Intro

Almost three months after Akademy 2017, I finally found the time to write a blog post about how I experienced it.

Akademy is where I learn again about all the amazing things happening in our community, where I connect the dots and see the big picture of where all the effort in the various projects together can lead. And of course, I meet all the wonderful people, all the individual reasons why being in KDE is so amazing. This year was no different.

Some people voiced their concern during the event that those who are not at Akademy and see only pictures of it on social media might get the feeling that it is mostly about hanging out on the beach and drinking beer, instead of actually being productive. Everyone who was ever at Akademy of course knows this impression couldn't be further from the truth, but I'll still take it as a reason to not talk about any of the things that were "just" fun, and focus instead on those that were both fun and productive.

Tales from the KDE e.V. Board of Directors

One thing that happens at every Akademy is the Annual General Assembly (AGM) of the KDE e.V.

This association, usually just called "the e.V." by the community, is KDE's legal and financial representation. Among other things, it raises funds and uses them to make in-person meetings within KDE happen, such as developer sprints or conferences, and sponsor attendees who cannot afford travel and accommodation for those themselves. It also takes care of legal issues such as maintaining KDE's trademarks, and this year it also uses some of its funds for two marketing contractors, Ivana and Paul, to help push our promo efforts. Since last Akademy I am on the board of directors of the KDE e.V., so the AGM is especially important to me.

One important aspect of this year's AGM was that three out of the five positions in the board of directors were up for re-election. Two of the board members whose terms ended, our president Lydia Pintscher and vice president Aleix Pol, ran for another term and were re-elected, whereas Marta Rybczynska was not able to run for another term as treasurer, and is now followed by Eike Hein. Eike used to be one of the "KDE phantoms": He's been a very active KDE contributor for many years (most notably the maintainer of Konversation, Yakuake and several key parts of Plasma such as the Task Manager), but the majority of his fellow KDE members have not seen him in person until this year.

Fortunately I had the opportunity to talk to Eike more than anybody else at this Akademy because we had been assigned as roommates. He had lots of interesting stories to tell, from the way IRC facilitates building communities, to communication culture in Korea (where he now lives), to the experience of moderating multiple Subreddits, and much much more. I'm really looking forward to working with Eike on the board!

My highlights from two days of talks

The following are explicitly my personal highlights. If you're a non-programmer like me, who is also especially interested in design and/or in KDE software running on anything that isn't a traditional desktop or laptop PC, chances are you might find those talks as interesting as I did. If you know more about programming than I do, you'd also enjoy a lot of the other presentations, where I could just sit and be amazed by how people like you can understand all of that technical stuff.

So, here goes:

Aleix Pol's talk about A laptop by KDE summarized our experience with the KDE Slimbook, the very first KDE-branded hardware on the market, and gave a few ideas on what we might do next in that area. This was especially important to me because I was deeply involved in promoting the KDE Slimbook initiative. The talk was followed up by a BoF session during the week where we did an in-depth retrospective on how the Slimbook project went so far and what we learned from it.

A talk which was especially relevant for me as a user researcher was the one on (K)UserFeedback, where Volker Krause introduced the new framework that allows applications to - after opt-in and fully anonymized, of course - collect usage data and send them to KDE to use it for improving our software. Given that privacy is at the core of our Vision and Mission, of course we are extremely cautious in that area, but some usage data is needed for us to make software that fits the needs of our users, not just our own. Volker's talk was accompanied by a BoF on Tuesday where we discussed what our policy on collection, storage and use of that data should look like in order gain useful information without compromising our users' privacy.

