Endless with traditional desktop for a Research Lab

#1

Hi all,

This is my first post here, thank you for the great OS.

I intend to investigate the use of OSTree and Flatpak in computers destined to run statistics in a research laboratory in the future. My concerns with other OSs as arch or ubuntu is security, the combination of OSTree and Flatpak generates (as far as I can understand) an environment where the kernel and the different apps does not communicate between each other, and that would be desired in my particular use case.

  • Are there any projects that offer traditional desktop with the combination mentioned above? I could only find endlessOS.
  • Is it possible to convert endlessOS main shell to Gnome Shell or other more traditional interface (mate, budgie)?
  • Several important softwares are not yet in Flatpak format, can these be sideloaded in endlessOS, in case I need them?

Thank you.

2 Likes
#2

Hi,

Are there any projects that offer traditional desktop with the combination mentioned above? I could only find endlessOS.

The closest one I know if is the Fedora Atomic project. It does not use Flatpaks, however.

Is it possible to convert endlessOS main shell to Gnome Shell or other more traditional interface (mate, budgie)?

We don’t support other shells, and probably won’t support them in the near future.

Several important softwares are not yet in Flatpak format, can these be sideloaded in endlessOS, in case I need them?

You can generate your own Flatpaks and use them freely (it’s easy! See http://docs.flatpak.org). If you do so, feel free to share it with us :slight_smile:

If you have any more doubts, don’t hesitate to get in touch again.
Cheers!

1 Like
#3

@lf-araujo: we’d love to know which apps you think are missing on Endless. Even if we can’t build a solution now, we do take feedback into consideration as we continue to improve Endless. Feedback is always welcome and appreciated!

1 Like
#4

Thanks for the replies!

In two messages, you guys made the community far more welcoming than I have ever experienced before. This is sorely needed in linux, congratulations.

@nuritzi note that a essential element to make a good distro for scientific research is a traditional de, as the researcher will probably need to go back and forth between apps and the terminal. My current setup uses Budgie, because of simplicity and performance.

The packages I am interested in may be obscure to general audiences, but here it goes:

From these only R and Freesurfer are opensource, perhaps Rstudio is opensource as well, not sure.

Best,
lf

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#5

Pandoc is free software, too! A very useful tool. It’s written in Haskell. I don’t know whether we have a Haskell toolchain in the OS yet – it’s probably a bit of a hard sell to add and maintain one for a single application.

On http://pandoc.org/installing.html#linux there are instructions for installing it to your home directory from the package, though.

1 Like
#6

Dear @wjt and @feaneron,

Sorry for bumping this conversation.

I understand that endless will not support other DEs, however I plan to experiment with it and another doubt arose.

  • Is there any way of installing the original gnome desktop in the system or only the modified version exists on the repos?

Thank you,
lf

#7

Only our modified GNOME Shell is included in the OS. There’s no repo for OS components – the base system is an immutable ostree snapshot, and Flatpak can’t be used to install different desktops.

That said: in principal you could build and install upstream GNOME Shell (and related components as needed) to /usr/local, but you’d be firmly off the beaten track then.

#8