Well, I don't have a copy of my presentation video yet to share with people, it is coming. This weekend, KDE was quite busy, with presences in at least three places: Toronto, Phoenix, and somewhere in Brazil. I had my hands full in Toronto for the one day Ontario Linux Fest. For the most part, the attendees were users or project reps from a number of open source endeavours, and at least some local hardware integrators.
The talk was well attended, with users representing a number of different levels of KDE 4 familiarity. Since my talk was entitled, An Introduction to KDE 4, I made the goal to be the most broad of introduction to our main product, KDE 4. After my usual stand-up comedy routine (and subsequent rotten fruiting), I got down to demonstrating a number of things about KDE to the audience, showing some day to day activities that one would do with KDE 4. For example, simple things like launching apps, changing the desktop or adding applets to the panel were used to demonstrate the KDE 4 Workspace. I showed KDE 4 behaviours when inserting a flash drive, and how to safely remove it. I also showed the weather features off, since our own Mr. Starr of weather applet fame was in attendance.
For applications, I briefly showed off our productivity programs, like Patience, Dolphin, Konqueror, Okular, Gwenview and Marble (OSM rules!). I also then showed a number of other applications that ship separately from KDE 4, including Amarok and KOffice, taking care to set reasonable expectations for KOffice users on the current state of the project.
I even showed a screenshot of KDE 4 on Windows, with a number of programs running there. Afterward I talked a little about KDE itself, and the work we put into KDE 4. Cornelius, I stole your lines of code graph for this, and I also snagged a developer stats graph from the dot.
During the rest of the event, Eugene, Shawn and I hung out at the KDE table and answered questions from curious users, including a number who were excited to try KDE 4 for the first time after going to the talk. A few users came with questions about features and bugs in the KDE 4 series - many were using older distro releases, so I let them play around in a blank user account on my laptop, which I used for the presentation. My laptop was running Slackware64 with KDE 4.3.2 packages, and is pretty close to the unmolested KDE 4 as shipped from upstream. This causes bugs due to distro modifications to become easily apparent for some user complaints. For the rest of the complaints, many of the users left the booth happy, waiting patiently for the releases of Linux distros that will be happening in the next few months complete with KDE 4.3.x.
Generally though, there was a trend at this event to users being either completely new to Linux, or those that were involved with server-side work. KDE was the only project that seems to have any desktop presence.
- Log in to post comments