< Changes
Maui Desktop(Hawaii)
Summary
Maui is an innovative Linux distribution currently in development that specifically targets personal computing. Maui is a fast, efficient, simple to use, easy to learn and yet powerful system for computer users of all levels. Hawaii, the desktop environment, is a lightweight, coherent and fast desktop environment that relies on Qt 5, QtQuick and Wayland and is designed to offer the best UX for the device where it is running.
Maui doesn't have the traditional packages, it offers an innovative update system with point in time recovery and lower bandwidth usage; applications are shipped as bundles (compressed images that don't need to be decompressed).
Owner
- Name: Christopher Meng
- Email: i AT cicku DOT me
- Release notes owner:
Current status
- Targeted release: Fedora 22
- Last updated: 2013-08-26
- Tracker bug:
Detailed Description
What is Maui?
Maui is an innovative Linux distribution currently in development that specifically targets personal computing. Maui is a fast, efficient, simple to use, easy to learn and yet powerful system for computer users of all levels. Hawaii, the desktop environment, is a lightweight, coherent and fast desktop environment that relies on Qt 5, QtQuick and Wayland and is designed to offer the best UX for the device where it is running.
Maui doesn't have the traditional packages, it offers an innovative update system with point in time recovery and lower bandwidth usage; applications are shipped as bundles (compressed images that don't need to be decompressed).
Open Source
Open Source is collective power in action, the power of a worldwide community that build, share and improve the software together and then make it available to everyone. We want to make a system that is easy to use and give our users the best out of the box user experience. This is only possible thanks to the worldwide Open Source community, because experts all over the world make a little piece of technology available to others.
Out of the box experience
Maui aims to offer an excellent desktop experience with Hawaii. Instead of forcing you to know every detail of your computer we expect you to turn it on, sit down and just use it.
It's not the kind of Linux distribution you tried before. Instead of including a plethora of different desktop environments, Maui has only one made to overcome the boundaries of the current solutions. Hawaii the desktop environment, has a balanced settings policy, between the minimalist approach where almost no preferences are available and the highly-customizable approach where every single detail can be changed. Sane defaults for the needs of most users will make you feel at home.
The "shell" is modular, this means we can create variants optimized for the device you are using. A "shell" optimized for the desktop will be the first choice available, but we plan to make a tablet shell available as well. As the technology we are using will be widely adopted our applications and third-party's will have a different UX experience for both desktop and mobile devices (some projects like Snowshoe are already doing it).
We pay attention to the details in order to offer you the most exciting user experience possible.
Relies on amazing and powerful technology
Hawaii was born to take advantage of what Qt, QtQuick, Wayland and systemd offer. Wayland is the most exciting piece of technology for the Linux graphics stack in years and Maui is the first Linux distribution to use it, in fact Maui couldn't be done without it.
Wayland provides a method for compositing window managers to communicate directly with applications and video hardware, its goal is a system where every frame is perfect, where applications are able to control the rendering enough that users won't see tearing, lag, redraw or flicker.
Qt is an application development framework based on C++ and has been chosen to implement the desktop environment and applications. Over 450,000 developers in more than 70 industries have chosen Qt to build advanced applications and devices. It's available as a SDK that aims at maintaining binary compatibility through minor releases, this means your applications will run on previous versions of Maui and developers won't need to rebuild the bundles for every minor release of the operating system.
The shell is built using QtQuick, a collection of technologies that are designed to help developers create intuitive, modern, and fluid user interfaces. It includes QML, a CSS & JavaScript like language to ease the development of dynamic and modern applications.
QtQuick applications rendering is fully hardware accelerated and designed to run at 60Hz and is synchronized with VSync in order to avoid tearing, lag and flickering.
Qt Creator is a cross-platform IDE (integrated development environment) tailored to the needs of Qt developers. It focuses on providing features that help new Qt users get up and running faster, and also boost the productivity of experienced Qt developers.
Benefit to Fedora
Of course users can benefit from this new DE in Fedora.
In the past Fedora users can only use yum to install GNOME/KDE/LXDE/XFCE, after Fedora 18/20 released, MATE/Cinnamon/Enlightenment are available for yum, too. Although users can compile DE by themselves, it's really painful and hard to maintain. Think about every time after reinstall the OS :). It would be more convenient to provide RPMs to users, so install/update/uninstall will be very easy.
Moreover, Maui Desktop is a fairly new toy for people who is willing to use fresh things. I think bringing it into Fedora can also attract more users.
Scope
Just package every dependency and promise that they can be reviewed 'PASS'.
- Proposal owners: Package all dependencies and push them to review queue.
- Other developers: Keep existed dependency packages updated, make sure the default backgrounds and theme is available.
- Release engineering: Nothing here currently. If there are sufficient interests and participation, a Fedora Maui spin could be released.
- Policies and guidelines: N/A (not a System Wide Change)
Upgrade/compatibility impact
N/A (not applicable)
How To Test
Once the packages are APPROVED. we can test this easily.
User Experience
yum install @hawaiishould install the new desktop environment
Dependencies
All packages listed in the tracker need to be reviewed and tested.
Contingency Plan
These are just RPMs and we just need to do push or unpush. So we don't need to care about reverting the changes.
Documentation
Upstream components has a number of man pages and HTML content that will be included within the packages.
Release Notes
Currently none.