experience as well because I'm not as connected as I mentioned but still my contributions to KDE were very appreciated by my current employer because being part of KDE in the community and running projects for it and interacting with the community I got to increase my skills in community management interaction in promotion and things like that so when I came to Athens back five years ago I managed to get a job into a startup working with developers back then and that was responsible for managing let's say the online platform and the community for the developer so even if you are not a coder if you contribute based on all the things that Nate already mentioned there are opportunities and you know turn this into your favor and put all these skills that you received from KDE into use both in real life but also in your CV and managed to get a job even in companies that are not directly related to KDE this is what I wanted to add also one thing that I don't know if you mentioned there later on Nate but we haven't mentioned since we are talking maybe to students GSOC and season of KDE opportunities that we have I was just reminded by that I don't think there is currently an open thing let's say but maybe many of you listening are aware of the Google Summer of Code where students have the opportunity to work on specific projects KDE is usually part of this particularly in the last years so I think the applications for this year have ended but if you continue being a student and where you want to apply in the following years for new contributors to join us they get to work with a mentor they get to work on a project of that thing and I think GSOC also gives some payment to some extent for the work we put into it and at the same time we have our own Season of KDE which again we open up to external contributors and we try to bring the people in again with mentoring and targeting specific goals and specific targets for it but for students particularly it's a very good way to get your hands on something that you know a product that will get out in the market a product that has been used already and will give you experience interacting with the community interacting with developers and you know working on something that is doing is having an impact so I just want to open that parenthesis maybe people are interested I don't know if our team listening can share maybe some links with KDE you know websites so people listening can learn more now moving on to the next slide after that as you might have understood by now by joining and contributing to a community like KDE there are other similar communities at the same time right you will be becoming part of something much larger like a bigger ecosystem your contributions your work will be available exactly because of the open source nature of the software to millions of users having a global impact if you care like we do you're making a difference in things that matter and this is something very very important for us as well there's always a technological challenge there's always an innovative aspect of it but again a big part of it is why because we care about the goals our vision and we want to improve things for all of us this by itself it's a very strong motive for many of our community members and it can't be a very strong driving incentive for our contributors who often find that our vision our goals are things they can get behind and are very satisfied that their work supports something bigger something that is part of I can say global movement where many people are putting a lot of effort in order to push things forward so moving on to the to the next slide at the same time we already talk about the professional aspect of it being part of something bigger but it can also help you as a person and as well as a professional so being part of an international community with hundreds of contributors thousands over the year with a set of value of skills that to my at least experience are of immeasurable value like you learn to say some examples you learn to work remotely you learn to work collaboratively collaboratively within teams you learn to work using modern development and communication tools discussing making decisions in you know diverse environments with people that come from different cultures different backgrounds skills that focus already points to the communities all of these are skills that you can put to use in many aspects of your life not just your professional let's say resume and what it's very important as well and might often skip it is the fun aspect of it right in parallel there's the human aspect of being part of the community there's a fun aspect of being part of a community with similarly similarly oriented individuals having fun for many of us it's a very good opportunity to be introduced to new people coming from all the corners of the world learning about new and different cultures travel to various places where we held our events we all get together and I'm pretty sure that if you ask our contributors new and old most of them will tell you how meeting new people but also coming together with people that you work together maybe daily but also once a month depending on your time is I think one of the most exciting parts of becoming part of our community and like getting together with people meeting them having fun and working on things together like and putting them out there for people to use so I think this is a big aspect of why people enjoy being part of KDE and before we move on let me briefly echo what Nyofitos just said I agree entirely with all of that personally I would say that most of my social network and relationships are KDE based at this point I count I think I have more KDE friends than I have in person friends here so and personally I find that contributing to KDE is the most fun that I've ever had in my entire life so there are definitely strong aspects here of fun and community and friend building and purpose so it's not just dry boring technical coding although some people really love that for its own sake as well but yeah there's definitely a big social and community aspect here yeah I guess if you are a developer that you like to hide in your basement and just write code that's perfectly fine as well like as we mentioned in this community of people your code will be contributions will be very well received and that's also welcome we're just trying to highlight all the various ways that you can benefit or you might enjoy from being part of the community so I think talking about this getting together and people it's a good time to talk about academy it's KDE's annual conference and it's international event it draws hundreds of attendees from the global KDE community together every year in order to discuss and plan the future of the community and also the technology behind it so academy has a pretty standard structure nowadays and it's a certain aspect of the community I think it's been around for 20 years as an event now it has grown of course into something bigger back then when it started in terms of the practical things it features a two-day conference let's say with presentations on the latest KDE developments but also we often host people from similar projects like ours from the open source community in general to talk about their projects or maybe how they are using or implementing KDE technologies in their own projects and then the conference takes