Akademy 2022: Conference report

Thanks to Fedora sponsorship (both for my travel and the conference itself), I was able to attend Akademy last week in Barcelona. It was great to finally meet in person folks I’ve been working with for the last couple of years.

I’ll highlight here a few talks that I found interesting. I’ve made another post focused on the future for Flatpak support and integration in KDE.

The full agenda for the two days of conference is at conf.kde.org. You can find the recordings for all talks as raw videos on KDE’s YouTube channel until they are cut into more easily linkable videos.

Konquering the World: Are We There Yet?

Nate Graham gave an update on how far things have progressed to make KDE Plasma and Apps available pre-installed on consumer devices. It’s an important goal to find partners to pre-install KDE software as most users are not able to install their own operating system.

Full Steam ahead!

David Edmundson explained the story behind the Steam Deck and the work funded by Valve to make KDE Plasma work great on it. This is a great step for KDE and for gaming on Linux in general.

Asahi Linux - One chip, no docs, and lots of fun

Hector Martin was invited to speak about his experience working on Linux support for Apple devices. What I found the most interesting is that they were able to build strong debugging and reversing tools thanks to virtualization support in the M1 chips and that significantly helped them with reverse engineering.

Fedora, KDE, Kinoite, and Mobile

Neal Gompa gave an overview of the work we’ve been doing in Fedora to make KDE Plasma and Apps work great in Fedora as part of the KDE SIG.

Conclusion

This list is definitely not exhaustive as I could not attend all sessions. Overall, the conference was great and I hope that the hybrid format is kept. It was not easy especially for remote attendees for Birds of a Feather sessions but it mostly enabled some speaker to present remotely which is valuable already.

See you next year!