A talk which was interesting for me from a strategic, design and user perspective was the one about Mycroft AI Plasmoid & Plasma Desktop Integration, in which Aditya Mehra presented some of the amazing things the Mycroft AI can already do in Plasma, as well as his plans for the future. Digital Assistants are one area where the Linux desktops clearly lag behind all big proprietary operating systems. Many Free Software proponents reject digital assistants outright due to a perceived inherent privacy problem, but Mycroft (apart from currently using a Google service for speech recognition, but there are plans to replace that) shows that privacy-protecting and fully user-controlled digital assistants are possible. That is why from my perspective, this is a hugely important strategic area for KDE. This talk was also accompanied by a BoF on Tuesday, about where else in Plasma we can use Mycroft's capabilities. If you are as excited as I am about the role KDE could play in Free Software solutions for AI and home automation, consider participating in the discussion on my community goal proposal on that subject.

In his talk Opening new doors: KDE in embedded, Agustin Benito Bethencourt presented some of the ways in which KDE could play an important role in the world of embedded systems, for example in the automobile industry. He has been involved in two different projects in that area and told us that the industry is waking up to the benefits of open source, and that from his perspective, now would be a great time for KDE to make ourselves known in that space. This talk, too, was accompanied by a BoF session, where we discussed next steps for getting our software to run on automotive systems. This is also an area where I believe it's important that KDE champions Fee Software, because, like with virtual assistants: What have we won if our PCs and phones run Free Software, but our cars are not in our full control and might even spy on us? If you are interested in this project, head over to the Automotive project on Phabricator and join the discussion and work there!

In his talk Looking for Love, our marketing contractor Paul Brown taught us the importance of focusing our communication strategy on the users' needs, by presenting, in clear and easy to understand words, what benefit our products bring to them, instead of trying to describe their purpose as precisely as possible from our own perspective. That he took the Kirigami wiki page, which I had contributed significantly to, as a negative example of a description which uses way too much jargon and focuses on technical details instead of user benefits, of course meant that I had to endure seeing one of my "babies" being ripped apart in front of my eyes, but it was definitely worth it! The talk was meant as an appetizer for a workshop on Monday, were Paul helped everyone who wanted to improve their product website.

In his talk Input Methods in Plasma 5, Eike Hein made it clear that the state of input methods (which are needed primarily for text input in e.g. many Asian writing systems, but can also handle things such as emoji input or auto-completion or -correction) in Plasma and KDE applications is currently lagging behind other popular operating systems and desktop environments. He presented what needs to be done to improve the situation, and is now rallying people behind a proposal for a community goal to make it happen together. So here as well: If you also feel that improving input methods in KDE software is important, join the conversation on the proposal!

Camilo Higuita, author of the Babe music player, gave a talk Introducing Babe and a contextual approach to multimedia desktop apps where he demonstrated how Babe uses various techniques and online services to find connections between songs in order to give smart answers to search queries. His talk was also accompanied by a BoF session during the week, where we discussed some design ideas and how to use Kirigami to make Babe a convergent desktop and mobile application.

Yours truly also gave a presentation, together with Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, titled Folding Your Applications, where we talked about the design behind the Kirigami Ui framework and how application developers inside and outside of KDE are already using it to easily create mobile and convergent user interfaces.

Putting Ideas to Action: The Workshop and BoF Days

Monday through Thursday were dedicated to workshops and Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions, where various groups in KDE - established project teams, groups spontaneously forming around a topic, or often a combination of both - discussed how to drive their ideas forward.

In addition to the already mentioned follow-up sessions to talks from the previous days, these were the sessions that inspired me most:

In the Plasma Mobile part of the Plasma BoF, we learned about Plasma Mobile's current status and discussed what needs to be done next. There is also a proposed community goal to improve the Plasma Mobile platform for end-user needs, so if you agree with me that Plasma Mobile is of strategic importance to KDE, please participate in the discussion there!

