Good news everyone: Our final technic tests with Kubuntu, KDE Neon and all about Ubuntu 20.04 + KDE 5.19 together with a complete new development of our own Building tool suceeded! Since Bodhibuilder won’t work on Ubuntu 20.04 so far we just took their script, adjusted it like we need it and re-wrapped it with a nice little PySimpleGui Gui. And after long days, evening and almost nights of fighting we got it run – and now we are already in the process of setting up our first internal builds for iBuntu 2.0 Lix Nur! Here just a little picture grabbed from the factory 😉
Of course this isn’t the end result but it shows you already where the road will lead us: We will have a nice Global Menue, the new Icon and Window Design of macOS and a lot of more cool things.
At the end of the day right now we are thinking weather we integrate the new latte dock (which would users allow to integrate KDE Widgets within it) Or stick with the more simple but also way more user friendly plank dock – which in my opinion comes just way more closer to the “real” macOS Dock in look and behaviour. So maybe we will stick with plank as our standard dock but this shouldn’t bother you.
And of course I am sure many of you will have mixed feelings when we will switch to KDE. A complete new Desktop Environment you think, will this work?
But I promise you all the neat things you might already know from macOS and/or iBuntu Catalinux will stay: Gestures, Shorcuts, Standard Programs like Stacer and of course our iBuntu Update Tool. The only thing which will change will be the “Finder” (which now isn’t nautilus anymore but Dolphin) and the standard E-Mail-Programm will be Thunderbird once again instead of Evolution.
Also little tools like Pinta (a substitue for MS Paint) will be replaced by it’s KDE Pendant KDE Colors. But all of these adjustments we only do because the KDE-Pendants are just better than their gnome equivalents – plain and simple.
I mean this is the reason I want to keep with plank dock. This is an example where in my eyes the KDE-Pendant “Latte dock” isn’t under the premise “as close as possible to macOS” and that’s why it won’t be in our final Release as of today. But if a KDE-Tool is really better than the gnome variant than why should we stay with the gnome tool 🙂
So, enough for this week, as you see the hard days are over (I really hate technical tests xD) – now the only left work is to just set up everything again from scratch, test the whole thing from top to bottom and than – maybe around the same time like the original macOS 11 will be released – we will release our new Version to the public.
As of iBuntu Catalinux: As we always said we will keep it alive. Ubuntu announced that at August 13th they will release Ubuntu 18.04.5 – this will be the time we also will upgrade and update our Catalinux-Master and release the build as iBuntu Version 1.3 – already wih iBuntu Update Tool and Balena Etcher integrated.
Except this we decided not to integrate other design or program features. If we would bring the Big Sur Design themes with our Catalinux Version this only would confuse so Version 1 of iBuntu always will be named “Catalinux” and always will have the macOS Catalina Design theme with it. We are thinking of providing a kind of mini-tool which would “upgrade” the design themes but even with that I am not really satisfied because we would cannibalize our Version 2 if we would have the Big Sur Desing also available for Version 1.
Maybe it will be like a really minimalistic solution, a Script which only downloads the Bright GTK3-Themes for Big Sur and Plank and activates them. If anyone than would use our Deskmode Switcher to return to either Bright or Dark Mode than the Catalina-Themes would be reactivated. Via Gnome Tweaks everyone is still free than to get the Big Sur Theme back – this is the only thing I could be ok with. So who ever want it can get it with our scriptsolution, if he than changes back to our default settings he will have to do a deep dive into gnome tweaks to bring Big Sur back for Catalinux.
So long.