Last week Nicolas Fella, Roman Gilg, and I represented KDE at the Qt World Summit 2019 in Berlin.

The booth just before the venue opened – half an hour later it was crowded in here.

This year we set up a lounge area upstairs for people to chat, see our hardware and software offerings, as well as charge their phones between talks. At the center of our booth we had a large KDE-branded table with various bits of swag and a KDE Slimbook on display which we used as our main device for demoing our extensive KDE Applications and Frameworks offerings.

#QtWS19

Plasma Mobile table

We also had a dedicated table for our mobile effort where we showcased our KDE apps for Android and of course Plasma Mobile. The latter of which we had running on a good ol’ Nexus 5X and more importantly the Librem 5 Dev Kit by Purism. Unfortunately, the Pinephone developer kits we were hoping to show as well weren’t shipped in time for the event. Anyway, if you’re interested in learning more about what’s going on with Plasma Mobile go check out our new weekly blog series!

Plasma yoga action

Another unusual device we presented was the One Mix 2S – a 7″ convertible laptop featuring an Intel Atom processor rather than something ARM-based. It also has a selection of ports you would rather expect from a full-sized laptop, such as USB-C/A and HDMI, making it an interesting choice for use in a docking station setup. It ran an experimental version of Plasma Wayland with automatic screen rotation and tablet mode toggle which increases the hit area for controls and the spacing between them. Finally, our booth also featured a Pinebook which impressively shows how well our software performs on slow but cheap hardware.

Supercharge your phone at the KDE booth.

On the evening of the first conference day KDAB celebrated their 20th anniversary by throwing a party with table football, VR games, and most importantly: free beer. A perfect opportunity to spread a stack of KDE Konqi beer coasters throughout the venue! However, the next morning I had to get up early as I got asked to participate in a panel discussion at 8 am on contributing to Qt. Surprisingly, despite the party the evening before we ran out of chairs in that room. Lars Knoll did a live demonstration on how to actually submit a Qt patch using Gerrit and then we all discussed the pros and cons of contributing upstream. Sadly, there was no recording.

Konqi trying to protect KDAB’s precious wooden counter from beer stains.

Since the three of us were pretty busy running this large stall there wasn’t much free time to sit in any of the presentations. I did get a chance on the second day of the event to attend Ulf Hermann’s talk on the future of QML which is a very important topic for the advancement of Plasma. Overall their changes planned for QML 3 in Qt 6 sound reasonable but given the sheer number of to do items mentioned during the presentation it is somewhat early to assess the impact on our software stack.

Just a few days from now I’ll be visiting Berlin once again. This time for the KDE Frameworks 6 sprint end of next week, kindly hosted by MBition. Are you using KDE Frameworks in your application or are even a contributor already? There’s lots of work to be done, come join us and check out the Wiki page for more information!