Ubuntu Core GDM Experiment

@marcustomlinson @jamesh

I’m reading about your Ubuntu Core GDM Experiment in the weekly updates and it makes me very curious :smiley: It sounds like a full graphical snap. Can you describe more about it, what currently works, what’s the target and so on?

When possible it would be great if we could see some video too about that :blush:

See

The end goal is to have an UbuntuCore based desktop fully rolled from snap packages…

5 Likes

It’s an experiment in building a graphical desktop system on top of Ubuntu Core. I generally tag updates about it as an “experiment” because most effort has been centred around working out what’s possible rather than having a fixed end goal. Most of the effort so far has been on getting a graphical login (the “GDM” part), and being able to launch a strict confined desktop session from there.

I’m not sure that there’s much new that you’d see from a video: if you’ve seen the default Ubuntu 20.04 desktop session and the gnome-initial-setup first boot experience, then that’s basically what you’d see. There is still a lot of work to do before you could use this system to do real work. In particular, graphical snaps can’t yet connect to the Wayland server running in the confined desktop session, and we don’t have slot-side implementations for a number of the “implicit on classic” interfaces those snaps rely on.

1 Like

That’s super amazing! :star_struck:

I get it, but that’s super interesting, thanks for this great job and description :blush:

Is there an update on the “experiment”. How did it conclude ?

I’ve also been curious about this?