One of the biggest things you can do for KDE (that does not involve coding) is helping us organize Akademy.

Now is your chance to become KDE champions and help make Akademy 2024 happen! We are looking to host Akademy 2024 during the months of June, July, August, and September. Download the Call for Hosts guide, and submit a proposal to host Akademy in your city to akademy-proposals@kde.org by October 1, 2023.

Do not hesitate to send us your questions and concerns! We are here to help you organize a successful event and you can reach out at any time for advice, guidance, or any assistance you may need. We will support you and help you make Akademy 2024 an event to remember.

Plasma 6 release day is getting closer... and we still have no wallpaper to use! But we're going to change that with your help and this contest! We are calling on all artists to submit their original wallpaper designs and compete for the chance to win a brand-new laptop (see below). The contest will be open for three months, starting now!

The Contest

The winning entry will be used as the default wallpaper for KDE Plasma 6.0. Learn more about Plasma.

Theme

Wallpaper entries should somehow suggest the following themes:

• Trustworthy (i.e. reliable, stable, dependable)
• "A reflection of me" (i.e. personalized, familiar, comfortable, "fits like a glove")
• Personal growth (i.e. independence, level mindedness, critical thinking)

You should not feel constrained by the themes. Quite the contrary: The goal is for them to inspire your design and maybe help evoke these feelings/thoughts in the viewer, but you should take the abstract nature of the ideas as a way to freely express your creativity in your design.

Style

• KDE Plasma 6 is a whole new Plasma! Be bold with your design, and don't feel like you have to adhere to the visual style of Plasma 5 wallpapers. A unique style is fine, even more so if it can start a design trend for the following Plasma 6 versions!
• Lean on the abstract. Representational and literal elements should be used sparingly.
• We'd recommend avoiding text elements in your wallpaper, such as "Plasma" or even "6". However, this is not a strict rule: if it works with your style, then it works!
• Similarly, we would recommend avoiding logos overlaid on top of the wallpaper; if you do decide to include a logo, it should integrate with the design and not be used for quick identification.

Some examples from past Plasma releases.

Rules

• The wallpaper must be original, created specifically for this contest, and released under the CC-BY-SA-4.0 license. Therefore no submissions using AI art will be accepted.
• The minimum required size for wallpapers is 3840x2160, though 5120x2880 is preferred. Vertical wallpapers should be at least 1080x2280.
• You are allowed to submit up to 3 wallpapers. Entries can be made in public at in this Discuss category, but you can also submit them in private to niccolo.venerandi@kde.org
• Each submission should include the following:
• The wallpaper
• The name of the wallpaper
• A dark mode version of the wallpaper (not mandatory, but recommended)
• A vertical version of the wallpaper (not mandatory, but recommended)
• If asked, you should be able to provide the source files used to create the wallpaper in a non-proprietary format, like an Inkscape-compatible SVG, .blend, .kra, .xcf, etc.
• Any submission containing racist, sexist, demeaning, or any other inappropriate content will be removed and disqualified immediately.
• The organizers will be accepting submissions up to 11:59 pm of November 14, 2023.

Selection process

Judges for the competition will be selected from the KDE Visual Design Group and other esteemed community members. Wallpapers will be judged based on artistic merit, originality, and adherence to the design themes mentioned earlier. At the end of the submission period, six finalists will be selected for a second round.

Artists who make it to this stage will receive a small prize (e.g. a KDE t-shirt!) and actionable feedback from the judges. The artists will be able to upload different variations addressing the feedback. This stage will take between one and three weeks. At the end of it, a winner will be selected and announced. The winner will get a Framework Laptop 13!

While there will only be one winning selection, other submissions may be included as optional wallpapers in Plasma 6, or used in future releases. The judges' decision is final.

The Prize

The winner of the contest will receive a Framework Laptop 13 DIY Edition, featuring a 13th Gen Intel® Core™ i5-1340P. This laptop has a modular design and can easily be wholly disassembled and rebuilt, allowing you to replace any part or upgrade key components anytime.

The Framework Laptop 13 also features an Expansion Card system that lets you choose exactly the ports you want and where you want them; there are four available slots and a great variety of cards: USB-C, USB-A, HDMI, DisplayPort, MicroSD, Ethernet, Audio, ultra-fast storage, and more.

Of course, compatibility was tested with the most popular Linux distributions and Framework offers many step-by-step setup guides for them.

Join the competition here!

