One thing is sure; FOSS has taken significant strides over the way since the 80s. Apparently, FOSS has been around since the 1950s, when purchased hardware was run by free specialized bundled software.

Until 1985, Richard Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation that was meant to support the Free Software Movement. FSF committed to Free Software, the one that users could use for free, modify, sturdy, and even share.

According to Stallman, the main difference between open source and free software is the fact that “open source is ideally a development methodology, while free software is merely a social movement.”

A year later, FOSS came into the limelight based on four freedoms. The four freedoms of free software were established solely as a result of the free software movement, and they denote what exactly constitutes free software.

Here are the freedoms;

Freedom 0 – this is the freedom that allows you to use the program for any purpose; you simply run it as you wish.

Freedom 1 – it is the freedom to accessing the code. It means that you can study how the program works. Interestingly, you have the freedom to change it to do your computing just as you wish.

Freedom 2 – this is the freedom to redistribute the copies to others to help them.

Freedom 3 – it’s the freedom to distribute your copies of modified versions to others. That way, you give the entire community the chance to benefit from the changes you made. A precondition for this is accessing the source code.

Just a couple of days ago, the lead developer and CEO of Solar project “Local key Doherty” announced major changes in Budgie Desktop 11, with an account of some developments coming along. In that blog, he also made an announcement that took the users by surprise;

[...]

That’s right! Budgie is ditching GNOME to make the transition to Qt.

Ikey remarked that this change would take effect upon the next major release of the software, which effectively discards the components of GNOME architecture.

Initially, Budgie was designed to work with GNOME software programs, which eventually lead to its full integration into the GNOME software stack.

This slow and unprecedented integration raised some problems for Solar Project. First, they had to scramble to update Budgie anytime GNOME released an upgrade because the outdated version would cause errors. This started ever since the first version 3.10 of Budgie was made public, and the problem persisted until GNOME 3.22.

The problems would manifest as API/ABI inconsistencies, elements cluttering each other, clogged workflow, widgets, and template crashes. In some instances, GdkScreen APIs became completely dysfunctional.

For a while, we have heard this justification, among distributions that have refused systemd as init, that elogind was adopted as a necessity for running wayland which is the future of graphical desktops. Some future this is, but anyway. For Artix it was a day one decision, for Void and Adelie it has been a year or more, for Slackware a few months. But it is only a handful of distros at this point that have totally refused the use of elogind and stick to consolekit2 (which was recently upgraded upstream unlike common myth that has it abandoned). Consolekit2 can handle logind functionality but can’t provide seat management. So there is seatd, a daemon that just does this. So count the different functions, unrelated to each other, that systemd provides all in one huge blob.Sway is the equivalent of i3 for wayland. For i3 users their setup transfers 100% to sway, all modified functionality will be there once you login.

Wlroots is wayland’s modular library. This is native in obarun and maintained to help wayland function without systemd/elogind. It is currently kept back at 0.12 as Arch but will be soon upgraded to 0.13.

Greetd – wlgreet is a display manager compatible with wayland. This has a PKGBUILD at the link above so you can build it appropriately for Obarun.

None of these are officially supported as a desktop setup in Obarun yet, but the setup is a demonstration that it can be done. Can it be done with sysv, openrc, runit? We don’t know. Can it be done with s6? Since it is done within Obarun it can be done. Whether you can handle the complex service setup without 66 and in lack of any other service manager, who knows! Of course you can cheat and employ 66, do the setup, then remove 66 and leave it as is, as a pseudo custom s6 setup of services. Don’t cry if one day you decide to switch services, disable one, enable another, without 66. The procedure can make a tough man cry.

Gavin Falconer or bbsg in Obarun forum, has started this thread for the discussion of this project/solution. A how-to instructional thread. A few of us have tried it and made it work. I am sure it will receive plenty of attention and refinements in the near future, and possibly be adopted officially as an Obarun setup, with all the related packages added to the repositories. For now it is a community project, and it is proof that it can be done.

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