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Make Apps for Linux

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Re: Make Apps for Linux

#261

Post by p_l »

charcircuit wrote: post #258
sylware wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This what the "pressure-vessel" container from collabora (used by valve on dota2/cs2), is trying to solve... but now the issue is the container itself as it does _NOT_ follow fully the elf loading rules for all elf binaries and does ignore many configuration parameters of many software packages (data files location, pertinent environment variables, etc), basically presuming "ubuntu" to be there. Basically, I have my…

>It seems only the linux ABI can be trusted... The ABI is not stable. Google has to do extra work monitoring for ABI breakages to make sure that pushing out an update of an LTS branch of the kernel does not break people's drivers. https://source.android.com/docs/core/architecture/kernel/sta...

Linux kernel userland ABI is stable. Nothing else is on linux.

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#262

Post by weikju »

rubymamis wrote: post #20

The problem is OSS software not even trying to compete with the market. People using OSS software taking it for granted that the UX is going to be subpar, and it really is. Regular propriety software faces the risk of their users not paying, therefore adapting to make end user experience great. OSS usually doesn't have that risk. Open source needs to be exposed to risk from end users. I tried to change that with Note…

Notes is a beautiful app! Wow.

Regarding Plume: just from that landing page, it looks 100% like Notes. Anyway, I'm interested to learn more about it when it launches!

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#263

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

squarefoot wrote: post #42

More software? Wonderful! I'm all for it, but before starting something from scratch why not contribute to something that already exists, or possibly pick some project that was abandoned or simply needs to be worked on for example to be built with newer compilers, run on newer hardware, etc. Which makes me wonder if there is somewhere a database of dormant/dead projects that would deserve to be resurrected.

I wonder if any of the major Linux package repos collect statistics that let you search for apps that are both (a) widely used and (b) unmaintained/feature-incomplete.

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#264

Post by freedomben »

rubymamis wrote: post #134
freedomben wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are definitely some challenges with getting people to pay for OSS, but I wouldn't be so quick to blame that all on what happened in this situation. I think you'd be experiencing the same (or worse) if your app was closed source for reasons I'll mention in a minute. I'm the exact type of person who would be in your target market and likely to pay, but aside from having never heard of your app (which may be your…

I appreciate your opinion. Notes has been quite a success for me. With over 1,300,000 downloads[1], and being featured in awesome tech websites[2]. Just on Ubuntu alone there are 7000 weekly active users (that have downloaded it from the Ubuntu Store). My new app Plume is going to be a big improvement over Notes. First, your data is and will always be as simple as Markdown/plaintext. My new block editor is based comp…

Well dang! I didn't realize it was that big. That is impressive and definitely changes my opinion a bit. It's quite unfortunate to have such low paid numbers with that many downloads.

By logseq's on-disk format, it is local first but it's a stricter subset of markdown with a handful of extensions. The strictness is because Logseq parses all the markdown into an in-memory graph database, and in order to make that work with markdown the top-level has to be a list and needs some IDs and other identifiers in order to properly link/embed blocks and pages and such.

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#265

Post by chefandy »

zlg_codes wrote: post #225
chefandy wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worse for users than nothing? IT shouldn't be a default, but if it's that or nothing-- as it often is when it comes down to limited resources-- I think it's better than nothing. If you're looking to make a useful tool for a broad audience that must run locally, you have to support windows because that's where 80% of the users are. You should support OSX because that's where 15% of the users are. That's two codebases…

I'm really not swayed by "we must use this turd because the alternative is nothing". "Nothing", to me, is a technical challenge and a sign I should probably start writing the thing myself. Yes, not everyone has the skill or time to do that, but it's also no reason to accept half-baked solutions that don't take the user's system resources into account. Compute may be cheap but it's still a resource we need to use wise…

If you only care about the best technical solution, and don't care about economics, then you almost, by definition, only care about what existing FOSS users are doing, and I don't find that scope limitation useful in any way. I love FOSS. I've been a regular contributor to FOSS for decades. But the impact user-facing FOSS apps have on the overwhelming majority of users is miniscule, as is the comparative number of regular FOSS users. Server apps? Apps developers use to make the apps everyone else uses? Absolutely. A music player? A chat app? Nope. Software that makes a visible impression on users is commercial. That's just reality. And companies that don't consider ROI on the products they create aren't companies very long.

