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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

#241

Post by pxc »

pxc wrote: post #161
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.

> the existing engineering talent here

Oops! That should read

> the existing engineering talent there

apologies. Missed the edit window on the comment, and only saw the error now.

I'm not at System76 and never have been

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#242

Post by Shared404 »

addicted wrote: post #79
michaelmrose wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like it is already better than gnome settings. >The search also displays a list of all the settings that match the search criteria and not only where they’re located as GNOME Settings does, this makes it easier to change your settings without having to leave the section you currently are in. >the search bar is available at the top of the navigation view, this is problematic when inside nested menus as the user…

Does that have anything to do with the DE though? Isn’t that a change that could have simply been made to the Gnome settings itself?

It could, but hasn't been - and GNOME is hostile to users/devs doing such things so it probably never will.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#243

Post by Shared404 »

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #120

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 expe…

It looks like they're keeping the core of the workflow, but refining it further than the current GNOME extension they develop can.

The bigger thing is that GNOME is making it harder and harder to customize and extend, which is a problem for System 76 for obvious reasons.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#244

Post by toastal »

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 ?

They're one of the few players selling modern coreboot machines

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#245

Post by topspin »

Underphil wrote: post #41

"...we’re all curious as to how this desktop will look like..." Is this an Americanism? My brain can't read this properly.

There is a english.stackexchange.com question on this: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/55672/is-it-what...

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#247

Post by mmstick76 »

qsdf38100 wrote: post #126
brink wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get to meet people who dislike Rust very often. Why don't you like it?

my 2 cents: rust evangelists, the promises of the end of bugs, and how perfect the language is for any use case... that makes my BS detector go off. Everyone has to love Rust nowadays, it sounds like a cult or something. It makes me hate rust without even having tried it, which is dumb and sad.

Every programming language that has ever existed has had evangelists. The tech field is littered with them. Whether that's people who play video games and fight over GPU brands and console brands; or people who fight over operating systems, languages, and frameworks.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#248

Post by awrmc »

sprash wrote: post #84
mixedCase wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the transition from version 3 to 4, GTK is now more focused on being a generic UI toolkit, with GTK4-based libadwaita now being the place to be for GNOME-specific patterns.

History and experience tells a different story [1]. Never trust a library that is maintained by GNOME. 1.: https://github.com/thestinger/termite

Checking the response from the maintainer shows another different story: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=679658#c12

>Implementing keyboard selection inside vte means that every terminal based on vte benefits; adding only hooks for you means that all the other terminals get no benefit.

The patch being pushed wasn't going to help other projects. The developer of that project was working on a fork of the library but it appears it didn't get much use and was abandoned: https://github.com/thestinger/vte-ng

I don't see much more that anyone from GNOME could have done there.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#249

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #214
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand. Tesla, Ford, and Toyota all have cars that work though. They all work so well you can basically swap any of them out and the user doesn't have to change anything. The user can pick any of those cars and do well. I'm not talking about cars though, I'm talking about Linux not getting a lot of traction on desktop because of too much choice. The mainstream environments are often not viable for somebody tryi…

You're right, a car is a bad analogy. Cars are several orders of magnitude more complex than a desktop environment. They probably even have more lines of code. A desktop environment isn't that difficult to make, that's why we have so many. Gnome and KDE peaked 10 years ago and they're now stuck in a local maxima, afraid to move outside their comfort zone. A new desktop environment is an opportunity to question assump…

There's no easy answer. The freedom of choice is beautiful and part of why I use Linux but an ecosystem can become polluted and drive away new users.

I don't know what else to say. I'm describing the landscape as I see it.

I do disagree that KDE or Gnome are stuck, I thought Gnome 40 was a nice refresh. It's evolved quite a bit from the Gnome 2 of Red Hat Linux that I used as a youngster.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#250

Post by awrmc »

lmm wrote: post #223
addicted wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

libadwaita exists solely to move Gnome specific stuff out of GTK into libadwaita. And it's hard to see how an open source project with as many developers as Gnome/GTK have can have some secret agenda that is counter to what they are saying publicly and creating libraries and code publicly to implement.

> it's hard to see how an open source project with as many developers as Gnome/GTK have can have some secret agenda How many serious Gnome/GTK developers are there who are not IBM employees?

That question is a non-sequitur. But to give you a type of answer, most of libadwaita came out of Purism.
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