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

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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.

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

  1. We’re open to suggestions for alternatives ↩︎

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Mauro Gaspari is participating to Akademy 2025 and is going to be available for in-person discussions

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looks like i missed the link in the initial posting!

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I like Brescia. Both the city and the university venue are pretty much ideal, and we already know the local organizers (thank you Pietro) can handle it. I also expect the university should be able to handle the conference doubling in size. There’s value in visiting new places regularly, but I understand there’s also value in sticking with what we know works, and that organizing a big conference in a new location every year is quite challenging.

We’ve previously co-located GUADEC and Akademy in 2009 (Gran Canaria) and 2011 (Berlin) and called it Desktop Summit. I remember long ago hearing some negative feedback about how this arrangement felt like two separate events sharing the same space. But I haven’t been around for that long. I’m curious how old-timers felt about it. We actually have a website https://desktopsummit.org/ for this colocated event, though it’s probably not worth saving.

I think a better name would be Linux Desktop Summit. Linux App Summit isn’t a great name since apps are only half of what we discuss.

Expanding from 6 days to 8 days is ambitious. I know we’ve done it before, but that’s a long event. I agree with going back to 3 days of BoFs. Do we really need 4 days of presentations?

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The “feedback” I have about past co-located GUADEC and Akademy is organization issues and this is one of the reasons behind the proposal of having a dedicated management entity for this new LAS.
The organization of the event should not rely/depend on GNOME nor KDE.

Everything is open to discussion, from the name of the conference to the location, dates and agenda structure.

We provided “hints” based on what we can personally help with. If the chosen location is not Brescia I can’t guarantee my full support in the same way. I’m up for other places but I couldn’t propose something I would not be able to make it happen.

Do we really need 4 days of presentations?
If we reach the goals we have: yes.

Is appropriate to have 4 days in a row + 3 for BoF?
Probably not. Indeed some discussion I had with few folks is about having a mix of workshops (BoF, whatever) during the talks days to increase the participation ratio. Was too complicated to put a proposal for that in the document so we left it out for further discussion.

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My experience with Linux App Summit is that the current members of GNOME and KDE get along very well. It’s been a long time since the last Desktop Summit and my perception is that the communities are much closer these days. I have also attended Akademy and had a great time. I don’t think nowadays it would feel like two separate events.

Although I see value in separating GNOME/KDE tracks to guarantee each communities’ topics get the proper space.

There’s also so much we share that we can even have a 3 track format to have space for shared topics. Mostly the topics that already get covered in LAS, such as the app ecosystem, Flatpak, Portals, desktop Linux outreach, etc… aiming for this 3 track format could help with blending the communities while giving each its own needed space.

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There are plenty of considerations to make, but overall I think that’s a great proposal. Thank you!

I have helped organize some of our events and witnessed the amount of energy and money it takes to put out a good event.

I see the fixed-location conference proposal as an opportunity to focus our energy into organizing generally better events.

When organizing an event in a new location, a lot of energy goes to figuring out venue, accommodation, transportation, and many other matters. Organizers often don’t have the resources to do additional things that could enrich our event experience.

With more organizing time available, we could focus on:

  • making more environmentally friendly decisions
  • making the event more accessible
  • improving the remote experience
  • better social events
  • organize other small/decentralized regional events
  • much more.
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Discussing the idea we planned to have separated, dedicated, tracks but then we tought: this would split the communities.
We should, in my opinion, do a great job in the agenda in order to mix the topics and have a more unified expierence with members of every community being able to attend speechs from every project.

I aim to 4 tracks…. :grimacing:

that’s the central point that, generally, only who already organized a conference can really understand

I understand the community members who like to change place every year but must be taken into account that this is also the main reason of not having the conferences to grow and keep a minimum experience quality level that satisfies.

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I didn’t attend 2009, but I was on the board in 2011, and I was in the room where GNOME decided not to do Desktop Summit again. It was not unanimous. Some people felt that we should continue doing Desktop Summit every other year. Others saw no value in doing Desktop Summit at all. I don’t remember anybody advocating for doing a joint event every year. My memory is that the KDE board wanted to do a Desktop Summit every other year, but obviously I wasn’t in that room.

From what I remember of the conversations, a big complaint from 2009 was that it felt like two separate events, with little point in having them together. In 2011, people tried to make it feel like a single event, but that led to complaints that we lost our identity and our shared social space. Both directions led to complaints, and it was viewed as a no-win scenario.

What I think most of us agreed on was that there was a small pocket of both communities that really do benefit from being in the same space, basically the people whose work involved being on xdg-list. And there was a large contingent of people that really just needed to be around other GNOME developers to make plans, hash out designs, or just form social bonds. What people disagreed on was how to best serve the needs of that small pocket without detracting from the needs of the large contingent. Doing a joint event every other year was viewed as a compromise that could work, but ultimately it’s not what we chose.

In the end, GNOME walked away from Desktop Summit, and (I think) Linux App Summit grew directly out of the desire to have some space where those small pockets of GNOME and KDE could talk. That has its advantages, as it doesn’t take anything away from the core identity of either project’s event. But it also has disadvantages, as it makes it harder to get the right people in the same place when everybody’s travel budgets shrink.

I don’t actually know if we made the right decision. And I don’t really know if the right decision 14 years ago is the right decision today. (14 years already?!) But that’s the history as I remember it.

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The genesis of our Linux App Summit started is that it was originally a GNOME only event (LAS GNOME, Linux App Summit, hosted by GNOME) with the idea that we would use this to find new sources of income/sponsors by focusing on apps and the app ecosystem since around that time flatpak just got started.

We did that for two years and then I heard wind that KDE was upset that we had this conference. I went to their board and outlined what this conference was about and invited them to come to our second LAS in Denver. They did attend although there was definitely a gap of trust. But the next one was joint in Barcelona and that I felt was a big success. It felt like a uniform event and with great interactions.

I definitely feel like we can continue to leverage LAS in this way, but if we were to make it all one conference I think that would be beneficial especially from a sponsorship perspective. But also, I think we can also use this to get desktop adjacent folks like kernel, graphics (XDC), and the freedesktop people together and start making this as a uniform userspace industry level conference.

I’ve always strongly felt that we are stronger when we all work together especially given how much investment has dropped off.

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