Good morning for them.
We'll now are getting ready for a talk by Alesh.
I would kindly ask you if you could sit closer to the middle.
So newcomers can have an easier time in sitting.
Thank you.
I was as reference to this as defragmentation,
which I think is very appropriate.
Thank you.
Okay.
Are you ready?
So we'll be having Alesh Paul,
a current president of KDE,
talking about the challenges
and his rear of KDE after 30 years,
almost 30 years.
So please give him warm welcome.
Sure.
As you say.
Yeah, thank you very much.
I am really glad to be here with you today
because what Faustam is always a big opportunity for us
free server communities to get together.
When thinking about what to do this year,
I wanted to say me, but it wasn't really me.
It was Albert's idea that we could talk about
on 30th anniversary.
Throughout the year, we will be doing different events
and activities explaining about
celebrating anniversary.
And I guess that at least for me, this is my first
stepping stone.
Our anniversary is going to be October and this year.
And actually this is what my talk is going to be about.
Normally my background is in the software development
and that's normally what I talk about,
about things that have been working on,
specifically about that feature and so on.
But this is not the talk we're going to have today.
I hope you're fine with that.
What I wanted to talk today about is
to reflect a little bit on these years of KDE
of how it has worked.
Obviously, when KDE started, I was in middle school
and completely unaware, not only about what
this was, but so world together.
But well, here we are, these days.
Yes.
So I don't want to give you the weird boring talk about.
And in 1997 happened this and that.
But I think that we still need to go back to the very
beginning, the announcement.
This is the subject of the email if you put this text online.
You will get it quickly.
New scrap channel for Linux in Germany in 1996.
So about 30 years ago from Matthias,
where he said, I want to work on this thing.
I called the Cool Derset of Environment.
And these are the things I would like to be working on.
His vision originally was quite.
I put on the ground in that he saw that a lot of technologies
were getting in place for.
Well, whoever to put together.
User experience for for Linux that was graphical,
that was accessible.
I think that he mentioned something on the lens of.
I want my girlfriend to be able to use Linux,
and it's not really ready.
So how can I sit down and work on that together?
Well, at this point, he saw that there was this cute thing
flat around.
It looked like it could do the job.
So he started connecting the dots.
And I'm sure doing a big ton of work to make it happen.
This was only the kickstart of the project.
Obviously, a lot happened.
Especially in the first years, if you look at the
history, you see that a lot of the things that we're still using
nowadays happened early on.
And well, we've been doing a lot of maintaining and enhancing
all of that, but still interesting to see, like, for example,
our well-incomposator, like you saw on the last talk.
It was one of the components that Mattias started back then.
And it has changed a lot.
Many maintainers, many developers have passed through it.
And well, broken and fixed it over time.
But yeah, it's this legacy.
One more vision perspective, well,
we've been trying to enhance it, for example,
we don't talk about cool desktop environment anymore.
Not because we're not cool, but probably we're not
cool enough to pull off cool with a K like that.
So eventually, we came up, well, now we're just gay,
it's not an acronym anymore.
We're not a desktop environment.
Desktop is also deprecated concept in many aspects,
like not many of us are using desktop computers anymore.
We still call laptops to the computers, and then we have phones,
and we have convertibles, and all of that.
And all of these are things that we're trying to tackle.
But so yeah, and also not our desktop is not called
Kd anymore, like everyone know.
It's called Plasma these days.
Yeah, Kd is the community that we are doing.
And ask Kd, but this is our official vision this days.
A well in which everyone has control over their digital life,
and enjoy freedom and privacy.
These are the topics that we want to address when we work on
our different products, and quality experience quite well,
and what we are about.
If you're interested about on this, we have a thoroughly
explained on our many week is with strategy,
admissions, statements, and all of that.
But we are a lot of contributors, though, who sit down,
and put together a bunch of cool software with C this time.
Trying to zoom out a little bit and think about what this
has been about.
I tried to put it together in a timeline.
It's very sparse.
It doesn't really try to be complete at all,
but I thought still would make sense to give it some context.
So when Matthias started working on that cool desktop environment,
people outside the Linux world were using Windows 95,
Windows Linux itself was just starting,
Linux started in 1990, right?
And when we see a bit of the pictures of what it looked like back then,
it was quite reminiscent of all of that.
