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

311–320 of 408 posts

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#311

Post by pjmlp »

jandrese wrote: post #115
acdha wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have an example of that friction? Looking through the docs at e.g. https://gtk-rs.org/gtk4-rs/stable/latest/book/hello_world.ht... it doesn't seem that bad but not having used it I would be curious how it works out once you're building a serious app.

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…

Thanks for the link, the last time I used Gtk-rs, the book wasn't yet a thing, you can imagine how much fun I had learning those patterns on my own.

Yes, there is relm nowadays, which was yet to be born when I did my Gtkmm => Gtk-rs port.

At least I can also now point others to the book.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#312

Post by pjmlp »

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…

Not at all, if you would say "A window manager isn't that difficult to make, that's why we have so many.", I would agree.

A desktop environment is so much more, is a full stack development experience, with development tooling, APIs, and UI/UX workflows that users can be confident they work across most applications unless they go out of their way not to support the native idioms of the desktop environment being used.

Most of those "so many experiments" fail at being half as good GNOME/KDE are at being a full desktop environment as other desktop and mobile platforms are.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#313

Post by pjmlp »

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 is hardly a clone when it lacks the Objective-C/Swift userspace from macOS.

This has been the problem from GNU/Linux desktop for ages, the Look gets cloned, yet the Feel dies along the way.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#314

Post by pjmlp »

anthk wrote: post #9
flenserboy wrote: post #5

Better to adopt Budgie and move it over to Rust if that's really where they want to go.

Solus OS' BOFH got tired of Gnome and he will switch the entire stack in to Enlightenment. And inb4 "E17 and such have Gaudy theming", last E has a flatish theme, so something like Arc for E would be really easy to implement. https://www.enlightenment.org/

This Enlightenment?

https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened

Definitly a good choice. /s

Enlightenment was a nice window manager back in the mid-1990's, nowadays who cares if it still compiles.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#315

Post by ThinkBeat »

pxc wrote: post #176
ThinkBeat wrote: post #128

What exactly is a Linux "desktop environment"? Does it contain a window manager or is that fully separate? Is it the "explorer", shell, menu, dock, what not? (But didn't that at least in part reside in a window manager)? Is it libraries that applications that are to be executed under the DE? If it is using the GNOME libraries (GTK???) ? Will GNOME applications be native?

> Does [a desktop environment] contain a window manager or is that fully separate? yes, it does. You can sometimes swap out the default WM for a DE, if you want > Is it the "explorer", shell, menu, dock, what not? yes > (But didn't that at least in part reside in a window manager)? not really. That's an implementation detail that just varies between different DEs and WMs more than across time. Most DEs don't use the…

As part of the WM, are a set of applications that are made to take full advantage of it?

And the same set of applicatins are in general included in each one?

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#316

Post by blub »

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…

Maybe you're right in some fundamental way, but as an example iOS, macOS, Android or Windows are all considered stable and efficient, secure and highly performant by most end-users. As a specialist one can quibble and point to counter-examples, but all of these are fine choices. The only big differences are in privacy and level of control offered.

It's more likely that by the time Rust makes an impact in Linux stability and performance - because you're using an OS, not just desktop environment - nobody will even remember what System76 was.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#317

Post by fossdd »

The new settings window looks really customized. Not sure. I've no problem if they change things in PopOS. It looks better then their custom GNOME. GNOME without customizations is in my opinion the best DE.

Also cause GNOME uses by default Wayland. COSMIC uses Xorg..

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#318

Post by jolux »

pjmlp wrote: post #309
SkyMarshal wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they are the defaults in Rust. Exactly, this is what I should have explicitly said. Language defaults have a powerful effect on a project's norms and culture. > You have to go out of your way to get these things wrong. Yes, you actually have to try to write shitty Rust code, at least where there are defaults that prevent it. Thus the average Rust program will have that baseline level of quality. Like TQM/TPM/Six-Si…

Like ActixWeb?

Do you think Actix Web would be safer if it were written in C++?

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#319

Post by pantalaimon »

pjmlp wrote: post #307
opan wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Raspberry Pi seems to be doing just fine with them, whereas the FOOS competition is where exactly?

Allwinner, Rockchip and Mediatek seem do be doing just fine without all the blobs.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#320

Post by Vogtinator »

Narishma wrote: post #172
blinkingled wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if you have tried recent versions of Plasma but they have made a great deal of progress on all fronts including fixing a lot of bugs. I don't encounter any on day to day basis on Tumbleweed which gets you the latest version.

Here's a small one I encounter on a daily basis on Tumbleweed: the update notifications scrolling is broken. It scrolls the list of updates super slowly and goes back to the top when it reaches the end instead of just stopping. Another small one: I've set the panel to auto-hide. It works fine for the most part but occasionally it will stay visible until I minimize and restore any window.

openSUSE and Plasma developer here. I haven't heard of the issue with the scrolling before, is there a bug report?

> Another small one: I've set the panel to auto-hide. It works fine for the most part but occasionally it will stay visible until I minimize and restore any window.

I've had that as well, but only on X11. I've switched to Wayland some years ago, and never got around to debug that.

Post reply on HN