On martes, 3 de marzo de 2020 2:40:12 (CET) Nate Graham wrote: > Greetings KDE friends! > > This weekend I attended the 2020 HackIllinois event in Champaign-Urbana > as a FOSS mentor, representing KDE. I'd like to present my after-action > report: > > > > *Overview* > > First the good news: the KDE team won! > > My students reported that the judges were impressed with their results, > excitement, and passion, and the fact that one of the submitted patches > (https://invent.kde.org/kde/konsole/-/merge_requests/68) has already > been merged. > > My students principally worked on building a visualizer for plasma-pa's > microphone audio input level > (https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=411563) and managed to put > together a pretty decent proof-of-concept: > https://phabricator.kde.org/F8146046 (code is available at > https://github.com/NSLeung/KDE-Neon-HackIllinois2020/commits/joey_branch). > The code is not in a merge-worthy state, but could definitely get there > eventually. > > They also submitted some nice smaller patches: the aforementioned > Konsole fix, and one for Dolphin too: > https://phabricator.kde.org/D27757. They also made a thorough > investigation of a significant Yakuake issue that has been affecting two > of them: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=389448. > > Two of the students in particular seem quite eager to continue their > contributions. > > > > *Promo & social observations:* > > Nobody had an unkind or negative word for KDE. People who had heard of > us really seemed to love us. > > The other FOSS mentors at the event who I talked to had all heard of KDE > and some had used Plasma in the past or still do. While most of the > students I talked to had never heard of KDE, most of the ones who had > were already using a Plasma-based distro (mostly KDE Neon, with some > Manjaro)! Several GNOME-using students were impressed by what they saw > and eager to help out, and the students already using KDE software were > super duper enthusiastic. Most had never filed any bug reports or > submitted patches, but eagerly jumped into this. They did not find the > process of doing so especially difficult, so I suspect that a lack of > outreach was principally what had kept them from doing so before. > > Students were especially impressed with Yakuake, the embedded terminals > in Dolphin and Kate, and Plasma itself. They all thought it was very > attractive and polished-looking. > > > > *Onboarding & technical observations:* > > Overall, the process of setting up a KDE development environment from > scratch was not a major pain point, especially for the Linux-using > students. However a number of build failures took a lot of time to > investigate and teach people how to work around: > https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=418328, > https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=418330, > https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=418331, > https://phabricator.kde.org/D10041. Please help to keep the master > branches of your projects compilable with default CMake settings, common > compilers, and easily installable dependencies, everyone! :) > > The students using Apple laptops had to set up their development > environments in virtual machines due to a lack of macOS support in our > current developer tooling and documentation. I had them install Neon > Developer Edition, which worked fine overall, but it occurred to me that > this edition would be more useful for its stated purpose if it shipped > with a pre-generated .kdesrc-buildrc config file, plus kdesrc-build > itself and all necessary dependencies from > https://community.kde.org/Guidelines_and_HOWTOs/Build_from_source/Install_th > e_dependencies#KDE_neon.2C_Debian.2C_Ubuntu.2C_Kubuntu. These enhancements > would have yielded been significant time savings for my VM-using students. > > > > *Hardware observations:* > > From my observations, at least 70% of the students attending the event > were using Apple hardware running macOS. Most of the remaining students > were using non-Apple hardware running some flavor of Linux, about a > 60/40 mix of Plasma and GNOME, respectively. I did not see a single > student using a PC running any version of Windows. > > > > Overall it felt like a worthwhile endeavor! Now time for some sleep... > > Nate
This is great! I'm going to save this for the 2020 yearly report, if you don't mind. Cheers Paul -- Promotion & Communication www: http://kde.org Mastodon: https://mastodon.technology/@kde Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kde/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/kdecommunity LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/kde