And we've been evolving over time.
On the very beginning, for example, we started putting a lot of effort
in making sure that all of the foundations were ready.
Obviously, KD has also evolved alongside the internet.
Back then, it wasn't what it is today, even though, if you think about it,
like many of the, like it resembles it a lot, but it obviously has
has exploded in complexity quite a bit.
One of these big components that started in the first year was
KDML that famously became webkit over time.
Yeah, something that we have to offer to humanity, I guess, at this point.
And yeah, it's free software because of KD, not because of anything else.
But for us, the important part wasn't, in any case, all of these smaller components
for us, the important thing was what we were delivering to the user,
much like when Matthias started, Matthias didn't start working on it,
at least as far as I understand.
I don't think I've ever met Matthias.
To have a cool web rendering engine or a cool, I don't know,
email client, what he wanted was an environment, a place where, like, one could,
well, with your computer and start using Linux, and we have the
idea of thinking, oh, I need to use these weird things because I really like
this software, right?
Software this talk, I did a little bit the exercise of going through more
mostly Wikipedia and chasing after the different screenshots.
This is version of KD100.
Something that I always find interesting when I'm talking to the,
what we call the dinosaurs, from back then, is that, like, they always find
very specific differences between 1000 and 0.1 and 0.3 and this kind of stuff.
Well, again, I was in a different universe at those times.
But, well, if we look at it, I think that is something that is already quite familiar.
Obviously, everything is super pixelated, but I think it's a
sort of an environment that we could start using any of us today and be
moderately happy.
So, there's a dinosaur speaking over here.
Right.
So, well, this was the one, then the two.
This was our mascot for a while until, well, we upgraded into a dragon,
which is always better than any humans.
And Gandalf.
This was three, actually, this was the first, I used, then I started
contributing with, depending on how you think about it,
you could say it hasn't changed much, but it also has changed a lot.
You can see, all of the graphical elements are much more polished,
but the components, the concepts remain.
Also, Katie 3, we had one of our biggest changes, at least when it comes to
a desktop, which was we created Plasma.
Plasma was created in a, well, other moment in history that was also very specific,
very much related to how Nokia decided for some time that
Lynx was cool and kid was cool and all of us were cool.
And this started working on a ton of technologies that, well, many of them we embraced.
And this was what it looked back then.
I think we can also, again, definitely see big change on how things are presented and how things look.
But yeah, it's also so shows it's time.
Maybe it feels more modern to me because I used that one much more than any of the others.
But I guess you can see that too.
Here we can see, for example, a lot of more of graphical,
well, vectored graphics, we can see a lot of shadow and stuff.
That's also after there was the graphic revolution, if you want, like we are already relying on.
OpenGL being present and properly accelerated and this kind of stuff, right?
And this was then plus my five, which is the one that we were running until a couple of years back.
This is one of the last screenshots.
I guess that we can say that it's quite even similar that we have today.
This was plus my six at the very, I think it was six zero, this one.
But yeah, what we can see is that it's a lot of similar concepts that have been polished,
that have been mastered over the years and that have made more accessible.
All of these using a computer to each one of us.
Here, I've only been showing, for example, only that stops.
We have also grown, you access for phones for weird kind of devices.
We're going to go into that a little bit later.
But obviously it's not just the, it's not just the desktop environment.
You need to be able to do things with your computer and with the desktop environment.
You cannot really do that unless you, well, had the web browser.
That could be also a thing.
But we've been working on a ton of applications and frameworks to give an idea of how many applications
and stuff we have going on.
Let's try to put them together here in this weird.
It's all right.
It's working.
No, it's working.
Yes.
So, we have a ton of applications.
So, if you have any need for, well, solving any specific problem,
you can probably find the tool today within our umbrella, the KDM umbrella.
And if it's not there, you can always like pitch in and put something together.
So, I think that I always remember that was quite nice when I started in KD.
I started working with the educational suite, KD Edu, with an application that I started working
because I wanted to learn random things.
And my first, was more meeting I, it was, KD Edu's brain that we did in Paris.
And then I met the, the calcium original author and he was chemistry teacher.
And he said, yeah, I am was teaching chemistry and I didn't know how to interact with it
and show it to my students, so I thought it could be cool to make an application.
How cool is that, right?
