The Linux App Summit (LAS) is designed to accelerate the growth of the Linux application ecosystem by bringing together everyone involved in creating a great Linux application user experience.
Here are some categories that could hold interesting talks. We encourage you to submit a talk by September 15, 2020 even if you don’t think it fits into one of these topics.
Regular talks will be 40', lightning talks will be 10'.
ECOSYSTEM GROWTH
The growth of Linux-based hardware offers more choices in the market and indicates further investment into the Linux app space. App Stores are offering thousands of applications and games for the Linux platform and open source is growing necessity in tech.
How can we ensure continued growth for the Linux app ecosystem? Are there areas of opportunity we should explore? How can we build sustainability into our ecosystem? How do you keep your users engaged?
PLATFORM DIVERSITY
The Linux platform’s greatest strength is the wealth of diversity in our ecosystem. There are toolkits and software languages for every purpose. Whether you want to develop a game, design an application, or even build a website, the app ecosystem has the tools to make that happen.
Are you working on a technology that enables cross-platform distribution? Do you have ideas for how we can enable platform diversity? How should we evolve to reach your users?
INNOVATION
Important technologies that you use on a daily basis (maybe without realizing it), have been developed within the Linux app ecosystem. Discuss with us how to push the boundaries of what we are offering right now and reach more users than ever before.
What does the Linux app ecosystem need to get to the top? What are we missing? Are there new technologies we should be embracing?
PEOPLE & COMMUNICATIONS
While the Linux app ecosystem has been largely shaped by open source communities, we believe there's space for everyone. Making sure both businesses and communities alike can thrive in the ecosystem is vital for the platform to be sustainable over time. It is vital that people are able to make a living from the work they do for Linux users.
How can we make sure companies find their niche in the ecosystem? How can we help communities work together to create and support end-user apps? How can we keep people around in the long-run?
LEGAL AND LICENSING
Whether you are a die-hard Free Software advocate or are just looking to write a commercial application or game, there are no restrictions on what can be built on the Linux app ecosystem. How can we navigate the complex world of licenses to create great products?
What kind of open source business models exist through licensing? What are the latest issues related to licensing that our community should be aware of?
Important Dates
CfP opens: early July
CfP closes: September 27th
Speakers announced: October 12th
This session will cover how the Clutter project can be used for building GUI based applications in Embedded hardware such as beagle-board and RPi.
A complex camera support library for Linux, Android, and ChromeOS.
Cameras are complex devices that need heavy hardware image processing operations. Control of the processing is based on advanced algorithms that must run on a programmable processor. This has traditionally been implemented in a dedicated MCU in the camera, but in embedded devices algorithms have been moved to the main CPU to save cost. Blurring the boundary between camera devices and Linux often left the user with no other option than a vendor-specific closed-source solution.
To address this problem the V4L2 community is collaborating with industry leaders to develop a camera stack that will be open-source-friendly while still protecting vendor core IP. Libcamera is under active development and interested vendors have the opportunity to contribute and provide feedback to ensure we cover all use cases before the API is finalised.
RTL experince in Linux environment not developed like LTR one. As I use Linux since Mandrake 9, I see RTL in Linux isn't mature like in other environements like Mac and Windows.
RTL used as a main and secondary languages for about 20% of the world. Making Linux better for them is important.
In this talk I'll scoope issues with RTL, and how to solving it.
A Linux desktop's sole job is to connect users to their applications.
There used to be a time where one application was a process. 'ps' would show one easy to manage entry. Now Discord in a flatpak is 13(!) procesess. Have two electron instances and a system-monitor is useless. We have backgrounds services that linger with indecipherable names. It doesn't scale anymore on the desktop. We need metadata.
This is a solved problem with new kernel features. CGroups are used commonly for your system services. Any sysadmin won't deal with an Apache process, but the whole webserver as one cgroup. By embracing this not only do we have metadata providing a single-truth of the launched context, but also expose all of the kernel features reserved for cgroups. Separate network namespaces, hard CPU quotas, Out-of-memory protection that works, we can expose this either as transient modifiers or as sysadmin overrides.
We've been tackling this on both the GNOME and KDE side. In this talk we come together to talk about what we have each done on our respective sides. Where we've found common ground to common problems, as well as our plans for where we take the linux application ecosystem in the future.
