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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

#341

Post by berkes »

megumax wrote: post #134
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…

From what I know, system76 didn't shill cosmos as a rust DE, the only reference to Rust being done in some reddit comment. Most PopOS users don't know what Rust is, so it wouldn't make sense to talk about Cosmos as a Rust project. Now, 90-95% of users use GNOME or KDE, having some competition from a `new` GTK4 DE can't be bad, so I would like to see Cosmos gain attention, and maybe be ported to other distros.

The people that System76 sells to most likely buy their hardware. In which case the word 'Rust' is worrying at least. Would you buy a laptop that ships with rust?

Jokes aside: during early development it makes perfect sense to advertise tech being used, because the audience is so different at that time. So even if system76 would "shill" it as a Rust DE, at this phase, that would be fine, because of the highly technical audience.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#342

Post by javier2 »

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 don't mind system76 succeeding, that would be great, but I have not really liked any of their laptop offerings. I also really don't want another half funded DE for Linux. I really wish they would dedicate these resources to improving GNOME and gtk instead. Things like VRR, DPI scaling, touchpad behaviour, prioritising wifi driver bugs, basic things like copy/paste interactions between apps, screen sharing et.al. are still less than great experiences on Linux and is more important to improve than a new half baked UI.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#343

Post by GekkePrutser »

timellis-smith wrote: post #324
GekkePrutser wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

Any recommendations for good tiling managers for KDE?

There is krohnkite but I recently read development was halted and there was a new more favourable one. I've bookmarked it somewhere but I'll check!

Edit: this is the one: https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth

There's also kwin-tiling https://github.com/kwin-scripts/kwin-tiling

Not sure which is best tbh. I have yet to try them

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#344

Post by pjmlp »

nicoburns wrote: post #334
pjmlp wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like ActixWeb?

IMO the fact that the actix-web debacle was so well publicised speaks volumes in itself. The issues were actually discovered ahead of time by people reading the source code rather than people encountering bugs or vulnerabilities in the wild. That's a huge improvement over C software. Of course there are still bugs in Rust programs and libraries, but much fewer. And I think fewer to the point that eliminating them ent…

For every vocal example there are tons that fly under the radar until they are on the news for the wrong reasons.

It is no accident that Ada and Java also have security guidelines similar to MISRA, because even with memory corruption bugs out of the picture, as log4j newly remided us, security only happens when it is part of the daily process, regardless of the language.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#345

Post by schemar »

timellis-smith wrote: post #324
GekkePrutser wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

Any recommendations for good tiling managers for KDE?

You can also use i3wm as tiling window manager. It replaces KDE‘s default window manager. I had good experiences with that.

Guide: https://userbase.kde.org/Tutorials/Using_Other_Window_Manage...

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#346

Post by mmstick76 »

k_kalupe22 wrote: post #291
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/

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

Only the applications are GTK-based. The compositor that makes the whole environment possible is written in Rust.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#347

Post by mmstick76 »

javier2 wrote: post #342
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 don't mind system76 succeeding, that would be great, but I have not really liked any of their laptop offerings. I also really don't want another half funded DE for Linux. I really wish they would dedicate these resources to improving GNOME and gtk instead. Things like VRR, DPI scaling, touchpad behaviour, prioritising wifi driver bugs, basic things like copy/paste interactions between apps, screen sharing et.al. ar…

If what we want is a rewrite of GNOME with COSMIC features, that's not going to happen with GNOME. We already submit patches to GTK, and GTK4 is gaining layer-shell protocol support as a result.

Screen sharing is already made easy with Pipewire. I've not seen any issues with copy/paste between applications. WiFi driver issues can only be fixed by kernel driver developers with hardware documentation for the exact model of the PCI device they're writing a driver for. The same goes for touchpad drivers, but I've not had any issues with them on our laptops. We sell systems where we can vouch for the quality of the driver support in Linux for the WiFi and touchpad.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#348

Post by mmstick76 »

gpm wrote: post #266
btdmaster wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to use wayland: https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-comp/blob/main/src/main.rs#... .

Yet it also seems to be using an "x11 backend" (only) for now... not sure what to make of this without reading the code a lot closer. https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-comp/blob/main/src/backend/...

It is Wayland only, and the X11 backend is for running applications in a nested X11 client.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#349

Post by mmstick76 »

nopenopenopeno wrote: post #302
mmstick76 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

`sudo apt install nvidia-docker2` works on 21.10. I have been packaging NVIDIA's container toolkit since tensorman was created, because tensorman doesn't work without nvidia's container toolkit. It's a dependency.

Nvidia-docker is not the same as nvidia-container-toolkit, and neither of them have official support for 21.10 the last time I checked (a few months ago).

It is a component of nvidia-container-toolkit. Take one minute to browse the Pop repository and you'll find three packaging repositories forked from NVIDIA. libnvidia-container, nvidia-container-toolkit, and nvidia-docker. Installing nvidia-docker installs support for the whole system. Now you have functioning NVIDIA support in containers.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#350

Post by mmstick76 »

nopenopenopeno wrote: post #301
fulafel wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I’m sorry, I don’t quite recall the details but it was a few different things. The main one is forcing certain Nvidia libraries in the package manager so you need to take a few steps to undo some of the Pop OS Nvidia installation, which breaks other Pop OS stuff, of course.

There is no need to undo anything. We regularly test CUDA functionality with our packaging, and it's the whole point of having the packaging in the first place. So you don't have to manually install things from a third party repository or deb.
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