You don't need to have a whole industry around you.
You're going to sit down and start putting to that if something.
Also, on today's perspective, maybe it's not even that much.
We have this kind of accessibility quite granted.
But back then, even more, right?
Delivering your application, your systems to, well, internationally was much harder.
We didn't have all of the infrastructure that we have today.
And yeah, we need to have a waste of that.
Obviously, all of that, it's not trivial to make, right?
That's why I mentioned the frameworks.
The frameworks are basically components that we use to share concepts throughout all of these applications, including cute.
And yeah, make our life a little bit simpler and easier as we can, because that's kind of what it is about, right?
Like, when we talk about free and open software, we talk about sharing, we talk about collaborating.
And one of the best ways to collaborate is to technical means, right?
Because as they say, collaboration can be also a selfish thing or sharing, right?
And that's somewhat what we do.
So, I think that now would be a bit interesting to think a little bit about, like,
we've been talking about all of the things that we've been putting forward all of the different products.
But, like, how do you make it happen?
Do you move from that guy who was in the university to being in 20, 30 years ago to what we are today?
Where we have our product in different hardware lines across the globe.
We have people also working on it.
I don't know, in Asia, in Africa, in Europe, right?
America.
So, how does that happen?
One of our most important aspects, especially on the technical level, has been killed.
It has been component that we've been using since the very beginning.
In the very beginning, because, well, Matthias needed something to get started.
If he had had to start putting together a ticket, he would probably still be doing it.
And he would have gotten distracted with something else.
But there was a library that he could start using and starting producing while a user experience for the while geared to whatever he wanted, right?
Another important thing for us for cute has been, like I said earlier, we've been,
well, there's a person waving there, sorry.
Cute has been evolving with the industry, they have their own needs, all the industry has its own needs,
and they have been putting together a ton of very interesting technology.
We have been using it when they started getting interested in hardware accelerated graphics.
We got infrastructure to do hardware accelerated graphics.
When they wanted adaptable UIs, we got infrastructure to be able to put adaptable UIs.
And we've been working together since today, you have many KD developers that are very well integrated into the cute project and vice versa.
We have the foundation as well called the KD for cute foundation, that make sure that cute remains free software as much as possible.
And then we can always continue to rely on it, which is super important, right?
It was a problem in the beginning, in fact, about how some people didn't really like the licenses that cute had.
It was something that was worked out, and it has worked since we still have cute as free software and used all over.
And having all of these work and components slowly getting in place has meant that we have been able to get contributors,
good and contributors who wanted to work on the different things, everything, obviously, that we developed is in the open.
And people when they feel like, well, they want to start having an impact or making maybe solving a problem.
But KD suddenly becomes a good place where to do that, because you don't have to figure out everything else.
You just need to solve the problem that you have, and then you have everything else, but the problem you had.
Also, nothing super novel, but something that is very important in free software communities, and also not for granted for sure.
All of that has been happening, like I said, in the open, mostly, and these changes over time always, but through a million reasons,
chat is where we do a lot of our talking, started being more mailing list, I guess.
And it's becoming more chat, more and more, both have pros, both have cons, and for sure, both of them are very present.
I wrote VCS as in version control systems here, because we have definitely changed how we use this a lot.
Actually, if we go back to the timeline I wrote earlier, we would be able to come up with a whole different one with our VCS, we started with CVS, which was the one that was used.
In the 90s, I guess, I never even really thought this one, or at least not in any serious way.
Katie was using subversion between 2015, I would say, which worked quite well.
It was a humongous big repository where everybody worked together.
It was working fine, but it was kind of hard doing feature work and all of that things that we take for granted nowadays with Git.
We're using it, we start using more of a naked-git thing together with a particular fabricator.
And in this we're using GitLab, which is used and known by many of you, I'm sure.
So if you're familiar with all of this tooling, you can already count that you're counting yourself,
as how far into into Katie, and if you want to contribute, I'm sure you will feel at home in no time.
Our communication with our users has been largely happening throughout Godzilla, butzilla being the tool we use to get tickets and back reports.
Obviously, our users are always in also engaged throughout the channel, the chat throughout the mailing list.
But Godzilla is how we report those tickets and it's very much still today.
But the tool we use to do most of that.
