KDE Platform Profiles - Low fat software platform you can pick and choose from with sugar coating on top

Speaker: Kevin Ottens

Traditionally, the D of KDE was standing for Desktop. Nowadays the KDE name refers to our tremendous community, and we're talking about "Workspaces". We almost obliterated the "desktop" term, it just happens to be one of our products.

As a community we're getting more diverse and our collective focus has widened in scope. Our traditional desktop focus has been augmented with other targets such as mobile and web. This happens to also reflect general trends in the ecosystem around us. On the workspace side, Plasma is our 4x4 technology to address the wide spectrum of devices at the interaction level.

But what about resource consumption? Do we play well on small devices? What if our apps are just guests on some device and shouldn't consume to much disk and memory space on it?

All those questions are valid, and current. As we're moving into the consumer electronics space we have to ask ourselves those questions daily.

In this talk, we won't have the arrogance of claiming to provide the definitive answer to all the aspects of our platform on small devices. Still we'll try to provide a clear picture of the situation. We'll show up some of the findings we got while investigating dependencies within our platform.

Then, we'll present one of the strategies we're executing to make the KDE Platform more friendly for consumer electronics via the use of platform profiles.

Finally, we'll take a look at the current offering of tools provided by the community to address those platforms. What you can find and use today, but also what is in development on the KDE side and will be available in the coming months.

Kevin Ottens

Kevin Ottens is a long term hacker on the KDE project. He contributed to the KDE software stack at large, with a strong emphasis on API design and frameworks architecture. Graduating in 2007, he owns a PhD in computer science which led him to particularly work on ontologies engineering and multi-agent systems. Kevin's job at KDAB includes developing research projects around KDE and contributing to Akonadi. He still lives in Toulouse where he serves as part time teacher in his former university.