Although this is a minor release, we have some big features to share with you. You may notice that a big focus is on improving the experience for our users in Indonesia, and that’s because we’re shipping on laptops in that area at scale. If you’re not in Indonesia, don’t worry – we have plenty of improvements and bug fixes for you too. Here are some of the things that the newest release of Endless OS brings you:
Discovery Feed
The Discovery Feed helps you explore more about your world, and your computer. You can access it right from your desktop by clicking on the orange button at the top.
The Discovery Feed is currently available in English and Indonesian, with plans to expand to other languages soon. It provides a place within Endless OS where you can go to find the latest news, interesting information, and suggestions for apps that you may not know about. Since it refreshes on a daily basis, you can check back each day for new updates.
News and Information
Reading news and blog articles offline has never been easier. The Discovery Feed shows you articles from Endless apps to help you keep up with recent events and help you find new things that might interest you. You can install more Endless apps from the App Center to get more variety in your feed.
App Discovery
At Endless, we’re not only making an awesome operating system, but we’re also making a suite of apps that help you get many of the benefits of the internet even when you’re offline. Each Endless app you install adds more to your Discovery Feed so that you can enjoy random bits of knowledge throughout the year.
Flathub is enabled by default
Flathub aims to be a central hub for making desktop applications available to users. That’s great news for Endless users since Flathub will now be enabled on Endless OS by default.
Now, you’ll automatically be able to see new Flatpak apps in the Endless App Center. This expands your access to great apps so that you’re always on the cutting edge of what is out there.
Other Improvements
Support for Broadcom B43 wireless drivers. This important enhancement provides driver support for a large number of older Broadcom WiFi cards, which means that WiFi will now work for more laptops! This is great news for our Download users since more computers will now work seamlessly with Endless OS.
New “Store Demo” mode. Endless is now shipping on brand-name laptops and is being sold in Southeast Asia, Brazil, and other select countries. We’ve made a Store Demo mode that retailers can enter to show off what Endless can do without creating a proper user account. In Store Demo mode, users will not be able to save changes or files, and when the computer is rebooted, the computer returns to factory state.
High DPI support. If you have a High DPI display, Endless OS now supports crisp text, more attractive icons, and richer images. If you’re an existing user that is upgrading to Endless 3.2.5 or beyond, you may need to visit the Settings → Displays panel and select a new higher resolution, then logout and back in again to enable High DPI.
Indonesian DVD image. Endless has made a DVD ISO for Indonesian users to see if producing DVDs helps people to install Endless more cheaply and easily than before. As we learn about how useful the DVD is to people and improve the performance, we may roll out DVD images for other languages.
USB error message bugfix. If you don’t have enough space to download Endless OS while trying to create a USB stick, you’ll now get a “not enough space to download” error message.
Offline page fix. When you are offline and try to open a browser window, you will now see a generic offline page. We had introduced an offline page that helped to redirect users to offline apps in the computer, but unfortunately, the desired experience was not possible. Instead, we hope that the Discovery Feed will help users explore Endless when they are offline.
Flatpak update bugfix. We fixed some bugs around upgrading apps via flatpak. This is great timing for our Flathub enablement, since you’ll now be seeing a lot of new apps!
Wikipedia article bugfix. We fixed a crash that occurred when clicking on an internal link in a Wikipedia article found in some of our Endless-made apps.
Search results bugfix. We fixed a bug that gave too many duplicate results when you used the Global Search feature on the desktop.
Improved article load times. We improved the speed with which article cards loaded within apps.
Improvements for app developers. We added some fonts that were missing from the original release of the Endless runtime so that app developers can create better apps for Endless OS. We also fixed a problem where an app in development without any content available would crash.
Known Limitations
Video playback errors. We’ve found a bug that makes viewing some videos on ARM products slower or impossible due to a video decoding issues. We’re working on a fix, but until we find one, Endless Mini and Mission Mini users will be affected.
Hidden apps from Flathub. Some apps on Flathub are currently hidden in the App Center because we already have a version of them in Endless. Over time, we plan on replacing the apps that we initially packaged with their Flathub version. We also hid apps that we found to not work well during our testing. We hope to expose these apps once they are working better. We welcome bug reports either to Endless or Flathub.
