800+ IT
News
als RSS Feed abonnieren📚 I have a concept for a new distro, which I call 'nouveau OS', and I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.
💡 Newskategorie: Linux Tipps
🔗 Quelle: reddit.com
These ideas have been in the works for a few weeks now. I've thought them over carefully, and I'd love to hear what the community's thoughts on them are. I've started work on some of these components, but Sodium and Chlorine are still a hundred years away without contributors.
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/927/
Rather than serving to be a replacement for other Linux distributions, nouveau OS serves to be a drop-in replacement for the likes of macOS (Intel only for now) and Windows.
Planned features & possible ideas include;
PACKAGE MANAGEMENT & PHILOSOPHY
- built on ALPM/pacman/Arch Linux base but is NOT rolling release, nor does it use Arch repositories - pacman is fast, though, hence why I used it
- new releases happen every 3-6 months, will be named after vintage/ultra luxury cars with cool names, and will have their own repositories with the newest working packages possible that will recieve support until the end of the release's lifecycle
- these releases are maintained for at least a year each, with release cycles emulating those of Windows 10 major updates
- certain packages, such as microcode, will always be as new as possible. these packages will be in their own repository, possibly titled "security"?
- the introduction of a new package format allowing one to install an app and all of its' dependencies with just one click, through a GUI
- this package format will be a frontend to ALPM, and will contain several .pkg.tar.zsts in one, as well as guidelines for how sandboxing should be configured (if applicable) - format called .NVPKG
- the aforementioned GUI application will be a one-stop shop for installing flatpaks, appimages, snaps (requires further setup to discourage usage), nvpkgs, pkg.tar.zsts, and Windows executables
- built in tools to allow running Windows executables & DLLs inside a compatibility layer, e.g. Wine, Lutris, configured out of the box
- fancy new features shall not be implemented until they are 110% ready; the last thing we want is for nouveau OS to gain a reputation for being unstable/bleeding-edge.
- absolutely may NOT be scooped up by a corporation. if we get broke, let it burn and never sell out. someone can always fork it.
BASE SYSTEM
- the use of on-board Btrfs, as well as filesystem encryption (unless a VDI setup is used) and compression utilities, as the standard filesystem
- the use of a unified kernel image without additional bootloader software that will include a kernel, initramfs, and memtester program, as well as out of the box, RECCOMENDED support for Secure Boot, to prevent tampering with the bootloader
- NO TELEMETRY WHATSOEVER except for anonymized, opt-in crash reports
- SELinux hardening to the kernel level, enabled and enforced by default
- root account is disabled by default but can be enabled during setup or after installing
- systemd, glibc, et al
- Plymouth! In fact, the disk unlocker screen should closely resemble the gdm login screen.
- Hibernate support working out of the box
- base system should be as close to 100% GPL as possible
- an exception to this rule would be the propietary fonts, media formats, and drivers installed by default by the install app
GUI
- before the below is finally carried out, use GNOME 42 with old GNOME apps (such as terminal instead of console and gedit instead of text editor)
- the replacement of the bloated mess that is X11 with a new window server (titled "Chlorine") which will directly use GTK, Vala, et al, and its' own window placement, resizing, and compositing system, which will feature an optional "tiling mode" designed to emulate the likes of i3
- the use of a new desktop environment which will be called "Sodium", written with the principles of the new window manager in mind
- elementary OS's icon theming and global design motifs
- universal, system-wide light and dark modes, as well as switching at sunset and sunrise
- NO MORE GSETTINGS. NO MORE DCONF. ALL CONFIGURATION MUST BE ACCESSIBLE FROM A GUI AND WILL BE STORED IN .CONF-esque FILES
- .desktop files should ONLY be used in gui apps that will be actually launched by a user. For example, ImageMagick and Vim would not have .desktop files. Emacs would, but only for its' GUI version. The terminal versions of Vim and Emacs get launched through the terminal.
- Built in OpenGL and Vulkan libraries
APPEAL TO WINDOWS & MAC USERS
- being designed with accessibility in mind for the other 95% of casual computer users whom, for the most part, solely comprehend Windows and macOS
- aforementioned creature comforts
- the ability to (optionally) install and boot from a flexibly-sized VDI image within their existing parttition setup, whilst retaining access to one's existing NTFS, HFS+ or APFS filesystem(s)—thus eliminating the need for partitioning (and allowing said user to install from their existing OS)
INSTALLER
- Completely graphical
- Only uses two files; an EFI executable containing a unified kernel image, et al, and a squashfs file which takes up no more than 4GB of memory, ideally 2GB max, when loaded. Both should be stored in the ESP.
- The squashfs file only contains the base graphical system and a few apps needed to operate it, such as GNOME disks, a guided troubleshooter/installer, text editor, terminal, et al. Otherwise, very simple and slimmed down. Checked with a SHA512 sum stored in the unified kernel image.
- This squashfs is used to both install and recover the OS.
- When an OEM installs nouveau OS, only the ESP should be present, with these two tools.
- The rest of the disk will be set up by the guided installer, alongside user-installed applications, user accounts, timezones, languages, countries, et al
- To set this ESP up, one can use an "Impactor" program which builds a new EFI executable, downloads the latest squashfs, configures Secure Boot, and saves them to a new ESP.
USER APPLICATIONS
- the use of (strongly reccomended) system-wide sandboxing on all user-installed applications
- widely-used FOSS applications installed by default and sandboxed (such as VLC, Firefox (with uBlock!), some sort of RTF/TXT all-in-one editor, LibreOffice)
- most other built-in GNOME applications to be replaced with Vala-based apps that fit Sodium's narrative more adequately
- the ability to optionally install propietary applications during setup, such as Google Chrome or Zoom, which are disabled by default
CREATURE COMFORTS
- some sort of GNOME Sushi-esque universal file previewer
- a dock that doesn't suck
- Spotlight-like system-wide and internet-wide searching
- changing the name of tracker-miner-fs (for obvious reasons)
- adding and removing existing bookmarks from Nautilus, as well as built in file previewing for all formats
- LibreOffice uses MS Office '07-365 formats by default
- X11 touchpad gestures
[link] [comments] ...