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Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

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Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#111

Post by _qbjt »

smoldesu wrote: post #72
a-dub wrote: post #46

i always disliked gnome 3 because of the user interface (it seemed to be an amalgamation of all the bad things from os x or even macos), not because of the underlying language it's coded in.

I know a lot of people who despise GNOME 3 on the whole, but I'm willing to defend it for what it is. If you've ever used a touchscreen Linux device, it becomes a whole lot easier to appreciate what they did with the toolkit. GTK apps just... work on a touchscreen. No modifications or fancy-pants libraries required. They also work really well on desktop too, with nice plump interactive elements that make sense for th…

I use GNOME + Wayland on desktop, with a few tweaks and extensions, and I'm totally willing to defend it. It's a lovely computing environment that just feels at home to me and I think it has a tasteful balance of modern and traditional UI patterns.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#112

Post by Klonoar »

jonpalmisc wrote: post #66

At the risk of sounding too negative/critical, I honestly just don’t like the design language here. Everything seems overly rounded, and more importantly, the screenshots even show very weird/inconsistent alignment and padding in the UI. Why is it that so many Linux GUIs — between apps and desktop environments — suffer from a lack of attention to detail? Once again, it’s early, I’m sure they are aware of some of thes…

It's early enough that I'm giving the benefit of the doubt on the spacing issues. They're obvious enough that I would hope System76 (who seem to care about design in most respects) are aware and will get it eventually.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#113

Post by ranfdev »

diskzero wrote: post #63
Narishma wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GTK is just a library, you can use it from any language it has bindings for.

Understood. I have made significant contributions to GTK. My contributions possibly had memory leaks or memory corruption issues that will bring down the higher Rust layer. I am trying to understand the purpose of the Rust layer. It is fine with me if it is because Rust is interesting, but what is being presented doesn’t seem like a Rust desktop environment _to me_.

I've made some small contributions to gtk-rs-core (the library providing rust bindings to glib, gdk...).

While the lower layers written in C do impact the overall safety, the bindings are made to be as safe as possible.

For example: every glib parameter that may take NULL in Rust becomes an Option.

GObject's methods are defined on traits and checked by the Rust type system. There are also some macros to provide an easy and safe interface to the GLib type system.

All of this directly applies to gtk-rs.

Overall, the bindings are well documented and with many examples. There's even a book. Also, there's a great community around them.

Bindings website: https://gtk-rs.org/

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#114

Post by wmf »

capableweb wrote: post #54
trulyme wrote: post #32

Nice, exactly what Linux needs the most - another desktop environment! Sarcasm aside, it does look pretty good. But between indistinguishable window title bars and yet another settings app (wanna bet it will miss some config so users wil still need to run one of the others?), I think I'll pass. As far as I'm concerned this problem was solved ages ago, so I simply don't understand why the designers keep mucking with i…

> Nice, exactly what Linux needs the most - another desktop environment! One could argue that because no one desktop environment has taken over the Linux mindshare, we haven't invented the one yet, so people keep trying. It's not until something takes over the mindshare (like systemd did), we can all unity and start improving upon the same base.

I'm pretty sure there will never be The One due to political and psychological factors. Many people use Linux specifically because there's isn't One way to do things.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#115

Post by jandrese »

acdha wrote: post #96
jandrese wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that Rust is extremely opinionated at to how code should be structured and there is going to be considerable interface friction with a system that is built around aliasing data every time there is a callback.

Do you have an example of that friction? Looking through the docs at e.g. https://gtk-rs.org/gtk4-rs/stable/latest/book/hello_world.ht... it doesn't seem that bad but not having used it I would be curious how it works out once you're building a serious app.

Things are already getting quite hairy by page 4[1] of that link. And that example is showing data completely owned by the GObject. If you need to pass a mutable reference to third party data to a GObject it's not going to work in Rust. Imagine a button that you click to change the contents a GtkTreeModel connected to a GtkTreeView--you're going to need to work hard. You're going to write a fair bit Rust specific glue code to work around these issues.

[1] https://gtk-rs.org/gtk4-rs/stable/latest/book/gobject_memory...

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#116

Post by [deleted] »

mariusmg wrote: post #108
pkulak wrote: post #64

I know that open source and Linux in general don't need/want another DE, but selfishly... I really want System76 to succeed. They give me the same kind of feeling I had when Apple was kicking butt in the early 2000s. And I think that for them to become a general-audience company, they need to really own more of their software. They have some great ideas, and they've already plugin'ed Gnome to within and inch of it's…

> I really want System76 to succeed Succeed at what ? Re-implementing Gnome in Rust ?

[deleted]

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#118

Post by magicjosh »

lallysingh wrote: post #105
ijidak wrote: post #91

I know we developers love our languages. But I'm always skeptical when underlying language choice is featured prominently as a selling point for any new project. It tells me, this is a technology-first, users-second enthusiast project. And thus, I'll be surprised if it tackles the deepest issues users need solved. That doesn't mean it isn't cool as a proof of concept for a new or popular language. It just makes me qu…

System76 isnt making it about the implementation panguage: https://blog.system76.com/post/648371526931038208/cosmic-to-... A Ctrl-F rust showed no results. This post's author just likes Rust.

Ah just to clarify, the blog post you referenced is from this past June. COSMIC based on Rust is a new development that System76 has not blogged about yet besides mentioning it in a Reddit post.

As a System76 fan, I too am curious to see what the point is. I have no idea what Rust is nor do I care.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#119

Post by keltor »

trulyme wrote: post #32

Nice, exactly what Linux needs the most - another desktop environment! Sarcasm aside, it does look pretty good. But between indistinguishable window title bars and yet another settings app (wanna bet it will miss some config so users wil still need to run one of the others?), I think I'll pass. As far as I'm concerned this problem was solved ages ago, so I simply don't understand why the designers keep mucking with i…

It "looks" good because so far all it is, is recreating GNOME running in PopOS while using the Rust GTK4 bindings.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#120

Post by rhn_mk1 »

What is the point of the effort though? It doesn't seem to me that the user is gaining a whole lot from an almost exact rewrite of some apps that already existed.

They don't need to be fast to use, so there's nothing to gain from better speed. They weren't ugly, so a slightly different styling is not a win. They weren't crashing all the time, so reliability is not it.

They don't try to redesign some core desktop experience from the looks of it either.

So... why?

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