Akademy 2026
conf.kde.org

I was very excited about this year’s Akademy (KDE’s anual conference), until I saw this… Linux desktops won’t save us.

A talk in three parts, building towards a vision for a sovereign desktop in 2026 (and a look back).

Loved. In 2003, together with Eva Brucherseifer, Jan’s company relevantive ran the first large-scale usability study of the Linux desktop on behalf of decision-makers considering migration. KDE 3.1 on SuSE was tested by 60 office workers with no prior Linux experience; 87% enjoyed working with it, 80% estimated they could reach professional competence within a week. The Linux desktop wasn’t a usability disaster — but realising its potential required deliberate configuration, honest naming, and treating migration as a human-resources problem, not a technical one. The findings shaped a decade of OpenUsability work inside KDE. They are, awkwardly, almost entirely still applicable. We’ll look at what stuck, what didn’t, and why “lovable” — not merely “usable” — is the bar today, and why getting it right cuts the cost and risk of every migration discussion that follows.

AI-native. A desktop that loves you back has to know you. Personal AI has crossed the threshold where the desktop itself can be compiled per user, per device, per moment, from a small portable model of the user — what we are sketching as Kadai: an encrypted, vendor-agnostic personal kernel from which Plasma assembles each Activity. Plasma is uniquely well-fit for this — Activities, Plasmoids, the existing scripting surface — but a handful of upstream changes (declarative reconciliation, per-widget capabilities, richer Activity metadata) would turn KDE into the first shell that treats AI as infrastructure rather than as a chat box bolted to the side.

Sovereign. Once a user owns their model and their tools, the same question returns at institutional scale. EU institutions, member countries, and a long tail of organisations are openly asking what a credible, non-colonialising desktop stack looks like. No project carries this alone — a sovereign desktop is an ecosystem question. KDE is uniquely positioned as the shell, the integration layer, the experience; but filesharing belongs with Nextcloud, the browser with Firefox, the office suite with … The last third of the talk is about what KDE’s partnership surface could look like — outward, to industry and public administration, and sideways, to the allied open-source projects that already do the rest of the work better than anyone could redo it. Who owns that surface, where it lives, what KDE e.V. would need, what not to build. Sovereignty, from this angle, is just lovability and AI-ownership scaled up to the organisation: the user not owned by a vendor, the institution not owned by a foreign supplier — and the stack not owned by anyone, because the right partners hold the right pieces.

This talk is an invitation — from peple with a long arc inside this community — to take a serious swing at the question the 2003 study posed and never quite resolved: what would it take for KDE to be the desktop people actively choose, not just the one some of us settle for? Attendees will leave with: a concrete proposal (KaDAi) to react to or tear apart, a clear set of asks the project could direct at Plasma maintainers, and the framing for a sovereignty conversation that KDE is uniquely positioned to lead.

  • istewartEnglish
    1·
    5 hours ago

    Thank you @Kiriko for relaying this. The following will be directed at the original author. As the official KDE fedi account sharply responded to David earlier, I’m assuming there’s a chance they might see it. Charitably assuming this is not chatbot slop (likely a bad assumption),

    where the desktop itself can be compiled per user, per device, per moment, from a small portable model of the user — what we are sketching as Kadai: an encrypted, vendor-agnostic personal kernel from which Plasma assembles each Activity.

    This is flatly nonsensical. How would this be in any way better than secure synchronization of existing configuration files? I.E. an integration with existing tools like, say, rsync or SyncThing? An interface that changes itself while the user is using it is a recipe for end-user frustration and, ultimately, rejection. I use KDE across a couple of devices, both conventional desktop and touchscreen, and its existing tools for panel configuration and the like are acceptable and worthy of further effort. Continuous “per-moment” automatic reconfiguration of the user interface – what seems to be the proposal here, if this fanciful jargon is at all parsable – is making the assumption that your black-box, poorly-debuggable inference engine knows what the user wants better than the user does.

    Do I even need to mention how ridiculous it would be to replace discrete settings files, parsable by both human and machine, with a black-box database of vector weights that may have variable performance across mobile and desktop hardware?

    The glaring risk here is taking the alienation users feel at a point-release interface change, say, from Win10 to Win11, and turning it into a continuous-integration experience. The experience being proffered here is very likely to end up being, “Where did that option go that I only need 1 time in 20? Why was it hidden without my express input? What the hell is this stupid fucking computer doing???” and the user taking their friend’s suggestion to try out Xfce or similar.

    This brings to mind Steve Jobs’ insistence on using magneto-optical drives for the early NeXT black hardware; the idea being that the user wouldn’t be tied to one specific machine, their files and user identity would live on the MO disk that could be transferred from machine to machine. The problem was that the MO disks were horribly slow and expensive, leading to the impression that the NeXT machines weren’t worth the exorbitant price tag. Frustration was baked into every user encounter with the interface. The proposal here risks being slow on lesser hardware AND continually incoherent, a recipe for an abandoned project that isn’t even as well-remembered as NeXT, with no potential to be adapted into something like OS X or iOS.

    Lastly,

    Sovereignty, from this angle, is just lovability and AI-ownership scaled up to the organisation:

    This sentence seems even more nonsensical. I understand and can agree with current European anxieties surrounding US dependencies in their tech stacks, and I can definitely understand KDE as a European-led project that ameliorates that. But as our community here understands, the word “sovereignty” has also been thoroughly colonized by cryptocurrency bros, most of whom became resolute enthusiasts of the current generation of AI. If “sovereignty” is going to continue to be your watchword for this crap, you may ultimately be operating at cross-purposes to your stated intent.