place over a weekend for two days and then for the next five days over the week we have various workshops what we call birds of feathers which is people gather together to talk on topics we have coding sessions like mini hackathons let's say but also we have a lot of community oriented events right where we get together we socialize we drink we eat and maybe do some sightseeing get a bit glimpse of the city and what it has to offer so it's academy it's a great opportunity to meet KDE contributors but also other people from my ecosystem other users you don't have to be a contributor necessarily in order to attend it's open to everyone you get to learn about all the latest features Joey a great atmosphere and feel like be part of a let's do things let's do things like that usually surrounds academy you'll have the chance there to meet our developers artists translators upstream and downstream maintainers users necessarily already mentioned open source enthusiasts professionals from all over the world so this is what academy is for us now talking a bit about its history and its purpose academy is very very important for us for several reasons maybe mainly to me it's it's central to our community as a place to meet we meet together in different locations every time so we meet between us but also we meet and learn about new people and new places every year it is for us a great place to be great relationships among our community we're not just random nicknames behind the computer we're actually people in person and it's always great to put a face in front of these names and nicknames so it helps us build a sense of community to strengthen the bonds between our contributors having maybe older and newer contributors mixed together people from different places that they wouldn't have a chance to meet together and then at different circumstances they get together they interact they learn more about each other what each one does and maybe it's a new opportunity to give new ideas about what he is doing and where he's going so in addition all these people aspect of it let's say of the community aspect of it and the networking opportunities academy is also important for us for developing our software so this is a key event where most of the developers are there and they talk to each other about how to move forward having all these people involved in development together at the same place at the same time means that many processes can be sped up difficult topics that maybe have come up in the recent past can be discussed can be resolved key decisions about how to move forward can be made that define the future of our software and our products so this is a very important aspect of it as well think of it like a sprint if you have an experience of how modern companies work on projects and maybe finally academy is a place where we have the annual meeting of our membership I think we mentioned this already but Katie is supported by an official non for profit organization which is registered in Germany which supports the community on financial organizational and legal matters so this organization is run by the board of directors that is elected by our members I think there are currently more than 100 maybe 120 or 130 active members that's like 142 I think something like that so a lot of people so every year at academy the meeting of our membership takes place where members get to discuss and vote on important topics related to the organization and related to the future of KDE it's worth mentioning here just so you know that to become a member other members of the organization need to vote you in recognizing your contributions to the community what you can offer to KDE how you have been contributing so far and how you can contribute in the future so moving on to the next slide now that you know what KDE and what academy are I think it's a great opportunity to invite you to this year's event taking place between the 15th and the 21st of July at the University of Macedonia from where we have many people watching us right now and that has helped us set up this workshop to give a personal touch as a person living in Greece for many years I'm personally very happy that this event will be coming to Greece it's never been held in Greece over the 20 years that it's been taking place so again I would like to thank the people from the university and the open source team there that helped us with this it's a unique opportunity for all of you listening to learn more about KDE get to meet our community get to meet our contributors and of course get involved see all the various aspects that you can get involved so if this sounds like something that would interest you would excite you feel free to go at the link here register to our event it's free and we will be happy to meet you in person in two months from now and it's so soon it's already and I guess since we're speaking of getting involved I'll switch back to UNITE so we can inform people about the various ways that you can get involved in the KDE and become part of this community so we've talked a lot about how KDE is mostly a volunteer organization and this is definitely true because of this KDE is fueled by the passion of people who use it and like it and make sure that it's software works really well so KDE has always been very very very interested in getting people on boarded and involved so we're going to talk a little bit about how you can get involved yourself if any of this sounds interesting to you so first of all we have a web page here that you can check out this is our general getinvolved page community.kde.org get underscore involved and on this page you can see a whole bunch of different ways that it is possible to get involved we've mentioned development of course because KDE is a software institution and we produce software and so development is very important and development isn't the only thing that goes into software there are other important things like design, like testing like QA like translation like icon work like promotion in the wider community there's so many different ways to get involved so if that's something that's interesting I would encourage you to check out this link one thing that I'll briefly talk on is my personal experience and my sort of pipeline of getting involved so I started using KDE software regularly in the year 2017 and I started using it really enjoyed it but I found some issues and bugs and things that can be improved and so I started submitting bug reports and bug reporting is a really great way to get involved because this is in addition to a way to get personal issues fixed by bringing them to the attention of developers it's also a first way for you to have contact with the community and be speaking with members and start to build social relationships and once you've started to submit bug reports at a certain point you'll start to notice that not all of them are getting fixed immediately because there are never enough resources for everything and so what I did at this point is I started moving into what's called bug triage which involves filtering bug reports to find ones that are actionable from ones that are not actionable this is something that anybody can do this doesn't really require any technical skills just organization and interest really one of the things that I discovered when I started doing this was that one of the reasons many bug reports were not fixed