Yeah, we've been talking a lot about the user-visible products, but I guess I already went through it.
We've been working on on the kitty frameworks.
We have several services that have also popped over the time because they are necessary to keep going down as well.
One example would be the embaloo, who is the one we use to index files, but it's something that happens.
It's not really a framework, although we have a framework called like that, which is how we, how an application would interact with it, etc.
And yes, like I was saying a little bit earlier, we could see how the graphics change.
The graphics change doesn't happen on a vacuum though.
You need to reshape and rethink a lot how you are.
I discussed earlier how we started being the coolest environment that we were the Katie environment.
We used to have Katie releases, we don't have Katie releases, we have these days.
Applications releases that happen every now and then.
We have plasma releases that happen every now and then and they're not entirely the same.
Because something that is important to us is that also our applications don't need to be used in plasma.
You can use your applications if you use different little steps up, you can use our applications if you are.
On a proprietary operating system because life is not always as easy as we would like, but.
We are working together obviously our applications many of them will integrate better on our.
System but that's not granted.
And what it is granted it's not necessary that you need to use it to use the applications.
But in any case what we've been working towards is building this trust building working with our user understanding what the problems are and trying to solve them.
There's been especially on the last few years.
We've been doing a lot of work towards making it possible for for users to have their needs met.
Something that if we think about.
What has changed.
Computing or at least like personal computing over the last few years is that we started doing a lot of making systems that.
What you can do anything you want right in the 90s.
2000s you wanted a computer that can do anything and the sky is the limit.
And we've been transitioning towards systems that are excellent at doing the kind of things you do with a.
And we've been taking this by kd is coming up with very flexible solutions like plasma.
For example, today you can run it on different form factors.
You can run plasma on I don't know mobile phone that's up a laptop.
But then when you are on this form factors make sure that.
You have a policy you have a good experience, which is ultimately what is important to us.
We want our users to be happy not to have all of the bells and whistles.
Although at times we do get doesn't whistles because who doesn't like a bell and whistle.
Also our users have grown and I don't mean here that they're eating a lot.
What I mean is that we have.
But more and more of them also people are using today probably.
Our software in more high stakes environments kind of things.
It's important that we respect and follow that as well right.
And the industry also is entirely changed.
Also the industry was more about like making sure you can do anything.
30 years back than it is today.
Also the hardware have changed a lot.
I'm going to try to go through that a little bit.
And also our people have changed right.
Like most of the people back in 30 years ago now we call them dinosaurs and we don't call them dinosaurs because we're mean.
But because often they decide to move on to different things and new people will come and new ideas are going to come.
But that's also has been one of the big reasons why Katie has remained.
We have been able to work together all of us and like with our big disruptions continue providing value to our users and to ourselves as well.
And and respect each other which is so very important.
And to do that while meetings have been a very important aspect of it all.
This is the first meeting that.
Katie did I think that this was 1997 and obviously cameras weren't very good by then.
But.
Well, too close already kicking hands I see.
But in any case.
We've been.
Meeting more and more this was our academy meeting.
Glass summer in Berlin.
Academy is the conference that we do every year like the then we saw before this wasn't called the Academy yet.
But that's what it evolved into.
We're working on having academy this summer in grads so if any of you want to come you're welcome to.
Maybe I didn't mention it explicitly enough but if you want to be part of any aspect of Katie you're more than welcome to you just have to like find the the right mailing list or chat room to be here and say hi and we.
We will welcome you.
So we have to kind of events we have academy that is more of a conference not all that unlike here obviously much smaller as you can see here.
Where we do talks we do presentations but we also allocate some days to sit down and discuss.
Our different topics.
And academy would would last for for a week but then we've been also having events that we call sprint.
That our marks much smaller actually this was a quite big sprint so maybe that doesn't count this is a better picture.
Where we again sit together and discuss a different specific topic being able to also do this team building is is important because.
But it's very cool and very powerful to be able to be distributed.
Ball wide but creating the human links and to have discussions in person always happens in a.
In a better way.
And because it's it's very important to be friends right like you don't create a good product if you don't get to talk to your peers you don't get to discuss you don't want to say.
This is a good idea or this is a bad idea especially when we are in this industry that.
For lack of a better world is in identifying we see a lot of the products we are compared to growing ads over growing.
