It's been a long time! I have been very busy with my PhD but this particular semester I have more time to volunteer to KDE so I thought the fact that the Ohio Linux Fest was happening close to me was a good opportunity to do some KDE promo in USA.
I ended up being caught up in the middle of many deadlines just before the event, so I had very little time to prepare the promo material that I was going to show. I was somehow able to modify some Plasma artwork that was available for ISO sizes just in time for printing for the Ohio Linux Fest. I also borrowed a laptop with modest hardware, where I had Neon 5.10 running. The whole setup looked like this:
Clik here to view.
The KDE boot at the Ohio Linux Fest.
Once the frenzy of setting up the booth was through, I had some time to enjoy the first night of exhibitors at the happy hour organized by the event. My booth was next to a BSD table sponsored by iX Systems, where they were showing pretty cool stuff in BSD like the TrueOS and the Lumina desktop. I was very impressed by the Lumina desktop, also based in Qt5, and Ken Moore himself was staffing that booth so I got to learn a lot of details about it.
Back to the KDE side, I got to talk to many people that stopped by and showed interest in Plasma. I was happily surprised by the amount of people that stopped and just said "I love Plasma, I use it every day" since I have always thought KDE is more of an European desktop. I also talked to people that had tried Plasma 4.x back in the day, but were very impressed by how smooth Plasma could run on very basic hardware so they said they would try it again. I even got someone to install it the first night of the event on an older Macbook, and he came back to my booth next day to say he was pretty happy with it! Some others also asked the usual questions: "doesn't it take too much memory?", "how is it better than <insert another desktop>?", "I never understood Plasma", etc. But one very common interaction I had with the crowd that surprised me a lot was about Plasma Mobile on the Librem 5. This announcement seems to have caught much attention because lots of people were asking me about it. I think people are eager to try Plasma on a phone so I am looking forward to this.
About the talks, I have very little to mention, unfortunately. I attended the GSoC BoF where Swati Lodha talked about her contributions to digiKam. I had no time to attend the talks on Saturday, except the keynote by Tarus Balog from OpenNMS which was very informative (and fun).
Overall, I think this was a great experience and the organizers of the Ohio Linux Fest did such a great job that it turned out to be a very positive first experience as an exhibitor in a conference of this magnitude. I really think KDE should be represented next year, not only as a sponsor in an exhibit, but with a talk. I really hope my time commitments allow me to attend next year and help with one or both of these.
Edit: I first thought of a separate post regarding the sponsorship of the artwork and the trip, but I now think it's better to mention all of this in the context of this post. My participation in the Ohio Linux Fest was sponsored by the KDE e.V. and I am very thankful for both their travel support and for sponsoring the printing of the promo material. Of course, the sources for that promo material are available for anybody that needs to print more.
