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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

#361

Post by commoner »

macco wrote: post #326
pkulak wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, I don't consider those in-house. They are working on an in-house laptop, and if it ends up anything like their in-house desktops, it could be really nice.

Do you have a source for that? This would really be a game changer. Unfortunately, you need a really great number of units, that building your own custom laptop hardware is feasible. I really which System76 success with that. I always thought, if Dell were smart, they would do their own Linux-based brand, where they would reuse parts from mainline Dell. Kind of how they produce gaming laptops.

In November 2019, System76 announced that it would start designing and developing laptops in-house starting January 2020. The development process was estimated to take 2-3 years. The first generation of System76’s in-house desktop line (Thelio) took over 2 years to develop.

- Article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/11/20/syste...

- HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21586422

If you have any suggestions for the laptop design, System76 is collecting feedback here:

https://github.com/system76/laptop-suggestions

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#362

Post by southerntofu »

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 agree there's an old-school Apple feel to it. The difference may be that System76 is concerned with user freedom: from coreboot to COSMOS they intend to produce and support FLOSS.

I think if Apple had embraced free software early in its history, it could have known a much brighter future (err, present?). Hell, even HyperCard may still be alive and kicking.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#363

Post by southerntofu »

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?

Yes, pretty much like that. The author put "unsafe" blocks everywhere and the rest is history. Unsafe as a keyword is a kind of pledge: as a dev, you swear to the compiler that you've checked this part for correctness/safety. If you don't, you may get bitten, but the simple fact that "grep -R unsafe" will yield most (if not all) instances of potential memory fuckups is a huge win for auditability.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#364

Post by pjmlp »

anthk wrote: post #356
pjmlp wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Current E has nothing to do with E16. https://www.enlightenment.org/ EFL has been supported by Samsung and Tizen, so I expect a full rewrite soon. They are doing really good changes now.

If you bothered to read the linked article it goes about that great Samsung and Tizen support efforts in code quality.

And lets be honest, who still cares about Tizen in 2022?

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#365

Post by southerntofu »

stonogo wrote: post #206
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…

Ok, but GTK uses Javascript, which is where most of that toolkit's defects (both security flaws and slowdowns) come from, not C. Calling javascript from Rust isn't going to be a materially different experience than calling javascript from C.

GTK uses CSS but no JS. GNOME uses JavaScript intensively though, which is part of the reasons for the many slowness and bugs.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#366

Post by andrekandre »

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…

  > Some of the deepest issues that users need solved are ones that Rust was designed to solve at the language and compiler level.
true, but if they are just calling into gtk in the end, will it actually be any faster/more-stable?

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#367

Post by pjmlp »

mmstick76 wrote: post #352
pjmlp wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not, the point was that being in Rust wasn't either.

But the point is the exact opposite because any use of unsafe is clearly marked as such, and therefore a code audit will instantly find its use and question it. Hence the fallout surrounding it.

How do you find unsafe on a binary library?

Also that is besides the point, unsafe only deals with a very specific cause of errors that plague C code bases (and those of languages copy-paste compatible with it).

Rust's unsafe wouldn't have done anything to protect against an hypotetical log4r.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#368

Post by southerntofu »

1_player wrote: post #295
k_kalupe22 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

I don't know about revolutionizing the Linux desktop, but i can assure you rust made me a better programmer (even when i write C or python) despite being a very bad programmer to start with.

I also know that Linux desktops are often victims of memory bugs, and that a higher-level language for extensions is something people appreciate, that's why there's JS in GNOME.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#369

Post by pjmlp »

southerntofu wrote: post #363
pjmlp wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like ActixWeb?

Yes, pretty much like that. The author put "unsafe" blocks everywhere and the rest is history. Unsafe as a keyword is a kind of pledge: as a dev, you swear to the compiler that you've checked this part for correctness/safety. If you don't, you may get bitten, but the simple fact that "grep -R unsafe" will yield most (if not all) instances of potential memory fuckups is a huge win for auditability.

Rust's unsafe wouldn't have done anything to protect against an hypotetical log4r.

As for the memory fuckups you are right, pity that they are using a C GUI library.

Even if the binding has been deemed safe upon validation, if only remains a valid certification until the next Gtk version update, even minor ones might break the assumptions validated on the unsafe code block.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#370

Post by southerntofu »

symlinkk wrote: post #259
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/

So basically it’s not Rust.

By that standard no binary that links against glibc, whether originally written in rust or go, is in fact rust or go.
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