 So, let me welcome Aleš again. This time knows as the KDEV president, but as the gold champion for the KDEV goals, it's all about the apps. Take it away, Aleš. Thank you, Adam. The slides. Can somebody put them on? In the meantime, I'm going to introduce myself. My name is Aleš, like you can now see on the slides. And I'm going to talk about the KDEV, it's all about the app's goal, a goal that was led by Jonathan until recently, and, well, Jonathan, hi, and, well, thanks a lot for all of your work. The arrows don't work, all right, well, like it says here, and like I said, I am also the KDEV president right now, but I've also been, have been developing KDEV software for, well, I generally say for over a decade, but it's almost a decade and a half now. And I actually started developing apps in particular, KDEV algebra, even before I started developing KDEV because the application started outside, which I think it's interesting in the app's kind of perspective in that, well, you can be a small project, you don't have to be like a whole community around something like, you sometimes end up being, but you can just do it from, from, from home rather easily. In this case, my home was, incidentally, still is in Barcelona. And when I'm not making apps, I am working for Blue Systems, also developing KDEV software around. Now, I wanted to give a little bit this context in that KDEV has had apps for very long time, right? Like, in fact, it would be very difficult to imagine a community like ours without apps in itself, apps being, well, whatever is that the user is interacting with the system that doesn't feel like it's on the background, right? Nobody would consider maybe that the Plasma is an app in itself, like the Plasma shell, but it would consider, I don't know, I guess, Windows is not sure what the right components there are of there or on MacOS, on Android also, it's very clear. This distinction, like in general, apps are something that you can sometimes install that you can uninstall eventually unless you're using an developer rating system. And it also has the advantage that, like I said earlier, you can be having some kind of problem and say, I want to have a piece of software that solves this and that I can interact with in my systems. And then you can just use an application to do that, and you can do that without having to implement a whole rating system, which is, well, not all that desirable. In KDEV, for example, I am pretty sure that the first contributions were the window manager, of course, because if you don't have Windows, you don't have, well, anything you can interact with. But then I'm pretty sure maybe like the second or third big steps were probably what ended up becoming Conqueror and what ended up becoming, I guess, the system settings applications, right? Because, well, how are you going to interact with your system beyond those Windows? In KDEV, we've had very famous applications that have been developed since the very beginning and nowadays are super popular thinking about gate or ocular, well, it changed names over time. But, well, there are things that were necessary 25 years ago or so and are still necessary today and we still develop them. Okay, that went a bit direct. So what I want to discuss today is a bit of the process I have been going through when starting to look into the app's topic now. Let's see what we've been distributing overall, what we've been, how we've been reaching to our users and seeing what kind of things have been working and more or less or what kind of things could be improved more in terms of our publishing platforms rather than actual features in each of our applications because, well, my plan, like I'm going to discuss a bit later on is to, well, be talking with the different communities over the next few months and discuss how we can improve the situation and make sure that the experience from those KDEV products is as optimal as possible on each of the platforms and, well, that we can make the most out of our work both in our perspective but also for our users. It doesn't practice well. You never develop a project without having a user in mind and caring for a user. We have in these fronts maybe two big categories. Whatever it's Linux because it's a big topic for us. I mean, there's obviously as well the source code releasing but releasing source code doesn't really give us much information. Also, we don't get to control very well how our users use our software which ends up meaning that you can be developing an application but then your users will be having problems that come from it being a different version or something like that. So I think that's from a KDEV perspective what we're interested in is on positioning ourselves in the situation where we're in control of the thing that our users get to use if they want to have the optimal experience that we consider they can have and then optimizing for that workflow. Starting with Linux, starting with Linux, I started looking at a snap. They do have very interesting and big dashboards with information and I thought, well, let's see who is using or what it looks like our presence there. Something that we can see over there straight away is that the KDEV Framework Snap which isn't an application in itself but a platform to create applications has reported over half a million active devices that supposedly means I don't know the actual definition but they are devices that are actively being used. It's not like that install that you did one day and then you forgot about but it's something that you regularly are starting. This happens because there's well all of our apps are based on that platform but not only ours since we're providing a platform for Qt applications which is what we generally do. There's other components from elsewhere that they decide to rely on the work from the Qt community so that they don't have to create or compile to build all of these components once again. It also allows their users to share this content with us and will not have it duplicated several times on their systems. As far as our apps go you will see that it's generally always the same components that are the most used everywhere. Here we can see that Ocular and Krita, I had to go one by one through them so I hope I didn't forget other top ones but those were the two that I saw that had the most