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Make Apps for Linux

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Re: Make Apps for Linux

#271

Post by eternityforest »

zer0zzz wrote: post #118
smoldesu wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stuff like Flatpak and Snap exists because the framework side kinda is built-out. Isolation technology had matured, newer desktops emphasized per-window security and needed APIs to portal in and out of each instance. The desktops needed a packaging/infrastructure solution to tie that together and make it presentable to the user.

Yet I still can't compile an app on some arbitrary release of some arbitrary distro and just run the darn exe on another and be 100% sure it will work.

On other platforms people don't even try to support anything but one "distro".

You could make an AppImage or snap that would work across pretty much any mainstream non-hobbist-oriented distro, and Snap/AppImages is pretty much the Linux equivalent of EXE.

Raspberry Pi OS just moved to NetworkManager and they have PipeWire, which was the last reason I had to deal with less common software stacks, so it seems like stuff is getting more standardized.

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#272

Post by tomcam »

rubymamis wrote: post #113
tomcam wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing. Appreciate your fighting the good fight, and sorry for the results so far. Maybe apply for a Futo scholarship for one? But definitely close source for Plume.

No need to be sorry, really. I'm just learning how to navigate this world. I've been pretty lucky so far. Notes is one of the top results in Google (for the keyword "notes"). So I get a lot of traffic and a nice passive income. But it's not something I can fully live on (plus it's unstable and I hate serving ads).

Hosting?

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#273

Post by piperswe »

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...

The module ABI is not stable, but that's not the ABI typically referred to when someone says "Linux ABI". That would be the userland ABI, which is stable.

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#275

Post by eternityforest »

xkekjrktllss wrote: post #270
eternityforest wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The corporate enterprise community is who appears to create most of the attempts at user friendly, one size fits all, stable standards, because.... that's what seems to sell, and what saves development budgets not having to support lots of different OSes, as Windows has shown.

Many of the non corporate hobbyists are fine with everything needing tweaking and maintenance, they chose Linux specifically because they want to tweak stuff.

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#276

Post by Zambyte »

Dalewyn wrote: post #202
zer0zzz wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most underrated feature of windows probably ever.

It really is mindblowing that Windows 11 is still capable of running 32-bit programs written for Windows 95 , that's 28~29 years of backwards compatibility and environmental stability. If we look back to programs written for Windows NT 3.1, released in 1993 , and assume they run on Windows 11 (because why not?) then that's 30 years of backwards compatibility. Did I say mindblowing? It's downright mythological what Mi…

> It's downright mythological what Microsoft achieves and continues to do.

This seems like it was meant in a positive way, but I really don't think that if compatibility with your system requires "mythological" efforts, that should be seen as a good thing for your system.

It's also worth noting that backwards ABI compatibility only masters when people limit their software by not distributing the source. Early UNIX software can run fine on modern GNU by just compiling it.

API Compatibility Is All You Need ;)

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#277

Post by xkekjrktllss »

eternityforest wrote: post #275
xkekjrktllss wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The corporate enterprise community is who appears to create most of the attempts at user friendly, one size fits all, stable standards, because.... that's what seems to sell, and what saves development budgets not having to support lots of different OSes, as Windows has shown. Many of the non corporate hobbyists are fine with everything needing tweaking and maintenance, they chose Linux specifically because they want…

Not sure what point you're trying to make but the "non corporate hobbyists" are ineffective to the point of irrelevance when it comes to Linux core development. Everything they do is downstream from the influence of giant corporations.

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#278

Post by bitwize »

worksonmine wrote: post #199
IshKebab wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You just have to read the manual" and "you get used to it" are basically synonyms for "the UX is bad". 1 second of googling: https://fstoppers.com/opinion/stop-telling-people-read-manua... I'm sure there are better articles if you search more. If you have time for a book, I highly recommend "The design of everyday things". If you don't agree with me that book will change your mind.

You get used to it as in "used to how CLI programs are usually designed". Just as you get used to what the select icon in a GUI does. Without any prior experience in any both seem like alien technology, but coming from GUI to CLI you have the bias of already knowing one when comparing. People claim macOS is intuitive and everything works the same, but I'm handicapped in it. I just call it inexperience not being bad U…

The difference is, you can teach a user who's never seen a computer before to work with a GUI in an afternoon, maybe a weekend -- and if the GUI is well-designed, the skills they learn on one program will transfer well to others.

Meanwhile, there are XKCDs about how even experts can't remember how to work tar: https://xkcd.com/1168/

Before 1984, computer UX was, universally, sucky. As Alan Kay put it, the Mac was the first computer worth criticizing.

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#279

Post by zer0zzz »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #235
zer0zzz wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet I still can't compile an app on some arbitrary release of some arbitrary distro and just run the darn exe on another and be 100% sure it will work.

The trouble is you're trying to distribute it as a binary yourself. The there are two traditional ways for distributing software for Linux: 1) The system package manager. It will download a binary from the repository which is the right one for that system. 2) make && make install. This is mostly for software in development that hasn't made it into the package manager yet. It will compile from source and produce a bin…

That's the problem. The Linux way of distributing apps is wrong for trying to compete with the other consumer platforms. The ChromeOS or electron style of doing things is another story though.

Re: Make Apps for Linux

#280

Post by isodev »

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…

Ensuring an app looks and feels the same across various distributions seems quite challenging when it’s not only different flavours of the OS but also different desktop environments.

At the same time, the OS flavours don’t seem to offer a unified way for handling payments, subscriptions and in-app purchases which is a significant burden to implement from scratch by every app developer.

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