solile Development: Week 1.5 You probably don’t know what solile is, so let me explain. solile (yes, without capitalization like a hipster) is a new mobile desktop environment that I am working on. It melds ideas I got from working on Lomiri with a more modern tech stack. Let’s go over some ideas I have had and what I have been working on. Compositor This is the boring piece that nobody cares about until it breaks. The compositor will support wayland with no support for x11/xwayland. This is mostly so I reduce the workload on myself having to implement two different protocols that need to superficially act the same to the user. xwayland-satellite is there if a user really needs xwayland support. I did actually consider orbital and Arcan as alternatives, but from a pragmatic and user-focused stance, going with such young technologies with shifting / differing goals would be unwise. ...
Click Clack (Flatpak?) Forcing Lomiri to Face the Music About a week ago I posted a Mastodon poll asking people what packaging system they use for their GUI apps. The poll unsurprisingly came out about 50/50 between system packaging formats and Flatpak, with Snap and… compiling from source… getting just a few points. This is unsurprising why? Flatpak has been a growing form of distribution for user-facing programs for the Linux desktop. I say Linux desktop instead of a specific desktop like GNOME or KDE because Flatpak aims to be desktop and distro agnostic. While Snap says that it is distro agnostic, in reality it is heavily tied to both systemd and Canonical, taking an Ubuntu-first approach to desktop apps. ...
Lomiri: The Final Frontier (And Old Friend) Note: I recalled this from memory. Some information may be out of order. Lomiri has always been a popular user interface. From the time it was first created it was supposed to be the “next step in the Ubuntu ecosystem” and the interface of the Ubuntu Phone. Sadly, this next step never came to fruition and we got GNOME as the default Ubuntu desktop instead. ...