So on the last day of Hivefest XI I had to take an early flight into what it will be my second event here in Europe called Akademy 2026, the event is basically to get together of the Katy community which is known to become the cool that stuff environment for the GNU/Linux system and this is one of the most important communities on the open source world.
Akademy is a special one because it's the 30th Anniversary of the Desktop and sort of a big milestone to what the community has become.
This is a screenshot of the K Desktop environment launched someone on 1996 as competitive interface on the Linux GUI environments. It's been 30 years since then, and the desktop and family of applications is astonishing. There are currently over 200 applications developed and maintained under the KDE umbrella. These range from core system tools and file managers like Dolphin and Konsole to creative and productivity software like Kdenlive, Krita, and Okular.
However, back to the event, my experience was wildly cut down short because of Hivefest leaving me on the last day of the event. But a series of unfortunate events. I was happy that I took the morning flight from Barcelona. However the bus that took us from Vienna to Graz departed almost a whole hour. This made me get out of Vienna by 2.30pm instead of 12.45p. Eventually the bus arrived at 4pm.
Then there was another issue which was the fuzzy location withing Graz took an couple of expensive Ubers to take me to the right campus. The there were the buildings and before giving up as most buildings were closed for the day. I was able to jump on IRC and discover the rooms where the talks were talking place.
Eventually I was able to enjoy a whole hour and change of talks on the last day of talks. Fortunately enough however I manage for some lighting talks. They went from the forgot Plasma Activities to the prices to the various members, etc.
I suggest you, of you are interested and want to find about technical reviews, go to Planet KDE. I leave you with the picture of the community, unfortunately I miss that as well.
Kudos on completing your daily Ecency leaderboard quest, @jza!
Tipped with Ecency POINTS.
You're really getting around. I have always quite liked KDE, but it went through some rough patches at times. My current system uses it and it works well. I've not been to many Linux events, but there can be a similar vibe to Hivefest with people who want to create stuff. It's just a shame we can't get as many together these days.
Yeah I'm currently in a room full of devs talking about Activities and how it should behave in the future.
I half expected to see @dickturpin there. He goes to some big conferences.
I will admit I don't get into all that KDE can do. It has hidden depths.
I haven't used KDE for about fifteen years now.
I expect it's changed a bit. I have used Gnome, but found it less intuitive.
I've become lazy over the years. My daily driver is Ubuntu; on the whole, it just works. My DE is GNOME. I've used just about everything over the years, but my days of affing about are behind me.
Hands up all those spending sleepless nights with xranr.
There is nothing wrong with 'just works'. There were times when you could not take that for granted with Linux. There will be depths to each DE that I don't explore so it's mainly about doing the basics well.
Yeah is not only the desktop out has like 100 applications and yeah since I use it I have change my applications with mouse gestures. I removed all panels.