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GalliumOS / galliumos-distro

Docs, issues, and artwork sources for GalliumOS
https://galliumos.org/
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GalliumOS 4.0 #566

Open reynhout opened 4 years ago

reynhout commented 4 years ago

Planning and preparations for GalliumOS 4.0.

Our presumptive upstream distribution is Ubuntu 20.04, which released yesterday.

TODO

mrjohnc commented 4 years ago

Question: What is the licensing requirement for background images, there are many amazing open license images (usually CC BY-SA 4.0) on Wikimedia Commons e.g

reynhout commented 4 years ago

@mrjohnc Those are great images, thanks for posting!

CC BY-SA 4.0 is a compatible license.

I think we're pretty open on licensing -- any agreement that allows us to use the image (of course) and modify it for our purposes (generally limited to cropping, some color shifts, and sometimes a small GalliumOS logo). We are more than happy to include attribution, as long as it can be in the documentation -- i.e. not on the desktop image itself. We are also happy to allow redistribution in any form the original licenser desires.

Thematically, we've historically chosen blue tones, and a vaguely architectural subject. Personally I'm leaning toward something warmer and maybe more organic.

mrjohnc commented 4 years ago

No problem, let me check about the crediting, I'm confident it will be acceptable (licensing is part of my job) but just to double check.

I can make a longer list of pages (the competitions I linked to have run for several years) and then if you pick images I can prepare the credits if you like

bbtdev commented 4 years ago

First of all, thank you for your efforts.

Please consider gnome as a DE, it has really evolved in the last years. Modern, fast, low resource for a modern desktop (same as Plasma), few bugs (Plasma is full of bugs from my experience), extremely touch friendly, my Samus would love it.

Those who dislike gnome are few, but extremely vocal and loud. So test it yourself.

ghost commented 4 years ago

I like GNOME but I consider it a bad fit for GalliumOS. For one thing, it's very unique. Normally when I talk about this it's a positive thing, we need more unique user experiences, but for GalliumOS we want something that instantly feels familiar for Windows and macOS users. Gnome (and by extension Budgie) are quite fast and responsive on my primary computer. Bugs crop up occasionally but it's no big deal, and resource usage is ... okay. Can you run GNOME on a Chromebook? Absolutely. Are you going to have a good user experience? Maybe, depending on the exact specs of your configuration. It would run effortlessly on your SAMUS but those high-end Chromebooks are a bit of an outlier. All the other hardware we're targeting here looks like a potato compared to that. I think it would be irresponsible for us to ship something with such a drastic shift in user experience and without taking into account how well it performs on weaker hardware in particular.

bbtdev commented 4 years ago

Ok, is it possible to have two DE options? 1 for potato chromebooks (2gb) and 1 for more modern ones?

ghost commented 4 years ago

That's not out of the question but I severely doubt it.

reynhout commented 4 years ago

@bbtdev It will always be possible to install a different DE on GalliumOS, but I expect we will only ship (and focus our customization/compatibility work on) one choice that works well on all supported models.

Parallel efforts for other DEs or WMs would be great material for the wiki or Reddit tutorials, and if they gained enough traction, it would be great to incorporate them into the distro.

bbtdev commented 4 years ago

@reynhout I understand, maybe you will consider Gnome then? Since it's modern/polished/touch friendly/stable. Cheers

guipsfr commented 4 years ago

Something like Pantheon Desktop would be a good alternative. Simple/Modern/Stable

babuloseo commented 4 years ago

A lot of Chromebooks have 4gb ram, so a lot of desktops environments like the latest GNOME, Cinnamon and based derivatives are going to use a lot of memory. But at the same time we want something more modern and that enhances the desktop or laptop usage as well.

spacehobo commented 4 years ago

I think we all have emotional attachments to various desktop environments, and feel like recommending our preferences as a way to support our own value as decision makers. I feel that any decision should be made by measuring actual setups on representative hardware, and not based on our own recommendations.

