 All right, so this is going to be a bit of a weird presentation for me because it's kind of a bit outside of my comfort zone, but on the other hand it's something that I've missed in what we do for a while. So what I want you to get from this presentation is a little bit of ideas or inspiration on how you could focus your work into making sure that we are caring and doing the most for out of our work overall. First of all, let me present myself. You see something. Well, I guess that my presentation slide is gone. So let me just explain it. My name is Alish. I am a KDE developer. I have been for over a decade right now. I'm also the KDE President as I was introduced as well. I'm employed by Blue Systems doing software work on KDE, and I am based in Barcelona in the lovely Mediterranean coast. Now, what I wanted to reflect on today is that we're all consumer of things. We are all very used to by using consumer products. What economy has been about over the last century, and well, it has its upsides and they are kind of all geared towards of being able to use things and use them easily. And I think that this is something very directly related to what we do, what we do as KDE, which is create things so that specifically software, pieces of software, so that people can enjoy them and use them as tools, right? It's unlike other software products, not unlike, I don't know, a bag of chips, right? When you need to be able to get emails, you will get K-Mail. When you need to get carbohydrates, you will buy pasta, right? So we're all familiarized with the concept of product, and in the end it's a lot of what we create. Products for people to check their emails and a bunch of stuff. Now, I think that it would be interesting for a second to take a step back and think about how a consumer, somebody who's used to buying bag of chips and someone who's used to buying cars and TVs, well, they're going to consume our software, right? Because while many people use it, thousands and some people say millions use our software. Well, we have all wondered why it isn't billions. And in the end, part of our task is to make it easy, not just to have our products used, but to make sure that everybody can reach technology, hardware, computation, internet, etc., right? So that's what I would like to discuss. And since I didn't really know how to have this conversation, I reached out to my university notes where they talked about something that is called the marketing mix. What I think that kind of misses like a lot to do is to have acronyms for things. So these are the four P's of the marketing mix, which I'm going to talk about. And then I would like to see how they match what we're doing in KDE. And actually, I think that a lot of it would also apply to any of our projects. It's not like we're doing all that worse than the rest. It's I really care about KDE. Now, first of all, we need to have the product. We need to define it. When we talk about bag of chips, it's not only like the potatoes, right? It's the potatoes processed in a very specific way so that it's easy for you to consume, not unlike our our software products, right? When we talk about why is KIG important? For example, KIG is a geometry application for educational students. Well, it is important not because people don't have other ways to draw circles and lines, right? It's because we create a product that has been thought from the start so that people can learn, can do their geometry work over that piece of software. What's like Plasma, for example, as well, right? Plasma's idea is to acknowledge that people will want to have a computer or some software and they will want to make the best out of it. And when we try to simplify it by providing a graphical user interface, but a lot of more stuff, right? We have all of the services around it. Everything is geared towards creating this one product that should satisfy whoever consumes it. And while we all know that Plasma feeds in the whole community in a much more complex light, we are all aware of how all of what Linux works, we're still something that people are perceived directly, right? While we are part of the big thing, people expect us to be delivering it as a product and actually be as good as it is. From when they buy it from something more commercial that would be, like I said, a pack of chips. If a pack of chips when you're eating explodes on your face, you will be angry and you will start insulting people. Something similar happens when the software explodes. Now, second aspect, the second P would be price. So we'll use that when we buy something. We have to pay some money in exchange. Price goes much beyond that. Actually, something that we have seen on the internet. Yeah, something worth noting is that this market makes it something from the 70s or 80s. Well, from before the internet. But while they still apply, it might be a bit outdated in this regard. Google, without going much further, have shown us how money is not the only price that you can pay when you're using a product. You can pay with your data, for example, Facebook. Actually, it's been what the internet has been about over the last 10 to 20 years, at least, right? But there are other prices as well. There is money, there is security, there is privacy. It can also be that you have to go through hoops, installing Arch Linux and then all of that, right? And I think that at the moment, the price of using what we create is going a bit along these lines. That's my opinion for sure. We have a place. Now, when we buy the pack of chips, the place would be the supermarket, right? When we talk about Google services, it's probably Google.com or Gmail or whatever. I don't really know. For us, what is it? And actually, if you saw the KDE, all about the apps talk, if you saw the Wayland talk, I think that there is a lot of effort that we're putting, not just KDE, but overall in the Linux community and free software community to make this place more defined and actually much easier to reach. Because it has been, like I said earlier, and also in my opinion, a bit complex. Especially given the premise has been, in a lot of cases, downloading weird things from websites, buying a computer with an operating system and stopping it for another one that is not really supported. This is a weird