The Linux App Summit (LAS) brings the global Linux community together to learn, collaborate, and help grow the Linux application ecosystem. Through talks, panels, and Q&A sessions, we encourage attendees to share ideas, make connections, and join our goal of building a common app ecosystem.
LAS 2022 will be held virtually and in person in Rovereto, Italy. While this conference will be held during Central European Time (CET), everyone is welcome to participate and attend!
To find more about the local venue, please see our Local page.
Registration for LAS 2022 is open. (There is no cost to attend LAS, but registration is required. To watch and participate in the event you'll need to login to our conference platform using a password-protected link. You'll receive this link after registering.)
We also welcome attendees to join the LAS Telegram channel and follow LAS on Twitter @linuxappsummit. Remember to use our hashtag: #LAS2022. Videos from LAS will be live-streamed on our YouTube channel.
Join us as we kick off LAS 2022!
We often think of a successful open source project as one that just tackles a challenge for the public. This perception has driven several open source project owners to start innovative open source projects without any plans on managing communities behind these projects and this leads to an increase in the number of dormant open source projects that already exist. A successful open source project is built on the collaborative effort of a healthy community. An adequately coordinated community can plan and develop projects and unanimously work together to ensure sustainability in project performance. The responsibility of achieving a thriving open source community does not rest on the community managers or the program managers alone but also on the whole community.
During this session, I will share with you an introduction to open source communities. How to build a healthy open-source community. The need to adopt the community first approach in an open source project. How to achieve a sustainable & inclusive community.
When you struggle through your first contribution, there's an excitement that comes from a ""greener than grass"" Github contribution graph. It is easy to get carried away trying to meet your target number of contributions that you fail to focus enough on quality. How often should you contribute to open source? Frequently. However, you should prioritize making valuable contributions.
During this session, we'll discuss Quality Over Quantity. You’d learn;
- How to create a strategic approach for your contributions
- What to watch out for and consider while contributing.
- Tips for maintaining the quality of your contributions.
- Quality and quantity: striking a balance
Flathub was founded in 2017, and has since been established as the place to download around 1,500 apps which can be easily installed on any Linux distribution. In less than 5 years there has been consistent impressive growth in available applications, and Flathub is without a doubt an excellent resource for Linux users, developers, devices, distros and extremely cool apps.
The last 18 months have shown significant acceleration with applications like Open Broadcast Studio (OBS), Firefox, Bottles, Yuzu, and Telegram choosing to directly publish on the Flathub store to have a direct line to their users in a format that provides distribution-agnostic packaging with support for multiple toolkits and technologies. We’re also seeing multiple distributions including Flathub directly or with a single click, and consumer devices selecting Flathub to complete their app offerings.
However, along with the good news there are concerns about the true long term sustainability of the FOSS app ecosystem, and the dream of sustainable application development eludes many in our community. Software developers on proprietary platforms can have an idea on a Friday, hack on it over the weekend, publish it on a Monday, and collect a check at the end of the month. The idea of OSS developers asking for financial support used to be an uncomfortable conversation, but as mobile and cloud SaaS platforms have swallowed the software world we find ourselves at a crossroads. How can we enable developers to contribute in a way that is not just fun for them, but also sustainable? Shouldn't desktop developers have the same opportunities and successes that OSS has had in mobile and cloud?
This is the problem we are trying to solve, and what we've been working on for the past year. Thanks to the efforts of many people at this conference and support from GNOME, KDE & Endless, we have been able to focus on tackling the application distribution problem as a whole, not just as a set of technical requirements. Can we build something that can compete with users’ expectations of quality, convenience, ease of use, while keeping the values of open source that attracted us all to the platform in the first place?
So what’s next for Flathub – or what should be next? This presentation will discuss recommendations for creating revenue streams, overcoming financial barriers to true sustainability, along with recommendations for community inclusivity and growth. We must let our best innovators and collaborators fully participate in the Flathub community while keeping on a stable career path.
Most of the challenges we will be facing this year cannot be solved by code alone (don't worry, we still have plenty of those), but by work that requires multiple disciplines across multiple organizations. We need all skill levels, non-developers, marketing, etc. to make a multi-country, multi-currency app store that is fair and transparent without bringing the bad parts of the duopoly with it. We look forward to discussing how we can all tackle this together, and sharing our vision for the future.
