Devel

This is a continuation of my on-going development blog on the solile desktop. I would highly recommend checking out my previous post to get some context if you have not already. Now, into the nitty-gritty… Dock I chose the dock as the first development target as it is theoretically easy to implement the basics of app launching and desktop file listings. The basic framework of the dock has been written using iced for the UI and iced_layershell for bindings to wlr-layer-shell-unstable-v1. This allows me to write the dock as if it were a normal iced app and then just stick it to the side of the screen. I’ve been following the development of iced_layershell for quite a while now and it seems to be pretty actively developed and is pretty stable for basic usecases. libcosmic is becoming less enticing as I see what I can implement with raw iced, even though I might end up using bits and pieces of it for underlying stuff like theming or accessibility. Currently, I am still working on the actual layout and icons for the dock, but I expect that by next week I should have a working PoC to post images and publish the code for. ...

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. ...