On Tue, July 21, 2020 7:24 am, Israel Dahl wrote: > My main question is going to be, what architectures? > > > Mobile is the newest low-spec ubiquitous computer everyone uses. How do > we support cheap computing easiest? Mobile, is pretty much the only answer > to that. And most mobile OS are not focused on low-spec.
Also, most mobile solutions (such as Android) are for arm processors not x86. That would mean two copies of everything to support both platforms. Even in the mobile market, they're switching to 64 bit. Google is pushing to drop support for 32 bit and is no longer creating llvm cross-compilers 32 bit for Linux systems that build Android tools. So, it'll be just as hard to support low end arm systems as is it is to support low end x86 systems. I could see us trying to leverage the Android-x86 project or libhybris and use some of the Android apps that will run on x86 machines. That would give us access to more apps/applications. I don't think dropping support for x86 and moving to arm is the best solution for supporting older machines at this point in time. Supporting both platforms is going to complicate things a great deal as well. We can either support old computers well or low resource mobile devices and devices like Raspberry Pi well. It would be very hard to split resources and support both. They have different needs and constraints. > What about compiling a mobile OS using musl (postmarketOS for example), > or perhaps figuring out a way to get a really low-spec WM that works with > Weston working as a good phone/tablet/laptop/desktop UI? So that would probably be WIO at this point ( https://wio-project.org/ ) as far as the windowing goes. This project is already doing what you've mentioned minus the mobile support: https://github.com/tpimh/nenuzhnix They're using musl and Wayland. I mentioned WIO and they're looking into that as well. I'm guessing postmarketOS isn't going to be a good project to try to get involved with because I haven't had any luck contacting the developers about it. I have e-mailed the developer of nenuzhnix before. I think he'd be welcome to sharing resources. There are also some Puppy Linux distro developers that are working with musl. I think they're concentrating on trying to get tinyxlib working instead of Wayland though. Do we want to go with Wayland or do we want to go with a tiny X server (like TinyCore Linux and a few of the Puppy spins)? I was looking at some of the tiny X ports and xserver-xsdl (used by Android apps). There's an interesting port of K-Drive (part of Xorg) that works on top of SDL. If we could build that successfully, SDL2 works with KMS and it could handle low level functionality like keyboard/mouse/video support. Then we wouldn't have to worry about maintaining that part of things with Xorg once X Server development stops. As mentioned, the other way to go is Wayland and a project like WIO. Most popular GUI frameworks will have support for X11 or Wayland at least for now. One last option is nano-x instead of X or Wayland. It'll be interesting to see what happens with BSD systems and what they choose since they can't adopt Wayland as easily as a Linux system. I guess I've raised more questions than answers. What does everyone else think? What's our target audience? Which processors (x86, arm, 64 bit, 32 bit, etc.) do we want to support? Which processors do we have access to (old computers, old laptops, old Android tablets, Raspberry Pis, etc.)? What do we want our desktop environment to look like (Wayland, Xorg, KDrive, nano-x, framebuffer, maybe something like Jide had, something else altogether)? -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~torios Post to : torios@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~torios More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