Resource constraints are important, but we may all be surprised at what actually consumes memory on a modern system Most of it turns out to be data (images, videos, documents, etc) rather than program code, these days. The difference between pieces of software in terms of memory consumption may turn out to be more about the theme resources than actual code-level features, for example.

Likewise we realised years ago that "wakeups" were more important to battery life than raw CPU percentage statistics. The focus on preventing needless "wakeup" events helped interface responsiveness as well as battery consumption, but we had to take measurements to make it happen.

Part of this issue came up in the IRC channel when someone noticed that modern XFCE and KDE desktops are roughly equivalent in terms of resource consumption in 2020. If this is true, it means that we need to pay close attention to our definition of and criteria for a "lightweight" desktop interface. We may have been paying attention to the wrong thing for a while, now!

reynhout commented 4 years ago

@spacehobo Agreed. I'm more concerned about RAM than disk consumption, because the latter is easier to mitigate.

I ran some quick tests on the latest releases:

This is booted to the desktop from the live image, and the DE default terminal application launched to run free -m after the machine settles down.

In my previous measurements, the DEs that start higher also grow more quickly as DE apps are launched. Other apps (e.g. Firefox) are the same on all DEs. No surprise, but it emphasizes the importance of starting small.

In my mind, Xfce and KDE are strong candidates. Xfce would be easy, most of our work from 4.12 will apply directly. KDE has improved dramatically in recent years, both resource-wise and UX-wise. I haven't used it enough to shake out any problems it might have.

So Xfce is the default, but I'd be interested in jumping to another DE if it brought meaningful improvements in at least some of these areas:

I haven't seen anything about KDE, in my brief usage, that disqualifies it. That's my only observation so far. :)

ghost commented 4 years ago

KDE annoys me for a lot of the same reasons Windows does. I absolutely hate how some applications don't obey the system settings and the location of certain options in the settings are completely nonsensical. That being said, I don't personally care for Xfce either. I do think KDE has superior visual design to Xfce and the HiDPI and multi-monitor support are probably, at the very least, better than Xfce's. I would have to try both of them out on hardware to know for sure, but I'm pretty sure as it currently stands my vote would go to KDE.

guipsfr commented 4 years ago

What about LXDE ? it has very low cusumption and looks great on Lubuntu for exemple.

reynhout commented 4 years ago

@guipsfr Back in the GalliumOS 1.0 era, we decided that Xfce was adequately better than LXDE to justify the additional resources. I haven't seen LXDE in a few years though, so it's definitely worth checking again. It is significantly lighter weight than any of the other DEs.

ghost commented 4 years ago

LXDE is very lightweight and super fast, It would be a great candidate for slow computers like the Bay Trails and Braswells. It does lack a lot of modern creature comforts that I think would make the whole user experience feel very dated for users with faster machines. If KDE has adequate performance and it's overall resource usage lies somewhere between LXDE and Xfce, that's an improvement on all accounts. Using LXDE would only serve to improve resource usage and performance. The overall UX would be negatively impacted.

bbtdev commented 4 years ago

Lxde is barely maintained, it has been replace by LXQT which is pretty good. Maybe give it a shot? I would sugest something more modern than XFCE; between XFCE and KDE, I would go for KDE.

mrjohnc commented 4 years ago

Question, for the Chromebooks you're planning on supporting should there be new github issues for each one? I'm finding additional issues which are not included on https://wiki.galliumos.org/Hardware_Compatibility

e.g trackpad doesn't work properly, touchscreen doesn't work

ghost commented 4 years ago

No.

MrChromebox commented 4 years ago

@mrjohnc not until testing against 4.0 alphas starts, since there's no correlation to what doesn't work now and what won't work then

mrjohnc commented 4 years ago

@mrjohnc not until testing against 4.0 alphas starts, since there's no correlation to what doesn't work now and what won't work then

OK, cool, thanks, I'm very happy to test stuff then to work out what does and doesn't work :)

Hurricos commented 4 years ago

In the realm of lightweight DE's, there's also MATE, which I find runs well on resource-constrained hardware (on an Acer Aspire 722 with 2G total, I'm sitting at 441MB used at login) -- while also being fairly mature. I find it's very similar to Xfce, but just with better adherence to principle of least surprise and fewer bugs.

