Two weeks ago I attended Akademy in Barcelona, KDE’s annual conference. Let me tell you, it was great to finally, finally, finally see people in person again! It was so nice to meet up with old friends, and put faces to names for new ones!
Four years ago I gave a perhaps arrogantly ambitious talk at Akademy 2018 entitled “Konquering the World – a 7-Step Plan to KDE World Domination“. In it, I described how the at-the-time new Usability & Productivity goal supported a deeper end goal of getting KDE Plasma pre-installed on commercially available hardware–that being the only way I believe we can introduce a truly huge number of new people to KDE’s friendly and powerful flavor of free software.
Four years later, the Usability & Productivity goal has been completed, with basically everything it set out to do being done now! So at this year’s Akademy, I gave a talk to discuss the progress in getting KDE Plasma preinstalled on hardware. What were our successes, and what do we still need to work on to make further gains in the arena of pre-installation? Find out here!
TL;DW version: check out https://kde.org/hardware 🙂
Adventures in Linux and KDE 
I enjoyed your talk a lot, thank you!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Also looking forward to seeing the fruits originating from the discussion and exchange with the distro makers after your talk.
Especially I’d like to read in some future blog posts how the LTS Plasma stack is going to evolve: which concrete plans you got and how those will be materialized over the course of time, to make life for business users, administrators and distro makers easier.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yes indeed. No news on that yet; it’s still being discussed.
LikeLike
It’s hypocrisy when you say you want to Konquer the world and have ‘K’ logo on more devices, when KDE Plasma abandoned both Konqueror and gorgeous geared ‘K’ logo in Plasma(currently is really ugly and unrecognizable).
sorry to say that, but without proper tool to konquering and distinct/recognizable/liked logo/branding it will be a hard way, without resorting to Putin/Ballmer methods of perversion 😉
Don’t threat this post to seriously, but really, ‘Plasma logo’ sucks hard, and you are probably the powerful one, that can reverse that decision.
cheers and keep bugfixing 😉
LikeLiked by 1 person
I’m not the biggest fan of the current Plasma logo either, and Plasma 6 would be a perfect time for re-branding!
LikeLike
I don’t like that much either
LikeLike
I like your talk A LOT!
Thanks for that. It was amazing to watch!
By the way, regarding that 14 years old fedora patch, let me just bring to your attention that openSUSE has a “run dolphin as root” for many many years and that it might be a solution to the current implementations (but you probably are already aware of that…)
LikeLike
Ups… this was meant to be a reply to the post.
Sorry about that!
LikeLike
Nah, I think the Plasma logo is cool for an application launcher icon. The icons that could be improved are the indecipherable ones in the default window decorations though.
LikeLike
One thing I find confusing about the branding is that you renamed the organisation to KDE (i.e. Kool Desktop Environment) and the Desktop Environment to Plasma.
I would undo this, and drop the “Plasma” brand except for internal use. Most people just call it “KDE” anyway!
LikeLike
At this point the re-branding happened 13 years ago and undoing it would probably cause more confusion than it would resolve. And what name would we use for KDE as an organization?
LikeLike
The organisation could be called something like the Kool Software Collective or something similar. Maybe even just “Kool” to avoid acronyms.
Very few people call the Kool Desktop Environment “Plasma” — time to acknowledge that the 13 year old rebrand was a fail and that the dual naming is a mess!
LikeLike
I don’t agree that it was a failure. I see lots of people calling Plasma by its real name. In principle this isn’t any more complicated than the idea that an iPhone runs something called “iOS,” not something called “Apple.”
LikeLike
I don’t think Apple’s iBranding is that good either and not really the same comparison. It would be a similar comparison only if the company were “iOS” and the OS called “Apple”.
Hearing the desktop environment called “Plasma” is maybe a confirmation bias from working with developers who know what your idiosyncratic branding is, rather than the average user.
My suggestion:
Kool for the company
Kool Desktop Environment for the desktop environment
Kool Mobile Environment for the mobile environment
… and last but not least, lots of K branding everywhere in applications!!
LikeLike
As someone who started using Linux with KDE about a year ago because I Windows was too slow on my laptop and the Windows 11 tpm requirements, I couldn’t relate more to what I heard from you in the begging of your talk. That the state of affairs in the proprietary software world isn’t good, that KDE and free open-source software is fun and empowering.
I think a lot of people like myself, give Linux a shot because something isn’t quite working for them on Windows or Mac OS, but there FOSS world and the KDE community especially, have so much to boast about. From freedom and flexibility and performance, to owning the software and the piece of mind that comes with it.
For me being kicked out of the Windows world by the tpm requirements of Windows 11 was probably the best thing Microsoft did to me, ironically 🙂 But using KDE software made me really like using computers again, which might be the result of how software can affect people and their interaction with computers in the best possible way.
I really wish you all the best in Konquering the world. Hopefully to a state that more people know about KDE software, at least as an alternative they’ve heard about. KDE software deserves more attention and users, just as normal people deserve better software.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I’m so happy that you found a home in KDE. Spread the word! Tell all your friends! Help them switch, too!
LikeLike