general questions about lomiri
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hello all, me and some of my friends are designing our own tablet from scratch, and i have been tasked with finding a UI and software suite for the device, o the tablet and touch oriented options, lomiri seems one of the most promising, however, given my unfamiliarity with linux UIs on phones and tablets, i would like to ask a few questions about lomiri, and was directed to do so here,
my questions are:
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is lomiri available for distributions other than ubuntu touch, or architectures other than arm? if not, would significant effort be needed to port lomiri to other distributions or architectures?
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is lomiri using wayland? is lomiri a wayland compatible desktop, capable of running wayland and xwayland applications seamlessly, what is the relationship of mir to wayland, and what is the architectural relationship of mir to lomiri?
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what graphical toolkits does lomiri use? are lomiri's panels and apps written in gtk? qt? or something else? should applications written for lomiri be done so with any special considerations, as compared to common desktop DEs?
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how well does lomiri work with a keyboard and mouse? the lomiri website says it is WIP on desktop, is it useable? is it comparable or significantly worse than ubuntu unity? would any work have to be done to improve this?
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how customiseable is lomri? can panels be rearranged, can gestures be remapped or relocated, for example, could the directions of gestures be swapped for a left handed user? would this be doable currently or would it have to be added? if the latter, how difficult would doing so be
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how themeable is lomiri? can other colour schemes besides the purple and orange theme be selected? can colours be changed and can the visual elements be changed in shape? can lomiri apply matching themes to both its own UI and to applications running within it? what are the limits of theming in lomiri, and what could potentially be added?
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is the open store capable of using various backends depending on the distro on which lomiri is used? for example, could it show debian fedora or flatpak applications? can the open store present only applications which would work on touchscreen? given the historical link between ubuntu touch and ubuntu desktop, does the open store rely on snaps or the proprietary snap backend?
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what features does lomiri's window manager have? i am aware it can display windows both fullscreen and floating, does it have other features i should be aware of?
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what features of lomiri do you really love? what features of lomiri may i be unaware of? what features are unique to lomiri compared to other UIs? what sets lomiri apart and above compared to other UIs? what should excite me and how would i convince my colleagues to use lomiri on our devices too?
i hope i have asked these properly and appropriately, and none of my questions are a pain, thanks to everyone here in advance for any answers you can provide me : -)
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Hi @Raposa, I am not deeply involved in Lomiri, just with Mir and it's ecosystem. So I will answer those questions I can.
This could be useful background on the Wayland ecosystem:
https://mir-server.io/docs/ok-so-what-is-this-wayland-thing-anyway
is lomiri available for distributions other than ubuntu touch, or architectures other than arm? if not, would significant effort be needed to port lomiri to other distributions or architectures?
Yes, it is, for example, in the Ubuntu 24.04 and Fedora 40 archives and available for multiple architectures.
https://packages.ubuntu.com/noble/lomiri
is lomiri using wayland? is lomiri a wayland compatible desktop, capable of running wayland and xwayland applications seamlessly, what is the relationship of mir to wayland, and what is the architectural relationship of mir to lomiri?
Mir is a library for writing Wayland compositors and enables using Xwayland to support X applications.
https://mir-server.io/docs/developing-a-wayland-compositor-using-mir
Lomiri is one of multiple Wayland compositors written using Mir, and supports X applications. (Indeed the Mir support for X was initially contributed by one of the Lomiri developers.)
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@alan_g thank you, this means there wouldnt be any packaging issues for using lomiri, or any issue running libadwaita and kirigami apps under lomiri either, which is very good news : -)
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@Raposa said in general questions about lomiri:
is lomiri available for distributions other than ubuntu touch, or architectures other than arm? if not, would significant effort be needed to port lomiri to other distributions or architectures?
Yes multiple distro's as Alan listed, also with Nixos available. Yes different architectures, have lomiri + ubuntu noble running on an x13s arm and a yoga intel.
@Raposa said in general questions about lomiri:
how well does lomiri work with a keyboard and mouse? the lomiri website says it is WIP on desktop, is it useable? is it comparable or significantly worse than ubuntu unity? would any work have to be done to improve this?
I would suggest test it your self, but for me quite well.
@Raposa said in general questions about lomiri:
is lomiri using wayland? is lomiri a wayland compatible desktop, capable of running wayland and xwayland applications seamlessly, what is the relationship of mir to wayland, and what is the architectural relationship of mir to lomiri?
Also interesting to read the Mir white paper https://ubuntu.com/engage/build-smart-devices-with-mir-whitepaper
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@Beta-Break i tried lomiri on a desktop, using the ubuntu desktop iso provided by ubuntu unity with their latest release, both lomiri and unity seemed comparable, but i thought it best to ask since i am not very familiar with either
