GUI: drop tsparticles and replace with a different approach

[amartinz]

Currently the installer's rendering process is very crash happy, which be reproduced 10/10 times on my machine (Fedora 36).

After some investigation we came up with the idea to remove tsparticles to reduce the ressource usage of the installer and replace it with a different approach, which is still to be discussed.

Jami proposed:

we could also instead have some slideshow with images/screenshots about Ubuntu Touch (similar to what Ubuntu's ubiquity installer does)

This issue is meant to start a discussion and track work that needs to be done.

For a first step, however, tsparticles should be dropped from the installer.

/cc @Flohack74 @JamiKettunen @maciek134 @NeoTheThird @pajlow

[amartinz]

Note: there is also a memory leak, which should be fixed with [email protected], which is related to https://github.com/ubports/ubports-installer/issues/2806.

[maciek134]

As a quick fix, removing tsparticles here should be enough: src/ui/partials/Animation.svelte

[amartinz]

PR for dropping tsparticles: https://github.com/ubports/ubports-installer/pull/2809

particle animations are replaced with square animations. CPU and memory usage have decreased.

[pajlow]

@capsia37 made some designs we could use as a start. https://github.com/ubports/ubports-installer/pull/1552#issuecomment-934736910 Maybe we can still have some moving stuff as a background layer.

[amartinz]

@capsia37 made some designs we could use as a start. #1552 (comment)

Nice, thanks for pointing it out!

Maybe we can still have some moving stuff as a background layer.

Only the "lines" animation was removed and replaced with the "square" animation. So we still got animations but the tsparticles dependency is gone.

Regarding any future GUI planning, i realized this also needs to be done per OS, as if you flash anything else than Ubuntu Touch, it should not show Ubuntu Touch sliders :sweat_smile:

[pajlow]

Regarding any future GUI planning, i realized this also needs to be done per OS, as if you flash anything else than Ubuntu Touch, it should not show Ubuntu Touch sliders

Since we don't really "advertise" the other options (LineageOS, AsteroidOS and Stock Roms) we can probably show the slides for Ubuntu Touch installations only. Other installations would only show Yumi inside the loading circle.

If we want to go with this approach, I would like to work on it. We would need some graphics + texts though.

[maciek134]

@pajlow we should probably have it in a way that would allow adding slides for other OSes easily, in case someone would like to contribute them

[pajlow]

@amartinz I think we should have another release before the slide show is included. The particles are really causing heavy CPU load.

[amartinz]

I agree, however i can not do releases. Only @NeoTheThird and @mariogrip can.

[amartinz]

The latest installer release 0.9.7-beta has tsparticles dropped.

[Flohack74]

So can we close it? @amartinz

[amartinz]

I think yes, as we could open a new one for the slideshow feature.

[Flohack74]

Then do so ;)