Read the statement by Michael Teeuw here.
CALL FOR TESTERS: New install script
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@sdetweil I beg to differ, yes less software, because the whole thing is based on the lite image, not the full image, with all the packages not installed and daemons not running there’s actually a pretty significant reduction in installed software and services. Actually, I consider the possibility to work on the lite image a significant advantage of my script over other installation methods.
curl, git, node and MagicMirror are pretty much a given, since omitting any of these would pretty much defeat the purpose of the whole thing.
About “noise”, you lost me there. There is no package or binary called “noise” installed on my test system, and since I know pretty much all of the common mainstream window managers and quite a few obscure ones at the very least by name, “noise” would either have to be pretty new or a quite obscure one. If you doubt my admittedly boastful claim, kindly research “sithwm”, evilwm and xmonad. I’ve actually used all of those at some point, if only for evaluation purposes
The script in itself neither installs nor sets up any window manager at all. Xserver-xorg-common, which is pretty much the only suspect, doesn’t even contain or depend on any. I can definitely say it’s not a dependency or part of any of the packages my script installs. If you could tell me where you found that information, I might be able to shed some light on the issue.
PS: Found it. /usr/bin/noise is part of the openfoam package. My script definitely didn’t install that one.
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@drdeath noise in this context meant insignificant to the problem at hand
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@sdetweil Ok, got it.
But there really isn’t any wm in my setup. The purpose of a wm is to let the user manipulate windows, which he isn’t supposed to do, so having a window manager would actually be detrimental in this use case.
I originally had my blackpixel tool in there as a stand-in, but as I already explained over on discord, it turns out the process that really matters to keep the X server alive is actually the shell process running the init script, not any process that script starts.
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@drdeath I am sorry that you found my comment offensive. That was not my intention at all. I think it’s a shame if there’s an atmosphere where you can’t express ideas or ask questions. Even if they are stupid, one should remain respectful. I think it’s good when people start new projects and try different approaches. So thanks for that!
Out of technical curiosity: Why are you using X? Wouldn’t it be possible with Wayland?
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@KristjanESPERANTO Apology accepted, I didn’t really take offense, it really was mostly just irritation on my part at the flat-out dismissal of my work and everybody focusing on what I consider to be minor technicalities.
As for why I don’t use wayland (yet), X is what I know, and it does the business. I’m not saying I’ll never make the switch (I’m quite curious to learn more about it) but for now I’m happy to leave good enough alone. Frankly, I’m not sure switching to wayland wouldn’t break a things, since the ancient tools I rely on might not play well with the new kid on the block.
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@KristjanESPERANTO since you got me curious, I looked into Wayland a bit.
So to answer your question again:
While Wayland is generally considered more efficient in general use scenarios, in a scenario where you want no window management, no window decoration and certainly no visual effects, that efficiency advantage would not only be negated, but turned into a disadvantage.
Also unlike X11, Wayland apparently cannot be started as a bare-metal service but always requires a compositor like Weston or Sway in the background which would actually not only result in a heavier premium in resource usage but would also require a more complex and error-prone setup.
Last but not least, wayland is far less use-case agnostic compared to X11. Like many modern software suites, it makes a lot of assumptions about how it is going to be used. Since many, if not most of these assumptions wouldn’t hold true in a scenario like the one we’re discussing here, using Wayland would carry a lot of the downsides of running MagicMirror on a full DE, in short, you’d be fighting against your framework instead of working with it.
In conclusion I can say from what I learned about Wayland so far, I definitely made the right choice with X11.
N.B. that are only the conclusions of a very brief look into Wayland on my part, so there may very well be ways to make it behave the way I want it to, but if they exist, they seem to be a lot less trivial and well-documented.
