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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

#181

Post by apatheticonion »

yepthatsreality wrote: post #173
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 would love it if there was a shameless clone of the MacOS DE for Linux. Elementary OS

It's a great approximation, but I haven't had a lot of success using Elementary.

The best experience I have had so far is Gnome41 on Debian Bookworm (my current setup which I log into about once a week) - though the DE has some design choices that cater more to mobile desktop environments at the expense of desktop usability (I don't want to appear ungrateful towards the volunteers developing it, it's a great project and I know critique is easy).

I'm talking about a complete rip off. Things like per-window virtual desktops, screenshot/video recording via hotkey. The global menu. The rock solid stability. Window decorations, spacing, fonts and overall feel. MacOS's DE _feels_ really solid.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#182

Post by kelnos »

coolso wrote: post #144
laputan_machine wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's open source. You sound like 1) you're knowledgable about what makes "good UX" and 2) you care enough to post about it. Instead of complaining, why not contribute to making it better?

It’s this pervasive mentality that continues to hold the open source community back, even still in 2022.

How is that the case? Open source software only thrives when there is a community around it that is dedicated to making it better. Many people seem to think that only programmers can do this, but there's always a need for designers and documentation writers to step in and help as well. Admittedly, some programmers have trouble accepting advice and criticism from non-programmers contributors, but I do believe this has been getting better over time.

What is the alternative, if not for people who notice problems and care about them to step in and contribute?

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#183

Post by apatheticonion »

pxc wrote: post #168
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?

Gnome41 on Debian Bookworm is my current setup and am actually typing this comment from there.

I use it about once a week and as far as I can tell, Gnome40+ is giving off signs that I might be able to use it as a daily driver (for work).

Looking forward to the updated Files application and whatever else is coming in G42.

That said, there are a lot of design choices that cater more to mobile form factors and the desktop experience suffers as a result.

Then there are non DE related issues like application installation. Chromium has bizarre window and mouse performance issues related to Wayland. Graphics card drivers are difficult to install, even as someone who knows how to read documentation. Flatpak has a permissions structure that doesn't always make sense for certain applications (like OBS, Discord, IDEs) and installing applications using a package manager is very hit and miss (e.g. OBS is broken in Debian Bookworm when installed via apt because of a qt5 dependency)

I don't mean to sound negative - I only complain because I love Linux and want to be able to go to my friends and colleagues and say "you can use this" - feeling confident that they will have an experience on par with MacOS.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#184

Post by stjohnswarts »

pkulak wrote: post #129
aidenn0 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The shell is implemented in GTK4, and the compositor depends on smithay[1], so I assume they plan for Wayland support. 1: https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-comp/blob/main/Cargo.toml#L...

Interesting, thanks. Guess they went that way because of Rust, but it would have been super cool to have another wlroots compositor on the block. EDIT: Just found this, which explains a bit: http://way-cooler.org/blog/2019/04/29/rewriting-way-cooler-i...

You never know what's possible in the future but I imagine right now they're working on the core features so supporting every compositor around is down the road a bit.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#185

Post by stjohnswarts »

dathinab wrote: post #156
pkulak wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Selling lots of Linux-based hardware that they design in-house. > Re-implementing Gnome in Rust That seems a bit disingenuous. It's all still GTK.

gnome =! gtk sure they are a bit more related then KDE and QT, still but the same at all

We all know that. I assure you. Gnome uses GTK and evidently Cosmic 2.0 will use GTK

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#186

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#187

Post by moojacob »

apatheticonion wrote: post #183
pxc wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Gnome41 on Debian Bookworm is my current setup and am actually typing this comment from there. I use it about once a week and as far as I can tell, Gnome40+ is giving off signs that I might be able to use it as a daily driver (for work). Looking forward to the updated Files application and whatever else is coming in G42. That said, there are a lot of design choices that cater more to mobile form factors and the deskt…

That Chrome bug seems frustrating... have you tried changing chrome to use Wayland instead of XWayland? Go to chrome://flags and change Preferred Ozone platform from X11 to Wayland.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#188

Post by Someone »

rollcat wrote: post #152
jandrese wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 glu…

Asking as someone who's never spent significant time/effort working with Gtk/GObject in C (only a bit in Python). Isn't it still generally desirable to have the compiler yell at you, if you can't convince it you know what you're doing? Rather than allowing the possibility of memory corruption. I do agree that the code in the example is far from beautiful. I wonder if we were to redesign GObject from scratch, if we co…

The work you have to do to show your compiler that certain constraints hold (say that i and j point inside the same array and that i can be extremely cumbersome, even in cases where it’s obvious that they do hold. That makes it not seem worth the trouble.

Of course, that obvious may turn out to be incorrect for some edge condition.

Basically, that’s the same reason why mathematicians don’t put all proofs through a proof assistant.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#189

Post by nopenopenopeno »

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 left PopOS and never looked back when I needed nvidia-docker to do some deep learning work and learned they had knowingly made it difficult to impossible to reliably use nvidia-docker with PopOS, and they recommended their own unmaintained project that doesn’t even intend to be a replacement for nvidia-docker. It couldn’t have been more useless to me.

Breaking compatibility with Ubuntu-compatible dev tools is one thing, but the lack of awareness or consideration of tooling standards is evidence that Pop_OS! is not for me.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#190

Post by ficklepickle »

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.

> shameless clone of the MacOS DE for Linux

Red Star OS has you covered

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Star_OS

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