Components

This is a work-in progress description of which components could be used to put together the hello system.

Core OS

• FreeBSD - Liberal license, great ZFS experience, slowly-changing, complete operating system system, no different competing distributions. Possible alternatives: NetBSD?
• https://github.com/furybsd/furybsd-livecd - Builds Live ISOs for FreeBSD, is customizable. Live system can be booted from ISO file using https://www.ventoy.net/ which allows one to have multiple Live ISOs in parallel. Live system optionally can be installed to disk. Current issues: Without Ventoy, copies the whole ISO to RAM before booting. Possible alternatives: NomadBSD, GhostBSD?

GUI toolkit

• Qt 5 - Most cross-platform applications are written in it. Unlike Gtk, it is also not tied to many of the unwelcome technologies.
• lthemeengine - export QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=lthemeengine to be able to get OK/Cancel buttons in the preferred order and to set custom colors for the Qt theme. Possible alternatives: Kvantum (allows themes to be made using SVG)

Desktop environment

• LxQt or Lumina - Lightweight and based on Qt 5. Possible alternatives: Xfce (Gtk would bring in Gnome-related dependencies), KDE (would violate the "software minimalism" principle)

Display manager ("login box")

• sddm - Qt based.

Window manager

• To be defined - No pure Qt solution known so far. Lumina uses fluxbox (window decorations don't look native and there is no window snap), NomadBSD uses openbox (window decorations don't look native and there is no window snap). kwin_x11 draws in many Kf5 dependencies and may be resource hungry (to be verified) and lacks Alt-Tab application switching but it can do animations, window snap and has compositing features built in.

Compositor

• compton - Drop shadows. Possible alternatives: Compiz

File manager

• https://github.com/probonopd/filer/ - Very lightweight. Opinionated fork of PCManFM supporting AppDir. Can render the desktop, too. Current issues: Dependency on glib through libfm, limited Drag and Drop so far. Possible alternatives: lumina-fm (minimal, no glib dependency), https://github.com/probonopd/dfilemanager (more powerful, but does not build on FreeBSD yet)

Global menubar

• To be written? - No pure Qt solution known so far. Maybe port over the KDE appmenu Plasmoid as a standalone application? Possible alternatives: Launch KED Plasma just for the global menubar (would violate the "software minimalism" principle).

Dock

• To be defined. No pure Qt solution known so far.

Search and application launcher

• Qt version of Drill to be written? - Possible alternatives: Drill (would look non-native since not written in Qt)

Browser

• Chromium or Falkon

Utilities

• qterminal
• lumina-archiver
• lumina-calculator
• lumina-config
• lumina-fileinfo
• lumina-info
• lumina-mediaplayer
• lumina-open
• lumina-pdf
• lumina-photo
• lumina-screenshot
• lumina-search
• lumina-textedit
• lumina-xconfig

Fonts

• UI font to be decided. Candidates: URW Nimbus Sans (not L) from e.g., https://github.com/ArtifexSoftware/urw-base35-fonts/ (similar to Helvetica);
• pkg install google-fonts

Application Suites

Libre Graphics Suite

Complete application suites (additional ISO)

https://github.com/AppImage/AppImageKit/wiki/Libre-Graphics-Suite

• Scribus
• Inkscape (despite Gtk)
• Krita
• Possibly Gimp (despite Gtk; has overlap with Krita, do we still need it?)

Libre Video Suite

• OBS
• Kdenlive

Libre Office Suite

• LibreOffice

3D Printing Suite

• FreeCAD
• Cura
• Possibly PrusaSlicer

Development Suite

• Qt Creator
• Arduino IDE
• Golang
• LiteIDE