Category: Presentations & Interviews

Talk at Akademy 2025 — minding the big picture: opportunity from chaos

At Akademy 2025 this year, I had the privilege of giving a talk about a big picture topic close to my heart, and you can watch it here:

For those who prefer reading over watching and listening, I’ll give a quick summary:

I believe that the challenges facing the world today present an opportunity for KDE to grow in importance and reach due to a variety of favorable trends embedded in the chaos and conflict, including:

  • Increasing skepticism of traditional proprietary American big tech
  • Increasing EU public funding opportunities
  • Windows 11 sucking and losing its edge for gaming
  • *Postscript: MacOS Tahoe stumbling and being publicly mocked as well

But this is a window of opportunity that I think will close. So I encouraged everyone to think about how we can make KDE software ready for adoption from the following perspectives:

  • Being known about in the first place
  • Looking good enough to be taken seriously
  • Being easy to download or otherwise acquire
  • Working properly and having enough features
  • Having enough support resources and an articulable “lower total cost of ownership” story

Because if we’ve got all five, our offerings will start to look irresistible, and I think we’ll gain market share very quickly!

Interview on FLOSS Weekly

I was recently interviewed by Jonathan Bennett of the FLOSS Weekly show! If you aren’t totally sick of my ugly mug yet, you can hear me talk about some of my favorite topics: KDE on hardware, onboarding people to Plasma, the importance of preserving readiness, and how difficult it is to actually install and uninstall software on a Mac. You can check it out at https://hackaday.com/2025/06/04/floss-weekly-episode-835-board-member-b/, or watch the video version here:

Interview about Techpaladin and life

It looks like Brodie Robertson hasn’t gotten sick of me yet, because we sat down again recently, this time on the subject of Techpaladin! We go over a lot of stuff I wrote in the announcement blog post last month, plus more detail and other topics too. This ends up being a pretty nerdy talk as we additionally meander between finance and exchange rates, Dungeons and Dragons, Alpha Centauri, Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs, the KWin Zoom effect, and, of course, KDE World Domination. 🙂

KDE Human Interface Guidelines update

It’s been about a month and a half since I wrote about KDE’s new Human Interface Guidelines (HIG). It turns out there’s a surprising amount to report since then!

First of all, the news got picked up by Linux Magazine which did a story about it, including an interview with me! That felt nice.

Next, there have been a number of contributions and enhancements:

Joshua Goins

  • Fixed a lot of typos, awkward wordings, and small errors.
  • Added information about using Qt to set Task Manager badges directly.
  • Expanded the instructions on contributing to the HIG.

Thiago Sueto

  • Corrected several typos and spelling errors.

Christoph Wolk

  • Improved the grammatical correctness of one of the text recommendations.

Nate Graham (me)

  • Polished up the text some more.
  • Added additional suggested inclusiveness-related text replacements.
  • Clarified when a hamburger menu is and isn’t appropriate.
  • Updated the icon size recommendations.
  • Added examples and suggested replacements for common acronyms.
  • Wrote a recommendation for how to implement “go home” navigation.
  • Mentioned when first-run wizards are and aren’t appropriate, migrating some content from our old “Frequently discussed topics” wiki page.
  • Refined the recommendation for button length and combox text capitalization.
  • Described when it’s appropriate to shorten button labels because nearby context indicates what they affect.
  • Expanded the Icons page to offer more concrete guidelines about how to choose an icon and what style to use, and also added more pictures.

Overall I think it’s looking pretty good now, especially the Icons page which received a lot of attention recently.

In addition, there are more pending merge requests by Christoph Wolk, Emir Sari, and me. So it feels like an actual team project now! I think the goal of encouraging more contribution can be called a success.

Finally, Christoph Wolk and I have been going through System Settings pages and tweaking them to comply with the HIG. System Settings is good low-hanging fruit since it’s almost all QML at this point, so changes are easy. And there are a lot of pages, so it’s not hard to find small inconsistencies.

But were not finished yet! More eyeballs are needed. A few TODOs need resolving. More images could be helpful. So check out these two links to learn how to contribute changes:

Even a beginner developer can help out by tweaking the user interface to conform to the HIG. And if you’re a hardcore developer, we still need some more components for writing powerful QML apps.

Still too scary? Then donate to KDE. Our budget is tiny, so your money genuinely does have an impact!

Interview on Tech Over Tea about KDE’s position in the world

I recently went on Brodie Robertson’s Tech Over Tea channel for a second time. I guess I didn’t succeed at pissing him off enough on the first go-around, because he invited me back! Let’s see if I did a better job of it this time by telling him he was using Arch wrong. 😀

Anyway, Brodie was a fantastic host, and we talked about a number of topics such as KDE’s position in the world, institutional continuity, fundraising and financial stability, the difficulty of reporting and triaging bug, the challenges of packaging software, and windows that block WiFi signals.

I hope you enjoy it!

And here’s the link I mention at the end: https://kde.org/community/donations 🙂

Akademy 2023

As you may have seen from other posts on https://planet.kde.org, KDE’s annual Akademy conference is over and people are starting to blog about their thoughts on it!

This is my fifth Akademy, and my third one attending in person. As always, it was great to meet up with colleagues and old friends in real life! A kind of magic happens when a bunch of technically adept people with strong social relationships gather together in a room. There was a lot of it on display this year, even despite the punishing heat and spotty Wi-Fi performance!

The talks this year were quite good (as always), and I hope that at least one of mine could be counted among them. I gave a talk about my KDE Goal, “Automation and Systematization“, and a short lighting talk about Welcome Center, in addition to helping to present the KDE e.V. Board report. I particularly enjoyed the lightning talk by Kai Uwe Broulik about his custom solar PV array monitoring system using System Monitor, which I would love to get running for my own system!

But my favorite part of Akademy is always what comes afterwards: the “Birds of a Feather” (or BoF) brainstorming sessions. My favorites were the ones on Tuesday organized by Joseph De Veaugh-Geiss on the subject of internal communication. These were very productive and resulted in multiple actionable tasks as well as an impromptu hacking session/sprint on Thursday to update old wiki pages, consolidate information, and use the default Wikimedia theme! Unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend, but this is a subject I’m really excited about as I think documentation and internal communications are critically important topics, so it was wonderful to see so many other people excited about it too. If you’d like to help, please update any stale information or whole pages you find at https://community.kde.org. If you find a stale page but don’t feel comfortable making any such changes yourself, just edit it and add the text {{Outdated}} to the top, and someone else will handle it.

Overall, it was a useful productive and great time! After so many trips to Europe over the past 6 months, I’m now looking forward to some nice, uninterrupted stretches of normalcy where I can sit down and do some much-needed hacking and KDE e.V. work that’s been piling up, and actually implement some of the ideas and changes that we’ve all been discussing!

Presentation at University of Macedonia: Making a Difference

Today I had the honor of delivering a virtual presentation with fellow KDE contributor Neofytos Kolokotronis at the University of Macedonia, the site of KDE’s 2023 Akademy conference. The subject was “Making a Difference: How to contribute and jump start your career in Free Software with the KDE Community”, making it especially relevant for those who have been looking to get started contributing to KDE and don’t yet know how. But even if you’re a seasoned KDE contributor, I bet you’ll learn a thing or two about KDE’s storied history or ambitious plans!

Check it out: