I was at Akademy 2018!

It was a very productive week of intense discussion and hacking. This year it was hosted by the Technical University of the beautiful City of Vienna.

View from university roof terrace to Peterskirche

After my arrival at the airport on Friday I attended the welcoming event on the top floor at the university, with beautiful city scenery in the background. It was a great opportunity to meet new faces, of which there were many at this year’s Akademy; some of them have been valuable members of the community for years with nobody having them actually seen in person, up until now.

Just keep walking, there’s beer down there!

Saturday and Sunday were packed with talks, including my presentation on Plasma Browser Integration. You’re definitely missing out if you’re not using it yet! ;) After the last session was over on Sunday, we headed to a social event in a bar that I can only describe as “dungeon”.

On Monday we held a Plasma BoF session about Plasma Mobile, Plasma on Wayland as well as long-term architectural planning. One of the topics for Wayland was Virtual Desktops that we now can (and have to) freely shape for Wayland: being able to talk to Plasma users gave us developers a clearer picture of how they use VDs and the way they should interact with Activities.

View from Kahlenberg

Tuesday had so many workshops and discussions going on that I found myself hopping from room to room every other hour as to not miss out on something. Traditionally on Wednesday a day trip takes place and those who wanted hiked up Kahlenberg to be rewarded by a fantastic view over the city. Later, we headed to the Prater for some bumper car fun.

One of the new faces I met during Akademy was an AppImage developer: we chatted about some of his requirements and trouble encountered while integrating AppImage launcher with Plasma. As a result, I wrote a thumbnailer for AppImage files. I also investigated an issue with Plasma not finding newly installed icons at runtime.

The LiMux project was also present and ran a session on systemd user sessions and other enterprise-related topics on Thursday. As a result, Plasma now warns when shutting down with another user logged in on the system, like it did in the old KDM days.

Thumbnails for .appimage files
Warning about other logged in user

Furthermore, I familiarized myself with Flatpak portals and how Qt and other apps interact with it. Additional work I did during free hours at the conference were performance improvements to Dolphin, Plasma startup, and Breeze widget style as well as various fixes for file actions (“Compress” and “Link To” context menu entries) preparing them to be usable from the desktop in the future.

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