Akademy is KDE's annual event where the community comes together in one place to meet in person, share ideas and hack on common projects.

This year's Akademy was held in Thessaloniki, Greece and started on July 15th and ran until July 21st. This year 150 people attended Akademy in person, and 220 tuned in online to attend chats and BoFs over video conference.

The first weekend of Akademy, as is tradition, was dedicated to talks, panels and fireside chats. The sessions, which were streamed live to the whole world, covered a wide variety of KDE-related topics, ranging from the hot topic of the road to Plasma 6, to how to hack off-the-shelf solar panels, and many things in between.

Day 1 - Saturday 15 July 09:45 Opening

Aleix Pol, president of KDE, opened the event and thanked all attendees and sponsors for making the event possible.

10:00 Empowering Open-Source Space Technologies

The first keynote of Akademy 2023 was given by Eleftherios Kosmas from the Libre Space Foundation. Eleftherios explained how the LSF is making inroads in space exploration and technology through the use of a wide range of open source technologies. He talked about how free software and hardware are carving out a niche in the ultra-competitive and cut-throat space industry, despite the fact that, as he reminded the audience several times, "space is hard".

11:15 KDE Goals

In the traditional Goals time slot, Nate Graham, leader of the Automate and Systematize Internal Processes goal, explained how they intend to preserve the knowledge from one generation of KDE contributors to the next; Carl Schwan listed the ways the Accessibility goal allows more people to use KDE software in more ways than one; and Joseph De Veaugh-Geiss highlighted the milestones of the KDE Eco goal.

At this point, the conference split into two tracks.

12:30 Measuring Energy Consumption

In room 1, and related to the above, Volker Krause took us on a tour of how we, the end users, can start contributing to greener computing by measuring consumption at home. Volker walked us through the available software and then told us about devices, some expensive, but some surprisingly cheap and effective, that everyone could use.

12:30 A Tale of Kleopatra

In room 2, Ingo Klöcker gave us a glimpse of how, over the course of a year, it was possible to push KDE's cryptography key manager Kleopatra from barely accessible to accessible with minor restrictions, often thanks to, sometimes in spite of Qt.

14:30 KDE e.V. Board Report

After lunch, the KDE e.V. board presented their annual report to the attendees. The board members have done a lot of work to support the KDE community over the past year. In this session, board members Adriaan de Groot, Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Lydia Pintscher, and Nate Graham (Eike Hein couldn't make it) told the audience about the things the e.V. has done, the work of the organization, and future endeavors.

Topics covered included contractors (we have more of them now), events (including external events), sprints, fundraising and sponsors, highlights of the past year, and future plans.

14:30 Over a million reasons why Snaps are important

In room 2, we heard from Scarlett Moore that there have been more than one million downloads of Snaps since the project began in 2015. This means that Snap is a packaging system to be reckoned with. Scarlett told us how she got into the workflow of building a huge amount of Snaps and how she managed to keep them updated using KDE's invent.kde.org platform and Ubuntu's launchpad.

15:15 KDE e.V. Working Group reports

Back in room 1, we attended a panel hosted by Lydia Pintscher on KDE's working groups. Neofytos Kolokotronis talked about the Community WG and how its main mission is to act as a mediator, ensuring smooth communication between community members and defusing conflicts. David Edmundson told us about the Finance WG and how we had deliberately overspent 2022 to reduce the accumulated funds in KDE's coffers, and the ways the extra expenditure is being used to help strengthen the community. Carl Schwan explained how the Fundraising WG has had several recent successes, but continues to look for new opportunities. David Redondo of the KDE Free Qt Foundation, responsible for protecting the free version of Qt, told us about progress in the relationship between KDE and the Qt Group. Finally, Bhushan Shah, representing the Sysadmin WG, talked about updates to KDE's hardware infrastructure.

15:15 Flatpak and KDE

At the same time, in room 2, Albert Astals talked about another way to distribute software, this time using Flatpaks. In his talk, Albert discussed what Flatpak is, why it's interesting for KDE, and talked about the different ways developers can build and distribute their software using Flatpak, Flathub, KDE's CI and binary factory infrastructures, and so on.

16:25 KF6 - Are we there yet?

Later, in room 1, Alexander Lohnau, Nicolas Fella and Volker Krause talked about the current state of KDE's frameworks and toolkits, and the progress and challenges of migrating to Qt 6.

