I’m learning about i3 and xfce on arch (my daily driver). I’m not linux expert, but I’ve been really enjoying figuring things out after switching from ubuntu to arch. This weekend I’m getting the icons for network manager applet and clipman working on the whisker panel, and then removing the i3bar.
Well, at least that’s rhe goal. I don’t have much free time, so tbis will mkst likely be a month project, not a weekend. :P
Or maybe I’m already too old for so much tech. But thanks for letting me think that I’m still a young boy ^^ Not helping with my question but pretty self satisfactory.
If you are using Ubuntu, they have live patch available. You have to sign up for Ubuntu Pro, but that is free for individuals. I just heard about this and haven’t tried it yet ubuntu.com/security/livepatch
I think i just misunderstood how “DIY” Linux was and thought it came with essentially no drivers. I thought it was kind of like rooting an Android, you get more control in exchange for having to do everything yourself. I mistakenly lumped all drivers under “everything”
More exotic software will probably come from the internet, but the basics should be on the DVD. Good luck with your journey, reach out if you need any help, im sure everyone here would be happy to assist.
Yes, just make sure that the boot setup for the distro install is compatible with what you intend to install it onto (I.E. if your server is going to be using EFI to boot an OS, install your Ubuntu instance as GPT, EFI onto the SSD). Depending on what wireless modules you are using and where you are sourcing them and how you are installing them, you might need to ensure Secure Boot is disabled in the BIOS of your server. This will be the case if the kernel module package you are installing doesn’t sign the wireless adapter driver you intend to use. Otherwise, most drivers you could possibly need should be baked into the kernel and you should be good to go.
(One further sidenote coming from someone who has not used Ubuntu in a long time (since 16.04’s release), it would be good to check in the /etc/fstab file that the filesystem references are using either UUID or PARTUUID. Depending upon the drive layout of the server you are mounting the intended drive into, traditionally labeled references such as sda or nvme0n1 can change depending upon the slots each drive is seated. Using UUID or PARTUUID in the fstab reference alleviates any potential complications from this scenario where fstab might reference the wrong drive in mounting partitions. I do believe Ubuntu would likely do this by default nowadays, but it can’t hurt to check.)
Thanks for all the info. I have no comment since I need to watch like 3 youtube videos and spend another hour reading before I really understand that second paragraph, but I will definitely be referring back to it.
What I did pick up was that the kernel actually comes with basic hardware drivers, which is a huge relief. I have pretty standard wifi hardware on standby, so I can try that.
Yes you can do that, make sure you are on the same CPU infrastructure (ie, don't try to install linux on an SSD from an intel laptop if you're going to be running it on an arm based processor or something).
You know, as much as people here say they aren’t happy with it, I haven’t seen any specific complaints that detail the problems. What bad change does windows 11 even make from windows 10?
Not saying I don’t see problems with windows, there are… A lot. But what are the new problems with windows 11?
Edit: to the people downvoting as if you disagree with me: I’m literally asking a question because I don’t know much about windows 11. I am not trying to make any kind of statement for or against windows 11, I just don’t know what the current flavor of bullshit is and wanted to.
Literally the only annoyance I had with it initially was that I preferred my taskbar at the top of the screen, and you can’t move it, at least not without janky registry hacks, on Windows 11.
I’ve since gotten over it, because for me and the vast majority of people, it’s functionally identical in almost all cases.
The only other thing I can think of that’s still a rare annoyance is that sometimes, completely at random, Windows Explorer, if you’ve just left a window open in the background for a while, will just rip focus from whatever other thing you were doing.
Yes, they’re trying to shoehorn their copilot AI thing into the UX, but that was so easy to disable and forget that I refuse to call it a real problem, myself.
No, we have been making our own platform toolkit (libcosmic), which is built upon iced-rs. We are using this both for our wayland compositor applets, and our desktop applications.
iced? Interesting. I though it’s still pretty experimental. There’s no official documentation yet, right? When I was looking at Rust UI libraries Yew and Leptos looked more mature. I guess you’re confident iced have enough backing and isn’t going anywhere.
How do you find working in Rust on a bigger UI project? Any issues?
Iced is a lower level GUI library, similar to what GDK is to GTK. We built our own COSMIC-themed GUI toolkit around iced, which is called libcosmic. As we’ve gotten more and more widgets and application logic developed, actual application development with libcosmic is a breeze. Even if you do have to create a custom widget, it’s much easier to creating custom widgets in GTK. We’re able to develop much faster than we ever could with GTK now.
Yew and Leptos aren’t comparable since they’re not native GUI toolkits. These are for web developers rather than application development. It wouldn’t be possible to use this for developing layer shell applets for COSMIC, either.
Why develop libcosmic around iced instead of going with something else modern that’s easy to develop in such as Flutter? Iced/libcosmic is probably a bit more efficient resource-wise but that probably wasn’t a huge point.
That would compromise our vision of a GUI platform built from the ground up in Rust. It would also not be feasible to use Flutter for applet development. We can easily make modifications directly to iced for all the Wayland integrations that we need in COSMIC, as the iced code base is very lean, and written in Rust.
Got it. So being written in Rust is one of the requirements. Makes sense. Flutter is great for self-contained applications but we can definitely use another sane native toolkit besides Qt that has wider applicability.
The GTK4 project was cancelled for multiple reasons. We originally began working on Relm4 to use GTK4 for COSMIC applets. While others on the team were also experimenting with alternative Rust GUI libraries.
It required a lot of effort to patch GTK4 to support the Wayland layer shell protocol. Getting those patches merged into GTK4 was also taking a much longer time. There were long delays between code reviews; and they also wanted a series of much larger refactoring changes to be made to GTK4 before exposing the layer shell feature. It was much easier to get layer-shell working with iced, as it is a much leaner and concise code base.
GTK does not support fractional scaling, which is something we want our applets to support on day one. This was one of our major concerns. A concern that didn’t apply to iced.
It was also exceedingly difficult to create custom widgets with GTK in Rust. Even those of us with years of experience considered it to be unreasonably difficult. So it was not feasible to expect new hires on the team to be able to comfortably develop COSMIC components with it. In comparison, our team was able to develop custom widgets with iced with much less effort and with greater flexibility, so the demand for iced grew stronger.
At the end of the day, GTK is not a Rust toolkit, and its API is cumbersome to adapt to Rust. Use of GTK would always be a compromise that lessens the developer experience for COSMIC app and applet development. A compromise that would eventually require us to rewrite everything in a native Rust GUI library the moment it would become possible to do so.
Since we are developing a desktop environment from the ground up anyway, we decided that there would be much more value for our time if we contribute to the Rust ecosystem and utilize iced to make a fully featured GUI library for application development.
Makes sense, thank you for the detailed answer! By the way, I saw that gtk apps will be automatically themed, is that only gtk3 or also gtk4? Edit: typo
This sounds really cool. I don’t see any documentation for libcosmic. Are you planning to promote it as an alternative toolkit for building desktop apps or do you see it more as an internal tool strictly for COSMIC DE development?
What’s the accessibility story for blind users for example?
Is it going to be suitable to use with proper bindings with other languages or it’s not an interest at this time or are there plans to support things like that and stability of apis, etc?
You can generate documentation by running cargo doc and browsing the generated web pages in target/doc. There are also examples in the examples directory of libcosmic, as well as a design demo example which is a WIP.
libcosmic is an alternative toolkit for building desktop applications and layer shell applets. It wouldn’t make much sense to build a toolkit only for ourselves. It’s the best way to develop layer shell applets for COSMIC, and other Wayland compositors that support the layer shell protocol.
linux
Top
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.