Author: Sriram Ramkrishna

Linux App Summit 2026 Social Media Retrospective

Linux App Summit 2026 Social Media Retrospective

This is my personal retrospective post – there will likely be some version of this that will go out to various stakeholders.

I want to start off by giving huge praise to our organizing team that worked really hard this year in putting this event together. Couldn’t ask for a better team to work with. Our organizing team is a mix of KDE and GNOME people.

This post will focus on the outreach, fundraising, and social media campaign since that was the bulk of the work I did for LAS this year.

Linux App Summit (LAS) for those who don’t know is a conference organized around the goal of encouraging developing apps on the Linux platform. With
the advent of technologies like Flatpak, we had the technology to be able to ship apps directly to users instead of through the distros. Opening
an opportunity for a bi-directional relationship between app developers and the users of their apps.

This year marks the 10th year I’ve been involved in organizing LAS and its previous incarnation, LAS GNOME. LAS is organized jointly by GNOME and KDE who help fund and promote the conference jointly. It is a showcase of how we can unite and do impactful things.

I was not able to attend this year due to other commitments. I hope other who did attend will weigh in and let us know how it was in-person.

Let’s get to it!

Challenging Myself

I wanted to challenge myself this year and really bring in the kind of engagement  that I could be proud of. I’ve not really had the kind of time I wanted to work on this and it was time to really focus and see what could be done with a proper plan. The goal I wanted to take myself is driving awareness and growing attendance on what our app ecosystem is doing.

What does that entail?

Improving our social media game

The underlying problem I have identified is that Linux and apps was not getting into the headspace of developers. It still felt that this conference was unknown even in our own spaces. We need to break out of Mastodon and start exploring different platforms and content.

In previous years, we were using Buffer since it was free but it was really difficult and unwieldy. We could only schedule 3 days in advance and at times the posts would just drop. We needed to first change the tools we used to really improve our engagement with the world.

With help from the sysadmins at the GNOME Foundation (thank you, GF and Andrea Veri and Bart!), we were able to install Mixpost a self-host social media platform. The two great things about Mixpost is 1) analytics of the posts and social media platforms we were active on and not so active on 2) have a workspace around all our social media accounts and have a team of people working in it with an editorial flow and content calendar. This allowed us to share the workload of posting among many members. For instance, when I wasn’t around, Aryan Kaushik was able to take it over and post. Mixpost is now also being used for various GNOME’s accounts as well. The software continues to improve and hopefully they’ll get around to single-signon support.

With the ability to actually have metrics, the next step is to actually take goals for each of the social media accounts we had and see if we could meet them. Below is a table of the targets I took and the results from February 2026 – May 2026. Instagram was actually started in the beginning of May.

Social Media Start Count Target Count Result
Mastodon 596 796 926 👍🏼
LinkedIn 534 700 619 👍🏼
BlueSky 0 100 39
YouTube 1420 N/A 1610
Instagram 0 N/A 42

Overall, I think we did ok! The high count for Mastodon was because of the great work of the GNOME and KDE accounts on mastodon boosting our posts and helping promoting them before, during, and after LAS. I noticed doing things like polls on mastodon got a lot of attention without needing boosts from the other accounts.

We had decent engagement on LinkedIn. Certainly better than in the past. The trick though is that LinkedIn requires a different lens when you post. Since it is mostly focus on B2B and B2C type of messaging you need to write them differently. I didn’t do it this time because writing social media posts is hard and takes a lot of time and thought.

I didn’t take any goals for YouTube since we did not conceive that we would create content targeted for YouTube. In a spur of the moment, I did a ‘podcast style’ conversation between Matthias Clasen and myself talking about LAS. That gave us about 354 views. Which was encouraging and gives us some idea how organic content on YouTube would be received.

Bluesky was a new account for us. So we started with zero. We gained 39 followers. That might not seem like a lot given the time frame but BlueSky is an interesting platform when it comes to engagement. You can get quite a bit of engagement even if the follower count is low. I think given more time on the platform we’ll be able to make that 100+ if we keep posting content. I think hashtags matter here and playing with the right kind of hashtag and content matters. Bluesky is also was a great experiment when you didn’t have big accounts like GNOME and KDE boosting you.