place to go to, right? Nevertheless, it's there. It's working. I am sure that out of the 70, many people who are in this room, a lot of us have done it. So it's not that bad. And many of us, we're still also working on the alternative, right? For example, the KDE Slimbook is also another way of looking at that problem. The app source are as well, et cetera. And the last piece is promotion. Now, we have a place. We need to make sure that people go into this place, how to make sure that this happens. For example, we have the DUT, we have Planet, we have the talks that we go to conferences and talk about what we do. We have the community, the Linux user groups that are in every city and they talk to their peers and explain when our software would be good for them. All of these are small pieces into this promotion machine that we are part of in the end podcast. We've all seen also these treat signs for some projects. I remember seeing one from Firefox 10 years ago or so and I felt like it was weird. These logos are supposed to be only in my laptop, but it wasn't the case anymore. There's many ways of doing this, writing books, documentation can be also part of promotion. It's also part of the product as well. Everything is connected and works with each other. Now, I've presented these four things. I'm going to try. I'm going to do my best effort into analyzing how some of our software feeds in the consumer centric world. And maybe we can see, not today, I'm not going to tell you what to do right now, but we can see new ways where we can work further. Like I said, not like we are doing something terrible, but we need to look into the future. Something that brings, like, brights my red light every time that I see it is when I see maintainers, developers that don't really take responsibility of the delivery process. This has admittedly not been very easy to do up until recently, but technology has evolved a lot and our infrastructure is also so much better so that we can start thinking about those things. And someone who clearly has done this very well is Krita, for example. Now, what do I mean by taking responsibility of the creative delivery process? Well, we have some people thinking about how to create software, what it's going to look like, what it's going to feel like to the user. We need these people to be involved into the, well, for one, the feedback that comes back from the user to make sure that they can react when something doesn't work like it should. We don't have to, we cannot assume that we're going to do everything perfect because in this life nothing is, and so it's in our software. So as part of this iteration process, we need to make sure that the people who are responsible in the beginning can also be responsible in the end. Somebody that has frustrated me, and I'm going to give you an example, it was I think it was maybe ten years ago when we were part of the Brazilian education deployment. We had a lot of people using KDE software over there. Some were still KDE edu apps, some others were plasma, but in the end what really shocked me is that while we were having hundreds of millions of people using the software, the amount of feedback we got was still quite minimal, right? And how was this possible? Well, when talking to the organizers of the deployment, they started to tell me about all of these infrastructures that they had to get the feedback from the teachers because good reasons actually, right? English wasn't that good or they didn't feel like they were technically capable of communicating with us. These are all things that we should make sure that stops being a problem over time if we want to make sure that, if we want to be able to continue saying that we care about users, that we care about what people are doing and that we can offer solutions for that. And another very good example about that is KDE Connect where it has two sides. It has the Linux Qt side and then it has the Android side. And when discussing the development feature, the Linux side always needs to be super backwards compatible because people who use Debian will stay on an old un-maintained version for many years when Android people will get an update automatically from Android or Google Play with the last version, which is the thing that has been queued by the maintainers at any point. So it's really awkward that we have a better communication with our users on Android and especially on Google Play than it is on actually the platforms that we are comfortable with using and actually we're telling people to use. I know that there's ways to improve that and many of us are working towards that, but I think that it would be very important to make sure that we keep these as an angle rather than that thing that is happening in parallel with my daily life because in the end, if somebody has a problem, they tell you and you cannot, well, you can solve the problem, but that person will never get the fix or they will get the fix eventually. There is a lot of frustration that gets unresolved. We need to make sure that frustration is not part of our daily lives. Now, we need to make sure that we get to do this as a team. You have a lot of people you can rely on and I use them, talk to us, talk to everyone, and let's make sure that the issues get resolved and that you can do what you want. Now, when thinking about the kind of products we have, we have apps, we have systems, but like plasma, actually mostly plasma, and we have frameworks, which are kind of a weird product in itself, but actually it's a good explanation of what we're talking about. An example of an app, K2 Berlin, I was talking about K earlier, but what is our price, the first pay? Well, the price of K2 Berlin is mostly zero euros and possibly, you could do a donation, that's kind of part of it. You could hire somebody, if it's not doing something that you would like it to do, that's kind of it. Oh, sorry, I was on the first P still. Oh, sorry, I forgot the first P, it was product. What is the product? The product is the app itself with whatever feature it has at the right moment. The place, well, the place actually, it will depend a lot on the platform you're on. If you're in Android, it will be either Android or Google Play. I actually think that K2 Berlin is in Google Play, or at least