Introducing Aurora Preferences GUI (BETA)

Hi all,

Our maintainer @ledif has been working on something really nice and its finally time to show it. This new shiny thing is already merged in the latest and stable-daily streams, so without further ramblings:

Aurora Preferences GUI

Integrated natively to KDE System Settings panel, you can now find a new entry called Aurora Preferences

Aurora Preferences is currently a simple GUI frontend to our rebase-helper and allows you to easily switch between streams.

Here I have switched from aurora-dx:latestto aurora-dx:stable-daily

From the top right, during a rebase, you can open the details windows which opens a terminal window running the rebase script:

There are still some small issues around, for example the details window and the preference UI shows that the rebase didnā€™t finish successfully, although looking at rpm-ostree status a new working deployment is staged for next reboot.

The older ujust rebase-helper scripts is still available if you prefer to use that.

You can find all the stuff from ledifs repo: GitHub - ledif/kcm_ublue: KCM for KDE-based Universal Blue images and report issues you find.

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Looks awesome.

In the screenshot, what does ā€˜Developer experienceā€™ refer to?

It means the -dx image will be loaded

Could this be implemented in Bluefin or is KDE just that better extensible?

I donā€™t know how extensible the gnome-settings part of Gnome is.

But KDE supports this natively, that the settings panel can be exnteded to have own sections.

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I still donā€™t quite get how itā€™s actually working. For example, the first option system updates is doing what? Arenā€™t uBlues automatically updating themselves? Mine sure is and I donā€™t have that thing turned on.

About hardware enablement, one should still be able to have proprietary drivers for Nvidia even for newer models of GPUs, right?

This is a bug as we changed the update services a while back and the GUI is still looking for the old update service ā†’ so it shows the updates would be off. It will be fixed.

So even if the GUI shows updates are not on, they are in the backend.

Yeah you can enable the nvidia drivers from the GUI.

I should have propably made it more clear that this is still in ā€œbetaā€ stage and will have errors / small hiccups.

Your idea and initiative are good.
My suggestion would be to add more information on what the feature is and how it works more specifically within those exclamation marks. That would make it easier to understand for some users.

Great work! Hoping it comes to Bluefin at some point. Kind of regretting not starting with DX.

Iā€™m open to suggestions about what to include in the little info bubbles next to the options to better explain what they do.

As @inffy mentioned, the updates toggle not being checked is a bug that I just fixed and should be pushed in the next stable-daily image.

In general, the ability to disable updates has been explained by @j0rge in the past as ā€œif you are on a work-trip for the next few days and you need your laptop to be rock solid, turn off automatic system updating.ā€ Iā€™m not sure how to convey that in an info bubble, but maybe something like ā€œEnable and disable core system updatesā€?

As far as hardware enablement goes, from my understanding the main difference between HWE images and non-HWE images is that HWE comes with Bazziteā€™s kernel whereas the non-HWE images come with Fedoraā€™s kernel or CoreOSā€™s kernel.

Iā€™m not a great documentation writer, so itā€™s not clear to me how to convey in the little bubble what it means to use Bazziteā€™s kernel without listing the various patches that it carries such as ASUS and Surface support. Any suggestions are welcome!

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