 Ok, so I am a bit late to the party but last week I went to Berlin to learn about the latest next cloud version called Hub 5 and obviously as a KD developer I had the obvious question – hey, can we learn anything from them? So I'll talk about things like design applications and even offices. As a bit of a spoiler I managed to interview with the CEO and I even managed to make a trip to the KDE official offices for the first time as well. So let's get started right away talking about the design. With Hub 5, Next Cloud is introducing some sort of theme or design concept called Next Cloud Personal. Looking at it, it seems extremely similar to the material you concept by Google. It includes principles like focus on the content, ESO views and so on. I don't quite see significant differences concretely in the design which isn't bad. We have nice rounded corners and a blurry sidebar, I appreciate a lot, but maybe it's more a long-term thing. In KDE we don't quite have anything like that, except maybe the obvious simple but default powerful when needed. There aren't really great design pre-simples that we follow. We have mockups that we use as a reference and we try to stay consistent. I do wonder if this Next Cloud Personal idea is more of a marketing term or if it's something that we as KDE should kind of aim for. One concrete design element is that the accent color now can be set automatically based on the wallpaper, which again reminds me a lot of the material you idea and it is something that KDE also implements beautifully, if I may add. So we are good on that. One thing that is very appealing, Hub 5 introduced that design system, or I guess it could be called a toolkit. Basically they're ensuring their pen pot, which is basically an alternative to Figma materials so that everybody can mock up something using the official design and it's going to be nice and consistent. In KDE it's not quite like that. We do have some reference stuff on Figma, which is proprietary, whereas pen pot is open source, but it's not much and most developers or designers don't use it, again, proprietary. We would love to switch to pen pot, but sadly it hasn't been proved stable or powerful enough for us in the past, but maybe now it's the time to switch over. Food for thought. I'd love to copy NextCloud here. The next big focus of this release is collaboration between users, something that makes complete sense given NextCloud intended use case and something that's way less important here at KDE. The collaboration aspect is seen as an example in the circle feature. It's a set of users who can ask to join certain circles and when you're in, you have access to certain files with certain permissions. This is actually something that I think KDE needs, not in the desktop itself, but rather in KDE's NextCloud instance for developers. We do use NextCloud, we have some sort of a team structure, but it has very few teams and it's really confusing and you have to contact somebody specific to join a team. It's a bit messy. Then we have files themselves. The cool thing here is that there's a very powerful tag system. This is something that I would love to see in Dolphin as well. In theory, we do have some sort of tag thingy, but I've personally found it to be quite buggy and well, let me tell you about what NextCloud is doing. It's now possible to create some automatic actions to run when you tag a file. These seem to be just a couple, but still. As an example, converting a file to PDF when you set a certain tag or sharing files with a certain tag to circle people. You can also create rules to automatically add tags to certain files, which is pretty cool. Personally, I feel like sometimes a tag system with a nice search functionality is more effective than a folder system. Yeah, I said it. So it would be pretty cool to make our tagging system more powerful and maybe a bit automatic. Still, regarding files, there are a couple of things that I want to praise NextCloud for, even though it's nothing that we as KD would be interested in implementing. First up, you can share a file with a person, but disabled option to download that file. It will only be displayed with a watermark. This sounds pretty useful in some legal environments. Second up, if you start editing a file that's shared with other people with an application like, I don't know, Krita, which does not support editing the same file by multiple people at the same time, well, NextCloud will automatically lock it to prevent other people from working on it at the same time, which would obviously end up in work being thrown away. That also sounds pretty useful in various contexts. Even for me, I'd use NextCloud, and I often work with KD in live locally, and it would be a disaster if I were to work on a KD in live file at the same time as my editor is. So we've talked files. Now let's talk NextCloud talk. Talk is the application they use to manage calls between people, a bit like Google Meet, but it goes through your own server instead of Google's. It seems to me like the application is still paying ketchup with other solutions, even open source ones like Jitsi, and this update seems to bring a picture in picture. That is, you can get back to NextCloud whilst on a call and the video feed will stay at the bottom right part of the screen. This is not the only application implementing picture in picture lately. As an example, the big open source browser Firefox also implements it as a little window that you can drag around. And even though it seems to be very much a web thing, this PIP feature, it sounds like it would be really useful on a desktop as well. Say that you open a video or, I don't know, a master don't client with a video inside of it, and you want to have that just feed floating around. Can you do that? Well, kind of in KD Plasma. There is a KWin effect, whose name I forgot, but I'll edit in later, which allows you to use a shortcut to draw any window slightly transparent on the bottom right of the screen. Even if you change the desktop, it's still gonna stay there. However, you cannot move it around, which feels like a bit of a deal breaker, and even worse, if you minimize the application, it's going to freeze, since it won't be painted anymore. So not as appealing as could be. I would love to see a PIP as an actual feature and with a button to toggle it on and off directly in the title bar of any application. Agree? Disagree? So let's get back to NextCloud and switch to the notes application, which is basically a .md file editor. KD does have a couple of md file editors, such as costwriter. What NextCloud does is a nice, what you see is what you get type of thing, which I haven't seen that much in KD apps. What I'm particularly interested in, though, is the smart picker, which was introduced in hub for just a few months ago, and is now being improved. The idea is pretty simple. You press slash and you get a context menu with various kinds of content you can insert or different ways to insert content. It could be an address, which you can select from OpenStreetMap, or an image through Imgur dialogue as an example, or normal text, but generated with AI, or even transcribed from audio. We'll get back to this and so on. This kind of thing is useful basically anywhere. It's a list of ways to more easily insert text or images in any text field or input field. Because of that, we have this smart picker in a