Akademy talk imagines Plasma assembling itself around a personal model of each user.
KDE's annual conference takes place this weekend at Graz University of Technology in Austria, with an AI-native desktop proposal likely to divide attendees.
The KDE project is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, giving delegates at the Akademy conference in Graz another reason to raise a glass. The conference begins on Saturday, September 19, and registration remains open.
Although Xfce 1.0 appeared earlier, its initial releases were proprietary, making what was originally known as the Kool Desktop Environment one of the earliest FOSS desktop environments for Linux. Version 1.0 was released in July 1998.
A lovable, sovereign, AI-native KDE, presented by longtime KDE contributors Eva Brucherseifer and Jan Muehlig.
In 2003, they conducted an usability study of the then newly released KDE 3.1. Of the 60 office workers tested, none of whom had earlier Linux experience, 87 percent said they enjoyed working with KDE.
Writer and AI critic David Gerard points out the proposal's resemblance to the Resonant Computing Manifesto, launched in December 2025 at Wired's Big Interview in San Francisco.