An Open Letter: A Proposal for a Unified Linux App Summit (LAS) 2026

Community
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:warning: Notice
This proposal is personal and must not be associated to any “status” I have as a GNOME Foundation member or GUADEC 2025 organizer.

:information_source: Crossposting
We already posted this in GNOME’s Discourse instance and there are multiple posts on social medias.
We would like to receive as much feedback as possible and discuss the idea together.

Hello everyone,

We are writing to you today to formally present a proposal that we believe represents a new, bold direction for the Linux desktop community. After observing the current landscape of our major conferences—GUADEC, Akademy, and the Linux App Summit—we’ve identified a shared challenge: a decline in traction and a reliance on the same core group of contributors and sponsors.

This proposal has been privately submitted to the leadership of the GNOME Foundation and KDE e.V. for their initial review. In the spirit of open-source collaboration and transparency, we are now publishing it as an open letter to the wider community for your feedback and discussion.

Our vision is to merge GUADEC, Akademy, and the Linux App Summit into one major annual conference. This unified event would be held in a fixed location, Brescia[1] , Italy, and would serve as a single, powerful platform to showcase the collective strength and innovation of the entire Linux desktop ecosystem.

We have detailed our vision in the full document, which we invite you all to read. The document covers:

  • The key challenges facing our conferences today.

  • The structural solution of a unified, fixed-location event.

  • The benefits for attendees (reduced costs and travel) and sponsors (increased value).

  • Our plan for a diverse track structure that respects and includes all communities.

  • Our commitment to preserving the identities of the individual communities within this new framework, ensuring that key gatherings and celebrations are not lost.

  • Our plan to invite other desktop environments and core technology teams to join the conversation.

We believe that by consolidating our efforts, we can create a more impactful and sustainable event that attracts new talent, secures diverse sponsorship, and fosters a stronger, more unified community for the future.

This is an open letter, and we welcome your thoughts and constructive feedback on this proposal. Please share your comments below. We are here to answer your questions and discuss this with you.
:link: 3. Proposal - Open Letter - Google Docs

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,

Pietro di Caprio & Mauro Gaspari

–
P.S.
Mauro Gaspari is going to be present at Akademy 2025 as exhibitor with the Ubuntu booth

  1. We’re open to suggestions for alternatives ↩︎

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On Mastodon, but not only, the following topic was hot:

Chapter 4.1 in the document proposes 4 talk days, followed by the trip day and then 3 workshop days.

This scheduling is an initial proposal, we already discussed the option of mixing workshop and talks to allow more people to attend the laboratories as not everyone can afford to attend more than few days.

It was too complicated to write a proposal that made sense in a short form and we preferred to postpone the discussion. You’re welcome to share your thoughts about what could be a good agenda for you.

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Pretty solid proposal.

Since this is addressed that the boards of the two primary participant organisations I would suggest and acknowledgment that they have tried something similar (Desktop Summit) already twice.

The main difference to the proposed conference is that this one would be at a fixed location and date.

There must have been other reasons why this has not been tried ever since.

Also not quite sure about the name.

Piggy backing on a know one has its advantages but also considerable drawback if the branding is too narrow.

I am an organizer of a local FOSS event and we have been battling the implications of having “Linux” in its name for years without any good solution.

Might be better to revive or reuse parts of the old name for the shared conference

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Thank you for sharing your feedback

The main difference, along with the fixed location, is the fact that would not be organized by the two foundations but by a third entity (to define) that has as only scope the organization and management of the conference. This is where the previous tentatives failed.

Allow me to say it in a bald way: there was shared responbility but each project wanted to care only the interest of their project. [1]

This proposal aims to a more tight cooperation thanks to, let’s say, a management control team. And aims to involve more and more projects while keeping a neutral position towards individual projects.

The final goal is to allow the projects and the communities to get the best from the conference(s) and enable growth.

  1. I’m not pointing the finger on any specific project. This is what I understood talking with people and sponsors. ↩︎

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In this it wouldn’t have happened, let alone twice.

There are of course differences in how each of their conferences are run, e.g. scheduling, registration costs, etc., but I doubt these would have been unresolvable, especially long term.

I attended both of these and they were fine.

In this case re-using one of the “source” names is even less ideal than then issue of the narrow target group definition.

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I had no chance to attend them. Talking with people, talking about the organization and the option for this proposal: that’s what I understood.

The Linux App Summit has a very good identity and would be a shame to let it go but I understand the point and we are totally open to proposals and changes.

I tried to state it in multiple places and ways: this is, indeed, a proposal and we’re not saying “if you don’t like it as it is then we won’t proceed”.

We prepared a base for discussions and defined few things trying to address the issues and doubts that arised while talking with few people (I spoke mainly with GNOME people while Mauro spoke mainly with KDE people).

The two boards also received the attachment that is mentioned in the open letter ( we didn’t filter anything we said to the boards when publishing the document) that addresses concerns about the management of the conference itself, of the expenses and of the sponsorships.
We preferred to keep this part of the discussion at a “higher level” as it requires to think as a legal entity and not as a community.

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As an outsider (“just a user”), I also don’t know about the word “App”. To me it sounds like the focus is on (3rd-party?) apps only, not on the desktop shell or other core technologies.

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In the same way “Desktop Summit” lets me think about desktop tech only but the three conferences don’t cover “just desktop”.

“App” could be meant as “Software”. Linux Software Summit? :man_shrugging:

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I liked both a lot :slight_smile:

Right, I am sure there are various opinions on that :smiley:

The two boards will hopefully provide you with additional feedback.

I can very much relate to the appeal of adopting an existing (and already shared) name.

