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Post by beardyboy40 on Sept 20, 2021 18:56:32 GMT
Hey all
There are a couple of interesting linux stories to have hit the news in the last few days (both picked up by distrowatch weekly today if you want to check them out yourself) which are relevant I think to the Bodhi community so I thought why not kick off a discussion about them.
First story is that Ubuntu are planning to switch Firefox to snap by default from the next release. No intention of starting any flame wars here but would like to hear views of this community as canonical moves ever closer to going all snap. How do you think this will effect Bodhi? Is Ubuntu becoming increasingly difficult to base off of with these changes to snaps? Will this mean an eventual switch to Debian (given that 32-bit now is already)?
A second (more interesting) story is that, as a consequence of the ever more restrictive practices and design choices of the Gnome project, Solus is are planning to switch their Budgie desktop from GTK over to EFL. The Solus lead dev has posted a long and very detailed blog post about it (which is linked in Distrowatch). What do people think about that? Could the extra attention on EFL be good for Bodhi? It is certainly a pretty radical seeming move. The technical details go over my head (sure it makes sense to Stefan and Ylee) but it sure sounds like a radical departure for Solus.
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Post by thewaiter on Sept 20, 2021 19:34:17 GMT
I will react to EFL. I do not know the Solus dev programming skills and how he covered his research about EFL but I agree with you. It will be pretty radical. From my point of view the dev will need to ask raster (the EFL creator) for some help and info. If I understand properly he wanted "just" replace GTK widget tool with EFL. We had several chats with Ylee about EFL vs other widget kits and we were pretty frustrated about EFL. Although raster claims the EFL is almost same quality as GTK (BTW raster was a GTK project member in the past), we think EFL has some limitations and lacks GTK elegance. Also the weakness is the documentation. You have tons of docs for GTK. I am not able to compare both widget kits in details as I am only EFL programmer and only played with some code in GTK. Anyway the Solus dev also claims he wants to have a better theme for his desktop. At this point I had to look at my arcgreen theme project which I have been workin on 1,5 years. Raster more than one year on his theme which should become an Enlightenment default at some point. Sadly, I can not see many themers working on e24/elm themes which is bad. E17 era was more productive in this territory. Anyway, yes, EFL is fast and light on HW resources. Completely written in C. BUT EFL changed a lot and still in progress. This is bad news for us because Ylee needs to adapt Moksha code working with last EFL versions. Unfortunately some features are broken and no more working. Actually if they decide for EFL I am happy. The more interest will bring more solutions, more apps, more pressure to raster and EFL quality (hopefully). The only thing I would like to say to Solus dev is "Good luck" in porting  Stefan docs.tizen.org/application/native/guides/ui/efl/ |
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Post by ylee on Sept 21, 2021 0:01:00 GMT
Hey all There are a couple of interesting linux stories to have hit the news in the last few days (both picked up by distrowatch weekly today if you want to check them out yourself) which are relevant I think to the Bodhi community so I thought why not kick off a discussion about them. I read far too much and try to keep up to date with the FOSS news so all this is already old news by now. Anyway ... ... First story is that Ubuntu are planning to switch Firefox to snap by default from the next release. No intention of starting any flame wars here but would like to hear views of this community as canonical moves ever closer to going all snap. How do you think this will effect Bodhi? Is Ubuntu becoming increasingly difficult to base off of with these changes to snaps? Will this mean an eventual switch to Debian (given that 32-bit now is already)?
...
Well considering what I posted on twitter it should be clear I am not happy about this decision.  While I understand the motivation of Ubuntu in this decision, debs installing snaps instead of the actual package is not ideal for the kind of distro Bodhi is. That is why I have snaps disabled by default on BL6. Will I move to debian? I am uncertain, we will have some time to think about it. If this trend continues then certainly I will have no choice. .... A second (more interesting) story is that, as a consequence of the ever more restrictive practices and design choices of the Gnome project, Solus is are planning to switch their Budgie desktop from GTK over to EFL. The Solus lead dev has posted a long and very detailed blog post about it (which is linked in Distrowatch). What do people think about that? Could the extra attention on EFL be good for Bodhi? It is certainly a pretty radical seeming move. The technical details go over my head (sure it makes sense to Stefan and Ylee) but it sure sounds like a radical departure for Solus.
We talked about this on our Discord channel. And yes of course the technical details discussed there make sense to me and actually there is not really many such technical details present. I read that blog post maybe 4 times over a couple of days. Honestly if he carries thru on this it could only be good for Bodhi and assuming he can get along with and work with the e-devs then it will also be good for EFL. It truly is exciting news. But ... I am with Štefan tho a port of Budgie and some of their applications to EFL is non-trivial and is going to prove to be very difficult. If Solus has enough developers and they are already familiar with EFL then certainly it is doable. Our experience with developers not already familiar with EFL has been terrible. Every one that tried and keep in mind these were seasoned C programmers gave up after a month or maybe two. That is everyone with the exception of Štefan, and he had little C experience. Štefan is just stubborn and a little OCD  Two quotes to keep in mind regarding how difficult this may prove to be: Raster is talking about just the source code for the themes. Now this last quote came from a comment on the Daily WTF post on EFL: I am not going to link to it here as it is rather negative but some criticisms are valid in my mind. Also I am lazy and that article has pages and pages of comments and I really don't feel like hunting for the OP of that particular comment. Regardless, the above story is 100% believable. So it is exciting news but I have a wait and see attitude. I also have some paranoid feeling I may end up helping here and there if they do go through with it. Like I have time for another distraction ... even if my help is just reporting bugs and issues (with or without patches). It all takes time you know. |
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kiezel
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Post by kiezel on Sept 21, 2021 8:27:26 GMT
While I understand the motivation of Ubuntu in this decision, debs installing snaps instead of the actual package is not ideal for the kind of distro Bodhi is. That is why I have snaps disabled by default on BL6. Will I move to debian? I am uncertain, we will have some time to think about it. If this trend continues then certainly I will have no choice. In that case you may have another option for the selection of an upstream code base for Bodhi: Linux Mint. The Mint devs also don't like snaps: www.zdnet.com/article/linux-mint-dumps-ubuntu-snap/In fact, they've packaged Chromium themselves, for that very reason: www.zdnet.com/article/linux-mint-introduces-its-own-take-on-the-chromium-web-browser/So there might be an alternative to going "full Debian". |
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Post by Hippytaff on Sept 21, 2021 14:04:43 GMT
It doesn’t look like mint has a minimal iso to start from though, so it would mean stripping it back first then starting from that base, which isn’t ideal for many reasons.
