Tech Over Tea - Bringing The Joys Of KDE Around The World | Kye Potter

Episode Date: December 29, 2023

There's a program you've probably never heard of called KDE Networks which aims to build local KDE communities with local members around the world and today we have a member of the Australian branch on to talk about it. =========Guest Links========== The KDE Network: https://community.kde.org/The_KDE_Network KDE Get Involved: https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved ==========Support The Show========== ► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson ► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo ► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF ► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson =========Video Platforms========== 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg =========Audio Release========= 🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss 🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953 🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM 🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw== 🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea ==========Social Media========== 🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9 🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow 📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/ 🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345 ==========Credits========== 🎨 Channel Art: All my art has was created by Supercozman https://twitter.com/Supercozman https://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/ DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

Good morning, good day, and good evening. I'm, as always, your host, Brodie Robertson, and today, I think this is episode 200. Don't quote me on that, and I don't have anything special planned. Um, maybe I'll do something another time. Or maybe I'll just forget about it like I did with every celebration on the main channel. Regardless, welcome to the show, Kai Potter, as part of the KDE Network, a project that many of you probably have never heard of how's it going um good how are you brody not too bad uh also just a heads up for the people that have trouble with accents there is now two australians on the podcast

so good luck with that oh no I look I've had people from like all over the world on I had Mirko Bromban on and he has like a really thick Italian accent and struggles with English so I'm sure people will be fine I'm sure people are already saying oh

why are they British why are they New Zealand just stop yeah I'm sure people are already saying, oh, why are they British? Why are they New Zealand? Just stop. Yeah, I was asked what part of Britain I was from when I was over in the US quite a lot. Yep, yep. I don't get it myself. I don't know. It's not that difficult to tell the difference.

I think they're listening for the stereoty like stereotypical like australian accent that doesn't exist outside of american movies uh i've i've spoken to some people that live like real rural like i know some people that live like along the murray and they've got some pretty pretty thick accents it's just outside of that you're just not gonna hear it yeah yeah so kd network i guess we'll start with what even is this because as we're talking about before just finding the fact that it exists is kind of difficult yeah um, turns out our SEO, like how easy it is to Google this is, it's impossible.

You can't find it. You have to know exactly where it is and what it is already, which sort of defeats the point. Yeah, yeah. But the entire point of it is just to build communities in places where free software adoption would be scattered or non-existent. Basically to build up user groups in places.

So, for example, Australia, not very many people, like it's not nearly as big here as it is in uh let's say germany or other countries in um in europe um for example like um we have some like kde and even other open source projects like there's some really great products here like we've got critter we've got caden live those are usable by anyone no matter what operating system you're on. I think Crit is even on Android now. I don't know how, but it somehow happened. Oh, it is. But they're not really that well-known.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the point of this project is to try and bring that and also all of our promotion and all of that outside of Europe, outside of that area of the world, because all of the contractors, a lot of the people who are in KDE are all in that same geographical area. So it's not, we can promote really hard there, but there's only so many there's only so much there and there's so many people in the rest of the world yeah yeah

like i've noticed it's not just a kde thing but like red hat does events a lot in europe gnome does events in europe a lot of the time there is events in europe there's there obviously a lot of stuff happens in the us as well but it seems like primarily europe is where it happens yeah everything happens in europe and the point of this is to try and at least have something outside of there um and even the events that do exist outside of europe kde isn't there yeah yeah The point of this project is to have a small community in every country around the world to try and expand our horizons beyond that. Mm-hmm.

Wait, where is the website? Wait, did they let the... I went to the LinuxConfAU's website and I think they let their SSL cert expire. Oh no. Well, let's not... Let's go to their Twitter page. Fine.

I guess that explains why there's no event planned for 2023. Yep, okay. Yeah, it seems like they just didn't have any plan at all throughout the entire year. But there is everything open, which happened back in March. Yes.

The Australian network currently consists of myself and a few others, and we haven't actually attended any events yet um the australian network is um inactive at the moment it's the best way to say it uh we need more members yeah i did scroll through the um matrix and i've noticed that what like the last message was like september or so yeah we exist and we're all there wanting to help but none of us have actually been available to go to any events at the moment right um that is just the australian one though for example um the usa i don't have i don't have the ones that have happened this year um i have the ones that happened uh last year though okay uh example, they went to Scale19x.

That makes it sound like it was 2019, did I? No, it started in 2020. That doesn't work. Okay. Scale19x, which is the largest community run software conference in North America. Mm-hmm. Here we go. Scale19x.

Oh, okay. They called it 19X because it was the 19th edition. Oh, like, yeah, 19th Expo. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, went to Scale 19X. And funnily enough, the All-American High School Film Festival. Okay, sure. So the reason we went to that one is because Kdenlive exists

and it's free. And have you seen how much Adobe charges? Let's find out. I've not used Adobe in a long time. Adobe, is it Adobe Cloud? Is that what they call it? Oh, yeah, Creative Cloud Let's have a look

Okay Buy now So For the all app suite $43.97 a month Why would you pay $29 for Acrobat? Okay

For just video stuff, let's say you just want Premiere. $30 Australian a month. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah, that's a bit. Or Kdenlive. $0 a month and it's open source. Mm-hmm.

So because it's full featured but it doesn't have a large user base so there was yeah we did an event over there though the uh usa um kde network did an event uh like put up a booth at that film festival. And a quote from their blog article they wrote, we reached lots of excited students. I suspect many of them will try Caden Live shortly. Moreover, we reached many excited educators who thought Caden Live would fit in their classroom

in one way or another. Oh, wow. So it seemed like it had a positive effect then. A very positive effect from this. Mm-hmm. Hmm. And yeah, that's just what the USA group's done. There's also, like we go over to, oh, what's another big one?

The next biggest one I would say, actually, probably bigger than what we did in the USA would be india um because i've just realized i don't know how to pronounce this give me a moment i still cannot pronounce that um type it in the chat okay um malay my malay alum um okay i think that's i think that's it it's as good as we're gonna get yes uh we were so um So, of course, schools and governments and everything in India needs computers and stuff for obvious reasons. Right. program, we managed to get all of our KDE software translated and localized to that language before Windows. Oh, okay. And because of that, we now have an official government contact.

And I'm not sure if you've heard it uh g-compress uh one of our pieces of software um is used very widely in the school system um as well as critter and caden light wow no i wasn't aware of this one so this is like uh g-ompress is a highly a high quality educational software suite including a number of activities for children aged 2 to 10 okay oh so it's like an identify color thing oh so it's like a just a general overall like education suite yes um and it's used very widely in schools in that region. Yeah, so apparently a lot of Kerala, which is quite actually a pretty big chunk of India,

is very widely using this software. So we have targeted that area and people actually know what our software is over there. Wow. So that, that's actually really cool. Cause I know there is, um, there's a lot of projects that are, I'm blanking on the name now. Um, I'm blanking on the name now.

It starts with an E. Linux distro. Ship's GNOME. I've had the guy who runs it on the show. Oh no. There are projects like that which are definitely targeting developing nations. And it's good to see that there's more happening there's more of that happening outside of just gnome based

projects because you know gnome's great as well but kde offers a different experience and it would be nice to see kde trying to filling uh fill in those gaps that maybe, you know, that, like, those projects are not touching yet. We need options. Otherwise, there's, without options, there's no competition. Without competition, there's no anything. We need competition. There needs to be, you know, realistically, we need Windows, we need macOS, we need Linux, and we need all the desktop environments that come with it. As many options as we can get, the more options, the better. But options aren't anything if you don't know about them. And that's what this whole project is about.

Mm-hmm. But again, those... I still can't actually believe that we managed to do that with that India thing. Well, I guess if there's a void there that's not being filled, it's not that crazy that it happens. It would be one thing if there was already Windows established there as the main thing, but if Windows hadn't approached that translation yet,

it makes perfect sense why something that's actually going to deal with it fits well into that space. And that's one of the advantages you have of these open-source FOSS projects, whatever term you want to be using. If someone wants to do that translation, they don't have to wait for some contract to come along to get it done.

Like if they want it done, then, you know, they can, you know, with a couple of people get that done themselves. Yes. Again, all of our translation stuff, it's all out there. Anyone can pop in and start working on it. And if we need people in a specific area who know a specific language, we will see if we can find people there who are willing to contribute and perhaps do what we did in India. I mean, in Kerala, I probably said that wrong,

but see if we can do that in more places, read information. And yeah, that's what we did in India. We've also been to Brazil and went to LatinoWare, which is the biggest free software event in Latin America. Another quote from their blog. I have one of these for everyone except for the India one for some reason. Is there a problem on my end or is it just a bunch of websites with break- broken SSL certs right now? Um, did you- is Latinoware broken for you?

Yeah, it's- take a look. Let- check it out yourself. What is happening? Okay, so it's not my end. No, that's broken for me as well. Okay, okay, that's good. I'm happy there's nothing broken on my side. When did it expire? Let's see. Not valid. Not after 21st. That's a couple of days out. Yeah. Huh. Anyone from LatinoWare happens to see this, fix your SSL cert. Yeah.

