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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

#281

Post by smoldesu »

jklinger410 wrote: post #258

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.

It's basically adwaita with some different accent colors. I hate them too, but the chances of anyone changing their mind on it? Slim to none, friend.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#282

Post by awrmc »

michaelmrose wrote: post #270
awrmc wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Every semi persistent grouping of individuals has leadership even if informal and redhat and the gnome foundation have defined leadership structures.

But that's the whole thing. Redhat and the foundation don't have any leadership over a decentralized group of open source developers. Gnome is not like the Linux kernel where there's one giant repository with one lead maintainer serving as a bottleneck. There are individuals who hold more influence but that's more because a lot of other volunteers chose to follow them, not because they seized power from anybody.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#283

Post by seb1204 »

Honest question: would the Linux ecosystem benefit from a UI style guide? Similar to what Apple and Google provide for the mobile platforms?

My thinking is that such a style guide could help developers, desktop environments and distributions at the same time.

As many mention here the developer of a small app or program is not a UI guru. So if there is a guide to follow why not?

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#284

Post by amarshall »

seb1204 wrote: post #283

Honest question: would the Linux ecosystem benefit from a UI style guide? Similar to what Apple and Google provide for the mobile platforms? My thinking is that such a style guide could help developers, desktop environments and distributions at the same time. As many mention here the developer of a small app or program is not a UI guru. So if there is a guide to follow why not?

GNOME has their Human Interface Guidelines [1]. Of course GNOME is not the whole Linux ecosystem, and not everything is GTK.

[1]: https://developer.gnome.org/hig/

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#285

Post by GekkePrutser »

pxc wrote: post #158
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 know that open source and Linux in general don't need/want another DE Unpopular opinion, but more DEs is fine and good, especially if they will have teams that are either (a) large or (b) well-funded. Plasma and GNOME are very good, and Unity was actually great to use in its heyday. Imo what we don't really need more of are the conservative, under-resourced 'classic look and feel' DEs like most of the minor playe…

Yeah a new DE would be welcome. I hope this will be less opinionated and barebones than gnome. That just needs too many add-ons to be useful.

I use KDE now which does provide a lot of choice but I'd love something that has tiling built in. And yeah I know there's add-ons for KDE that do that :)

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#286

Post by opan »

xvilka wrote: post #265
nopenopenopeno wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Blame NVIDIA instead. If they had open source their blobs, it would have been everywhere out of the box. Most evil company for open source ever.

>Most evil company for open source ever.

I won't ever defend nvidia, but... I really think Broadcom is worse. They've ruined tons of routers and wireless cards. Also, the Raspberry Pi is full of blobs because of them.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#287

Post by GekkePrutser »

addicted wrote: post #207
pxc wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know that open source and Linux in general don't need/want another DE Unpopular opinion, but more DEs is fine and good, especially if they will have teams that are either (a) large or (b) well-funded. Plasma and GNOME are very good, and Unity was actually great to use in its heyday. Imo what we don't really need more of are the conservative, under-resourced 'classic look and feel' DEs like most of the minor playe…

A DE is pointless without the apps that run on Linux. And that's the problem with the proliferation of DEs. Applications, which range from having no developers actively working on them, to the best teams at Microsoft working on them, have to handle yet another DE, and have to deal with the bugs raised by the users of yet another DE, etc. UI/UX is hard enough to begin with, but requiring devs to either maintain severa…

This is only true if they use another toolkit. If they choose GTK or Qt it's fine.

Edit: it's GTK so no problem

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#288

Post by smoldesu »

apatheticonion wrote: post #220
yepthatsreality wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you just want to keep using MacOS. All of that should be more or less easy to tweak on Linux but that’s currently the trade-off. What you’re asking for is someone to rip off MacOS but it’s only acceptable if it’s a rigid and as well supported as MacOS which is developed by a trillion dollar company. That or perhaps join the Elementary OS QA team so that it can have a chance at reaching that really solid _…

> Sounds like you just want to keep using MacOS This is the essence of the issue. As someone who started on PCs running Windows and Linux for decades, I moved to MacOS for work because it's a zero config Unix based system with a productive and ergonomic desktop environment. I don't have an inherent bias towards Apple/MacOS and currently no longer use it (though I have an old x86 MacBook I use when not working on my d…

I think if you gave KDE a try, you'd be really surprised. I too like fancy screenshots with drop-shadow compositor effects and transparent elements; the Spectacle screenshot utility does this perfectly for me, and can be bound to a universal keybind. Desktop utilities like 'peek' give you instant gif-recording capabilities for the more advanced stuff, and of course there are full-fledged apps like OBS for more advanced capture work.

> That said, I would be more than happy to pay a substantial annual license fee for a Linux experience that rivals that of MacOS.

Are you looking for BSD?

Joking aside, you're going to have to be a lot more specific than "rivals" MacOS. There are a lot of cases where MacOS has dug itself into arbitrary, insurmountable leads (eg. nobody is going to add haptics to your touchpad with a software update), but there are also cases where Linux whoops MacOS up and down the block (full WINE functionality, Vulkan drivers, Nvidia compatibility, system-agnostic filesystems, etc.)

