Last week KDE’s annual world summit, Akademy, happend. And how exciting it was.
Akademy always starts off with two days of ever so exciting talks on a number of engaging subjects. But this year particularly interesting things happened courtesy of Blue Systems.
First Plasma Mobile took the stage with a working prototype running on the Nexus 5 using KWin as Wayland compositor. This is particularly enjoyable as working on the prototype, currently built on Kubuntu, made me remember the Kubuntu phone and tablet ports we did some 4 years ago.
Plasma Mobile was followed by a presentation on Shashlik, technology meant to enable running Android applications on Linux systems that aren’t Android. So I can finally run candy crush on my desktop. Huzzah!
Rohan Garg and I also talked for a bit about our efforts to bring continuous integration and delivery to Kubuntu and Debian to integrate our packaging against KDE’s git repositories and as a byproduct offer daily new binaries of most software produced by KDE.
After a weekend of thrilling talks, Akademy tends to continue with a week of discussion and hacking with Birds of Feathers sessions.
Ever since the Ubuntu Developer Summits were discontinued it has been common practise for the Kubuntu team to hold a Kubuntu Day at Akademy instead, to discuss long term targets and get KDE contributor’s thoughts and input. Real life meetings are so very important to a community. Not just because it is easier to discuss when talking face to face making everyone more efficient and reducing the chances of people misunderstanding one another and getting frustrated, they also are an important aspect of community building through the social interaction they allow. There is something uniquely family-like about sharing a drink or having a team dinner.
A great many things were discussed pertaining to Kubuntu. Ranging from Canonical’s IP rights policy and how it endangers what we try to achieve, to websites, support, and the ever so scary GCC 5 transition that José Manuel Santamaría put a great deal of effort into making as smooth as possible.
In the AppStream/Muon BoF session Matthias Klumpp gave us an overview on how AppStream works and we discussed ways to unblock its adoption in Kubuntu to replace the currently used app-install-data.
Muon, the previously Kubuntu specific software manager that is now part of the Plasma Workspace experience, is getting further detangled from Debian specific systems as the package manager UI is going to be moved to a separate Git repository. Also tighter integration into the overall workspace and design of Plasma is the goal for future development.
As always Akademy was quite the riot. I’d like to thank the Akademy team for organizing this great event and the Ubuntu community for sponsoring my attendance.
❤ KDE ❤
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