BoF Host: Mosaab Alzoubi
RTL used as a main and secondary languages for about 20% of the world. Making Linux better for them is important. In this session Mosaab will talk about the current state of RTL developing in Linux and ho to improve it
BoF Host: Heather EllsworthKen VanDine
In this session, we will walk through the Flutter snap tutorial and answer any questions that arise. At the end of the session, we hope that everyone has built their own super cool flutter snap and even considers making more 👍
Game Achievements for All - Dennis Payne
( 15:25 - 15:35 UTC)
The GNOME Circle - Allan Day, Jordan Petridis, Arun Mani J
( 15:40 - 15:50)
In an effort to define what's considered official GNOME software, an opportunity arises to support and promote the wider GNOME community.
We want to briefly present the GNOME Circle, a new initiative by the GNOME Foundation to support independent developers who are using our technologies and to accelerate the grow of our community and software ecosystem.
Let's bring together everything great that is made for, and with, the GNOME platform!
Snaps are confined, standalone Linux applications bundled with all the necessary dependencies to run independently. They are designed to simplify development and deployment of software, and make it easier for users to discover applications. Sounds like an enticing idea ... but where do you start?
This presentation unveils the boffinry of the snap ecosystem. It introduces and highlights the steps needed to package applications as snaps, including the underlying snap technology and mechanisms. The session will cover the building blocks used in the snapcraft.yaml file required to turn Linux applications into snaps, with overview of capabilities, confinement, interfaces, plugins, and more. By moving all the cruft behind the scenes, now all it takes is one simple recipe to build software with fun and ease.
The Hack Experience is a project based on the idea of Everything is hackable. This project tries to introduce an interactive content for kids to learn to code and other computer related content.
During this talk we'll show what we can do with this technology and the future plans for the Hack project.
There is a lot of discussion about how apps should be built, but has anyone watched an app actually get built? Behold, a something-hour time slot where you literally just watch Linux game porter Ethan Lee build Linux games. What you will see is completely uncensored and is actually, seriously how he builds programs that may very well be installed on your very computer at this exact moment in time. No joke. Compare the resulting footage to everything else you see at the summit and attempt to measure the delta accordingly.
Ethan "flibitijibibo" Lee has developed over 60 commercial Linux games over the past 8 years, including FEZ, Celeste, Streets of Rage 4, Bastion, Transistor, VVVVVV, Super Hexagon, Proteus, Eversion, Dust: An Elysian Tail, 5D Chess (yes, an actual playable 5D Chess), and Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator. He is extremely sorry for this so-called presentation.
Creating winning proposal responses, contest entries and grant requests can be as straightforward as 1 - 2- 3. Based on real life examples from the 2020 GNOME Community Engagement Challenge, this presentation will offer some helpful hints to creating winning entries and garnering support for your next project.
The role of marketing in open source is to increase usage and adoption, and collaborating with members of your ecosystem can vastly extend your reach. But developing a shared vision across multiple organizations with different goals requires as much finesse as working on open source code itself—neutrality, trust, and a willingness to find common ground are crucial. How do you create an architecture of participation? This keynote demonstrates how marketing, refracted through an open source ecosystem, expands the spectrum of outcomes more than any single organization acting alone.
About Melissa:
A 20-year veteran of technology marketing that began in the dot-com era, Melissa Logan pioneered the role of the open source marketer that helped fuel the rise of open source software development. She led marketing for open source projects at The Linux Foundation and founded Constantia.io, a firm that supports open source projects/companies such as Apache Cassandra, Tidelift, and others. Previously, she worked with companies as diverse as Microsoft, Isilon (acquired by EMC), Octarine (acquired by VMware), Meridian (acquired by Aruba Networks), and others.
Logan loves all things open source and community, and spends the rest of her time riding horses in the vaquero style. She launched the Sexism Field Guide in 2018 to help people identify and confront all forms of sexism. Logan graduated from the University of Oregon with a degree in Journalism and Political Science, but only uses one of those. Life goal: The benevolent advancement of humanity’s best ideas. https://twitter.com/Melissa_B2B
The ever growing popularity of ARM devices has meant a new market for Linux apps. However, unlike conventional platforms where we enjoy the stability of a well tested graphics stack, platforms based on the ARM architecture tend to be quirkier.
In this talk, I'll be talking about the basics of how the Linux Graphics stack works touching on how technologies such as DRM, DRI, and Mesa interact with each other and the history behind how we've come to the current Gallium design in mesa.
