Two weeks ago, several of us from Qt Group travelled to Graz for Akademy 2026, KDE's annual summit. The conference was hosted by Graz University of Technology (TU Graz). This year’s conference was extra special: it marked KDE's 30th birthday. Happy birthday, KDE!

Aiming for a 10 year life-cycle for smartphones

My experiences at Akademy It's been a hot minute since my last blog post, mostly because I was focusing on finally finishing my studies - while I'm not quite done yet (still missing one exam), I have a good reason to come out of hiding: KDE Akademy 2026 just happened and I was there! # Talks While I was already at the Plasma Sprint in Graz last year, this is my first other KDE-related event I attended and oh boy was it ever an event. So many talks ranging from educational and thought provoking to simply silly fun and plenty of opportunities (for frequent and extended coffee breaks leading to even more education, thought provoking and simply silly fun conversations! # BoFs If it was just that I would have already called this amazing, but the "talks" part of Akademy was just the first two days (not counting the "arrival day" + evening welcome event which I could unfortunately not attend myself), but the following days were equally amazing, if not even more so. A bunch of lively discussions in plenty of BoF rooms (and, which I have learned there, the famous hallway BoFs) around so many topics I can't even hope to mention them all here. I attended some conversations around how to better get in touch with stakeholders to reduce the general society's reliance on big tech, the technical intricacies of theming systems in general and KDE Union in particular, implementation details for the new XDG Intents, ... I could go on forever, really, but I shall restrain myself. In short: Tons conversations and planning that works best in-person was done as well as a lot of networking and putting-faces-to-names. # The C word Now unfortunately not everything was sunshine and roses - Wednesday was a day of unspeakable, chocolate-based torture for all of us. We toured the Zotter factory near Graz which included the ability to taste-test their chocolates at various steps during production process (yes, this includes up to as early as whole dried cocoa beans!) as well as a wide selection of their final products. It was much more interesting than I thought it would be and such a great experience to do all this with so many kool (with a K!) people. However... let's just say mistakes have been made and I misunderstood the Zotter employee's statement that there are "roughly 300 taste testing stations" as a promise and not a threat. I definitely purchased a number of chocolate bars in their shop at the end but I don't think I'll be eating any of them any time soon after my complete lack of self control during the tour and the ensuing (and entirely predictable!) consequences. And the worst part: After that we went to a Buschenschank for a good old "Brettljausn" (not sure how to translate, but essentially a meat and cheese buffet) where I _also_ ate way too much since it's been way too long since my last proper Brettljausn. And with that I think I covered everything I wanted to talk about - Thanks so much to everyone organizing and attending to make this such an unforgettable week! If you'll excuse me, I'll now fall into bed and sleep what feels like for several days straight

After a long week of working lots and making lots of connections, here is what happened this year during Akademy! * Talk recap * Ocean is divided into two areas, Ocean Graphical Assets and Ocean Design System. * Ocean graphical assets refers to all currently-available theming elements that Plasma provides. This includes, color schemes, fonts, icon packs, Plasma styles, pointers, and window decorations. (The only one missing is application style). * Ocean design system has also progressed. We begun the migration of Ocean icon sources from Figma into Penpot. This is achieved by using a svg copy function and then we paste a flat version of the icon into Penpot. With this, at least, users will be able to create mockups using actual Ocean icons. The UI will look more adjusted to what we can offer. There will be a copy in Figma for redundancy but designers will likely not need any specific changes done to icons in Penpot. * When Penpot is able to support more of the complex boolean operations done in Figma, this will make it easier to store better sources in Penpot. * My talk focused on the progress we have so far with the various elements of Ocean. * Union BoF * Discussed all the areas that Union engine is working on and what is available for us to use at the moment. * Reviewed ways to test Union and provide feedback. Working on learning the structure and work for Ocean style. * Desktop Icons Arrangement BoF * Discussed the need to revamp the way our icons are arranged in the desktop and the various workarounds that our implementation has. * I offered to help in bringing some good research into HCI and surfacing the most common ways that users would expect to arrange their desktops. * Penpot BoF * Discussed the need to build a plugin that can export Penpot css code and turn it into Union css code so that components are more easily integrated into the style out of the design. * Activities BoF * Discussed the need for a reviving of this misunderstood feature of our desktop. * I offered to work on building a research-based proposal ## Goals The Union + Ocean goal was selected for the next two years as a priority for the Community. “Yay for more work!”. I am so excited and thankful to the Community that saw this work as important for the future. I am committed to doing a lot more for it and during Akademy, we communicated about what our combined development path will be. I can’t wait for the work ahead! Thank you @KDE! ### Share this: * Share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook * Share on X (Opens in new window) X * Share on X (Opens in new window) X * Like Loading... ### _Related_

This year’s Akademy is over - at least for me. I’m already on a train on my way back home, but there’s still plenty of people staying in Graz for more days of hacking and fun. Even though I haven’t contributed to KDE much in the past few years, I am really glad I decided to go. First, I want to thank everyone from the organization and local team for hosting us in Graz and orginzing a great Akademy. I know how much work it is, so kudos to all of you <3. I’m really happy that the community is in such a great shape. There’s a lot of new people participating and contributing, which is a great sign! After all as Cornelius showed in his talk - this year we have the most people ever contributing to KDE - and the year is not even over yet! This year we also voted the new KDE Goals. I am really happy that KDE for Enterprise goal have been voted in. As someone pointed out (with a little tongue-in-cheek): we’ve solved gamers, now it’s time to solve enterprise. Kevin and the team in enioka Haute Couture are already doing great work on KDE PIM thanks to the Sovereign Tech Fund. They started with improving my akonadi-e2e-tests experiment and pushing it forward to a point where it has helped them discover (and fix) many bugs in CalDAV in IMAP - this is foundational work that everyone will benefit from. It’s inspiring to see so much activity and many new contributors in KDE PIM again. I attended another talk about making KDE “lovable” by Eva and Jan. They discussed many things, but one that stood out to me, especially with relation to the Enterprise goal, is that we should make sure that the end-users, those who actually use our software in organizations, feel like they gained something by migrating away from whatever they were running on before and were used to. They should feel our software makes their jobs easier, makes them more efficient and feel like it adapts to their needs - make it not just usable, but /lovable/. I really liked that thought. How do we make KMail loveble, though? That’s a tough one… As for myself, I had a lot of schnitzels over the couple days, took a slide down from Schlossberg, fixed some bugs and generally had a great time. I managed to get KMail, KOrganizer and KAddressBook to compile and run on macOS to the point that I can actually read and write emails. But there’s a lot of fixes and polish needed still, more on that some other day. All in all, it was a very fun, very productive and very inspiring Akademy for me, and I can’t wait to see everyone again.