A talk in three parts, building towards a vision for a sovereign desktop in 2026 (and a look back).
- Loved. In 2003, together with Eva Brucherseifer, Jan’s company relevantive ran the first large-scale usability study of the Linux desktop on behalf of decision-makers considering migration. KDE 3.1 on SuSE was tested by 60 office workers with no prior Linux experience; 87% enjoyed working with it, 80% estimated they could reach professional competence within a week. The Linux desktop wasn’t a usability disaster — but realising its potential required deliberate configuration, honest naming, and treating migration as a human-resources problem, not a technical one. The findings shaped a decade of OpenUsability work inside KDE. They are, awkwardly, almost entirely still applicable. We’ll look at what stuck, what didn’t, and why “lovable” — not merely “usable” — is the bar today, and why getting it right cuts the cost and risk of every migration discussion that follows.
- AI-native. A desktop that loves you back has to know you. Personal AI has crossed the threshold where the desktop itself can be compiled per user, per device, per moment, from a small portable model of the user — what we are sketching as Kadai: an encrypted, vendor-agnostic personal kernel from which Plasma assembles each Activity. Plasma is uniquely well-fit for this — Activities, Plasmoids, the existing scripting surface — but a handful of upstream changes (declarative reconciliation, per-widget capabilities, richer Activity metadata) would turn KDE into the first shell that treats AI as infrastructure rather than as a chat box bolted to the side.
- Sovereign. Once a user owns their model and their tools, the same question returns at institutional scale. EU institutions, member countries, and a long tail of organisations are openly asking what a credible, non-colonialising desktop stack looks like. No project carries this alone — a sovereign desktop is an ecosystem question. KDE is uniquely positioned as the shell, the integration layer, the experience; but filesharing belongs with Nextcloud, the browser with Firefox, the office suite with … The last third of the talk is about what KDE’s partnership surface could look like — outward, to industry and public administration, and sideways, to the allied open-source projects that already do the rest of the work better than anyone could redo it. Who owns that surface, where it lives, what KDE e.V. would need, what not to build. Sovereignty, from this angle, is just lovability and AI-ownership scaled up to the organisation: the user not owned by a vendor, the institution not owned by a foreign supplier — and the stack not owned by anyone, because the right partners hold the right pieces.
This talk is an invitation — from peple with a long arc inside this community — to take a serious swing at the question the 2003 study posed and never quite resolved: what would it take for KDE to be the desktop people actively choose, not just the one some of us settle for? Attendees will leave with: a concrete proposal (KaDAi) to react to or tear apart, a clear set of asks the project could direct at Plasma maintainers, and the framing for a sovereignty conversation that KDE is uniquely positioned to lead.
My understanding is that this is just a sort of open forum/presentation on this as an idea. That being said, it’s a stupid-ass idea.
I don’t want my computer to “love me back” it’s a fucking machine that I built to do my work on and play my games on. I am the only form of agency I want having access to it.
If I ever want an AI agent running all the time in the background doing shit for me, I’ll fucking install and configure one myself! I want my OS to be an OS, not some “smart”, interactive fake person that will hallucinate random Bash commands, fuck my partitions up randomly, and bork my system.
I alone am the only thing that I want destroying my system, if that’s going to happen, it will happen by my own hands, my own shitty commands, my own piss-poor scripts.
This AI delusion and hype cycle is more infuriating than the NFT craze, and that’s really saying something.
AI-native. A desktop that loves you back has to know you. Personal AI has crossed the threshold where the desktop itself can be compiled per user, per device, per moment
Fucking… what?
So many things with this statement.
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We fuckin’ our desktops now? Or they saying it needs to know you which is disturbing in itself
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AI can’t even give the same output twice. I guess we’re just building the bugs straight in, huh?
AI-native
Makes me gag and sounds like slop only an AI could come up with. As a KDE user I hate this.
Pretty sure that submitted for the discussion was AI-drafted too
I use Gentoo, almost everything is compiled just for me.
No issues there.
AI in my desktop? Miss me with that shit.
Luckily, I use Gentoo.
I use Gentoo, almost everything is compiled just for me.
No issues there.
The greatest lie in the universe.
Yeah, this all sounds super fucked up. I suppose we shouldn’t have expected the KDE project to be sceptical of a new technology, they always went right in and published before it was quite ready and they were never the type to choose maintainability over additional features.
I can’t believe I’m actually commending the Gnome project, but they seem to have the right idea when it comes to AI.
It’s just a talk on a community meetup. It’s well-possible that nothing at all comes out of this. It’s not suddenly the strategic goal of the whole KDE community…
It sounds useful to me. But who cares? This is KDE we’re talking about! It’ll be a subsystem you can disable at will just like everything else in KDE.
Needs to be something that must ebay enabled first. I hate opt out technology.
That type of thing is typically a decision made by your distro. For example, since most people don’t have the necessary hardware to use decent models, I’d imagine that the AI packages wouldn’t be installed by default.
Only people that manually install the packages will get the AI features.
