A few thoughts on endless

#1

Just installed endless on an Acer c720p.
Looks nice and works even with the touchscreen , that is until the system went into standby for a while.
Connecting to my wireless network failed at first , but that seems to be a network manager bug that also plagues recent Ubuntu versions. Manually adding/editting the security key in the network connection settings fixed that.
This particular computer has only 2GB of ram , like your custom hardware and I wonder why is zram not configured? The installer does not create a swap partition and opening a couple of pages in chrome and YouTube brought the system to a grinding halt.

On the bright side it recognized two printers and even the scanner on printer /scanner combo.

I do like the appstore approach , but would welcome the possibility to manually install a few packages.

There seem to be some flat pack or permission problems with some gnome apps. In Gnome Dictionary I could not add further Dictionary-Sources, the “add” button stayed gray and would not let me save the new entry. In Files/Nautilus I could not save login credentials for a smb-share permanently. Gnome books did not find any books although I created a folder “Books” in my home directory and put books inside of it.
I also tried making making gmail the standard mail transfer agent but only evolution is offered, even though gmail was installed by default. Same goes for VLC, neither in files nor in the settings was it possible to make it the preferred videoplayer.
There seems to be a glitch for the input method . I installed the system to use German language, since I am in Germany. I added Chinese input since I am trying to learn that language. The indicator in the taskbar does let me choose only between the Chinese characters for English and Chinese 中 英, the actual input remains qwertz though.

This system will be perfect for a few friends and relatives once the kinks are ironed out.

I’ll be back.

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#2

@Thomas_Sattler Thank you for your thoughtful comments.

I replied to your follow-up question regarding zram on https://community.endlessm.com/t/is-there-any-method-to-enable-zram/1867, but I’d like to take a moment to respond to your other feedback here…

GNOME Dictionary and GNOME Books are provided directly by the GNOME community – we simply enable their stable Flatpak repo. We’ll need to report those bugs with the upstream community. GNOME is actively improving their Flatpak support, so I’d expect bugs like this to be fixed over time. We temporarily hid a couple GNOME applications that we found to be completely broken in our testing, and I’m not sure if we saw GNOME Books partially working or if we just did not test it well.

The Gmail “application” is actually just a launcher to open gmail.com in the browser in “webapp” mode. Perhaps it is possible via MIME types to advertise this as a mail handler. If you’d like to try editing the .desktop file yourself, an easy way to do so is to click on the name below the desktop icon and make any edit to the name. That will create a copy of the .desktop file in ~/.local/share/applications which you can edit as desired.

The missing MIME type handler for VLC is a known issue that we hope to have time to fix soon.

I’m pretty sure that the Intelligent Pinyin Chinese input method is working properly, though it is a little confusing at first, because you need to click on “English” in the dialog to toggle to “Chinese”. (The displayed “English” vs. “Chinese” is describing the current setting, rather than what is selected by clicking on it.)

I hope that helps. Thanks again, and please let me know if you have any further comments.

Roddy

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#3

@Thomas_Sattler One other comment on the Chinese input method… By default, the Shift key will switch between Chinese and English characters, but that can be disabled via the Preferences on the pop-up dialog.

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#4

@Thomas_Sattler Oh, I see that the characters you mention (中 vs. 英) would be for switching Chinese vs. English, so perhaps there is a glitch that I am unable to replicate, as I get the Pinyin entry when the taskbar shows 中. I’ll have to try on a clean installation with the language set to German.

Roddy

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#5

To clarify, there is no functional problem. Once pinyin is chosen from the taskbar, pinyin input and western character input work the way they are supposed to do. Both use the chosen input-method (pinyin / western) with the correct default input-device (qwertz/deutsch).
This is much better than windows or chrome-os. Changing from western to pinyin input within those also changes the internal keymapping / input-device to an american standard keyboard-layout wich doesn’t match the physical keyboard built into the hardware.
The only irritation is the character 英 (english) for the western (in my case german) input method. Chinese people who are used to writing on windows will adapt, out of former experience, to typing z in place of y and vice versa because they assume the internal keymapping changed to an amercan standard keyboard. They might also expect not being able to input “umlaute”, since they are used to that.
Even in android it works in that way, once you install the google-pinyin method on a german phone, chosing between chinese/western in pinyiyn mode, the system will draw a qwerty (american) keyboard on the screen not a qwertz( deutsch/german) one.
Linux mostly does it right, there is proper separation between input-device (physical, localized keyboard) and input method, unlike those other OS’s wich hardcode chinese to american input-devices.
So confusing the characters is more an annoyance than an actual problem.

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#6

@Thomas_Sattler Thanks for the clarification. I’m always happy to hear of ways that Linux / Endless is better than Windows or ChromeOS :slight_smile:

This is probably not high enough priority for us to carry a downstream patch. This is something that would be best to report to the upstream project that maintains the pinyin functionality, which we would eventually pick up as part of a normal maintenance update. If you are interested and need help identifying the relevant project, let me know and I can investigate.

Roddy

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#7