installations. Krita and Ocular had over 50,000 active devices. This doesn't sound like a whole lot admittedly but then let's remember that this is just a way for Ubuntu users to install their applications or any Linux users could be potentially using those apps but they have other alternatives. We'll go through some of them like Flatback or Optimage but then there's also the distribution packages for which we don't really have much information or I don't really know how to get those two. Like I said around 50,000 devices but then there's a whole lot of applications that are between 5,000 and 15,000 devices and then there's a whole lot of applications listed over there over 100. I counted again I had to count like one by one. Thanks a lot to Jonathan for a lot of this work. This seems to be working very well. Now the other one we can look at is Flatback which would be a very similar technology to Snap. Their information is a bit harder to read. I'm talking about Flatback here but then those numbers are coming from Flathub explicitly. Obviously I guess if you know how the technology works you don't have to register to their site to tell about yourself so they don't know about active devices but you do know about downloads because well you have to serve them so you can just as well count them and count on it. The data is a bit harder to read but we can see over there that we have the platform again being our most notable component. Since what they're showing us is downloads over there. What we get is that whenever there's an update there's a big spike of downloads and well we could count those as active devices I guess although that wouldn't be entirely right. The spikes were went up to around 200,000 but well take that number as whatever it means to you. In Crete and Ocula again we could see between 5,000 and 10,000 spikes which again were seemingly I wasn't able to go through all of them because again I had to go one by one but they seem to be among the most used ones understandably because they're very good apps but we do have over 50 applications we do have a team of people developing these in this case and if you're interested in the technology join them by all means. And then there's the rest of Linux, there's a Pimage. I don't really have information on the amount of users. I don't really know if we have good ways of measuring them. Maybe this is something that we could include somewhere to well be able to make this picture a little bit fuller but it's generally complex not only no Linux is true realistically it's well asking their users to login or anything but they're also setting up mirrors and having mirrors sending information would start to be even weirder so we don't really have those numbers but we do know that they're in the millions presumably and I mean it kind of makes sense in practice it's the way we've been installing applications since forever in Linux and it's what most distributions are prepared to do by default right now in KDE we've also been doing other platforms for for the longest time I'm gonna try and go through them I'm gonna start through Android. Android we do have QtConnect which instantly is the only application that I've seen that isn't built in in Qt and C++ software like we generally do but it's built with Android's normal technology being well Java and well whatever that is called all of that it has over 200,000 active installs being again that we know that they're fully tracked also QtConnect is on asteroid meaning that there are potentially more users that we don't know about we do have normal application normal for KDE applications also available for Android we did have some on the Play Store before we were removed for reasons we are working on trying to get them back again with automatized systems at the moment so far it's been working with asteroid nico and folger specifically have been working a lot on on that front we have a whole lot of applications that are available over there you can if you want to try it give it a test by going to asteroid and in adding our our repository or or yeah that's that's a way to to test it you can also see them on on binaryfactory.githc.org where but you will see how everything works and yeah if you're interested in Android there is this matrix room slash other things feel free to join it there's also a mail endless in case you want to send a big blow of text that would you want us to read well sitting down and sitting coffee another very popular operating system i don't know you've heard of it it's called Windows Windows has been one of the platforms that pretty specifically has been taking more seriously you can see well there are presentations hala specifically on the topic they have an amazing story over there and i think it's super interesting i recommend you to look at at hala's talk in LA yes if you didn't see it but in any case they have about three million active installations over there which is a super interesting number all things considered but also we do have applications that we've been shipping from our normal releases into the windows store in this case gate and ocular we can see that they are in around 100 000 which is not in the millions like critter but i think that it also shows that we do have a very nice chance over there uh that adding value and and providing something that uh users can use i think that it's it's useful to be to be there as a as a way to introduce the the world into the work our community does something that i didn't mention about android but it's probably also interesting is that for example android it allows us to test the the mobile use case better than probably plasma mobile can even do today since oh everyone literally has a an android device right now in the case of windows well literally it's very hard to buy devices without windows installed so all of these being able to just have kd applications running i think that it's a very important milestone and well something that that our some people in our community are doing very good work on again they do have a matrix chat that you can join it's on kd windows we've not been very innovative on the names of our rooms but well you can use that on your advantage kd windows uh on a matrix as well as the mailing list the other one which is admittedly quite uh famous as well is um macOS nevertheless we don't have numbers again i don't