> A lot of this functionality simply does not exist on Linux. With multi monitor setups, virtual desktops scroll on both screens. Gnome 4 is the first DE to pseudoreplicate MacOS's model.

This is tacitly untrue, KDE scrolls all monitors by default, and most x11 sessions can be configured to do the same afaik. The only holdouts are esoteric window managers like i3wm, where arbitrary desktop/monitor association is just part of their design paradigm. I'm pretty sure GNOME 3 could be configured to do the same, too (the developers just didn't put the option in the default settings app because they don't trust you, I guess). Not sure where you're getting this impression from, but it sounds like a misunderstanding.

> Screenshots and screen recordings are close but lack the nuance of MacOS (and Windows) that make them valuable. For instance no DE offers the ability to draw notes on a screenshotted area, copy the modified version to clipboard (rather than save a file).

Again, KDE's default screenshot utility ("Spectacle") has robust annotation and saving options. I just let it save the screenshotted areas to my clipboard, and it works fine. It should probably be compatible with your GNOME system too, if you want to try it out.

TL-DR:

Linux is not MacOS, for better and for worse. Most of the features you've listed are indeed configuration options, but nobody really ships a "MacOS clone" distro because it doesn't exist. You can't pay developers to make something like that because there's not a single other organization on earth with 200 billion dollars in liquid cash to spend on decadent UIs and eye candy.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#289

Post by awrmc »

smoldesu wrote: post #279
awrmc wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

> From what I've seen GTK never had good cross-platform development support. From the start, GTK was written so that it would have good cross-platform support. GTK itself (not GNOME or Glib) is perfectly system agnostic, and as you've mentioned, it compiles and runs on other platforms. Not sure why you'd knock the way GIMP and Inkscape LAF on other systems; they both look perfectly native on Windows, and much better…

>Not sure why you'd knock the way GIMP and Inkscape LAF on other systems; they both look perfectly native on Windows, and much better than the majority of cruddy MacOS desktop app wrappers

In my experience Qt apps behave much better on Windows and Mac because they're designed to be native first. GTK was never designed to do that, it started out as a clone of Motif and it only ran on Unix, the cross-platform support was added later when some Windows developers wanted to port GIMP to Windows. To me GIMP and Inkscape always had some weird GTK widgets that don't look or act anything like Win32 widgets. I'd say use Qt if you want a better native experience on mac and windows.

>The GNOME team never opened libadwaita for public comment, or held any forums where I could voice concerns with the direction they were headed. I can understand how this all sounds accusatory, but I really do recommend that you research it.

I've researched it. This isn't how open source works, projects are not driven by public comments on forums. They're driven by people showing up to work together on a shared goal. Those who show up and write the code, get to be the decision makers.

>The community has been completely locked out of the GNOME decision-making process.

It doesn't make much sense to say this, the whole point here is the community makes the decisions for itself and nobody else. Every single contributor past the original founders are from the community.

>They won't accept contributions that allow cross-platform stylesheets

>the GNOME team pretty much doesn't care about anything the community has to say. It's a bad direction for the project to be heading in, and it definitely makes it harder for regular people to write good-looking, system-agnostic GTK apps

I've no idea where you got this. I've never seen any comments from libadwaita developers to suggest that. This doesn't need to be contributed either, if you have a stylesheet you want to work on you can just ship it as part of your app, or create another add-on library for platform extensions similar to this: https://github.com/GNOME/gtk-mac-integration

Regardless of where it ends up, the styles for GIMP on Win32 is just a theme, if that's not available in newer versions then somebody needs to port it to the new theming system. You could wait for a GIMP contributor to do it but that might take a long time.

>It was a really good library until it hit v14, when the developers lobbed off support for Glade files

I might still be misunderstanding, but the break was caused by GTK4. The GTK3 bindings are a separate crate. You can use those until the GTK4 gui designer is released. Breaking glade wasn't done on purpose.

>v9.0.0 allowed you to build programs functionally and register their various interfaces as closures. This made it fairly simple to not only separate UI code from function code, but was also really comfortable to write "like a normal app". v14 eliminated this workflow though

I can't really figure out what you mean for sure but I did some searches. Closure support is still there but it appears to have been moved to another crate called gtk-rs-core.

https://gtk-rs.org/gtk-rs-core/stable/0.14/docs/glib/closure...

https://gtk-rs.org/gtk-rs-core/stable/0.14/docs/glib/macro.c...

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#290

Post by k_kalupe22 »

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…

They do this for getting higher ranks here at hackernews. What turns me off most is that they succeed, which in turn indicates that large parts of hackernews readers are biased towards Rust. Personally, I'm pretty sick of this evangelism and hype because I fell for it some years ago and started a project with Rust. Countless problems and dark corners. I moved in time to a mature garbage collected language. There's a reason Rust has kind of succeeded only in small niches where Rust is a good fit. And not everywhere (backend services, CLIs), like it was advertised by prominent evangelists.

However, for System 76 Rust is a very good choice.

But calling it "Rust based" when it's GTK is clearly a bit bold ...

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