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Consolidating the Linux Desktop App Story: An Idea

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Re: Consolidating the Linux Desktop App Story: An Idea

#31

Post by mikewhy »

michaelmrose wrote: post #28
gabrielcsapo wrote: post #14

Correct me if I am wrong but wouldn't the best move forward just be supporting and tuning https://electron.atom.io to make it more performant and supported on linux? Yes it is a battery killer, but I can see it being better if everyone put their tasks to making that a non issue. edit: why the down votes? This is a platform agnostic framework. I understand the performance is bad, but the one reason that linux doesn't…

Bad for battery and ram. Fixing this is probably difficult to impossible. I have 10 apps open imagine if they were all using 1-2GB of ram.

Maybe something like Go + the system web view. Only question is what is "the system web view" in Linux.

Re: Consolidating the Linux Desktop App Story: An Idea

#32

Post by gabrielcsapo »

michaelmrose wrote: post #28
gabrielcsapo wrote: post #14

Correct me if I am wrong but wouldn't the best move forward just be supporting and tuning https://electron.atom.io to make it more performant and supported on linux? Yes it is a battery killer, but I can see it being better if everyone put their tasks to making that a non issue. edit: why the down votes? This is a platform agnostic framework. I understand the performance is bad, but the one reason that linux doesn't…

Bad for battery and ram. Fixing this is probably difficult to impossible. I have 10 apps open imagine if they were all using 1-2GB of ram.

The issue is that electron is running a new chromium process for each application. This could be fixed easily sharing that process and making chromium more resource friendly.

Re: Consolidating the Linux Desktop App Story: An Idea

#33

Post by gabrielcsapo »

JohnTHaller wrote: post #18
gabrielcsapo wrote: post #14

Correct me if I am wrong but wouldn't the best move forward just be supporting and tuning https://electron.atom.io to make it more performant and supported on linux? Yes it is a battery killer, but I can see it being better if everyone put their tasks to making that a non issue. edit: why the down votes? This is a platform agnostic framework. I understand the performance is bad, but the one reason that linux doesn't…

Browser-based apps still kinda suck. Battery-wise, UI-wise in terms of integration, accessibility-wise, etc. And they're a huge step down in programming language availability vs native apps.

Most languages have the option to compiling to JS, all I am suggesting is that electron be the framework that people target. Having language support is possible by extending that framework.

Re: Consolidating the Linux Desktop App Story: An Idea

#34

Post by dtzWill »

nisa wrote: post #30

Unpopular opinion: Ditch everything GNOME, glib, vala, GTK and focus on making KDE, Qt, QML first class software. QML is powerful and is quite fast and can at least be made fast. KDE needs UI and design polish but the foundations are IMHO more sane than GNOME ever was. Move the good stuff from GNOME over to KDE. E.g. kio-slaves and gvfs should be one stable solid pluggable piece of software. And document that well -…

FWIW jwz redirects to something unfortunate, here's the same page via nullrefer.com which seems to do the trick:

http://nullrefer.com/?www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

and on archive.org:

http://web.archive.org/web/20170702194030/https://www.jwz.or...

Re: Consolidating the Linux Desktop App Story: An Idea

#35

Post by gabrielcsapo »

merlijn_s wrote: post #17
gabrielcsapo wrote: post #14

Correct me if I am wrong but wouldn't the best move forward just be supporting and tuning https://electron.atom.io to make it more performant and supported on linux? Yes it is a battery killer, but I can see it being better if everyone put their tasks to making that a non issue. edit: why the down votes? This is a platform agnostic framework. I understand the performance is bad, but the one reason that linux doesn't…

Programming languages or platforms aren't the issue. Software packaging and distribution is. Porting is easy. Getting your software to users is hard. Look at the Minecraft pocket edition (and its Windows 10 respin), one of the devs said that it would be trivial to port that to desktop Linux but they would have to set up their own payment and distribution system, which just isn't worth it for that tiny market.

Github, Gitlab, Bitbucket, it would be great if these platforms had an option to allow non-technically users to install software from them. It would eliminate the need for developers to push to a software platform.

Re: Consolidating the Linux Desktop App Story: An Idea

#36

Post by [deleted] »

rjzzleep wrote: post #8

I still think the whole Linux Desktop problem can be summarized in one sentence: There is a lack of a simple desktop app development environment. Yes there is GTK and yes there QT. But regardless of how much people may hate Xcode, it allowed people to create solid desktop applications in a fraction of the time that was needed to do the same in either GTK or QT. It's better documented, it's smoother, it's easier to st…

[deleted]

Re: Consolidating the Linux Desktop App Story: An Idea

#37

Post by nisa »

dtzWill wrote: post #34
nisa wrote: post #30

Unpopular opinion: Ditch everything GNOME, glib, vala, GTK and focus on making KDE, Qt, QML first class software. QML is powerful and is quite fast and can at least be made fast. KDE needs UI and design polish but the foundations are IMHO more sane than GNOME ever was. Move the good stuff from GNOME over to KDE. E.g. kio-slaves and gvfs should be one stable solid pluggable piece of software. And document that well -…

FWIW jwz redirects to something unfortunate, here's the same page via nullrefer.com which seems to do the trick: http://nullrefer.com/?www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html and on archive.org: http://web.archive.org/web/20170702194030/https://www.jwz.or...

Thank you! Didn't saw that.

Re: Consolidating the Linux Desktop App Story: An Idea

#38

Post by tyingq »

rjzzleep wrote: post #8

I still think the whole Linux Desktop problem can be summarized in one sentence: There is a lack of a simple desktop app development environment. Yes there is GTK and yes there QT. But regardless of how much people may hate Xcode, it allowed people to create solid desktop applications in a fraction of the time that was needed to do the same in either GTK or QT. It's better documented, it's smoother, it's easier to st…

Something of a dark horse for now, but there's Flutter. Maybe if it succeeds on mobile they'll add the missing desktop widgets.

Re: Consolidating the Linux Desktop App Story: An Idea

#39

Post by evv »

Sorry, but I believe this effort is doomed to fail if you don’t provide compatibility with the open web. It is the only online app distribution environment that has really thrived, other than Apple’s and Google’s.

Of course you could do this easily with electron apps. Too much bloat? Fine- go with a ReactNative/NativeScript approach with a JS VM controlling native UI. Hate JS? Fine- compile to it from your language of choice. Refuse to use a runtime? Fine- compile to webassembly. There is no excuse for not having compatibility with the open web.

As a developer, I have no interest in building for Linux- I need to go where the users are. But if I can develop a nice web app that can be deployed natively to Linux and mobile platforms- sign me up!

Re: Consolidating the Linux Desktop App Story: An Idea

#40

Post by pcwalton »

michaelmrose wrote: post #28
gabrielcsapo wrote: post #14

Correct me if I am wrong but wouldn't the best move forward just be supporting and tuning https://electron.atom.io to make it more performant and supported on linux? Yes it is a battery killer, but I can see it being better if everyone put their tasks to making that a non issue. edit: why the down votes? This is a platform agnostic framework. I understand the performance is bad, but the one reason that linux doesn't…

Bad for battery and ram. Fixing this is probably difficult to impossible. I have 10 apps open imagine if they were all using 1-2GB of ram.

> Fixing this is probably difficult to impossible.

It is absolutely possible to make a browser engine-based shell that is more efficient than Electron is. Electron has the wackiest setup imaginable, mashing together Node and Chromium, with two versions of V8 to boot.

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