was because there were simply too many bug reports that were old and out of date and not relevant not actionable had been fixed many years ago and simply being a person who can go through those and say well this has already been fixed this one is not a KDE problem it's a problem with the app that's a very impactful way that anybody can get involved in the process you can be helping others another way to help others is by talking to users directly on KDE's forum discuss.kde.org there's also a very popular subreddit the r-r slash KDE subreddit which has at this point I think over almost or over 100,000 subscribers so there's a lot of people there and people have questions so simply helping people with their issues is another great way to get involved there in addition is a very active visual and user interface design group within KDE so if you like visual design or human computer interaction there are many opportunities to get involved here and have a really big difference make a really big difference because KDE historically has been very technical we have lots of developers rarely a major shortage of them but we can always use people with a good eye for design whether it's visual design or human computer interaction and user interface design so that's another great way to get involved translation as I mentioned earlier I'm going to come back to that now is very important because we're giving this presentation in English all of us here are fortunate enough to be able to communicate in native language but there are many languages on planet earth and it's very important that people be able to understand KDE software in their native language if they don't speak English uh oh have I frozen I can be at least finally okay that's good this is what I get for running released and early pre-alpha oh everything came back okay great so as you can see I'm a little bit on the wild side when it comes to this anyway as I was saying we need to test this right it's another way to help yes exactly um so as I was saying translating KDE software into your native language is another very impactful way to make a difference has the potential to open up the use of KDE software to millions perhaps even hundreds of millions of people we've had the experience that KDE software is often very well translated into European languages but less so into languages of the rest of the world and so especially if you speak a sort of a a language of somewhere from Asia or the Middle East or even a less common European language it's a huge way to make a difference very quickly and then of course as we mentioned you can come to Academy Academy is a great way to have a meeting of the minds to meet people and make new friends and learn how to contribute by having personal experiences and talking with people and learning in person so if that's a way you would like to get involved then you can do that and for those of you who are in person it's going to be held at your university so you don't even have to go very far but so we already mentioned that our community and users it's international right which means by default it's decentralized and we work remotely, synchronously ever since KDE's conception many years ago and far before it was a trend due to the pandemic and things like that so we've been doing remote work collaboratively and very productively for several decades now so to achieve this just so you know a bit how we are structured we have built and set up our infrastructure we have a system administration team that helps a lot with that in order to correspond to our needs so here you'll see some tools that we use in order to collaborate together products so we use let's say invent.kde.org if you go there you will see our githlab instas it's hosted there we host our codes we are after one of Persos projects so there you can check up all the actual development that takes place, preview comments download the codes, play with it send merge requests suggest changes, all those of things you can do via Invent you just need to apply maybe for an account and then you can start contributing now moving on to our communications we use a matrix instance if you're not aware about matrix it's an open source protocol for communications kde again hosts its own server where members of our community can create channels to talk to each other regarding the development of our software or maybe other topics that have more relaxed discussions on topics of their interest so if you go to webchats.kde.org you can yourself join you are at the web interface as well any of these channels that you like you can find the development for the projects we talked about today, you can find community channels you can find the design group and things like that we also have our infrastructure for holding video meetings and in the last couple of years we also held the academy online through it and we still offer it virtually for people that can attend in person so here it's what we're using today as well it's our Salesforce instance of big blue button another open source video calling software, we are an open source community so we try to consume ourselves open source products and we're very happy to use things that other people have developed that we like so again this is a very useful tool it's also very useful for educational purposes I don't know if your university uses it but it can be used in that purpose as well and of course we have our mailing list technologies has moved on a lot but the traditional email seems to be replaceable nowadays we have mailing lists both for community topics but also for development and for all the various projects that are being developed by our community there is discussion about moving this forward but for now you can find all these links into our getting bold page and these are in place in order to communicate our community to collaborate and work together and deliver software so moving on it's worth mentioning I think we already came back to it many times we are a large community with many topics and as you might understand not everyone works on everything so inevitably there are many many teams split into KDE they are created around the software to develop on the topic of the focus that contributors have so this means that if you want to join you will most likely find something that is of your interest you might be interested in application that has to do about your children you might be interested in an application that helps you create content you might be interested in the interface the visual design about translation that Nate mentioned earlier so here you can see various teams that we currently have but of course there are much much more there are like dozens of them just to quickly go through them frameworks it already mentioned are the libraries that KDE software is built upon so if you are interested it may be a bit more low level coding if I can say that those are ways that you can contribute via joining that team also we have dozens of applications some of the most popular ones we saw earlier there are much more to them so you can join any application you like contributing one thing we always like to suggest is that's by something you enjoy doing like if you like an application and want to help improve it start there it can be with some translation it can be with some back triaging or whatever but if you are working on something that you use and you see it being