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A new wave of Linux applications

tuxphones.com

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Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#31

Post by cmeacham98 »

fsflover wrote: post #27
traverseda wrote: post #9

I have to say I just don't like Gnome's design. The shift away from text and towards more and more abstract icons, the "don't theme my app movement", removing features I consider pretty essential like typeahead.... Maybe mobile is where their weird (to me) design choices will finally shine though. Also looking forward to what KDE can accomplish in this space.

> Also looking forward to what KDE can accomplish in this space. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DLQWv8P5Hw

It's cool they have this (mostly) working on mobile, but those gestures are pretty clearly all copied from Android and not a result of KDE Desktop's design decisions.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#32

Post by floren »

dleslie wrote: post #13
taeric wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't rely on any phone's camera for speed. Sucks to hear this one is even worse than normal.

The camera is so bad that it's even a shame that they bothered adding it. The additional cost for the hardware clearly wasn't worth it.

Seconded. It's been several years of development time and I still think I'd get better pictures with one of those cameras that saved pictures on floppy disks.

I've bought two Pinephones and I hope things go well but man, I install Mobian and wonder what exactly their long term plan is... it runs like an absolute dog, worse than a $30 Android prepaid phone. The only way to get reasonable performance has been to use sxmo, which is ok for me but not the experience normal people want.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#33

Post by _jal »

traverseda wrote: post #9

I have to say I just don't like Gnome's design. The shift away from text and towards more and more abstract icons, the "don't theme my app movement", removing features I consider pretty essential like typeahead.... Maybe mobile is where their weird (to me) design choices will finally shine though. Also looking forward to what KDE can accomplish in this space.

Agreed. Visually, it is... fine, I don't care that much and the iconization of everything is probably just trend chasing. And personally I don't care too much about theming, but either it should be supported, or not.

But it is so dumbed-down now that I find it pointless as a desktop. I try it out every time I rebuild, and become frustrated with how it doesn't do any number of perfectly reasonable things to want from a Linux desktop. Then some random component I don't even care about starts misbehaving enough to be distracting, and I switch back to blackbox.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#34

Post by asddubs »

dleslie wrote: post #15
bogwog wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, the Pinephone store very clearly states that this is a beta device intended for experience linux developers/early adopters only. It’s not meant to be a daily driver yet.

It's not Beta. At the time I purchased it, it wasn't even Alpha. Beta, as a game developer, implies to me that there's a few outstanding show-stoppers but on the whole the product is safe to show to eager end-consumers who are willing to tolerate some rough edges. The PinePhone isn't even that, yet; I couldn't conscientiously hand it to a non-techy and ask them for feedback because I'm not even sure it would reliably…

Seems like you're just arguing semantics. The pinephone is very clearly advertised as aimed at developers

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#35

Post by allisdust »

smoldesu wrote: post #12

History is back around to repeating itself. I'm an avid Linux user (and even a developer who uses GTK pretty regularly), but the recent developments surrounding GNOME, Flatpak and their related libraries has not made me optimistic for the future of Linux applications. GTK4 is really bad. It launched with horrible text rendering issues (still unfixed, 10+ months later), broke compatibility with a number of basic featu…

Only if you are hung up on gnome of course. Plenty of alternatives that work out of the box in desktop space and flatapps aren't really needed really as one click with much less issues is possible many gui package managers.

First option for anyone coming from other OS should be kde. Defaults are sane and customizations are easy to do. Frankly I really don't know why all distros provide gnome by default. There are neither helping themselves nor the broader linux desktop community by shipping something that's broken in so many ways.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#36

Post by floren »

These applications look really pretty and all, but for my selfish purposes, I just really want real goddamn scrollbars back. I use a mouse that doesn't have a scroll wheel, but for the life of me I've been unable to figure out how to make applications like Firefox just give me a real scroll bar on the side of the window that's thick enough to grab without fiddly pixel-hunting.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#37

Post by [deleted] »

_jal wrote: post #33
traverseda wrote: post #9

I have to say I just don't like Gnome's design. The shift away from text and towards more and more abstract icons, the "don't theme my app movement", removing features I consider pretty essential like typeahead.... Maybe mobile is where their weird (to me) design choices will finally shine though. Also looking forward to what KDE can accomplish in this space.

Agreed. Visually, it is... fine, I don't care that much and the iconization of everything is probably just trend chasing. And personally I don't care too much about theming, but either it should be supported, or not. But it is so dumbed-down now that I find it pointless as a desktop. I try it out every time I rebuild, and become frustrated with how it doesn't do any number of perfectly reasonable things to want from…

[deleted]

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#38

Post by zozbot234 »

asddubs wrote: post #25
traverseda wrote: post #9

I have to say I just don't like Gnome's design. The shift away from text and towards more and more abstract icons, the "don't theme my app movement", removing features I consider pretty essential like typeahead.... Maybe mobile is where their weird (to me) design choices will finally shine though. Also looking forward to what KDE can accomplish in this space.

I still dislike the gnome3 title bar with the icons. As you say, unlabelled mystery meat and hamburger menus. I'll admit, part of my dislike for the new title bars is probably irrationally rooted in just wanting things to stay like they were on windows 98 when I first became familiar with computers, forever, and never to diverge too much from that. But those unlabelled icons, they really do puzzle and frustrate me. O…

> I still dislike the gnome3 title bar with the icons.

It's a key part of touch readiness. There's even a Windows-like theme for Gtk3+ that looks really close to the original, you might like it better than the default look.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#39

Post by kitsunesoba »

akselmo wrote: post #26
kitsunesoba wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The “don’t theme my app” thing just tells me that GNOME/GTK+/Adwaita aren’t built in a way that gracefully handles theming, or that devs building apps with them are doing things like hard coding colors when they should be using dynamic system colors such as those provided by UIColor[0] in UIKit. [0]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uicolor/ui_e...

I feel like partially the movement happened because some themes made the apps unusable and then instead of blaming the theming, users blamed thee app developers instead.

In some cases badly designed themes (like dark gray labels on black backgrounds) are the culprit, but most often it’s a result of the app developers hard coding colors in their UI elements assuming all users will be using a similar theme.

That’s not only bad for custom theme users, it’s bad for accessibility since there’s no way for increased contrast modes to modify the hard coded colors. Apps really just shouldn’t hard code colors.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#40

Post by fsflover »

floren wrote: post #32
dleslie wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The camera is so bad that it's even a shame that they bothered adding it. The additional cost for the hardware clearly wasn't worth it.

Seconded. It's been several years of development time and I still think I'd get better pictures with one of those cameras that saved pictures on floppy disks. I've bought two Pinephones and I hope things go well but man, I install Mobian and wonder what exactly their long term plan is... it runs like an absolute dog , worse than a $30 Android prepaid phone. The only way to get reasonable performance has been to use s…

If you need a good camera, consider Librem 5 instead.
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