Cutting features where it's maybe not needed and that doesn't really help a lot.
And the people who are using it.
And it does make sense operating systems are hard the business mothers are not super clear.
I don't think that anyone is getting rich these days with any of the operating systems.
And while we are doing the best we can.
From a Linux and kiddie perspective we have very big competitors right like if you look at the kind of people that.
All of us I guess in this room have around.
Well they're the biggest curious companies in the world we have I don't know.
Google Microsoft Apple right like.
Who are we to tell these people no no no the produce you're doing are not quite right.
Well, here we are and we keep saying so it's important that people have ways to.
To use the computers outside of all of these pressure that happens in the market.
And we continue delivering it with delivery by having contributors that by having users by having people who contribute money to the project and.
Well allows us to to keep going and to continue providing.
Solutions that.
That are useful and great for everyone.
The example that is a little bit outside of what we were discussing.
Is Greta for example Greta is.
Program that.
Some fellow people from the K office team actually back then.
Decided.
We want to work on our application that is very good at drawing because they like drawing they had a hardware.
But they realized that I don't know computers were not as good as real pen and paper.
And if you look today online you'll see a ton of people using Greta as a solution for their.
Painting be like recreational or professional or anything between.
This is very important like if we didn't have.
It wouldn't happen.
At least all that easy for them to put together.
A product and delivery.
Another example I'm quite proud of.
Yeah, this is a weird picture because I couldn't find a good one of our phones.
So I took it when I was preparing the talk.
This is itinerary you can see folk who has been developing it for a while.
Around here.
He wanted to work on an application so that when you travel you can put all of your itinerary in it and then you don't have to.
What we have rely on proprietary applications to tell you where you have to go every time right.
We were already developing plasma mobile background.
We're already developing a lot of the frameworks and systems that.
That he needed so he could focus on putting to their application.
And then delivering it into the phones.
I'm here actually we can see it running on on and right.
In fact, this is the actual itinerary for me to get to Brussels or it would have been if Dutch Japan had worked.
And yeah, really good application if you give it a go.
It's really nice.
We've been also working with several hardware vendors to.
We put together devices also with our server.
So one of the weird realizations at least for me was.
Okay, we are developing these systems.
As you very well know, this systems we create need to be distributed by distribution.
All right.
And then.
How do you get that into hardware like how do how did I go from.
I am a plasma developer so to say to.
Pay mother or father.
Use the thing I've been working on these days.
It wasn't all that trivial.
And to me it boils down quite a bit to all right.
Make it possible for people at least to buy it, right.
There's the also the alternative of try to erase whatever is coming with your hardware that you bought.
And.
Put this thing and hope that it works which we all do myself included not on this one.
But yeah, I think that it was a good way of doing this.
This is the slim book, but this days you can find three or four vendors.
There's to settle as well.
There's going to focus.
Who are going to sell your device that has all of our software and it's already.
Well, they already make sure that.
It's going to work and it's going to.
One of the big changes that we've seen that we got and still are very excited about was the steam deck.
It's like one of these big big companies decided how about we make Linux cool for gamers.
And and and they did they delivered.
Beyond my personal expectations and I'm sure that many of yours as well.
And they did it together with us.
So if you get one of these devices, you can.
Get into the desktop mode and use our software quite easily.
And yeah, that has also driven a lot of our development in that like.
We had to make sure that all of these new weird people who have these new weird use cases.
Well, they are users were met.
And our example of the things we're doing is kitty plasma mobile.
So the UX for phone is something that oh, yes, we have a booth around here on on the corner.
If you want to try any of that, you can go over there and thinker with some of the.
Uh, however, bits we have lying around.
Oh, very cool.
Now, if you've been in this world for the last ten years, you will be telling me.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, you're talking to me about buying new hardware.
That's not what we do these days.
This is not a kilo.
And you will be quite right.
That's why we've been working together with other communities in these.
Environment on what we call the end of ten campaign where we were.
But using the opportunity that Microsoft is asking every user to throw away their hardware because it's not cool enough.
And we're telling them or use Linux, use our software even on.
And we're going to make good use of it.
You don't need to throw it away.
Yeah.
Now, uh, you don't really want to go super in depth in that topic because it can be quite boring.
But I think that it's, uh, who is important to mention.
Uh, finances are important for free software much like for any other project.