improved and you see your changes and your commits being shipped in the next version it's very self-fulfilling and at the same time it keeps you motivated and then you can move on from there to other things as well then there's a plasma team it's our flagship software in a way many people know us from that it ships with the devices that we mentioned earlier it's a desktop interface that ships it ships with many Linux distribution if you're using a Linux distribution it's possible that you're already using plasma or you have a chance to use it if you're using something else and it ships in popular devices like Steam nowadays also and then there are other teams that are not necessarily formed around software development let's say topics like design where people discuss the looks and the fields and the user interface of our software so you can continue with your opinion on that as well there's the eco team that is concerned we mentioned this in our goal as well with making our software as energy efficient as possible and how we can extend the work we put into this to other open source projects as well help them to be more energy efficient as well there's the quality assurance teams that it focuses on introducing processes and methods that improve the quality of code so our software it ships in a better form and better quality to our users so there are many many more where we already mentioned localization teams that translate our product into different languages so all of these can be a great step for you to be involved in our community understand more about our software and make your first step it vastly depends on what your anti-point is what your interests are it needs to click something in you and then you can start finding the right team and getting involved right and I think this brings us to the end of our presentation I think yes? that's right so yeah for questions extend the attention I guess to all of you watching if you have any questions since you want to ask about KD, open source academy or event or anything else that to your interest we would be very very happy to hear your questions I think we can start with the local team people watching us from the University of Macedonia and we can start with some questions from you if there are any in the room we don't have sound from the team there so if anyone wants to ask something just let us know if there are no questions maybe we can turn to our line audience I think at some point I notice around 50-60 people watching us there someone from our team can also inform us if we have any questions if you don't ask us anything we will start asking you when we put our fingers and say I'm going to start asking the people with all the stickers on their laptops what those stickers are exactly I see a lot of them so we have some questions from the remote attendees the first one is which languages do we need to know to start contributing okay I'll take this one the answer is I'm going to assume the question is about software development I would say that probably the two biggest languages that are used in KDE are C++ and QML C++ of course is an industry standard everybody knows it QML is a user interface design language that has been created by the Qt company and many pieces of KDE software are written in QML so one thing that we often find when people start talking about development and they ask which languages should I know is that they often greatly overestimate the amount that you need to know to start so I'll talk a little bit about this personally let me start by saying I am not either a talented or a skilled programmer I have learned some programming over time but I would say that it is very much not a natural thing for me I started contributing KDE code when I had almost no C++ knowledge but the thing about KDE code is that because it's in the open you can see what it's doing and KDE code tends to be very well written in general it's very easy to understand and so if you have any kind of previous programming background or experience or let's say experience even with scripting languages or something that was my case is that I did not know C++ but I had done some scripting and bash and python and pearl so if you're familiar with any kind of coding or scripting at all then you kind of understand the structure of how code works and your first contributions using a language that you don't understand can be very much a monkey see monkey do type of thing where you look at the code and you see what it's doing in one place and you can see okay if I copy that and modify it in like an easy way then I can change it to do what I want in such a circumstance you don't actually need to know very much at all and you can learn over time by doing but if you do want to formally study some languages that will help you in KDE I would say C++ in general C++ using the Qt framework specifically because all KDE software is based on Qt's version of C++ and Qt libraries when I say Qt I'm not using the word Qt as in small and adorable I'm pronouncing the Qt project the way they want it to be pronounced it's actually not Qt they want it to be pronounced Qt so this Qt toolkit is something that we use QML I found can be very approachable I think I had never used even a tiny bit before I used KDE but I find QML to be a very easy to learn language that newcomers can often get to grips with really quickly and really easily especially if you're sort of more of a user interface type person I would really recommend looking into QML do a quick tutorial start working on some KDE QML code that would be basically all of plasma a lot of modern apps all of KDE's mobile apps and some of KDE's older apps which have recently been ported if you're more of like a back end person definitely focus on C++ and Qt if you tend to be more interested in compilers and stuff CMake is a good place to start CMake is an industry standard build system so yeah those would be my recommendations for what to do and where to go I'm going to take one question from the remote attendees and one from the local audience so the first question from the local audience is will we see Rust being used in KDE projects are there discussions related to using Rust and integrating into existing KDE frameworks alright I'll take this one too if you don't mind so Rust is something that we're definitely seeing exploding in popularity one challenge of Rust is that the user interface toolkit story is not so mature right now so one thing that we in KDE basically believe is that it's a bit premature to be saying we're going to rewrite everything in Rust that said Rust definitely has a place in back end code that is very memory intensive that deals with low level stuff where you really don't want it to crash we are in fact seeing some small movements towards porting crash prone C++ code to Rust I know that there's currently an initiative to do this for KDE's Akonadi email and calendaring and personal information management system a KDE contributor named Carl Schwann is currently rewriting part of this in Rust so in terms of I would say targeted applications where Rust can make sense we're definitely starting to move towards this we're not anti Rust in any way but I would say that when it comes to writing an entire application in Rust that's a little bit premature because KDE has a very mature library of user interface components both on the C++ side and also on the QML side and