Flathub stats for KDE applications [that are part of the release service]

I just discovered https://gitlab.gnome.org/Jehan/gimp-flathub-stats that tells you the download (including updates) stats for a given flathub application.

Ran it over the KDE applicatitions that are part of the release service that we have in flathub.

The results are somewhat surprising:

org.kde.kdenlive
Total:   22649 downloads in 8 days
org.kde.kalzium
Total:   16571 downloads in 9 days
org.kde.kgeography
Total:   16343 downloads in 9 days
org.kde.kbruch
Total:   15744 downloads in 9 days
org.kde.kapman
Total:   15473 downloads in 9 days
org.kde.kblocks
Total:   15426 downloads in 9 days
org.kde.katomic
Total:   15385 downloads in 9 days
org.kde.khangman
Total:   15370 downloads in 9 days
org.kde.kbounce
Total:   15280 downloads in 9 days
org.kde.kdiamond
Total:   15242 downloads in 9 days
org.kde.kwordquiz
Total:   15173 downloads in 9 days
org.kde.ksudoku
Total:   15155 downloads in 9 days
org.kde.kigo
Total:   15125 downloads in 9 days
org.kde.kgoldrunner
Total:   15062 downloads in 9 days
org.kde.knetwalk
Total:   15030 downloads in 9 days
org.kde.palapeli
Total:   14939 downloads in 9 days
org.kde.klickety
Total:   14917 downloads in 9 days
org.kde.klines
Total:   14866 downloads in 9 days
org.kde.knavalbattle
Total:   14848 downloads in 9 days
org.kde.kjumpingcube
Total:   14831 downloads in 9 days
org.kde.ksquares
Total:   14829 downloads in 9 days
org.kde.killbots
Total:   14772 downloads in 9 days
org.kde.kubrick
Total:   14696 downloads in 9 days
org.kde.ktuberling
Total:   14652 downloads in 9 days
org.kde.kontact
Total:   3728 downloads in 458 days
org.kde.kolourpaint
Total:   2542 downloads in 9 days
org.kde.okular
Total:   2304 downloads in 3 days
org.kde.kpat
Total:   1203 downloads in 8 days
org.kde.ktouch
Total:   880 downloads in 9 days
org.kde.kate
Total:   638 downloads in 9 days
org.kde.ark
Total:   571 downloads in 9 days
org.kde.dolphin
Total:   566 downloads in 3 days
org.kde.elisa
Total:   387 downloads in 3 days
org.kde.minuet
Total:   103 downloads in 9 days
org.kde.kwrite
Total:   84 downloads in 9 days
org.kde.kcachegrind
Total:   35 downloads in 9 days
org.kde.kcalc
Total:   23 downloads in 4 days
org.kde.lokalize
Total:   10 downloads in 3 days

kdenlive is the clear winner.

After that there's a compact block of games/edu apps that i think were/are part of the Endless default install and that shows, since after that the next app has like 6 times less downloads.

"New" (in the flathub sense) apps like lokalize or kcalc are the ones with less downloads, i guess people haven't seen them there yet.

My KDE Onboarding Sprint 2019 report

This week I took part on the KDE Onboarding Sprint 2019 (part of what's been known as Nuremberg Megasprint (i.e. KDEConnect+KWin+Onboarding) in, you guessed it, Nuremberg.

The goal of the sprint was "how do we make it easier for people to start contributing". We mostly focused on the "start contributing *code*" side, though we briefly touched artists and translators too.

This is *my* summary, a more official one will appear somewhere else, so don't get annoyed at me if the blog is a bit opinionated (though i'll try it not to)

The main issues we've identified when trying to contribute to KDE software is:
* Getting dependencies is [sometimes] hard
* Actually running the software is [sometimes] hard

Dependencies are hard

Say you want to build dolphin from the git master branch. For that (at the time of writing) you need KDE Frameworks 5.57, this means that if you run the latest Ubuntu or the latest OpenSUSE you can't build it because they ship older versions.

