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The future of the Linux desktop can look like this.
Let's build it!
(I am at #39c3 currently, specifically around the table called " " usually, ask for 'hikari'!)
@hikari oho, this sounds interesting! but also, I got a bunch of questions, ya know how it is
- what's wrong with the existing linux userland, the freedesktop stack and everything, to the degree that it should all be thrown away in favor of what was once proprietary microsoft-specific stuff? Sure, including wine by default and making it work properly, that's what some distros already have, and it'd be nice to get a distro which always keeps wine up to date and has it configured and pre-installed with various tools and frameworks for most windows programs one might want to run, but why replace the whole desktop, dbus, all that?
- what about accessibility software? I'm thinking here, perhaps you could package nvda and the MSAA stuffage it needs to run? the wow64 mode of wine broke it however and I dk why, but yeah. The thing is, windows apps, in windows, can be accessible for different assistive technology tools. Linux apps, while not running in wsl or whatever, expose their accessibility interfaces over at-spi, the linux accessibility API. However, in this windows/linux hybrid powered by wine, a lot of that support is severely degraded, I'm talking stuff like nvda doesn't recognize its own shortcuts, neither on wayland, nor on x11.
But yeah, that being said, it's relatively easy to get a display manager to show your desktop in the login screen, all you have to do is to put a .desktop file in /usr/share/wayland-sessions, which will get picked up by your display manager and showed next time you log in.
About a compositor, depends, does wine in desktop mode open all programs in a single window, without trying to make new windows? if so, I recommend cage, the kiosk wayland compositor, if all you need is a single window and no real configuration support. If you want a bit more flexibility and keybindings, I recommend cagebreak, it's a fork of cage with more advanced features, and xwayland support too
- The desktop and userland being almost entirely WINE is the core idea of this project, the look and feel is almost an accident thereof. I don't think I can give an answer to “why” that will satisfy you. You may as well ask the ReactOS people why they aren't working on Linux instead.
- I should clarify that there will probably still be things like dbus and systemd and so on in the userland, to the extent WINE needs them.
- Thanks for reminding me of accessibility! It's one of the many things I'll have to keep an eye on. I don't know what this will look like yet.
@hikari ah, so there'll still be systemd, dbus, pipewire, display managers and the like? that's better, indeed, I thought an enormous amount of effort would be expanded on reimplementing COM, as well as whatever passes for PID1 on windows.
Yeah, I'm equally baffled about react OS, but with that one, they're reimplementing the whole kernel space and stuff, so they don't have a better set of tools to use, but linux does. O well, it's just one of those things which I don't really understand, and those go in the we'll live and see category of my brain haha.
Even so, this project is very interesting, and it'd be awesome if I could follow development and stuff. You mentioned an irc channel where people can keep tabs on the project, is there a matrix as well? or, better put, do you have issues with bridged matrix users? some irc people complained a lot in the past about how the matrix bridging is disruptive to the IRC side, but I'm not sure with what bridges and tools anymore, so yeah.
@esoteric_programmer no matrix for now, have never used it before
@hikari I can usually use bridges to talk to irc people, but it can sometimes be disruptive and some admins prohibit bridges, that's why I asked. If you'd like to get started with matrix and so on stuffage, I can help with that too, but I presume that's for later