Our speakers: (Both are hoping to attend in person.)
Rob McQueen is CEO at the Endless OS Foundation. Rob is an experienced engineering manager and company leader, and has been a user, developer and advocate for a Free and Open Source Linux desktop for nearly 20 years. Based in Cambridge, United Kingdom, Rob also currently serves as the President of the GNOME Foundation, a 501(c)(3) in the open source desktop space, and is Chair of the Board at OpenUK.
Jorge O. Castro is a community manager, specializing in Open Source. A cat herder – a combination of engineering, developer relations, and user advocacy. He spent the last 10 years or so delving into cloud land working with projects like Kubernetes and Cloud Custodian. Jorge is interested in helping the Linux desktop achieve the same level of ubiquity and success.
This talk will present the field of media art to the summit: video art such as video mapping and projections, installation and kinetic art, audio creation for professional hardware such as AES67 systems and discuss about its uses by artists generally accustomed to macOS or Windows system, and how Linux enables them in many kind of approaches and issues, such as environmental friendliness and backup, replicability & preservability of artworks.
A tour of the ossia ecosystem, a set of software and libraries used to enable this kind of artistic creation will be given, with a breakdown of the tech stack and technical choices made along the way.
Flathub is the de-facto default store for flatpaks apps. Adding support to be able to make and receive payments has been an important feature for a long time. At the beginning of this year the Flathub organization, supported by the GNOME Foundation and Endless Network, decided to go ahead and sponsor the development necessary to make this happen
This talk will outline the current status of the project to add support for payments in Flathub, which will, ultimately, allow creators to receive donations or to charge for their apps.
We see this as a great opportinity to create a rich ecosystem of applications for Linux; not only in the more traditional Linux desktop space, but in new/emerging devices that are starting to appear on the market (such as new GNU/Linux phones, or new gaming devices based on Linux such as the Steam Deck)
Fractal is a popular Matrix chat client for the GNOME desktop which has been in development since 2017. Fractal was designed to work well for collaboration in large groups, such as free software projects.
For a long time there were two main areas that needed improvements: performance and maintainability were limited. What’s more, it lacked end-to-end encryption (E2EE) support.
Over the course of 2021 we spent countless hours rewriting Fractal from scratch and now we are close to the first release. Fractal-next is built on top of the matrix-rust-sdk, a set of libraries that help to build Matrix clients. The client, still written in Rust, now uses GTK4. During development, the focus was on performance, maintainability and E2EE. And of course, we kept mobile support.
Please join a handful of Canonical folks in a virtual room to celebrate the release of Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish! We'll talk about changes in the latest release, announcements, and give you a place to ask us questions about anything Canonical or Ubuntu!
Note that this will be live streamed and recorded. All participants consent to being on such video.
Let the party begin!
Use any linux distribution inside your terminal. Enable both backward and forward compatibility with software, and freedom to use whatever distribution you’re more comfortable with.
Distrobox uses podman or docker to create containers using the Linux distribution of your choice. The created container will be tightly integrated with the host, allowing sharing of the HOME directory of the user, external storage, external USB devices and graphical apps (X11/Wayland), and audio.
Project is hosted on: https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox
Project website and documentation: https://distrobox.privatedns.org/
Topics to cover:
1 - what is Distrobox, why It is born and underneath technologies
2 - resolve compatibility with apps that run only on a specific distro
3 - resolve compatibility with apps too new or too old for current distro
4 - show how to integrate apps and cli programs with your main distro
5 - show distrobox compatibility range and what other problem solves:
5.1 - on rootless distros (eg. company laptops)
5.2 - on LTS distros (eg. Debian Stable, Ubuntu LTS)
5.3 - on immutable distros (eg Fedora Silverblue, Endless OS, SUSE MicroOS)
This session will be about the importance of design in app development, especially in the Open Source space.
It'll guide developers on how to make mockups, UI designs, prototypes, collaboration etc. using tools like Figma. I'll also talk about conducting UX research in a sustainable manner, keeping the budget in mind, even if it is zero. I'll also touch on related topics like principles of design, design thinking, human centric design, inclusive design etc.
Attendees will learn why design is important in app development, and why its not something that is added after completing the product.
