Ideas and Inspiration for a new mintwelcome version - With flutter

[Jean28518]

Hi!

I don't know if I should post this one here or at the linux mint forum.
If such posts don't fit in here, just mention it and I will post this in the linux mint forum.

I am using linux mint for years and learned flutter in the last weeks.
In my opinion currently mintwelcome doesn't take the user too much by the hand.

So I designed a general proposal for a new mintwelcome version.
For that I used flutter, which the new ubuntu installer is also using.

You can try it in the browser here: https://www.server-jean.de/mint-welcome-proposal/
(The linux build is much more performant and looks nicer.)

I hosted the project here: https://github.com/Jean28518/mint-welcome

Concept of mintwelcome

• At first mintwelcome asks you like the current version for the desktop theme.
• After that it could be selected between different browsers, office suite and other software.
• Then it askes, if you want to configure your linux mint manual (like now), or to let it configure automatically with recommended settings (e.g. automatic updates, timeshift setup, etc).
• After that you will be in the "end" screen with links to the software manager, the firewall, the documentation and the contribute site.

(I designed only the frontend, this version is not functional in any way)

Flutter

Flutter does not support any common linux desktop themes. So everything has to be built by hand.
For that I designed a Mint-Y implementation (which obviously is more like an interpretation, not the actual one ;) ).
I built a collection with support for "pages", buttons, text, the mint colors and other widgets.

Currently dark/bright themes and the primary color is supported by my Mint-Y implementation.
Sadly for a switch between the dark and the bright theme a application has to be restarted.

Icon themes are currently not supported by my module. Every icon needs to be loaded in as a specific image. (Maybe a "icon call" package for linux could be built in the future.)

Some impressions about the Mint-Y theme:

Conclusion

In the end for a real flutter implementation some further work has to be done. Especially for the icons.
It depends on, which path you want to go with linux mint in the far future.
Stick to native gtk or use flutter as a frontend with native support for gestures, animations, ..?

Also what do you think about the general concept of mintwelcome itself without the frontend discussion?
I would love to improve the current mintwelcome or to develop my flutter implementation further on.

[clefebvre]

Thanks Jean,

It looks interesting. My gut feeling is that I'd prefer to stick with GTK, both for UI consistency and for maintenance purposes.. though you got me pretty curious about this interface. It does look pretty interesting.

Would you be able to share some of the code? I'd be interested to see what it looks like and how it can integrate with gettext and be run as an app.

[JosephMcc]

Most of what I see there could really probably be implemented in Gtk. That would avoid the issues with theming and icons.

[carlosmintfan]

@clefebvre He shared a link to the code: https://github.com/Jean28518/mint-welcome