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Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

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Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#101

Post by eric__cartman »

jonpalmisc wrote: post #66

At the risk of sounding too negative/critical, I honestly just don’t like the design language here. Everything seems overly rounded, and more importantly, the screenshots even show very weird/inconsistent alignment and padding in the UI. Why is it that so many Linux GUIs — between apps and desktop environments — suffer from a lack of attention to detail? Once again, it’s early, I’m sure they are aware of some of thes…

I think it's because designing good user interfaces is hard and very time consuming (at least for me it certainly is). And generally Linux users are more contempt to put up with inconsistencies and annoyances because many probably don't care and leave most things in a default state, or customize stuff to their heart's desire.

I'm not saying this is exclusive to Linux distros, I sometimes find the UI in Windows 10 to be confusing, having to jump between the settings and control panel application to find some niche option. It's apparent that parts of that UI were made 20 years ago while others are made with modern toolkits.

I hope that System 76, being more consumer oriented than other companies that mainly develop for Linux, listens to feedback from a wide range of users and manages to develop an ecosystem to be the "MacOS of Linux workstations" in the sense that everything is polished and working out of the box and everyone from regular home users to advanced professionals and enthusiasts can pick up and use without major inconveniences.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#102

Post by aidenn0 »

pkulak wrote: post #64

I know that open source and Linux in general don't need/want another DE, but selfishly... I really want System76 to succeed. They give me the same kind of feeling I had when Apple was kicking butt in the early 2000s. And I think that for them to become a general-audience company, they need to really own more of their software. They have some great ideas, and they've already plugin'ed Gnome to within and inch of it's…

The shell is implemented in GTK4, and the compositor depends on smithay[1], so I assume they plan for Wayland support.

1: https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-comp/blob/main/Cargo.toml#L...

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#103

Post by jjice »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #89

Why aren't they working on making a laptop in-house? This seems like a massive diversion and waste of time...

Pop_OS is a large product of theirs, even if it's open source. It's one of the killer parts of the System76 line up in my opinion.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#104

Post by Taywee »

diskzero wrote: post #63
Narishma wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GTK is just a library, you can use it from any language it has bindings for.

Understood. I have made significant contributions to GTK. My contributions possibly had memory leaks or memory corruption issues that will bring down the higher Rust layer. I am trying to understand the purpose of the Rust layer. It is fine with me if it is because Rust is interesting, but what is being presented doesn’t seem like a Rust desktop environment _to me_.

The big selling point of Rust in respect to these kinds of scenarios is that it's very often that a C or C++ library says things like "You must not call function CallAfterFoo before function Foo is called", or "Once you call DestroyObject, that object must not be used again", or "You must not call SomethingDangerous while a ResourceOwningObject exists", and so on and so on.

In well-tested libraries like GTK, SQLite, Curl, and such, they are often quite robust just based on having been heavily developed and tested by many people over a very long time, and there are still ways that they can be misused and abused that are usually well-documented and warned against. A well-developed Rust wrapper actually makes it impossible to misuse one of these libraries from Rust, and therefore better enables a much smaller team of developers to write secure, robust applications. Rust can guarantee these documented restrictions at the type level and even make impossible many error conditions.

So even though the UI is GTK, Rust still enables developers to write more robust applications with less fear. Personally, I find that GTK with Rust is a very pleasant experience. It's less about guaranteeing that the lower libraries have no bugs and more about preventing people from interacting with the libraries in dangerous or buggy ways.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#105

Post by lallysingh »

ijidak wrote: post #91

I know we developers love our languages. But I'm always skeptical when underlying language choice is featured prominently as a selling point for any new project. It tells me, this is a technology-first, users-second enthusiast project. And thus, I'll be surprised if it tackles the deepest issues users need solved. That doesn't mean it isn't cool as a proof of concept for a new or popular language. It just makes me qu…

System76 isnt making it about the implementation panguage: https://blog.system76.com/post/648371526931038208/cosmic-to-...

A Ctrl-F rust showed no results.

This post's author just likes Rust.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#106

Post by troyvit »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #22
Koshkin wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you rate KDE (Plasma) better?

I use Plasma. Of all the DEs it is probably the most buggy, but I continue to use it because it is the only one that doesn't force an ideology onto me. It is so insanely configurable that you can make it whatever you want. It's also still mouse-first, and has not been redesigning itself for touch screens.

The only nit I'd pick is that while it might be mouse-first KDE is also amazingly usable and configurable via keyboard, especially for a DE that looks so vanilla out of the box.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#107

Post by dotancohen »

jonpalmisc wrote: post #66

At the risk of sounding too negative/critical, I honestly just don’t like the design language here. Everything seems overly rounded, and more importantly, the screenshots even show very weird/inconsistent alignment and padding in the UI. Why is it that so many Linux GUIs — between apps and desktop environments — suffer from a lack of attention to detail? Once again, it’s early, I’m sure they are aware of some of thes…

  > Why is it that so many Linux GUIs — between apps and desktop environments — suffer from a lack of attention to detail?
Because nobody who notices files issues. Open source projects do not have the UI teams of Apple and MS. Please, find the bugtracker and file the issues that you've noticed. Thank you!

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#108

Post by mariusmg »

pkulak wrote: post #64

I know that open source and Linux in general don't need/want another DE, but selfishly... I really want System76 to succeed. They give me the same kind of feeling I had when Apple was kicking butt in the early 2000s. And I think that for them to become a general-audience company, they need to really own more of their software. They have some great ideas, and they've already plugin'ed Gnome to within and inch of it's…

> I really want System76 to succeed

Succeed at what ? Re-implementing Gnome in Rust ?

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#109

Post by wmf »

pkulak wrote: post #64

I know that open source and Linux in general don't need/want another DE, but selfishly... I really want System76 to succeed. They give me the same kind of feeling I had when Apple was kicking butt in the early 2000s. And I think that for them to become a general-audience company, they need to really own more of their software. They have some great ideas, and they've already plugin'ed Gnome to within and inch of it's…

DEs are just the window dressing and computer management.

That's how you end up in a situation where the contents of the window clash with the dressing because more and more apps can't be themed. If they want a consistent look they'll need to fork or write a whole new set of apps.

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