Let's go to Instagram, that'll work. Okay, here we go. Instagram has a working SSL cert. They know how to automate it. Yes. Here we go. Okay, now we can see what they do. Cool. Okay. um quote from their blog um they loved everything and many attendees were unaware that actual free software existed for educational purposes because again even you haven't heard of um g-conference well it's not exactly like something targeted towards me so it kind of makes sense why I hadn't heard of it, but it would be nice if stuff like this was able to get out there a lot more.

Yeah, yeah. But if people like you don't know about it, I mean, you're very much in the space. Sure, sure, yeah. Then what chance does some primary school or some preschool have of finding out about that? I guess that's a good way to put it, yeah. If someone in the space can't find it,

people outside of the space definitely can't find it. And, yeah, so we went to LatinoWare. A lot of exposure through that. And in China, we also have a community in China. We went to the Linux Application Ecosystem Salon. What a name. It is a name. Tell me they don't have a broken SSL cert.

Linux Application Ecosystem. I'll send it to you in chat if you need a copy and paste it. Linux application ecosystem. Wait. I'd send it to you in chat if you need a copy, paste it. Oh, it's un-Googleable as well. Oh, I love how one of the things that comes up is our fabricator ticket when you search that. Okay, wait, Ubuntu Kylan went there. That's something.

Wait, wait, wait, no, I think i found it i think maybe or this is a blog about it oh okay this is a blog about it okay this works this is from 2021 um yep i'm on that blog as well. Mm-hmm. Uh, yes, this is... This is one of the people who was in our, um... Yeah, that's actually from someone in KDE Network China.

Oh! Perfect, then. I think that is. I'm not 100% sure, but I think that actually might be. I've become a KDE developer and joined Plasma Mobile Team. Well, they're a KD developer regardless. Yeah. Yep.

Yeah, didn't meet any Chinese developer online. I'm going to say they're in that. I could probably check just by going to the list. All of the lists of who's in all these groups are public. And... just by going to the list, all of the lists of who's in all these groups are public. And, yeah, so they were there to, yeah, just promote development of the software within Chinese unis. And actually, because there's a bit of a disconnect, because China, about how FOSS development actually works.

So this was also to sort of promote how the software is developed, how everything works, because you can't contribute to something if you don't know, well, one, that you can, and two, how to do it. So that was a big focus of that event. What do you mean there's a disconnect with, like, how to do it? There would probably be a bit of a disconnect how to do it. And also the fact that we exist at all is another one.

And another quote from their blog, After the event, I was approached by many students asking how they can support KDE. So we probably got a couple of contributors through that. Again, I don't have hard facts there as we don't keep a register of where everyone is. Right. Because that would be weird. Yeah, those are the major events that we have attended. Yeah, those are the major events that we have attended.

And at the moment, we are still trying to grow this program to more countries, to more everything. Get as many people as we possibly can into these groups. Spread them out as far over, you know, as many different places around the world as we can, just to try and at least allow people to find our software. Because, you know, SEO isn't perfect, especially not of this program for some reason. We can't just rely on word of mouth to spread things across borders. So when did the project first start?

If you have one now, roundabout. Yes, I do have that. It was proposed in 2020, actually, at Academy 2020. But the project actually started in 2021. Okay. So it is, like, really new then. It is a very new program, yes. KDU Network. I wonder if I can find the proposal.

No, I'm not going to find the proposal. It would probably be in... Yeah, you should be able to find it. It would probably be on YouTube. Just a recording of that proposal coming through.

Uh, I found the writeup on dot KD dot org. Oh, okay. Uh, yeah, I think this is it. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. The, um, uh, Anika,

is that how you say it? Uh, Anika. Yeah. Yeah. Anika. Um, their names on the,

uh, right up here. Yeah. They also did a talk at Academy 2021 talking a bit of a progress report as well. For some reason, I noted that one down, but not the proposal. Well, you got something.

I've got something. And yeah, all the stuff that happens through these promo events will go onto the community reports, which is, you know, eb.kde.org slash reports. Yeah, those are the annual report from KDE. And you will find pretty much all of the activities from all these different communities and even non-KDE network stuff

be put together in these reports. There's a lot of information here. So obviously we have these... We'll do this in two parts. If someone wants to join an existing KD network, say the Australia one, what would be the process they would go through to actually do so? And is there a different process based on, you know, which group? As far as I know, other networks don't really have any special groups, any special rules. You just have to be from that area.

You can, of course, join the room, like the Matrix room, if you aren't from that area. But to actually properly join the group, you should actually be at least capable of traveling to that area. And you just have to be willing to carry out a kde event in that area and basically join the matrix talk to people and when something's coming up just ask hey you're going to this event can i join or hey i want to go to this event does anyone want to help me try and get there kdev will sponsor all of the promotional materials if you if you

try to go to an event for example usually you'll get um kde tablecloth uh and kde banner and a couple of other things to bring along with you um depending on where you are, that would either be shipped out to you or whatever. But to start your own thing in your own country, all you really need to do, again, in Matrix, everything's through Matrix with KDE, go into the promo room, just KDE promo room, and say hey i live in i live in this country i would like to make a kde network here and one of the contractors most likely anika will reach out to you and say sounds great um and discuss getting that set up with you. Okay. So if anyone out there happens to be in, I don't know, pick a country. You're in Jamaica. There we go. There's a country. You're in Jamaica and you want to set up a

KDE network. Go do that. Yes. And talking about that, this is sort of a bit more awkward because of how this has been framed, but I was actually planning on inviting you to the Australian network.

Hey, we're both in Australia. If you want, I mean, you're already in the room now um you're welcome to come along to any of our events um and help out promoting kde in australia i certainly uh would give it a thought because i've been saying that I'm probably going to try out Plasma 6 when it drops We'll see how I feel about Plasma 6 and then we'll go from there Yeah

Plasma 6 again I think you've even mentioned this in one of your recent videos but it'll be a bit of a it may end up being a little bit of a rocky start but it'll get it'll get very quickly

ironed out just because of that huge influx of bug reports we've already got a ton of them that are very very quickly being worked through but of course there will be people with very weird configurations yeah i know nate's already done a um a blog post talking about how the second the alpha started there was a giant uptick in bug reports and that that just makes sense you now that you have an actual build that is available for people to use,

it's something that people can easily install on their system, and people are going to try weird things. There's going to be someone out there that has three Thunderbolt monitors. There's going to be someone out there using a Haswell CPU. There's going to be someone out there that's using some weird screen reader that nobody even realizes exists like all of those things are going to be out there and i have no doubts the problems are going to be ironed out um but yeah i i've definitely been told that the first release is going to be... It's going to be rocky, but I don't expect it to be whatever KDE 4's first release was.

It shouldn't be anything like KDE 4. Everything I've heard about it, from all the devs that are just running it daily right now, it's good. It just has a couple of things that need to be ironed out. Unlike 4, which... From my understanding, I think 4 was... It was released initially as a dev release,

and people just assumed because it was KDE 4 that was considered the full release, and it just wasn't ready. Yeah, KDE 4 was marketed, at least internally, as a development release, but the actual version number was 4.0. Yeah. Which really shouldn't have been done, but it happened. Yeah, that's why you see...

It's not happening again. Yeah, that's why you see GIMP doing 2.99.26 or whatever it's on right now. I think 18 maybe like you always have it just before that that flip over just so you have that room to say yes this is clearly a dev release do not run this unless you know what you're doing yeah um this is actually completely random but if anything I like uh what uh mojang slash microsoft does with uh minecraft java snapshots like what is 23w04a it's very clearly a snapshot is what it is yeah so i'm sure internally they have like a much more. I'm sure there's like a meaning behind each point.

I don't know what it is and it's completely off topic. Yeah. But like, yeah, having some clear numbering system, some clear naming system to indicate this is a dev release is really, really important. Yes, yeah. Does KDE currently have some sort of numbering? I actually don't know how the dev releases are, like, titled.

Um, I think, uh, actually I'll double check, but I'm pretty sure they're just beta 1, beta 2. Okay, that's fair enough, that works as well. Yeah. And then release candidate 1, release candidate 2. Yeah, yeah, okay. Yeah, that also works just fine. Like, any sort of indication is better than just

4.0 when it's not 4.0 but don't use it yeah yeah um either way um it is very clear that everyone here has learned from the kde4 experience uh so with kde6 i mean you've seen how much the timeframe has been extended to give as much time as possible for ironing out bugs. There's even going to be things like a string freeze to make sure everything gets localized properly. And there isn't like some languages have localized like the old version of the string it's been like changed like what that button does has also been changed or something like that right there's a lot of different things that are making sure that this release will be as stable as we can possibly get

it for a pointo release right because i expect with the translations the the big translations like you know the spanish translation the mandarin translation like all of these like all these ones that have a big community around them those will be fine but when it's the smaller translations that may be like you know a hundred people use in the world like those I could easily see lagging behind pretty quickly. Yes. Although, if you actually have a look at any of our Git repos, you will actually see that almost every commit is from, well, the GitLab name is script-gitty, which is actually our localization bot that just puts all the localization changes over from subversion into Git.

