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Consolidating the Linux Desktop App Story: An Idea

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Re: Consolidating the Linux Desktop App Story: An Idea

#21

Post by revelation »

marktangotango wrote: post #5

I was rolling my eyes reading this and then hit this, which is the real value of the article IMO: > few Linux platforms (if any?) had taken a series whack at building a consumer grade app and developer experience. We tried, it was not successful, and instead of digging up the past I would rather ensure we can inform the future. "What not to do, and how not to do it" are at least one valid take away from that whole er…

The biggest takeaway from the era is that no one fucking bothers to write software for 10 different distributions with 15 different ideas on how the most trivial of things are to be accomplished.

And here is this guy wanting to build number 16. There is an xkcd on this. This train has left the station.

Re: Consolidating the Linux Desktop App Story: An Idea

#22

Post by merlijn_s »

rjzzleep wrote: post #15
merlijn_s wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the flatpack integration, Builder really has the potential to become the Xcode for Linux. I hope that Ubuntu starts to support Builder. Ubuntu tried something similar with qtcreator and the Ubuntu sdk, but that was a really bad experience. Let's hope that the switch to Gnome also means that Ubuntu switch their efforts to Builder.

flatpack solves a deployment/distribution issue. distribution is irrelevant when you have nothing to distribute.

The biggest issue is the distribution.

One of the devs of the Minecraft Windows 10 edition said that it would be trivial to port that to desktop Linux but they would have to set up their own payment and distribution system, which just isn't worth it for that tiny market.

Having packaging and distribution built into an IDE goes a great length to solve that issue.

Re: Consolidating the Linux Desktop App Story: An Idea

#23

Post by merlijn_s »

mhall119 wrote: post #3
swiley wrote: post #2

I really don't understand the drive to make GNU/Linux a "consumer operating system." The consumers don't care and are happy with absolutely awful software. Shiny GUI toolkits that are a huge pain to develop for, and non-free software gos against what the people who use GNU/Linux now want. That's why ubuntu's unity stuff failed, because they chased after users who don't care and alienated the only ones that might use…

It's because Linux desktop users want to be able to use consumer software, and the only way they're going to get it is if Linux becomes a consumer operating system

Yes! Developers are people too..

Re: Consolidating the Linux Desktop App Story: An Idea

#24

Post by gorkonsine »

JohnTHaller wrote: post #18
gabrielcsapo wrote: post #14

Correct me if I am wrong but wouldn't the best move forward just be supporting and tuning https://electron.atom.io to make it more performant and supported on linux? Yes it is a battery killer, but I can see it being better if everyone put their tasks to making that a non issue. edit: why the down votes? This is a platform agnostic framework. I understand the performance is bad, but the one reason that linux doesn't…

Browser-based apps still kinda suck. Battery-wise, UI-wise in terms of integration, accessibility-wise, etc. And they're a huge step down in programming language availability vs native apps.

Exactly. If using Linux means getting stuck with apps that are horrifically slow and your battery life is awful, whereas just switching to Mac or Windows eliminates these problems, that's not going to make Linux a very attractive alternative.

Re: Consolidating the Linux Desktop App Story: An Idea

#25

Post by drdaeman »

revelation wrote: post #21
marktangotango wrote: post #5

I was rolling my eyes reading this and then hit this, which is the real value of the article IMO: > few Linux platforms (if any?) had taken a series whack at building a consumer grade app and developer experience. We tried, it was not successful, and instead of digging up the past I would rather ensure we can inform the future. "What not to do, and how not to do it" are at least one valid take away from that whole er…

The biggest takeaway from the era is that no one fucking bothers to write software for 10 different distributions with 15 different ideas on how the most trivial of things are to be accomplished. And here is this guy wanting to build number 16. There is an xkcd on this. This train has left the station.

Nah, almost all mainstream (and even most non-mainstream) distros are basically equal. Seriously, maybe I'm wrong but I don't think that's an issue.

As long as your distro doesn't replace glibc for e.g. musl or bionic, and has all the usual GNU (and X11, and DBus if you need that) userland, i.e. no odd stuff - there is no much difference. Most of the time things just work. Normally, the only time you'll have to "write software for some specific distribution" is when the distribution is unusual in its ways, but you still want to target it.