that story is much less well developed for Rust so we're going to be taking it mostly for back end things right now thanks Nate so we have another question in fact we have many questions around 12 or 13 questions up to now oh good the other one is what are the short and mid goals of the KDE Plasma Mobile would you like to do this one Neophytas or should I talk about it? the short end I didn't get the second part of that question they're asking what are the short and mid goals for Plasma Mobile now Nate feel free I was hoping you knew more about Plasma Mobile than I did because I'm actually not super involved in Plasma Mobile I have a little bit of contact with it so I can talk in broad outlines here but not tons of specifics so Plasma Mobile of course is targeting mobile phones and also tablets I think probably the biggest goal of Plasma Mobile right now is to improve the distribution story when you have an x86 based computer it's relatively simple to install Linux on it because you just get a Linux distro everything uses x86 there's no problem but for mobile phones they all use ARM based hardware and everything ARM is kind of weird and custom so definitely one thing that we think would make Plasma Mobile more accessible is somehow improving the distribution story there and working to get Plasma Mobile as a software stack much more widely available on many different kinds of hardware without it being a sort of custom per device thing I know that there have been some efforts on that and some partnerships with other distros in my opinion this is probably the biggest thing that needs to happen but the way it generally right now because there isn't a super general purpose thing it means that anybody who wants to integrate Plasma Mobile onto a device needs to do some custom work and so we've seen some interest from device manufacturers from hardware partners essentially if you want Plasma Mobile on your device you need to either be a super nerd volunteer who can do it yourself or you need to put professional development time into making it work I think Plasma Mobile is already pretty awesome I've used it a little bit it definitely could benefit from more exposure, more real world usage, more development but I think it's definitely got a bright future when it comes to fighting against the proprietary platforms Just to add to what Nate already mentioned a big part of it is the hardware limitation in terms of it's not just Plasma that needs to improve it's the same time it's like the hardware that runs in the phones right so in order to be at a state that will be usable by majority of people so Plasma Mobile is already on many devices, hundreds of devices actually we mentioned the pine phone that were KDE ship Plasma Mobile ship there by default but to a large extent with Plasma and not just Plasma, other similar environments that are meant to be used on an ARM based phone they are very limited by the hardware under it and Nate already mentioned several issues with that many different things that one needs to take into consideration in order to do something to work it's not like a computer that it's much more standardized nowadays you can run a distribution on it and it will automatically run by default and set up everything like that so Plasma Mobile is developing but what you see is not you know being out there and getting into the people's hands is mostly limited by the level of the hardware that we have available to us now you know it needs to be open source and we need to have access to drivers that you know in order to improve let's say for example the graphics card or the calling or things like that so many aspects of it are limited by these kind of situations you need to you're able to maybe make it work on one device but you have many many issues making it work on two or three or hundreds of devices so it's not just a problem Plasma is facing everyone developing software in this you know field you will see that they have similar issues so we're working on it but hopefully we'll have the hardware at some point where we can prepare something more massive let's say mass production that we'll get to the heart of it for now it's mostly for developers and people that are enthusiastic and want to test things out and how things are improving it has progressed over the last I remember but when I joined it was just an idea and over the last years we've seen it chip on phones right and improve if you come to any of our events you will see how the devices are improving from year to year and how they are much more responsive how they can run apps nowadays they're much much more apps that you can download on your system I think they got but still for day to day usage we have a long way to work towards it yeah I think the example with the pine phone really illustrates the path forward here because with the pine phone this was a very inexpensive device that came preconfigured with plasma mobile and so you didn't have to do any of the super difficult installation and firmware flashing process to get it on there and so I think basically you're going to hear me talk about this a lot but I think more partnerships with hardware vendors is definitely in addition to being the way forward for KDE software in general I think it's especially going to be the case for plasma mobile because mobile phones mobile phone hardware tends to be so custom and there is so much lockdown proprietary firmware so we definitely need for people selling this hardware to put in some of the work of making the software work on it anyway I'll shut up about plasma mobile because I know there are other questions yes we do so there are two questions related to quality assurance I'm going to read both of them together so that maybe they are just integrated so the first one is from the local community how can we get involved to contributing to the quality assurance of the KDE ecosystem the other one is to contribute in the quality assurance are there any recommended minimum setup or configuration preferred by the groups hmm alright let me start with this one this is another subject quite close to me technically my job title in blue systems is QA manager so I have a lot to say about this topic quality assurance is definitely something that KDE can hugely benefit from I would say if you want to get involved in quality assurance there is a link at our get involved page maybe I can find it real fast while I'm talking here there's a whole bunch of things you can do so probably the first one is use KDE software because if you're using it that's the best way to find issues and QA related stuff with it the next thing that you can do is bug triage as I mentioned earlier once you find an issue submit a bug report for it on our official bug tracker do your best to report all the necessary information start working on bug triage for other issues and in the process you will probably start to notice a whole bunch of different things that will that you didn't even know were bugs because you don't use those features you'll start to get a 10,000 foot view of the entire project which is important so in terms of minimum setup for using KDE software I would always recommend using relatively recent versions of stuff so that means don't use Debian stable don't use an old Ubuntu LTS version always try to be using as close as possible to the most recent versions because otherwise you're just going to waste a