I don't think I've seen that before. That's cool. Just looking at that, I'm going to say that our localization, well, I guess our multiple localization teams are incredibly active. Just considering how much is being committed daily. Well, right now is like the time they really need to be active. Like this is the time. Yes, this is the time. This is crunch time, basically. Crunch time, basically.

Even ignoring that, though, if you look at even when it isn't crunch time, there is always a lot of localization changes happening. Right, right. If anything, you really need to actually filter out script kitty commits just because there's so many of them. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yeah, I have no doubt that they do a lot of really good work but you know there's always going to be things that get missed because they might not be you know the primary focus and especially for those ones where there's like less people working on it because you know there's a

lot of things to translate in kde so there's a lot of strings in every, in every repo and every project. There is so many strings being thrown around in every direction. So much to translate into every language in the world. Yeah. Like we've got, you know, we've also got to do it to the other language I couldn't pronounce before. We've got to do it for that language as well.

There's so much that has to go into so many different languages. Stuff is going to be missed, but we're going to get it as best it possibly can be. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I wish the best of luck i i hope that comes along that comes along really well um i really hope as well um i'm not really a part of um like the main development or the um translation parts of things but yeah i've just sort of been watching at a distance going, ooh, hope this works. It's looking good.

A lot of commits are being made, and a lot of those commits are changing a lot of things and making a lot of things better. So that's, I don't know, from that sort of perspective, it looks good. There's a lot of stuff happening. I don't know if that stuff is the right stuff but it is definitely happening well as long as it's not um

the situation that happened with uh was it gnome a couple weeks back uh i'm trying to where is it? Was it this one? The, um... Was it a... Where someone just, like, put in some malicious translation into the project. Was it... Oh, it was in the Ubuntu release.

Yes, the Ubuntu release. Where someone snuck something into one of the translations and nobody noticed until it came out. Um, yes. I don't know what sort of review happens, uh, to ensure that doesn't happen here, but I would imagine there would be some form of review process. Um, I know each team, uh, like, cause each translation team, there's one team for each language. Each team has a team leader, which can just veto anything that comes in from any team member, any translation team member. So there are processes, but I don't know.

Yeah, I don't know yeah i i don't know either um it's it's always a concern though but you would hope that most people are trying to be a good actor and are trying to like improve the project yeah but then you have things like the blender ddos so some people are just like you know some people are just assholes like this is how it it is. There will always be those people. I don't know why someone DDoS Blender. Like, what are you doing? What is the plan? What are you trying to achieve?

My favorite theory is that Cloudflare DDoS them to get them to buy Cloudflare. That would be very good. I mean, it wouldn't, but that would be... That's like it wouldn't but that would be that's like that's like top tier that's great um um yeah i don't know it the hope is that everybody is being you know is trying to improve this and make it all better. But even, like, something like the Lynx kernel, for example, there have been people that have tried to sneak

things into the code base before. So, I have no doubts that it happens on a project like KDE, and hopefully, the people involved are paying attention and just reviewing what's coming in. And it sounds like, at least in most situations, that happens. But sometimes you may be caught sleeping and let something through that probably shouldn't be let through. Yeah, it does happen. But if that does happen, there are very strict processes that come into place to make sure that that person does not help anymore

because they are not helping. Yeah, yeah, clearly. There is a pretty strong, actually there's quite a difficult process. I mean, it's not difficult as in if you're doing the right thing, it's not very hard for you, but there is quite a process for getting a proper KDE developer account. You can, of course, contribute without one. But to actually get that developer status on your account,

there is quite a process because that does have some power behind it. So there are checks in place. I've never looked into that myself. If you happen to know part of the process off the top of your head? Okay. So, but mostly it is just contribute normally for the start, which is you do not have any commit rights to any repositories at all, except for the ones in your own thing. You cannot merge anything.

You're basically just a git lab user on any other uh open source project right um so you just have to do a handful of commits onto a bunch a couple of different repositories until you have a like you have you have a bit of time behind you you have some commits behind you and you have a a SSH key, as in you've just generated your own SSH private key, which is one of the requirements. All you do, you open a ticket with sysadmin. Sysadmin will review it. They'll look at your commits.

They'll look at what you've done they will double check everything they'll see if you've upset anyone in the community I'm not actually sure the full list of what they check but they do a lot of checks and take a while for them to process these because they

come with an amount of power and they will have the final yes or no you also require someone else who is already a developer to sponsor your application. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's similar with... I've looked at the process to become like an Arch maintainer before.

It sounds fairly similar where you need to have been involved, going through bug reports, things like that, and then somebody else involved with it is like, hey, this person's a good member of the community let's bring them on yeah a similar process except here you are contributing in the same way that anyone else would be and even when you do get that full developer right um you don't just start just committing to random projects directly. Right. That's just not good practice or really good at all. You should still be opening merge requests for almost everything you do. But it does give you the ability to, for example, if you end up being the maintainer of a project, first thing, you actually can be a maintainer of that project. You can close issues. You can accept merge requests, things like that.

Yeah, there's quite a few things that actually require a developer account for it to be a thing. Like, for example, I'm not strictly a developer, but I do have a developer account just because I need it for a couple of different things I do around KDE. Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, that's simple enough. So when did you first start getting involved with Linux and then get involved with KDE? Were you using KDE from the start or was that something you started doing later?

I actually started, well, actually pretty much like most people started with GNOME. That was many years ago now. I was dual booting Windows and Ubuntu. That was my first sort of experience with Linux. I can't actually and Ubuntu that was my first experience with Linux I can't actually remember what year that was but that was quite a few years ago now Was it before or after Unity if you remember?

Before or after Unity Oh I actually cannot remember. Um... Boon to Unity... I... First release was 2004. It would have been before Unity.

If it says here first release was 2004. That's the first release of unity oh wait that's a different distro yeah yeah yeah that's yeah that's when like the remix came out okay um switches to unity um unity was removed in 2017. It probably would have been during Unity. Okay, okay. Maybe during, maybe slightly after. Either way, it was sort of vaguely at that time. So I tried it a bit then, used it as a second operating system, not my primary, not my daily driver,

just sort of experimenting with things here and there. Then I stopped using Linux for a while and just completely dropped out of it for a couple of years. Then about the same time, actually, pretty much about the same time as Linus started doing their Gaming on Linux challenge. Just a little bit before that actually was when I was starting to experiment with Linux again. So I was starting to experiment. I installed

Arch on a second partition and then, yes I went with Arch, I know. I'm on Arch still, it's fine. Yeah. I installed Arch on a second petition. And then as I was starting to experiment with that a bit, and I'm like, not all my stuff's quite working yet. Then when I was using Arch, I actually chose KDE when I was using Arch.

That was my first time using KDE there. And then, probably a couple of months after, Linus announced their Gaming on Linux challenge. And I was looking at that going, huh, that's interesting. Interesting decisions made there yeah i did videos in that entire series yes there were you know luke knew what he was doing luke knew what he was doing even then still had nvidia troubles because you know. Yes. NVIDIA is very unique on Linux.

I can say that as someone who is currently running two NVIDIA GPUs of different generations. What do you happen to have? A 2060 and a 1050 Ti. Why is the 1050 Ti there? Why is the 1050 Ti there? So the 1050 Ti is because I have an extra slot and I need it. The other thing is, it is the newest NVIDIA GPU, also one I happen to have. Actually, probably the newest, but it's one of the NVIDIA GPUs that works with macOS. So I can actually emulate macOS and have GPU acceleration.

Also, if I need to run OBS, I can offload OBS to my other GPU. So it doesn't bog down anything. That is a good... Actually, you make a fair point there. Okay. It doesn't help that much, but it does help a little bit. Hmm. Hmm.

that much, but it does help a little bit. Hmm. Hmm. But it does mean that I cannot run the harshly open source NVIDIA drivers. Because one GPU supports it and the other one doesn't.

There's some work being done there. But yeah. The Novo stuff is, it's coming along. It's going to be a while before it's actually usable. Yeah, yeah, Novo stuff, yeah. That's definitely coming along as well. Um, I'm actually surprised that that project has come as far as it has so far.

That's how I also feel about us here, Linux. When I saw it initially, I saw the people involved, like, yeah, you all have great experience, but there's no way that this is going to be possible. Surely not. And now we have Linux just mostly working fine on Apple Silicon. Like, okay, sure. Yeah.

You might have to recompile everything, but it's just Gen 2 then, isn't it? It's a Fedora. I think it's a Fedora-based now. It's Fedora-based, yeah. They've switched it to Fedora-based. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I wonder if they're recompiling all of the Fedora repos now. I'm not sure what's being done on the back end.