think we have many applications on the store or um we do have our account on the store but i think that it's just being used to um have a key so that we can sign our packages but i don't think our applications are being listed over there uh so we don't have numbers on users of those um i think that this could be something interesting uh i was mentioned that there is a somewhat stable community around homebrew that you can use i've never used homebrew i barely know what it is so i i wouldn't know but in any case if you have a mac you want to use more kd applications and you would like to help you can join at kd dash mac matrix channel or the mailing list and oh man sorry about the focus thing um join the chat or the mailing list and talk to the the team i'm sure they will be interested like i said there's a bunch of information that we don't have there's linux also beyond linux there's the bsd's for example and other um special operating systems that do have kd applications running and available uh we don't have numbers over there i would be surprised though that they were on the scale of the numbers we've been discussing well at least the bsd's on linux i can imagine that like the rest of linux to be bigger than flatback and snap combined so um kd we're a community we have a ton of products all of these um applications are released generally separately um either being within kd year which is what used to be called kd applications before and it was called as well um kd source compilation i think it was called and it's been called different things but it basically is um regular release of useful kd software that is meant to be used with plasma but not exclusively everything in the kd gear you should be able to use on other linux systems or maybe windows and other operating systems as well we can find there the big suites that we've been um having within for the longest time like kd pym kd edu kd games um there's also some applications that are in there separately like kd connect for example or um neo chat i believe uh students recently or or maybe maybe neo chat does read this but separately yeah in case it's something we need to mention as well we don't release every application uh in parallel there's some applications that appear um on their and something worth uh noticing is that right now we also have a kd gear mobile which is a bunch of applications that sprouted from well having a plasma mobile right now and having this need for well having everything released and uh well neatly packaged well now we are having these releases which i believe are monthly um but you can see all of the icons over there they look lovely um use them most of these applications by the way you can generally use on the desktop as well they're built with kirigami which is a pretty cool framework to create applications on and by the way there's gonna be a puff about creating applications for plasma mobile uh on monday i believe well during the buff days so feel free to join them um there was a new website created for listing applications uh properly it's called apps.k.org just take a look browse it a little bit see if there's something that you always wanted but you never knew it existed i think it's it's it's quite useful um it also has direct links on how to install it on your different platform so it can make your life a bit easier all right now as the goal if you think that the different things are a bit too specific for you but you would like to have the discussion at large maybe because you're an application developer maybe because you think the problem is very important feel free to join us on the matrix channel um we're gonna have a boss for a lot of the topics that we've been discussing today uh also during the week take a look and don't hesitate to join you don't need to ask for permission you don't need to ask for anything you can just go in there and you have something in your mind that you want you would like to share and would be useful just do it um by all means and now i think that we still have some time for questions hi thank you very much alash we yes we still have time for questions although no questions in the widget yet uh luigi and i will of course monitor and forward any of them um but maybe people are waiting for the um round table session for the gold champions when a whole session dedicated for questions and discussion with the gold champions so maybe maybe that's why we don't see any yet well i'll be there yes alish do you have any buffs that you would like to advertise in the meantime coming up this this week well you know i do and i think i already said so but i can repeat on monday there's uh buffs for linux applications kd applications on mac on windows on plasma mobile join them we need you we should have the uncle something i need you in my barf yes okay we do have questions coming in would you like me to read them to you yes please on the kde gear mobile mobile slide what application was the one with the blue square icon i was fearing that this would happen it looks like there's been a mis-rendering of sorts um when i looked at the slide on my system it looked fine it's a dialer it's uh it my system it has a small phone from the time where phones were not mobile always it would be a rectangle in a rectangle but now it looks like a phone kind of thing sorry next one is do you think kde should focus on one way of delivering gaps to users or stick to one that works best on each platform but we cannot do one for every platform right on android you can you have to do apk and google play on uh on windows you need to be on the windows store um and i think that talking about these more third-party uh platforms catering to the system that the platform puts at our um reach is the right way to go uh for many reasons that i think that are probably obvious otherwise we can just discuss them uh sometime on the box i imagine you might be thinking about linux and i think that linux in this topic it's um a bit i'm moving target still so i wouldn't see ourselves uh while narrowing ourselves into one of those i think that there's things still to um to uncover what will uh what will be supported on every distro what what is monetization monetization looking like on the different uh platforms uh i think that there's a lot of topics that are very important and us technologists don't really pay attention