Synapse - KDE

KEcoLab Sprint: Two Days in Berlin

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 10:00:00 GMT

KDE Eco organized a two-day sprint to work on KEcoLab — the energy measurement lab I maintain. A few more people came and joined on day two, which made the discussions richer. The sprint was mostly about figuring out the next steps for KEcoLab, fixing some open issues with the measurement pipeline, and trying to get a second system set up in the lab. You can find the full sprint notes here.

Thanks to KDE e.V. for sponsoring the sprint, KDAB for hosting us at their Berlin office, and Volker for the guidance and support throughout.

Headless Remote Access

The first thing we wanted to sort out was making the lab PC fully remotely accessible, which means we could use it without having someone physically in the room to debug our issues with the lab PC. SSH was already working fine, but RDP was not very reliable (it used to break sometimes). Nowadays, We had to go to the lab PC in person once to allow remote connections, which is exactly the kind of thing you do not want to do repeatedly. During the sprint, we applied a fix using flatpak permission-set to persist screen capture permissions across reboots, based on a recently merged patch (plasma/xdg-desktop-portal-kde!326).

However, the issue is not fully closed. A couple of days after the sprint, the problem came back and it was not clear what had changed. We had a follow-up meeting to discuss this, notes here. Joseph and Volker are currently testing different approaches to figure out how to properly persist the session across reboots. We will update this once we have a reliable fix.

Setting Up a Second Machine

Cornelius Schumacher donated a Fujitsu Esprimo 510 to the lab for us to add as a second System Under Test. It did not go well. The machine threw six beeps on boot, which pointed to a CPU or motherboard problem, most likely a BIOS flash failure. We tried reseating the RAM, resetting the CMOS battery, testing each RAM stick one by one. Nothing changed. The machine is not usable, but we are keeping the hardware for spare parts.

Debugging the Okular Pipeline

We ran the full Okular measurement pipeline on Wayland and hit a few problems. On day two, we saw an R error about non-numeric data. When we looked into it, the collectl files had data from pipeline runs we had stopped earlier, stopping a pipeline mid-run was causing the next run to append data to existing files, which broke the statistical analysis. We now have issues open to fix this properly:

Kill pipeline: #64
Failsafe for pipeline failure: #18
Cancel SUS script: #16

A cleanup stage has since been added to the pipeline to handle this — see !152.

The reports also had wrong durations and missing averages. That turned out to be missing stopActions in the ydotool scripts. Once we fixed those, the numbers looked reasonable. Joseph is continuing to work on this and will follow up on the remaining open questions.

There is also a broader question about the data itself. Our power draw results look very different from measurements taken at Umwelt Campus Birkenfeld back in 2022. Their data showed distinct power draw phases across tasks, while ours is mostly flat apart from the spike when Okular opens. It could be Wayland versus X11, Flatpak versus a repo package, or just Fedora versus Ubuntu. Probably a mix of all of them. Something to investigate.

Future Planning

We went through the open issues and talked about what comes next, integrating KEcoLab into a broader KDE Plasma testing workflow, planning for the Akademy BoF, and ideas around extending ydotool/kdotool to make measurement scripts more flexible. We did not get through everything but the direction is clearer now.

Outside the Lab

After the first day, Carl, Aakarsh, Joseph, and I headed to Tempelhofer Feld. It was a warm evening and the field was full of people cycling, skating, and just sitting around. We walked around for a while and talked about everything except KEcoLab, which was exactly what we needed. A big thank you to Carl and Joseph for showing us around, Berlin has a way of making you feel like you have all the time in the world, even when you have a pipeline to fix in the morning.

Not everything worked, but we came away knowing exactly what needs to be fixed and why. That is usually what a good sprint looks like.

Tempelhofer Feld

What I Learned, Loved and Lived at Akademy 2025

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 10:00:00 GMT

After months of being completely consumed by my bachelor thesis and then giving myself some much needed rest, I finally have the time and headspace to sit down and write this post. And honestly, I have been waiting to write about this because Akademy 2025 was special.

This was my first in person Akademy after three years of attending remotely. Every year I would watch talks through a screen, imagining the energy in the room and the hallway conversations I was missing. This time, since my thesis brought me to Europe to work at CERN, I finally had the chance to join everyone in Berlin. KDE made it possible for me to attend in person, and I was also scheduled to give a talk on my Google Summer of Code project, KEcolab, which I currently maintain. So you can imagine how excited I was for this entire week. People say Akademy feels more like a KDE festival than a conference, and I was about to find out why.

I packed my bags in Switzerland and left for Berlin.

Arrival and Welcome Dinner

I reached Berlin on the fifth and went straight to the welcome dinner near Tiergarten. The restaurant had a relaxed vibe, and within minutes I was meeting people I had only ever known through Matrix usernames. Suddenly the names on my screen had real voices and real faces. We talked about everything from new KDE developments and the Banana release to personal side projects and long contribution journeys.

