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A new wave of Linux applications

tuxphones.com

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Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#271
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There’s tons of trackballs with wheels. Both CST Lasertrac and Kensington Expert Mouse have them.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#272

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…

> libadwaita is in a "functional" release state, but still lacks support for custom stylesheets, Libadwaita is an implementation of GNOME's design, analogous to libgranite in elementary OS. This includes the visual design. GNOME only has one style, Adwaita (which means “the only one”!). If you don't want to use GNOME's design, you don't want to use libadwaita. > basic desktop integration on non-GNOME desktops Libadwa…

What if I want to use GNOME's nice touch functionality and rich set of apps, but not the style? (Which in my subjective view is wayyy too gray).

Why do those things have to be tightly coupled all of a sudden? We've made it through decades without breaking theming, what changed?

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#273
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…

Nitpick: Zoom isn't Electron-based on any platform AFAIK. On Linux it uses Qt. On Windows it uses its own fork of DuiLib [1]. I don't know about Mac.

[1]: https://github.com/duilib/duilib (apparently only documented in Chinese)

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#274

I've been a long time linux desktop user, recently switched over to macOS after getting fed up from not being able to do many basic "productivity" related tasks, without having to open a terminal, search for a package on google, fiddle with some config, do a rain dance, etc... Skimming through just the blog post and some of the comments on this thread gives me a bit of a flashback thinking of all of the headaches I'v…

When I was a younger engineer I loved Ubuntu because I got to feel like a hacker that was making my custom working environment. But these days I’m just irritated by how much it takes to do _primitive_ things. I spent 30 mins today just getting my Outlook calendar to display in Ubuntu. I had to use Stack Overflow to learn of a package I had to install. No error messages. The calendar just remained blank until I instal…

I have very limited experience with Linux but every time I try to install something, I find that I lack some dependency and then wind up trying to build from source. What could fix these types of issues? Why does most software just install effortlessly on Mac OS? Is there something that Apple does that could be mimicked in Linux? I may be naive, but seems like a legit question.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#275

I've been a long time linux desktop user, recently switched over to macOS after getting fed up from not being able to do many basic "productivity" related tasks, without having to open a terminal, search for a package on google, fiddle with some config, do a rain dance, etc... Skimming through just the blog post and some of the comments on this thread gives me a bit of a flashback thinking of all of the headaches I'v…

I did feel like you and did the same as you, however I noticed I am just fighting a different fight in macOS than Linux it is not all that better you still have to fight the system to make it work for you

- Convoluted first setup , you need x-code command line tools for even say git.

- Docker doesn’t work completely for all builds and still needs a Linux vm to run

- your servers are not usually arm64 not everything works as it would locally

- node - Applications like Dropbox have(or had) limited or no support and only slowly adding them

- I have to still setup basic coreutils and dozen other gnu basics which either are not there or very old versions from 80s

- Procfs and other standard Linux goodies you are used to are not there .

- you have to keep in mind BSD isms and context switch. Flag order matters in BSD /Mac world rm /dir -rf won’t work but will in Linux.

- Homebrew is not too bad as package manager but compared to Linux world (apt , Pacman, yum or emerge ) it is pretty limited in features and options

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#276

I've been a long time linux desktop user, recently switched over to macOS after getting fed up from not being able to do many basic "productivity" related tasks, without having to open a terminal, search for a package on google, fiddle with some config, do a rain dance, etc... Skimming through just the blog post and some of the comments on this thread gives me a bit of a flashback thinking of all of the headaches I'v…

I've had the exact opposite experience. When I started using Linux the UI was a crutch, but as I learned, the command-line became much more compelling because it was substantially more powerful- it's infinitely easier to add features via flags and params than it is to integrate in a GUI. I pretty much live in the command-line now and I've never been more productive. All of my calendar/doc/notes needs are in the cloud…

First time I’ve heard “BTRFS” and “reliability” together.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#277

I've been a long time linux desktop user, recently switched over to macOS after getting fed up from not being able to do many basic "productivity" related tasks, without having to open a terminal, search for a package on google, fiddle with some config, do a rain dance, etc... Skimming through just the blog post and some of the comments on this thread gives me a bit of a flashback thinking of all of the headaches I'v…

Amen. Engineers like to tinker. From installing custom ROM on their phones, to deciding which JavaScript router to use along with other 99 packages to run a blog. We’ve all been there. But sometimes the time comes, where you just want to be as productive as possible or focus on other things. And that’s when things like Ruby on Rails or iPhone start look interesting. They just work, and let you focus on creating value…

I really wish/hope there is a big push to attract creatives for projects. I am 100% sure “tinker to the end of time” mentality hurts adoption as a general use OS.

Tried to donate some time to some projects, but devs usually just shrug or don’t like if you come with UX suggestions. Hopefully that is changing, really enjoyed the article.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#278
post #210
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Qt (QML/QtQuick; Widgets are no linger the preferred method afaik) you have qmetaobjects-rs, which is reeally nice.

QML is practically electron - it's runtime interpreted declarative UI plus a Javascript engine. QML still has only rudimentary support for AOT compilation. Both the old qmlcompiler and the new qmlsc compiler are commercial-only: https://www.qt.io/blog/the-new-qtquick-compiler-technology . LGPL users only get the interpreter. Widgets is still the 'Real Qt'. Some very modern, responsive-layout desktop apps like Telegra…

Having a declarative UI does not make it comparable to Electron. Same as XAML is not comparable. They don't embed the whole browser.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#279

This could be less about device convergence and more about UX improvements and design coherence among apps. Some examples of what's been happening: - Touchpad gestures through various efforts: https://linuxtouchpad.org - Gnome: libAdwaita: https://blogs.gnome.org/alexm/2021/12/31/libadwaita-1-0/ - Core workflows getting better first-class approaches rather than being another app to install: (e.g. screenshots & screen…

Excellent links - thank you so much for the resources. I'm very excited to see what the Pinephone Pro brings as a platform to build towards in this regard. I'm already eyeing shipping some apps on Flathub! I hope the React Native => Flathub pipeline gets built out, similar to what Ubuntu is doing with Flutter => Snap. Exciting times!

I am very displeased by Snap being shoved down one's throat on Ubuntu. This has caused me to actually abandon Ubuntu completely. Linux mint and Debian now.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#280
post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amen. Engineers like to tinker. From installing custom ROM on their phones, to deciding which JavaScript router to use along with other 99 packages to run a blog. We’ve all been there. But sometimes the time comes, where you just want to be as productive as possible or focus on other things. And that’s when things like Ruby on Rails or iPhone start look interesting. They just work, and let you focus on creating value…

Does the IPhone just work though? My wife has one and I always find it a pain to deal with. Simple things like playing videos often don't work with VLC (never had this problem with Android) so I have to use Handbrake to convert it to a format that the Iphone will accept. Same thing with audiobooks, MP3 versions don't work I have to convert them to M4B for some reason.

My sense is that it "just works" if and only if you've completely bought into the Apple ecosystem. If you want to back up your photos onto iCloud, Apple has made it easy. If you want to periodically back up your photos onto an external hard drive, Apple shrugs and says that you should manually copy them over.
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