20.04 release also saw support for HiDPI (looks great by default on a Haswell Iris MBP and T480s). Worth reading the release notes.

I think my biggest concern with a change of DE would be making sure to keep things consistent with 3.0 (which MATE currently is). GalliumOS has always looked extremely clean to me, and as long as that stays true I'd be pleased with anything.

I agree with GNOME being too 'unique' for this -- while the use of Wayland is tempting due to promises of significant future support and a lot of graphical offloading being done, it's also quite weird in many ways -- you literally have to install an extension to prevent the Super key from invoking a graphically intensive presenter :(

anglishu commented 4 years ago

I've been following the development of Galliumos for a long time and I think the Xfce desktop environment should stay. I think that there is no point in doing too much revolution. Many people have become accustomed to the xfce environment, it is also easy to use and does not overwhelm the configuration as in e.g. Kde. But let's get to the point.

The release of Xfce 4.14 has brought support for HiDPI support as well as other changes. Just look at the list of changes. Multi-monitor support / switching. Here I see no major problem as in the above mentioned compared to e.g. Lxqt or Mate. Default apps. It could be like before, or something like the distribution of Peppermint Os. They use there different applications from different environments from eg lxde, xfce, cinnamon etc. Resource consumption in version 4.14 has not increased dramatically, nor is it very large compared to other environments . Visual design. Xfce look, here you can look how other distributions solved the problem. Xfce may look nice and neat, for example Zorin Os. Manjaro Xfce with a default look also doesn't look bad. These are my small comments and observations.

CoWinkKeyDinkInc commented 4 years ago

I think that the XFCE desktop currently being used is fine. I would be okay with a switch to LXQT, though it is a desktop that I haven't really tried that much, so I am not aware of any downsides to using it.

anglishu commented 4 years ago

Lxqt is not bad, but it seems to be an unfinished environment for me. It would be better in this case for pantheon desktop environment. But as I mentioned, it's better to stay with xfce. The more that most chrombooks are not very efficient equipment. Ps. I will add that I tested various graphical environments, distributions on EDGAR and it seems (BANJO). Acer chromebook 15 version with i3 processor ?.

bbtdev commented 4 years ago

I honestly think XFCE is outdated. A change would be nice. With so many good modern DEs I think it will be refreshing to have something new.

Morlok8k commented 4 years ago

re: the name: Of the choices between Fluorine, Francium, Fermium, Flerovium; I think the best is Francium, as it sounds the closest to Gallium.

ghost commented 4 years ago

Not that it's terribly important, but I like Fermium

GregCanada commented 4 years ago

I agree with Morlok8k, for a similar reason: Gallium was named after Gaul (the early name for France), and Francium was named for France.

guipsfr commented 4 years ago

I tryed both Manjaro XFCE and Cinnamon on my Chromebook Asus C425, and both are running really great. I finally choosed Cinnamon for the aesthetics and it's simplicity of use, but also for the capacity of customization C425 is a recent middle range Chromebook, so I think if it works great on mine it will also work on older chromebook to.

tepiloxtl commented 4 years ago

In my subjective opinion about DE of choice, Im an obvious supporter of Xfce, since it was my DE od choice since early 2010s, and in my opinion none other DE until recently really matched it in both robustness and performance. Although I would not be disapointed to see other DE choice, like Lxqt, Mate or maybe Cinnamon. Objectively I dont have anything against KDE these days, but again subjectively I still find it more fiddly than it should be, and I still finds rough corners where other DEs fares much better. It is visually nicer than the other options though. And Gnome is as stated an outlier here, catering to different experience as the other discussed, and while maybe viable for touch-enabled chromebooks, not many devices would really profit from it

loopgru commented 4 years ago

I'm a Gnome partisan, but I'm not fussed about installing with (ideally) a target or just switching it over post-installation.