I finally met the KDE Eco team and the people working on the Endof10 campaign which is going amazingly well. We chatted over drinks, laughed a lot, and I might have invited half the table to visit CERN if they ever pass through Switzerland. Dinner was great. I had a pasta salad whose German name I still cannot pronounce, along with some very nice KDE drinks.

I returned late at night and realised that my slides were still not ready. My talk was scheduled for early morning on day one, so I stayed up finishing everything and managed only a few hours of sleep before the big day.

Day One

Day one opened with a keynote by Alexander Rosenthal on Open by Design. It set a very thoughtful tone for the conference. Right after that, I gave my talk titled KEcoLab: KDE’s Automation Tool for Energy Consumption Measurements. You can watch it here: https://youtu.be/ybduSygg2Ns?si=tZlXN7XuGcfyux-Q The audience asked some great questions about expanding energy measurements to more applications and tools and how the process of measurement works behind the scenes.

Presenting KEcoLab at Akademy 2025

My talk overlapped with the Plasma talk, so I unfortunately could not attend that one. I spent the rest of the day listening to some very inspiring sessions. The KDE annual recap was a highlight, showing how far we have come as a community. It covered improvements across many applications, developments in Kirigami and updates to the new language bindings for Rust and Python. There was also a small peek into what is coming next such as improvements to drawing tablet support and the Plasma keyboard.

If you are interested in contributing to KDE, trust me when I say there are endless ways to do so even if you are not a technical person. You can explore opportunities here: https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved

Day Two

Day Two was packed with talks that focused on being thoughtful developers and maintainers. The keynote by Paloma Oliveira, titled The Politics of the Pull Request, stood out to me. It explored open source from angles we often overlook and gave me a lot to think about.

Paloma Oliveira’s keynote on “The Politics of the Pull Request” - exploring the social and political dimensions of open source collaboration

I also enjoyed talks related to Wayland and Plasma Mobile, and in between sessions I helped volunteer at the welcome desk. At the end of the day, we all gathered at C Base for the social event. Great pizza, great people, great atmosphere.

Day Three

Day Three was dedicated to BoFs. I attended the KDE Goals BoF and then started preparing for the KEcolab BoF because we had to quickly fix a few last minute issues in the lab setup.

Our session was right after the Okular BoF, which turned out to be perfect timing. The Okular team gave us really helpful input since KEcolab and Okular are working on an ongoing integration. We talked about the possibility of running individual energy tests on different components and many other ideas. You can follow the issues we discussed here: https://invent.kde.org/sdk/kecolab/-/issues

Day Four

Day Four had more BoFs. I am sad I missed the You Can Dance BoF because it sounded like everyone had a lot of fun. I joined the KDE Out of Experience BoF and the KDE Flatpak BoF instead, both of which were genuinely interesting.

Day Five

Akademy day trip. This was incredibly fun. We were split into groups and had to complete different tasks around Berlin. We even had a bear themed challenge which led to some hilarious photos. We placed KDE stickers on poles, shared selfies and enjoyed the entire city.

Exploring Berlin with the KDE community - sticker missions, bear challenges, and unforgettable moments

Later we visited the Computer Museum which was heaven for anyone who loves old hardware. They had everything from retro consoles to the legendary 3dfx Voodoo chips. I spent way too long inside the museum and ended up missing the group that went to the dinner spot afterward.

Classic Macs - The originals that started it all

Day Six

The last official day included the Linux InstallFest. A few new contributors came in to install Fedora KDE on their laptops and it was a relaxing final day. People were packing, saying their goodbyes and heading home. I stayed for the after drinks event and spent the evening talking to more people before ending the day with bittersweet farewells.

But Akademy was not over for me yet.

Day Seven

I stayed an extra day to work on the KEcoLab lab with Joseph and Volker in KDAB, Berlin. Huge thanks to both of them. We switched the lab from KDE Neon to Fedora and set up Wayland. We are now testing ydotool so KEcoLab will run smoothly on Wayland as well. We did ran into few issues with the VNC but it was still productive, fun and a perfect ending to the week.

After lunch I said my final goodbye to Berlin and headed to the airport.

Final Thoughts

Akademy was one of the best conference experiences I have ever had. It was a week full of meeting incredible people, listening to inspiring talks, sharing ideas, social beers and feeling truly part of KDE.

KDE is one of the most welcoming open source communities and I am grateful to every single person who made my time there so special.

Thank you to KDE eV for sponsoring my attendance. Thank you to everyone I met for the warm conversations and kindness. I will not list names because I would definitely miss someone but you all made this Akademy unforgettable.

A special thanks to my KEcoLab team (Joseph, Volker, Kieryn (for the constant help throughout the event, Aakarsh and all past contributors). Also a big thank you to the KDE Eco Team, the EndOf10 team, KDE Promo and the entire KDE family. And of course thanks to the volunteers and organizers who made Akademy perfect from start to finish.

I already cannot wait for the next one.

The KDE community