Adding Modern Desktop Environment Options to Gloire

One of the biggest barriers for adoption of up and coming operating systems is bad accessibility, graphical interfaces, and application frameworks. To not make Ironclad-based systems meet this fate, we have some cool progress to show!

In this article, we will cover our advances porting the MATE desktop environment to Gloire, our testing Ironclad distribution, alongside the work done to port the GTK+ ecosystem that allows easy porting of other applications and DEs, and where we go from here in this effort.

Why MATE (and by extension, GTK)?

The MATE Desktop Environment (DE) is a pretty complex, yet portable option that lets us port and test the GTK ecosystem while knowing that we are working with software that has already been ported to other operating systems, like FreeBSD or OpenIndiana, lowering the workload when compared with other DEs only made with Linux in mind.

GTK is also a pretty enveloping ecosystem, that makes it so future DEs and Window Managers (WMs) using the toolkit are easier to port, being more efficient with our efforts.

Where is all this work?

All the porting work as been done in Gloire, our testing and primary FOSS distribution. Instructions on how to build and run it on common emulators, alongside downloadable images, are provided on the project’s README. None of the available binary images for download include this work as default DE due to stability issues we are polishing with mate’s panels, but applications like the file manager, text editor, and terminal emulator, are fully functional!

Where to go from here?

In the future we want to deepen our support of GTK-based DEs by porting other options, like XFCE, while maintaining support for non-GTK already-ported options like JWM. Once all the details of MATE are working, we will make MATE the default DE of Gloire.

Thanks to

This work was done in large part by Dennis Bonke (Codeberg, Github), who was sponsored through NGI Zero Core, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet program. Check his work if you can!

Feedback

For any feedback please join an Ironclad community, or as a second choice, contact me at my email. I would love to hear back!