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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

#161

Post by pxc »

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 is just using Rust for COSMIC because the existing engineering talent here already use and like it for other things they work on at the company, like their device firmwares. It's a good common/familiar language for the teams they have. I don't think they're expecting Rust to do any magic for them.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#162

Post by pxc »

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 agree! I think they're just using Rust because they'd rather use it than C, not because they need safety guarantees for the DE applications.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#163

Post by apatheticonion »

Great to see!

Selfishly, as a MacOS refugee and someone who has an on/off relationship with using desktop Linux as my main (and a desire to use it daily); I would love it if there was a shameless clone of the MacOS DE for Linux.

I don't care for customisation, I just want a sensible default that I can get up and running with immediately.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#164

Post by botdan »

benatkin wrote: post #67
thanatos519 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It happened for me in 1994, and I think it's a case of "gradually, then all at once": Once Microsoft and Apple stop maintaining their software, people who still have computers and electricity will move to Linux.

I hope so. The thing is that we have Chromebooks, which is the Linux Kernel on the Desktop (to me, doesn't satisfy the goal of Linux on the Desktop). So we need something so compelling that Google will also not be able to keep up. Or we need Chrome and/or Android to morph into something open enough to be considered Linux on the Desktop.

Modern Chromebook with their "Linux containers" are really, really close to being a wonderful developer experience with the same level of user accessibility, support, and refinement of any of the other "major" operating systems out there. I'm surprised Google hasn't capitalized on it further.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#165

Post by mkdirp »

lawl wrote: post #93
mstipetic wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really not understand that most people don’t want to use custom i3 configs?

I do, as i said, i'm getting old and use stock gnome these days, because i don't want to maintain custom configs for everything anymore.

Right. And so Pop!_OS gives you a decent tiling window manager, with sane defaults, without having to spend hours on customising your configuration. What's more, the tiling they provide is an optional feature. You can enable and disable it at any time without messing with you config for hours.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#166

Post by pxc »

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…

> Why is it that so many Linux GUIs — between apps and desktop environments — suffer from a lack of attention to detail?

The software you're looking at hasn't been released yet— at all. Not even an alpha. There are literally no tags on the libcosmic git repo.

You mention that it's early, but I'm not sure you appreciate how early.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#167

Post by Narishma »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #128

What exactly is a Linux "desktop environment"? Does it contain a window manager or is that fully separate? Is it the "explorer", shell, menu, dock, what not? (But didn't that at least in part reside in a window manager)? Is it libraries that applications that are to be executed under the DE? If it is using the GNOME libraries (GTK???) ? Will GNOME applications be native?

It's all of those things.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#168

Post by pxc »

apatheticonion wrote: post #163

Great to see! Selfishly, as a MacOS refugee and someone who has an on/off relationship with using desktop Linux as my main (and a desire to use it daily); I would love it if there was a shameless clone of the MacOS DE for Linux. I don't care for customisation, I just want a sensible default that I can get up and running with immediately.

> I don't care for customisation, I just want a sensible default that I can get up and running with immediately.

Why's GNOME not good enough for this use case?

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#169

Post by SkyMarshal »

wmf wrote: post #149
nine_k wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony is that the reason why authors claim when they remove theming is to have a consistent look. For some apps I don't care too much, because I run them in full screen anyway, and their specific look is adjusted to their function: IDEs, DAWs, even graphic editors. But if they do support DE-wide themes, I do appreciate that!

Yeah, GNOME should just admit that it's an OS and stop pretending to be a framework or DE or whatever.

They sort of do. https://os.gnome.org/

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#170

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]
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