This year, 2025, the KDE Community held its yearly conference in Berlin, Germany. This makes me happy in various ways – I like Berlin, and visit the city more often than, say, Amsterdam, which is a lot closer to my home. Here are some of my notes (wall-of-text) from this year, posted on the day of KDE’s 29th birthday.

Travel and Lodging

As usual, I took a train to Berlin. The Deutsche Bahn (DB) Inter City Express (ICE) is generally pretty fast. Not this time, as the first leg arrived 29 minutes and 30 seconds late, for a change-over of 30 minutes. The announcer in the train already said “your connecting train cannot wait” but that did not stop 20 Dutch people from sprinting from platform 3 to platform 12 and then being annoyed as they watched the taillights of the departing train.

Berlin is, as always, Berlin. Filthy and weird and wonderful. I smacked a man on the U-Bahn with my pink whip, much to the amusement of his partner. Hotel Les Nations is my regular place to stay, and remains a good – not particularly cheap – place to stay.

Things Around Town

There’s a Square Dance club open every evening of the week. I only visited one, the Honey Bears, at the south end of Lichterfelde, and had a warm welcome there. Square is a little like KDE, you can show up somewhere and find people with the same weird little hobby and spend an evening just doing your thing.

Berlin being Berlin, the buses also run until late, which is nice when trying to get back from Lichterfelde to Alt-Moabit.

The beer garden at the Zoo and the beer garden at the locks on the Spree and other beer gardens – see the pattern? It was wonderful weather for hanging around in the evenings with KDE friends. It’s about eight years since my kids figured out that “Akademy” means “Dad goes out drinking with his buddies”, when they saw that in Almeria.

The day trip was one of the most chill I’ve participated in and I congratulate the team on picking something to get a bunch of KDE people out of the building and into the park.

Venue

The TU Berlin is a huge building, built like a maze, with upstairs and downstairs and half stairs and hidden levels and everything. It would make a great Doom level. The lecture halls for the conference part could seat about 180, which is a good size for Akademy. Not over-crowded, not so large that we feel lonely. A/V worked well, and the professional video / streaming folk were exactly that – professional.

Slightly less good were the BoF rooms the rest of the week. I kind of missed the nooks-and-crannies that we had in Würzburg and in Thessaloniki. The acoustics in several of the BoF rooms were terrible. That didn’t stop us from having a full schedule. And one of the attendees – Dominic, you got me coffee, and you fixed up the room audio for my workshop – turned out to have amazing skills at figuring out the multi-channel audio setup.

So there was good bits, and less-good bits. I’d hope for more small rooms in future. Having small rooms means that the acoustics are a bit better, because there’s just less hubbub to begin with. It also means that we could have a room with more quiet no-discussion-just-knitting kinds of activities.

Soylent^W KDE Akademy is People

I had so much fun meeting new people – Aks and Tecsiederp and the audio guy Dominic and and and .. even the security guy on duty on saturday who told me excitedly about how he uses KDE Connect on his Steam Deck. It’s good for Akademy to move around a little and bring in new people each year. People who need to hear the story of the pink whip™ for the first time.

I had so much fun meeting old people. Er .. I’m old enough to be plenty of attendees’ dad, I mean “KDE people I’ve known for years”. People who were there when the pink whip™ was first used. Faces returning to the community, like Sebas, and faces I see every year because they are like a rock, like Cullmann.

KDE Akademy is Talks

For Reasons™ I missed the opening keynote from the state of Schleswig-Holstein. The second day keynote from Paloma Oliveira was really good. It was about politics and power dynamics and welcoming (under-represented) groups into a community. Of course it was politics, because Free Software is politics, because all technology is politics, and choosing who to welcome is a fundamental part of a Free Software project.

At Akademy itself I nodded along in agreement, but I don’t think the message really hit home again until events in early October. Separately, a study by the Dutch national “Social Cultural Planningbureau” this month reports that diversity “leads to friction more than inclusion”, in a buried-the-lede no-shit-Sherlock report that says that you actually have to work actively on inclusion. Which is one of the things Paloma said.

I gave (part of) one talk, but that was the report of the board, which is what the Dutch call “een moetje”. So I didn’t get my hair cut for that one.

Talks I particularly enjoyed on the first day were Harald’s about KDE Linux (I got a banana, and I did install KDE Linux, and did report a bug with the partitioning-thing and UUID that it uses) and Cristián’s about more and better language bindings for Qt. I might be 95% a C++ guy, but I feel having a larger number of languages available for expressing ideas is generally better (and many languages are better than C++ in particular areas).

There’s an interesting piece by Felienne Hermans in the Dutch NRC of october 14th 2025 about how programming is possibly the wrong way to think about improving the world through (digital) technology.

A talk I would very much have liked to see was Alexandra’s talk about running business and Free Software together.

Day two I had signed up as a volunteer to act as session chair in room 2. That reduced the choices I could make, but each track and each talk has something cool to offer. Absolute banger talk by Joshua about getting things right for artists. I’d like to thank Achilleas from Red Hat who also chaired in that room for being a great team.

This year’s speakers were all really good as well at being on time, wrapping up on time, and handling questions well. Audiences, too. I think I only shut down one “more a comment tha..”

KDE Akademy is BoFs

The BoF parts of the past few years have been rather hit-and-miss for me. My regular technical involvement with KDE as a whole was either very focused (on Calamares) or absent (because of work-work eating up all my C++ energy). I had a nice time sitting down just to do some work on Calamares this time, in one of the little-too-noisy BoF rooms, and because of that I listened in on, for instance, the End-of-10 Campaign discussion.

A BoF I actively went to was the KDE Initial System Setup BoF, led by Kristen. “KISS” isn’t necessarily a good acronym, but my suggestion of Linux Initial Configuration of KDE was emphatically rejected.

Initial setup and Calamares are pretty closely related, and something I’d like to do (see above, re: C++ energy) is improve interoperability of the two.

KDE Akademy is Dance

Don’t get me started on American Country Square Dance, because I will Be Tedious At You™ about it. At the welcome event Nicole asked me about it and I went on at length and in the end I put a square dance workshop on the BoF schedule.

Ten people showed up, that’s enough for one square! I can teach a very basic workshop, and the people who showed up were perplexed and amused – and followed instructions really well. That’s programmers for you. We gave a little demo at the end of the BoF wrap-up meeting, although it was a bit chaotic because two of the dancers had already left to catch the train back to Warszawa.

Next year I’ll be back (with more practice on my part on the teach-people-to-dance thing) for another round^Wsquare, and I hope other people will come with crocheting or other arts and crafts. Because in the KDE community you should be able to bring your whole self; programmer, kolourpaint-expert, dancer, and eepy-sleepy person.

Takeaway

Akademy is the event that brings the KDE community together; the whole breadth of people, as far as “in-person, and somewhere in the world” can bring everyone. I know we missed people – who can’t travel, who won’t travel, who can’t afford to be there for health or financial reasons. I had the privilege of being able to attend – time and health – and to be supported by KDE e.V. for that travel. It is worth it, every year, and I hope to see many new (and old) KDE contributors next year, wherever it may be.