The media partners we had 9to5Linux, Tuxdigital, It’s FOSS, and Linux Magazine all helped in this regard by using their accounts boost our posts in these other platforms and give us visibility. Thank you to our media partners for helping out and we hope we can work with them closer next year. I’ll like to engage with them further to see how we can help each other out including contributing content. Another idea is to reach out to the speakers of these talks and get them to write some articles that could be contributed based on their talks.

Finally, Instagram. This is an untapped gold mine. I was skimming through the platform looking for GNOME/KDE/Linux desktop type posts to see how well content did. Saw one young lady, who showed off her GNOME desktop with some caption and it gave her 130k views. It was about 10 seconds long. That was impressive. I posted a short video talking about Linux App Summit, and while I got about 130 views – the analytics said most stopped watching after 9 seconds of the 4 minute video I posted. That hurt my pride. I resolved to do better and get better engagement with a 10-15 second video that packed more information and visually more stimulating. As of now the LAS account is still gaining followers despite not posting for 2 weeks. Once again, the media partners helped by liking my posts while the other accounts lay idle.

Working with YouTube Influencers

One other aspects of my plan on boosting the visibility of LAS was to start working with influencers on various platforms. I made a few attempts with a few I knew but was only able to get on one podcast – Tux Digital. Michael Tunnell was kind enough to invite Aleix Pol and myself on his show. For an hour and half, we answered questions and did some bantering. We even went in some organic directions that was fun! I know I had fun, I hope Aleix did too. The exposure was pretty good with approximately 8k+ views for that episode that was 90 minutes. The feedback to the video was very positive with many resolving to attend the conference. Unfortunately, I didn’t set up utm links so that I know where people came from.

Through social media and influencers, we hoped to break out of our media ecosystem and branch out to platforms that developers and Linux enthusiasts hang out and consume content. Meeting where developers are needs to be something we will need to focus on going forward.

Results

The in-person conference was a success, we had 110 people at the conference, the venue capacity was 100. We had 156 people who registered for the conference, this is about a 71% conversion rate. The industry average for free  in-person events is 50%. For LAS, this is unprecedented because we usually had a much worse turnover rate historically. At one point, a few years ago I had started looking into doing registration fees to give people some reason to go and not ghost the conference.

For online this year, we had about 50 online registrations  but it’s hard to gauge anything about online participation since we freely published the YouTube link on social media.

The results for the conference for online had the following results on YouTube:

2025 2026
Day 1 Views 922 1.7k
Day 2 Views 485 1.5k

The above numbers show views within the 24 hour period of each day. These are really good numbers where we’ve more than doubled our viewership on one of the two days compared to last year. Ostensibly, it shows that our social media did build awareness.

Here is the (still increasing) numbers as of now on Youtube:

First Day: 2k views
Second day: 2.7k views

The videos are currently being broken up into individual talks. But the individual talks as of now are averaging about 300 views or so with the top one being 900+ views for Lennart’s keynote.

The aggregate views for all the 13 individual talk videos posted so far is 4.9k. If we combined that with the combined 2k and 2.7k views, we can simplistically (mathematically speaking) would be 9.6k. Interestingly enough, that is not a big difference from the 8k views of Tux Digital podcast that Aleix and I were on. 😀

In regards, to the people who attended Linux App Summit, 16 people filled out the surveys and by in-large most of the people who attended heard about LAS through word of mouth and not so much through social media. So, that’s an interesting data point. I expect that is because of people like Lorenz Wildberg (thank you!) who did on the ground outreach.

Interestingly, enough our online views were quite good compared to say SCALE which peaked at 7.1k views for one talk but in general the average views was less than the average views than at LAS. Our subject matter is increasingly important.

Also to be clear, views do not translate to people.

Looking towards 2027, we’ll want to increase our in-person attendance while doubling our online views. Something we will be focusing on when we organize for next year.

