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Make Apps for Linux

makealinux.app

101–110 of 422 posts

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#101

Segmentation has been tough for a Linux newbie like myself. I hope there can be greater unification some day so that applications have one install type, and come with greater predictability.

It's still annoying even if you're experienced with Linux. Especially if there's multiple install methods for the same app with different levels of support.

Flatpak is the closest thing thus far, but certainly hasn't "won" yet.

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#102

> Stop making Linux distributions, make applications instead. Stop listening to people trying to tell you what you should do or not.

Stop listening to people who say to stop listening to people trying to tell you what you should do or not. It is not all relative, there are good and bad choices.

"Gotcha" replies like this aren't helpful. The GP comment is just a pithy retort to the title that uses the same language for effect.

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#103
post #34

I think the premise is wrong when there still doesn’t exist a core set of frameworks that are abi stable on Linux. On competing platforms there are way more frameworks out of the box (CoreImage, CoreAudio, CodeML, SceneKit, AppKit, etc) and they don’t break as often. I know in Linux they have fun things like snap and flatpak but it is really solving the problem using a bit of infrastructure and package management ins…

People like to shit on tools like Electron, but there's a reason they're popular. If you need to reach a broad audience with a native tool, using heavy-handed web-based plumbing is a bigger win for Linux users than supporting only windows and macos where like 97% of desktop users are.

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#104
Does anybody have much experience with the difference between Electron and NW.js.

Electron seems to get all the limelight, but from reading the two websites, nw.js sounds like a better solution to me.

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#105
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I think KDE is light years ahead of macOS and Windows. In fact I find macOS to have been be of the worst window managers of all the popular platforms (sure it’s pretty and easy to use, but trying to do anything beyond the basics requires magical incantations that are impossible to discover organically). Each to their own though.

Well, I'm a Qt programmer (and love it!), so I know a bit about this ecosystem. Unfortunately in terms of UX and aesthetics, KDE apps don't come even close to the macOS ecosystem. But that's alright. I'm here to change that.

Can you share some of this ‘love’ to me? Because my experience with QT so far was : it does ‘who knows what’, ‘who knows when’ and ‘who knows why’ And if you wish it to work the best tactic is “do not change anything, it will surprise you and there will be no way to go back” :)

May be I am missing something important in understanding? I was trying to tweak some projects for my needs. I successfully did it but it was a nightmare.

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#106
post #82
post #34

I think the premise is wrong when there still doesn’t exist a core set of frameworks that are abi stable on Linux. On competing platforms there are way more frameworks out of the box (CoreImage, CoreAudio, CodeML, SceneKit, AppKit, etc) and they don’t break as often. I know in Linux they have fun things like snap and flatpak but it is really solving the problem using a bit of infrastructure and package management ins…

That core would be GNOME or KDE frameworks, coupled with the FreeDesktop standards, at least that was the plan about 20 years ago. However as the site says doing distributions is what most folks keep doing, and naturally there isn't a single stack that can keep up with snowflake distributions. In the end, Google took the Linux kernel, placed two core set of frameworks, one in Java, and the other in JavaScript, and na…

None of that core is standardized across even a hand full of distros.

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#107
post #28

It's not an attractive scene for GUI developers on Linux. Gnome, Qt, and Electron all have some unappealing aspects. Many people who get the itch to make a Linux GUI app will immediately be discouraged by having to choose between them.

What's wrong with Qt? It works well enough if you want to write C++ or Python. Electron works on Linux the same way it does on Windows. GTK has some more issues on other platforms, but mostly works on Linux too.

I should have said "Many people" instead of "Anyone" in my original comment -- edited.

I would use it myself, but a lot of developers don't want to use C++ (too complicated) or Python (too slow, dynamicness becomes unwieldy for large projects). Languages in between - like Swift and C# - are the sweet spot for desktop GUI apps.

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#108
post #34

I think the premise is wrong when there still doesn’t exist a core set of frameworks that are abi stable on Linux. On competing platforms there are way more frameworks out of the box (CoreImage, CoreAudio, CodeML, SceneKit, AppKit, etc) and they don’t break as often. I know in Linux they have fun things like snap and flatpak but it is really solving the problem using a bit of infrastructure and package management ins…

I had read somewhere that Win32 (via Wine or Proton) is the most stable target for Linux right now.

Yeah exactly!

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#109
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But writing a tiling wm is fun. Writing software collaboratively is the point in itself, not just the means of getting some kind of artifact in the end. Being an open source developer means having agency over your goals and means to get to them, which you often don’t have when doing commercial software development. You sure end up with roughly edges, but the. IKEA-effect kicks in and you like it anyway.

Right and this holds the platform back. I'm all for hobby development- I've been an supporter of open source software for over 2 decades. But nothing much has changed since that time in terms of UX and user-friendliness. (Yes I am aware a lot of things have changed, but as much as things have changed - much of it is still the same.)

It doesn't hold the platform back because if the hobbyist didn't scratch his own itch he was never going to spend 1000x as much development effort creating a Photoshop competitor or even yet join the effort to triage gnome bugs. We would almost certainly just be less their contribution for no benefit. This whole faulty analysis relies on treating open source developers as a fungible resource like employees of a firm that ought to be tasked with something different. It's not so.

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#110
post #80
post #34

I think the premise is wrong when there still doesn’t exist a core set of frameworks that are abi stable on Linux. On competing platforms there are way more frameworks out of the box (CoreImage, CoreAudio, CodeML, SceneKit, AppKit, etc) and they don’t break as often. I know in Linux they have fun things like snap and flatpak but it is really solving the problem using a bit of infrastructure and package management ins…

Cuplrits are mostly glibc devs with their manic abuse of version names (and very recently, a GENIUS who added a new ELF relocation type): this is a pain for game developers to provide binaries which span a reasonable set of distros in time. Basic game devs install one of the latest mainstream and massive distros, build there, and throw the binaries on steam... but that recent distro had a glibc 2.36 and now their bin…

I agree. I recall a talk from Linux Torvalds on how bad the glibc folks break things and why he won't ship a binary version of his scuba tool. If the binary breakages start with the darn C lib, you're gonna have recurring problems all the way up the stack on a regular basis I feel.
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