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See, they have some very remote sites and only the wireless parts which is there.

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So the second part that they need to use. And the third part is that for some

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remote workers, they basically use VPN and they push more for web applications used for those.

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Use case wise, where you get all the operations you might have by someone making

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wines, right? So you have like the actual winemaking with the labs and so on.

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And then you find gradually more classical, I would say, type of operations inside of the company.

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Obviously, they have to do some logistics, packaging and so on.

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And they are big enough to have like their own IT department completely in-house.

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All of those user groups, though, they have one thing in common,

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which is the typical office work.

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So office documents, email, calendaring, this kind of stuff.

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And each of those groups, of course, also have their own niche use,

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right? Because if you're working

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in a lab, you're not doing the same thing than someone in a warehouse.

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So what do they use?

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Interestingly, they...

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On the desktop, that's mostly Linux that they use, okay?

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So, well, you get the colors, right?

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Red, that's proprietary, that's bad. The other colors, that's fine, right?

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So they have very minor use of Windows there because they tried to move everyone

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to Linux like 20 years ago.

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And right now they have Ubuntu 22 something with their own patches.

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They are actually very interesting because they are very mature.

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They actually do, they test their own patches.

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They do their own packaging on top and so on, which we don't see that often in customers.

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On the desktop side, so that the blue blobs that we have on the left,

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they completely banked on Plasma Desktop plus the smaller utilities coming with it.

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And then they have a few critical applications for them. Greenview,

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Ocular, Inkscape, LibreOffice, Firefox, fighting for dominance with Google Chrome

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like everywhere else, I guess, and Console.

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You might think that they use Console only on the IT department,

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but interestingly, they use

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it in other departments as well because their ERP, the ERP that they use.

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There's interesting functionalities which are provided I did only via terminal use.

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So, yeah, you get your office clerk doing some things in console there.

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So that's for the desktop, right? And then most of the rest,

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because that's enterprise desktop, right?

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Most of the rest has been moved to web applications.

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For that, that's a mix of on-site servers and cloud use.

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And you get like a bigger mix of,

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free and proprietary software there. They have a couple, so the yellow ones,

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that's a couple of software that they made in-house for their own use.

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And obviously, I couldn't fit everything that they have, right,

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they have much larger offering there.

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The last block on the right, that's the supporting services on which everything else is provided.

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So for instance, they provide remote desktop access for the remote workers,

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for instance, LDAP server, and the file sharing is mostly through Samba,

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but there's currently a move slightly in popularity.

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People are using a bit more and more Google Drive there.

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So they decided to have this kind of organization, as I said,

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20 years ago, because they figured back then that the web apps would basically

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start to eat everything.

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I got a nice quote from them, which is basically, in summary, the rise of the browser.

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That's what cemented the case for the Linux desktop, right?

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If there was not that move, then they would probably be more dependent on business-specific

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applications, which would be on Windows.

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But since everything of that moved on the web space, then it's much easier to

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actually say, well, let's move everything to Plasma, right?

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So we did a bunch of things with them. First, we got in touch a little while ago now,

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we actually spotted like an email on the KD mailing list and there were people

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with problems and no one could do that on their volunteer time.

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So we simply reached out and said, okay, what's exactly the problem?

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Could you help us figure that out?

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And we've seen if we could do that through paid work.

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Nothing came out of that quite immediately, but we kept the communication open for over a year.

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And then they had a real blocker. They were like, yeah, OK, this one,

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you really need to help us there.

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And so that started with some PDF rendering in Ocular.

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So that's a funny case as well, because while they are making wines and so wine

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bottles and those labels on the bottles, right?

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So they have to deal with Reprographics companies.

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Companies and so they have a very extensive use of PDF and some features that

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you don't generally use in PDFs and especially the overprinting preview was

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completely missing in Ocular and they wanted to get rid of Acrobat Reader for Linux.

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They kept around just for that so we had to fix that.

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We also figured out that there were some more cases of Ocular failing some of the.

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Pdf test suites that you find around there

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so one of those has been fixed as well i'm not getting in the details for technical

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for time reasons uh mostly um with the spread and their use of semba they use

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cifs mounts on linux quite extensively and so obviously they find issues,

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uh so again with ocular we figured that there was no chance to properly save

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changed files when they were on the IFS mounts that required fixing KIO.

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KIO again, they had problems with the directory listing for the file dialogue

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that we addressed with some heuristics and aggressive caching.

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And then they started to throw us in different directions.

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So closer to LibreOffice where there were issues during saves as well.

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And we actually carried that one all the way to the kernel and figured out that

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was actually a problem in the CIFS driver on the kernel.

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We took the opportunity to actually figure, okay, you've been using all this

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stuff for 20 years, right? What do you think of it?

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So they're very loyal, right?

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The good for them is KDE 4. For them, the switch to KDE 4, that's been a major

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shift in the way KDE saw itself and how they perceived KDE.

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So from them, that was like moving from hobbyist to actually professional project.

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They actually even mentioned R and Cygo as instrumental for this change of perception.

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They like the fact that we maintain a standard desktop windowing interface paradigm.

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They think it's cool that other communities experiment, maybe more and so on,

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but for the enterprise desktop, they need that, right? Because they need their

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user to have something stable and known.

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And they like the overall responsiveness and developer access,

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which is generally very good, depending on the volunteer time, obviously.

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The bad, good thing, not much, they said, but if you push a bit, you learn a few things.

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Things, they found out because they use authenticated proxies that the KDE community

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services, like getting the Plasma themes or this kind of stuff when you talk

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to the store, that apparently doesn't work.

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Well or at all. They think that maybe the web-first support could be a bit better,

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especially if you think about this kind of shit that is a bit from Samba to

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Google Drive or things like that.

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You would want to take something which has been synced locally and then open

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it directly in Google Docs, right? And it's a bit clumsy right now to do that.

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And obviously, they thought that 5D professional development support wasn't

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easy, and so they were actually happy to find us.

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I got a nice quote for the whole community, so you can praise all yourself for that.

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So from their project manager, who said that he's been participating in many

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communities over the years, and for him, I mean, we're basically a shining beacon

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of doing things right, balancing the growth, the innovation,

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the health management, And that's not something easy, so yay us, right?

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As a conclusion, we learned a few things.

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So I'm kind of extrapolating from a single case here, but I see other enterprise desktop use.

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So we can make a few informed guesses. We make a fine enterprise desktop already,

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which is good. It could be even better if we go a bit further in embracing the web applications case.

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And if it was easier or clearer, I don't know, to get the professional support

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that people are looking for.

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We successfully tried a contract model with them. That's probably something

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which won't scale. So we can do that because that's one customer.

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But if we want to handle more of them, we probably would have to be a bit more creative there.

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That might require gauging the market a bit to find the right approach to actually handle that.

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And which means we might want to do a survey or something like this to get better

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information about the enterprise use cases for the existing users, right?

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Because that's one that there's probably more we can learn from to figure out their needs.

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This is a very short talk. I couldn't get into the hardcore technical details.

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You can trust me, that was very fun.

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There will be a post on my blog sometime next week with all the gritty details

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if you want that and thanks for your attention Kervin.