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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

#251

Post by awrmc »

michaelmrose wrote: post #123
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that the battle over desktop environment supremacy leaves desktop Linux less compelling overall. There is so much choice that it's paralyzing and new users constantly second guess themselves. You have thousands of developers doing their own thing rather than working together to make mainstream choices like Gnome more viable.

Gnome doesn't want thousands of developers implementing their own visions for their projects and others don't want to donate their time to implementing gnomes vision. The proper thing for them all to do is all implement their own visions and people to use or work on what they please. Nobody asks why Tesla, Ford, and Toyota are wasting everyone's resources by being different company. Nobody suggests having different c…

>Also gnome is so flawed in so many ways from leaking memory due to unfixable mismatch between js and compiled code, to nonsensical handling of multiple desktops, to add-ons that both rely on monkey patching your desktop due to lack of addon api and can with a single crash kill your whole session, to hostility towards themeing, to ugly header bars, to hostility towards support for non gnome desktops.

Most of these issues are just bugs, not issues with some vision. The gnome people I've talked to want them fixed and want help with fixing them. But I get that it's lot easier to complain on hacker news than it is to fix architectural issues in a large codebase.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#252

Post by awrmc »

smoldesu wrote: post #192
mixedCase wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you want high level bindings, instead of gtk-rs. Have you tried relm4? > and additions like libadwaita has made GTK unusable for many Could you expand on that?

> Sounds like you want high level bindings, instead of gtk-rs. Have you tried relm4? No, because as of 9.0.0 it was perfectly capable of building ergonomic UIs and works with external tools like Glade. It used to have plenty of features, now it does not. I haven't tried relm4 because I'm not going to write any apps for GTK4 while it's still broken (egregious text rendering issues, assistive tools like Cambalanche are…

That seems like a lot of revisionist history. From what I've seen GTK never had good cross-platform development support. Programs like GIMP and Inkscape always looked and behaved very oddly to me on other platforms. The little support that's there is because interested parties contributed it. If this is what you want, it's self-defeating to refuse to contribute it.

If you do not want to use Rust, you can always use another language like Python or Javascript. I might be misunderstanding because the rest of your complaints are jumping around a lot, it would be easier to understand what you're talking about if you shared some code illustrating what the problem is.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#253

Post by mohanmcgeek »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #180
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…

> 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. Some of the deepest issues that users need solved are ones that Rust was designed to solve at the language and compiler level. 1. System st…

Because this is written in Rust and given how hard it is to hire Rust engineers, this will be abandonware in no time.

Remember vala anyone?

Although I want this to succeed if it is infact more performant and smoother than GNOME.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#254

Post by awrmc »

CameronNemo wrote: post #70
cyber_kinetist wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then they would need to either 1) do the yak-shaving and create a whole new GUI stack in Rust (which would be an absolute boon to the Rust community but will be a tremendous effort), or 2) switch to Qt (and basically become KDE) Thinking about it, maybe Sciter ( https://sciter.com/ ) would be an okay foundation to build a DE in (lightweight stack, flexible theming, solid Rust bindings). But then it isn’t open source…

create a whole new GUI stack in Rust Is there a reason iced is not good enough (other than not being accessible)? https://iced.rs/ https://github.com/iced-rs/iced/issues/552

Iced looks pretty cool but it's focused on being a cross-platform toolkit and will probably not ever be the best choice for making programs native to Linux, like a desktop environment. If you thought there were enough problems between GTK and Qt with skinning, fonts, keybindings, and all that stuff, adding another toolkit to the mix just makes it worse.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#255

Post by mohanmcgeek »

amarshall wrote: post #35
diskzero wrote: post #29

Original Nautilus and early GNOME developer here. I am very out of touch with what is current, so excuse some possibly ignorant questions. How is this a Rust-based environment if it is based on GTK? I assume GTK is still essentially the C-based GTK we used with some improvements. Why is this called Rust-based? I’ll do some more research but would like to get some insight from more knowledgeable sources.

The answer seems to be that the applications [1] are written in Rust using gtk-rs [2] (Rust-bindings for the GTK libs). [1]: https://github.com/orgs/pop-os/repositories?q=&type=source&l... [2]: https://gtk-rs.org/

Does this work similar to the python bindings that were ubiquitous a decade ago?

My understanding is that you don't get any memory safety/performance advantage from using Rust because gtk can still be unsafe.

Is this correct?

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#256

Post by awrmc »

smoldesu wrote: post #193
michaelmrose wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gnome doesn't want thousands of developers implementing their own visions for their projects and others don't want to donate their time to implementing gnomes vision. The proper thing for them all to do is all implement their own visions and people to use or work on what they please. Nobody asks why Tesla, Ford, and Toyota are wasting everyone's resources by being different company. Nobody suggests having different c…

> Gnome doesn't want thousands of developers implementing their own visions for their projects and others don't want to donate their time to implementing gnomes vision. This is definitely looking more-and-more like the case. The GNOME team's insistence on cutting people out of their workflow has left them with less contributors... which leaves them with a worse desktop and a roadmap that's being pushed further-and-fu…

It's not easy for me to take this comment seriously because gnome doesn't actually have anything anyone could define as leadership. It's a decentralized open source thing. You might be incorrectly assuming bad faith.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#257

Post by ludston »

mohanmcgeek wrote: post #255
amarshall wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer seems to be that the applications [1] are written in Rust using gtk-rs [2] (Rust-bindings for the GTK libs). [1]: https://github.com/orgs/pop-os/repositories?q=&type=source&l... [2]: https://gtk-rs.org/

Does this work similar to the python bindings that were ubiquitous a decade ago? My understanding is that you don't get any memory safety/performance advantage from using Rust because gtk can still be unsafe. Is this correct?

Even Rust code can still be unsafe. It's a question of where it can be unsafe. You're reducing the scope of code that can be unsafe to specific areas.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#258

Post by jklinger410 »

I love System 76 and I love the idea of Pop OS but I just know it's going to be ugly as sin.

I don't know who their designer is, but they're the only reason I'm not pumped about all of this.

There is a good reason these color schemes aren't seen elsewhere, ever, in any interface. Hopefully they will fully support theming or even provide a different built in theme.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#259

Post by symlinkk »

amarshall wrote: post #35
diskzero wrote: post #29

Original Nautilus and early GNOME developer here. I am very out of touch with what is current, so excuse some possibly ignorant questions. How is this a Rust-based environment if it is based on GTK? I assume GTK is still essentially the C-based GTK we used with some improvements. Why is this called Rust-based? I’ll do some more research but would like to get some insight from more knowledgeable sources.

The answer seems to be that the applications [1] are written in Rust using gtk-rs [2] (Rust-bindings for the GTK libs). [1]: https://github.com/orgs/pop-os/repositories?q=&type=source&l... [2]: https://gtk-rs.org/

So basically it’s not Rust.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#260

Post by Brain_Blasted »

m0llusk wrote: post #191
keltor wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Actually, it looks good in part because it is styled with CSS which is not true of GNOME or PopOS.

Not sure if you're being sarcastic here. GNOME Shell and GNOME apps are both styled with CSS. An example: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-weather/-/blob/master/d...
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