Stopped Clock — Year of the Linux Desktop

Year of the Linux Desktop

May 23 2016

As some of you already know, xdg-app project is dead. The Swedish conspiracy members tell me it’s a good thing and should turn your attention to project Flatpak.

Flatpak aims to solve the painful problem of the Linux distribution — the fact that the OS is intertwined with the applications. It is a pain to decouple the two to be able to

Keep a particular version of an app around, regardless of OS updates. Or vice versa, be able to run an uptodate application on an older OS.
Allow application authors distribute binaries they built themselves. Binaries they can support and accept useful bug reports for. Binaries they can keep updated.

But enough of the useful info, you can read all about the project on the new website. Instead, here comes the irrelevant tidbits that I find interesting to share myself. The new website has been built with Middleman, because that’s what I’ve been familiar with and worked for me in other projects.

It’s nice to have a static site that is maintainable and easy to update over time. Using something like Middleman allows to do things like embedding an SVG inside a simple markdown page and animate it with CSS.

=partial "graph.svg"
:css
  @keyframes spin {
    0% { transform: rotateZ(0deg); }
    100% { transform: rotateZ(359deg); }
  }
  #cog {
    animation: spin 6s infinite normal linear forwards;
  }

See it in action.

The resulting page has the SVG embedded to allow text copy & pasting and page linking, while keeping the SVG as a separate asset allows easy edits in Inkscape.

What I found really refreshing is seeing so much outside involvement on the website despite ever publicising it. Even during developing the site as my personal project I would get kind pull requests and bug reports on github. Thanks to all the kind souls out there. While not forgetting about future proofing our infrastructure, we should probably not forget the barrier to entry and making use of well established infrastructures like github.

Also, there is no Swedish conspiracy. Oh and Flatpak packages are almost ready to go for Fedora.

Jakub Steiner