The release of TileOS 1.0 'T-Rex', built on the Debian package base and featuring a desktop that uses tiling window managers, is now available. TileOS aims to achieve the same objectives as the Ubuntu Sway Remix distribution (developed by the same author), providing a ready-to-use interface that requires no additional setup and is designed for both experienced Linux users and newcomers who wish to explore a tiling window manager environment without spending a significant amount of time on configuration.
However, unlike Ubuntu Sway Remix, TileOS is much more open to various modifications and customizations, and is free of any potential copyright issues (Ubuntu Sway Remix uses registered trademarks of Canonical, but no official response regarding integrating the distribution into the official Ubuntu family has been received yet). Builds are prepared for the amd64 architecture (support for arm64, particularly for Raspberry Pi boards, is planned in the future). The source code of TileOS components is available on GitLab.
TileOS focuses primarily on window managers that use the Wayland protocol. Official editions with Sway and River desktops are available, while editions with SwayFX (a fork of Sway enhanced with various desktop effects) and Qtile are under development. The distribution uses a Debian Stable package base; however, various enhancements, newer versions of some software, and graphics drivers are pulled from the testing branch. Additionally, several optimizations for disk subsystem and memory performance have been included, as well as some improvements from Ubuntu, such as mounting disks in the file manager without prompting for a password.
Key features of TileOS:
- Linux kernel 6.6.15 with improved response time (option CONFIG_HZ=1000, Debian uses CONFIG_HZ=300).
- Open video driver set, Mesa 23.2.1, and Xwayland 23.2.2.
- The Zram mechanism is enabled by default, using the zstd compression algorithm.
- A significant number of non-free drivers and firmware are pre-installed, greatly expanding support for various hardware.
- Repositories with additional software, such as VirtualBox, Visual Studio Code, Librewolf, OnlyOffice, and Brave, are enabled by default.
- The ability to select additional software in the Calamares installer has been implemented.
- D-Bus Broker is used as the implementation of the system bus D-Bus.
- For sound, server PipeWire is used.
- User session management is handled by systemd, allowing for the proper termination of running applications and components during reboot, shutdown, or logout, and ensuring the correct handling of application autostart.
- In the Sway edition, systemd-oomd is used as the OOM Killer daemon. In other editions, EarlyOOM is used.
- A unified Catppuccin theme, featuring soft pastel colors, is used for the styling of applications.
Features of the Sway edition:
- The desktop evolves alongside the Ubuntu Sway Remix distribution, ensuring mutual transfer of certain changes.
- Many utilities from the NWG-Shell project are utilized, such as the Autotiling window auto-layout script, the nwg-drawer full-screen application menu, the nwg-displays utility for setting display parameters, the nwg-look utility for customizing appearance, the nwg-bar session manager, and nwg-wrapper, which allows displaying the contents of any scripts on the desktop (it also enables hints for keyboard shortcuts used in the distribution).
- A minimal set of components is pre-installed, including the PcmanFM-Qt file manager, Pluma text editor, Alacritty terminal emulator, Engrampa archiver, and others. Additional software can be selected during the system installation or installed directly after the system installation.
Features of the River edition
- A dynamic window manager named River, written in Zig and incorporating many elements from DWM, Awesome, and Bwpwm, is used. River is characterized by its ease of configuration (the configuration file is a standard shell script executing commands sequentially for the IPC bus riverctl), broad flexibility, and lower resource consumption compared to Sway. Since River is in active development and currently significantly lags behind Sway in functionality, the TileOS River edition is experimental.
- As with the Sway edition, NWG-Shell project components are utilized, except for those which do not explicitly support River (for example, wdisplays is used instead of nwg-displays).
Source: opennet.ru
