Ramblurr's Sway Desktop

This is an rpm-ostree based minimal Fedora developer desktop with the sway window manager and podman/toolbox for doing development and running less common graphical applications.

It is based on the work by Martin Pitt:

• source
• blog post

High level design

The goal of the system is to be a workstation, using rpm-ostree for the base OS, and a combination of Docker and Flatpak containers, as well as virtualization tools such as Vagrant.

Status

This project is actively maintained and is ready for use by sophisticated and interested users, but not ready for widespread promotion.

See some [https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[email protected]/thread/J6BJS7Z4NKNOQUZWGYXZZIEKYMWBBSUY/](discussion about the first release).

Installing

See the Silverblue documentation at https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-silverblue/installation-guide/. There's also a guide for installing inside an existing system: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-silverblue/installation-dual-boot/.

Important issues:

• flatpak system repo

Using the system

One of the first things you should do use is use a container runtime of your choice to manage one or more "pet" containers. This is where you will use yum/dnf to install utilities.

With docker for example, you can use the -v /srv:/srv command line option so these containers can share content with your host (such as git repositories). Note that if you want to share content between multiple Docker containers and the host (e.g. your desktop session), you should execute (once):

sudo chcon -R -h -t container_file_t /var/srv

Next, let's try flatpak. Before you do: There's a known flatpak issue on AtomicWS - run this workaround, which you only need to do once. After that, try flatpak.

If you are a developer for server applications, try oc cluster up to create a local OpenShift v3 cluster.

Finally, try out rpm-ostree install to layer additional packages directly on the host. This is needed for "host extensions" - privileged software that doesn't make sense to live in a container. For example, rpm-ostree install powerline to use that software for the shell prompts of the host. Another good example is rpm-ostree install vagrant-libvirt to use Vagrant to manage VMs.

Future work

• GNOME Software support for both rpm-ostree/flatpak and possibly docker
• automated tests that run on this content