Because I don't have Apple Silicon myself. Well, I guess I'll find out when someone I know ends up with Apple Silicon. So, why did you start wanting to use linux in the first place because you mentioned that you you've been using it you used it for a while um a while back on and off yeah um i switched to linux uh because uh i'm not sure why i originally tried it. I actually do not remember. But these days I have decided to switch. Sorry, my computer is trying to lock itself. I forgot to turn that off.

These days I'm using it just because some parts of it actually just work better for my workflow. It allows me to do a couple of things that i can't really do on windows that easily but mostly because windows is starting to do some things that are really annoying me uh for example windows 10 i was like oh cool that's that's nice you know new interface new everything then i clicked on something in the start menu when it started downloading it and installing it. Like, I was trying to click on this, trying to work out what this program is, and you just installed it. No prop ups, no asking, no prompts. At the moment, there's also they're experimenting with ads in

File Explorer again exactly where I want ads yeah I've seen two separate occasions of this happening there's one more recent it was actually on

a platform previously known as Twitter someone was like hey they're doing it again and it was they were in their documents folder and it was advertising hey you should be using OneDrive so it stays synced with all your other devices as like a side

panel so it's just the little things like that that are really starting to annoy me as like a side panel. Right, right, right. So it's just the little things like that that are really starting to annoy me. And of course, other things like development. If I need to compile something, I can actually do it on Linux and it sort of works and I don't need Visual Studio to take up 20 gigabytes on my hard drive.

Only to realize it's the wrong version of Visual Studio. Now I need five different versions of visual studio one version for each piece of software i need to compile yep yep and at one and at one point i was messing around i never actually got anywhere with it but with um making like a nintendo homebrew software um but it turns out if you want to do that, the main project you would use is DevKit Pro. Issue is

DevKit Pro only runs on Linux, really. It's heavily integrated with all the Linux binaries. But they have a Windows build. It uses MSYS2. I'm not sure if you've heard of that. MSYS2. It's ringing a bell. MSYS2. I'm unsure if you've heard of that. MSYS2. It's ringing a bell.

MSYS2. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, I've used this before. Yeah. Yeah. Thing is, MSYS2, it is incredibly cursed. There is something incredibly wrong about opening a Windows command prompt, then opening bash and

running pac-man oh it's a modified version of sequin oh that does sound cursed yes um and yeah there's it it just feels wrong using it and i have made some incredibly cursed images by combining like the Windows version of Dolphin with some like MSYS2 stuff happening. I had, I actually posted an image to Reddit where I like had like Pac-Man updating something and I had like the Windows version of Dolphin open. And someone said that I needed a better a better Windows theme Okay, you should try and improve that once you get a better Windows theme you should try calling some scammers This is Windows

God I opened Dolphin Because Dolphin does have unofficial Windows builds. Why? I don't know. I think they were experimenting with it at some point and then just never turned off the builder for it. Dolphin File Explorer for Windows.

It's, it is on, it is okay on Windows. What? Well, I guess it makes sense. It is, it is cute, so what? I guess it makes sense, it is cute, so it can run it's built in a way that it does run on Windows don't expect support

if you actually use that, but we do compile it for Windows that being said I'm guessing you run the Jenkins binary factory at the moment. What? Oh, I mean, I'm sorry. I'm actually not sure what website you're on. I was just assuming you're on binary factory, which is our Jenkins instance.

Oh, no, I just found some Reddit posts mentioning it. Oh, okay. But yeah, it is a thing. And yeah, so the reason I switched over to Linux, because I had all these things, I was essentially using Linux on Windows anyway. Right, right. I tested out Linux a couple more times. And one day, one of my friends, actually, who's also into this sort of stuff, managed to completely move. They were over for a couple of months. I was still hopping in and out, in and out, trying my best to move.

But some things just didn't work that I really needed to use at that time. I couldn't get it working. Most of that's been cleared up now. And now I am dual booting, but I primarily use Linux and only really ever boot over to Windows for virtual reality stuff. Right, right. Because I have a Windows mixed reality headset. There is work. Yes, there is work to get that running on Linux.

It's not ready yet. Because I was going to say, like, VR stuff works just fine on KDE, but I don't know about that specifically. Yes. If you're doing that, though, you should be using X.Org. Yeah, I know there is support for the headsets on the Wayland version because KDE actually supports DRM leasing, unlike GNOME, which... I need to do a video on that at some point.

I don't know if you did- NVIDIA doesn't on Wayland. Oh, NVIDIA's a problem as well, I didn't think about that part. Yeah, okay. Because the support is there and it will work with like AMD and Intel stuff. I didn't consider the NVIDIA stuff. Yes, so it's almost there. It's getting close now. Now we just need NVIDIA to fix their drivers.

And then the project that's working on I've forgotten their name the project that's working on getting All the VR stuff working on Linux, which they're progressing very well actually to Finish up and get their driver fixed And then I will actually be able to basically uninstall windows and fully transition but wow that's that's exciting that's pretty much that's pretty much the only thing i'm waiting on now like a couple of weird obscure stuff but like obscure games and things like that but stuff like that i can easily

just open up a virtual machine for if i needed to yeah like that's not something i need a dual boot for like these old games and protons moving quickly enough it'll be fixed in no time yeah i'm so impressed with what's happening with Proton, because I've... I've been gaming on Linux since 2020 or so, um, even since then it's gotten better, but just the fact that Proton exists. Obviously, Wine was around, and you could always configure Wine to get a lot of games to work, but there's a lot of additional things Proton ads and it just makes it really really streamlined nowadays i just grab a game like i'm playing through the yakuza series right now i just boot it and it just works like i don't there might be like a couple of minor tweaks to do but

for the most part it just works and that that's not something that could have been said a couple of years back. Definitely not. And it's, yeah, everything on the Linux desktop at the moment is progressing so quickly. We have moved from, you want a game? Good luck. You want to run any piece of software? Good luck. to run any piece of software good luck uh to we have modern versions of wine that can run a lot of things now we have native support for a lot more applications

uh stuff's being if stuff isn't packaged from your distro well that's fine we have flat pack now well if you don't have a flat pack there's also distro box which is just a simple way to set up containers yeah and if you even if you can't get through flat pack there's also a distro box there's there's so many ways that you can make sure that everything you have is there. And even the primarily Linux applications are being upgraded and updated and more and more contributors are joining. And all of this, it's bringing the desktop to a much, much more useful state in an ever-increasing pace. Absolutely.

And, again, that's why we need to go back to this topic that was from ages ago now. That's why we need this KDE network. To increase awareness, both to get more contributors and to get more users. Without users, you don't get bugs. And without, I mean, you don't, without users, you don't know about bugs. You don't get bug reports. You don't get bug reports. You don't get bug reports. Yeah, that's much better.

You don't get bug reports and without bug reports you can't really fix them. So for our software to be the best it can be, we need people to actually use it. So how long have you been involved in the Australian KDE network? Um, since its inception. Which was when? Which was when?

Um, that would have been, oh, that would probably be in the very beginning of this year. Okay, so it is really, really new then. Okay. Yeah. If I actually just scroll up. There isn't very much in that channel. I should be able to very quickly find... Oh, I forgot Neko doesn't let me

use a scroll bar. Yeah, I scrolled up and I think it's like it's somewhere around the start of this year. Yeah, I think it was about the start of this year that the thing was created. You can see, if you scroll up far enough, you'll see where I made the profile picture for the room, which was very jank. Yeah, 1st of December 2022 is when the room was made. Oh, absolutely. Okay, late last year then. Yeah, very late last year.

I'm actually known pretty much this time last year. It's about a year old. It's almost December. How did that happen? Yeah, I don't know. I can't answer that one for you. So... Go on, go on. It's fine. Oh, no, I didn't really have it.

I wasn't really going in with that. Oh. I was going to ask, what, I didn't really have it. I wasn't really going in with that. Oh. I was going to ask, what made you want to get involved with it? I wanted to contribute to KDE somehow, but I didn't really know where I would fit, because I'm not a C++ developer. Do you have any development experience? I have development experience, and none of it is in C++, and honestly, I do not a C++ developer. Do you have any development experience? I have development experience and none of it is in C++. And honestly, I'd not know if I want to learn C++.

I don't. That's what I'm going to tell you. That is what I have been told. So to be able to contribute to KDE with code, which is what most people think of when they hear contributing to KDE. Yeah, yeah. To be able to actually contribute with code, I would have to know C++. And I don't particularly want to learn C++.

I'm happy enough with Python, which is not suitable to make a desktop environment with. But I'm happy enough with, you know, doing whatever scripty stuff I do in Python. So I thought, where else can I help? And I was basically just asking around, and I've picked up all these weird sort of odd jobs as I've went. At the moment, I'm doing some minor merge request triaging every now and then.