lot of time you'll find issues that have been fixed weeks, months or even years ago and it's not a good use of your time so be using like a rolling release distro or a semi rolling distro or a discrete release distro that you always have upgraded to the latest version like Ubuntu non LTS versions like Fedora KDE KDE Neon can be a good platform too you can always run KDE Neon or any other distro in a virtual machine too if you are worried about polluting your local system with unstable packages as you can see from the hiccup I had earlier that's definitely a risk a thing that can happen when you're doing QA type stuff one thing that I will say about QA is that KDE has in general been improving on the QA front we have a lot of people who are using our software and who are reporting bugs what we don't have right now and this is something I feel very strongly about what we don't have is a strong pipeline within KDE from QA to development because often something that happens is that people find issues, they submit bug reports the bug report gets confirmed it accumulates duplicates and then nothing happens nobody fixes it so what we are desperately in need of is people who want to volunteer within KDE specifically to fix issues that the QA team and QA people find because simply finding issues isn't enough right like the whole point of QA is to find the issues and then somebody fixes them so it's a two-step process I would say we are definitely definitely definitely definitely in need of more people who are willing to work on QA issues rather than the fun sexy work which is making new features redesigning the way buttons are shaped increasing the corner radius that's all fun right what's a lot less fun is fixing boring bugs that you don't experience yourself so if that's something that you want to help out with please I implore anybody here who wants to do development topics pay attention to the QA stuff and people who want to do QA stuff please faithfully submit bug reports against modern versions and help to triage existing bug reports to make sure that the state of the bug tracker is accurate because that's how it becomes actionable when it faithfully reflects reality I could go on forever but I will ramble incoherently so I'm going to stop here unless anybody has variants of that question that they want to ask there is a follow-up question related to that they're saying that we were asking about specifically about code quality okay so that's definitely another topic I find that in general the quality of code in KDE is approximately 500% better than at any other place I've ever encountered including the professional companies that I've worked at because everything is out in the open anybody can see the code and improve the code because the kinds of people who are attracted to KDE tend to be pedantic nerds we never find a shortage of people who are interested in improving code quality importing to new APIs so if this is a topic that interests you I think KDE is a really great place to volunteer because you will find a lot of like-minded people who care very deeply about code quality, code correctness fixing bugs in the right location rather than shipping ugly work-arounds I would say sometimes KDE focuses on these things to a fault sometimes we find that an issue that is a prominent issue doesn't get fixed because we want to take the time to fix it in the correct way takes more time to fix it than doing an ugly work-around and in a commercial company it would be the opposite your boss is breathing down your neck boss says who cares, ship the ugly work-around we'll fix it later, the customer is happy and then the code quality suffers eventually the product becomes an unmaintainable mess and a new one is shipped and then you get to sell a new thing to customers so that's the way it works everywhere else but definitely not within KDE we have guidelines for code quality that can be found all over the place but in general I find that the kinds of people who contribute to KDE are simply people who care deeply about this topic as a matter of their inherent personality so if that's you, you will find a home here for sure so we have another follow-up question you have mentioned software being used in academic scientific settings are there any efforts or projects right now related to academia would you like to take this one Niafita? yeah sure, if you've seen the slide I don't know if you can go back to it if you go there into that webpage it's kde.org slash 4 slash those are all you can find their software that we develop and I think we also have a recommendation for software that we don't develop but can run very well together with our software and may interest you those are our applications that we are currently developing and there are teams around them so if you want to contribute to one of them or use any of them feel free to download and install them and start using them I don't know if this was the intention of them question hopefully that helps okay so the next question is have you guys ever considered using Rust go as a replacement for C++ so let me take that one when I'm asked this question I often like to pose a question back to the asker which is have you ever considered putting an airplane's jet engine into a boat to power it such a thing is probably possible they're both engines, they're both vehicles they both burn fuel to get from point A to point B but the devil's in the details because they do these things in very different ways they have different form factors they consume fuel at different rates they have different characteristics and it's the same thing with programming languages because KDE code is based on Qt and C++ we have literally millions tens maybe even hundreds of millions of lines of code that use C++ so just replace it with Rust or just replace it with Go is kind of the equivalent of saying delete all of KDE and start over from scratch it's kind of not a feasible proposal what we can do is in a targeted manner use different programming languages and different programming paradigms and different toolkits in places where it makes sense because C++ is showing its limitations I think we've definitely seen this in terms of crashiness and there is some interest in using Rust in the back end as I mentioned earlier to improve the memory safety and crash resistance of KDE code but in general suggestions to rewrite everything in Rust are not really actionable you have to see where it makes sense to do for a new project sure write it in whatever language you want but as I think we've mentioned KDE is 27 years old at this point KDE is a multi-generational institution we have a lot of software we have a lot of code it may be difficult to understand just how much code there is so it's kind of not feasible to say just rewrite everything and some fancy new thing so the next question is are there any in-person events in Asia? to my knowledge in terms of KDE maybe Annika you are more I was actually thinking the same yeah you are more in my position to talk about that so please free Annika is just to introduce you to the people listening Annika is part of the KDE team that helps us on community and promotional issues so she has much more knowledge than what we made on this front Annika go ahead so we are trying to do in-person events but not directly related to KDE but we are participating in different events related to FOSS or non-technical