GalliumOS 4.0

[reynhout]

Planning and preparations for GalliumOS 4.0.

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

TODO

• [ ] Set minimum hardware support
• [ ] Review new versions of Desktop Environments
• [ ] Evaluate Snaps in context of minimum hardware
• [ ] Name the release Element names starting with "F" are Fluorine F 9, Francium Fr 87, Fermium Fm 100, Flerovium Fl 114
• [ ] Port kernel patches to 5.4 LTS and/or 5.6+
• [ ] Review included packages
• [ ] Include new Desktop art!
• [ ] Update website
• [ ] Spin ISOs (unified if practical, multiple if not)
• [ ] Update migration tool? 3to4 (and maybe 2to3 for good measure?)
• [ ] ...

[mrjohnc]

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

• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Featured_pictures
• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Commons:Picture_of_the_Year/2018/Results/R2
• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Earth_2018/Winners
• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2019_winners
• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Africa_2019/Winners

[reynhout]

@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]

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]

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]

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]

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

[ghost]

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

[reynhout]

@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]

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

[guipsfr]

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

[babuloseo]

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]

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]

@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:

• KDE 5.18 384MB
• Xfce 4.14 402MB
• Budgie 10.5.1 541MB
• Gnome 3.36 689MB

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:

• HiDPI scaling
• Multi-monitor support/switching
• Default apps
• Resource consumption
• Visual design

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

[ghost]

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]

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

[reynhout]

@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]

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]

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]

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]

No.

[MrChromebox]

@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]

@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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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

[GregCanada]

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