Yeah, some minor merge request triaging, just saying, hey, this issue's old. Sorry, not this issue. This merge request hasnaging, just saying, hey, this issue's old. Sorry, not this issue. This merge request hasn't been touched in three years, and it cannot be merged. Does anyone actually still want to work on this at all? Right. And over time, I eventually found, hey, KDE Network. Hey, there's this KDE Network thing.

Hey, what can I do for a promo? Where are you from? Australia. Hey, we don't KDE Network thing. Hey, what can I do for a promo? Where are you from? Australia. Hey, we don't know anyone in Australia. Do you want to start KDE Network Australia? So that's how that happened. The network has been created. But nothing's really happened yet. There's been discussions.

Plans have sort of been put in place for when we will have an event. Nothing specific there. But other than that, I've also moved out. And there are a lot of different ways you can contribute to KDE that does not involve programming at all. Absolutely. We already talked about one of them being translation. Yeah, translation.

You can join the KDE network you which significantly helps i mean that all american high school film festival and what happened in india are both very very significant events um so you could work with promo in that way you could also work with a non-region specific promo just promoting just promoting KDE, helping, you know, helping write Twitter posts, Reddit posts, stuff like that. There's a lot of work that needs to be done there. There's always good to have a second pair of eyes reading over material before we send it out.

There's also, you could join any of the, you have to get experience in other places before this, but you could also join any of the working groups. For example, I'm in the community working group. There's also the fundraising working group. If you're good at helping people, coming up with ideas with fundraising, there's this admin, there's all of these different ways that you can all help. You're good at helping people coming up with ideas with fundraising. There's sysadmin.

There's all of these different ways that you can all help. Like, even to really obscure stuff. Like, I respond to the KDE Connect iOS reviews. For what? Okay. Sure. There's all these really odd things that no one would ever think of that are still things that need to be done yeah there are so many random things just because you can't code doesn't mean you can't

contribute absolutely obviously there's also you know just donating if that's something you can do but you can also yeah there's also ways to donate and all of that's on our website obviously there's a lot of people that just don't have the resources to do that. But even if you don't have the resources, you know, just documentation stuff also is good to do. Join on our Wiki Wednesdays, which are also talking about networks. They are all in time zones that are not very friendly for Australians. But join our Wiki Wednesdays. Go through and clean up ancient Wiki pages that are doing nothing

but misleading people because they're ancient. No one's updated them in such a long time. Go and help out and fix the community Wiki, the user-based Wiki, the other Wiki I forgot the name of. We have three Wikis. What are they we have yeah user base tech base and community okay well there's even things outside of the project directly like you can get involved with packaging on whatever distro you're using if you happen to be you know an arch user you can get involved with doing kde stuff on

the arch wiki like all of this stuff even though it's not directly involved with the project is also going to help out as well yes there's there's so many things in so many places everything is done well not everything everything but almost everything's done by volunteers so everyone is happy to have someone new come in and help out as much as they can well there's my personal favorite that i'm really good at with games which is breaking everything and finding bugs that is also a very valid thing you can do um and we do desperately need bug reports so if you would like to be a part of that, again, all of the information on how to contribute is on, I'm going to see if I can grab the, that is the wrong page.

There is a wiki page that actually goes through and lists all of the best ways that you can. Where in the world is it? I've lost it. I've completely lost the how to contribute page. Get involved. Here we go. There is this page that will explain, look, here's how you contribute.

You can donate. You can report issues. You can help directly with development. Bug triaging, quality assurance, accessibility. There's a lot of stuff that needs to happen with accessibility. It's very important there. Management, which is, okay, that's just, I don't know why it's labeled management.

It's actually the gardening team. but there's the gardening team there, which is, we need people in the gardening team. Translation, it's called gardening. That's probably why it's labeled that, because there's no actual gardens. Translation, human interface design, web design, documentation, user support. Just hang out in the main KDE chat on Matrix and just help people out. Yep, yep, yep. Promotion and KDE Eco.

I think promotion is one that people don't really pay that much attention to. Like, I will occasionally get people being like, oh, Brody, you don't do anything helping out. Like, I do a lot of videos on Weyland, and people are like, oh, that's not useful. You're not writing code. Like, do you know, like, I'm the only person here that is sitting here actually letting people know that some of these issues are being worked on.

Like, occasionally you'll see a Pharonix article, but there's a lot of things where it's just, like, skipped over, that people just have no idea, or even, like, a thing. Like, the, um, the one thing I talked about recently, like, the multi-window app issue with Wayland, where there's no way for windows to place themselves, like, knowing that exists gives people the ability to actually, you know, go and work on it if they want to go and do so. So promotion, I feel, is... It's one of those things that is really undervalued

because it's not something that is, you know, directly... There's no direct impact that you can link to it like you can with, you know, writing code or writing documentation yeah it's definitely one of the most important things we can do because without users you aren't really a software project um i mean you are but not really a notable one sure um and yeah there's so much that happens in every single one of these promotions incredibly supported important support is incredibly important you need documentation we need all

of these things to be done at the moment we are you know we are getting along just fine but the more more hands on deck we, the better it is for everyone. And for example, actually, the promo team pretty much always watches your videos, Brodie. Partially my fault because I send probably most of them into the promo chat but you always bring up something that hey look Brody's mentioned something in this video we should go work on that

I do have one that might actually lead to some interesting discussion because I'm going to test out just using like the Steam Deck interface, like the part of the device that is just directly connected to it, to mess around with KDE and just see how usable it actually is

with just those touchpads and just the touchscreen. So maybe there'll be something interesting that comes out of that as well. I'm not entirely sure just yet because I haven't gone and done so. That would actually be interesting and again that would be something that that video your experience with that would be handed all around the uh interface designers and all of that like people people do in kde watch your videos what i'm trying to say i guess yeah i i always it's always weird to me when I find out that someone

that I already knew about is like, oh yeah, I watch your content. Like, what? What do you mean? Like, when I... A good example of this, I know that Joshua Strobel, the budgie guy, before I'd ever spoken to him, I knew that he would occasionally show up in my comment section and just correct some little thing

about Budgie or mention some little thing that I didn't mention. Like, oh, that's cool. The space the space is a really small space but I think how would I say this it's a small space but there is a lot of different people in it and there is a lot more a lot more collaboration than people might realise

just looking at it from the outside looking at it at a surface or looking at it at like a surface level yeah and i think the one of the biggest things that sort of shows that is the fact that kde and gnome while we are separate projects we aren't really directly competing with each other we're both aiming for the exact same thing we just have different products to show for it there will certainly be instances in certain repos where developers might butt heads like a good example of this is the whalen protocols repo because even though you're both trying to make a desktop and both trying to make a great like you know these these different experiences

there are things that do affect both systems and both projects might have different ideas about where they want to take it. And when it's something that's supposed to be this cross desktop solution, you know, that's when you are going to see some of that, that like butting heads trying to work out, how do we actually do this in a way that we both benefit from? Yeah, there are, there of course will be times where people don't agree on stuff but uh with kde we actually do have um a separate group that can come in if a dispute gets too heated or if someone isn't playing nice to try and settle that and

make that not a thing because we want this to be as inviting for anyone anyone to easily come in and people because everyone's volunteers we can't have people being frustrated with with the way things are being done that's just not right yeah yeah no that's that's fair trying to maintain a community that people want to get involved with I'm sure is difficult at the scale of something like KDU

Yes it is It very much is I'm on that team It does help though that one of the things that is an issue with these cross desktop It does help though that One of the things that is an issue with these like cross Desktop repos is you have these all these projects that have these different goals

But at least with KDE you all agree on like the fundamentals There's nobody arguing that you know the Qt framework shouldn't be used for example Like there are these core things that are a part of KDE that everybody just agrees on. It's just more of the specific implementation details and how we want to go about addressing these problems. And I'm sure when it comes to, like, the UI design stuff, there is a lot of heated discussions about exactly where a button should be placed,

how that button should be styled on styled on things like that yes there would be pretty much everywhere you go there's going to be people disagreeing uh usually in kde um it's not it's not too heated it's not too much of um it doesn't spiral out of control right right um sometimes it does like it happens but at least it doesn't seem to be uh it doesn't seem to go as bad as some of those cross repo things again because we have those things that everyone agrees with cross-project repos i mean yeah yeah no i get what you're saying yeah it it's just dealing with people is just a challenge no matter what the situation is

and being able to put your own your own goals aside and at least listen to what someone else is saying i think is it's an important skill for everyone it is incredibly important and yeah a lot of people pretty much everyone really in KDE has that and we're trying to we're trying our best to make that everyone um I can't provide specifics but no that's understandable that's understandable um yeah uh let's see where can we go from here? Um, hmm. I actually don't know. Actually, go on. Oh.

