KDE at LinuxTag 2008 in Berlin

KDE was very busy at LinuxTag this year. We were present with two main booths - Amarok and KDE - and a whole bunch of talks within our own track. Additionally, Aaron Seigo gave a well-received keynote on Wednesday, painting a vibrant vision of the desktop in a mobile world, and the direction KDE is heading in. Read on for a more detailed coverage of the event.

Till Adam brought the features of Kontact to the audience on Thursday. On Friday morning Sebastian Kügler opened the KDE track with an introduction to KDE 4. As Sebastian Trüg could not make it to Berlin, Aaron jumped in again and talked about the Plasma basics. He was followed by Till Adam who presented the possibilities of Akonadi's storage concept and the future of KDE's Personal Information Management suite.

After lunch Ellen Reitmayr talked about usability concepts in KDE and the efforts the team undertakes to incorporate them into the desktop and the applications. Franz Keferboeck gave an overview of KOffice's apps and introduced the audience to the new features that will come with KOffice 2. The final applause for the day went to Lydia Pintscher and Harald Sitter for their talk on KDE multimedia.

On Saturday KDE was the topic in two more talks: Lydia Pintscher and Sven Krohlas focused on the new features of Amarok 2, while Holger Schröder gave a presentation on the latest development of KDE on Windows.

Booths

Both main booths were well manned and even better visited. The interested crowd asked zillions of questions and was very eager to see the latest features, goodies and eyecandy of KDE 4.1 which we showed on all computers at the booth, on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. Other visitors came by to share ideas or suggestions, and altogether they gave wonderful feedback.

The booth staff talked their heads off and tried to answer all questions, to satisfy everyone's curiosity and sometimes even find a solution to the users' problems that popped up once in a while. The booth staff were also supported most of the time by some of the developers who did a great job dealing with bug reports right at the booth.

At the booths, members of the community met some of them for the first time. We welcomed new faces to the family and formed new and inspiring working relationships with people from the KDE community and beyond.

Besides these main booths, almost all distributions showed off KDE 3 and KDE 4 desktops, most notably openSUSE, Kubuntu and also Fedora. In addition the German Federal Office for Information Security displayed computers running Kontact on Windows as well as on Mac OS X.

Many thanks to all who helped and supported us and made this LinuxTag possible.