16:25 Documentation goals and techniques for KDE and open source

In room 2, Thiago Sueto discussed what it is to be a technical writer, what he does, and what documentation goals and technologies are used to achieve them, focussing on KDE in particular, but also on open source in general.

17:05 Plasma 6 is coming

Marco Martin and Niccolò Venerandi then took the stage in room 1 and showed us many of the new visual improvements we should expect to see in Plasma 6 (Niccolò) and the underlying technical parts, changing components and APIs (Marco).

17:05 UIs in Rust with Slint

At the same time in room 2, Tobias Hunger introduced us to Slint, a UI framework written in Rust with bindings to Rust, C++, and Javascript. Slint scales from microcontrollers with no OS and only a few KiB of RAM to desktop UIs supported by graphics accelerators. The presentation showed what slint is and how to build a small UI with it.

17:55 - KRunner: Past, Present, and Future

In room 1, Alexander Lohnau talked about KRunner and how he started developing for KDE three years ago, thanks in part to KDE's search-run-and-do-a-lot-more utility. In his talk, Alexander covered the changes needed to migrate KRunner to Plasma 6, and explored how to port and improve existing runners.

17:55 - KDE Embedded - Where are we?

Meanwhile, in room 2, Andreas Cord-Landwehr talked about the tools KDE has for easily creating embedded devices and how they work; which devices are most interesting at the moment; the concept of an immutable image; and the next topics and directions KDE community members should pursue in the embedded area.

Day 2 - Sunday 16 July 10:00 Kdenlive - what can we learn after 20 years of development?

Eugen Mohr, Jean-Baptiste Mardelle and Massimo Stella from the Kdenlive team took us down memory lane, from the very beginning to the present day. They told us about how the team came together, the hurdles they had to overcome, the current situation and the plans for the future of KDE's popular video editing software.

10:50 Make it talk: Adding speech to your application.

Jeremy Whiting believes that speech is an underrepresented but perfectly valid way to communicate with users. Jeremy proved his point with examples of applications that, if speech-enabled, would help people who are visually impaired (or just looking at something else), and went on to explain Qt technologies that could be used to integrate speech into KDE applications.

11:00 The Community Working Group - Keeping a Healthy Community

In this talk, Andy Betts presented the work of the Community Working Group, how it resolves conflicts between community members, and advice on how to get along within the KDE community.

At this point, the conference split into two tracks.

11:40 Internal Communication At KDE: Infrastructure For A Large And Diverse Community

In room 1, Joseph De Veaugh-Geiss took the stage and walked us through some of the problems that a community as large as ours has when it comes to communicating with each other and the outside world.

11:40 - An OSS Tool for Comprehending Huge Codebases

In room 2, Tarcisio Fischer talked about an OSS tool being developed by CodeThink to help developers understand large codebases. Although the tool is still under heavy development, he showed and explained the tool using KF5, Kate, Konsole as case studies.

12:25 The Evolution of KDE's App Ecosystem and Deployment Strategy

Back in room 1, Aleix Pol explored how the Linux application ecosystem has changed and the implications for KDE.

12:25 Matrix and ActivityPub for everything

At the same time, in room 2, Alexey Rusakov, Carl Schwan, and Tobias Fella talked about the Matrix IM platform and ActivityPub standards and how they can be used outside of their primary purpose. They gave a broad overview of the functionality provided by Matrix and how it fits into the ActivityPub protocols, which are primarily intended for real-time messaging and social networking applications.

During the lunch break, all attendees got together in the main conference hall, and later in the University's lobby for the all-important group photo.

14:30 Selenium GUI Testing

After lunch, in room 1, Harald Sitter told us about and demonstrated Selenium, a technology for testing GUIs of KDE software. Selenium can be used for regular testing, testing for accessibility problems, and also for energy efficiency.

14:30 Remote Desktop for KWin Wayland

In room 2, Arjen Hiemstra showed-cased how he was working to fix the lack of networking support in Wayland.

In X11, running graphical applications remotely was a core feature. Wayland does not implement this feature natively, but remote desktop control remains an important use case for a number of users.

Arjen showed how it is possible to use KDE's KWin compositor, combined with a new library called KRdp, to control any KWin Wayland session over a network.

15:15 Testing the latest KDE software

Later, in room 1, Timothée Ravier joined us virtually and discussed what, when and how non-developers can test the latest KDE software, including Plasma Desktop and Apps. He also gave a demo using Flatpak.

