Desktop, Desktop and Desktop, Sprint in Pineda de Mar (Barcelona)

First of all, excuse the super late release of this post, I have been super busy up to the point where I couldn't use 15min to spellcheck this post, now I had to adapt it a little bit, change times etc.

From 11jun to 18jun we had an amazing sprint in a small town near Barcelona called Pineda de Mar. This sprint was organized to gather all the developers highly motivated in move the Desktop forward, including those working in areas not strictly related to what the user sees or not strictly known as part of the desktop. We had a week of fun and work lead (as usual :p) by Kevin Ottens.
We had endless discussions about our weak and strong spots , hacked a little bit (some more than others), played table tennis (Yay for the Southern European team vs the British Empire), and enjoyed good quality food done mostly by Dario Freddi (let the italians cook we say) though more people worked in the kitched to prepare delicious disesh (Kevin, Sebas, Clemens, Marco Martin, Lluis Eskerda...).

It is hard to describe what the environment of a sprint is like, just imagine that you are with your best friends a whole week doing what you love only stopping for eating and having fun. In this case KDE is the people and what we love is our software, full week non-distractions equals super productivity of all kinds. It is hard to summarize the whole week, but these are my personal highlights of the sprint:

• Almost everybody attending the sprint would like shorter and more dynamic releases (à la chrome or kernel).
• Everybody agrees that we must be careful when modifying the Desktop, we don't want to make it worst !
• Common agreement that we have to start looking for alternative to the current windows 95 paradigm.
• Our current notifications suck and we know how to fix'em (1) (2) (3).
• Virtual desktop are a thing from the past in its current state.
• Activities are a super awesome concept, yet we are nowhere close to make them appealing in the desktop (as they are in the tablet)
• Knowledge about Plasma terminology was shared and kind of agreed on (did you know that Plasma Active is about all form factors? yes! that includes the desktop !)
• We need better PulseAudio support
• We need a better screen support
• Lots of stuff to clean and polish! papercut program by Agateau on the way
• Lot of people using icontask (this is more of a personal note :p)
• WebAccounts is supermegaultraimportant, we need it now.
• We want KTp or even better "KPeople" everywhere, it will become one of our new pilars.

On this list (I hope quite close to the reality) you can see more or less the feeling of the Desktop developers, and especially that it is alive in all senses.

Photos taken by Martin Klapetek

I hope you could see a glimpse of how intense a sprint is lived and how useful they are.

Bye !