Libre Application Summit 2018

Earlier this month i attended Libre Application Summit 2018 in Denver.

Check out the great group photo at #LASGNOME! Thank you for all the participant and speakers for posing for us :-) pic.twitter.com/v7pPmcCBV1

— LAS GNOME (@LASGNOME) 8 de setembre de 2018

Libre Application Summit wants to be a place for all people involved in doing Free Software applications to meet and share ideas, though being almost organized by GNOME it had a some skew towards GNOME/flatpak. There was a good presence of KDE, but personally I felt that we would have needed more people at least from LibreOffice, Firefox and someone from the Ubuntu/Canonical/Snap field (don't get annoyed at you if I failed to mention your group).

The Summit was kicked off by a motivational talk on how to make sure we ride the wave of "Open Source has won but people don't know it". I felt the content of the talk was nice but the speaker was hit by some issues (not being able to have the laptop in front of her due to the venue being a bit weirdly layouted) that sadly made her speech a bit too stumbly.

Then we had a bunch of flatpak related talks, ranging from the new freedesktop-sdk runtime, from very technical stuff about how ostree works and also including a talk by our own Aleix Pol on how KDE is planning to approach the release of flatpaks. Some of us ended the day having BBQ at the house the Codethink people were staying. Thanks for the good time!

Soon, @tsdgeos tells us all about KDE Applications releases in @LASGNOME. @kdecommunity pic.twitter.com/ODnxEZ77xv

— Aleix Pol (@AleixPol) 7 de setembre de 2018

I kicked off the next day talking about how we (lately mostly Christoph) are doing the KDE Applications releases. We got appreciation of the good work we're doing and some interesting follow up questions so I think people were engaged by it.

The morning continued with talks about how to engage the "non typical" free software people, designers, students, professors, etc.

The @kdecommunity and @Codethink people having interesting discussions over sushi at #LAS2018 pic.twitter.com/O5lH1hPTlk

— Albert Astals Cid (@tsdgeos) 7 de setembre de 2018

After lunch we had a few talks by the Elementary people and another talk with Aleix focused on which apps will run on your Plasma devices (hint: all of them).

The day finished with a quizz sponsored by System 76, it was fun!

The KDE spies team wasn't very successful at #LASGNOME trivial, but had lots of fun :) @tsdgeos @AleixPol @maru161803399 @albertvaka pic.twitter.com/k0172A3Vk1

— Albert Astals Cid (@tsdgeos) 8 de setembre de 2018

The last day of talks started again with me speaking, this time about how amazing Qt is and why you should use it to build your apps. There I had some questions about people worrying if QtWidgets was going to die, I told them not to worry, but it's clear The Qt Company needs to improve their messaging in that regard.

Learning about Qt in the @LASGNOME from @tsdgeos @qtproject pic.twitter.com/Vr5Raj10Su

— Aleix Pol (@AleixPol) 8 de setembre de 2018

After that we had a talk about a Fedora project to create a distro based exclusively in flaptaks, which sounds really interesting. The last talks of LAS 2018 were about how to fight vandalism in crowdsourced data, the status of Librem 5 (it's still a bit far away) and a very interesting one about the status of Free Software in Research.

All in all i think the conference was interesting, still a bit small and too GNOME controlled to appeal to the general crowd, but it's the second time it has been organized, so it will improve.

I want to thank the KDE e.V. for sponsoring my flight and hosting to attend this conference. Please Donate! so we can continue attending conferences like this and spreading the good work of KDE :)