Send your talks to Akademy 2025! (Now really for real)

We have moved the deadline for talk submission for Akademy 2025 to the end of the month. Submit your talks now! 

https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2025q2/008217.html 

https://akademy.kde.org/2025/cfp/

Qt World Summit 2025

These past two days I attended the Qt World Summit 2025

It happened in Munich in the SHOWPALAST MÜNCHEN. The venue is HUGE,  we had around 800 attendees (unofficial sources, don't trust the number too much) and it felt it could hold more. One slightly unfortunate thing is that it was a bit cold (temperatures in Munich these two days were well below the average for May) and quite some parts of the venue are outdoors, but you can't control the weather, so not much to "fix" here.

 

The venue is somewhat strangely focused on horses, but that's nothing more than an interesting quirk.

Qt World Summit is an event for the Qt developers around the world and the talks range from showcases of Qt in different products, to technical talks about how to improve performance along others less Qt centric talks about how to collaborate with other developers or about "modern C++".

As KDE we participated in the event with a stand trying to explain people what we do (David Redondo and Nicolas Fella were more in the stand than me, kudos to them)

For following years we may need to re-think a bit better our story for this event since I feel that "we do a Linux desktop and Free Software applications using Qt" is not really what Qt developers really care about, we maybe should focus more on "You can learn Qt in KDE, join us!" and "We have lots Free [Software] Qt libraries you can use!".

 

Talks for the videos will be published "soon" (or so I've been told). When that happens the ones I recommend you to watch are "Navigating Code Collaboration" by  LAURA SAVINO, "QML Bindings in Qt6" by ULF HERMANN and "C++ as a 21st Century Language" by BJARNE STROUSTRUP, but the agenda was packed with talks so make sure to check the videos since probably your tastes and mine don't 100% align.

 

All in all it was a great event, it is good to see that Qt is doing well since we use it for the base of almost everything we do in KDE. Thanks to The Qt Company and the rest of the sponsors for organizing it. 

 

 

KDE Gear 25.04 branches created

Make sure you commit anything you want to end up in the KDE Gear 25.04
releases to them

Next Dates  
    March 13 2025: 25.04 Freeze and Beta (25.03.80) tag & release
    March 27, 2025: 25.04 RC (25.03.90) Tagging and Release
    April 10, 2025: 25.04 Tagging
    April 17, 2025: 25.04 Release

https://community.kde.org/Schedules/KDE_Gear_25.04_Schedule

KDE Gear 25.04 release schedule

This is the release schedule the release team agreed on

https://community.kde.org/Schedules/KDE_Gear_25.04_Schedule

Dependency freeze is in around 3 weeks (March 6) and feature freeze one
after that. Get your stuff ready!
 

KDE Gear 24.12 branches created

Make sure you commit anything you want to end up in the KDE Gear 24.12
releases to them

Next Dates:

•   November 14, 2024: 24.12 freeze and beta (24.11.80) tagging and release
•   November 28, 2024: 24.12 RC (24.11.90) tagging and release
•   December  5, 2024: 24.12 tagging
•   December 12, 2024: 24.12 release

https://community.kde.org/Schedules/KDE_Gear_24.12_Schedule

KDE Gear 24.12 release schedule

This is the release schedule the release team agreed on

https://community.kde.org/Schedules/KDE_Gear_24.12_Schedule

Dependency freeze is in around 3 weeks (November 7) and feature freeze one
after that. Get your stuff ready!

Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit 2024

This weekend "The KDE Alberts"[1] attended Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit 2024 in Sunnyvale, California.

The Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit is an annual unconference that every project participating in Google Summer of Code 2024 is invited to attend. This year it was the 20th year celebration of the program!

I was too late to take a picture of the full cake!

We attended many sessions ranging from how to try to avoid falling into the "xz problem" to collecting donations or shaping the governance of open source projects.

 

We met lots of people that knew what KDE was and were happy to congratulate us on the job done and also a few that did not know KDE and were happy to learn about what we do.

 

We also did a quick lightning talk about the GSOC projects KDE mentored this year and led two sessions: one centered around the problems some open source application developers are having publishing to the Google Play Store and another session about Desktop Linux together with our Gnome friends.

 

All in all a very productive unconference. We encourage KDE mentors to take the opportunity to attend the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit next year, it's a great experience! 

 

[1] me and Albert Vaca, people were moderately amused that both of us had the same name, contribute to the same community and are from the same city.