Make core components & applications more generic

[FangcatChina]

As we all know that Vanilla OS is a GNOME-based operating system, while it does encourage users to create images for other desktop environments using Vib. However, creating a "perfect" image for another DE is actually difficult since most of the applications such as first-setup & vanilla-installer are especially designed for GNOME.

Lately I've been trying to create a KDE image for Vanilla OS. However, the pre-built commands are mostly written for GNOME, which may cause severe issues for other DEs. For instance, after completing setting up accounts, first-installer would directly terminate user session, which would not properly return to SDDM due to the "abnormal" way to log out.

Besides, the arrangement of packages and configurations are also weird. For example, GDM autologin for vanilla is done in vanilla-installer instead of desktop-image. At the same time, IBus is installed in core-image instead of desktop-image.

This kind of tight coupling between core components and GNOME makes it hard to produce a clean, well-integrated image for alternative DEs without forking or heavily patching the upstream code.

I'm still working on the KDE image and some related PRs, and sincerely hope that Vanilla OS could become a universal & highly customizable operating system in the near future!

[NN708]

I really appreciate your detailed feedback. I don't have much experience with other desktop environments, but I fully agree with the direction of making things more DE-agnostic.

A few thoughts on the specific points:

For first-setup, it's actually designed specifically for GNOME, and I think it would be better to write a separate frontend for KDE using Qt, and ideally split the logic into a universal backend with pluggable frontends.

For vanilla-installer, you're right that it should be universal, so that users could install any system image with the same installer ISO. Anything DE-specific should be in that DE's image, and we definitely should have a dedicated base image for DEs to reuse most of the code: Vanilla-OS/desktop-image#238

Your KDE work would be genuinely valuable here, as we could know which parts of the stack are actually DE-agnostic and which are not. Please do submit your PRs when you're ready, and we can discuss the details together.