Next Steps

Our organizing team will be posting relevant individual talks on social media once all the individual videos have been posted. I hope you all share those with everyone.

Secondly, we would love to add more people to our organizing team. Specifically, in order to really build out our outreach we need a lot more people to help network and reach out to developers from different communities and different platforms. This way we can start building relationships with other desktop projects, app developers, game developers, designers not just from Linux but from other platforms as well. For that we need a small army of advocates.

 

Thanks

I wanted to add the social media work is a team effort and that I would like to thank Aryan Kaushik and Aniqa Khokar for helping write posts and editing them. As well, I would like to thank Caroline Henriksen for doing all the images and themes on social media!

GNOME OS Hackfest During FOSDEM week

For those of you who are attending FOSDEM, we’re doing a GNOME OS hackfest and invite those of you who might be interested on our experiments on concepts as the ‘anti-distro’, eg an OS with no distro packaging that integrates GNOME desktop patterns directly.

The hackfest is from January 28th – January 29th. If you’re interested, feel free to respond on the comments. I don’t have an exact location yet.

We’ll likely have some kind of BigBlueButton set up so if you’re not available to come in-person you can join us remotely.

Agenda and attendees are linked here here.

There is likely a limited capacity so acceptance will be “first come, first served”.

See you there!

Linux App Summit 2025 – Call for Papers Open Now

It’s that time again, and we are in our 7th year doing this conference (if you include LAS GNOME).

This year, LAS will be held in Tirana, Albania and we are going all out this year to make it the best conference representing apps on Linux.

For those who don’t know or have not heard of Linux App Summit, the idea is to have desktops work together to help enable application developers to build apps on the Linux platform. It’s a parallel effort to the Flathub and Snapstore app stores.

LAS is positioned to promote third party developers, inform the ecosystems are the advances on the desktop, and for developers, designers, and contributors working on the desktops to meet each other and discuss how to move the platform forward as a community.

LAS’s success depends on all of you. If you’re passionate about making Linux as a viable alternative to proprietary platform then we need your help! Linux enables local control of your technology that you can adapt to your needs. Build local ecosystems enabling a local economy. A community driven platform will protect your privacy, safety, and security without bowing to shareholders or to politicians. This is the place to tell us about it!

So, I ask all of you to attend LAS, help drive our numbers up. Have a great idea that you won’t to share with this ecosystem of developers? Implemented something on a phone, in an automobile, or something else? Have a great concept? Want to update all of us on what the next version of your app is going to do?

Through here, we can find out what is missing? What do we need to do move forward? What are the trends we should be looking at?

Feel free to reach out to our team and we’ll be happy to answer any questions at info@linuxappsummit.org.

You can submit a talk at https://iinuxappsummit.org/cfp. You can register for the conference at https://linuxappsummit.org/register.

Can’t come in person or give the talk in person? Not to worry! LAS is a hybrid conference and you can attend from remote even though we would love to meet you in person.

Finally, we are looking for sponsors. If you know of a company who would make a great sponsor please reach out. If you’re interested in sponsoring LAS, you can email us at sponsors@linuxappsummit.org. For more info at https://linuxappsummit.org/sponsor.

 

 

GUADEC 2022 – GUADALAJARA

Last month, I was fortunate enough to be able to attend GUADEC in Guadalajara. It was thrilling to see everyone in person after a two-year absence. Even better, after many attempts we finally were able to have GUADEC in Mexico!!

For those who don’t know, the genesis of all that came from these chain of events 2016. At the time, I was working at Intel, and one of the kernel developers at Guadalajara, who just happened to be the keynote speaker at GUADEC, connected me to Manuel Haro – he had a conference called CISOL that he was running and needed a keynote speaker.

It so happened that Neil McGovern had recently became the Executive Director of GNOME just a few weeks ago. I told Manuel that Neil would be the better option but he ended up wanting both of us to speak. So we both ended up in Zacatecas, MX. Incidentally, that was when I first met Neil and this sparked the beginning of a beautiful friendship!! So, really it seems quite fitting that his GNOME adventure began and ended in Mexico!!!