That is, unless you need to target some specific library version that's higher or lower than the usually available, incompatible with the usual version, and you don't want to have a statically-linked release variant. E.g. something that would work only with Qt5.2 but not with Qt5.6. Don't see why not to just throw it all in a tarball and call it a release. Saw this done many times, I just unpacked it, ran it - and it worked.

And that is if that's you who package your software. Usually, some user just takes it further and becomes a maintainer (or a co-maintainer, or just a volunteer who submits patches).

Re: Consolidating the Linux Desktop App Story: An Idea

#26

Post by voltagex_ »

merlijn_s wrote: post #22
rjzzleep wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

flatpack solves a deployment/distribution issue. distribution is irrelevant when you have nothing to distribute.

The biggest issue is the distribution. One of the devs of the Minecraft Windows 10 edition said that it would be trivial to port that to desktop Linux but they would have to set up their own payment and distribution system, which just isn't worth it for that tiny market. Having packaging and distribution built into an IDE goes a great length to solve that issue.

Except they could throw it on to Steam for Linux - it's a business decision not to put it on there and let Valve take 30%.

Re: Consolidating the Linux Desktop App Story: An Idea

#27

Post by michaelmrose »

dcgudeman wrote: post #9
rjzzleep wrote: post #8

I still think the whole Linux Desktop problem can be summarized in one sentence: There is a lack of a simple desktop app development environment. Yes there is GTK and yes there QT. But regardless of how much people may hate Xcode, it allowed people to create solid desktop applications in a fraction of the time that was needed to do the same in either GTK or QT. It's better documented, it's smoother, it's easier to st…

I agree. I commented earlier about how I think they should pool their resources to create an Xcode for linux. Seems like one kind of already exists ( https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Builder ) but I don't how much is being invested in it. And honestly I don't really care that much about the language or the UI framework so long as they just pick one.

There are a multitude of different dev environments I don't think we need a new one that will probably have less effort invested than current popular environments.

Re: Consolidating the Linux Desktop App Story: An Idea

#28

Post by michaelmrose »

gabrielcsapo wrote: post #14

Correct me if I am wrong but wouldn't the best move forward just be supporting and tuning https://electron.atom.io to make it more performant and supported on linux? Yes it is a battery killer, but I can see it being better if everyone put their tasks to making that a non issue. edit: why the down votes? This is a platform agnostic framework. I understand the performance is bad, but the one reason that linux doesn't…

Bad for battery and ram. Fixing this is probably difficult to impossible. I have 10 apps open imagine if they were all using 1-2GB of ram.

Re: Consolidating the Linux Desktop App Story: An Idea

#29

Post by ledgerdev »

rjzzleep wrote: post #8

I still think the whole Linux Desktop problem can be summarized in one sentence: There is a lack of a simple desktop app development environment. Yes there is GTK and yes there QT. But regardless of how much people may hate Xcode, it allowed people to create solid desktop applications in a fraction of the time that was needed to do the same in either GTK or QT. It's better documented, it's smoother, it's easier to st…

> There is a lack of a simple desktop app development environment.

Does anyone think that Xaml Standard + GTK + dotnet core might be a potential path forward? Supposedly Microsoft is working on a GTK implementation, and very much intrigues me.

edit: Discussion here http://www.xamarinpodcast.com/41 21:30 - New "backends" for Xamarin.Forms - macOS, GTK#, and WPF

Re: Consolidating the Linux Desktop App Story: An Idea

#30

Post by nisa »

Unpopular opinion: Ditch everything GNOME, glib, vala, GTK and focus on making KDE, Qt, QML first class software. QML is powerful and is quite fast and can at least be made fast. KDE needs UI and design polish but the foundations are IMHO more sane than GNOME ever was. Move the good stuff from GNOME over to KDE. E.g. kio-slaves and gvfs should be one stable solid pluggable piece of software. And document that well - Good tools are already there - Qt is documented, QtCreator is usable, KDevelop is fine software - merge the efforts to make that platform fast and sane and secure. Also please stop that CADT stuff[1]. Won't happen, but one can dream.

1: http://nullrefer.com/?www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

Edit: jwz doesn't like hacker news. removed referer.

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