Cross-Desktop Collaboration During FreeDesktop Summit 2014

Taking place earlier this month in Nürnberg at the SUSE office was the 2014 FreeDesktop Summit where members of GNOME, KDE, Unity, and LXDE-Qt desktops collaborated over joint topics important to the success of the Linux desktop in a cross-desktop world.

This is the second time there's been a small, cross-desktop gathering at the SUSE offices to discuss cross-desktop matters; reportedly there's also plans for this to become an annual event with the meeting expected to happen again in 2015. At dot.kde.org is a write-up about what the small group of GNOME/KDE/Unity/LXDE-Qt developers discussed while out in Bavaria.

Among the results from this few-day event were:

- Standardization around the XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP environment variable for informing applications what desktop environment they are using.

- The first formal specification for how applications should be associated with given MIME types and URI schemes.

- The inhibit specification is still in its early atages for letting applications prevent the locking of the screen, etc, in a cross-desktop manner.

- When it comes to Wayland talk, the desktops agreed to a D-Bus signals based protocol for startup notifications, in place of X client messages as used today.

- The Implements= key within .desktop files was finalized.

- Significant clean-ups to the XDG specifications.