After months of being completely consumed by my bachelor thesis and then giving myself some much needed rest, I finally have the time and headspace to sit down and write this post. And honestly, I have been waiting to write about this because Akademy 2025 was special.
This was my first in person Akademy after three years of attending remotely. Every year I would watch talks through a screen, imagining the energy in the room and the hallway conversations I was missing. This time, since my thesis brought me to Europe to work at CERN, I finally had the chance to join everyone in Berlin. KDE made it possible for me to attend in person, and I was also scheduled to give a talk on my Google Summer of Code project, KEcolab, which I currently maintain. So you can imagine how excited I was for this entire week. People say Akademy feels more like a KDE festival than a conference, and I was about to find out why.
I packed my bags in Switzerland and left for Berlin.
Arrival and Welcome Dinner
I reached Berlin on the fifth and went straight to the welcome dinner near Tiergarten. The restaurant had a relaxed vibe, and within minutes I was meeting people I had only ever known through Matrix usernames. Suddenly the names on my screen had real voices and real faces. We talked about everything from new KDE developments and the Banana release to personal side projects and long contribution journeys.
I finally met the KDE Eco team and the people working on the Endof10 campaign which is going amazingly well. We chatted over drinks, laughed a lot, and I might have invited half the table to visit CERN if they ever pass through Switzerland. Dinner was great. I had a pasta salad whose German name I still cannot pronounce, along with some very nice KDE drinks.
I returned late at night and realised that my slides were still not ready. My talk was scheduled for early morning on day one, so I stayed up finishing everything and managed only a few hours of sleep before the big day.
Day One
Day one opened with a keynote by Alexander Rosenthal on Open by Design. It set a very thoughtful tone for the conference. Right after that, I gave my talk titled KEcoLab: KDE’s Automation Tool for Energy Consumption Measurements. You can watch it here: https://youtu.be/ybduSygg2Ns?si=tZlXN7XuGcfyux-Q The audience asked some great questions about expanding energy measurements to more applications and tools and how the process of measurement works behind the scenes.
Presenting KEcoLab at Akademy 2025
My talk overlapped with the Plasma talk, so I unfortunately could not attend that one. I spent the rest of the day listening to some very inspiring sessions. The KDE annual recap was a highlight, showing how far we have come as a community. It covered improvements across many applications, developments in Kirigami and updates to the new language bindings for Rust and Python. There was also a small peek into what is coming next such as improvements to drawing tablet support and the Plasma keyboard.
If you are interested in contributing to KDE, trust me when I say there are endless ways to do so even if you are not a technical person. You can explore opportunities here: https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved
Day Two
Day Two was packed with talks that focused on being thoughtful developers and maintainers. The keynote by Paloma Oliveira, titled The Politics of the Pull Request, stood out to me. It explored open source from angles we often overlook and gave me a lot to think about.
Paloma Oliveira’s keynote on “The Politics of the Pull Request” - exploring the social and political dimensions of open source collaboration
I also enjoyed talks related to Wayland and Plasma Mobile, and in between sessions I helped volunteer at the welcome desk. At the end of the day, we all gathered at C Base for the social event. Great pizza, great people, great atmosphere.
Day Three
Day Three was dedicated to BoFs. I attended the KDE Goals BoF and then started preparing for the KEcolab BoF because we had to quickly fix a few last minute issues in the lab setup.
Our session was right after the Okular BoF, which turned out to be perfect timing. The Okular team gave us really helpful input since KEcolab and Okular are working on an ongoing integration. We talked about the possibility of running individual energy tests on different components and many other ideas. You can follow the issues we discussed here: https://invent.kde.org/sdk/kecolab/-/issues
Day Four
Day Four had more BoFs. I am sad I missed the You Can Dance BoF because it sounded like everyone had a lot of fun. I joined the KDE Out of Experience BoF and the KDE Flatpak BoF instead, both of which were genuinely interesting.
Day Five
Akademy day trip. This was incredibly fun. We were split into groups and had to complete different tasks around Berlin. We even had a bear themed challenge which led to some hilarious photos. We placed KDE stickers on poles, shared selfies and enjoyed the entire city.
Exploring Berlin with the KDE community - sticker missions, bear challenges, and unforgettable moments
Later we visited the Computer Museum which was heaven for anyone who loves old hardware. They had everything from retro consoles to the legendary 3dfx Voodoo chips. I spent way too long inside the museum and ended up missing the group that went to the dinner spot afterward.
Classic Macs - The originals that started it all
Day Six
The last official day included the Linux InstallFest. A few new contributors came in to install Fedora KDE on their laptops and it was a relaxing final day. People were packing, saying their goodbyes and heading home. I stayed for the after drinks event and spent the evening talking to more people before ending the day with bittersweet farewells.
But Akademy was not over for me yet.
Day Seven
I stayed an extra day to work on the KEcoLab lab with Joseph and Volker in KDAB, Berlin. Huge thanks to both of them. We switched the lab from KDE Neon to Fedora and set up Wayland. We are now testing ydotool so KEcoLab will run smoothly on Wayland as well. We did ran into few issues with the VNC but it was still productive, fun and a perfect ending to the week.
After lunch I said my final goodbye to Berlin and headed to the airport.
Final Thoughts
Akademy was one of the best conference experiences I have ever had. It was a week full of meeting incredible people, listening to inspiring talks, sharing ideas, social beers and feeling truly part of KDE.
KDE is one of the most welcoming open source communities and I am grateful to every single person who made my time there so special.
Thank you to KDE eV for sponsoring my attendance. Thank you to everyone I met for the warm conversations and kindness. I will not list names because I would definitely miss someone but you all made this Akademy unforgettable.
A special thanks to my KEcoLab team (Joseph, Volker, Kieryn (for the constant help throughout the event, Aakarsh and all past contributors). Also a big thank you to the KDE Eco Team, the EndOf10 team, KDE Promo and the entire KDE family. And of course thanks to the volunteers and organizers who made Akademy perfect from start to finish.
I already cannot wait for the next one.
The KDE community