[manjaro-dev] [thus] plans for 2014

[Philip Müller]

This is just a draft of the plans we have for 2014 and our graphical 
installer thus.

For Manjaro, 2013 was a good year. The peak we did with our release 
0.8.5 featuring a graphical installer. live-installer was forked from 
Mint Debian Edition and was always coded to be temporary. We already 
started our own installer with Roland, simply called minst. This one is 
based on c++ and qt5. The biggest issues we had was the partitioning 
page. Since Roland had no time to even work on minst, I had no choice 
than look for something else. So I went for cnchi, the installer 
Antergos is using. Since I got already familiar with python it was no 
biggy for me to adopt it for Manjaro needs. Then I got stuck on the 
unsquashing part of our images. Mateusz jumped in and joined our thus 
development team. He gave me the missing code so we could go on with 
developing thus. So I merged changes done by Antergos into thus. With 
code cleanings and new ideas Ramon joined our team. His work is amazing 
and always get grateful adopted by Antergos developers directly into 
cnchi. So we close 2013 with a happy comunity and even more happier 
developers of two projects working together.

So what are the plans for 2014? Well, we want to be thus more distro 
agnostic and flexible to be used also by other project. Sonar Linux 
comes here in mind. Manjaro is based to be flexible, so our graphical 
installer should be too. Our tools should be free and useful also for 
other projects. We try to get the best out there into Manjaro, so we 
have no issue in having other projects using our technology too. We will 
port thus to qt framework so KDE/QT centric distros can adopt it too. 
Octopi is already used by other distros than just our own. We will 
divide our team in two groups. Mateusz and Arnt will build the QT-team 
and focus on changes regarding the UI based on that framework. Myself 
and Ramon will concentrate on GTK as it is now. All developers will 
additionally work on the engine of thus, which will be used by both 
frameworks. There is no plan to finish this project, so we will release 
and announce changes as they come. It is always good to test our 
testbuilds, we release on regular bases. They are small images in CD 
size to showcase our work on thus. Currently they are based on XFCE, our 
default desktop environment of Manjaro Linux. The latest addition was 
our qt-based keyboard layout generator you also find in our 
manjaro-system-settings application.

So stay tuned for the things to come in 2014.

kind regards

Philip Müller and the thus development team