Maybe not much like in that, in a company, you will have different needs and responsibilities.
But in any case, we need to be funded.
We need to have servers.
We need to have people hired to work on different topics that people from the community won't be all that excited to work about.
So we need to do that.
Um, we've also had or up up down down.
And if, if you wanted, we could have had a timeline of how all of that worked.
Um, on the very early years.
Actually, it seemed like there would be several, um,
or more interest within the industry, which it was hard to materialize to the honest.
Uh, but what they moved on, um, until Nokia, I think happened.
Um, all of the finances changed quite a bit.
I understand these also took your four years until they got tired of this whole Linux thing.
And then they went away.
And ever since we've been in a slow, but upwards tendency towards while continuing to get like what we call supporting members, which are the different industry partners.
And also we've been working more with individual people and thinking about how to make them part of, um, of that financial solution.
To the extent that last year we had a great, um, get fundraising experience.
And we are very thankful for that.
We, uh, we promise that we will put the money to good work, uh,
especially to make sure that our products are as great as we want them to be.
It's always daunting, uh, actually like putting money into hiring because then you become, well, somewhat responsible to,
to the people you're hiring, but it's important that we do this kind of things.
And so far it's actually been quite good people have responded very well.
And it means that people can continue working and putting their effort into what we do, which is very important and very interesting.
And I want to thank everyone who has been working on these things, uh, because, but without you it wouldn't be possible.
Right?
But are we done? Well, no, we're not done, right?
There's still problems to solve.
There's, um, well, not everybody is using plus matches yet.
And not everybody is using Linux just yet.
So, um, well, we need to keep working.
Uh, our user keeps evolving.
Yeah. Sorry.
Our user keeps evolving.
Uh, there are new phone factors, new users like for example, the,
the student business required.
We're thinking some aspects of how our user experience.
Uh, the mobile phone required some thinking of our user experience of making sure that
what we create is always as good as, uh, as it gets to be, right?
Uh, the hard work is changing.
And quite a bit. Actually, there's something that worries me these days, like on.
Although in the laptops kind of thing, it was super easy. You get an ISO from whoever, from Ubuntu, from Suze, from whoever.
You put it in there. It installs. It works. Perfect. No problem.
Um, mobile. We haven't been able to do that. Had we been able to do that, Linux, um,
while today would be much better. I think that we all agree on that one.
And we see that more and more manufacturers are adopting arm, which is,
from my understanding, big responsible for this, this way.
And well, I am worried that maybe in a few years it would not be all that easy to,
just install the software that we keep putting together, because it simply cannot boot,
which is like, um, silly concept, right? In any case, uh, Linux is changing as well.
Uh, distributions have been evolving quite a bit over the last few years.
There, we will have seen many new ones come up.
And they work in many different ways than they used to.
The old Linux distributions also continue doing their work.
And we continue working together and it's very important for us.
Uh, in this regard, we have been, uh, thinking a lot about what we call KD Linux,
being, um, Linux operating system made by us with our software,
that we are aiming that is going to be reliable.
And that is, well, if it breaks, you can go back to the last version that worked.
And it's going to continue working. And it's going to be fine, which is,
you know, what we want in an operating system, right?
We are thinking, like, I was saying about being able to have our software delivered in different pieces of hardware.
And we need to have the security that we can solve the problem.
Something that, like, uh, scares me is when, like,
I usually can come to me and say, do this thing is not working.
And I say, okay, I'm going to sit down and fix it.
And then I cannot give them the solution, right?
This is something that we need to make sure that can happen.
And we can only make that happen by collaborating, by collaborating with,
with different, upstreams and downstreams and side streams.
And this is something that we've been doing.
We've been working with different communities, uh,
in view of making all of that possible.
For example, well, here, I used to have the, uh, Linux apps on me,
and it logo, I think it's gone, but it's, um,
what, a collaboration we're doing with, uh,
no, we're going to have our conferences here.
In May, everything goes alright.
But keep tuned, you'll see.
Uh, you get some news.
Now, from a very personal level, if you,
well, by my appeal, what I've been discussing, what do you do?
But you can use our software, you can use our software.
Anyway, I'm sure that you can find at least some bits that you can,
you can use today.
And if not, you can fill it out.
I'm sure.
You can consider joining us.