The conference itself was great, I enjoyed a number of the talks especially the ones by Endless folks. I missed some that I’m grateful to be able to go back and  watch.

I gave a talk around ecosystems and the GNOME community. This was quite a personal talk for me and centered on how communities should always be reaching out to other communities. I used Linux App Summit as an example of how this worked in practice and its effects on the ecosystems. We are mightier as a meta community than we are as individual silos if you want the tl;dr.

It’s mildly ironic that the attendees likely were interested in a technical talk. 🙂 There is a certain amount of self selection there – as a project, we tend to talk about our woes around resource management or growing community – but it’s important that we all have agency and that solving people-problems needs to be a shared goal.

This GUADEC was a very special one for me. My wife, Aarti, also joined me on this trip. While not her first open source conference, this is the first one where she was a speaker/workshop lead. Her workshop was all around understanding Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) from the point of view of an educator. As a person who teaches young humans,  she provided observations, facts and visual presentations to help understand how young girls and persons of color become discouraged from entering STEM fields. Big props to the audience who bought their authentic selves and listened and participated with their full heart and and souls. There was laughter, tears, and authentic heartfelt expressions of wanting to be an ally. To my wife, this was her first exposure to the GNOME community – and they did not disappoint. It was certainly a bonding experience for her with many in the GNOME community. My wife is an amazing human, and I’m lucky to be part of her life and have her light join mine on this journey of ours.

Guadalajara was amazing – the random acts of kindness that we experienced while walking this city made this city special for us. It also felt like home, and by that I mean – it felt like we were in India. The sights, the smells, and the flora. Even the monsoon level rains and the flooding – all familiar things for us. The food was amazing – and it comes down to the fresh, local produce that we as Americans do not appreciate. The intensity of flavors and spice made the same food you get in the U.S. feel bland. We intend to return with the rest of our family and be able to enjoy Mexico a bit more – in the meanwhile, I’ll be working hard on my Spanish so that I can be my authentic self. As a social person, it really kills me that I cannot express myself and forced to use English in a non-English speaking country.

I would like to thank the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring mine and Aarti’s trip.

 

Community metrics

Some may know that I’m involved, as part of building an app ecosystem, in figuring out how to measure Free Software communities. We formed a working group within the CHAOSS project.

One of the things that we want to do is figure out community metrics for both KDE and GNOME. This post is related to GNOME but should be universally applicable.

Going forward, the importance of making decisions through data is going to be more important. We know that we are under-resourced, and we vaguely know where we are under-resourced but we have no data to conclusively show anything about our community.

If we have successes, we should be able to demonstrate that. If people want to donate or be part of an advisory board – then they have something to assess. And yes, the data could also prove or disprove aspects of our community if we are honest with ourselves. Metrics should be thoughtful and tell the right and accurate story.

Collecting data has always been a challenge for Free Software – this is because we are all rightly skittish about giving up our privacy. We should still be able to collect data without compromising privacy and by showing what decisions this data is driving and what questions are being answered.

Doing this can make us more goal-oriented. That’s going to be important.

To that end, in addition to working with the CHAOSS project, I’m also working with Georg of Bitergia and publishing the metrics that come from the GNOME GitLab. Right now, the work will require looking at metrics collections, making sure that it is accurate, and then building an engine that can be used by the community, maintainers, foundation staff, and Directors of the GNOME Foundation based on conversations within the community. I hope to do a lot of that at this years GUADEC.

There will be a series of blog posts where I’ll be talking about these metrics and going through the ramifications of building community metrics.

We are using Cauldron whose components are all developed under an OSI approved license. You can find the metrics for the GNOME community at https://cauldron.io/project/6416.

If you’re interested in being a fledgling data scientist, community manager, or just love to look at data – feel free to reach out. We would love to have you.

This series will also be cross posted to dev.to as well.