If you ask yourself what the deal is with all those community goals I keep referring to: The initiative to define some concrete mid-term goals for KDE for the next 3-4 years was actually born at Akademy, during a BoF titled '"Luminaries" Kabal Proposals', where Kevin Ottens, Frederik Gladhorn and Mirko Boehm presented to us what came out of their discussion about how they think KDE can be put on the right track towards the future. The goal-setting initiative was one of their proposals. Another one was integrating the KDE e.V. working group reports, which have so far been part of the AGM, into the general conference schedule, allowing people who are not members of the KDE e.V. to learn what's happening there, as well as significantly shortening the AGM. This proposal will be implemented at next year's Akademy. Their third proposal, making sure the barrier of entry to contributing to KDE is as low as possible, has been picked up in two goal proposals (which are likely to be merged into one), so, once more: If you agree that this is important for KDE, join the discussion over there!

In a BoF titled "Visual Design Direction", Andres "Andy" Betts brought up some ideas on how to better integrate designers into the Plasma development process again, and volunteered to spearhead the next round of design improvements. Andy has also submitted a goal proposal related to this, so… you know the drill by now.

Closing Words (and a shameless plug)

Now that I've advertised various community goal proposals here (one of them being my own), let me use the final paragraph to link to my other proposal, Making KDE software the #1 choice for research and academia. This goal aims to give KDE software the exposure in the research and academic sector that it deserves due to its features and quality, but currently does not have. I think KDE has a lot to offer to researchers, teachers and students, so I'd like us to get in touch with them, promote our software to them and improve it based on their direct feedback. If you agree, participation is welcome!

With hat out of the way, I can summarize that this year's Akademy was a very successful event, despite being slightly smaller than usual (due to the location being a bit hard to reach and the timing falling into vacation time for many KDE members). I'm now full of enthusiasm again about the things to come for KDE, and looking forward to next year's Akademy in Vienna!

Filed under: KDE

19 Oct 2017 9:46pm GMT

I had the privilege to attend the KDE Edu sprint in Berlin that happened from the 6th to the 9th of October.

There i mostly worked in the KTuberling port to Android. If you have children (or maybe if you want to feel like one for a few minutes) and an Android device please try it and give some constructive feedback ;)



Though of course that's not all we did, we also had important discussions about "What is kde edu", about how we should be involved in the "Making KDE software the #1 choice for research and academia" KDE goal and other organization stuff like whether we want a phabricator rule to send email to the kdeedu mailing list for a set of projects, etc.



Thanks go to all the people that donate to KDE e.V. that made sponsoring the trip possible, and to Endocode for hosting us and sponsoring all kind of interesting drinks and pizza on Sunday :)

19 Oct 2017 9:29pm GMT

So I have over the last few years blogged regularly about upcoming features in Fedora Workstation. Well I thought as we putting the finishing touches on Fedora Workstation 27 I should try to look back at everything we have achieved since Fedora Workstation was launched with Fedora 21. The efforts I highlight here are efforts where we have done significant or most development. There are of course a lot of other big changes that has happened over the last few years by the wider community that we leveraged and offer in Fedora Workstation, examples here include things like Meson and Rust. This post is not about those, but that said I do want to write a post just talking about the achievements of the wider community at some point, because they are very important and crucial too. And along the same line this post will not be speaking about the large number of improvements and bugfixes that we contributed to a long list of projects, like to GNOME itself. This blog is about taking stock and taking some pride in what we achieved so far and major hurdles we past on our way to improving the Linux desktop experience.
This blog is also slightly different from my normal format as I will not call out individual developers by name as I usually do, instead I will focus on this being a totality and thus just say 'we'.