I said, um, then my computer locked, and then I forgot what I was going to say. I'm sorry, I'm going to turn that off. Where's the switch? Where's the battery manually locks? we go no more no more screen locking so what i was gonna say um obviously the first year of you being in the australian kitty network it's understandable that there isn't going to be that much that gets done because everyone's sort of trying to work out like what can we do where's a good place to go because i i scrolled through that um the the chat log and i noticed that you were like i didn't even realize that i think it was linux comp existed

um so that first year everyone's kind of just trying to get used to it and work out like what even can we do but going into 2024 obviously you can't make any promises about you know exactly what is going to happen but what would you like to get done uh at least try to get done specifically for kde network australia uh we want to at least turn up to our first event would be a good start um we want to yeah turn up to an event and at least get that done see if we can promote see how it goes uh and mainly just test the waters is one of the first things we want to do is um in 2024 test the waters work out okay is is this particular event something we want to go to yeah yeah and also getting the promotion materials made primarily because i do not currently own a kde promo tablecloth i don't own a kde promo banner um once we've got those sorted we can just bring those across to as

many events as uh we go to but that's not currently a thing that we have so getting getting those basic materials and going to event and going to that first event is our primary goal and just showing off seeing what seeing if this event is something that already knows about us or even um something i've sort of thrown around why don't we go to something that isn't specifically open source related? What if we go to something that is like techie? So there'd be people who would potentially be interested in our software, even if they're using Windows, because a lot of our software exists on Windows. Like Krita and Kdenlive, again, those are the two big ones I can think of. Oh, and Oculus actually really nice on windows as well so those main three apps just sort of demonstrating those on

both on both windows and linux and mac os but i'm not bringing my mac out to an event that is the thing is heavy uh showing showing how look we make software for everything this is entirely kde this is windows with a couple of kde apps um even things that aren't specifically open source related because while we can show ourselves off in the open source bubble and there'll be things that people didn't know about, bursting that bubble and advertising outside of that is one of the best things that we can do. For example, how much did we get done at Scale 19 versus the film festival?

The film festival had a much more positive impact than Scale 19X. Yeah. Scale 19x. Yeah. Scale 19x was still, like, it's still a very good event that we definitely was worth going to. Absolutely, yeah. But the film festival had a much more positive impact.

Yeah, if you're just talking to people that, you know, already use Linux and maybe some of them already use kde like it's great to be there it's great to have some representation there but you don't like it's sort of the problem that the fsf has had for a long time where you don't need to advertise free software to the people that are using free software like they know it's good already like you there's not a ton that you can really achieve there yes um and And again, because we're promoting free software via KDE. We aren't really, you know, advertising KDE versus GNOME

or anything like that. That's not our goal. So, yeah, we've tossed around ideas of different events that we can go to. You know, team up with an artist and go to some convention where there'll be a lot of artists.

I've tossed around the idea of going to a furcon, like a furry convention. Teaming up with a critter artist. Sharing a booth with them and saying look we have an artist here they do critter we are the people that make critter

critter's free use it, it's good that's not actually the pitch but you get what I'm saying i'd have something much better if i actually went ahead did that um crit i think is a really good example there because i i've watched some streams from artists and like people will talk about critter as just a good tool they'll be like oh i use uh clips uh clip studio pain I use Critter and it's just like as a part of just a list of things they use

they just don't think about the people behind it so that I think is a really easy entry point that Ori has some public recognition it's just the people behind it don't really have that same recognition yes It's just the people behind it don't really have that same recognition. Yes. It's sort of advertising. We make Krita.

What else we make is definitely something we can do. And that would also be part of the pitch that we would do there if we went ahead and went to a Furhorn or if we went to anything else where there'd be a large amount of artists. Yeah, again, there's lots of different places we can go with lots of different things that can be done. At the moment, we've just got to decide where to go and what we should be primarily promoting there. I'm sure that's sort of the tough part as well, just working out exactly how to do the whatever demos and presentations are going to be done

because I'm assuming none of the people involved have any experience doing that. Yeah, I don't have a lot of experience directly doing that. I have done like little fundraisers in like before, like I did a fundraiser for my robotics team recently when we had to go over to the US when we were not expecting to have to do that. We went to an event. They were like, oh, yeah, congratulations, you've won. You can go to the US now.

It's in a month, by the way. So I have experience doing that sort of thing, but going to a convention and being behind a booth instead of the other way around would be very different and not very many people have experience with that. So, I mean, it's something I'm sure i can sort of pick up as i go along but it is it's definitely going to be new for me but new skills are new skill there's again i'm gaining out of this as well i'm you know getting up my public speaking um yeah and i'm sure that first time doing it is going to be a really big learning experience for that'll really help out with the second time because you know the first time you might have a plan in mind but when you put that into practice it doesn't really play out the way you think it

does so doing that and then the second time you're like, okay, here's what worked, here's what didn't work, let's do it this, let's, let's, let's try it out in another way, and just see if this actually clicks. And then maybe there's also sort of a different way of doing it that works better at certain events. Like if you're doing a very, a very techie event, you can present things in one way, whereas if you're doing something like that film festival, there might be a whole different way you'd want to present it like with the some sort of techie event there's a lot of things you can assume the people there probably know like you don't really need to explain the concept of what open source is to a general tech conference most people probably have an understanding but if you're dealing with a film

festival maybe no one there has any idea yes um although explaining what exactly open source is to uh to that sort of degree isn't exactly the most important thing i think saying that it's free it's free yeah it's the most important what i was going to it's free. It's free. Yeah. It's the most important. What I was going to get at there is maybe you realize that you don't need to explain it. Like you do that once and then you're like, oh, that's actually not that important. It's, you know, as you said, it's it being free. That's a lot more important to it.

Yeah. If they, if they stick around for a bit, because again, you only have so long before the person gets bored and walks over to some other booth. Yeah. The most important thing is we to some other booth. Yeah, yeah. The most important thing is, we make this editing software, it's free, here's a laptop that has it on, has it installed, look at what you can do. It's good. Give them a sticker or something.

I think that's what the film festival did, they were giving out stickers to anyone who popped over to the booth. That is a good way to do it. Everyone loves stickers. They don't know what they're going to do with them, but they'll just take a sticker. That is me. I do that.

I will always take a sticker if there is one on a table. I'm a business card person. If you have a business card, I will take your business card. I will also take business cards. I have a pile of business cards from the last convention I went to. I feel like this is a habit I picked up from my dad because when I was a kid he had

like a giant... It's basically like, you know, a giant folder with nothing but business cards in it. He would never use any of them. He just had them. I have business cards for twitch streamers i'm sure that's super useful uh and the only information it has on it is their twitch and like their name yeah look here's my name here's my vtuber avatar here's my twitch i still have it i have a couple of them

um yeah yeah i i'm curious to see what ends up happening uh through the year then. Do you have any ideas about trying something outside of... Obviously, I know there's been talk about LinuxConf and everything open. Has there been any talk about trying out something like a

film festival or something just outside of that tech space or not really yet? There has been a short discussion that i mostly proposed as i wonder if i wonder if uh promo will be okay with this idea at all um when i suggested hey we should maybe we could turn up at a furcon right at a furry convention that's the main one that i've sort of brought up because a lot of not all but a lot of people in that furry community are very tech-centric um so they will have a bit of an understanding of that sort of stuff but might not be fully in that community in the same way right right so it is i think and also the art there's a huge art culture so we could advertise

things we could advertise critter we could advertise things via critter depending on if the person knows about it or not um so yeah there's a lot of different things we can do there we haven't really discussed anything other than that because discussing conventions that we could go to instead of conventions that we will go to um one's significantly more productive than the other so i've just decided to let's wait until everyone's actually ready to go to a convention first yeah no that's understandable because everyone's been busy and for example I'm actually located in a particularly remote part of New South Wales, so I can't easily travel to a convention. Right, right.

If I wanted to do something up in Sydney, which would probably be where it is, that's five hours drive. You are really, really rude. I didn't... So, yeah, like, while I could say, KDA EV, please pay for my fuel, and they'll probably pay for 80% of it, it's not what they would do in that case. First thing, no, I don't want to travel five hours

to do some... to go to a convention where I'm advertising kda and then go five hours home again i think a lot of people just don't realize how big australia is as well like it because like most people live along the coastline and when you just consider that like it's not that big of a deal but even for me right like i i live in the like northern adelaide suburbs even for me it's like maybe like half an hour to drive into the city if i wanted to go out i've got family members out in places like claire it's like a two-hour drive to get to them and that's only like a uh well let's say a 20th of the way to the border like if you're going north yeah it is a things difficult yeah yeah yeah but hey we can

it is a lot easier to be five hours away from a place than it is to be you know flying from europe which is mostly what this project tries to prevent. We do not need to pay for plane tickets to send the promo contractors out to every single country on the planet. I do not think people who donate to KDE would even want that anyway. That's terrible. Just for context, if I wanted to go to Frankfurt, just the first one that shows up, $3,000. Yep.

That sounds about right. Yeah. That is Australian dollars, though. Yes, yes. So, yeah, monopoly money. But even so, it's a lot of money. It is still a lot of money, even when you translate that to US or Euros. It's a lot of...