At the end of the talk attendees should have a better understanding of what goes on behind the scenes in the graphics world and a high level understanding of the Mesa/DRM architecture.
Furthermore, this should help Linux app developers gain a better understanding of mesa and allow for faster debugging of graphics issues on ARM devices.
GNU Health is social project that uses Libre technology to improve the health care system around the world.
In this talk, I'll be talking about the GNU Health Federation ecosystem and MyGNUHealth, the mobile and desktop application. We will talk about the technical components (KDE, Qt, Kirigami, Python... ) and how we can deploy MyGNUHealth in every desktop computer, as well as in mobile devices, such as the PinePhone.
I will go into details about the communication mechanism across the participating nodes in the Federation, the role of the GH message server (Thalamus) and the security aspects.
Finally, we'll dedicate sometime to the functionality of the main components and nodes, from Personal Health Records (PHR), to social medicine, bioinformatics, epidemiology, medical genetics, personalized medicine and cancer research.
I will present some general UI/UX tips & tricks that will help you design better. Everyone should know the basic principles and patterns of design, and once you understand them you will naturally integrate them in your work.
UI/UX is a craft. The more you practice it, the better you are at it. Some people argue that you need to have 'good taste' in order to be a designer, to be the 'artsy type'. While this might be true for Graphic Design, Branding and Visual Arts in general, when it comes to Interface, Interaction and Product Design, the focus is more on practicality and 'common sense'.
Understanding basic design principles will provide an advantage when creating or contributing to your favorite Open Source project.
About this talk:
In this talk, a Linux kernel developer gets to complain how his normal "test case" i.e. userspace code, could do better when it comes to a whole range of different things that have been learned over time by maintaining a stable interface to the kernel for 20+ years.
About Greg:
Greg Kroah-Hartman is a Fellow at the Linux Foundation. He is currently responsible for the stable Linux kernel releases, and is a maintainer of the USB, TTY, and driver core subsystems in the kernel as well as other portions of the kernel codebase that he wishes he could forget about.
BoF Host: Adam Jones
PipeWire has been making a lot of progress lately on providing a drop-in replacement audio server that unifies the PulseAudio and JACK APIs. Recently, it was announced that it is ready for general testing and at this rate it should be ready to be distributed as a replacement of PulseAudio in 2021.
Looking in the future, though, we need to ask ourselves... how can PipeWire improve the user experience? Does it actually bring any value to end users that have never heard of JACK before? Does it bring any changes?
In this talk, George is going to give an overview of how a PipeWire-enabled system looks like and behaves at the moment and then take a glimpse in the future, looking at ideas, which are already being worked on, that could revolutionize the user experience in an environment as complex as the desktop - with your help!
GTK 4 is a major new version of GTK, that is scheduled to be released before
the end of this year. It contains many improvements that will make it easier
to develop polished applications with modern features.
This talk will present an overview of the major changes and new features,
with a focus on what matters for application developers, whether you are
writing a new application or thinking about porting an existing one.
In this presentation I would like to discuss a little bit about what Wayland means to application developers.
How does it compare to X11? What do I need to support it? What new challenges and opportunities does it put on the table? Let's see if we can shed light on it and move on together.
Modern mainframes feature state of the art hardware and software, including Linux, which is now the fastest growing operating system for the platform. Many organizations that are now taking their first steps into Linux, or moving workloads back to the mainframe, to take advantage of the security enhancements and software now available for Linux.
In this talk, I'll cover what is involved in porting an application to the big-endian architecture, as well as free (as in beer) and open source tools and services available to developers to build, test, and release applications for the platform. I'll also talk about how the IBM Z Ecosystem Team has been working with individual developers, the Linux Foundation’s Open Mainframe Project, various Linux distributions, and specific open source projects to port their applications to the mainframe architecture. I will conclude by touching upon about how apps running on Linux can communicate with the more traditional mainframe back-ends, including open source projects like Zowe that modernize these interactions with an API and more.
Learn how to easily pack almost any kind of application using appimage-builder. This tool uses a new way of producing the AppImage bundle that doesn't have the restrictions of requiring the oldest active GNU/Linux release as build system or having to patch fixed paths inside dependencies binaries with obscure sed commands.
Take a break from the real world and attend this virtual tour of the Amalfi Coast in Italy!
Enjoy learning more about the Amalfi Coast with an in-person guide!
