Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

Post by rollcat » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 9:53 PM UTC

jandrese wrote: post #115

acdha wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have an example of that friction? Looking through the docs at e.g. https://gtk-rs.org/gtk4-rs/stable/latest/book/hello_world.ht... it doesn't seem that bad but not having used it I would be curious how it works out once you're building a serious app.

Things are already getting quite hairy by page 4[1] of that link. And that example is showing data completely owned by the GObject. If you need to pass a mutable reference to third party data to a GObject it's not going to work in Rust. Imagine a button that you click to change the contents a GtkTreeModel connected to a GtkTreeView--you're going to need to work hard. You're going to write a fair bit Rust specific glu…

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 9:57 PM UTC

michaelmrose wrote: post #123

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that the battle over desktop environment supremacy leaves desktop Linux less compelling overall. There is so much choice that it's paralyzing and new users constantly second guess themselves. You have thousands of developers doing their own thing rather than working together to make mainstream choices like Gnome more viable.

Gnome doesn't want thousands of developers implementing their own visions for their projects and others don't want to donate their time to implementing gnomes vision. The proper thing for them all to do is all implement their own visions and people to use or work on what they please. Nobody asks why Tesla, Ford, and Toyota are wasting everyone's resources by being different company. Nobody suggests having different c…

Post by dathinab » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 10:01 PM UTC

pkulak wrote: post #121

mariusmg wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really want System76 to succeed Succeed at what ? Re-implementing Gnome in Rust ?

Selling lots of Linux-based hardware that they design in-house. > Re-implementing Gnome in Rust That seems a bit disingenuous. It's all still GTK.

Post by pxc » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 10:01 PM UTC

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…

Post by oblio » Thu, Jan 13, 2022, 10:06 PM UTC

eric__cartman wrote: post #101

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…