See, they have some very remote sites and only the wireless parts which is there.
So the second part that they need to use. And the third part is that for some
remote workers, they basically use VPN and they push more for web applications used for those.
Use case wise, where you get all the operations you might have by someone making
wines, right? So you have like the actual winemaking with the labs and so on.
And then you find gradually more classical, I would say, type of operations inside of the company.
Obviously, they have to do some logistics, packaging and so on.
And they are big enough to have like their own IT department completely in-house.
All of those user groups, though, they have one thing in common,
which is the typical office work.
So office documents, email, calendaring, this kind of stuff.
And each of those groups, of course, also have their own niche use,
right? Because if you're working
in a lab, you're not doing the same thing than someone in a warehouse.
So what do they use?
Interestingly, they...
On the desktop, that's mostly Linux that they use, okay?
So, well, you get the colors, right?
Red, that's proprietary, that's bad. The other colors, that's fine, right?
So they have very minor use of Windows there because they tried to move everyone
to Linux like 20 years ago.
And right now they have Ubuntu 22 something with their own patches.
They are actually very interesting because they are very mature.
They actually do, they test their own patches.
They do their own packaging on top and so on, which we don't see that often in customers.
On the desktop side, so that the blue blobs that we have on the left,
they completely banked on Plasma Desktop plus the smaller utilities coming with it.
And then they have a few critical applications for them. Greenview,
Ocular, Inkscape, LibreOffice, Firefox, fighting for dominance with Google Chrome
like everywhere else, I guess, and Console.
You might think that they use Console only on the IT department,
but interestingly, they use
it in other departments as well because their ERP, the ERP that they use.
There's interesting functionalities which are provided I did only via terminal use.
So, yeah, you get your office clerk doing some things in console there.
So that's for the desktop, right? And then most of the rest,
because that's enterprise desktop, right?
Most of the rest has been moved to web applications.
For that, that's a mix of on-site servers and cloud use.
And you get like a bigger mix of,
free and proprietary software there. They have a couple, so the yellow ones,
that's a couple of software that they made in-house for their own use.
And obviously, I couldn't fit everything that they have, right,
they have much larger offering there.
The last block on the right, that's the supporting services on which everything else is provided.
So for instance, they provide remote desktop access for the remote workers,
for instance, LDAP server, and the file sharing is mostly through Samba,
but there's currently a move slightly in popularity.
People are using a bit more and more Google Drive there.
So they decided to have this kind of organization, as I said,
20 years ago, because they figured back then that the web apps would basically
start to eat everything.
I got a nice quote from them, which is basically, in summary, the rise of the browser.
That's what cemented the case for the Linux desktop, right?
If there was not that move, then they would probably be more dependent on business-specific
applications, which would be on Windows.
But since everything of that moved on the web space, then it's much easier to
actually say, well, let's move everything to Plasma, right?
So we did a bunch of things with them. First, we got in touch a little while ago now,
we actually spotted like an email on the KD mailing list and there were people
with problems and no one could do that on their volunteer time.
So we simply reached out and said, okay, what's exactly the problem?
Could you help us figure that out?
And we've seen if we could do that through paid work.
Nothing came out of that quite immediately, but we kept the communication open for over a year.
And then they had a real blocker. They were like, yeah, OK, this one,
you really need to help us there.
And so that started with some PDF rendering in Ocular.
So that's a funny case as well, because while they are making wines and so wine
bottles and those labels on the bottles, right?
So they have to deal with Reprographics companies.
Companies and so they have a very extensive use of PDF and some features that
you don't generally use in PDFs and especially the overprinting preview was
completely missing in Ocular and they wanted to get rid of Acrobat Reader for Linux.
They kept around just for that so we had to fix that.
We also figured out that there were some more cases of Ocular failing some of the.
Pdf test suites that you find around there
so one of those has been fixed as well i'm not getting in the details for technical
for time reasons uh mostly um with the spread and their use of semba they use
cifs mounts on linux quite extensively and so obviously they find issues,
uh so again with ocular we figured that there was no chance to properly save
changed files when they were on the IFS mounts that required fixing KIO.
KIO again, they had problems with the directory listing for the file dialogue
that we addressed with some heuristics and aggressive caching.
And then they started to throw us in different directions.
So closer to LibreOffice where there were issues during saves as well.
And we actually carried that one all the way to the kernel and figured out that
was actually a problem in the CIFS driver on the kernel.
We took the opportunity to actually figure, okay, you've been using all this
stuff for 20 years, right? What do you think of it?
So they're very loyal, right?
The good for them is KDE 4. For them, the switch to KDE 4, that's been a major
shift in the way KDE saw itself and how they perceived KDE.
So from them, that was like moving from hobbyist to actually professional project.
They actually even mentioned R and Cygo as instrumental for this change of perception.
They like the fact that we maintain a standard desktop windowing interface paradigm.
They think it's cool that other communities experiment, maybe more and so on,
but for the enterprise desktop, they need that, right? Because they need their
user to have something stable and known.
And they like the overall responsiveness and developer access,
which is generally very good, depending on the volunteer time, obviously.
The bad, good thing, not much, they said, but if you push a bit, you learn a few things.
Things, they found out because they use authenticated proxies that the KDE community
services, like getting the Plasma themes or this kind of stuff when you talk
to the store, that apparently doesn't work.
Well or at all. They think that maybe the web-first support could be a bit better,
especially if you think about this kind of shit that is a bit from Samba to
Google Drive or things like that.
You would want to take something which has been synced locally and then open
it directly in Google Docs, right? And it's a bit clumsy right now to do that.
And obviously, they thought that 5D professional development support wasn't
easy, and so they were actually happy to find us.
I got a nice quote for the whole community, so you can praise all yourself for that.
So from their project manager, who said that he's been participating in many
communities over the years, and for him, I mean, we're basically a shining beacon
of doing things right, balancing the growth, the innovation,
the health management, And that's not something easy, so yay us, right?
As a conclusion, we learned a few things.
So I'm kind of extrapolating from a single case here, but I see other enterprise desktop use.
So we can make a few informed guesses. We make a fine enterprise desktop already,
which is good. It could be even better if we go a bit further in embracing the web applications case.
And if it was easier or clearer, I don't know, to get the professional support
that people are looking for.
We successfully tried a contract model with them. That's probably something
which won't scale. So we can do that because that's one customer.
But if we want to handle more of them, we probably would have to be a bit more creative there.
That might require gauging the market a bit to find the right approach to actually handle that.
And which means we might want to do a survey or something like this to get better
information about the enterprise use cases for the existing users, right?
Because that's one that there's probably more we can learn from to figure out their needs.
This is a very short talk. I couldn't get into the hardcore technical details.
You can trust me, that was very fun.
There will be a post on my blog sometime next week with all the gritty details
if you want that and thanks for your attention Kervin.