As we have been doing yearly, a few weeks ago we had the 2024 edition of Linux App Summit (LAS). For those of you who don’t know, the Linux App Summit is a conference co-organised between KDE and GNOME among others where to bring together the different stakeholders of the linux ecosystem to make sure we have all the collaboration tools in place to have a great state of the art platform for the uses the world needs from us.
This year it was special in that since it became the Linux App Summit, we held it outside of Europe! We had LAS in Monterrey, the northernmost part of México in the ITESM (Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey), a really nice campus and a beautiful venue.
Besides meeting people from other projects as I’d normally do in LAS, this year I had the added opportunity to meet the community the other side of the ocean. There certainly are good differences between how we organise FOSS communities Europe and there, it’s always useful to experience and iterate to ensure we are truly creating a community for everyone.
LAS ’25, Call for hosts
Are you considering bringing such communities to your home town? Please reach out, you can find some information how to do that here: https://linuxappsummit.org/bids/.
In my opinion, organising a conference is one of the best ways to bring FOSS talent to where you are. It’s often hard to find new ways to be part of what we do, this is a great one. I personally had the opportunity to do it in LAS’19 in Barcelona and it was a great experience.
LAS has the added value of being a melting pot of people from different communities so it’s a great opportunity to meet people that you might not crossed paths with before!
In the recent past, GNOME has taken a doing their own thing stance when it comes to collaboration: Wayland protocol support, libadwata mandates, gtk breakage, server side decorations, icon naming standards, etc.
It might be good to highlight where gnome is supporting efforts of cross desktop collaboration and support and how it benefits KDE.