lot of places in NextCloud. We get something similar in applications where you write, like Notion, or even Ghost, which I use for my blog. Here's the thing. I see no reason why this should be a browser-only thing, quite the opposite. I think it would be extremely useful to have it in applications as well. However, this only works if it's consistent, so it would have to be some sort of a standard. Yeah, it's a bit of a long shot to think something like that could be implemented at a desktop level, but a man can dream, right? Oh yes, he can. By the way, NextCloud Notes application is also available on Android now, which also beats KD, which has no Android Notes application, unless you consider the Maui ones. So yeah, we should probably do that sooner or later. Finally, we get into the groupware stuff. This includes mail and calendar as an example, meaning that we can directly compare these to KDE offerings, like Kmail or Contact. Of course, that's only true up to a certain extent. Take NextCloud Emails as an example. You now have email group folders, which allow managing a mailbox by more than just one user. This could be a sales folder shared with a certain team or circle. This clearly has nothing to do with Kmail as an example or contact. But take this. NextCloud Email Client now allows you to unsubscribe for newsletter with just a click directly from the client itself. And I don't see any reason why a KDE email client couldn't have something like that. Or hear me out, according to the CEO, there's also plans of having a summary feature that takes an email or a thread and just summarizes it for you. This is something that's starting to pop up in some email clients. The one I use shortwave actually has that feature. And I don't see any reason why we couldn't offer something similar. This does raise concerns about privacy and AI. So let's talk risks of AI. Actually before we do that, as a bit of a side note, one of the things they announced is their own social, like improvements. One of the things they improved is their own social, which is NextCloud social, which optionally by the way connects to ActivityPub, so masternone and such. The little icon on the top bar for this application is a hearth, which at first made me think that they were announcing a NextCloud dating application, but that sucks, man. I'm sure that they have this feature ready for the next release, Hub 6.6. So anyway, I was saying AI. The CEO seems to be aware of the risks that are related to it, going from CHU footprint bias in the training material and of course privacy. As a direct example, every time I summarize one of my emails with shortwave, it probably gets sent off to OpenAI. And I'm sure that Sam Altman is in his house reading my correspondence all day long. Because of that, NextCloud gives a ethical rating to each AI service, going from red to green. As an example, image generation, text generation through OpenAI, these are all red services. They still allow you to turn them on if you want, but they do warn you that there's issues related to them. To each red AI service, they also try to offer a more green alternative. As an example, we have stable diffusion as the more ethical alternative to Dolly. Translation also has its own ethical solution called the NextCloud Translation System, which runs locally, so you don't have to send your data to somebody else to translate it. The text transcription through Whisper, which is yellow, because the training data technically isn't publicly available, that's a small issue. And then of course, we have a text generation. We already have ChatGPD, which is obviously a red type of service, but what about a more ethical one? Well, they did announce that they will release this year an NextCloud text model that you will be able to run locally. This way, none of your data gets sent to third-party companies, which is pretty interesting. This brings me back to the title of the video. NextCloud seems to be all in when it comes to the latest developments of AI. I mean, people are constantly asking us to start using AI, otherwise we'll be left out or something, but of course we rarely see practical, actionable suggestions. That's not very exciting, but we could make some use of AI in, as an example, managing bug reports, not to have like some auto-answer that would be annoying, but it could be useful to have systems that maybe check for duplicates automatically in a smart way or check if the component is correct or crash information might be missing, these kind of things. So we'd still need to send all bug reports text to OpenAI, but at least it's all public stuff anyway, so there's no big privacy concerns there, still not very good. To be clear, this is not something anybody in KDE is actively working on, it's just an idea that I saw in the chat, but okay, what about AI integration in the desktop itself? So personally, I do see some places where it would make sense. My let me repeat that very personal idea is that we could fit to something like chat GPT, the XML we use to save configs and user requests and basically allow the user to ask in a natural language to change certain settings, like set the login wallpaper to the same one as the desktop. That's maybe feasible, but has significant downsides. So it requires an active internet connection, it costs money to use OpenAI APIs and requires sending some data, not necessarily personal, but still to OpenAI. In this context, we very much need the same things that Nextcloud needs, an open source model that's able to run locally. It's not like having an open source model would mean that KDE would start using it, not at all actually, but it's the least we would need to even start a discussion about it. I want to finish up this video with two last things I'm kind of envious towards Nextcloud, but that aren't technical at all. So first one, offices. I've visited the Nextcloud offices and they look like this, well, so sure, Nextcloud actually has developers that they hire and they probably want a place where the employees work from, whereas KDE is more like volunteers around the globe. But still, KDE has offices, or rather an office. And I visited it just the day after. It looks like this. So I was super happy to be there with all of the KDE merch around the room and even an award for being the best desktop environment ever. Not exactly a recent award, but still. Now I'm not going to elaborate because this won't make any sense if I do, but look at this and then this. I don't know. I just really like the Nextcloud offices. Secondly, I've seen Nextcloud prepare for the announcement for the hub five whilst in Berlin and they decided to rent a stage with high tech cameras, which I'm very envious of to record a nice announcement as we would expect from bigger tech companies. Personally, I really like this approach and I would like to see something like this on the KDE side of things as well. Usually we just have some screen recording of the new feature, maybe a 3D rendering and just an article. It would be cool to have like big events like at Academy, where we do also have a big stage to perform announcements about the latest releases by KDE and then upload this. I would think like that's pretty cool. Wow. I have a 20 seconds left of recording, so let me just say thank you Nextcloud. That was seriously amazing and 10 seconds, thanks everybody for following, don't eat to the channels.