I will make a fork

[CicadaSeventeen]

I find you often can not catch up with issues here. Maybe you are kind of busy. I am going to make a fork of SpiralLinux and resolve of of the issue myself.
The change I make will be written in readme. I may not often submit PR here, but you can just merge it when you want.

[CicadaSeventeen]

@geckolinux

[geckolinux]

Hi @CicadaSeventeen ,

Of course anybody is welcome to fork the project. However, when dealing with open source projects, patience is a virtue. :-)

SpiralLinux is not my full-time job, and in fact it's not even a part-time job. One of the reasons that I created SpiralLinux based on Debian is due to the slow rate of change of Debian. I intend and expect SpiralLinux to be a low-maintenance project requiring infrequent releases due to the low amount of change in Debian. I respond to questions and bug reports as time permits, giving priority to major issues that were caused by some sort of major deficiency in the default configuration of SpiralLinux. Things related to user error, user questions, Debian bugs, Debian limitations, and/or unique hardware compatibility issues are not something that SpiralLinux can solve via the default configuration, so they are not a priority, although I'm happy to offer suggestions as time permits.

[CicadaSeventeen]

Thanks a lot.

I have been dealing with some issues we talked about before. You can see here to see what I have done and have planed to do. I will respect most of your ideas ( ie, I will not remove virtualbox packages ) in this repo so that you can merge it sometime if you want.

I am much more free of time these year because I suffer from depression and leave school for some treatment., though sometimes I may be too depressed that I can not do any work. So when I am fine I often try to help with some projects or do my own ones. I mean, if you have some idea but do not have enough time to do so, you can just tell me and maybe I can do the job.

[geckolinux]

Thanks @CicadaSeventeen , I really do appreciate the good ideas as well as your availability. I'm sure that we'll be able to help each other despite our changing availability and circumstances. Best wishes for you and your health.

Regarding PRs, I think it would be easiest to just talk about the issues and planned changes and how to implement them. I don't really have the SpiralLinux repository set up for pull requests, as they are just simple tar.gz uploads. I don't consider myself a developer, I'm just an experienced Linux user and configurator, so I don't really need or want to implement the full git development workflow.

[geckolinux]

Regarding these suggestion changes from your Github:

removing /tmp in btrfs subvol mount point
I don't think you really want to do that. Without a separate /@tmp subvolume the snapshots will not be bootable, and the contents of /tmp will be included in each / snapshot.

adding dbus user session package
Which package name exactly would it be, and what would it accomplish?

Thanks a lot.

[CicadaSeventeen]

Regarding these suggestion changes from your Github:

removing /tmp in btrfs subvol mount point
I don't think you really want to do that. Without a separate /@tmp subvolume the snapshots will not be bootable, and the contents of /tmp will be included in each / snapshot.

adding dbus user session package
Which package name exactly would it be, and what would it accomplish?

Thanks a lot.

1. I do not meet any problem without /tmp subvolume till now. I will test for some time remembering your suggestion. Why you think contents of /tmp should be preserved?
2. package name is dbus-user-session. It is necessary to use snapd, though I do not advice you to support snapd by default but to tell users not to use snapd if possble because it causes problem with snapper. Besides it is necessary to run podman. However, if I remember correctly, apt install --install-recommends podman or apt install --install-recommends podman will not recommend dbus-user-sesion (I will check it)

[geckolinux]

1. I just tested an installation of SpiralLinux without the /@tmp subvolume, and the snapshots from GRUB will not boot into the graphical interface.

   • Why you think contents of /tmp should be preserved?

   The contents of /tmp should not be preserved. Removing the /@tmp subvolume will cause Btrfs / Snapper to include a snapshotted version of /tmp in every snapshot, because snapshots are taken of everything on the /@ subvolume, and without a separate subvol /tmp would also be part of that.

2. OK, thanks, we might be able to preinstall dbus-user-session if it doesn't cause any new problems.

   • tell users not to use snapd if possble because it causes problem with snapper

   Could you please explain the problem?

[CicadaSeventeen]

1. I just tested an installation of SpiralLinux without the /@tmp subvolume, and the snapshots from GRUB will not boot into the graphical interface.

   • Why you think contents of /tmp should be preserved?

   The contents of /tmp should not be preserved. Removing the /@tmp subvolume will cause Btrfs / Snapper to include a snapshotted version of /tmp in every snapshot, because snapshots are taken of everything on the /@ subvolume, and without a separate subvol /tmp would also be part of that.

2. OK, thanks, we might be able to preinstall dbus-user-session if it doesn't cause any new problems.

   • tell users not to use snapd if possble because it causes problem with snapper

   Could you please explain the problem?

1. You are right. I mistakenly think Debian will automatically mount a tmpfs on /tmp when /tmp is not mounted by fstab. This is behavior of Arch and Fedora, but not for Debian. I will undo this change. Thanks a lot.
2. snap mount read-only files on /snap, if it is not unmounted at the time you use snapper undochange (I always prefer to use undochange rather than rollback, probably rollback with same problem), the read-only files will be stuck here. This can be solved by make /snap a subvolume. However, snap also put files into /var/lib/snapd (I do not know if any other places are used by snap). Although /var/lib/snapd will not cause problem for snapped, it will be inconsistent with /snap after rollback. You have to make it another sbuvolume to avoid that problem.
   Do you remember openSUSE main repo does not include snapd? That is the point.

[geckolinux]

2. I see, thanks for the good explanation.
   Have you tested a sudo snapper-rollback X ? (Note that this is not the snapper command with a space between snapper rollback but rather this snapper-rollback utility.) From what you describe it seems like it should work to rollback with snapper-rollback, because /snap and /var/lib/snap would be together on the same /@ subvolume snapshot, so they would be together in a consistent state.

[CicadaSeventeen]

Reports: Some of my changes that may help you.

1. Adding fonts-noto. It provides fonts for all unicode, otherwise some languages will show as blocks (called tofu usually). You can search in language options when install by calamares, and you can see them,
2. Adding task-*-desktop packages. This will help you to install recommends packages for a desktop environment. Packages that easily to forget , like dbus-user-session which I told you before, can be isntalled by this way.
3. Removing hplip-gui. This is just a hp office program, why you install it? Maybe because you find it provides a /hp under /lib/firmware? If I remember correctly, /lib/firmware/hp is just a empty directory.

[geckolinux]

1. Thanks, good suggestion. It's rather large at 12MB. And is fonts-noto-cjk needed too?
2. Hmm, I don't really like including task-* packages because they usually bring a lot of bloat. We can compare the amount of additional packages and size that the task-*-desktop packages bring to each edition to see if it's worth it or not.
3. HPLIP is unfortunately necessary for HP printer/scanner owners.

Thanks again for the suggestions.