They will learn to use existing UI toolkits to create mockups and prototypes for their apps.
They will learn to conduct user research and gather feedback in a user centric approach.
They'll learn about the fundamental principles and philosophies in the world of UX Design and design in general.
All of this, while keeping their financial and time resources in mind.
There are two ways one can develop snaps: the hard way or the elegant way. Packaging applications as snaps isn't always easy, especially when it comes to graphical desktop applications. Developers need to figure out a fair deal of components and settings for their software to function perfectly. Runtime libraries, environment variables, icons, themes, desktop integration... the list goes on. What if there was a way to have these automagically happen?
Well, there is! Snapcraft Extensions are a powerful, flexible set of tweaks and options designed specifically to make life easier for snap developers. In this session, we will talk about what the extensions can do, how they work behind the scenes, and the different ways they can contribute to faster, more streamlined, and more consistent snaps.
Join Canonical as we explore ways to level up the Ubuntu gaming experience. Building on the great work of WINE, Proton, and the Steam stack, we look at ways to build on that success by tackling the fundamental issues of drivers and dependencies in a non-rolling release. Does it really take a computer science degree to get a good gaming setup on Linux?
We say no, find out why.
The freedom to fork software projects and start new ones, even just for fun, is an essential feature of free and open source software. It can, however, present issues with regard to localisation. As code is upstream of translations, each fork of a software project is a fork of all its translations, as well. The fragmented nature of the Linux ecosystem makes it harder to have a consistent user experience in languages other than English, especially for smaller languages with fewer volunteer translators. On the other hand, the freedom of FOSS also affords possibilities. In this presentation I will reflect on what could be done to help keep the growing Linux app ecosystem well translated while working in the "garden of forking paths" of FOSS.
The GNOME Foundation funded me to work a project starting in November 2021 to make Progressive Web Apps first-class citizens in the GNOME desktop environment. Progressive Web Apps are essentially websites which make use of web standards to enable them to look and feel more like native apps: they can be installed like native apps, used without the usual browser chrome such as the address bar, and they can support some or all of their functionality offline. My project has consisted of working on a new portal to allow Flatpak'd web browsers to install web apps without adding sandbox holes, adding back support for web apps to GNOME Software, and revamping the web app support in GNOME Web. I have also bootstrapped an initiative to include a set of PWAs with GNOME Software to help users discover them and broaden the set of apps available for linux desktops. Much of the work is also useful for KDE and other desktop environments, so it is not only beneficial for GNOME. This should increase the value proposition of the linux desktop both for users and app developers, who can reach users much more easily. This presentation will cover the project and hopefully get you excited about PWAs on linux desktops!
A new distribution openSUSE Leap Micro
openSUSE Leap Micro is a new distribution based on SUSE Linux Enterprise Micro with the main purpose to be a host-os with minimal footprint which fits well the app-centric world.
A small foot print, focus on the EDGE as well as data center, containerization and virtual machines, whatever flies your app. Leap Micro has a 6 months release cycle with support lasting until the next release or up to 4 years of support with a migration to SLE Micro.
Proposed type a 10 minutes lightning talk.
I will go through ways to make sure your app is usable on the device, how to test it and what the possibilities for you and your users are.
It's been almost a year since Flatpak started fundraising on the Open Collective platform, with some modest success. While several companies have contributed to Flatpak development, most notably Red Hat, the project is under-resourced and crowdfunding may be a way to address that while maintaining the project's independence. This lightning talk will cover how we are approaching the fundraising, what technical work it has enabled, and what the future might hold.
When I started learning music production in the mid 2000's, the choice was: Windows, or Mac?
In intervening 15+ years, support for Linux as a pro-audio OS has got to the point that I don't use anything else
Two major improvements have been Hubert Figuière's efforts around Flatpak packaging, and Wim Tayman's work leading Pipewire development. I will highlight those and more creative apps that are available to modern Linux users.
Lxroot is a lightweight, flexible, and safe alternative to the chroot program. A non-root user may use Lxroot to safely create a chroot-style virtual software environment (via unprivileged Linux namespaces), and then run one or more apps inside that chroot-style environment. Lxroot is a general-purpose and flexible tool. As such, Lxroot has potential uses related to Gaming, Ecosystem Growth, Platform Diversity, and Innovation.
