aquaBSD 1.0 Alps (beta 0222a)

22/02/2022! 🌊
https://youtu.be/CEHMOM4L2vI

(Don't listen to GitHub, I did infact release this on the 22nd.)

Still using aquaBSD core 1021a (as new 0222a has some as-of-yet unresolved GSOD bugs & the sc driver doesn't seem to report any graphics VGA modes 😢), but the WM and installation process have been refined alot. Here are the things which have been added:

• Alot of polishing, stability/usability improvements, and graphical updates in the window manager.
• Window resizing & proper fullscreening support (at the request of a window client).
• Big updates to the UI system, including image elements, theming system through theme files (in $AQUA_ROOT/conf/themes), and proper HSV-space colour interpolation.
• Window decorations and a new DWD (dynamic window decorations) protocol for aquaBSD applications.
• NVENC support with the aquaBSD NVIDIA drivers (based on 510.39.01 and thanks to the excellent work of @shkhln) and, with that, support for NVENC in applications which use ffmpeg (e.g. OBS Studio). The nv-codec-headers package may be installed to compile other applications with NVENC.
• Big performance improvements in the installer (now performs an SRV lookup to get a list of FreeBSD package mirrors, and runs a quick (1.5 s) speedtest on each one to choose the fastest).
• Once again, many new features and things I've probably forgotten about since 1221a 😄

aquaBSD 1.0 Alps (beta 1221a)

Merry Christmas! 🎅 🎉
https://youtu.be/t2yQQYLinGg

As opposed to 1021a, this changes literally nothing under the hood (in fact, this is still using aquaBSD core 1021a), but is a pretty large superficial update.

• New compositing window manager based on XCB/EGL (as opposed to Xlib/GLX with x-compositing-wm).
• 3D wallpaper.
• New system for ZPK's (and many changes to iar & aqua-kos along the way).
• Huge changes to the UI device, mainly to support a new OpenGL backend in addition to the framebuffer backend.
• Super simple start menu.
• ZPK builds of a few applications (notably Blender & xterm).
• Continuous integration brought to even more components (iar has a build which runs on a Linux container on AWS' Graviton2 ARM processors which I think is metal) & started writing some simple tests (so far only for iar).
• Probably a bunch of other things I forgot about in the past nearly 2 months 😄

aquaBSD 1.0 Alps (beta 1021a)

Pretty big update under the hood:

• Now running on top of aquaBSD Core (aquabsd-core), which is based on FreeBSD 14, rather than a barely modified version of FreeBSD 13.
• Completely automated build system from start to finish with Bob the builder (aquabsd-builder) for creating aquaBSD installer images.
• Continuous integration for all components necessary for creating an aquaBSD installer image with Cirrus CI ❤️.
• A package repository and build tree for aquaBSD components (aquabsd-pkg-repo, similar to FreeBSD's ports tree).
• A new graphical installer (aquabsd-installer) to replace FreeBSD's text-based bsdinstall installer (currently just installs the kernel and base aquaBSD distributions to a ZFS boot environment on a single drive of your choosing).
• A bunch of changes to the UI system that come from that, including grid sections, radio elements, sticky elements, SVG's, and much more you'll be able to play with once I release the library for interacting with aquabsd.alps.ui.
• Experimented with some values in the UI, so things may look uglier, feedback awaited.
• Reduced the image size by a further ~20% from 0921a.
• After more than a month of waiting, a Snake game (my highest score is 161, you're welcome to try and beat it).
• And yes @Jukitsu, the flag of the French language is indeed this → 🇧🇪

There are a few environment variables that are recognized by the installer which you can play around with. Click "Poweroff", then "Terminal", and type in one of the following:

export AQUABSD_INSTALLER_AUTOREFRESH=0 # disables automatic detection of drives and network interfaces
export AQUABSD_INSTALLER_THEMEPAGE=1 # enables the hidden & experimental theme selection page
export AQUABSD_INSTALLER_LAVA=0 # disables the (sometimes resource-intensive) lava-like graphical effect on the right-hand side of the screen.

Then, you can start the installer again by typing in:

LD_DYNAMIC_WEAK=0 aqua --devices /usr/share/aqua/devices

Also happy (late) Halloween! 🎃

aquaBSD 1.0 Alps (beta 0921a)

Added many AQUA components and a simple UI demo. Not super interesting for the time being, but it's quite an important step. Experimented with making smaller image sizes, but ideally would like to end up going even smaller than this for the final version of the installer.

aquaBSD 1.0 Alps (beta 0621a)

First release of aquaBSD. Lacking a lot of features soon to come, but you gotta start somewhere, right?