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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

#171

Post by rjzzleep »

pxc wrote: post #158
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 know that open source and Linux in general don't need/want another DE Unpopular opinion, but more DEs is fine and good, especially if they will have teams that are either (a) large or (b) well-funded. Plasma and GNOME are very good, and Unity was actually great to use in its heyday. Imo what we don't really need more of are the conservative, under-resourced 'classic look and feel' DEs like most of the minor playe…

If this DE has low resource usage and working freedesktop screensaver protocol implementation and idleness implementation but doesn't force me on their toolbar and window manage I'll take it immediately.

Lxqt is the closest to allowing that because it wraps standard tools when possible, but this wrapping of standard tools also means that those tools don't really work.

For example, I use slock for screenlocking, but there is actually no working third party freedesktop screensaver implementation that doesn't tie you into their DE.

Xsecurelock seems to have hacks for it, but it can't even do something as simple as just showing an image without breaking with the wrong window compositor.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#172

Post by Narishma »

blinkingled wrote: post #25
LeoPanthera wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not sure if you have tried recent versions of Plasma but they have made a great deal of progress on all fronts including fixing a lot of bugs. I don't encounter any on day to day basis on Tumbleweed which gets you the latest version.

Here's a small one I encounter on a daily basis on Tumbleweed: the update notifications scrolling is broken. It scrolls the list of updates super slowly and goes back to the top when it reaches the end instead of just stopping.

Another small one: I've set the panel to auto-hide. It works fine for the most part but occasionally it will stay visible until I minimize and restore any window.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#173

Post by yepthatsreality »

apatheticonion wrote: post #163

Great to see! Selfishly, as a MacOS refugee and someone who has an on/off relationship with using desktop Linux as my main (and a desire to use it daily); I would love it if there was a shameless clone of the MacOS DE for Linux. I don't care for customisation, I just want a sensible default that I can get up and running with immediately.

> I would love it if there was a shameless clone of the MacOS DE for Linux.

Elementary OS

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#174

Post by akdor1154 »

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…

Fortunately it's not a gnome project, so there's a good chance you will be able to just change the theme to something you prefer.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#175

Post by lawl »

mkdirp wrote: post #165
lawl wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do, as i said, i'm getting old and use stock gnome these days, because i don't want to maintain custom configs for everything anymore.

Right. And so Pop!_OS gives you a decent tiling window manager, with sane defaults, without having to spend hours on customising your configuration. What's more, the tiling they provide is an optional feature. You can enable and disable it at any time without messing with you config for hours.

If its good or not is a matter of taste in the end, but not the entire point. It also hijacked Super+L which was screen lock (like on windows).

And then cosmic was even worse by changing the behavior of the super key completely.

Both of these things broke my workflow for things i never asked for.

I like pop and their polish compared to ubuntu [0]. I really hate it when software breaks my workflow.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28904171

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#176

Post by pxc »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #128

What exactly is a Linux "desktop environment"? Does it contain a window manager or is that fully separate? Is it the "explorer", shell, menu, dock, what not? (But didn't that at least in part reside in a window manager)? Is it libraries that applications that are to be executed under the DE? If it is using the GNOME libraries (GTK???) ? Will GNOME applications be native?

> Does [a desktop environment] contain a window manager or is that fully separate?

yes, it does. You can sometimes swap out the default WM for a DE, if you want

> Is it the "explorer", shell, menu, dock, what not?

yes

> (But didn't that at least in part reside in a window manager)?

not really. That's an implementation detail that just varies between different DEs and WMs more than across time. Most DEs don't use the window manager to draw the desktop background, but some do

> Is it libraries [and] applications that are to be executed under the DE?

yeah, at least if they're integrated with the DE or come with it on a given distro

> If it is using the GNOME libraries (GTK???) ? Will GNOME applications be native?

that's up to System76, basically. I think they do want most GNOME apps to be more or less native under their DE

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#177

Post by yepthatsreality »

tibbydudeza wrote: post #40

So what is the win for System76 here ???. They just make boutique computers computing against the like of Dell/Lenovo when it comes to Linux friendly computers. How many sales do they do per year to justify this direction

The win is that they’re no longer required to work around Gnome as Gnome’s vision is to minify the DE. This makes it difficult to develop a custom flavor if your base keeps removing features or making strongly opinionated UI decisions.

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#178

Post by CameronNemo »

gnud wrote: post #142
CameronNemo wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

create a whole new GUI stack in Rust Is there a reason iced is not good enough (other than not being accessible)? https://iced.rs/ https://github.com/iced-rs/iced/issues/552

I'm assuming Iced has no A11 support (these projects never do). Probably no RTL support. Possibly no reusable "system" widgets like open/save dialogs.

Can you clarify what you mean by "these projects never do"? Your comment comes across as dismissive. Especially since I already noted that it was lacking a11y in my original comment.

Anyway although a11y and i18n support have not been implemented, they are planned.

https://github.com/iced-rs/iced/issues/250

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#179

Post by gefhfffh »

qsdf38100 wrote: post #126
brink wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get to meet people who dislike Rust very often. Why don't you like it?

my 2 cents: rust evangelists, the promises of the end of bugs, and how perfect the language is for any use case... that makes my BS detector go off. Everyone has to love Rust nowadays, it sounds like a cult or something. It makes me hate rust without even having tried it, which is dumb and sad.

Don't be sad. You realizing that your emotions get in your way is already half of the solution. M

Re: Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment

#180

Post by SkyMarshal »

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…

> 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.

Some of the deepest issues that users need solved are ones that Rust was designed to solve at the language and compiler level.

1. System stability and memory efficiency, zero or fewer crashes due to memory-safety or thread-safety problems.

2. Security and assurance via the elimination of entire classes of attack vectors like buffer overflows.

3. Highly performant, responsive applications that are a joy to use.

Solving problems at the compiler level eliminates the reliance on fallible programmers to do so. People also tend to discount maintaining those solutions over years of dev team turnover, startup failures, etc. Building those solutions, capabilities, and constraints into the language itself makes maintenance over the entire product lifecycle more consistent.

It's like buying a Toyota, you know from the brand alone that you're getting a certain baseline level of reliability, maintainability, durability, and longevity. Rust is like the Toyota of programming languages - it can produce many different types of cars/programs, but they're all guaranteed to come with a baseline level of assurance, and to eliminate common classes of problems that degrade the end-user experience.

It may not make sense for other languages to be prominently featured as a selling point, but Rust is an exception.

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