events if you in fact know somewhere we can contribute and we can definitely do something in Asia recently we participated in FOSS Asia in Singapore and I guess we can do many more events in fact we are participating in two more events in India in the coming months so yeah good and I think we have the KDE network in Asia as well yes we do I can share the links in the chat yeah awesome so you can find the other people from Asia who are interested in Asia and now you can organize together links let me also mention that this is a great translation opportunity we find that KDE is often underrepresented in Asia for the simple reason that our software is often not translated into the many languages of Asia so if anybody here knows any of those languages it's a super impactful way to contribute you know because there are there are hundreds of billions of people who speak languages that KDE software is not well translated into so definitely take a look at that okay so the next question is a bit long so I'll try to go slowly as I have been working through building frameworks and plasma which I have not yet been fully successful I have found differences between the wiki and the versions of KDE tools which I am using this has discouraged me from making corrections to the wiki I can imagine having different versions of the wiki pages each associated with the release of KDE kind of like how python.org lets you choose a version of the python.org page based on a specific python version who can help me with this so this is a good point I think you've definitely found a place where our documentation can be improved maybe this is possible to do on a wiki I'm not sure I know we have some wiki experts here who could maybe chime in but in general this sort of very targeted question it's actually good to go straight to the source so I would encourage you to go to the KDE develop room and ask your question there and start a conversation about onboarding which I think is that is super important I know it's particularly important to Neofitos who was the leader of the onboarding goal several years ago so maybe I will hand the rest of the question off to you at this point the idea is started again from personal experience so similarly how a person here is trying to do something and they find an issue that's how I started working on this goal and then I realized that it's not just me I'm trying to help on that front and I set up and suggested some processes or some ideas of how we can move this forward in order to help with onboarding people obviously documentation in the wiki is a big part of it it's very very helpful particularly for developers or people that are interested in developing code we do currently have people actually being employed by KDE to improve our documentation because we feel this is something very very important we continue to work upon that but of course if you find something that you need you feel like it could be improved feel free to reach out to the documentation team there's probably an email next to where you found the documentation so you can reach out to someone or maybe even suggest your own changes or maybe try to get some help on how you can commit those changes to our wiki so you know your problems maybe you can fix them and help other people to not have those problems going forward so that would be an ideal scenario or maybe we can help you with that if you found something yeah let me mention one final thing the development onboarding page that we have is something that has been subject to a lot of revision over time because people approach with so many different setups some people want to use Arch which is easy some people want to use Debian Stable which is hard some people want to use Windows which is impossible unless you use a VM so it may indeed make sense to have multiple versions of this wiki page and then you choose your platform you say what environment you're using and then you get a set of documentation that works specifically for that platform I could see that making sense that said it's a wiki which means anybody can update it and change it so I would really encourage you to if you don't feel comfortable actually making such a change reach out to other people in the KDE develop room in other similar places and propose the topic get some agreement on it and then if there is agreement on it make that change that can be a really great way to get started is the people who are struggling with documentation are usually the best people to improve the documentation as counter intuitive as that sounds yeah and talking to other people will give you feedback on is it what you're so valid is it what you're looking into and maybe also give you some guidance on how to work on improving it right so don't be shy reach out and I'm sure people will be happy to help you okay so the next question we have have you thought for a storytelling app with scenario structure and timeline characters and plot design and different pathways like Scrivener I guess maybe I am not aware of anything like that currently within KDE maybe I'm wrong there are so many apps it's hard to keep track it sounds like a good idea I think that this maybe one of those things where you can scratch your own itch if it's something that you'd like to see be the change you want to see in the world yeah maybe it's a good point to point out how the community works like we are a bit autonomous in that way and self driven so it's not like we get together and decide hey we need to develop this app and then we tell people you and you and you go work on this app it's usually quite the opposite it's like a bottom up approach people get together they find a need for some specific app or if I use kits for a specific app they have interest in developing it they start and then because we're a big community if you start on something then it's very easy for someone that's to jump and help you know someone it will catch the interest of someone else if you announce it I want to do this as long as it's it fits under our manifesto in the way we do things it's very easy to pick it up and then once you start working on it where you will find other I'm pretty sure you'll find other people and start growing a project so yeah so the next question yeah okay so the next question is can one contribute to the Qt6 migration without having to have a local Qt5 setup I'll take this one yes it's possible I think it makes it a little bit more difficult because not all software is currently ported to Qt6 so without having Qt5 you won't be able to run anything that isn't ported which may make porting a little bit more challenging but in principle if you want to be very adventurous you can have only Qt6 and when you find an app that doesn't build or doesn't run on Qt6 you can just immediately port it and get it working so yeah feel free sounds good it sounds like an adventure so I would say get started and see what happens so the next question is how to create new holidays for a given country in the plasma panels date widget okay so that one is fairly straightforward the holidays data lives in a KDE framework called K-holidays so you would find that framework on invent.kd.org check out the code find the place for your country's holidays follow the pattern add a new holiday and submit a merch request for it so the next question is what versioning tools or platforms are being used by KDE get Mercurial etc