It's just a lot. Yeah. Yeah. And it would be nice to be able to build up more of an ecosystem for this stuff in Australia. Because, as we mentioned, there is things like LinuxConf. There is everything open.

We have PyConf Australia as well. But there's not that many strictly open source things and Linux things in Australia. And if there is a way to promote the extended use of the software, maybe over time you start seeing more of these events cropping up in more states. Yes. We are very willing to try and grow all of the KDE networks as much as we can, and especially get more networks in place as well yeah yeah uh for example if i just

now this isn't always the most up to date but if i just click on um just one of the pages the kde network um this country has one member. Members of the group. This person. And we would like more members to join the team. I can tell. We've got Mexico. Mexico has one person as well.

Again according to the Wiki page, there might have been people who joined in the matrix, but never added themselves to the wiki. That does happen occasionally. Mexico, yep. I would like more members to join, for sure. I'm sure you do. So again, if you are from any of these places, please, please reach out, uh, join

the, join the channel. Um, the matrix channels are all in, all in these wiki pages. Yeah. Hopefully after this, at least some more people happen to know about it. Cause as I said at the start, and I've said a couple of times i did not have any idea this existed because let me see i'm just for anyone who's who's curious who hasn't tried it yet if we search for the kde network not the kde network community just the kde network on google which is you know a good search engine you probably are not going to find it so unless you know that this exists

actually getting involved was difficult like i'm sure there are people who'd be more than willing to get involved that just had no idea that this was even a thing yeah i agree knowledge of this is definitely an issue i'm'm still scrolling. I have not found anything actually about the KDE network yet. I've found the KDE Wikipedia page. I found it. It is

on the second page under some random Linux and Unix stack exchange post. Oh, wow. Okay. And then below that is a network manager issue on KDE Neon from 2019. So even if you do know about it, you're going to have trouble finding it.

Because to be able to find it, you'd have to start the KDE network community. Just because the subdomain is community.kde.org. I, okay. Maybe there's a reason for this. Why is it not called the KDE community? Why? Like, I get it. It's like a network of, it's like a network of groups's like a network of groups like that makes sense from a

naming perspective but from a seo perspective there has got to be a better name for it surely i'm sure there is a better name for it that isn't network manager um but there is a reason it's not called the kde community it's because anyone anyone who really contributes in any way, anyone who's part of KDE, is a part of the KDE community. Because these are many separate communities that are specifically for promotion in those regions. I have an idea. KDE Community Network. KDE Community Network. KDE Community Network. That might work.

It's a bit of a... Yeah, it's a bit wordy. Yeah, it's a bit wordy. I'm sure there are names that we could call it that isn't this confusing, but for now at least it is the KDE network. Mm-hmm. Yeah, lots of different places. We need more networks and we need more people in those networks.

Yep, yep, for sure. One thing, this is a bit off topic, one thing I did want to ask you, because I ask everybody who is at all involved in KDE about this, single click or double click? I am personally double click. What? You were the first one! Okay, what is your logic here uh i am used to it okay that is my logic okay i am used to it

that is not something that i would like to change also i will have to use windows occasionally and i do not have to want to reconfigure every single Windows machine I touch. Right, right. Okay. Because I will switch between Windows and Linux. If I get used to single click, I will sit down at someone else, like I'll go to my friend's place and they'll just single click on everything and they'll look at me like I'm completely insane. I do not want to have to relearn how to use my computer. Also on things that are single click, to highlight something, I have to draw, I know this isn't

the only way to do it, but I'm in the habit of drawing a selection box around it, which isn't always easy or possible. Depending on the space in between items. Mainly the most reason is just habit. Single click probably is the better choice, like the superior option, but I'm used to this. This isn't something I'm going to change. 3DE prides itself on being the most customizable, so it's not like we're going to take away

single clicks or double click support i think like i changed the font of the i've changed the font of the clock on my desktop of course i can make it double click actually that's something i will say one of the things i really don't like about katie is that font that I always see in the screenshots. Oh my god. I really hate the font. It looks so bad. Which font? The font that is your... Is it just the default font for KDE? Whatever

font is being used for the clock, I really just don't like. I'm noting that down. It's probably just a me thing and nobody else cares, but there's something about the font that bothers me. To be fair, I do everything with like Jetbrains mono, so maybe it's just a me thing. And as soon as I- Well, you can change it to Jetbrains mono. Yeah, I'm sure you can uh and that's what i'll do the second i install plasma six

my um i'm not even talking about like the the block uh down there which i actually have seconds turned on for i mean i actually placed a clock like a digital clock widget on my desktop and changed it to an invented language. Okay, sure. I don't actually... I can read it, but I just don't bother. At this point, it's actually just a cool decoration on my desktop.

Oh, okay. Why not? But it changes. It's interactive interactive there's lots of little funny things you can do with kde like that yeah that's one of the things i do like about kde that it's it's always been like really big on customization like not to say anything bad about you know i've i i like what gnome does where they're trying to do a very crafted experience, and for the people who want a crafted experience, that is, you know, a great place to go.

But if you're looking for something that you can really make your own, and you don't want to, you know, use a tiling window manager, really right now, the best option that's actually being actively worked on is probably KDE. Yeah, Plasma has a lot of stuff you can do with it. For example, I have a color picker in my dock, which is, I mean, sorry, not dock, in the panel. I use macOS terms. That's really odd for me.

Okay. In the panel, I have a color picker in the panel that I can just click, pick any screen color, and I can get the exact text code for it, copy it to my clipboard. There's one of the colors used in your profile picture. Oh. Okay, that's cool. Yeah, I use color picker very often. It's very quick for me to pull that up.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, I use a color picker very often. to pull that up yeah i i i use a color picker very often my current color picker is this i think it's a c program written like 20 years ago um it just opens up a like a it changed my cursor it pauses the screen i just pick a thing and that's it just copies to my my clipboard there's nothing else to it um sometimes it uh breaks and locks up my entire desktop which is fun uh oh dear um so it doesn't actually so what it does is it it visually covers the screen but i can still use my desktop so i can i have a hotkey to open up my terminal and if i kill the application everything comes back back. But it's not good when it happens.

I would highly recommend using the KDE one if you ever switch over to Plasma. Yeah, that seems like a good solution. Yeah. If you just have that icon in your dock, click on the little color picker, pick a color. The color appears in that little preview window. You can... I'm just going to send another screenshot here you can then click on the little dot and it will show you those colors click on any of those colors to copy the hex code that is a lot more sensible and for me that is just

permanently in that dock and i can just it's enough, it doesn't really get in my way, I can just pull that up any time I need it. I don't think you noticed, but you kept saying dock. I'm still saying dock. You are still saying dock. Well, look, most people, look, I'm doing better. Some people are still calling it the, um... Taskbar?

Taskbar. Yeah, yeah. the taskbar, which is confusing because the taskbar usually contains a task manager, which is another different Windows thing that has a completely different purpose. The task manager is actually the icons to open apps and close them. Basically, the thing you're using it most for. Yeah. When I first heard panel in KDE, I was confused for a while. I didn't really know what was being talked about.

Yeah. The terminology isn't the same as everything else. Again, because it's so customizable, all of these terms are very foreign for a lot of people without just copying other terms that exist like they're like windows terms or mac terms like there's not really any way you can really get around that besides just yes having easy ways to explain it and even if we did have a even if if we did decide we are calling it the taskbar, right? Mm-hmm. You can have a taskbar without a task manager.

Mm-hmm. It's optional. Right. So what do you have... If you have a taskbar without the task, that's just a bar. Status bar. You can have one without a status bar you could you could pull that out so you just have an empty bar there if you want to you can have a bar like a entire panel on your screen and all it is is just lots of color pickers you just you've just filled it with many many color pictures

you can put uh what widgets have we got we can you can have the time um just have time you can have an analog clock just have time in like a bunch of different countries yeah just have just have an analog clock for every time zone i actually don't know if you can do that. You probably can. You can't. Someone add that just for the memes. Yeah, someone should absolutely add that. That would be good, having different time zones for each panel, for each widget.

Actually, having the ability to set multiple time zones is kind of useful, especially if you are someone who does meetings with people. You know, you've got, like, American meetings or whatever, and you're in Australia. Yes. Another thing, actually, don't think this yet won't let you put in a panel but there is actually a widget that you can put on it on the desktop which at this point if you might as well not use a panel for this what we're talking about uh that shows individual uh usage of each core like you can

have system monitors there as well um again all these things that uh windows got rid of um uh with windows 8 windows 8 no windows 10 uh the those um sort of widgets they got rid of back then the windows 7 ones were good. I liked the, like the, basically the system monitor one in Windows 7. That was actually useful. Either way, you can bring that back with Plasma. Put it anywhere on your desktop. Resize it. Change the font of your clock to a language that literally doesn't exist.