to generally but they are going to matter a lot and doing this properly will make a huge difference as for now offering snaps and flatbacks for example doesn't seem to be a huge burden while in practice we've been packaging all of our software for like 50 distros or so well through the different teams in the different distros but in practice it's been done by people all around the projects so adding a couple of them doesn't seem to be all that bad and i'll like you could say it's bringing a lot of of users already that that trust in these solutions so uh let's continue doing that as long as it works and when we see something that is unequivocally desirable let's go with it yeah um okay a question from Björn how about using k user feedback to estimate at least lower boundary of rest of linux users we are using it for some applications for example k is doing it already plasma is doing it already okay in practice what this means though is not that you're counting um people using linux you're counting people who enables the checkbox right which is very important if you're using some of our software enable that checkbox so that um well we can get all of this information and use it to develop our products but in practice that would be always be a crippled number like like just knowing the people who does not for example right it's a valid number it's a true number i believe but it will still be a crippled number and by the way i am not saying that we're ever gonna have a non crippled number in the free software communities we care about privacy and there are cases where you will not want your software to be talking elsewhere what i'm saying cases it doesn't mean that it's always the case but you will always have the case where you don't want your uh system to be talking elsewhere um i see k is our feedback as a good way to communicate what a portion of our um user base things and wants but as for counting users i hardly think that it's gonna be the right way of doing it but i can be proven wrong if you have a good plan uh join our bobs our meetings and let's see what we can do there okay thanks uh the next question is from buschan do you think that improving experience of third party developers who use kd frameworks or libraries should be part of this goal or that is a slightly different goal it's definitely an important topic for kd i am not sure it's something that this goal should be about because this goal is about the kd apps but then for example like i said in the in the beginning i started being a third party developer of an app and i ended up being well i am today which is very much in kd so there is definitely a path for a third party application developer to flourish into something that benefits the community at large i mean we can try it uh improving the developer experience is something that has been part of our goals uh in the past like well you all very well know for example through the onboarding goal it's something we touched on it's something we can touch over here on on on some on some level and some things that are definitely part of the of this goal would definitely um have a good impact on our third party developers so i don't know uh join the buffs and that's how the discussion about what kind of things we can do in practice it's not what i am going to do as the goal lay anyway it's more about well what kind of discussions we can have so people who are not doing work today because it's not like i can personally do any more kd work right now but other people who join they have to join us and see what kind of things they can do and then work together right yeah uh okay we still have time for questions this comes from Benson what was the first app you developed and why did you develop it uh i started developing kalgebra because i don't know i was 18 or so and i was bored i guess there was this application that was a similar ish two very original algebra that i quite liked when i was studying um um well high school and well i wanted to learn how to well implement the language specifically like how to turn an expression into something that could be computed and that's why i started doing kalgebra i would like to say i wanted to help teachers around the world uh and i did but that wasn't ultimately my first reason to do so the other reason also was that i was spending summer when i started uh somewhere with very limited internet connection and well i needed something to practice my flourishing c++ skills on back then for c even so i started researching and i ended up doing but i actually remember going through the process of like choosing which toolkit to use if i had to be using that cute thing or gtk or whatever so i didn't come even from katie perspective i just wanted to start coding i had i was to start university that year and well that's what i wanted to do so i did it okay we can squeeze one more in the question comes from fiesta's what are the apps that currently excite you the most well i find it really exciting how uh we were having all of the plasma mobile applications happening like all of a sudden we have a ton of kittigami applications that in practice we could have had like three years ago maybe but the fact that we have all our phone ready right now are suddenly available right so things like the podcast application uh is something i welcome i am personally a big user of podcasts and being able to use katie software for it is something i am looking forward to actually it's something that i was thinking like can i really uh reliably move into plasma mobile if i'm not gonna be able to listen to my podcasts and but it seems like this could be a thing so that's one problem less but obviously there's a lot of applications that we use generally every day and we also think for granted that dolphin it's important that they still exist the other one that we i am using every day today and i wasn't using every day like one year ago was neo chat right which is for connecting to atrix very well done very useful both dimension of course next year we'll be using it for experiencing academy right well let's not make assumptions of what academy is gonna look like today uh in a year of course okay thank you very much alice we'll see you later of course in the in the event but for now uh we'll be moving on to the next talk sessions thank you very much cool thanks adam thanks everyone