Live data from Hacker News

A new wave of Linux applications

tuxphones.com

291–300 of 584 posts

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is silly that dark mode isn't regarded the same as just switching themes. Forcing its adoption however breaks dependency on non-themable components so its popularity is still a net benefit.

There's a difference between "we'll test and support two color schemes" and "we'll design ui with parametrised colors, shapes and text sizes which can adjust to any change and still be usable". If we settle on bright/dark/colorblind mode selectors that everyone expects to be supported, I'm happy. I've seen themes in the past and there was always a few apps which just can't resize elements in the expected way, or the backgrounds don't tile correctly, or ...

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

btrfs has come a long, long way. At this point the only major remaining problem is the parity raid implementation, so most people just run it on top of mdraid. btrfs native striped and mirrored raid are stable at this point.

In my subjective experience, I've been using it for the last 6 years and have not had a fault thus far.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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?

There's a number of solutions, none of them (even Apple's own) are really all that ideal. Pretty much all of your Mac apps are statically linked, which is why you download a large 300mb DMG or .app file that lugs along all of it's dependencies with it when you're getting a program. This has a few advantages (it's arguably safer, you can expect most software to "just work", etc) but it also has some disadvantages (uses more memory, lots of redundancy and "wasted" space with every download, kinda obfuscates directory structure, etc).

Honestly, there is no right answer here. Linux has tried doing a similar thing with Flatpak, but it's oftentimes more trouble than it's worth. Linux desktop software is supposed to be run as a local user without sandboxing; there's very little you can do to change that without re-architecturing the entire program to work that way too.

> Why does most software just install effortlessly on Mac OS?

Wait until you try Brew or Macports. The main reason why I genuinely cannot use MacOS on a regular basis is because of it's lack of a proper package manager, and moreover it's container support and general virtualization is unbelievably bad. If you manage to install Docker you're a hero, but if you manage to get it working properly? That would be news to me. Here on Linux it's just a "sudo pacman -S docker" away, and I don't have to lift a finger afterwards for configuration. Sometimes there are perks to running the same software you deploy to.

At the end of the day, it really depends on how you want to use your computer. I do SRE stuff for a living and desktop Linux is a godsend for that workload. Would I recommend it to a family member though? Not in a hundred years. Linux is still a server operating system first, and a desktop OS second. For me, that makes more sense than buying a Macbook and then using it to SSH into a remote server to do all my work.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#294
post #26

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.

This is exactly the reason.

But people seem to deliberately obscure why the Gnome devs are doing this and instead accuse them of being lazy and/or dictators etc.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#295

Until there is as “simple” to use an app like Preview on the Mac, most of these new generation apps are garbage. I’ve just switched to Ubuntu on a workstation I have lying around. And man, is it hard to use for just normal everyday use. Yes, it has the basics covered, but like many others my job has a lot of simple image manipulation related stuff. Convert pdf to png. Assemble multiple images into a pdf. Quickly shar…

Maybe I'm just thick, but I don't find Preview on macOS simple or easy to use.

What the hell is “Contact Sheet” and why should I have to care about this jargon?

> And man, is it hard to use for just normal everyday use.

This is how I see macOS. I've used it at work for 3 years now, and it still gets in my way every day.

I accept that some people like it, but it's very much not for me. (I suppose I “think differently” from Apple's designers.)

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#296

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…

[deleted]

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#298
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would ask, what is it you want to do? Linux phone development is more or less the same as linux development, just with a computer that has a smaller screen and a modem.

That's not quite accurate. What about power management, signal stability and coverage? Those need to be accounted for too.

I mean...that's why I said "more or less". There are of course differences, but a lot of app development can be done on a linux system and a cross compiler.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#299

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.

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 dep…

Assuming you meant "GNOME" Builder rather than GtkBuilder (the template loader for GTK), I'm the author of it and can help figure out what is going wrong on your system wrt not compiling anything.

Just file an issue on gitlab and I'll take a look.

Usually when we come across bugs like this it's related to distro packaging as we have no hand in that and the Flatpak packages I maintain generally do-as-advertised.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#300
post #218
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am very interested to learn about your workflow. What language do you program in? How does acme help programming in this language? Do you have a video or a stream I could watch? I'd love to know!

I write Go code almost exclusively. I don't have a video demonstrating it, but you can read http://jfloren.net/tools.html for more information about how I use acme, and watch https://research.swtch.com/acme to see it in action. Here's a few key points: * Select text & middle-click it (or just select with the middle button & release) to execute a program. I just keep a file full of common commands open at all times an…

I am not sure I would want to use it but I was totally amazed watching a video. It seems supper efficient when one learns it.
Post reply on HN