Talk at Akademy 2025 — minding the big picture: opportunity from chaos

At Akademy 2025 this year, I had the privilege of giving a talk about a big picture topic close to my heart, and you can watch it here: For those who prefer reading over watching and listening, I’ll give a quick summary: I believe that the challenges facing the world today present an opportunity for … Continue reading Talk at Akademy 2025 — minding the big picture: opportunity from chaos →...

At Akademy 2025 this year, I had the privilege of giving a talk about a big picture topic close to my heart, and you can watch it here:

For those who prefer reading over watching and listening, I’ll give a quick summary:

I believe that the challenges facing the world today present an opportunity for KDE to grow in importance and reach due to a variety of favorable trends embedded in the chaos and conflict, including:

  • Increasing skepticism of traditional proprietary American big tech
  • Increasing EU public funding opportunities
  • Windows 11 sucking and losing its edge for gaming
  • *Postscript: MacOS Tahoe stumbling and being publicly mocked as well

But this is a window of opportunity that I think will close. So I encouraged everyone to think about how we can make KDE software ready for adoption from the following perspectives:

  • Being known about in the first place
  • Looking good enough to be taken seriously
  • Being easy to download or otherwise acquire
  • Working properly and having enough features
  • Having enough support resources and an articulable “lower total cost of ownership” story

Because if we’ve got all five, our offerings will start to look irresistible, and I think we’ll gain market share very quickly!