 

The GNOME Extensions Rebooted Initiative

With the advent of the new release of GNOME 3.38 – we want to start focusing next cycle on improving the GNOME Extensions experience.

I’m using my blog for now – but we will have a extensions blog where we can start chatting about what’s going on in this important space.

What Extensions Rebooted Initiative is about

It is not a surprise that most people are aware that a large number of extensions break after each release which causes a lot of friction in the community.

Extensions Rebooted is a collaborative effort to address the issues around the GNOME Shell extension ecosystem. We want to start addressing this by making a number of policy changes and technological improvements while building a sustainable community.

Here are some highlights on how we plan to creating a better experience for GNOME extensions:

  • Proper documentation of how extensions work, reasonable expectations to be an extensions developer, participating in the GNOME extensions community.
  • Build CI pipeline (a virtual machine) for extension writers to test their extensions prior to GNOME releases.
  • Centralizing extensions for break testing on the GNOME gitlab space
  • Creating a forum for extension developers and extension writers to work together for the GNOME release cycle

To appreciate and expand on the details of this project, you should check out the Extensions Rebooted Bof on the last GUADEC and my GUADEC talk.

The Extensions Rebooted initiative’s ultimate goal is to get the extensions community to work with each other, have closer ties with GNOME shell developers and provide documentation and tools.

Extension writers are encouraged to get involved and build this better experience. Consumers of extensions are requested to help spread the word and encourage extensions developers to participate so we can all benefit.

To get involved:

GNOME Discourse:

  • Use the “extensions” tag when submitting questions about extensions.

Chat:

Gitlab:

The success of GNOME extensions cannot happen without participation and contributions from the community and so I hope that all of us who write extensions, who are interested in providing technical documentation, and have experience in CI pipelines/devops  can come together and make extensions a sustainable part of the GNOME ecosystem.

The next post will talk about using a pre-built VM image that extension developers can use to test their extensions and have them ready to be used prior to GNOME 3.38 appearing on distributions.

GNOME Extensions BoF – 18:00 UTC July 26, 2020

We will be having a conversation around extensions and the future of how we will be handling them based on policy, community, and other important factors.

If you are an extensions writer, then I would urge you to join our BoF to help understand what we will be doing with extensions going forward and also provide feedback. We do not want to do this in a vacuum.

https://events.gnome.org/event/16/

Looking forward to hearing from the community. Please understand some of things we will be talking about is:

* Centralilzing the location of extensions to the GNOME gitlab (not necessarily develop your extensions there, but if you want it on e.g.o then it will need to pass QA tests)

* Automatic QAing of extensions prior to release of gnome-shell.
* Policies
* Documentation
* Community building

See you there!

Linux Application Summit 2019 – retrospective

I wanted to pen something before the year is gone about the recent Linux Application Summit 2019. This is the 3rd iteration of the conference and each iteration has moved the needle forward.

The thing that excites me going forward is what we can do when we work together between our various free and open source communities. LAS represents forming a partnership and building a new community around applications. By itself the ‘desktop’ doesn’t mean much to the larger open source ecosystems not because it isn’t important because the frenetic pace of open source community expansion have moved so fast that these communities do not have organizational history of foundational technologies that our communities have built over the years that they use every day and maintain.

To educate them would be too large of a task instead we need to capitalize on the hunger for technology, toolchains, and experience that build and possess. We can do that by presenting ourselves as the apps community which presents no prejudice to the outside community. We own apps, because we own the mindshare through maturity, experience, and communities that spring around it.

From here, we can start representing apps not just through the main Linux App Summit, but through other venues. Create the Apps tracks at FOSDEM, Linux Foundation events, Plumbers etc.

In the coming weeks, I will be working with other conference organizers around the globe to see how we can create these tracks and have ourselves represent ourselves there.

LAS represented the successful creation of a meta-community and from there we can build the influence we need to build the norms we need to build on the desktop.

Looking forward to 2020!

Big thanks to the GNOME Foundation for their support of Linux Application Summit.

