My first in-person Akademy: Thessaloniki 2023

My first in-person Akademy: Thessaloniki 2023

This year, I was finally able to participate in-person at Akademy. Apart from meeting some familiar faces from the Plasma Spring in May this year, I also met lots of new people.

When waiting for the plane in Frankfurt, a group of KDE people formed. Meaning, we had a get-together even before the Akademy had started ;). On the plane to Thessaloniki, I made a merge requests to fix a Kickoff crash due to a KRunner change. Once that was done, everything was in place for the talks!

On Saturday, I talked once again with Nico and also Volker about KF6. This included topics like the remaining challenges, the estimated timeline for KF6 and some practical porting advice. I also gave a talk about KRunner. This was the conference talk of mine that I gave alone, meaning I was a bit nervous 😅. The title was “KRunner: Past, Present, and Future” and it focused on porting, new features and future plans for KF6. Thanks to everyone who was listening to the talk, both in person and online! Some things like the multithreading refactoring are worth their own blog post, which I will do in the next weeks.

The talks from other community members were also quite interesting. Sometimes it was hard to decide to which talk to go :). Multiple talks and BoFs were about energy efficiency and doing measurements. This perfectly aligned with me doing benchmarking of KRunner and the KCoreAddons plugin infrastructure.

The view of the city from the hotel balcony was also quite nice

Our KF6 and Qt6 porting BoFs were also quite productive. On Tuesday, we had our traditional KF6 weekly. Having this in person was definitely a nice refreshment! Apart from some general questions about documentation and KF6 Phabricator tasks, we discussed the release schedule. The main takeaway is that we want to improve the release automation and have created a small team to handle the KDE Frameworks releases. This includes Harald Sitter, Nicolas Fella, David Edmundson and me. Feel free to join the weeklies in our Big Blue Button room https://meet.kde.org/b/ada-mi8-aem at 17:00 CEST each Tuesday.

Since we had so many talented KDE people in one place, I decided to have a KRunner BoF on Tuesday morning. Subject of discussion was for example the sorting of KRunner, how to better organize the categories and the revival of the so-called “single runner mode”. This mode allows you to query only one specific plugin, instead of all available ones. This was previously only available from the D-Bus interface, but I have added a command line option to KRunner. To better visualize this special mode being in use, a tool-button was added as an indicator. This can also be used to go back to querying all runners. Kai will implement clickable categories that allow you to enable this mode without any command line options being necessary!

Finally, I would like to thank everyone who made this awesome experience possible! I am already looking forward to the next Akademy and the next sprints.