Ruyi Linglong A New Brand Name and the Future of the Deep Operating System Project

TapTechNews July 16th news, on July 13th, at the deepin Meetup Ruyi Linglong special session in Shanghai Station, the official of the deep operating system officially announced the brand new name of the project - Ruyi Linglong (Linyaps). Currently, Ruyi Linglong has become an officially incubated project of the OpenAtom Open Source Foundation.

According to the introduction, the history of the Ruyi Linglong project can be traced back to 2017, when based on the Flatpak solution, the package management mechanism of deepin was reconstructed and renovated. In 2020, the project drew on the technical solution of the sandbox/container and completed the core development of the Linglong prototype. In 2022, with the release of the deepin V23 preview version, Linglong, as one of its core features, initially had usability.

Linglong is essentially an independent package management toolkit, which can completely decouple the application from the system with its isolation technology, thereby completely solving the compatibility problem caused by upgrades between the system and applications, and between applications and applications, and at the same time reducing the number of packaging times when distributing under different operating systems to achieve one architecture, one build.

At this Meetup in Shanghai, Deng Bo, the technical leader of the Linglong project, deeply introduced the latest development status of Ruyi Linglong Linyaps.

Linglong provides a unified application runtime environment independent of the operating system based on mechanisms such as User Namespace and CGroup, including mainly libraries and dependencies commonly used in desktop applications such as Qt, and this runtime environment supports multi-version coexistence.

Ruyi Linglong optimizes resource usage through file sharing technology and allows multiple runtime versions to coexist. In addition, its main open source components include virtualization containers, command-line interfaces, package repositories, runtime management services, etc., providing capabilities related to package management. And at the top of the project framework, Linglong also provides package building tools and conversion tools for software developers, as well as an application store for software developers to distribute applications and for users to download and install applications.

Version Progress

At present, the main program version of ll-box Linglong has been iterated to 1.5.7, and the important version functions recently released are:

Linglong building tool supports building uab packages (only supported by deepin V23 and UOS V20)

Linglong conversion tool supports converting uab packages

Linglong building tool supports appimage to uab package conversion

Linglong supports uab offline running

Mainstream Distribution Adaptation

Has been integrated into the deepin V23, UOS 1071, openEuler system repository, and can be directly installed and used in the system.

Has been adapted to openKylin, Kylin Profe ssional Edition, Ubuntu 24.04, Debian 12, and in the upcoming 1.6 version, separate repositories for each distribution will be provided and can be manually added for use.

Ecosystem Progress

Since the project started, dozens of individual developers have joined and contributed to the application ecosystem.

At present, the official has successfully adapted more than 2000 Linglong applications, and these applications will be gradually put on the deepin and Uxin application stores and the Linglong web version store.

TapTechNews learned from the meeting that the future development of Ruyi Linglong focuses on the following key points:

Support more distributions: Compatible with more mainstream Linux distributions and replacing the traditional deb package format

Focus on ecosystem construction: Continuously optimize the Linglong package conversion and compilation tools, provide a complete Linglong learning tutorial and technical guidance documentation, and develop more developers to join the conversion or development of Linglong applications

Fully open source and open: The Linglong source code, store, and technical documentation will be gradually open sourced to allow open source enthusiasts to join the project co-construction

Application distribution mechanism: Build a cross-distribution application distribution system to allow Linglong applications to reach more Linux distribution users and reduce the application maintenance cost for developers