Let’s fight back against patent trolls

The GNOME Foundation has taken the extraordinary step of not just defending itself against a patent troll but to aggressively go after them. This is an important battle. Let’s me explain.

The initial reason for Rothschild to come after us they clearly believe that the GNOME Foundation has money and that they can shake us down and get some easy money with their portfolio of patents.

If we had lost or given them the money, it would have made us a mark to not just Rothschild, but to every other patent troll who are probably watching this unfold. Worse, it means that all the other non-profits would be fair game . We do not want to set that precedent. We need to set a strong message that if they attack us they attack us all.

The GNOME Foundation manages infrastructure around the GNOME Project which consists of an incredible amount of software over a nearly 23 year period. This software is used in everything from medical devices, to consumer devices like the Amazon Kindle and Smart TVs, and of course the GNOME desktop.

The GNOME Project provides the tooling, software, and more importantly the maintenance and support for for the community. Bankrupting the GNOME Foundation would mean that these functions would take a terrible blow and cripple the important work we do. The companies that depend on these tools and software will also be similarly hit. That is just one non-profit foundation.

There are many others, Apache, Software Freedom Conservancy and the FSF amongst others. They would be just as vulnerable as we are now.

What Rothschild has done is not just attack GNOME, but all of us in Free Software and Open Source, our toolchains that we depend, and the software we use. We can’t let that happen. We need to strongly repudiate this patent troll, and not only defend ourselves but to neuter them and make an example of them to warn off any other patent troll that thinks we are easy pickings.

Companies, individuals, governments should give money so we can make a singularly statement – not here, not now, not ever!  Let’s set that precedence. Donate to the cause. GNOME has a history of conquering its bullies. But we can’t do that without your help.

An American President once said “They counted on us to be passive. They counted wrong.”

Donate now! 

 

West Coast Hackfest – Summary

Sorry this was supposed to have gone out some weeks ago and I lazed it up. Blame it on my general resistance to blogging. 🙂

This year, I helped organize West Coast Hackfest with my stalwart partner and friend Teresa Hill in Portland – with assistance from Kristi Progi. Big thanks to them for helping to make this a success!

Primarily the engagement hackfest was focused on the website content. The website is showing its age and needs both a content update and a facelift. Given our general focus on engagement, we want to re-envision the website to drive that engagement as a medium for volunteer capture, identity, and fundraising.

The three days of engagement hackfest was spent going through each of the various pages and pointing out issues in the content and what should be fixed. Fixing them is a little bit problematic as the content is not generally available on WordPress but embedded in the theme of which few people have access to. Another focus will be opening up that content and finding alternatives to create content without having to touch the theme at all.

Our observations going through them are as follow:

  • Our website doesn’t actually identify what we are as a project and what we work on. (eg the word desktop doesn’t show up anywhere on our website)
  • There is no emotional connection for newcomers who want to know what GNOME is, what our values are
  • We have old photos from early 6-7 years ago that need to be updated.
  • The messaging that we have developed within the engagement team is not reflected on the website and should be updated accordingly
  • We have items on our technologies that are no longer maintained like Telepathy
  • We have new items on our technology page that need to be added
  • We have outdated links to social media (eg G+ should no longer exist)

Our tour of the website has shown how out of date our website has and it is clear that it is not part of the engagement process. One of the things we will talk about in GUADEC is managing content and visuals on the website as part of the engagement team activity. We have an opportunity to really find new ways to connect with our users, volunteers, and donors and reach out to potential new folks through the philanthropy and activism in Free Software that we do.

I would like to thank the GNOME Foundation for providing the resources and infrastructure to have us all here.

The plans for West Coast Hackfest is to continue to expand its participation in the U.S. As a U.S. based non-profit, we have a responsibility to expand our mission in the United States as part of our Foundation activities. While we have been quite modest this year, we hope to expand even larger for next year as another vehicle like GUADEC as a meeting place for users, maintainers, designers, documentators and everyone else.

If you are interested in hosting West Coast Hackfest – (we’ll call it something else – suggestions?) then please get in touch with Kristi Progi and myself. We will love to hear from you!