In September 2018, the X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC) was held in A Coruña, Spain. I participated as a Plasma/KWin developer. My main goal was to connect with developers from other projects and companies working on open source technology to show them that the KDE community can be a reliable and valuable partner, both now and in the future.
Instead of recounting chronologically what went down at the conference, let us look at three key groups of attendees who are relevant to KWin and Plasma: the graphics drivers and kernel developers, upstream userland developers, and colleagues working on other compositor projects.
If you search YouTube for videos of talks from XDC conferences, you will notice many speakers are graphic drivers developers directly employed by hardware vendors. The reason is that hardware vendors have enough resources to employ open source developers and send them to conferences. They benefit greatly from contributing directly to open source projects.
At the conference, I had the opportunity to talk to Nvidia engineers. They were friendly and eager to discuss their technical solutions, despite the fact that there were things that they could not disclose because of the proprietary nature of Nvidia's technologies. They did say they would provide us with some hardware for testing purposes, however. This is something we appreciate and our KWin contributors received some Nvidia hardware which allowed them to troubleshoot some of the problems our users may experience with Nvidia cards.
The situation looks completely different for Intel and AMD. Intel has a long-standing track record of open development of their own drivers and contributing to generic open source solutions supported by other vendors. Not too long ago, AMD decided to open source their most commonly used graphics drivers on Linux. In both cases, it is a pleasure to work with their latest hardware, and talking to their developers at XDC was as great as I had imagined. They genuinely care about boosting the whole ecosystem and finding suitable solutions for everyone. I want to explicitly mention Martin Peres from Intel and Harry Wentland from AMD. During our in-depth discussions, they showed great interest in improving the collaboration between engineers working on the low-level code and us developers working in userland.
We have yet to mention ARM. Although they were "Gold Sponsors" of the event just like Nvidia, Intel and AMD, their contribution to the conference in terms of content was minimal (most likely because their technology is mostly closed-source). However, several extremely talented hackers that provide open-source drivers for ARM Mali GPUs presented their work at XDC, and I have the highest respect for their efforts.
Linux graphics drivers are cool and all, but without XServer, Wayland, and other auxiliary cross-vendor user space libraries, there would be not much to show the user. After all, it is the X.Org Developer's conference. X.org is most notably the home to the XServer, and maybe in the future, governance-wise, to freedesktop.org as well. So after looking at low-level driver development, what role did these projects and their developers play at the conference?
Of course, the dichotomy from the previous paragraph is not that pronounced. Several graphics drivers are part of mesa, which is again part of freedesktop.org. Many graphics drivers developers are also contributing to userland, or are involved in organizational aspects of X.Org and freedesktop.org.
One of the more prominent organizational aspects is project hosting. Daniel Stone gave a talk about the freedesktop.org transition to GitLab; a rather huge project that was still ongoing at the time of writing.
There were not that many technical presentations about XServer, Wayland and other high-level components. After seeing some lightning talks on the first day of the conference, I decided to hold a lightning talk myself about my Xwayland GSOC project from 2017. You can watch the video of my presentation below. Among other interesting talks, Drew De Vault presented a demo of wlroot's layer shell. In the future, we hope to increase the amount of talks on the topic of higher-level user space graphics stack.
-We were a somewhat special crowd at XDC. Some attendees were from wlroots; there was Guido from Purism, and me from KWin. We were united by the fact that, to my knowledge, all of us were attending XDC for the first time.
Looking at previous conferences, the involvement of compositor developers was marginal. My proclaimed goal - and I believe the goal of many others as well - is to change this. From people working on embedded to desktop developers, everyone will benefit from working together where possible, and from exchanging information with each other, with upstream and with hardware vendors. I believe X.Org and freedesktop.org can be a perfect platform for that.
The organisation of the conference was great. I would like to extend a huge thanks to Igalia for hosting XDC in their beautiful hometown. The conference schedule was really accommodating, with three long breaks every day and long pauses between the talks, allowing the attendees to talk to each other. On the downside, all the attendees were spread out over the city in different hotels, which made post-conference gatherings a bit inconvenient. Following the Akademy approach - meaning, recommending a reasonably-priced default hotel for everyone - could make the next XDC even better.
Manufacturers took notice of Plasma's adaptability in 2018 and started installing KDE's desktop on their devices. Slimbook took the lead and released a KDE version of their sleek ultrabook back in January 2017. Then they upped the ante in February 2018 with the KDE Slimbook II, which came with more powerful hardware and a customized KDE neon operating system.
While Slimbook aimed for the higher end of the ultrabook market, Pine64 decided to go with "affordable" when they released the Pinebook. This thin and light netbook is built around their ARM-based single-board computer, and costs only 99 USD. It turns out that Plasma is perfectly adapted for that too, and developers collaborated with Pine64 to make sure everything worked smoothly out of the box.
Pine64 was not done, though. Towards the end of the year, they announced they were working on a Linux-based mobile device, dubbed the PinePhone. The PinePhone will run the postmarketOS Linux distribution and Plasma Mobile as its graphical environment.