• Wayland - We been the biggest contributor since we joined the effort and have taken the lead on putting in place all the pieces needed for actually using it on a desktop, including starting to ship it as our primary offering in Fedora Workstation 25. This includes putting a lot of effort into ensuring that XWayland works smoothly to ensure full legacy application support.
• Libinput - A new library we created for handling all input under both X and Wayland. This came about due to needing input handling that was not tied to X due to Wayland, but it has even improved input handling for X itself. Libinput is being rapidly developed and improved, with 1.9 coming out just a few days ago.
• glvnd - Dealing with multiple OpenGL implementations have been a pain under Linux for years. We worked with NVidia on this effort to ensure that you can install multiple OpenGL implementations on the system and have your system be able to use the correct one depending on which GPU and driver you are using. We keep expanding on this solution to cover more usecases, so for Fedora Workstation 27 we expect to bring glvnd support to XWayland for instance.
• Porting Firefox to GTK3 - We ported Firefox to GTK3, including making sure it works under Wayland. This work also provided the foundation for HiDPI support in Firefox. We are the single biggest contributor to Firefox Linux support.
• Porting LibreOffice to GTK3 - We ported LibreOffice to GTK3, which included Wayland support, touch support and HiDPI support. Our team is one of the major contributors to LibreOffice and help the project forward on a lot of fronts.
• Google Drive integration - We extended the general Google integration in GNOME 3 to include support for Google Drive as we found that a lot of our users where relying on Google Apps at their work.
• Flatpak - We created Flatpak to lead the way in moving desktop applications into their own namespaces and containers, resolving a lot of long term challenges for desktop applications on Linux. We expect to have new infrastructure in place in Fedora soon to allow Fedora packagers to quickly and easily turn their applications into Flatpaks.
• Linux Firmware Service - We created the Linux Firmware service to provide a way for Linux users to get easy access to UEFI firmware on their linux system and worked with great vendors such as Dell and Logitech to get them to support it for their devices. Many bugs experienced by Linux users over the years could have been resolved by firmware updates, but with tooling being spotty many Linux users where not even aware that there was fixes available.
• GNOME Software - We created GNOME Software to give us a proper Software Store on Fedora and extended it over time to include features such as fonts, GStreamer plugins, GNOME Shell extensions and UEFI firmware updates. Today it is the main Store type application used not just by us, but our work has been adopted by other major distributions too.
• mp3, ac3 and aac support - We have spent a lot of time to be able to bring support for some of the major audio codecs to Fedora like MP3, AC3 and AAC. In the age of streaming supporting codecs is maybe of less importance than it used to be, but there is still a lot of media on peoples computers they need and want access to.
• Fedora Media Creator - Cross platform media creator making it very easy to create Fedora Workstation install media regardless of if you are on Windows, Mac or Linux. As we move away from optical media offering ISO downloads started feeling more and more outdated, with the media creator we have given a uniform user experience to quickly create your USB install media, especially important for new users coming in from Windows and Mac environments.
• Captive portal - We added support for captive portals in Network Manager and GNOME 3, ensuring easy access to the internet over public wifi networks. This feature has been with us for a few years now, but it is still a much appreciated addition.
• HiDPI support - We worked to add support for HiDPI across X, Wayland, GTK3 and GNOME3. We lead the way on HiDPI support under Linux and keep working on various applications to this date to polish up the support.
• Touch support - We worked to add support for touchscreens across X, Wayland, GTK3 and GNOME3. We spent significant resources enabling this, both on laptop touchscreens, but also to support modern wacom devices.
• QGNOME Platform - We created the QGNOME Platform to ensure that Qt applications work well under GNOME3 and gives a nice native and integrated feel. So while we ship GNOME as our desktop offering we want Qt applications to work well and feel native. This is an ongoing effort, but for many important applications it already is a great improvement.
• Nautilus improvements. Nautilus had been undermaintained for quite a while so we had Carlos Soriano spend significant time on reworking major parts of it and adding new features like renaming multiple files at ones, updating the views and in general bring it up to date.
• Night light support in GNOME - We added support for automatic adjusting the color and light settings on your system based on light sensors found in modern laptops. This integrated functionality that you before had to install extra software like Red Shift to enable.
• libratbag - We created a library that enable easy configuration of high end mice and other kind of input devices. This has led to increased collaboration with a lot of gaming mice manufacturers to ensure full support for their devices under Linux.
• RADV - We created a full open source Vulkan implementation for ADM GPUs which recently got certified as Vulkan compliant. We wanted to give open source Vulkan a boost, so we created the RADV project, which now has an active community around it and is being tested with major games.
• GNOME Shell performance improvements - We been working on various performance improvements to GNOME Shell over the last few years, with significant improvements having happened. We want to push the envelope on this further though and are planning a major performance hackfest around Shell performance and resource usage early next year.
• GNOME terminal developer improvements - We worked to improve the features of GNOME Terminal to make it an even better tool for developers with items such as easier naming of terminals and notifications for long running jobs.
• GNOME Builder - Improving the developer story is crucial for us and we been doing a lot of work to make GNOME Builder a great tool for developer to use to both improve the desktop itself, but also development in general.
• Pipewire - We created a new media server to unify audio, pro-audio and video. First version which we are shipping in Fedora 27 to handle our video capture.
• Fleet Commander - We launched Fleet Commander our new tool for managing large Linux desktop deployments. This answer a long standing call from many of Red Hats major desktop customers and many admins of large scale linux deployments at Universities and similar for a powerful yet easy to use administration tool for large desktop deployments.

