Building a custom image

[boredsquirrel]

For user experience it really is best to not need to layer packages.

I dont know how many that would be, but at least for NVIDIA and proprietary codecs that would be quite a lot of packages.

ublue.it hosts images, I have absolutely no experience here, but having auto-building images applying the needed updates would be really neat.

• custom Kernel possible, either hardened or similar to Nobara for things like Surfacebooks
• proprietary drivers overwriting free ones
• licensed codecs overwriting free ones
• lots of "nonessential" preinstalled RPMs like
  • fish
  • kate
  • distrobox
  • virt-manager, qemu, qemu-kvm
  • waydroid
  • R R-CoprManager rstudio-desktop
  • stacer
  • tlp
  • unrar
  • pip
  • powertop
  • perl-Image-EixifTool
  • pandoc
  • gdb
  • custom SDDM themes
• uninstalling bloat
  • free codecs not working (kffmpeg-thumbnailer and ffmpegthumbs too for all videos!)
  • firefox RPM
  • Gnome apps, KDE Apps
  • unnessecary worse free drivers
• we could theme it, maybe restore grub and theme it (Fedoras guidelines say it has to be hidden and not themed)
• integrate useful modifications to userspace
• remove fedora Flatpaks, install Flathub instead
• preinstall Flatpak Firefox and more
• integrate autoupdates
• ... all other mods

I imagine building such an image just like you would natively do, but more advanced. I guess using rpm-ostree you can just create a modified image and extract that, but not sure about the other mods that are not layered RPMs.

We could have such a process running every hour, and serve this prebuilt image. I guess ublue already does something like that.

[iaacornus]

i will look about this one, although maintaining it would be the problem, since i am doing research in academia and i have quite a lot of responsibilities. Although i'd be happy to contribute if i have time

[boredsquirrel]

They have preconfigured ISOs with a patched Anaconda now!

It checks some boxes

• drivers
• flatpak and rpm-ostree autoupdates
• distrobox
• udev rules
• some settings

[boredsquirrel]

I agree this may be some more work, but looks like they did a great job at all the handwork. So it should be possible to just use their presets and modify them, its what they actually want, pretty cool.

There would also be the option to let them do some mods and use their image, but that would slow down updates by a day so I would not prefer to do that. (or we move the build schedule by 2h and use their image, okay)

[boredsquirrel]

how should be proceed then?

I would say two images, nearly identical, for system tweaks for gnome and kde.

then a smaller script for the user-side stuff.