A new wave of Linux applications

From my experience, if you develop Qt widgets (like dialogs with many child widgets), it is possible (some might say easy) to make things resize correctly by using QHBoxLayout (horizontal) and QVBoxLayout (vertical).

Don't get me wrong, Linux is still a massive PITA to set up properly. Forget about using it without ever seeing a command line. But, I can deal with that and I've googled my way to success when it let me down a few times to get things going. It's kind of depressing though that things like keyboard, sound, gpus, desktop sharing, touchpads, etc. just don't work in a sane way out of the box. I had issues with all of those with things either not working or just being mis-configured.

One thing that helped a lot is that a lot of proprietary applications can be installed via snap and games can be installed via Steam. Some OSS ones as well. I installed slack, signal, vs code and a few other things that way. And where that failed me, I was able to find some community AUR packages for things like webex and Chrome. Flatpak seems like it should do similar things to snap but mostly packages seem easier to find for snap. I don't really care about the philosophical differences between both. I'll use what works. A problem with both is hardware support. E.g. the Darktable snap is completely pointless because it lacks opencl support; the flatpak one has the same issue. I had to wait for the official package to be updated by Manjaro when they did their yearly release at Christmas. That took a few weeks after Arch updated upstream within a day or so. I have a GPU, why would I not want to use it? This is just flat out moronic.

I actually had some fun playing some Steam games that long stopped working in the mac version of steam (64 bit only) via proton. Very easy to setup and install. And to my surprise the Intel xe gpu actually isn't that bad. And of course GPUs work fine with Steam.

It seems software distribution is no longer blocked on distribution gate keepers not keeping packages up to date. I don't like to read about an update and then have to wait for it for six months while some non affiliated developers second guess all the testing and fixing that already happened upstream by the people that actually created the software.

IMHO modern distributions should push out most end user applications to snap, flatpak, or whatever and focus only on the stuff that absolutely can't work via those. That simplifies things for both developers, distribution maintainers, and end users. Distributions aren't really adding any value here (the opposite I would argue). That will rapidly achieve what three decades of dozens of linux distributions reinventing the light over and over again never achieved: a homogeneous market for distributing end user Linux applications (OSS and closed source). Given that a lot of those can be cross compiled to mac, windows, chrome os, android, and whatever, that is not a small market either. We are already starting to see some of that. A lot of SAAS software actually is based on things like Electron and creating a snap for that is not that hard. You'd be a fool not to. Even if it's less than 1 percent of your users, it's still worth doing.

Ironically despite all my C remarks, XFCE is one of the best experiences on desktop Linux, followed by KDE.

Just to think that on a past life I did write articles promoting Gtkmm.

Phones are battery operated. Performance per watt is mission critical.