I am sure I missed something, but this is at least a decent list of Fedora Workstation highlights for the last few years. Next onto working on my Fedora Workstation 27 blogpost

19 Oct 2017 6:35pm GMT

Kubuntu 17.10 has been released, featuring the beautiful Plasma 5.10 desktop from KDE.

Codenamed "Artful Aardvark", Kubuntu 17.10 continues our proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution.

The team has been hard at work through this cycle, introducing new features and fixing bugs.

Under the hood, there have been updates to many core packages, including a new 4.13-based kernel, KDE Frameworks 5.38, Plasma 5.10.5 and KDE Applications 17.04.3

Kubuntu has seen some exciting improvements, with newer versions of Qt, updates to major packages like Krita, Kdenlive, Firefox and LibreOffice, and stability improvements to KDE Plasma.

For a list of other application updates, upgrading notes and known bugs be sure to read our release notes.

Download 17.10 or read about how to upgrade from 17.04.

19 Oct 2017 1:51pm GMT

Alberto Ruiz just announced Fleet Commander as production ready! Fleet Commander is our new tool for managing large deployments of Fedora Workstation and RHEL desktop systems. So get our to Albertos Fleet Commander blog post for all the details.

18 Oct 2017 12:01pm GMT

Something went incredibly right, and review feedback poured in last week and I got to merge a lot of code.

My VC5 GL driver's patches for core Mesa got reviewed (thanks Rob Clark, Adam Jackson, and Emil Velikov), so I got to merge it to Mesa. It's so nice to finally be able to work in tree instead of on a rebasing branch that breaks most weeks.

My GL_OES_required_internalformat got reviewed by Nicolai Hähnle, so I gave it another test run on the Intel CI farm (thanks, Mark Janes!) and merged. VC4 and VC5 now have proper 5551 texture format support, and VC4 conformance test failures with 565 are fixed.

My GL_MESA_tile_raster_order extension for overlapping blit support on VC4 got merged to Khronos's git tree. Nicolai reviewed my Mesa implementation of the extension, so I've merged it. All that's left for that is merging the X Server usage of it and pushing it on downstream to Raspbian.

I tested the fast mutex patch series for Mesa, and found a 4.3% (+/- .9%) improvement in 10x10 copywinwin on my Intel hardware. Hopefully this lands soon, since those performance improvements should show up on ARM as well.

On the VC5 front, I fixed VPM setup on actual HW (the simulator's restrictions didn't catch one of the HW requirements), getting a lot of tests that do gl_ModelViewProject * gl_Vertex to work. I played around with the new GPU reset code a bit, and it looks like the next step is to implement binner overflow handling.

I've been doing some more review feedback with Boris. We're getting closer to merge on MADVISE, for sure. I respun my DSI transactions fix based on Boris's feedback, and it's even nicer now.

Next week: VC5 binner overflow handling, merging MADVISE, and hopefully putting together some Raspbian backports.

18 Oct 2017 12:30am GMT