Origami Linux’s COSMIC Desktop on Fedora Atomic Almost Wins Me Over

Posted by CackleRooster@reddit | linux | View on Reddit | 23 comments

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Inner-Bridge-5241@reddit

I'm the creator of Origami. Thanks for all of the support guys. Any feedback is welcome to improve the distro.

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hippwn@reddit

Hey, thanks for showing up! I have a hard time figuring out the difference between Origami and Fedora's Cosmic Atomic spin. Would you mind clarifying that?

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Well Origami actually uses that image as the base and builds upon it. Essentially replacing a lot of the Linux tools with modern replacements and ships with curated themes and configs to make the Cosmic desktop look better. We also remove a lot of the default apps and ship with distrobox and topgrade. Also we ship with our own cosmic extensions. Hope this helps clarify things.

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pedrohqb@reddit

Why no Homebrew as UBlue does?

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panick21@reddit

What cosmic extentions? Also how did you find working with that extensions system?

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Inner-Bridge-5241@reddit

Origami comes with the default cosmic ones. And we also have our own system update extension, and WIP workspace extension waiting for PR request into cosmic upstream. Creating cosmic extensions are fun to make. Easy to integrate .

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hippwn@reddit

Oh alright, it does make more sense now. Thanks for the clarification!

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Inner-Bridge-5241@reddit

Also just wanted to add we are working on a tool for configuring system things in one place. But still TBD

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YoMamasTesticles@reddit

Immutable/Atomic distros do not sacrifice the freedom of tweaking your system, even on a traditional distro, /usr should not be touched at all and /etc, where 99.9% of system-level configurations go is still writable

If you care about tweaking every single part of your system, that becomes a custom image category. Do all that shit you'd normally do on a traditional distro with a clear and reversible history through git commits

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dyews_ph2ter@reddit

Not to mention that sysexts can arbitrarily modify /usr as a user wishes...

Even udev and kernel modules, just not the ones required for boot.

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The_Bic_Pen@reddit

> /etc, where 99.9% of system-level configurations go is still writable

Doesn't that throw away the guarantee that your system will work given a specific snapshot? You can very easily break your system by messing with /etc.

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YoMamasTesticles@reddit

You can still break it if you do really stupid shit, but on Fedora Atomic, changes to /etc are monitored. If you make changes to /etc and go back to the previous image, they are reverted to the point where that image was created on your system

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The_Bic_Pen@reddit

Ah I see. That sounds more important than /usr not being writable. On a normal distro you wouldn't want to write to /usr in most cases anyway

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AulonSal@reddit

Okay, I might not understand enough about the problem, but for a few years I ran arch linux on a macbook pro from 2015.

The file /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/macintosh_vndr/us led to errors when I set a certain keyboard layout in sway.

I will admit that I should have debugged the actual issue, but did not have the technical competence for it and did not want to spend the time gaining that technical competence for such an issue, I somehow realised that copying /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/us to /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/macintosh_vndr/us would fix the issue.

I then told pacman to not extract /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/macintosh_vndr/us in its config.

This makes the change last through upgrades. If it breaks my system somehow, I will just use an a bootable iso / backups / extra installed barebones arch partition I have / whatever else.

Please tell me how this problem would be solved with an immutable /usr. (I understand no onus on you to solve my issues, but since you argued for it, I did not see too much of an issue posing this problem to you).

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YoMamasTesticles@reddit

First off, I can only speak for Fedora Atomic. Immutable/Atomic distributions have different implementations

If there's no way to operate on /etc, you'd create a custom image and make your changes there

I can't tell you how exactly to fix your issue, but I'll give you a few examples on what I do instead

I wanted to try Snap and Nix packages on my Fedora Atomic. Those require having /snap and /nix folders at the root. When my custom image builds, it runs a script which creates those folders, then another script installs the snap package through DNF, done I have snap support. Nix required running a script once on a live system

I like and use the micro editor. I want it to be the default and always launch with a certain argument. One script installs it through DNF, another moves /usr/bin/micro to /usr/bin/micro-bin and makes /usr/bin/micro a customized wrapper. Lastly it customizes profiles with sed so that the system really sees it as the default

I once used Brave Browser RPM package, but that did not support having a flags file. I realized the binary under /usr/bin/brave-browser isn't an actual binary but a wrapper script, so I customized it to handle the flags file kind of based on what Arch did.

My changes are always there with a clear history, as the image is rebuilt every day on top of an updated Fedora base through a Github action

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ABotelho23@reddit

Finally more people are realizing this.

True power users love this stuff because it puts their system into version control and makes things way more predictable and modular.

Modifying /usr (or basically any package-managed file, really) has basically always been bad practice, because you never know when an update will come around and wipe away your changes.

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YoMamasTesticles@reddit

Yup, I don't like the argument people on traditional distros make: "I want to be in full control of my system"

While I'm reading the 10th post of the day where a random update / tweak made someone's system unbootable, I've never had to deal with any of that on my Atomic system

My system is clean. It completely prevents the "Oh shit my stuff stopped working, I changed something last week, now I need to reinstall" situations

I don't care about updates, they just happen automatically in the background, while I'm doing what I want

If the update breaks something, I just go back in a minute, done

That's control

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Hadi_Chokr07@reddit

Fact is NixOS is an immutable Distro. You can basically do anything on it. The same way we in AerynOS want to eventually turn it into an immuatable Distro by making /usr only writable by our package manager moss.

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YoMamasTesticles@reddit

Yeah the problem is it's a "new concept" build upon the old

I wish we all agreed on keeping the core OS totally separated and adapted the tooling to not mix-mash with it

That way anyone could have a rock stable base which would be easy to troubleshoot as everyone would be on the same thing and there would be no limitations on how one can install end user programs

You can kind of see the model with Homebrew. Although not perfect, that's what I use for CLI programs on Fedora Atomic

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