Our current answer for that is kdesrc-build but it's not the most easy to use script, and sometimes you may end up building QtWebEngine or QtWebKit, which as a newbie is something you most likely don't want to do.

Running is hard

Running the software you have just built (once you've passed the dependencies problem) is not trivial either.

Most of our software can't be run uninstalled (KDE Frameworks are a notable exception here, but newbies rarely start developing KDE Frameworks).

This means that you may try to run make install, which if you didn't pass -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX pointing somewhere in your home you'll probably have to run make install as root since it defaults to /usr/local (this will be fixed in next extra-cmake-modules release to point to a somewhat better prefix) that isn't that useful either since none of your software is looking for stuff in /usr/local. Newbies may be tempted to use -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr but that's *VERY* dangerous since it can easily mess up your own system.

For applications, our typical answer is use -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/home/something/else at cmake stage, run make install and then set the environment variables to pick up things from /home/something/else, a newbie will say "which variables" at this stage probably (and not newbies too, I don't think i remember them all). To help with that we generate a prefix.sh in the build dir and after the next extra-cmake-release we will tell the users that they need to run it for things to work.

But still that's quite convoluted and I know from experience answering people in IRC that lots of people get stuck there. It's also very IDE unfriendly since IDEs don't usually have the "install" concept, it's run & build for them.

Solutions

We ended up focusing on two possible solutions:

* Conan: Conan "the C/C++ Package Manager for Developers" (or so they say) is something like pip in the python world but for C/C++. The idea is that by using Conan to get the dependencies we will solve most of the problems in that area. Whether it can help or not with the running side is still unclear, but some of our people involved in the Conan effort think they may either be able to come up with a solution or get the Conan devs to help us with it. Note Conan is not my speciality by far, so this may not be totally correct.

* Flatpak: Flatpak is "a next-generation technology for building and distributing desktop applications on Linux" (or so they say). The benefits of using flatpak are multiple, but focusing on onboarding are. "Getting dependencies is solved", dependencies are either part of the flatpatk SDK and you have them or the flatpak manifest for the application says how to get and build them and that will automagically work for you as it works for everyone else using the same manifest. "Running is solved" because when you build a flatpak it gets built into a self contained artifact so running it is just running it, no installing or environment variable fiddling is needed. We also have [preliminary] support in KDevelop (or you can use Gnome Builder if you want a more flatpak-centric experience for now). The main problem we have with flatpak at this point is that most of our apps are not totally flatpak-ready (e.g. Okular can't print). But that's something we need to fix anyway so it shouldn't be counted as a problem (IMHO).

Summary

*Personally* i think Flatpak is the way to go here, but that means that collectively we need to say "Let's do it", it's something we all have to take into account and thus we have to streamline the manifest handling/updating, focus on fixing the Flatpak related issues that our software may have, etc.

Thanks

I would like to thank SUSE for hosting us in their offices and the KDE e.V. for sponsoring my attendance to the sprint, please donate to KDE if you think the work done at sprints is important.

[Some] KDE Applications 19.04.1 also available in flathub

Thanks to Nick Richards we've been able to convince flathub to momentarily accept our old appdata files as still valid, it's a stopgap workaround, but at least gives us some breathing time. So the updates are coming in as we speak.

No KDE Applications 19.04.1 available in flathub

The flatpak and flathub developers have changed what they consider a valid appdata file, so our appdata files that were valid last month are not valid anymore and thus we can't build the KDE Applications 19.04.1 packages.

[Some] KDE Applications 19.04 also available in flathub

The KDE Applications 19.04 release announcement (read it if you haven't, it's very complete) mentions some of the applications are available at the snap store, but forgets to mention flathub.

Just wanted to bring up that there's also some of the applications available in there https://flathub.org/apps/search/org.kde.

All the ones that are released along KDE Applications 19.04 were updated on release day (except kubrick that has a compilation issue and will be updated for 19.04.1 and kontact which is a best and to be honest i didn't particularly feel like updating it)

If you feel like helping there's more applications that need adding and more automation that needs to happen, so get in touch :)