Introduce the attempts and insights made by the Ubuntu Kylin development team in building a Linux application ecosystem. First, by building the UKUI desktop environment and encapsulating the SDK, users can get a better experience and facilitate application development to support the development of the application ecosystem; second, actively lead or participate in open source application projects to make open source applications more stable, practical and easy to use ; Finally, actively promote the migration of popular commercial software vendors to the Linux platform, provide human support when they do not have Linux engineers, and form a virtuous circle.
It's well known: OSS is underfunded. That has a lot of implications in several levels, which I won't discuss here. Just for the sake of completeness, I'm gonna point a few of them:
OSS maintainers need to eat. Since OSS doesn't usually let people make a living out of it, they end with other day jobs. That means OSS projects are always at risk of becoming unmaintained, and increases the bus factor of projects a lot.
While OSS maintainers aren't able to monetize their work, big companies usually do, which is at least problematic.
That also means the culture surrounding Linux is "everything is free", so it's less attractive to new developers which want make a living out of their programming. That means a smaller app ecosystem, with a lot of abandonware.
The truth is, people want to pay for things! And software is no exception: see how well the AppStore or Steam do in that regard, so what's the issue with OSS? Why people don't throw money at developers?
Say donations, say charity. Even if factually donating $5 to SomeApp and buying that app for $5 is the same, psychologically those are two very different things
We live in a capitalist world, and we cannot omit that in our analysis. In capitalism value and perceived value are by no means the same thing, and perceived value scales with the price point put to something, not by their inherent value. Even more important, the price point doesn't necessarily need to match the price the customer ends paying. That's why sales work as a commercial strategy: you put the value with the original price tag, and by making a sale you offer customers the idea that they may get the same value by paying less.
If OSS is offered without a price tag, people just will assume its value is lower than the same product with a price tag, even if you allow to not pay anything at the end.
More on that: even if we hope to value an app by their inherent interest, that valoration will never be accurate. Developers don't know how to predict how many hours of development a task will take, regular people even less. Since things Just Work TM is easy to assume that things were easy to develop. The strategy of putting an "hours invested in this" is widely used in web products, I think we can assume with some success.
Even if the user knows the value of the app they want to use, probably they won't donate to it a cent. This is due to two things: friction and expectations. I'll talk first about the latter.
While a donation-based model lowers the fear of loss you may have in a payment-based model, it ups user expectations a lot. Why is that? If we think about other donation-based models they're usually built around the idea of "we're doing a public good and we need your trust and money to keep doing it". Well, trust is a hard thing to give, and you usually want the money you donate to be well employed. Not only that: money given to donations usually is a low-priority, highly constrained part of your typical budget. If in the mental model of someone there is X money for groceries, Y money for non necessary things, and Z money for charity, you're directly competing for a quite constrained budget with some high moral non-profits. Not the best place to be for a text editor.
Then you have friction, and it affects both charity-based and payment-based models. It's easy: given two paths, people will always follow the one of least resistance. And friction plays a huge role on that. If it's easier to pirate than to pay $2, people will pirate.
It suffices to say that having a donation link inside an About dialog which opens a new window and then asks you to input your credit card, your PIN, then check your mobile to confirm the transaction... won't work. Is way easier to just keep using the application. If each time you want to buy an app in Software you need to do about the same, people will avoid selecting paid apps.
Say we implement payments on GNOME. That needs to be done on a Platform level, for several reasons:
And on top of all of that, we need to put a price to our apps even if we go a pay-what-you-want route, and/or showcase how much work goes into making them.
High quality localisation is essential to great user experience for most people in the world, yet the process of translating applications in the Linux / FOSS ecosystem is often more difficult than it needs to be. The problems faced by translators may not be obvious to software developers, though. In this talk I try to give advice to developers and communities who would like to have their applications translated better, based on my experiences in translating various FOSS software.
Key points:
* Give credit
* Offer modern infrastructure
* Be responsive
* Enable communities
* Verify, but trust
* Provide context
* Avoid hard-coded assumptions
* Don't reinvent the wheel
* Encourage fixing issues at the source
* Consider sustainability
A whistle-stop tour of the work we at Collabora are doing for Valve - ranging from Linux kernel features and enhancements to graphics to OS enhancements and a few other things besides.
BoF Host: Anita Ihuman
BoF Host: Matthias Klumpp
ABOUT THE PANELISTS:
ANIQA KHOKHAR -- KDE
Aniqa is currently working as a Marketing Consultant for KDE. She has experience in managing marketing campaigns, social media, events, customers, business planning, corporate communications, and market research in education and non-profit sectors.
