Live data from Hacker News

A new wave of Linux applications

tuxphones.com

191–200 of 584 posts

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to see OP's response to that. I don't think I have seen anyone using a mouse without a scroll wheel for at least a decade.

I have a be trackball and a vertical mouse. Both expensive. Both without proper scroll. Many trackwheels on are also slow at of you want to flick many pages down. I rely mostly in keyboard.

> Many trackwheels on are also slow at of you want to flick many pages down.

This is why the Apple Magic Mouse is so great - it's essentially a phone surface instead of physical buttons.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#192
post #171

Rise in cross platform frameworks would be a positive trend. When I am writing a flutter application, I often run on desktop directly and resize to mobile shape. That works good enough unless I am writing a mobile-specific feature. This probably means most flutter apps can run on other linux based phones as well.

Cross platform frameworks have already risen in Electron. Every application I use at work runs on Linux. VS Code, Slack, Zoom, Postman, and others I can't think of are all Electron. And they all perform fine. The speed difference between JS and native is meaningless in 99% of cases given how fast modern CPUs are. RAM usage is similar. Everyone complains about it, but I've got 32 GB and I don't get above 8GB usage whe…

Probably good for there to be competition in the cross-platform space. Maybe Electron is a little overly-bashed, but it's best when it's not the only game in town.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#193
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The general demeanor of the team has been my-way-or-the-highway, so making suggestions mostly gets you labelled as a troll in their gitlab and sees you forcibly removed if you don't give up and assimilate into their opinion. Remember: > I guess you have to decide if you are a GNOME app, an Ubuntu app, or an XFCE app unfortunately. I'm sorry that this is the case but it wasn't GNOME's fault that Ubuntu has started t…

> And I have no idea what XFCE is or does sorry. Where is this from?

https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust and GTK3/4 are fairly well supported, no? I know QT is a bit more of a pain to do from Rust, but I wanna say that's possible too... though nowhere near as evident as gtk-rs.

GTK and Rust works really well on Linux, which I suppose is the pertinent part given the focus of the article. I've yet to work out how to get GTK and Rust to work on macOS or Windows, which makes cross-platform UI difficult.

FWIW, my smallish project [1] (Rust + GTK3) builds and works on Windows out of the box. I use the MSYS2 build environment.

[1] https://github.com/GreatAttractor/vidoxide

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#195
post #70
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not, but I would love to some day. I fucking hate my android phone (and the iphone is just as terrible, in slightly different and often the same ways). Thank god for the people tinkering on pinephones and purism phones, paving the way for something less awful, with control in the hands of the user We're not there yet, but we won't ever be unless people put effort into it. The linux desktop used to suck, too

To me, phone os is an easy way to get to apps, switch between apps, and handle notifications. It appears to be something else for you. What is an ideal phone for you, and how would Linux help achieve that experience?

That's pretty much my use-case too. I want my laptop, but smaller :)

Primarily, I want software I can trust, because I trust that the developers' motives are aligned with my own: a useful tool that I'm in control of.

In my experience, most Free software fits that bill; whereas most proprietary software seems more interested in persuading me to buy something or sign up for something that I don't want. (Most, not all; I can think of counterexamples.)

Bluntly, Free software is usually much less full of skeevy bullshit.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been a gnome user for well over a decade. What's common to hear from people like you who have a good level of understanding the ecosystem and the community is that Gnome developers consistently make shitty design decisions and refuse to take input from a wider audience. What is the reason for no group emerging, forking gnome and doing it the right way? I'd actually pay to support such efforts.

It’s not forked from Gnome but KDE tends to stay out of your way pretty easily and supports just as much as Gnome (with some Wayland caveats) if not more. In fact KDE community is very responsive and if you participate you will likely experience and benefit from the momentum they have.

I find touch support much worse on KDE unfortunately. GNOME works really well on my surface pro, KDE, not so much.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#197
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do however see many complaints when an app doesn’t support dark mode (which is closer to the typical use case of themes). Additionally, see my other comment about accessibility, which is also negatively impacted by hardcoded UI appearances.

Dark Mode is first class in the next releases of GTK4 and LibAdwaita. It'll be available in GNOME 42 and Fedora 36.

Yep and that’s great, but there are still other legitimate uses for theming. One of mine is cutting down padding to reasonable levels — GNOME is much more usable to me when using a theme like Nordic or Skeuos, both of which do that.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#198
post #49
post #36

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.

Why do you use a mouse without a scrollwheel?

Not parent, but I use a trackball. Apparently adding a plain scroll wheel onto one is rocket science or something, based on the prices.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#199
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

libadwaita and Kirigami are huge improvements for the desktop app ecosystem from what I've seen as a user. When I started to delve into desktop applications I quickly realized there's a couple hurdles I face: 1. QT was an ecosystem shock to me. I barely knew what to do to get started and got lost easily. 2. Do these applications work outside of Linux; more directly, do they have dynamic dependencies? From my experien…

Rust and GTK3/4 are fairly well supported, no? I know QT is a bit more of a pain to do from Rust, but I wanna say that's possible too... though nowhere near as evident as gtk-rs.

I've been experimenting with gtk-rs, but the GTK ecosystem is really difficult to get right. The examples are few and far between, and the type exceptions the macro DSL throws are very difficult to parse.

All the necessary components are there, but there just aren't enough guides out there to get started. I tried looking into how existing applications use the ecosystem, but experienced GUI developers pull tons of dependencies and use complicated code structures that are hardly documented.

I think switching from Python/GTK to Rust/GTK is probably an easy move, but as someone coming from .NET Forms GUI design, it's been tough getting into GTK. GTK Builder is supposed to have native support for Glade and all the other nice tools, but for me that either doesn't compile any code or refuses to even work at all.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#200

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...

Supporting themes imposes an ongoing technical burden across the whole ecosystem. It's not worth it. You don't hear people say "I hate macs because I can't make my title bars purple".

This attitude is why we can no longer have stuff that doesn't only come in "light theme" or "dark theme". I consider this a regression. Let me theme my damn computer the way I want. It's called a Personal computer for a reason.
Post reply on HN