Fedora Template Desktop Flavors and more.

[Epitre]

Dear all,

I'm quite new in the Qubes community and I'm pleased to be a part of as QubesOS is a great distro. I'm daily using it now for several weeks and I'm working on having a more comfortable user experience (at least for me).

A first part I have been working is to add Fedora template flavors. I created these templates in qubes-builder-fedora based on kickstart files provided by Fedora for the spins, at least, for a minimum packages selection. In order to have the proper desktop environment selected when booting the AppVM (eg. appearance management), I added xinit scripts based on start desktop scripts corresponding to the flavor selected (XFCE, LXQT and so on). At this time, I tried flavors for KDE, LXDE, LXQT and XFCE, and I'm daily using XFCE desktop for my AppVMs because it's small and also uniform with the default choice of dom0. Before creating things properly on github repos, I would like to know if it would interest some user and also Qubes team.

A second part was the general screen appearance. I like the Arc theme developed by horst3180 (https://github.com/horst3180/arc-theme) but the default package provided does not allow XFWM coloring of AppVM because it's using PNG assets instead of XPM ones. I corrected this and forked the repo (https://github.com/fepitre/arc-theme for those who wants to try, don't forget to build it with : --with-gnome=3.18 for Qubes 3.2). Probably some colors adjustments are needed but it's a good start. This theme uses a nice blue color for widgets, selection background etc. so for me it's perfect for dom0. By the way, I wanted to go further than only coloring the window borders in dom0. I have created arc-themes with all the colors of Qubes for AppVMs in order to have in my opinion a more visual confirmation of which VMs we are using. I have almost finished to prepare things for github (https://github.com/fepitre/qubes-arc-themes) so stay tuned ! Here is a screenshot http://i.imgur.com/OLGKwo3.png

Best Regards,
Epitre

[Epitre]

Hi,

I have forked qubes-builder and qubes-builder-fedora and add XFCE desktop flavor for Fedora 25 (https://github.com/fepitre/). I only put XFCE as a proposal for further considerations of having desktop flavors. The package selection is the same as the kickstart file. We could probably remove things but I choose it as a first public choice (from my side I trying lighter version).

I have not fork all the qubes repos so if someone would like to test it:
- clone the repo https://github.com/fepitre/qubes-builder (if you want to use the setup utility, I added XFCE flavor it in the templates.conf)
- create a builder.conf file with fc25+xfce
- get the sources and before building, replace the default builder-fedora by my repo https://github.com/fepitre/qubes-builder-fedora

Also, for those who wants to try arc-theme in Qubes 3.2 dom0 (with windows coloring): https://github.com/fepitre/arc-theme/releases/download/master/arc-theme.tar.gz and arc-theme with Qubes colors inside VMs: https://github.com/fepitre/qubes-arc-themes/releases/download/0.1/qubes-arc-themes.tar.gz

Et voilà ;)

Best regards,
Epitre

[Cyril]

Nice work! Thanks

[Epitre]

Thank you.

Do not hesitate to give me your feedback/suggestions.

Epitre