Pre-ship devlog

This post is about everything that recently happened with Matcha Linux

1. New terminal app!

Yes, gnome-console got boring, so I replaced it! With none other than ghostty. It’s great - has hardware rendering support, native integration with Kitty image rendering (so fastfetch renders the logo properly) and MANY color themes, one of which happens to perfectly match Matcha’s look and feel.

2. Package management

Since ghostty is from Alpine’s edge repos, I had to find a native way of tagging the packages both while building the iso, and installing the system.

Previous approach blindly installed every package from live ISO. This works only when every package is designed to be sourced from the stable branch. One edge package and updates (or maybe the whole system) breaks!

Now, a helper file helps install the necessary packages both onto the ISO and later system’s disk. Since packages are installed by their names, not separate files from some medium, the installation can also be way more accurate and, in some cases, more compact.

3. OpenGL checks

Ghostty loves OpenGL. But it relies on OpenGL 4.3+, and on hardware that doesn’t support this - crashes. Luckily, if GPU bridge fails, CPU can handle OpenGL operations just as well!

Matcha Linux, starting from today, is expecting hardware to support OpenGL 4.3+ to utilize the GPU for OpenGL APIs. Anything older than 2013-ish (which goes on par with UEFI requirement) would fail. In case of that happening, I added conditional rendering to use the CPU as a fallback.

For now, however, it’s system-wide (to support any other software built with OpenGL 4.3+). OpenGL ES is not supported on the GPU at the moment.

4. Bugfixes!!

Who doesn’t love when their software just… Works?

The upgraded matcha-calamares installer now has a full cleanup stage, correctly catches errors regarding the install ISO presence, also has fixes for many other mount and install issues that could happen in earlier releases.

Bottom line

I love building this Linux distro. The challenges I have to face and the amount of operation ordering I have to do helps me improve. Structure is one of the skills I think humanity is yet to fully master, and i hope that one day, it can.

As for the future of Matcha, it will continue to grow! Tech never sleeps, new releases need updates, and Matcha mustn’t be left behind. I also have more ambitious stuff planned (like an update manager and distrobox install module for calamares), and they are the only thing I’m afraid of implementing.

For now, I’ll stick to making Matcha Linux as stable as possible, and then focus on something more exciting.

I hope more people find this distro to test, daily drive and share the feedback! Always exciting to engage with communities.