High DPI bugs. We’ve found a few bugs that we’ll be working on in upcoming cycles like the cursor changing size during startup. We’ve also noticed that some third party applications don’t look as nice in High DPI mode. For example, Slack has a very small cursor, and Spotify has very small text and icons. You can work around this by setting your display resolution to exactly half the High DPI size, but text rendering won’t look as nice as it does in High DPI.
Try running the commands that @dan suggested in this comment and posting the output as a comment in that topic (make sure to tag @wjt and @dan in it). That should give them some insight into what might be going wrong on your machine, and suggest a fix. Thank you for being patient and sticking with us as we try and identify the problem, we will do everything we can get it resolved for you.
Where are all the new Flatpak apps as advertised from Flathub? The Application Center shows no new applications on my Endless Mini after upgrading to 3.2.5.
Actually, Flathub does publish applications for ARM, but some of the applications published there don’t run very well, so we don’t show certain ones in the App Center. If you want to try them out anyway, you can always download them directly from the Flathub website.
This is in fact one of the main reasons that Endless is working with Flathub, their app policy requires apps to work on ARM and 64 bit ARM wherever possible (it’s not possible to get 3rd party apps that only publish x86 binaries to work well on ARM so that rules out things like Slack). As Philip said, some other apps just work badly at the moment, but this is something that we’re working with the community to fix.
I’d like to see more work done to make Endless (Mini) a more hospitable environment for developers. I know developers are not the target audience for this kind of machine and using flatpak to sandbox is appropriate for your use cases, but it really is a drag trying to develop on Endless.
I often need command line tools from multiple runtimes and it would be convenient to have access to those from one terminal. Isn’t there some kind of “back door” you could provide for those who know what they’re doing (and don’t mind moving into unsupported territory) to allow applications to be installed in a docker container using apt like a traditional Debian machine?
Actually, if you just provided support for a hypervisor this problem would be solved. The infrastructure is there for ARMv8, though I’m not certain what the state of KVM/QEMU is for ARMv7. It’s worth looking into though. This would also allow users to install their own applications vs. waiting around for someone to build a flatpak (let’s face it, most vendors are not rushing out to build flatpak for their applications).
This is absolutely something that we’re looking at (no promises as to a timeline though). We want Endless to be a great place to develop on as well! There’s a few options under consideration so this feedback that you actually want this and some ideas about how you might want it is super valuable.
In terms of containerization technologies, is Actual Docker important to you? Or would something similar like systemd-nspawn meet the need?
The actual container (or virtual machine) technology isn’t so important. It’s just a means to an end. I’d just like the ability to open up a terminal (whether spun up in a VM or container) and develop like I’m on a traditional Linux box without having to blow holes in the sandbox for networking, X11, file system, etc.
Something else that might be useful is a tool to convert *.deb or *.rpm packages into a flatpak. I know that’s not trivial but it might be a stop gap solution until more flatpaks are available. In most case you’ve at least got a binary somewhere that should work on your machine. You just have to trace through the dependencies and look up the runtimes that provide them, pull all those in, etc. A mess I agree, but certainly possible.
Otherwise you have to motivate vendors to build flatpaks from scratch. I won’t bother until CPack from CMake offers flatpak as a packaging option.
@MichaelChampigny I realize this is an old topic, but we recently whitelisted a bunch of Flathub apps for ARM (Endless Mini), and there will be a handful of additional apps whitelisted with the upcoming 3.3.12 release in a few days. For Intel, our policy is to whitelist all Flathub apps by default, and only blacklist those that we find to be broken (or that we currently duplicate with our own builds). For ARM, on the other hand, we found that many apps would be broken on ARM when initially released to Flathub, and many games were incompatible with our graphics stack (and would update less than a frame per second), so we decided to blacklist all ARM apps until we explicitly test and whitelist in the next OS release. Over the past few weeks, I took the time to install and test all the ARM flatpaks available on Flathub, and enabled those that appeared to be working. I hope this will allow your Endless Mini to start having a little more fun.