Finally, Mycroft, creators of the successful open source IA personal assistant, are building the version 2 of their Mark device, and KDE is developing the interface. The original device used LEDs to display information, but Mycroft Mark II comes with a touchscreen. Plasma developers started collaborating with Mycroft engineers in November 2018 to bring KDE goodness to the intelligent speaker.
New developers and team members breathed new life into KDE's full-featured video editor, Kdenlive, in 2018. The team released no less than four versions throughout the year. At the same time, the developers were working on a major refactoring of the back-end code that culminated in version 19.04, released in April 2019.
Kdenlive team members also worked hard on community outreach and promotion, organizing virtual Kdenlive Cafés. In the Cafés, users asked about anything Kdenlive-related, commented on features, and pitched suggestions. The team also held sprints, delivered talks and ran workshops.
All this work has resulted in Kdenlive becoming one of the best and most well-known open source video editors in the field.
Documenters have been updating Userbase since September 2018. Userbase is the wiki aimed at KDE users and enthusiasts. The old screenshots from the KDE 3 and KDE 4 eras are now gone, and Userbase pages show the improvements of the new versions of Plasma and KDE applications. Writers have added several new tutorials, and plenty of other content has also been updated.
This effort is part of the ongoing goal to provide more helpful information for KDE users.
Most of KDE's success stories are incredibly impressive, but would go less noticed if it weren't for the contributors who spread the word outside the KDE community.
The Promo team ramped up the social media activity in 2018 - and it paid off. KDE's Twitter was started in September 2008, and in nine years it reached 48.600 followers. That is 5400 followers a year, which is not bad at all. However, in the last two years, the Promo team has averaged over 9000 followers a year, pushing the total readership well over 65.000 followers.
Likewise, in September 2018 the Promo team took over KDE's LinkedIn account. The aim was to reach an audience of business-oriented people. We doubled the number of followers in 4 months, and the growth has continued constantly ever since.
As for appearances in press, in 2017 KDE was mentioned slightly less than 80 times. In 2018, mentions grew to 120 times. KDE's environments, applications and technologies are mentioned in influential online publications regularly now.
This has also helped to increase the number of contributions. More contributors allow us to set up our own events better, sponsor developers so they can attend sprints, deploy contributors to conferences and fairs, and provide travel, accommodation and materials for all those things.
Beyond the purely monetary aspect, having a strong promo activity ends up helping everyone: it helps developers and contributors gain recognition for their work; the community can receive more support and the number of its members increases; users can discover our software and start enjoying the advantages of using a friendly, full-featured graphical environment and applications; and businesses can discover spectacular tools that allow them to create beautiful and maintainable applications in less time.
To summarize: 2018 has been a successful year for KDE in general. We laid down the ground work for more successes to come in the future.
Between the 23rd and 25th of March 2018, KDE Connect developers gathered in Verse's offices in Barcelona to work together for a weekend. It was the first meeting KDE Connect had in a while, and it was very productive!
We kicked off the sprint by going through our backlog of ideas to decide what was worth implementing. That helped us set the focus for the sprint and resume some blocked tasks.
One of the most requested features for KDE Connect is the ability to send SMS from the desktop. We already supported SMS to a certain degree, but some crucial features such as conversation history were not yet there. During the sprint, Simon and Aleix started working on a fully-featured interface for sending SMS easily from the desktop that includes full conversation views and a full contact list.
Aleix and Nico polished the Run Commands interface to make it more discoverable, so that we can easily configure KDE Connect to do anything we want.
Matthijs improved the functionality of multimedia controls, making it possible to display the album art from the desktop on users' Android devices (both on the lock screen and in the new multimedia notification). Meanwhile, Aleix and Nico started paving the way towards better integration with PulseAudio control, sharing some code between KDE Connect and the Plasma volume control.
A less visible but crucial part of what makes KDE Connect so useful is its integration with the system. Albert Vaca worked on a KDE Connect plugin for Nautilus, so people who don't use Plasma and Dolphin can also have a great user experience.
Another very important but often-overlooked task is documentation. Matthijs invested some time in improving the onboarding process for new contributors.
Last but not least, we fixed some ugly bugs during this sprint. Albert Astals fixed a long-standing crash in KIO, the KDE Framework used by KDE Connect for transferring files. Simon and Albert Vaca took care of some compatibility problems with Android Oreo, while Matthijs fixed a connectivity issue and even made some progress on Bluetooth support.
All in all, the sprint was a pleasant event. It was nice to meet the developers working on KDE Connect, to connect faces with nicknames, and agree on a common path we will follow in future development.February 2018 was a big month for the Promo team - we held a long-awaited sprint in Barcelona, Spain from the 16th to 18th. The aim of the sprint was to look at information we had collected over the prior years, interpret what it meant, and use it to discuss and plan for the future. The activities we came up with should help us accomplish our ultimate goal: increasing KDE's visibility and user base.