I feel like I've been talking too much Neophytos would you like to take this one or should I it's okay it's okay I mean you are the expert on the developer oh gosh if I'm an expert in development then the world is in trouble I should definitely not be considered an expert in development but anyway so KDE predominantly uses get one exception is the translation system still uses SVN I'm not aware of us using Mercurial or anything else anywhere so yeah so the next question is does KDE echo also have opportunities to contribute code which doesn't involve writing benchmarking code I don't know the answer to that question my first response would be to say yes I don't know maybe you know something more but I would strongly urge you to reach out to the KDE co-people and ask your question there there's a chat on matrix and there's a mailing list as well it's a new project so it's very active and we have many people on board so I'm pretty confident that you'll get an immediate response if you show interest in contributing I don't know if you have anything more to add I can add a little bit I think this is fairly similar to the QA question and the structure is similar where any good quality assurance effort consists of two parts part number one is identify the issues part number two is fix them so benchmarking is definitely important to find issues but of course if we have everything benchmarked and nobody knows how to fix them the whole exercise was completely pointless so the point of benchmarking is to identify places that need to be fixed so if you have more interest in fixing code to make it run in a more efficient way then that's basically step two of the echo process so definitely get involved there it's kind of like how QA QA first involves finding issues reporting them and then ultimately fixing them because if they don't get fixed then what was the point so we have only four minutes left I'm just going to pick choose some questions now this one is really interesting can I use conky character in my games interesting that's a license question I'm not the strongest on licensing would you like to speak on this a little bit neofitas I seem to recall that conky's license ask eddie whether an open source license or you know copy left license I don't recall exactly the one I think we have a website that's dedicated to that and you can check there the license from me fine in any case my answer would be I'm pretty if especially if you give contribution I'm pretty content not be an issue like say that conky was developed by eddie and havelink or something that should cover it most of the time so yeah all right the page the chat okay so the next question is are there any projects in the eddie world that is developing support for VR or AR hardware so I'll take this one very briefly I know that in the kwin window manager we are explicitly supporting VR headsets I'm not aware of any ongoing project within KDE to do something in a more user space direction like VR plasma or VR dolphin sounds interesting but I don't think we're doing that at the moment okay there's another question what do you think the biggest next step would be to move KDE closer to the world domination compared to the KDE software that we already do I don't know if I can do this in two minutes I will try in like 10 seconds more hardware classic talk at the academy about that so you should join us I do yeah you can see that if you go to my site pointstick.com there's a whole category called world domination so you can see my thoughts on that subject in a more extended fashion so yeah that's fine yeah I think you had the right idea to point people there but in a nutshell hardware sell hardware make it easy for people to use our software without going through the you know through the whole download something get it on you know an ISO install it do some you know fixes and then you're ready to go there it is you get the device you start using the software you don't ask any question what this does it run and things like that but it's something that are smooth with quality of software and you know people just use it most people will not get with their software they will use whatever it comes into their hands so if it's fine it works it will be happy with it so that's what I had in that front it's like 2% of the population that can install an ISO on you know on a device right like nobody can do that we can we're weird but most people cannot do that the one last question and then we are going to outro how our partnership with vendors initiated are there any specific groups for it very good question that's a good place to end to so this is something that the board is involved with quite a lot and you know fetus has been a board member in the past I'm a current board member so both of us could talk a little bit more about this if we wanted to but in general hardware vendor partnerships are intermediated through the board if the vendor is also a KDE patron there are other cases where the vendor is not a KDE patron one example is valve with the steam deck valve does not have a personal relationship with KDE instead valve has a relationship with the company I work for blue systems and so in that case the relationship is managed externally and those of us who work at those companies wear multiple hats so right now I'm wearing my KDE hat but then right after I sign off here I'm actually going to go to work and I'm going to put on my blue systems hat and I'm going to attempt faithfully to represent KDE's interests in that partnership there are some other ones that work that way so in general it's through third party companies or through the board we had no questions but now because the time has ended so I'm just going to ask the university if they could just do the conclusion of the session okay so I want to close this event I want to wait can't see me I want to thank our speakers Nate and Miofito so I want to thank everybody here for attending thank everybody who is attending online all the slides that the guys have presented us here will be sent in the email you've used for your registration and we hope to see you all in the upcoming academy third week of July from 15th to 21st so thank you for this great workshop thank you like all the people there that work and actually put all the hard work to organise this at the local level and the scenes and other people working on the streaming and managing questions and things like that so many many thanks to all of you for setting this up and giving us the opportunity to talk about KD and ourselves right how we plan to dominate the board so yeah thank you so much I would say this is probably the most polished and professional conferencing setup I've ever seen I'm super impressed I've even noticed that the camera focuses on the person who's to the microphone that's recording the loudest audience is amazing stuff so you should be very proud of the setup that you have here definitely thank you for inviting us here to Yammer on about KDE for a while it's something that we're all very passionate about and I hope that something that we said can be interesting and useful and actionable to those of you in the audience as well so thank you very much for your time and come and meet us right so the academy the master now at the University of Macedonia will be especially local you have no excuse you have to come to academy exactly great take good care people thank you