Akademy is, according to its web page, the annual world summit of KDE, one of the largest Free Software communities in the world. I would add to that is a great opportunity to meet really creative tech people, to learn and to get more involved into the Free Software world. This was my first time attending to it, and probably not the last one. I attended as a plasma extensions developer, as Nitrux developer and also as an AppImage Project contributor.
I wasn’t able to get presentation ready on time ready but I do had the chance to discuss about the above mentioned projects with the people around. So I’ll share the a summary.
Plasma Extensions
Is composed by a set of experimental plasmoids that follow a design goal: bring the most used and related settings together and upfront.
Nitrux
Is a GNU/Linux distribution focused on providing the best user experience possible. It combines an elegant design and a set of enhanced plasma widgets that group together the mos commonly used functionalities. It’s based (at the time writing this post) on ubuntu 18.04 and uses AppImages as the main way of distributing user applications.
In Akademy we, the Nitrux team, had the chance to present our work in the distributions BoF. Which included the NX Software Center which is a Qt-Qml application that makes usage of the plasma qml components to achieve a better blending with Plasma based desktops. Also it’s distributed as an AppImage which makes it a good reference of applications that makes use of the plasma qml components and kde frameworks and want to be distributed in the same way.
AppImage
As active contributor to the AppImage project I was presenting the AppImage KDE Thumbnailer. Also was discussed how to improve AppImages support in Plasma, therefore were requested the following features:
- AppImage files thumbnails in the file manager.
- Applications menu, mime-types and favorite applications integration.
- Execution and verification of newly downloaded AppImage files.
- Discovery newly available AppImages in the file system.
It was really great to see that our requests were listened and analysed carefully. We get to the arrangement that once the basic libs for AppImage manipulation were included in the major upstream projects the repositories we could continue working on the topic.
Conclusions
After a whole week of really interesting presentations, workshops and high tech I got the feeling of being part of something really awesome, the creation of a better and free software ecosystem for the world. The people there were really nice and the organization was awesome. In general, Akademy 2018 was a great opportunity to share experiences, results and also to make friends.