I’d like to run Ubuntu Core on my laptop with a full desktop environment.
Would it be possible to snap gnome shell, pulseaudio, etc for use in Ubuntu Core?
If not, what is missing for this to happen?
i think @alan_g and his team were working on making this possible eventually …
currently the only graphical setup you can run on core is a kiosk (single fullscreen application) setup … you’d have to put the whole desktop, the login manager and all applications into a single snap to achieve a complete desktop setup in the current condition.
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oh and btw …
is actually a demo showing a full (very ancient) desktop env snapped on top of ubuntu core (but it only ships like 3 apps and i havent touched it in a while, so not sure it works with recent mir-kiosk)
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There are quite a few things missing at present.
I have a strictly confined snap of a simple desktop environment (egmde): https://snapcraft.io/egmde-confined-desktop
If you play with this a while you’ll experience the limitations. The most obvious being the lack of a way to launch any application that isn’t part of the snap. (It is possible to manually launch applications outside of the snap and have them appear on the desktop.) There is work planned to enable desktops to launch applications, but so far as I am aware, that could be quite some time in the future.
You’ll also see that you’re running as root, not a user. To run a desktop as a user the snap needs access to logind. I’ve done some of the work on this, but the login-session-control interface isn’t in a release of snapd (yet).
This is all based on an example desktop that comprises a single program. A more complete desktop environment (like Gnome) is likely to contain many components that need individual tweaking to work in a strictly confined snap.
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