Have the time in words you can do it please don't do that just learn to at a minimum learn to read numbers please uh i have i have the time written out on my desktop I have it actually I'll just properly take a screenshot this is here I also have the time in numbers at the bottom right normally where it would be

which is good but I just find this incredibly funny I hate that so much if you want to do it's your system go right ahead but i'm certainly not going to i i love the fact that i can yeah yeah like just because you can doesn't mean you should but in this case you've mentioned when you read out that article about write software or something like that

just because you can sometimes means you should in this case I decided that I should hey look if you can do it why not? Like, same with the Cube, which recently came back.

Yes, the Cube is great. Cubes love Cubes' life. I don't get the love for the Cube. I really don't. I personally do not use the cube. Um, but we knew that it was big enough to the point where the promo team, I think their post was just the cube is back with just an image of the cube and nothing else.

Yup. Yup. Um, it is just an iconic part of the early part of Linux compositing that everybody sort of knows about it. Yes. It's a thing there. We can have it.

Why not? Doesn't mean you should. I mean, if you have a look at a lot of the different, especially in Plasma 5, they're actually removing a couple of the pointless ones in Plasma 6. But if you actually look at the task switcher, which is like the alt tab menu, you can choose cover flow. Cover flow.

Like cover switch, it's called, like non-Apple-branded CoverFlow as a valid option. There's a lot of different options you can pick in there for how you want your alt tab menu to work. If anything, the cube is probably more useful than CoverSwitch. I personally use it. It's probably not the most useful one I could use, though. I could get a lot more information over choosing breeze or compact or small icons. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or text only.

Who would use text only? Text only? That is exactly what it says on the tin. If you are... If you use a screen reader and you don't need the graphical display? Oh, yes. That actually would be a useful thing for that. If you don't need a screen reader and you're doing it,

I think you're a crazy person, but... Sure, the option is there as accessibility, and for everyone else, I don't know why you're using it. Yes. Again, yeah, there's lots of different options there. Some of them you probably should use, and other ones Nate mentioned in his his blog you probably shouldn't uh and they're going away because they are literally just a slightly worse version of another option right right um i think there

was something about i can't remember if these were the exact ones but i think it was like grid versus large icons. Mm-hmm. Or, yeah, there was a couple of these here, like thumbnails versus thumbnail grid. Mm-hmm. And one was just a slightly more polished version than the other. Well, that makes sense because there's been, like a lot of these effects have been around for a long, long time. So. Yeah. Okay, yeah, they are basically the same thing. Like, a lot of these effects have been around for a long, long time. So... Yeah.

Okay, yeah, they are basically the same thing. Okay. They are, yeah, they are pretty much the same thing. One just has very slightly improved versions of everything. So it's like, okay, why are we still maintaining both? Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. These are the same option. Yeah, yeah.

And yeah, so yeah, there's a lot of different things that you can do. You can customize it. You can, again, probably the best thing about KDE is the fact that you can customize it to be literally anything you want it to be. People have done skins that will, not skins, global themes is the correct term, that can completely transform the user interface into something that looks completely different. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Obviously, the most popular examples are the Windows themes. Yes, of course they are. And all of that is incredibly possible through this system we've got set up. You can also download all of those themes directly from the, well, directly from system settings really all you do to change your theme is you just go to the appearance section which is right

at the top, get new global themes and you can there's actually my the name of the window that pops up when you do that is my favorite repo name. Knewstuff. Then Knewstuff will open up, also known as download new global themes, system settings. You just pick a theme, hit install, it will download it, and then you can just switch

to it. Or even just switch to part of it. Change some settings but not others. It is incredibly customized. We want to change your default system font, which actually I'm pretty sure that clock, that default clock is the standard system font. You can set it to a monotype font if you want. Just install that font and just tell KDE, this is my font. I use this one. I guarantee any typist out there hates the fact that I use a monospace font for a lot of things.

Absolutely. Like, no, that's incorrect. You can't do that. Like, not my problem. K-Write is always monotype. I just use that for general note-taking, which means I use monotype fonts for general note-taking quite a lot.

All my notes are in Vim, so I use the monospace font because I got it set up for programming. Sure. Don't- please don't program without a Monospace font if you are- actually, better yet, don't- I saw someone programming in a cursive font, like, please don't do that. Oh, I- I was about to say that actually. Oh no.

I thought that was a joke i saw i've seen people programming in cursive as a joke i think yeah a lot of it is jokes um but i'm sure there are people that do it like seriously here's the worst example. Oh, yes, I have seen that. There are actually programming fonts that do have some cursive elements that I don't hate. Oh, like Python X strings having the mathematical F. Um, I think this is a good example where I don't, I wouldn't say I like this, but I don't hate it as much.

It uses cursive, likeive key values. Oh. At least it differentiates them. Yeah. It's a bit too cursive for me, but something a bit lighter than that I think actually is a good visual indicator of what's happening. Italics could also work.

Italics also works. You are right there. But that works too, I guess. Look, as you said, customization. Customization is great. Just because you can doesn't mean you should and that's why we're giving you that power. Yeah, yeah. We're going to set you very sane defaults,

defaults that you can happily just not ever change and just use your system as normal, and you probably won't even care. But if you want to change something, we will give you every option. Well, on that note, I think we should be wrapping it up. Okay.

So let people know where they can, I guess, get involved with KDE Networks, if they want to get involved with the Australian one, where they can go for that as well. So to get involved with KDE Networks if they want to get involved with the Australian one where they can go for that as well So, to get involved with KDE Networks I would recommend going to the

KDE Network wiki page I'm guessing you'll put the link in the description somewhere for that Check in the description there will be a wiki page for the kde network right at the top there is a matrix uh join link um you will need a matrix account to join uh it might try to get you to make a kde.org matrix account

those are not open to the public. Make one with whatever matrix hosting service you want to use. Matrix.org hosts one. It's fine. So make a matrix account. Join us there. There is, if you can't manage to work it out, there is also apparently a KDE network telegram. You would be able to join there and see if you can get your matrix stuff set up that way.

If you'd like to help out in other ways, there is always the KDE Get Involved page. And there is information for every different way that you can possibly help us there sweet uh and as for the australian one if they want to get involved with that one specifically specifically for the australian one okay um if you want to join any specific network um include oh we lost him hello hello Oh, we lost him. Hello? Hello? Is that my side or is that your side?

Hello, is this working? Yes, it is working now. My UPS just beeped. Oh, that, okay. Yep, okay yep okay well let's wrap this up quickly then okay no that's fine i'm on my phone now um uh because i'm okay that's fine um anyway so if you want to join specifically the australian group there is also a link for the australian page on that uh wiki page um that's in that description um is also a link for the Australian page on that Wiki page that's in that description. There's a link for the Australian page join our specific matrix channel

There is information there On yeah, just join that matrix channel say hi and everyone will get you in Let you know. Hey what can be done if you want to contribute to any specific events just let us know in the channel and there's a there's a lot of different stuff that can happen there and that goes for any of the kde networks not just network australia right awesome uh anything else you want to shout out or is that pretty much it i can do my outro uh yeah that's pretty much you can go into the outro awesome okay so if you want to shout out, or is that pretty much it? I can do my outro. Yeah, that's pretty much it. You can go into the outro. Awesome. Okay, so if you

want to see my gaming stuff, I stream twice a week over on Brodeon Games on YouTube and Twitch. I'm probably playing not Armored Core and Kingdom Hearts. I'm probably playing through Neptunia Sisters vs. Sisters

and Neo The World Ends With You. So come hang out for the weeb garbage. Have fun with that. If you want to see my Linux stuff, that is over on Brody Robertson. I do videos there six-ish days a week. Sometimes it's KDE stuff, and when Plasma 6 comes out, expect

to see a couple of videos about that. There's probably going to be some Steam Deck videos coming out as well, so I'm sure there'll be something fun. And if you're listening to the audio version of this, you can find the video version on YouTube at TechOverT. If you're watching the video and want to find the audio, there is an

RSS feed, there is a podcast feed on every platform out there. Chuck it in your favorite app if you want to use that instead. I noticed that below Spotify my biggest group is Antenapod antenna pod great app go use it uh does katie have a podcast app uh podcast app i do believe we do i do not know the name of it i'm not good considering this is a promo thing i'm doing but yes we do have a podcast app casts yes i think that is more for plasma mobile but it

should work on desktop as well um uh pretty much everything that works on plasma mobile works on desktop so it's on flat hub so i'm guessing you could just you could just install it see what happens yeah yeah the screen's on here screenshots oh yeah it's got very adaptive ui okay uh yes the as far as i know i'm not 100 on this but pretty much everything that we uh make for plasma mobile or even a lot of the stuff that's made for desktop uh the kde frameworks essentially force you to make the app in a way that is very adaptive between everything. Right, okay. That makes sense. Depending on which framework you use.

Okay, sweet. I think that's pretty much it then. I'll give you the final word. What do you want to say? I don't actually have anything to say no one ever does I just let them just go with it see what happens

that probably happens quite a lot see you guys later