What I would ask is a move to a more modern display manager- I like gdm (go figure), but really anything that'll allow me to select my DE without jumping through additional hoops to replace it would be nice.

As an aside, I'm running 20.04 on a CAVE. Had some futzing to do around screen rotation, but otherwise it's pretty solid out of the box.

ghost commented 4 years ago

There is no reason I can see to have xfce4-taskmanager & gnome-system-tools, xfce4-terminal & xterm, xfce4-screenshooter & gnome-screenshot, or other duplicates (sxiv, etc). I think VLC would be the best media player to include unless legally impractical. Personally, I just purge AppGrid on first boot of a GalliumOS install before even connecting it to the internet (to avoid all of it's extras like the apt source appearing on my system), so I hope it's a goner.

ghost commented 4 years ago

Xterm gets pulled in as a dep for some things, it will naturally be installed on a lot of Linux systems out there. That being said, it's not exactly user-friendly what with it's lack of menus and user-friendly buttons. I do think we should avoid pack-in syndrome, especially when it comes to including multiple programs that do the same thing. My personal computer has six web browsers, three media players, four terminal emulators, and two file managers on it but few people have as many screws loose as I do, if your sanity is questionable you can always use apt to install whatever you want. At points there have been discussions about shipping Firefox, but ultimately we decided that for our targeted userbase, Chromium is more likely to be a familiar user experience, and while I like to think that we reduce people's reliance on Google's services, being able to sync browser data from ChromeOS with a ten second login is a massive boon, plus anyone who would rather use Firefox probably already knows how to install it, and remove Chromium, if they so desire.

On the issue of AppGrid, I feel you. I don't personally go out of my way to remove it but I hate using it and it's aggressive behaviour regarding /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ is unacceptable. That being said, I think I know how to fix that and I'm not hearing any alternatives. Maybe GNOME Software is good enough to include now? I know we told people to avoid the Ubuntu Software Center like the plague for a long time but Canonical's not shipping that anymore afaik.

ashifolfi commented 4 years ago

With talking about DEs I want to say think about Mate. its pretty good. low memory footprint afaik. its a continuation of Gnome 2. Also with Display Managers I think LightDM with Gtk greeter is the best choice as it works wonderfully on chromebooks and is normally shipped woth Xfce and MATE while not being mega resource heavy like Gnome and GDM (gdm froze my chromebook when I tried to use it)

ghost commented 4 years ago

Can confirm. MATE is good but kinda ugly without some major tweaking and does suffer from some of the same issues as Xfce, I don't think the development stagnancy is as bad but there are things that feel straight out of 2002 when you're using it. While that does mean it's minimally functional for modern everyday use, which is often all I care about, damn, I'd like some creature comforts. Do remember that we're competing with Chrome OS which, in it's latest versions, has Android apps, Linux apps, and a beautiful modern desktop experience. And it's well optimized and lightweight on top of all that. I'm not saying we should sweat competing with Google too much or anything, I think GalliumOS and Chrome OS are for very different types of users, but when everything feels jank as hell on GalliumOS and there are only a few hoops you have to jump through to get your workflow working on Chrome OS, it makes returning to Chrome OS tempting.

For dexterity and fun I'd like to add the note that had we been having this conversation two years ago or so, I would have fervently supported MATE.

ghost commented 4 years ago

One more thing, we don't use LightDM because it has issues and LXDM does it's job better for our money anyway, not to mention our gorgeous, braindead simple greeter that shuts up and get's right to the point. GalliumOS. Who are you? Prove it. That's it.

ashifolfi commented 4 years ago

Hey so with LXDM please enable the user picker. I find it a little dumb that you have to type in the linux username when Chrome OS has an easy to use user picker. Like I always enable it because it feels less jank with it on.

mrjohnc commented 4 years ago

Can I suggest that disagreement about which desktop/s to produce may be coming from the variation in power of different Chromebooks. Whilst traditionally Chromebooks have had limited resources (save for the Pixels) many newer Chromebooks have much more welly.

