Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

blog.edfloreshz.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 408 posts

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#291

Post by k_kalupe22 »

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/

I appreciate your facts. But System 76 should then call it GTK based, I guess.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#292

Post by k_kalupe22 »

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.

Easy, it's for advertising reasons.

Devs, admins, enthusiasts etc. are the main target for Systems 76. Hackernews audience is very enthusiastic regarding Rust.

I think it's indeed unfair to GTK.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#294

Post by Rd6n6 »

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…

> 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.

I disagree. There are thousands of pieces of software out there using convenient technologies at the expense of performance. I think a real, legitimate advantage of unreal over unity is that it uses c++ instead of c# for gameplay code. I’ve never been cpu bound in unreal. Js algorithms often run 100x slower than Java ones, and if gnome were written in rust we wouldn’t have had quite so many memory leaks.

Also, pg credits much of his startups success to his language choice, letting him iterate faster

Language can make a pivotal difference!

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#295

Post by 1_player »

k_kalupe22 wrote: post #290
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…

Especially when you have top voted sibling comments saying "Some of the deepest issues that users need solved are ones that Rust was designed to solve at the language and compiler level."

What?! The year of the Linux desktop hasn't been eluding us because of buffer overflows and memory safety. The Rust hype train is incredible. The Linux desktop problems have nothing to do with the goal Rust sets out to solve.

It's definitely a good choice of language for the problem, don't get me wrong, but choosing that language doesn't improve the chances of COSMIC revolutionising the Linux desktop situation one iota.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#296

Post by fulafel »

nopenopenopeno wrote: post #189
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 t…

Can you expand on what in your view System76 did to impede it?

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#297

Post by SkyMarshal »

mohanmcgeek wrote: post #253
SkyMarshal wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> given how hard it is to hire Rust engineers,

That's not given.

> Remember vala anyone?

Vala is nothing like Rust, doesn't solve the same problems, and is much more narrow in scope (Gnome development).

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:AcldYn...

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#298

Post by noahadavis »

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…

If KDE and GNOME are stuck, it's not because they can't innovate with their UIs enough with traditional ways of interacting with a computer. In fact, I don't think innovating in a way that doesn't involve new ways to interact (such as VR/AR) is very desirable to most users.

The truth is, most people don't want to install operating systems, even if they're free and easier to install than Windows. The only way to go further is to ship with hardware and for that combination of hardware and software to be in demand. On top of that, when the operating system/desktop environment has reached a decent baseline of general usability like KDE Plasma and GNOME have, the software ecosystem around the OS/DE is more of a limiting factor than the UIs of the OS/DE.

The fact that System 76 sells laptops could actually give their DE a significant advantage over other small DEs if they ship their own DE. It's unlikely to overtake KDE and GNOME since System 76 doesn't sell tons of laptops like Dell or other big hardware companies, but I guess never say never.

I don't expect instant world domination, but I hope the Steam Deck (which will ship KDE Plasma for its desktop mode) will greatly boost the popularity and developer community of KDE. With success, there is a chance at a snowball effect where new users who enjoy the product contribute and bring attention, which brings more new users, etc. All things considered, the share of people using the Steam Deck isn't going to be that big compared to Windows or even MacOS, but it is getting a lot of attention.

One of my friends from the KDE community (which I am also a part of) has written multiple articles about this on his blog. Here's one: https://pointieststick.com/2021/12/09/what-desktop-linux-nee...

> A desktop environment isn't that difficult to make, that's why we have so many.

We actually don't have that many and they actually are pretty difficult to make. Linux has quite a lot of window managers, but not complete desktop environments. The 2 most popular ones require a lot of maintenance. Even GNOME, which has gained a bit of a reputation for dropping features is very large in scope.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#299

Post by nirui »

So... besides the Rust war, I want to talk something more obvious...

Take look the screenshot under "The search bar is available everywhere in the app" section, the Navigation button is not aligned with (I assume) the window title.

The Navigation button did in fact aligned with the "Find a setting..." search input box (trust me, I measured it with two different rulers). But... visually it's misaligned still because the bottom borderline of the Navigation button is too blended in with the window background color.

Well, that's ... dare I say... ugly?

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#300

Post by udbhavs »

I don't know how to feel about the settings app. The floating menu bar stands out too much for a navigation element, the different color scheme makes it feel like a widget. The "Navigation" button in the top left happens to be on the title bar gradient which gives it an off-putting neumorphic vibe, especially with the box shadow being much stronger at the bottom. I am not a Linux user but at first glance I prefer the more clearly segmented look of Gnome.
Post reply on HN