August 6th – 9th 2026
FOSSY was held in Vancouver, Canada this year on the University of British Columbia campus.
This was my first conference as a KDE representative sitting at the KDE sponsors table. I don't know if we were the biggest sponsor at FOSSY, but we certainly had the most people and tables in the sponsors area. We also had the most things to play with. A drawing tablet, a surface table with drawing pen, a steam deck, a rpi4 with small touchscreen, as well a various types of laptops.
The steam deck, and the rpi4 were setup to show off Plasma Mobile. The drawing tablet and surface tablet were there to show off Krita. One of the days, a Krita expert picked up the drawing tablet and freehanded a drawing of me. She then went over to the surface tablet and was very excited that the keyboard was attached. Using the pen and the keyboard she was able to draw and create a wonderful picture of Konki riding a surfboard.
For me, the highlight of FOSSY was Camp KDE on Saturday. Each of the talks was very different and very good, and following it all with a Q & A panel seemed like the icing on the cake.
Tracey's talk on QA was very insightful and made me feel more confident in filing bugs for KDE when I find them. Jaiden's talk about Ultramarine choosing Plasma reminded me of all the desktop's I've looked at and why I continue to run KDE. My talk was good as well, but I'll talk about that in a bit. Kdenlive is the video editor I use, and Bernd helped me understand all that goes into the tool I use, as well as give me a peek into many of the features I've been overlooking. Shawn gave a great talk about KDE Plasma on immutable systems. Although I'm still using a traditional system, he certainly showed me what I was missing by not using it.
I gave a presentation KDE from Enterprise to Mobile and I was also on the Panel: 30 years of KDE . The panel was fun, but it's hard to give a summary of something like that, so I'll stick to my presentation.
I maintain the KDE suite in EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux). So the first part of my talk was explaining the update cadence that we have so that Enterprise Linux users don't feel like their desktop is always changing under them. The second half of my presentation was more of a demo of what Plasma Mobile is looking like nowdays. Although I did have slides for things, I found that it was much funner for people to see me using it. I booted up my steam deck into Fedora Plasma Mobile and proceeded to give demonstrations of all the various features. It was a pretty big hit, and I learned things too as some of the audienced asked about this or that in Plasma Mobile.
Overall, I think KDE had a very positive presence at FOSSY 2026. I was glad I could be a part of it.