Would it be possible to support two desktops? One which was for efficiency and one which was for Chromebooks with more RAM and better CPUs. I'm unsure how much extra work this would entail, perhaps the higher spec desktop could be more 'community supported' or something?

ghost commented 4 years ago

Would it be possible to support two desktops? One which was for efficiency and one which was for Chromebooks with more RAM and better CPUs. I'm unsure how much extra work this would entail, perhaps the higher spec desktop could be more 'community supported' or something?

No. This is something we've wanted to avoid since the beginning. We will settle on one desktop that is supported by the team. If community projects want to tackle supporting other desktops we obviously can't stop them.

lilkidsuave commented 4 years ago

@mrjohnc You can already install a desktop environment on top of gallium os so it would make sense to choose a lower resource DE as a default for gallium os like xfce(already in use) or kde for the best compatibility.

mrjohnc commented 4 years ago

Yes, agreed, I was just pointing out for those wishing for a higher resource desktop that lower resource machines need to be supported

ghost commented 4 years ago

@mrjohnc You can already install a desktop environment on top of gallium os so it would make sense to choose a lower resource DE as a default for gallium os like xfce(already in use) or kde for the best compatibility.

Please don't do that unless you know what you're doing and have no expectation of support!

It's true that the most anemic of the machines we are supporting are pretty damn crappy, but the majority of the very popular models do have enough horses to handle even things like GNOME. I'm by no means saying resource usage shouldn't be considered when moving to a new desktop, just that I think we're putting waaaaay too much stock in it during the current conversation.

reynhout commented 4 years ago

@CreamYT Do you know of a good theme for the LXDM user picker? The default theme leaves much to be desired, and I prefer disabling it instead.

Bertanx commented 4 years ago

On the issue of AppGrid, I feel you. I don't personally go out of my way to remove it but I hate using it and it's aggressive behaviour regarding /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ is unacceptable. That being said, I think I know how to fix that and I'm not hearing any alternatives. Maybe GNOME Software is good enough to include now? I know we told people to avoid the Ubuntu Software Center like the plague for a long time but Canonical's not shipping that anymore afaik.

Yeah I think including GNOME software would be very nice, especially considering GalliumOS is many people's first Linux experience so it will make it easy for those people when they want to easily look for and install software. It is also significantly more professional looking and behaving than Appgrid.

reynhout commented 4 years ago

@Bertanx The fatal flaws with most software centers is that they either a) require a ton of GUI library dependencies, bloating the install.. or b) run a big background process that bloats the RAM usage.

Agreed that AppGrid has some serious deficiencies though. I vehemently disapprove of sneaking in changes to the user's APT configuration. We removed one of the locations in code where that occurs, but missed a second location. .. As for the UI, it's a bit unconventional but I don't have a strong opinion.

ghost commented 4 years ago

I dislike AppGrid's UI enough that you don't have to. Unfortunately with "progressive web" and electron apps becoming all the rage more and more, it's becoming unlikely that you don't have any software on your computer that completely disobeys the system theme setting and uses it's own hideous style, but something about AppGrid doing that really rubs me the wrong way. Maybe because it's included and makes the entire OS feel less like a cohesive package, or maybe it's just because it burns my retinas. I also don't really like the way a lot of things are layed out and think it's completely incompetent for doing any system-level package management (more than just quickly installing an app) but it's not really designed for that, there's always Synaptic, and for those types of tasks it's very difficult to beat a terminal emulator in my opinion.

reynhout commented 4 years ago

@coltondrg I, of course, concur that sudo apt install X is a superior experience all around, so perhaps I am not the right person to evaluate applications of the "Software Center" genre. :)

donaldsmith2060 commented 4 years ago

TBH I agree that apt and synaptic is the superior install method, I think you have to be a little savvy anyway to put gallium on a chromebook?

On Wed, Jun 3, 2020 at 11:41 AM reynhout notifications@github.com wrote:

@coltondrg https://github.com/coltondrg I, of course, concur that sudo apt install X is a superior experience all around, so perhaps I am not the right person to evaluate applications of the "Software Center" genre. :)

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