However, as I wrote before, this can be a massive hurdle for growth/outreach.

When we created our local FOSS event it was almost “required” to have “Linux” in its name but since almost 10 years we are struggling to reach people outside of “traditional Linux”, e.g. people using FOSS on Windows/macOS or mobile OSes just don’t think the event would have anything for them.

You would be in a slightly better situation since your event would be a contributor event not a user event but then again you still have the opportunity not to put yourself into a cage.

The original shared conference’s name, Desktop Summit, was pretty good for the time (both communities’ "main” product being a desktop shell) but might already be considered a bit restrictive due to an increasing number of apps being also on mobile platforms and both primary communities working (at least partially) on mobile shells of their own.

Unfortunately I don’t have any good alternative ideas, just wanted to caution against “quick win” by taking a know name and then really struggling later to deal with unwanted implications.

Ah, I see you have posted another comment :slight_smile:

Exactly!

Very good name for that time, already a bit narrow today.

Naming is hard :see_no_evil_monkey:

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That’s not correct, actually: the U in GUADEC means Users and we aim to involve as many Users as possible in this “updated” conference.

Indeed we want to provide small (economically small) FOSS projects (software, distros, platforms, whatever) a free booth at the venue - for the Users.

I appreciate your constructive sharing :blush:

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It would be an honor to see the Summit in Italy; I suppose it’s because you who are proposing can offer help there, and this would be useful. But I also see that KDE mostly meet in Germany and I don’t know where Gnome people usually meets. Given the late interest of Germany in open source software in public institutions it makes sense that there’s so much traction there. Can you explain a little more why Brescia?

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Total outsider here, greatly love and appreciate the work you all do creating this ecosystem.

Question: isn’t one of the FOSS-world’s (a.k.a. “Linux”?) greatest strengths its diversity? I mean there’s probably a reason why all these projects are their own projects. I, for one, enjoy the clusterisation very much and don’t dream of a unified anything so much. So much choice and competition, so little danger of it all going downhill at once.

Maybe there is room for an additional meeting for all the cross-project topics?

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Sure, you essentially already got the point: I’m in Brescia and to guarantee I can provide the effort required to make this happen I need it to happen in Brescia.
This does not mean I would not help in other locations but I would not be able to provide the same effort to the project.

I’m not an expert of Akademy but as far as I know is like GUADEC and LAS: they change city and venue every edition. GUADEC never happened twice in the same venue, for example.

I organized GUADEC 2025, in Brescia this July, has been the first GUADEC edition in Italy and received very good feedback.

While organizing it I noticed the effort required to:

  1. organize, of course
  2. get sponsorships
  3. make it a great edition

as, both for GUADEC and LAS (again, I’m not expert of Akademy) the organization is relying on local volunteers: you don’t know if the edition is going to be good, great or bad until you are there.

Following the appreciation received for the quality and the results of GUADEC 2025, not only from the participants but from the sponsors too, we came up with the idea of fixing the location for an improved organization (again, wherever it would be located), based on the analysis of what has been done to make such edition.

I would say it’s both the greatest strength and the greatest weakness.

While it’s true you have plenty of choice, it’s also true you have too many choice. You can’t get everything easily and you have to choose what to miss.

We’re sure there is a way to create something where the diversity is kept, strong, while attendees can benefit from the overall idea.

Linux App Summit is such meeting. It’s already co-hosted between GNOME and KDE.

The idea behind LAS is to involve (more than how happens for the two main events) the local communities. The problem is that:

  • the local communities are not actually really involved
  • the sponsors are not interested anymore in funding the event as it does not have traction[1]
  • the volunteers are missing when is time to propose a new location and take responsability of organizing it

who is participating to LAS are people who are participating to GUADEC and/or KDE: so why not make LAS the main event with the advantages explained in the document (and extended in this thread)?

  1. We spoke to some sponsor, of course. One of those is Canonical, in the person of Mauro Gaspari, co-author of this proposal. ↩︎

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As I wrote elsewhere, I’d like to see a one-off experiment like that, but I don’t think it is wise to now commit to this for a long time.

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Failure is a strong word. I would suggest you don’t use it if you plan to make friends. The two Desktop Summits definitively did not fail.

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Looking at this year’s Akademy schedule (talks and BoFs), it is doing very well. It also focuses a lot more on plasma and KDE ecosystem. I am not sure whether a generalized Linux Desktop summit replacement for Akademy would be a good idea.

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If you take the full paragraph instead of intentionally extrapolate just the last sentence maybe works better:

I didn’t say that the conference has failed. I said that it’s management has failed and this is what led to not repeating the thing.

I spoke with people, I speak on the basis of what I was told by those who were there.

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Already stated that the agenda schedule is probably the biggest challenge but I’m sure we can achieve a good one. Requires time and effort but is feasible.

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Given that the proposal is based on the idea of building and sustaining competence around a dedicated team even a one-off experiment would at least need 3 years in a row to evaluate this properly.

Indeed. After 2009 and 2011 I was hoping we would be able to establish this as a bi-annual thing with our individual conferences inbetween.

I guess LAS filled part of the gap when that did not happen.

This is true, however it is possible to accommodate focused interest in a wider conference.

For example at this year’s Grazer Linuxtage we’ve added dedicated half-day tracks for two such focused interests (Digital Artists and Cloud Native) so these communities could select several more talks from their area which did not make it into the main program.

The talk schedule shouldn’t be that problematic, Universities usually have enough space for multiple tracks in parallel so it is mostly a question of personnel and equipment (cameras, etc).

I think the BoF/Workshop arrangements would be much more challenging.

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