CASSIDY JAMES BLAEDE -- elementary
Cassidy is a UX architect who designs and builds useful, usable, and delightful digital products that respect your privacy. Co-founder and CXO at elementary, Inc., he works to expand the market share of open source software by constantly improving elementary OS and its services, such as the pay-what-you-want AppCenter.
LUIS VILLA -- Tidelift
Luis is a lawyer and former programmer. In 2017, he co-founded Tidelift, to help make open source work better for everyone. At Tidelift, he leads the developer outreach team and also manages the company's legal issues. In the past, he has worked at the Wikimedia Foundation (on legal and community), Mozilla (where he led the revision of the Mozilla Public License), Ximian (where he was on the GNOME 2.0 release team) and a large American law firm, where he advised startups and Fortune 50 companies on FOSS.
CLARISSA BORGES -- GNOME
Clarissa is a Software Engineering student, interested in FLOSS projects and UX research. She started contributing to GNOME during her Outreachy project, where she did usability research for some GNOME programs and fell in love with the community. Clarissa is currently running an initiative to introduce minorities to start contributing to FLOSS and always evangelizing for caring about usability on FLOSS projects.
JOS PORTVLIEET -- Nextcloud
People person, technology enthusiast and all-things-open evangelist. Head of marketing at Nextcloud, previously Community Manager at ownCloud and SUSE, recovering business consultant with decade long involvement in the KDE community, helping with promo and marketing. Enjoys avoiding traffic and public transport on bike through Berlin, but only when the weather is good. Loves cooking for friends and family and playing with the dog.
ABOUT THE MODERATOR:
NURITZI SANCHEZ -- GitLab + LAS Organizer
Nuritzi is currently the Sr. Open Source Program Manager at GitLab, where she runs the GitLab for Open Source program. Previously, she was a founding team member of Endless, a company making Linux-based computers for users with little to no internet access, and she is a former President and Chairperson of the Board at the GNOME Foundation.
This is a short non-technical introduction to flatpak. It will talk about what Flatpak is and what problems it tries to solve. The focus is on application developers that want to distribute their application (rather than end users).
On the Linux Desktop, we value always-on, always-connected, and always in-sync applications. Our data, discussions, and research must always be available to us. We must always be instantly notified of important changes to the state of our chats, computer, or the world around us. Until we shut the laptop lid. Once the lid is shut, the laptop can safely become a brick until the lid is opened again.
Your phone likely doesn't have the luxury of becoming a brick whenever you put it in you pocket. You expect that important changes to the world around you, whether targeted toward you specifically or people sharing your interests, will command your attention.
Meanwhile, you also expect your phone to last at least a whole workday of mixed use and sleep periods. It might have a more efficient processor and smaller screen than your laptop, but it also has a much smaller battery. There's no way your phone would last all day if it was in the same "active" state that your laptop is with its lid open. But likewise, your phone doesn't become a brick as soon as it falls asleep. How?
Your phone isn't always active. It just fools you into thinking it is. As we move Desktop Linux further into form factors like tablets and candybar phones, we'll need to provide this illusion of continuous connectivity to more applications.
This talk is all about how Ubuntu Touch can manage calls, SMS, Telegram messages, news broadcasts, and infrastructure alerts while still providing multi-day battery life. We'll discuss the Ubuntu Touch forced application lifecycle and its exceptions, then take a look at how push notifications are critical to the illusion of continuous connectivity. We'll finish by talking about the future of push technology on Ubuntu Touch and abroad, especially where we need help in evaluating and producing new technologies based on Web Push standards.
Flathub is a build and distribution service for Linux desktop applications. Between 2017 and 2020, it went from 0 to over 900 apps working on all major distributions. Handling hundreds of builds a week, it delivers terabytes of data to its users every month. In this talk, we'll review what makes Flathub fly, the current status, and what the future may bring.
Human Interface Guidelines play a key role in creating an ecosystem. They help to create consistent user interfaces and user interaction in an ecosystem. Human Interface Guidelines help designers and developers by giving them standardized solutions to common problems.
Get an overview about basic concepts of Human Interface Guidelines and how to use them to improve an ecosystem.
Bring your favorite snacks and beverages and enjoy some laughs! Quiz your knowledge on an assortment of topics.