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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 emissions over its lifespan.
Free Software is a solution, today! We have an opportunity to coordinate a global, unified Free Software campaign over the next 6 months to raise awareness about the environmental harm of software-driven hardware obsolescence, at the same time upgrading users from Windows 10 to GNU/Linux directly to keep those devices in use and out of the landfill. Let's think big and act boldly! In this talk I will update LAS attendees on progress in the campaign and extend an invitation for contributors to make Windows 10 the last version of Windows end users ever use.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/10/lots-of-pcs-are-poised-to-fall-off-the-windows-10-update-cliff-one-year-from-today/
[1] https://weee-forum.org/iewd-about/
[2] https://www.canalys.com/insights/end-of-windows-10-support-could-turn-240-million-pcs-into-e-waste
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 most support for phones, and where smarphone's specificity is taken the most seriously. In this presentation, we will talk about the opportunities and challenges that postmarketOS can offer to the app ecosystem.
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 created the widgets for Yaru. Many apps from the Ubuntu Flutter Community also came up, the most popular one being Musicpod(a music, radio and podcast app). Even though the app is FOSS and is mainly targeted to Linux, there are also versions of it for Windows, Mac and even Android. This cross-platform support didn't actually need much of an extra work, and even that extra work was actually to make them more friendly for that platform. With a big community and the new fork(Flock) being worked on, just to increase the community aspect of Flutter, the language is becoming a huge alternative yet being friendly for newcomers.
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 easy for contributors to write tests for their contributions.
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, designed to improve e-ink rendering and latency. By extending the Wayland Content Type Hint protocol, Caster enables applications to signal content types (e.g., text, images, video) to the compositor, allowing for dynamic refresh optimization on e-ink screens.
We’ll walk through the implementation, showcase a live demo of Caster, and discuss how we can make e-ink a first-class citizen in Linux.
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 are going to talk about the current state of the desktop portals, what kind of features are current available, and what's planned, both in the near term as well as the future.
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.
"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 to cover as much as possible of what's in front of us, including the aspects we ought to improve on.
This presentation aims to inspire developers to build beautiful, free (as in freedom) apps and leverage the powerful tools and community available through GNOME Circle.
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, and also the latest and greatest for the printing stack (CUPS, Ghostscript, ...) right from upstream, we at OpenPrinting have adopted Snap at first, as it allows packaging daemons and system software, which Flatpak and AppImage do not do, and also as it has a high security level and is easy to use.
But most of the available immutable distributions accept desktop applications as Flatpaks and do not support Snap, so for adding system software to those OCI containers (Docker, podman, rockcraft) are the way to go. And OCI containers are also used in server/cloud environments. Therefore we have created official OCI container images of CUPS and the Printer Applications in a GSoC project by Rudra Pratap Singh, mentored by Canonical's containerization expert Cristovão Cordeiro.
And there were also first attempts of packaging daemons as Flatpaks ...
This talk will be about our distribution-independent packaging of CUPS and printer drivers, the different packaging systems, their strengths and weaknesses, the challenges and how we have dealt with them.
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 their respective products, slightly souring the user expectations and experience with AI.
Us, the wide Linux app community should not throw out the baby with the bathwater and see this as an opportunity to show the users that there can be some added value to having AI integrations and applications in out tool belts.
This talk is about various possible integrations and use-cases that could prove useful for variety of Linux desktop users and some proof-of-concept designs.
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 resource starved. We need guardrails on where LLMs are useful and where it is not. Sri walks through his experiments with LLMs and where he found LLMs to be useful and where it isn't.
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 integrated with artificial intelligence technologies.” Built on the principles of openness, voluntarism, equality, and collaboration, openKylin is committed to developing a globally leading open-source smart desktop operating system.
This talk will introduce the openKylin team's in-depth exploration of the software package format. It will focus on how the integration of the Kaiming Package Format technology within the desktop environment addresses key challenges such as the lack of clear boundaries between systems and applications, fragmentation of distributions, and issues with security and compatibility. The talk will cover a series of package management features, including packaging, installation, updating, uninstallation, and running of packages, all aimed at enhancing system efficiency and user experience. By fostering technological innovation, the goal is to drive the deep integration of the operating system with Kaiming Package Format technology, improving software package management efficiency and security on Linux systems. Additionally, the talk will explore the collaborative design of open-source hardware and software, promoting the development of Kaiming Package Format technology and the growth of the software ecosystem.
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 exodus and so Tuba was born.
Over the years, Tuba went over a few design changes, updated from deprecated libraries, introduced countless of complex widgets, added support for the wider fediverse and their features, became fully accessible and unearthed many bugs in the whole stack that benefited the whole platform. Overall, it became a feature complete, accessibility focused and beautiful client for the fediverse.