The most popular as-is FOSS app for users is probably Firefox with a browser market share neck-and-neck with Opera and Samsung Internet, and everything less popular might as well not exist among probably 99% of users. Why? It's certainly not performance, I assure you. It's because it's poorly designed and users find it infuriating to use. Sure, you can find people complaining about their bloated slack client being slow on their machine. You think that's bad, find a professional photographer and ask them about the one time they tried to use Gimp.

I spend a lot of time talking about how FOSS could be a lot more usable to end users, and technical supremacy isn't it. If you showed your average end user an electron app with an intuitive, professional design that gets the job done well enough, and then you show them the blazing fast linux native version with a typically awkward homespun interface, I will eat my hat if they don't choose the electron version. Sure, in a perfect world, all tools would be forged specifically for their intended purpose. In reality, you are in a miniscule percentage of people that would rather have nothing than something which doesn't perform optimally because of it's bonkers architecture. But if you actually want to maximize the usability of any giving tool, the only reason developers automatically go to performance is because to a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#266

Post by eternityforest »

zer0zzz wrote: 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…

The Linux enthusiast community actively fights against anything like this because they want everything to be modular and made to fit specific applications.

Linux does have a de facto set of standards, they're not quite as stable because they change them and deprecate old stuff, but it's better than it looks, and with Snaps you can at least partially solve the issue.

But people choose distros that don't have those standards, and then you lose half your potential users if you don't support all the niche configurations.

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#267

Post by chefandy »

nmz wrote: post #232
chefandy wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I like to shit on electron because plain old tcl/tk is a better/leaner alternative. Apart from the myriad of other[0] alternatives that exist. [0]: https://github.com/sudhakar3697/awesome-electron-alternative...

I think that anyone who recommends Electron to a young developer interested in learning native application GUI programming should be slapped. It's the wrong tool for a specific job. That's a pretty niche use case to judge overall worthiness against, though.

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#268

Post by zer0zzz »

nmz wrote: post #232
chefandy wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I like to shit on electron because plain old tcl/tk is a better/leaner alternative. Apart from the myriad of other[0] alternatives that exist. [0]: https://github.com/sudhakar3697/awesome-electron-alternative...

I suspect the biggest issue with electron is that it leads to lots of devs packaging various V8 versions individually with their app. On windows they have been trying to get devs to switch to something called WebView2 where the OS provides an electron compatible chromium where unlike electron the resources are centrally managed by the OS.

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#269

Post by eternityforest »

Dalewyn wrote: post #237
pizza234 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If that's not stable, I don't know what is. What is? An immense amount of resources (developers) poured into developing live patches to make applications work on each newer version of Windows (or helping the application developers fix their applications). It's an interesting conceptual grey area - I don't consider it backward compatibility in a strict sense. This is documented in the book "The old new thing" by Ray…

It's because Microsoft understands and respects that computers and operating systems exist to let the user achieve things. The user ultimately doesn't care if his computer is an x86 or an ARM or a RISC-V, or if it's running Windows or Mac or Linux or Android. What the user cares about is running Winamp to whip some llama's ass, or more likely opening Excel to get work done or fire up his favorite games to have fun. M…

It's amazing how people don't want Linux to "Be like Windows"... but as far as I'm concerned windows is close to ideal, just with a few flaws and places where FOSS can do better...

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#270

Post by xkekjrktllss »

eternityforest wrote: post #266
zer0zzz wrote: 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…

The Linux enthusiast community actively fights against anything like this because they want everything to be modular and made to fit specific applications. Linux does have a de facto set of standards, they're not quite as stable because they change them and deprecate old stuff, but it's better than it looks, and with Snaps you can at least partially solve the issue. But people choose distros that don't have those sta…

The so-called "Linux enthusiast community" is better described as the Linux corporate enterprise community. Understanding this makes your comment make a lot more sense. The "specific applications" are in fact merely the priorities of the giant corporations who fund the overwhelming majority of Linux development for the purpose of accumulating profit.
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