Back in the 1980’s, apps were distributed on floppy disks. Floppy disk technology gave the common user complete control over which software, and when, ran on their computer. As such, computers in the 1980’s were truly “personal”. In the decades since the 1980’s, complex multi-tasking operating systems and community-controlled (often corporate-controlled) network based “app stores” have replaced the floppy disk. Today, the common user is “locked in” to one app store (or possibly to several app stores simultaneously). Control has shifted away from the common user, and towards the community (or corporation) that controls the “app store”. In other words, today’s computers and smartphones are most definitely no longer “personal”.
I wrote Lxroot so that I could install, upgrade, and run the software I wanted, the way I wanted. This includes installing and simultaneously running multiple versions of the same app, possibly even from multiple different sources, all done safely as a non-root user.
This 10 minute lightning talk will cover, at a high level, potential uses of Lxroot related to Gaming, Ecosystem Growth, Platform Diversity, and Innovation. For viewers who are interested in lower-level, nuts and bolts information about Lxroot, I recommend my November 2021 Packaging-Con talk (see link below).
Users, app developers, and app distributors should all know that unprivileged Linux namespaces can be used, without root access, to control the installation and safe execution of apps on Linux computers. Lxroot is one tool that allows users and app distributors to use Linux namespaces to accomplish these goals.
More information:
https://github.com/parke/lxroot
Packaging-Con talk abstract
Packaging-Con talk video
With wayland being mature enough to be the default option for more distributions and with recent events in the world that shifted focus to online meetings and work from home, comes an important question. What is the current state of screen sharing support in modern browsers on Wayland?
http://www.ristorantetema.com/en/
Building and maintaining an open-source project comes with many challenges, but it's fun and rewarding! Plugins and packages are an essential part of any framework, and Flutter is not an expectation for development to make a cross-platform application with a single code base!
You can develop a plugin package that connects the API to the platform-specific implementation(s) using a platform channel to provide calls into platform-specific APIs.
In this session, you will learn how to start developing a plugin for Flutter, the best practices from my experience of being the maintainer of great plugins such as Plus plugins, FlutterFire, and the importance of Federated plugins and their architecture together with platform channel API.
UKUI 3.0 is a lightweight desktop environment based on the Linux release developed by Kylin team. In addition to the traditional desktop mode, the tablet mode is also provided to meet the needs of various scenarios.
We will share UKUI's experience and achievements in how to add support for tablet form and its future planning.
Communication has become easier and more accessible than ever. This means more than ever we have social platforms (such as social media, discussion forums, social blogging, etc.) hosting content from different languages among which we have right-to-left ones. To have an inclusive platform, such software needs good support for left-to-right and right-to-left languages at the same time (regardless of the default language for the UI). Here, bidirectional text support comes to play.
Though technologies have features to address bidirectional text support, many software (desktop, mobile, web) don't use them. In this presentation, I demonstrate effective ways to add bidirectional text support to web projects. I also share some thoughts about the lacking pieces in technologies regarding bidi support.
I will go through the technologies we use in KDE to make apps that work on desktop devices as well as mobile phones, will try to cover briefly both Kirigami and Qt widgets to make sure everyone chooses their favourite toolkit.
In this forty-minute session we would introduce you to some key elements of our program ecosystem:
Wine - How it works and what its purpose is
Wine Prefixes - What they are and how Bottles come into play
Bottles Managers - How Bottles manages packages (and more) for each bottle
Layers - What they are and how they are implemented
Future plans and ideas
It may be obvious that energy conservation and efficiency in software engineering will mean fewer shared resources are needed to keep our digital society running. Oft overlooked is that Free and Open-Source Software is well suited to achieve both!
Free and Open-Source Software guarantees user autonomy through the four freedoms. This autonomy permits users to install what they need and uninstall what they do not, bypassing bloatware and in turn conserving electricity. And this autonomy means users may choose to continue using older hardware but keep the software up-to-date, reducing global CO2 emissions by avoiding the unnecessary production and shipment of new devices. Moreover, Free and Open-Source Software guarantees transparency: this has always entailed that anyone may inspect and learn from how software runs; today, this transparency can be extended to include software’s energy consumption when in use. When energy demands are transparent, software can be made more efficient and users may make more informed choices.