Um.
You might be thinking, oh, I'm not a C++ developers.
Well, we need any kind of people.
We need translator.
We need graphics designers.
We need people who can put together a UX.
We need people who go through the bug reports and says,
well, these are important.
These are not so much important.
Many, many things.
We even have a wiki page that, um,
that tells you how to get started.
You can easily search online.
Getting started, KD.
And you will find that page.
Easily, it's going to give you a ton of ideas.
Yeah.
So, join us.
You will be welcome.
You'll get to join us at a academy.
Any, you can always come to academy.
You need to get permission or anything.
And yeah, that was my presentation.
This is me.
My name is Aleshe.
I am from Barcelona.
I'm living in Berlin.
I'm the KDV president.
The KDV being the association around all of these things that I've been discussing.
I'm also a KD contributor and developer.
I've been working on several of the components of discuss here.
I'm employed these days by a good thing.
And I do operating systems with them.
I'm also part of the Linux-absomit organization teams.
And on Sundays at 6, I do a Twitch with Carl Citer, which is also an all over KD kind of person.
Now, yeah, thanks for listening to me.
If you have any questions, you may ask them now or come to the booth later on.
And ask anyone there, or me, if I'm there.
I thought this a question.
Any questions?
Any questions over there?
Okay.
Good morning.
Yeah.
I think it's a little bit hard to become a contributor for the KDV project.
Not because KDV is not well documented or whatever, just because it's big.
It's gigantic.
How do you say, what's the best method to become a contributor?
Use KDV neon, use Docker, use some solution.
What's your talk about that easiest way?
Using KDV neon is probably one of the easiest ways these days using KDV neon.
So it's something you can already start using.
Many people are using them.
It's not going to explode or actually like I was saying with Twitch security,
very seriously or you're not going to lose your data or anything like that.
But in any way, using the software shouldn't be the high part.
And it also depends on which aspects you want to contribute to.
Like, if you need an app, for example, what you can do is use the flat perks.
As you can either get them from flat top, where you're going to have the last version.
You can get them from the CI, where you can get the development version.
And from there, the sky is the limit, I guess.
There's a question over there.
Yes.
One, two, three.
So my question was about phones.
So what's the latest or greatest and best phone experience with KDV?
So you're asking devices, right?
The last one that was working quite well was the OnePlus 6.
We are working towards making the Farphone really good.
Also, push on one of our last mobile maintainers has been working on this new device called Mecca.
All of them, you can find them at the booth.
You can try them. You'll see it's super fast, super smooth, super beautiful.
Hello, you briefly spoke about distribution and packaging via flat packs of the applications.
What proportion of KDV applications would you currently say are packaged by flat packs?
And is there a kind of formal plan to increase the amount of applications that package in flat packs?
I think that the vast majority they are when they are not is because there's some weird constraint.
We're working towards making sure that all of the applications can work there.
Constraints look more like, for example, we have the KDV teams with that.
They have the service that runs around it and, well, making sure that it works properly and as needed is not trivial.
But we're working towards that. So our plan is 100% if possible and if not as much.
But we take it seriously in KD Linux all of the only way you have to graphically install applications is through flat pack and flat hub.
So it's very important to us and we're working in this direction.
Thanks.
Okay, we should have time for one more question.
One last question.
There's any hands moving there.
Hello?
What's the current status of the plasma big screen project like the usability of it?
I see that everybody is interested about the weirder form factors.
Plasma big screen was properly ported to our last.
After our last technology switch to kitsics and everything.
It is more or less working.
Development is not super active.
The hardware story again is not super clear.
There's a lot of devices that could be each a good thing that you would have connected to the TV,
which is entirely the use case for plasma big screen.
But I don't think that anyone has narrow down yet what the right behavior would be.
Actually, ideally, we would be able to install the software into the TVs, right?
But again, it's a weirdly closed ecosystem and it's very hard to get into.
So we still have to rely on satellite hardware being around on your, I don't know, not desk.
Around your TV needs to be there.
But yeah, it's working and you can run the different applications as you need.
And control it with the remote, which is what it's about.
So it is alive.
If you want it more alive, you can join.
And take a bite on the program because it is important that people use it and develop it for it to be successful.
Okay, so this has been it.
Where shall we give him another round of applause?