it was sometime in the past. If you're on Windows, it should be the Windows Store probably, or downloading MSI files. I don't know, I don't really use Windows at all, but if I was a K2 Berlin maintainer, I would have to get involved in that if I want my Windows users to be happy. And that's a good if, right? You can decide that you don't care about something, but then you need to be conscious about it, you cannot say, I'm going to hope that somebody packages my application and hope for the best because it should work, and actually it probably will just work, but you need to know where your application is being used at. And then on Linux at the moment, the answer is very, very diverse. On Debian will be APD, or probably also Flatback Slice Snap. Flatback Slice Snap should work somewhat on everywhere. Well, it depends. Also, it's important to remember that we need to focus on those because we cannot have every maintainer supporting everything ever, right? And then last would be promotion, which would be all the planet. Everyone remember, the planet is super important, whatever you say there, which is a lot of people use it. Now, here I have just one minute. I'm going to go through Plasma very quickly. Or actually, I'm not. I am going to leave you the task of doing it yourself. You can do the process. I think that it's an interesting thought process to do, and you will learn from it. But use the team. You don't need to work alone. Actually, if you're working alone, it's probably because you're doing something wrong. Don't do it. Spread your work. There's people who will be interested in some parts specifically. Use that for your advantage. Do not blame if something is not working, especially since you control the process. It's something that you can fix. We are relying only on free software, and as a team, we should be able to solve any of the problems. If something is not working on Qt, it's not acceptable to tell a user this is not working on Qt. If something is not working on Qt, you send the page to Qt and enjoy your life. And when I'm talking about Qt, it can be any part of our stack framework. It can be Linux. It can be whatever, all right? And thank you. Sorry for being a bit over time. Thank you, Alish. You're almost perfect in time. We still have four minutes left for questions. And if we look into the shared notes, there's actually four questions, so we have one minute each. The first one is, what do you think about Lenovo or Dell selling Linux laptops? I think it's great. It's something, actually, I think that it should be the right place for Plasma. At the moment, though, Plasma is not available over there, something that should be worked on, I guess. And actually, the whole conversation about how that should happen would be really interesting. It's not straightforward, but I think that we should strive to go in this direction. Doesn't need to be the big manufacturers either. I think that the important thing is to have something that we can tell people to use. SlimBook has been a good case for that. There might be others. There are others. The second question is, what do you think about the teddy bears? Something like getting normal users from Twitter to Macedon. I don't really have a strong opinion. I try to be part of every of these networks, because I think that it's the right place to be on. They admittedly cannot really put all of my effort over there, because what I care about is actually people using free software, people about using our software, enjoying our software. And I am not going to put myself in the position of going somewhere where people are not around. As Katie, though, if you care about the teddy bears, I would encourage you to join the Kitty Promo Group. I am sure that they will embrace you with a smile and let you do what you care about. OK, then the next question is a bit longer. Something that has worked for other communities to improve their product focus is to get to know their users by surveying them with simple questions to guide prioritization. As a free software community, we can ask of our users input better than a bug tracker already. Those tools fail to quantify the tendencies. I feel asking what is working for you, where is your software letting you down, et cetera, could guide us. Do you think that could help us? I think that it's super important. Actually, earlier this year, we worked actually with Volker, who is sharing user feedback, which is actually all about that. We haven't really used all of the potential. And actually, the polling thing you're asking about is actually part of it. When we do it, we will do our best to ask the right questions. I think that it's very important, especially because we don't want to only worry for the people who are having problems. I think that it's very important to know what makes people happy about what we do and not have this bias of whatever is not working is important because it's not always the case. And we might be losing opportunities over there. But also, again, if you're interested in working on that, join us and say, this is going to be my turf. OK, then the last question still fits in. How do you see Neon fitting into the idea of KDE taking more responsibility for connecting directly with users? I think that Neon has already done a lot in this direction. I remember telling years ago, Jonathan and Harald, about how I was getting a lot more feedback on Discover, which is some software that I had been working on since a long time from Neon that I was getting from any of the other distros. And actually, at that moment, Neon was just starting. So people were not, well, there weren't that many people back then as there are right now using Neon. There could be more, I guess. The Linux ecosystem is very complex. I am not going to be telling people what it should look like. I know what I want. And I think that if you've listened to me, you will kind of get an idea. I don't think that actually Neon is the end goal. But I think that it's definitely a very interesting tool. Right now, if I want to tell people, I need you to test this feature on Plasma. I think that it's probably one of the best ways to do so. But there are others there's open source at Tumbleweed. It's also an interesting way to do it. And I'm sure there are many others as well.