Arch + Gnome

[Shlok-Bhakta]

Typing this on mobile sorry for bad formatting.

Would it be possible to make a ex2 image of something like arch linux and installing something like gnome or KDE on it? I'm not sure how well the browser could handle something like this since those DEs seem pretty heavy compared to the alpine example. I just wanted to get y'all's opinion on how viable this could be? This is such a cool project and I really want to test its limits 😀

[alexp-sssup]

It could be possible, but it's likely to be not practical. We have experimented internally with XFCE which is currently at the edge of the possibilities for CheerpX.

Some further improvements on the performance are required, but the main problem is that large desktop environment need to load hundreds of MBs of data from disk just to boot. We think that with further improvements to compression on the cloud disk backend we will make XFCE achievable, but it's difficult right now to plan for even larger environments.

These considerations mostly apply since we wanted to make the graphical version of WebVM work well on all devices, including older mobile ones. For a local test it's perfectly fine to load several hundreds MBs from the virtual disk.