I currently have a project for an rpm-ostree-based Fedora Xfce variant on my Github. I am interested in maintaining this as an official rpm-ostree variant, so am looking to gain momentum from the community. Is this something you wish to have as a part of the Fedora ecosystem? Thoughts, suggestions, questions, or advice?
I’ve been corresponding with Timothée Ravier (Siosm) who works on the Kinoite project and they have been very helpful. My next step is to submit the changes to the upstream repository
I’m honestly not sure what happens when a PR is approved. I know it gets merged into the main branch but I don’t know if the changes will be ready for the next Fedora release.
I currently have a test silverblue machine that I am rebasing to your variant. Is there anything that needs testing or a spot to report issues? Happy to assist with playing and keeping the momentum going (though I only have one machine).
Right now, mostly nothing. PRs for the workstation-ostree repo only have an impact if they are affecting files that are used to build Silverblue & Kinoite right now.
This is a bit of a “+1” but I’d love to see Vauxite a bit more official. I’m interested in deploying a few desktops/laptops with it, but at the moment the sizes of updates are quite large due to being OCI-based.
I know long-term this will work itself out, as zstd:chunked support etc gets added, but for now it would be great to see Vauxite graduate to a native ostree spin on ostree.fedoraproject.org.
@siosm directed me to How to make a new rpm-ostree desktop variant in Fedora? - Siosm’s blog - unfortunately I’m very unfamiliar at the moment with Fedora and for health reasons pretty unlikely to be able to commit to heavy-duty maintainership. I can probably do periodic testing and could maybe help draft a proposal or two?
Universal Blue has ostree images for I think all desktop environments. It’s sort of a staging ground for those who want such images before they become Fedora official.
Yup, that’s how I first discovered it, but being OCI based with (currently) a single extra layer its updates are even larger! I assume once zstd:chunked support works its way through to all the places it needs to that’s will solve that, but I can’t get I sense of all the pieces that are needed or a timeframe for that.
You can build and host your own Vauxite ostree without using OCI. You’d rebase from your domain and origin URL. There’s an “official” Vauxite treefile at Overview - workstation-ostree-config - Pagure.io.
What you would have to do first is clone that repo on a Fedora server (or any Fedora version), and use that Fedora server as the host of your ostree repo. Make sure ostree and rpm-ostree are installed. You don’t necessarily have to use a publicly-accessible domain, as you can make it available only to clients on your LAN if you’d like. You’d need to run the build script periodically to update to a new commit.
If this is something you’re interested in, I can help guide you through the process. Or, if you’re familiar with the build process at all, you can use my archived GitHub repo as a starting point.
I might actually write up a blog post on how to do this, but most people would likely want to use the OCI-based Universal Blue images because they’re just easier to use and maintain.
@hyperreal since you were interested in maintaining a Fedora Atomic Xfce spin, did something come up in the process that stopped you? Just asking to see if there is a blocker we can get over so you can move forward in the process.
I don’t really use Xfce anymore so I lost personal interest in maintaining it.
IIRC the problem we had was something to do with the base image being too large because we had to include a lot of the xfce-apps comps group. The apps in that group were not available as Flatpaks. I think I offered to create Flatpaks for those apps, but I’ve never created Flatpaks before so I wouldn’t know how to begin.
Since this thread was revived recently I realize it’s still something the community wants, and I’ve now regained some interest in maintaining it.
EDIT/UPDATE: Okay, so due to my frustration with GNOME, I’m using Xfce again. I’m now fully on-board with maintaining and developing Vauxite as an official variant. I’m going to look into how to create Flatpaks. Once I’ve been able to do that, I’ll then look into submitting the Flatpak’d Xfce apps to the Fedora Flatpack repo.
