Hi everyone,
let me join in and contribute my share to the roadmap discussion...
Review of 2024
Last year, I took off towards improving Sculpt OS usability by adding utility GUI applications and documenting their development. After finishing the lvgl-based system-info application, however, I distracted myself with a quest for a new scheduling concept for base-hw. As the year passed, it turned out that the Goa SDK endlessly sparks new ideas that let me change course a bit towards developer-friendliness. As a result, I was able to establish a solution for using Sculpt as a remote test and debugging target with Goa. I am joyful to see the Goa testbed preset being integrated into our official Sculpt images.
As planned, I was able to assemble the first revision of the "Genode Applications" book. I would have liked to include a Goa tutorial for from-scratch Qt application development as well, yet it turned out that I am too much of a Qt noob for this to be worth the time and effort. Instead, I started an explorative journey on integrating devtool sandboxing into the Goa SDK and replacing gnupg with sequoia. This involved substantial refactoring of Goa's code base and is therefore still living on a topic branch.
On the devices front, I wanted to make use of the ZimaBlade single-board server and the StarLite tablet. Unfortunately, I haven't touched the former ever since and did not find the time to enable the touchscreen on the latter.
Outside the realm of my own topics, my most-enjoyed features of the year are the on-target debugging and the multi-monitor support.
My plans for 2025
Currently, I consider Goa and the StarLite tablet my most inspiring drivers. I picture myself jauntily using the StarLite with base-hw for Sculpt-native web-browsing, PDF viewing, YouTube and maybe Goa by the end of the year. For this goal, I gladly join Norman on the journey towards a file-management solution for Sculpt (e.g. for opening downloaded PDF files in mupdf). Moreover, I will be happy to accompany Stefan on the base-hw scheduler work.
With respect to Goa, I would like to seal the loose end that I left in form of the sandboxing and sequoia integration. Moreover, I plan to write a libslirp-based alternative to our linux Nic driver in order to relieve Goa users of the burden to set up tap devices.
Cheers Johannes