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KDE Conference discussion - “What would it take? A lovable, sovereign, AI-native KDE”
(conf.kde.org)
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.
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.