There is a difference between what developers expect icon directories to do what the actual freedesktop's specification states they should do and what the actual implementation of the specification does.

Marketing material about property graphs hides all the tradeoffs made to achieve their simplicity of use they fail to give a fair comparison against the relational model. Even though the relational model has advantages over property graphs. I would even argue benefits of the relational model outweight those of property graphs.

Lately I moved into elementary OS Juno besides the usual bugs in an unstable release I was expecting to be able to do most of what I was doing before. I recently published my first in elementary’s AppCenter so the first thing I wanted to do in my clean system was to install it and check everything was working fine. But to my surprise there were no elementary apps in App center!. What I hadn’t realized was that Houston (AppCenter’s backend) also needs some preparation for Juno which means rebuilding every application for the new environment based on Ubuntu Bionic. This new repository is not yet ready as it is to be expected in an unstable release. As I was thinking how to test my application I saw Spotify running inside a Docker container. This got me thinking I should learn about containers and this seemed like a good opportunity. I wanted to see if I could use them as a test environment for older Linux distributions specially elementary OS Loki.

It has been a year since I for the first time about my ideas on how to improve international input methods on elementary OS. I would like to do a summary about how things have changed since then not only in the operating system but also in my thoughts about what needs improvement how to do it and the amount of work required to get to that point.

It’s been quite some time since I wrote here but we haven’t stopped working at all in fact I have now a lot of new ideas of how to improve input methods on elementary OS. The good news is Loki will be here and we have some new cool features the probably bad but really not so bad news is that since Loki beta is already out Loki stable will be released any time now so addition of new big features is not really an option. This will not let us add a lot of the most interesting ideas instead we should start planning to get them on Loki+1.

We left off previously in that I was about to write code to load xkbcommon keymaps into the X server that soon proved to be not a very good idea because the keymap type on xkbcommon is an opaque structure this means the authors want to be able to change its organization at their will without breaking someone else’s code so the only way to manipulate it is through their API. We could technically bypass this but I think the maintainer burden added would be too much and it would make difficult to update to newer versions of the library. Another way to accomplish this is as a patch to the tree to libxkbcommon which sounds fine but as I said before I don’t want to bother other people because this is sort of an experiment also it would add code there that will be useless once we move to Wayland and will also make people less willing to move out from X.

I've been digging trying to implement the loading of xkb files on Gala turns out that stuff has been abstracted several layers deep which makes it difficult to experiment with this stuff without bothering people upstream and having to make changes and coordinate with several different projects (and teams). Because what I've been trying to do is rather experimental I don't want to just create patches for a lot of projects and argue they should merge my code because I think it will be good (I don't even know that myself) instead what I've been trying to do is implement stuff and see how well it works out and if I really think it's useful for others. I'm also looking to add the least amount of code to Gala so rewriting the whole keyboard handler seems like the most extreme solution and I am trying not to come to this.

This post contains some ideas I’ve had lately on how to improve the internationalization of input methods on elementary OS (mainly keyboard input). Originally my idea was to write a blueprint but I think there’s still a lot to be discussed before proposing what to actually do. I will write down my ideas here and hopefully with some feedback we will manage to get a blueprint we can work on.