15:15 Entering a Wayland-only World

Meanwhile, in room 2, Neal Gompa of the Fedora Project analyzed how KDE is doing with its move to Wayland and what problems still need to be solved.

16:20 KDE Wayland Fireside Chat

Right after that, Room 2 was handed over to Aleix Pol Gonzalez, David Edmundson, David Redondo, Vlad Zahorodnii, and Xaver Hugl for a fireside chat with the attendees about Wayland...

16:20 Kyber: a new cross-platform high-quality remote control software

... And a round of 10-minute Fast Track talks began in room 1, with Jean-Baptiste Kempf of VLC fame kicking things off with an explanation and demo of his new project, Kyber.

Kyber attempts to provide a high quality, 0 latency video feed, with bi-directional input forwarding, providing a cross-platform application and SDK to control any type of machine, regardless of hardware and operating system.

16:30 Fun with Charts: Green Energy in System Monitor

The second lightning talk was given by Kai Uwe Broulik, who explained how he managed to get data from off-the-shelf solar panels (that originally used proprietary software) and visualize it in Plasma's system monitor, alongside things like CPU and network load.

16:40 What has qmllint ever done for us?

Then Fabian Kosmale explained the usefulness of qmllint, a command-line utility originally designed to check that QML files are syntactically valid. But it has evolved to cover more checks, has been integrated into CI pipelines, and has a plugin API on the way.

16:50 Wait, are first-run wizards cool again?

Finally, Nate Graham introduced the new Plasma Wizard and explained why it was necessary in this day and age.

Both tracks rejoined for the final leg of the conference section of Akademy.

17:05 Sponsors lightning talks

Akademy would not be possible without the support of our sponsors. Aleix Pol welcomed to the stage representatives from the Qt Group, Codethink, KDAB, Canonical, Collabora, openSUSE, enioka Haute Couture and Externly. The representatives, many of whom are also KDE members, explained what they do and received a round of applause from the audience.

Other sponsors who were not present at the event, but who were also applauded by the attendees, were Slimbook, TUXEDO, and PINE64.

The media partner for the event was Linux Magazine.

17:50 Akademy Awards

The Akademy Awards recognize outstanding contributions to KDE. Aniqa Khokhar and Harald Sitter, last year's winners, presented this year's winners:

• In the category of Best Application, the winner was Heaptrack, maintained by Milian Wolff and the rest of the development team.
• The award for Best Non-Application Contribution went to Hannah Von Reth for her work on KDE's *Craft* system.
• The Jury Award went to Johnny Jazeix for his work organizing and supporting *Season of KDE* and *Google Summer of Code*.

Finally, the special award went to the local team representing the University of Macedonia, co-organizer of the event. The KDE community cannot thank the University and the organizing crew enough for the work they put into making Akademy 2023 a success.

18:10 Closing

Aleix Pol closed the conference part of the event and the five days of BoFs, hackathons and trainings began.

On the 22nd of June 1998, the KDE Free Qt Foundation was founded and has accompanied Qt on its amazing journey to become the success story that it is today.

Qt has established itself as the go-to solution for UI development because of its high quality, consistency, ease of use, and broad cross-platform support. A key factor in this achievement is Qt's dual licensing strategy: Qt is available as free software for open source, but it is also available under a paid license for proprietary software development. A legal foundation ensures the continued availability of Qt as free software alongside the commercial licensing options.

At the time the KDE Free Qt Foundation was founded, Qt was developed by Trolltech--the company that originally developed the framework. The Foundation has supported Qt through its transitions, first to Nokia, then to Digia, and finally to The Qt Company. It has the right to release Qt under the BSD license if necessary to ensure that Qt remains open source. This remarkable legal guarantee protects the free software community and creates trust among developers, contributors, and customers.

The KDE Free Qt Foundation is a collaboration between The Qt Company and KDE. KDE is one of the largest Free Software communities for general-purpose end-user software, and has been around since 1996.

Qt is developed as a true open source project. People from many different backgrounds join The Qt Company to contribute to the framework. Many contributors come from The Qt Company, but many others come from other companies and from Qt-based Free Software projects, including the KDE community. They know that their contributions will continue to be available as Free Software because the Foundation protects and ensures that contributions to Qt will remain open.

Join us in celebrating 25 years of freedom and collaboration for Qt! Join us in knowing that the KDE Free Qt Foundation is protecting the future of Qt, both as open source and as a proprietary and commercially supported offering.

For more information visit: https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation/