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KDE Mega Sprint 2026

· 3 min read

This April, KDE once again had a sprint in Graz, Austria. This one was deemed a "Mega Sprint" as unlike last year it was not just for Plasma, but for everything KDE-related from Plasma, goals, frameworks, apps, and more. We had a great turnout!

Group photo of the sprint attendees

Amazingly I managed to go the whole trip this time without getting sick! 😊

We covered a lot of ground! Briefly, a few of the things off the top of my head:

Testing​

Improving reliability, ease of running locally, documentation, and ensuring that test failures are reported by the CI in merge requests. We have some work to do for all of these to improve our testing story, and we collectively came to important decisions on how to move forwards.

Gardening​

There is a lot, often not enough hours/energy to deal with it, and a lot of the time people just don't even know about the issue(s). Let's try: being more proactive about closing bad/stale MRs, creating a GitLab bot to help automate things that get people's attention, keep track of things by sending regular notices to the mailing list(s) similar to how the "failing ci" emails help people keep on top of things.

Gestures​

A complicated topic! We had a lot of good discussions about the user flow/UI/UX, and I think we came to a really good place that sets us up for some excellent custom gestures/bindings with the fantastic work by Jakob & Natalie.

This sort of work is a really great example of something that would have been very difficult to do online, that we broke through with a lot of back and forth conversation/explanation/design at the sprint — which is exactly why we get together to unblock these things and make quick progress together!

Plasma Keyboard​

We covered all of the large topics/issues that have been pending, for example: morekeys/full keyboard emulation, emojis, speech-to-text, Wayland protocols, testing, etc. So much that each could probably be its own blog post! We'll continue to see a whole lot of changes and improvements here; we really want plasma-keyboard to be a first-class experience for all sorts of input stories.

Photo of all the Framework laptops at the sprint

Graz​

We were once again in lovely Graz, and the weather was a very welcome change from the brutal winter we've had in Canada — still had ice and snow when I left home! In addition to the mostly sunny weather and chirping birds, the city and its people were just fantastic once again. 💙

I can't say enough just how lovely Graz is, and how glad I was to get to visit again. 🇦🇹 Special shout out to Kevin Krammer, our KDE local who did so much to make this sprint great for us!

The fact that Graz is a lovely place to go is good news, since this year we'll be hosting Akademy there — I am already looking forward to coming back! :D

Lovely architecture on this museum in Graz

Interesting tower building in Graz

Shipping container apartments in Graz