Any idea how to install hints on an immutable OS (Fedora Silverblue)

[piedpipr]

[AlfredoSequeida]

I'm not familiar with an immutable OS. But I'm assuming by the name that you can't change the OS at run time so you might have to install it before? I'm thinking the OS documentation has something you can follow.

But as a quick heads up; if your fedora instance is running Gnome on Wayland - Hints is not supported. There is an MR that adds that functionality, but I have not had time to finish testing it.

[McPhale]

@AlfredoSequeida An immutable OS is one where certain system directories are locked down in ways that they aren't in traditional versions, and typically an OS update will blow away any modifications made to those directories if you do manage to write to them. (I think it's anything outside of the user directory). The idea is that it makes system updates more stable. It does make installing certain types of software difficult to do however, eg drivers that aren't bundled with the OS. I'm not as familiar with linux yet as I'd like to be so I couldn't tell you what those directories would be, but hints probably does need to write to them. I think in my case (steam os) the package manager is entirely disabled by default.

@piedpipr You can try installing it in a container via something like distrobox, which is the recommended way to install cli tools like this in an immutable distro as they aren't available as snaps or whatever. I had some amount of success doing this with hints but it only sort of works, and I've not gotten around to figuring out what needs to change yet. YMMV

[AlfredoSequeida]

Thank you for the info! I don't know how many people would want to install hints on such a distro, but if this is a niche thing maybe we can add something to the wiki under the window manager/distro specific steps.

If either of you wants to share what you've got working and what needs to be figured out, we can use this thread as a way to get those docs started.

[piedpipr]

@AlfredoSequeida and @McPhale Thanks to both of you. Actually my system uses Gnome on Wayland, so I could not test it. Maybe someday if the MR you talk about gets merged we can try. Besides, building something from source is a pain in a immutable system, and distrobox is good as long as you do not require root and kernel specific accesses for writing. Other than that it is almost the same as a normal OS (oversimplified) except you follow some ostree specific rules while installing something.

So it all boils down to support for Gnome on Wayland for my case.

[piedpipr]

Working on Gnome on Wayland and Fedora Silverblue

Hi, @AlfredoSequeida I tried again installing hints on my Fedora Silverblue (Gnome on Wayland) and I installed the PR from @realh along with his Gnome Shell extension, I can say this is working totally fine (apparently). I even merged his PR in my fork and currently using it on my system.

All I had to do is pipx install git+https://github.com/AlfredoSequeida/hints.git on my host (Silverblue) (I used my fork in its place) and made sure my system has these dependencies pipx python3-gobject python3-dbus gtk4 (which were already part of my system)

The only thing I can nitpick is that I experienced a little delay in launching the overlay, which kinda feels less snappy. The overlay appeared to have some kind of animation inherited from the Gnome and I would love to know if there's a way we can disable it for hints only. Also, the service seems to be consuming 22-23M of memory, I don't know if it is expected or not.

And the very last thing is this warning that appears when I execute hints

dbind-WARNING **: 01:47:57.324: AT-SPI: Unable to open bus connection: Failed to connect to socket /run/user/1000/at-spi2-VKYDI3/socket: No such file or directory
Gdk-Message: 01:47:57.549: Window 0x3bcd5cc0 is a temporary window without parent, application will not be able to position it on screen.

Apart from these it is working real good as of now before I can find any issue that might occur with extended use! I hope this helps anybody interested in using hints on their Atomic immutable systems.

UPDATE: Apparently it is working fine with many system apps and Gnome apps but not showing up on Brave, Chrome and most user apps.

[AlfredoSequeida]

That's great news! I wasn't able to get it working, but I think it might be due to my installation of gnome since you were able to get it working. I need to try it on a more standard installation.

As for the animations, I don't use GNOME, but other window managers / compositors have the ability to set window rules specific for an application based on the window class name.

For example see this Hyprland example: #34 (comment)

Here is a picom example: #13 (comment)

And another Hyprland example: #49 (comment)

You need to find something similar for GNOME.

[piedpipr]

@AlfredoSequeida I already found that it is not working with all the apps. Most system/gnome apps are working fine but many 3rd party user apps like Brave, Chrome and many others are not working. I will leave a comment on the original PR for this issue.

[AlfredoSequeida]

This is a good section in the docs to try first if you haven't yet: https://github.com/AlfredoSequeida/hints/wiki/Help,-hints-doesn't-work-with-X-application

There are also some environment variables mentioned in the readme that are helpful to set.

[AlfredoSequeida]

@piedpipr Hints supports Gnome Wayland now: https://github.com/AlfredoSequeida/hints/wiki/Window-Manager-and-Desktop-Environment-Setup-Guide#gnome-wayland