Flathub changed the game and gave developers a way to publish their applications directly to users. But how did this happen and what it took to get us there, and what effects will it have for the future of the Desktop.
Windows 10 security updates end on 14 October 2025 [0], KDE's 29th birthday and also, ironically, International E-Waste Day [1] (you cannot make these things up!). Hundreds of millions of functioning devices [2] will become e-waste. This means manufacturing and transporting new ones, which is perhaps the biggest waste of all: hardware production alone can account for over 75% of a device's CO2...
postmarketOS is an Operating System which develops free and open-source software to extend the life of consumer electronics. Nowadays postmarketOS runs on every kind of device: phones, laptops, desktops, tablets, and even routers, smart clocks and TV boxes. However, its roots are still anchored to smartphones, which makes it unique among its peers: it is undoubtedly the Linux platform with the...
This talk will introduce one of the more exciting things in GTK 4.18, the new Android backend.
It will cover some of the technical difficulties that we had to overcome to make GTK apps work on Android, and outline the next steps for making Android a first-class platform for GTK.
Lastly, it will provide pointers to help you get started on making Android apps with GTK.
Flutter has been here from the starting of 2017. Initially, it was a mobile only framework which slowly and steadily got support for other platforms, like Web and Desktop. As Canonical started working on their own flutter based App Center, the Flutter Yaru widgets became more and more polished. A point to note here, is that the App Center was initially an idea from the community, which also...
Portals have become the primary way of interacting with the platform for a lot of apps nowadays. If something goes wrong, apps can become completely unusable, so we better make sure that we don't break everything. But how do you even test Portals? This talk will give a high level overview of how Portals work, and goes into the details of what is involved in testing them, and how to make it...
E-Ink displays offer significant advantages in power efficiency and readability, but their integration into modern Linux desktops remains fragmented. Most Wayland compositors assume high-refresh-rate displays, leading to suboptimal rendering, ghosting, and unnecessary power consumption on e-ink panels.
In this talk, we introduce Caster, an open-hardware electrophoretic display controller,...
Desktop portals have become the linchpin of the application development platform for Linux: they not only provide a security boundary for sandboxed applications, and provide a way to mediate the access to system resources, but they are also a uniform system level API for application developers targeting the vast panoply of environments we collectively call "Linux".
In this presentation we...
Perhaps more popularly known as "tracker", LocalSearch is the filesystem and metadata indexer at service in GNOME desktops, and TinySPARQL is the crazy little data layer that makes it possible.
This talk will cover the plans beyond the rename of the project, and the open possibilities and ideas available to make a more powerful local search framework.
Keeping up with toolkit and design language evolution is not simple for a virtualization manager app. Add a bit of code quality decay driving away contributors and you have a recipe for a rewrite.
Find out how I learned my lessons in app development with Boxes and how I'm giving it back in a new form, compatible and yet much different. For modern VM workflows and for software sustainability.
"Test-driven Hardening" introduces a practical approach to seamlessly integrating Seccomp profile generation into your testing pipeline. By focusing on writing comprehensive tests (unit and integration) and leveraging tools like harpoon — now integrated with popular projects and enhanced with new features — developers can trace system calls and automate the creation of Seccomp profiles, to...
"We" have been doing "this" for about 3 decades and yet things keep changing: Stakeholders change, projects die and projects get born.
How is the wider linux community adapting to fulfil the needs of the present and future? What's the role of apps in all this? Hint: apps are (almost) everything.
I'll try to discuss these topics from my perspective, clearly subjective to KDE, but aiming...
1. Introduction
- Introduce myself: Developer, GNOME Foundation member, and creator of Drum Machine.
- Provide context: Overview of the app and GNOME Circle.
2. The Beauty and Impact of Building Apps
- Discuss why building visually appealing and user-friendly apps, especially for Linux matters.
- Emphasize the creativity and technical artistry involved in app development.
-...
Distribution-independent packaging, like Snap, Flatpak, AppImage, and also OCI container images, gets more and more common, allowing users to freely choose from thousands of apps from app stores, like on smartphones.
To be able to provide always the latest printer and scanner drivers,...
Ever since the release of ChatGPT 3.5 by the Not-so-OpenAI, the AI has become an annoying buzzword the likes of which we haven't seen the burst of the blockchain bubble. In contrast to that recent series of events, AI has already produces some real progress in quite a few areas of research.
Proprietary OS manufacturers have already jumped on the bandwagon and shoved dubious AI features to...
Flatpak has served us well for 10 years and succeeded in establishing a direct distribution model for app developers, independent of the underlying platform. However, development has slowed down significantly and the containers ecosystem has evolved significantly. How can we continue to meaningfully improve Flatpak? If we were to start over, what would we change?
There are many choices of LLMs out there, many that are focused on writing code. But a lot of them provide wrong or incorrect answers. Some of this will cause more work for maintainers as increasingly these LLMs are being used to submit pull or merge requests.
This talk is about how LLMs can be useful in lowering the barriers in writing applications especially at a time when projects are...
openKylin is an open-source project incubated and operated by the OpenAtom Foundation. It was co-founded by a diverse group of organizations, including foundational software and hardware companies, non-profit organizations, community groups, universities, research institutions, and individual developers. The project’s vision is to “provide the world with an open-source operating system deeply...
On April 25, 2022, Twitter changed ownership which led to a user exodus to other platforms. One of the top choices was the fedivere and specifically Mastodon. Mastodon wasn't new, it already existed for 6 years at the time and had gathered a large developer community. One of them, Bleak Grey, created Tootle, a GTK client for elementary OS. Unfortunately, its development had ended prior to the...
