It’s been a while since the last update. We’ve been migrating Nemo to Qt6, fixing compatibility issues, updating upstream components, and tackling Manjaro’s package changes. Notable progress includes Lipstick fixes, merged patches, and the Kremium compatibility layer for running Sailfish OS apps.
The software industry moves incredibly fast, and many technologies quickly become obsolete. Our efforts in Nemo have focused on migrating our software stack to Qt6. Previously, we introduced the compatibility package qt-old-features, which provided an interface for compiling Qt .pri files for some components. Recently, we encountered an issue with CONFIG+=stack_protector_strong, which was resolved by Michal.
In Manjaro, there are additional challenges. With the new version of GCC, some warnings have been promoted to errors. Other components are also evolving—for example, PulseAudio is being replaced by PipeWire, which has become an obstacle in building Lipstick, as our compositor still depends on PulseAudio.
We’ve been working on updating upstream components. Our patches to libngf-qt and libusb-moded-qt have been merged. The NemoMobile fork of the Lipstick compositor has been rebased to the latest upstream version, along with nemo-qml-plugin-systemsettings. Additionally, Lipstick’s tests have been fixed.
Glacier Gallery relies on Tracker Miner with its SPARQL plugin and, consequently, QtDocGallery. Besides compilation issues, Manjaro has replaced the Tracker packages with a different solution. These components are complex, and Sergey has suggested moving away from them.
Michal faced challenges with glacier-devicelock-plugin, discovering that the plugin was being installed to the wrong path. He submitted a fix for that.
One of NemoMobile’s ultimate goals is to support running Sailfish OS apps. A major obstacle is the closed-source Silica API. Sergey has developed a compatibility layer called Kremium, named after the Russian translation of “Silica.” It has already been demonstrated to run the harbour-gpsinfo app.
We have created a Mastodon account with the nemomobile.net RSS feed. This should allow for adding comments to articles in the future.
