Last week I decided to take KDE Itinerary for a test tour. Between the train rides there was also time for some KDE stuff.

FOSDEM

After writing an exam on Friday afternoon I took a train to Frankfurt. I did so not to enjoy the beautiful scenery of the area around Frankfurt central station at night but to be able to catch an early train towards Bruxelles for my first time at FOSDEM.

It has been a great experience to meet so many people interested in what KDE does at the KDE booth. It also was awesome to meet all the folks that are working hard on making Linux on the phone become a thing.

Pine64, Manjaro, UBports and KDE having dinner together

Plasma Mobile Sprint

FOSDEM went by in no time and so I found myself on a train to Berlin on Monday. My ride managed to defeat KDE Itinerary’s cancellation notification handling, but Volker managed to fight back.

In Berlin we met for a week-long Plasma Mobile sprint, hosted by KDAB in their offices. This gave us the opportunity to plan, discuss and hack all the things in a much more focused and productive manner than normally.

A particular pleasure was meeting Marius and Dalton from UBports/Ubuntu Touch and discussing how our projects can benefit each other. Most of our interactions was me nagging them to upgrade their Qt to allow KDE apps to run on Ubuntu Touch, but there was also fruitful discussion on sharing content between apps and a common push notification service (codenamed ‘Phushan’).

In addition to the discussion I also managed to get a few things done:

• We managed to build KTrip using Ubuntu Touch’s clickable build system (only for amd64, since crosscompiling Qt is a little more involved. If you find it easy please consider applying at KDAB).
• I started revamping the dated code of the dialer UI.
• Together with the Kaidan team I fixed an issue in KNotifications that was affecting them.
• Kaidan (XMPP client), Qrca (barcode scanner), Kookbook (recipe manager), Keysmith (OTP client) and Ruqola (Rocket.Chat client) are now available for Android in our nightly F-Droid repository.

On Saturday KDE joined UBports in their regular Q&A where we reported about the whole week and answered questions from the crowd. Check it out!

I left Berlin a bit earlier than planned due to an approaching storm, which was fine given how action-packed the whole week was.

Looking forward to doing it again!