Proposal: Use GNOME applications instead of XFCE

[legoktm]

Proposal:

Use GNOME applications instead of XFCE

Affected components

• SecureDrop Workstation
• SecureDrop Client

People and roles

• @legoktm
• @deeplow (previously done research in this area)
• SD team

Problem Statement

We are currently using a mix of GNOME and XFCE applications. This is not ideal from a UX perspective, nor from a maintenance perspective since instead of supporting one system, we have to support two.

Solution impact

• More consistent UX for admins/journalists
• Only a single DE's ecosystem to support on a technical level

Requirements and constraints

• We adopt a single DE's applications and update our provisioning routine and package dependencies.
• We consider a number of factors, including UX, security support and general upstream activity/maintenance

Exploration

• https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/default-pre-installed-template-flavor-considering-change-from-gnome-to-xfce/20269/10

Initial proposal

Pros for GNOME:

• default for Fedora, Debian, meaning its actively and extremely widely used and has more eyeballs looking at it
• also the default in Tails, where we already maintain integration for
• GNOME project as a whole has an emphasis on improving UX and consistent design
• leading the way on Linux accessibility (e.g. https://blogs.gnome.org/a11y/2024/06/18/update-on-newton-the-wayland-native-accessibility-project/)

Cons:

• higher memory usage (I think this is acceptable and won't really affect users given we specify 32GB ram and also, most of our VMs are pretty lightweight)
• Qubes has gone with XFCE, so some upstream docs/screenshots may reflect that

I think the pros, especially the UX consideration, outweigh the cons.

Selected proposal

[deeplow]

I agree regarding the UX considerations. The other ones I haven't evaluated. Here's a list of what's current being used:

XFCE applications

• xfce4-terminal

Gnome Applications

• gnome disk utility
• nautilus (file manager)
• gedit
• evince
• file-roller
• totem
• eog

Others (I don't really know if they're desktop evironment-specific)

• audacious

[legoktm]

@cfm indirectly reminded me that the font story is different depending on whether you start with the XFCE stack or GNOME. Despite the "lightweightness" of XFCE, it comes with 628 fonts (per fc-list | wc -l) while GNOME comes with 183.

I'm not sure if any journalist has ever complained about missing fonts? IMO if we go to GNOME, we should also install google-noto* and that should cover basically every language.

[deeplow]

From working on Dangerzone I realized just how large fonts can really be. For example, we had to add CJK support and that was ~150MB extra, I think.