Subject: Re: bug#57068: Resizing mcron job in vm-image.tmpl interferes with settings

From: Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Aug 2022 12:36:42 +0200

Hi Maxim,

Maxim Cournoyer <[email-masked]> skribis:

> The vm-image.tmpl is the template we use for our graphical Guix demo
> QEMU image that can be downloaded from our site
> (https://guix.gnu.org/en/download/ ->
> https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/guix/guix-system-vm-image-1.3.0.x86_64-linux.qcow2).
>
> This commit was made to allow SPICE dynamic resizing to work, as
> mentioned in a comment part of this commit.  XFCE lacks support for it,
> as also mentioned in the comment
> (https://gitlab.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-settings/-/issues/142), which means
> a new user downloading the image and running it in a SPICE-capable
> viewer such as virt-manager or gnome-boxes will be dismayed that it
> doesn't resize as they may have come to expect from other modern
> distributions.

Understood.

(I wonder if the QEMU Guest Agent can serve a similar purpose.)

>> Should we remove this workaround, possibly finding another one?
>
> I think we should use a desktop environment that is better maintained,

I think this is unfair criticism: Xfce is actively maintained, with a
large user base.

> and which works well with SPICE, without hacks, given the improvements
> to the user experience it provides, and given it's important that a
> first user encounter with Guix be smooth and shiny.  GNOME could do it,
> at the cost of a bigger image size.

Right.  I wouldn’t mind GNOME, but one reason we went for Xfce is that
GNOME is just too big, at least as currently packaged in Guix.

> There are other, perhaps worst issues with XFCE, which is that the
> keyboard layout switcher doesn't work, and it didn't seem trivial to fix
> when I looked at it.

Oh, I wasn’t aware of that, that should certainly be fixed.  (I fixed a
similar issue in GNOME some years ago, and I’m confident it’ll be easier
to fix in Xfce because it doesn’t have all those layers and daemons and
JavaScript and DBus interfaces.  :-))

That’s a general issue with all Xfce installations, not just in the VM
image, right?

Thanks,
Ludo’.