By Allyson Alexandrou

Akademy will be held online from 18th to 25th June and the Call for Participation is open! Submit your talk ideas and abstracts by 2nd May.

While all talk topics are welcome, here are a few talk topics specifically relevant to the KDE Community:

• Topics related to KDE's current Community Goals.
• KDE In Action: cases of KDE technology in real life.
• Overview of what is going on in the various areas of the KDE Community.
• Collaboration between KDE and other Free Software projects.
• Release, packaging, and distribution of software by KDE.
• Increasing our reach through efforts such as accessibility, promotion, translation and localization.
• Improving our governance and processes, community building.
• Innovations and best practices in the libraries and technologies used by KDE software.

Why should I submit a talk?

KDE is one of the biggest and well-established Free Software communities. Talking at Akademy gives you an audience that will be receptive to your ideas and will also offer you their experience and know-how in return.

As an independent developer, you will gain supporters for your project, the insight of experienced developers, and you may even gain active contributors. As a community leader, you will be able to discuss the hot topics associated with managing large groups of volunteers, such as management, inclusivity and conflict resolution. As a CTO, you will be able to explain your company’s mission, its products and services and benefit from the brainshare of one of the most cutting edge community-based Free Software projects.

How do I get started?

With an idea. Even if you do not know exactly how you will focus it, no worries! Submit some basic details about your talk idea. All abstracts can be edited after the initial submission.

What should my talk abstract or proposal include?

This is a great question! To ensure you get your point across both clearly and comprehensively, your abstract should include uses of your idea or product and show what different groups of people get out of it. For example, how can a company, developer, or even a user benefit from using your app? In what ways can you further their experiences?

If you’re still stuck on where to start or what to talk about, take a look at a brief list of talks given in previous years at Akademy:

• The KDE Free Qt Foundation by Cornelius Schumacher
• KDE Fedora by Neil Gompa
• Clear Dental by Tej Shah
• Linux Graphics by Rohan Garg
• Input Handling by Shawn Rutledge
• C++17 and 20 by Ivan Cukic
• MyGNUHealth by Luis Falcon
• KDenlive by Massimo Stella
• Integrating Hollywood Open Source with KDE Applications by amyspark
• KDE Products by Aleix Pol

You can find more Akademy videos on the KDE's YouTube channel.

As Qt 5 support is drawing to a close, and we shift to Qt 6, we need to ensure that KDE products are as reliable as ever. To this end, KDE will be maintaining a set of patches with security and functional fixes so that we can enjoy good KDE Software still based on Qt5 until our software is reliably based on Qt 6.

You can find more information on the technical details of this patch collection here.

“The Qt Company and KDE have been co-operating in development of Qt 6 actively and KDE is well set to migrate to Qt 6. Even though our aim has been to make porting to Qt 6 easy and straightforward, we do understand that with a large framework like KDE has porting to Qt 6 takes some time, and such a patch collection can help manage the transition.”

— Tuukka Turunen, The Qt Company, SVP R&D

"To transition to great future technologies like Qt 6 we need to have the peace of mind that our current users are catered for. With this patch collection we gain the flexibility we need to stabilize the status quo. This way we can continue collaborating with Qt and deliver great solutions for our users."

— Aleix Pol, KDE e.V. President

In this vein, we encourage everyone to participate in the KDE Frameworks 6 ongoing effort.

Alejandro López (right), CEO at Slimbook, with Adriaan de Groot from the KDE e.V. board.

After several product collaborations, today we celebrate an extension of this partnership by welcoming Slimbook to the KDE Patrons family.

Alejandro López, Slimbook CEO explains,

“Since our early days in 2015, we at SLIMBOOK have been trying our best not only to sell GNU/Linux compatible quality hardware, but also to contribute and help those who make Free and Open Source Software.

Our variety of contributions range from giving support to local groups of developers, the making of forums and tutorials to help the Linux community and sharing a common vision with KDE, to hit the market with a device able to provide the end user with the best out-of-the-box Linux experience available.

But our mission doesn’t end there and there’s more than meets the eye. Our main goal is to share our knowledge and experience, help each other, and of course, to give the GNU/Linux users the best in hardware excellence the same way as the KDE Team do with their excellent software experience.

We take our duty of supporting the KDE Community full of pride, and we are honored to be KDE Patrons."

Aleix Pol i Gonzalez, President of KDE e.V. stated,

“Slimbook’s attention towards FOSS users as a hardware provider is very important to KDE and the community at large. For KDE, being able to reach beyond the software experience to tangible and properly integrated solutions has been a dream come true. Working together in the different collaborations over the years has been really exciting, and we look forward to continuing doing so with Slimbook as a Patron.”

Slimbook will join KDE e.V.’s other Patrons: The Qt Company, SUSE, Google, Blue Systems, Canonical and Enioka to continue to support Free Software and KDE development through the KDE e.V.