Digital sustainability should be considered holistically: user autonomy and control over one's digital life as well as transparency in our digital infrastructure's resource consumption are a part of that. In this talk I will present how Free Software licenses enable users and their communities to directly influence the factors determining software sustainability.
This BoF is an open forum for discussing areas of improvement in Flatpak. What features are most important to work on? Can we decide on the technical direction for any major features? Should Flatpak provide a better UX for command line apps? Are there tooling improvements that would make life easier for Flatpak maintainers on Flathub or elsewhere?
There has been a recent push towards rethinking how a general-purpose Linux distribution is put together, and a rough consensus seems to be emerging. The core operating system is shipped as an immutable OSTree image and all the applications are Flatpaks. This promises painless upgrades, clear separation between the OS and applications, and secure and cross-distribution applications.
Endless OS, Fedora Silverblue and GNOME OS are prominent examples of this approach.
However, these next-generation Linux distributions present some problems for people who want to set up a development environment on them. The OSTree images containing the core operating system are intentionally minimal and hard to change. They don't even come with traditional package managers like APT or DNF. This makes it difficult to install any development tools, editors or SDKs.
So, how do we, as hackers, dogfood these next-generation Linux distributions and use them to hack on the same applications that we want people to use on them?
Toolbx solves this problem by providing a fully mutable container within which one can install their favourite development tools, editors and SDKs. For example, it’s possible to do "dnf install gcc" without affecting the base operating system.
This talk will focus on Toolbx, and what it offers to hackers using these next-generation Linux distributions.
With the background of all modern printers being driverless IPP printers and the standard job format being PDF and not PostScript any more for years we will have changes in the architecture of the printing stack.
From the 3.x series on (release end-2023) CUPS will not support classic printer drivers, consisting of PPD (PostScript Printer Description) files and filter executables, any more but go totally IPP, supporting only driverless IPP printers. To not drop support for legacy printers drivers are provided as Printer Applications (in the Snap Store), software emulators of IPP printers. Also the already available CUPS Snap (in the Snap Store) does not support classic drivers any more.
These changes require also changes in how user applications communicate with CUPS. Print dialogs for example cannot download PPDs from CUPS anymore to display the printer options, temporary CUPS queues for auto-discovered IPP printers must be supported, ... and printer setup tools need to list IPP services with shortcuts to their web interfaces and other configuration options, and for adding non-driverless printers they need to find and install the appropriate Printer Applications.
For print dialogs the responsibility of keeping up with changes in CUPS and other print technologies (like cloud print services) can also be transferred to OpenPrinting and print service providers, using the Common Print Dialog Backends.
In addition to this we have sandboxed packaging (Snap, Flatpak, ...) now and users want to easily print and scan also from applications installed via such a sandboxed package and CUPS is already available as a Snap, too.
In this talk I want to present the changes in printing and scanning relevant for application and GUI toolkit developers and packagers and what needs to get changed and how things get done.
This BoF is an open forum for discussing areas of improvement in xdg-desktop-portal and related projects such as libportal. Which portals would would provide the most utility? How can we encourage app developers to adopt existing portals?
I would love to talk about my experience with how to create Linux applications with Flutter and what efforts we have made in the past year to get the Ubuntu design and visuals to Flutter applications.
yaru.dart: getting the looks in
yaru_widgets.dart: getting widgets in that are convenient for the desktop
settings: using dart APIs and testing everything in a real application
firmware_updater and new installer: small effort, huge impact improvements
on the horizon: files, software, pdf viewer, image viewer
Your program might be easy for you to use, but can someone else use it just as easily? If we want people to use open source software, it has to be easy to learn and easy to use, or people will not use it. In this session, we'll learn about usability testing - what it is, why it's important, and how to do it. You don't need a "usability lab" to do usability testing - you don't even need to be in the same room. You can learn a lot just by watching five people use the software to do a set of tasks. We'll walk through all the steps to do your own usability test and how to understand the results so you can make your software even better.
We will celebrate the new release with cake, prosecco, and a very nice atmosphere!
Join us and let's have some fun!
On the last night of the conference, April 30, go and have dinner and then come back to the SmartLab space. We will have a a DJ performing from 21:30-24:00 and the venue’s bar remains open even later.