Pretty sure we can say that won’t be the case.
If you read the discussion, it’s about KDE being “Ai-native” and treating it as “infrastructure”. It literally even talks about how they don’t want it to be a “bolt-on chatbox”. They’re discussing making AI the desktop.
It is a “discussion”, but it seems more like prepping the community for something they already decided and want.
Meh. They said the same thing about integrating semantic search into KDE. Yet I have turned that indexing off since forever and it never really changed much.
I guess I spent a lot of time tagging my files back in the day so I could find them better, haha. What a huge ass waste of time!
AI is so vastly superior for searching than all previous efforts combined, it feels like renaming, tagging, etc are just pointless tedium.
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This is what it looks like when someone falls into an AI k-hole. I’ve seen it happen to friends of mine. They get lost down deep in Claude’s anus and start sending me completely fucking nonsensical ideas at odd hours of the day.
Looks like it is KDE’s turn. I doubt many people here are old enough to remember the shitshow that KDE 4.0 was… this made me think of that.
This is probably, the only time, I read something KDE related, and think its worded by a fassist psychotic fake-country’s spoke person.
Really good thread on Mastodon discussing this.
KDE blocked David Gerard on Mastodon for that thread btw.
Edit: forgor to add the link: https://circumstances.run/@davidgerard/117276666726477078
Fucking hell. So rather than respond to clarify, it sounds more like he hit the nail on the head, and they aren’t happy.
Pretty much.
And not before they called David’s post pointing out that THEY are hosting that “event” and showing it on THEIR OWN webpage “deceitful”…
…when they could, you know, simply not host it there in the first place.
https://floss.social/@kde/117274966019584452
This entire thread is a shitshow, one that is saddening to see.
Man, I feel like I need to educate people how open-source works.
Regarding them ‘accepting’ this talk. It’s a community. The community members organizing the conference are not going to block the community members that want to discuss this topic, not unless there’s a huge problem with scheduling/rooms/whatever.
Whether the talk is truly accepted, that will be decided by whether people attend it or not.
Whether the idea is accepted, that’s still on a whole 'nother page.Given that Nate Graham and Harald Sitter are talking about KDE Linux at the same timeslot in the other room (and that both talks happen during lunch), I don’t imagine too many people will attend.
Oof, I do think there’s less-hyped parts of the AI bubble that can add value.
For example, so-called “embedding models” need fairly little in terms of resources and allow you to implement semantic search across text files and theoretically also images (don’t know how cheap the latter is), so that you can search for “cake” and it’ll still find your pie recipe or whatever.
I do think this will come, it’s only a matter of time.But the description in the talk just does not sound like that. Users have never liked unpredictability in their desktop. Using a new technology to do it, is not going to change that.
So, at best I see this being useful, if the unpredictability is confined to a single screen/menu/program/whatever, but that completely undermines their whole concept of KDE being flexible, so that everything can be changed by the AI.I guess, one would need to watch the talk to see what they actually have in mind. They do seem to be aware that they’re proposing a moonshot idea, which is meant as inspiration, not as concrete goal. But yeah, really not sure even just the direction is what users want…
Fork when?
I am not getting this at all. Is KDE going the corpo route or are they talking about local, foss and open weights model, which people can run on their own and do things from them out of their own choice? Please can someone tell me what’s going on.
It’s just a talk on a community meetup. Nothing at all is decided or even discussed yet. For now, it’s 2 (two) people with an idea. It’s much more likely to not go anywhere than it is to become the direction that KDE as a whole moves towards…
I see. Thanks!
KDE has been going into a weird (and sometimes annoying) direction recently. This explains why.
and with recently you probably mean the last decade and a half probably
I haven‘t been using it for that long but updates in the last few months in particular shipped head scratching features like the wallet and desktop controller. Both of which were a nuisance and should not have been enabled by default. Especially desktop controller is unusable bloatware. I had no idea why my controllers all ‚broke‘ until I found a forum post explaining it‘s KDE‘s fault.
AI that integrates into your desktop is useful. Don’t freak out about it because it’s all total shit slop in Windows. This is KDE!
Myself, I think it would be really nice to be able to whip out a prompt in Dolphin, then tell it to,
find all the pictures of fish in this directory and rename the filename to reflect the species of fish.Having local AI search for my files integrated as a KIO worker that I can whip out in open/save dialogs would be amazing.
Since it’s KDE, we can be certain that it won’t require using Big AI providers. We’ll be able to hook it up to ollama (or similar), using whatever TF models we want.
Myself, I think it would be really nice to be able to whip out a prompt in Dolphin, then tell it to, find all the pictures of fish in this directory and rename the filename to reflect the species of fish.
Maybe true if you don’t end up with just another version of Akonadi that do not work 3 times every 2 tries
KDE could source their own training data, train their own models, add their own post-training behaviors, and release the weights under their same open source license, and people would still hate it, even if it was locally run and doesn’t go online at all.
Let the old heads be stubborn and fork it and stick to their human slop desktop environment.
