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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

#401

Post by michaelmrose »

awrmc wrote: post #280
michaelmrose wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How they handle multiple monitors is a choice and the memory leaking is a design decision as is the lack of addon api and a system where any crashing addon takes out the whole session. Bugs are inevitable but bad design is not.

The only one out of those that's a intentional design is multiple monitors. The other ones are known shortcomings that are just really hard to fix. The memory leak was fixed a few years ago: https://feaneron.com/2018/04/20/the-infamous-gnome-shell-mem...

It is worth noting that the first release of Gnome 3 which had the leak from the outset was in 2011 and in 2018 they mostly "fixed" the problem by just constantly running the garbage collector and marveling at how not so horrible that is.

Unfortunately the problem actually continued for some at least into 2020.

In summary a broken design nearly completely ignored for 7 years and fixed with a band-aid that doesn't actually solve the underlying issue over the next 2 years. 11 years in and the design fail is still with us. I appreciate the fact that many of the contributors aren't paid for their efforts and I applaud their efforts to give to the community but large parts of gnome ought to regarded as learning experiences not something to build the rest of our software on top of.

I hope System76's work will be a better basis especially since their financial success could fund future efforts.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#402

Post by SkyMarshal »

mohanmcgeek wrote: post #400
SkyMarshal wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

For the reasons I mentioned above, adoption of vala by projects in 2010 is exactly like adoption of Rust. That Rust is much more capable doesn't matter.

You didn’t give any reasons about adoption of Vala. You said it’s hard to hire Rust programmers, and then just “Remember Vala anyone?” without actually saying anything more about Vala.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#403

Post by macco »

commoner wrote: post #361
macco wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 su…

Thx.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#404

Post by renox »

Rd6n6 wrote: post #294
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 game…

If memory serves Rust provides memory safety but memory leaks aren't considered 'unsafe' so I'm not so sure for the memory leaks..

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#405

Post by UltraViolence »

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 developed software for Mac OS X around 2005 and I can guarantee you that Apple certainly wasn't kicking butt back then and is probably even worse off today with OS X becoming bloated and full of cruft.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#406

Post by FengLengshun »

iSnow wrote: post #335
pxc wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know that open source and Linux in general don't need/want another DE Unpopular opinion, but more DEs is fine and good, especially if they will have teams that are either (a) large or (b) well-funded. Plasma and GNOME are very good, and Unity was actually great to use in its heyday. Imo what we don't really need more of are the conservative, under-resourced 'classic look and feel' DEs like most of the minor playe…

>more DEs is fine and good I tend to disagree here. I recently switched back to MacOS after years of running both. The DEs on Linux are just one generation behind. Things have gotten better, but macOS and to an extend Windows are ahead. Linux DEs would be well advised to onboard more graphics and UI experts to make them more user-friendly and stable. Desktop metaphors have more or less stabilized and it's counter-pro…

I don't disagree, which is why I use KDE, as it is trivial to get it to look and behave like macOS and do so stably. Probably why many KDE distro that aren't following KDE's defaults use it too (Garuda Linux, XeroLinux, FerenOS)

I think Linux DEs are fine, it's just that the default config / on-boarding rarely asks what the user wants and what they need.

More distro/DEs need to incorporate UX/Desktop Layout Switcher, like Ubuntu Budgie, Zorin OS (Gnome, XFCE), Manjaro (Gnome, there are plans to do KDE as well in the forum?), and FerenOS. It'll solve the issues of personal preference in UX, as people could just one-click choose what feels/looks the best for them.

I personally don't mind taking a few hours setting up the UX I want with Fedora KDE, but I doubt most others do.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#407

Post by FengLengshun »

addicted wrote: post #207
pxc wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know that open source and Linux in general don't need/want another DE Unpopular opinion, but more DEs is fine and good, especially if they will have teams that are either (a) large or (b) well-funded. Plasma and GNOME are very good, and Unity was actually great to use in its heyday. Imo what we don't really need more of are the conservative, under-resourced 'classic look and feel' DEs like most of the minor playe…

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…

I think devs can use Gtk if they're developing for Linux or don't mind using pyGtk for multi-platform, use Qt or Flutter otherwise if they're going multi-platform, make sure everything follows freedesktop specifications, and then just pack it to Flatpak, test it for Gnome and KDE... then just tell everyone whose DE doesn't support it to just deal with it.

Heck, many apps are web-based and uses electron anyways, and those are generally multiplatform anyways.

I think if whatever app they make/port worrks via Flatpak, it should work on all/most modern distro.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#408

Post by phendrenad2 »

amarshall wrote: post #284
seb1204 wrote: post #283

Honest question: would the Linux ecosystem benefit from a UI style guide? Similar to what Apple and Google provide for the mobile platforms? My thinking is that such a style guide could help developers, desktop environments and distributions at the same time. As many mention here the developer of a small app or program is not a UI guru. So if there is a guide to follow why not?

GNOME has their Human Interface Guidelines [1]. Of course GNOME is not the whole Linux ecosystem, and not everything is GTK. [1]: https://developer.gnome.org/hig/

And the GNOME HIG is oddly barebones. It's more vague soapbox proclamations than an actual set of guidelines.
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