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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

#381

Post by addicted »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #287
addicted wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Many app developers have complained that even within Gnome, apps developed using GTK get a very high number of bugs that are caused by unique customizations that the user may have installed and no one else does. These bugs, despite being significant in number, consume an even more outsized amount of resources and energy because they are very difficult to reproduce.

System76 is only adding to that mess.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#382

Post by addicted »

pxc wrote: post #238
addicted wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> UI/UX is hard enough to begin with, but requiring devs to either maintain several UI/UXs, or try and come up with a design that works across the proliferation of DEs is highly counterproductive. Very few developers actually attempt to do this, on any platform— virtually none, as far as I can tell. It's slightly more common on macOS for developers to actually try to emulate or reuse the design language and look-and-…

A lot of developers are very concerned about UI/UX. Linux just makes it impossible for them to do so.

But even without them caring for UI/UX, the proliferation of DEs, even with common UI toolkits in the Linux world means they spend a lot of time and energy working on bugs that are not true bugs but are artifacts of a UI theme that the developer did not consider while developing their app.

For example, it's almost certain that the unified tooltip in COSMIC will lead to bugs complaining about how users are unable to drag the window by clicking on the chrome. In this case it would be fairly easy for a dev to close the bug because this is such a prominent and obvious difference in COSMIC. But there will certainly be other UI differences that will not be as easy to pin down to being the result of COSMIC's UI changes, and will not be as easy for devs to close.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#383

Post by jklinger410 »

smoldesu wrote: post #281
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.

Who knows, maybe they are reading this thread. Maybe they will do me a solid and make it really easy to switch off of this gross teal-brown-yellow that they are obsessed with.

So far all Cosmic UI has been immune to normal GTK theming.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#384

Post by no_time »

DCKing wrote: post #100

This blog post focuses on some superficialities of how their DE's apps will look slightly different. That's understandable for first impressions. I do hope these superficialities don't have all of System76's focus, as they're a dime a dozen in Linux DEs. Even the category of "we kind of look like Gnome, but with more familiar workflows" is oversaturated amongst Linux desktops (Budgie, Xfce, Cinnamon, MATE, Elementary…

>we can make font rendering best we can make it

The only distro that manages to do this OOTB is Ubuntu. I don't know how many patent demons they had to slay but It's second only to Windows 7's rendering.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#385

Post by jolux »

pjmlp wrote: post #367
mmstick76 wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My point is that Actix Web was still safer than it would have been if it were written in C++ (which is Rust’s whole goal as far as safety), and moreover the norms of the Rust community are so strong that most of the unsafe usage has since been removed, since it was unnecessary. Unsafe deals with memory errors, which are consistently the largest class of security vulnerabilities in native codebases. This is uncontroversial at this point. Rust won’t protect you from log4j, but it never claimed to. Java still protects you from mishandling memory, despite all the stupid automatic classloading features we keep discovering in it.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#386

Post by ShamelessC »

nopenopenopeno wrote: post #374
ShamelessC wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are most likely referring to `tensorman` https://support.system76.com/articles/tensorman/ which is regrettably premised on the notion that you have any intention of using Tensorflow in the first place. Unfortunately, the `tensorman` article shows up first (after several complaint/support threads) in a google search result for the subject https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=nvidia%20docker%20pop%... In all actu…

It wouldn’t be a significant if the Pop OS developers weren’t telling users that they don’t need nvidia-docker. Of course, they can tell users whatever they want, but I’m not going to trust their OS if this is how they plan to handle things like this.

I am actually participating in a thread right now where contributors are happily trying to solve this issue. Their devs are very helpful if you reach out.

https://github.com/pop-os/pop/issues/1708

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#387

Post by awrmc »

mmstick76 wrote: post #347
javier2 wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mode…

In my opinion, you're wasting your time with layer shell. The design of it is very X11-like and flawed. Panels setting their own position is problematic and prevents the shell from doing layout updates in one pass. You'll want to drop it eventually and use a private shell similar to the way it's done in weston.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#388

Post by isaiahg »

I know it's early but I was really hoping for something that looks different from the regular gnome desktop. Let me preface that by saying that I like gnome fine. And I've used it many times. But it's always felt like the design is less focused on desktop users and more an attempt to make a mobile friendly layout fit to desktop.

What system76 is doing could be a great opportunity to rethink a desktop for desktop users. And I understand that after so many years, users have come to expect certain things from a desktop and there's less room to innovate without alienating a huge segment of the userbase that doesn't want to relearn how to use their computer. But still it would be great to get a new idea in the space. And I would love to get an alternative to gnome and kde that isn't just a remix of the past desktops.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#389

Post by smoldesu »

mmstick76 wrote: post #355
smoldesu wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

GTK deprecated Glade, so it's really not the fault of the Rust bindings. But to be honest, Glade's only useful if the language doesn't have good syntax for creating widgets defining properties on those widgets. Creating GTK applications purely in C is a nightmare. Vala makes it manageable. Rust also perfects it with tools like https://docs.rs/relm4-macros/latest/relm4_macros/attr.widget...

If that's perfect, then I'm a monkey's uncle. It's definitely more code and less ergonomic than the previous procedural methods. You can also see Rust's syntax bursting at the seams when they declare widgets...

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#390

Post by symlinkk »

cowsandmilk wrote: post #327
symlinkk wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So basically it’s not Rust.

How pure does your program have to be to be rust for you? How few libraries in C or C++ must it call? The developers are writing all their code in rust, so it is in rust…

It’s a UI library that’s showing UI controls that are written in C. It’s dishonest to call it Rust because it wraps those controls in a layer of Rust
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