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enigma9o7
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Post by enigma9o7 on Sept 21, 2021 14:44:39 GMT
FYI, current Firefox latest is also not packaged for debian stable. All they build for stable is the latest ESR (extended service release version), only updated every 6 months or so. However, Mozilla themselves provide a compiled version of current that can be manually installed and autoupdates itself. Also, there is a ppa that packages the mozilla version (ubuntuzilla).
Mint does build and package chromium, and Bodhi already leverages their build for our chromium package. They'll probably come up with a solution for firefox too we could perhaps leverage. It's of course more work than doing nothing, but I imagine they'll probably automate packaging Mozilla's version. Or we could. Then don't need a build server, etc.
I guess a possibility is including Mint's repository in bodhi (which to me is the closests to being "based" on Mint that Bodhi could be, cuz as mentioned, mint is already on top of ubuntu, can't strip that down better than starting with ubuntu server and building up like Bodhi already does) but then some apps will probably end up with Mint branding... which doesnt matter much I guess... dunno.
Plus, I don't think this means they're going to stop updating focal's packaged firefox, which will probably work on bodhi 7, so maybe a solution is bodhi just copies that into bodhi 7 repo. [This already works for chromium for example, the bionic package installs fine on focal or bullseye, so I suspect probably similar with firefox.]
I think this is a sign tho, I suspect as Ubuntu moves into the future, new third party apps are just going to be going straight to snap and will never be direct packaged by them, and other large apps they can get the developer to snap package and provide to snap store etc without them having to do anything, they'll probably do.
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enigma9o7
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Post by enigma9o7 on Sept 21, 2021 14:49:41 GMT
As to Solus using EFL, I don't understand this stuff very well. So I would like to be schooled a bit.
My understanding is that EFL is "enlightenment foundation libraries" and these libraries have to be installed to build enlightenment. Moksha too. But as far as I know, they don't have anything to do with applications, right? Are there any existing applications in the world that use EFL (besides englightenment and moksha desktops?) Cuz from reading about that solus stuff, I get the impression he wants to write a file manger using EFL.
One thing I've learned about GTK2 apps is they can't be scaled, and GTK3 apps can only be integer scaled. I'm guessing GTK4 apps must finally fix that and allow fractional scaling, which is important for small screens with high resolution which are becoming more popular, but I don't believe any apps I'm using use GTK4. Moksha itself can be fractional scaled, and so can Terminology, which is an elementary app. I dunno about QT apps, I think the only one I know of is VLC?
Is there any connection between elementary and EFL perhaps?
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Post by thewaiter on Sept 21, 2021 15:06:48 GMT
Moksha is an EFL application. Ephoto, Terminology are also standalone EFL applications. Elementary is a part of EFL. It is a high level wrapper on EFL as well as a full widget set with buttons, boxes, scrollers, sliders etc. In Elementary config you can directly set up all widgets styles and themes. www.enlightenment.org/about-eflOn GTK, Yes. I read and listened in some reviews some desktops have very big problem with scaling. Moksha is perfect in this. Stefan |
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Post by ylee on Sept 21, 2021 16:45:17 GMT
Yeah I have considered Mint before and always keep an eye on what they are doing. We would just be using the Mint repos to avoid the ubuntu snap issues and still be using Ubuntu's or Bodhi's repos for the rest. It doesn’t look like mint has a minimal iso to start from though, so it would mean stripping it back first then starting from that base, which isn’t ideal for many reasons. Well while that may be true it is not as big a show stopper as you may think. Take a look at the package list on Ubuntu server (you can find that file on the ISO) and do a diff with the package list of the ISO for Mint (same version). Install mint and uninstall everything that the diff you created says is not installed on Ubuntu server. A little command line wizardry makes that task trivial. Keep in mind even with a Ubuntu server install I have to uninstall stuff as well as naturally install lots of stuff. More concerning is the fact mint packages some rather fundamental packages with mint changes, like base-files. In this case they do that to have stuff like /etc/lsb-release report the correct Linux Mint info. Bodhi has always took a more simple minded approach and directed edited that file. Naturally the Mint approach is better as then you do not get any dialogs during an update of base-files asking you about keeping the current version or installing the package managers version. So to use Mint as base I would have to start doing the same thing, package a bodhi version of base-files and keep it up to date and give it priority in upgrades overs mints or ubuntus version. Naturally I would need to closely examine all such pkgs like this that Mint has altered. As to base-files I had already decided to start packaging a Bodhi version in Bodhi Linux 7.0 anyway. So all in all Mint may be preferable... |
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Post by beardyboy40 on Sept 21, 2021 18:18:48 GMT
Thanks all for the posts. Very interesting.
In relation to the suggestion to base off Mint, I do wonder whether the Mint might themselves give up on Ubuntu as a base, maybe not in the immediate future but at some point. They do seem to take great issue with the way canonical goes about things these days and they do have LMDE as a ready backup option.
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