Celebrating 30 years of KDE at Akademy 2026

Two weeks ago, several of us from Qt Group travelled to Graz for Akademy 2026, KDE's annual summit. The conference was hosted by Graz University of Technology (TU Graz). This year’s conference was extra special: it marked KDE's 30th birthday. Happy birthday, KDE!

For three decades, KDE has been the largest open-source community building on Qt. The two projects have developed side-by-side, and much of what Qt is today has been shaped by KDE developers: their bug reports, their patches, their feedback, and their high expectations. Akademy is a yearly opportunity to strengthen that relationship.

Our talks

We were happy to contribute two talks to the program. Fabian Kosmale gave a tour of what's coming in Qt 6.12 and beyond. Richard Moe Gustavsen and Doris Verria presented StyleKit, a declarative styling system for Qt Quick Controls and Qt Widgets. The questions, hallway conversations, and BoF (birds-of-a-feather) sessions afterwards were especially valuable to us.

The wider program had plenty of inspiring topics, too, from KWin's move to Vulkan and new work on QA infrastructure to the modernization of Linux printing, KDE Linux, and the growing interest in digital sovereignty. Seeing so many ambitious projects built on Qt was humbling.

The Qt Booth

As always, we had our own booth with a banner and stickers. It was staffed for most of the conference, giving people a chance to stop by, ask questions, and chat with the team informally. Foot traffic was a bit lighter than we'd hoped, but the conversations we did have were insightful.

BoF sessions

On Tuesday, we hosted a day of BoF sessions. We talked about the Qt Project's goals and how to make contributing more welcoming. We shared updates on Qt Bridges, including a few demos for Rust and C#, gave a closer look at Qt Canvas Painter, went deep on styling with StyleKit, and discussed QtMultimedia use cases in KDE. We ended with an open "Ask us anything" session.

We were especially glad that a group of students joined us for much of the day. Their fresh perspective and their questions made the sessions better, giving us new opinions and questions on aspects “old-timers” might take for granted.

We came away with actionable and varied feedback. We got requests for rich text in Canvas Painter, for improved styling of Qt Quick Layouts, as well as for exposing an API for resolving properties that might return inherited values (such as visible).
We also got insightful comments on Rust interoperability, on using drop shadows for Widget styles (and its issue with clipping), and the future of printing on Linux. Some of it has already turned into follow-up work with KDE contributors. That's exactly the collaborative outcome one hopes from holding a BoF session.

Thank you

A big thank you to the Akademy organizers, the volunteers, TU Graz, and everyone who stopped by the Qt booth or the BoFs. Here's to the next 30 years of KDE and Qt, built together.

See you at the next Akademy!