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A new wave of Linux applications

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Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#201

Post by kitsunesoba »

nine_k wrote: post #167
stickfigure wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Supporting themes imposes an ongoing technical burden across the whole ecosystem. It's not worth it. You don't hear people say "I hate macs because I can't make my title bars purple".

If not for scrollbars color, I certainly dislike the macOS GUI for its straightjacket approach. (Also, poor window management.) I wish Gnome folks did not keep on copying it more and more. I see why it's easier to do, but KDE somehow manages. (And if one thinks that Apple UX design can't go wrong, remember Macbooks from a couple of years ago.)

I get what you’re saying but I find GNOME more evocative of iPadOS than macOS. It’s almost exactly what you would get if you tried to create a desktop environment using an iPad as a starting point.

macOS still has several traditional desktop affordances that are eschewed by GNOME, like full menus (not just hamburger junk drawer menus) and customizable toolbars.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#202

Post by leveraction »

quanticle wrote: post #113
shams93 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why we still need html/css for interfaces, so the PWA with wasm still seems to be the best way to distribute an app that works anywhere, or PWA for mobile and electron for desktop with wasm enabling very high performance client features.

I disagree with the whole premise of having a single app for both desktop and mobile. Even if you give developers the tools to make a good app for desktop and mobile, they won't. They'll make the mobile app first, ensure that it runs on desktop, and then dust off their hands and call it a day. To quote the Purism blogpost cited elsewhere in this thread: Web designers now have toolboxes to design web pages, which they…

> Except, web designers don't adjust web pages for mobile or web. They adjust pages for mobile, and then what you end up in a desktop web browser is acres of white space and buttons that are the size of your head.

I had to laugh at this.

I am writing a PWA now and this is definitely an issue in "desktop mode".

The thing is though, with giant monitors (I develop on a pair of 4k curved ultra-wides) there is so much room that most non-game apps just don't need all that much space. If you do use it all, it becomes cumbersome to move the mouse all the way to the corners because it is so far away. And even if you did use it, there would still be acres of unused space most likely, white or some other color.

I suppose you could do a true re-write and put multiple mobile screen onto one desktop screen, but that would be a very heavy lift and in the case of a saas app that will largely be used on mobile, it is pretty easy to understand why it never gets done. Bad cost-benefit and it would delay your launch.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#203

Post by selfhoster11 »

goodpoint wrote: post #107
traverseda wrote: post #9

I have to say I just don't like Gnome's design. The shift away from text and towards more and more abstract icons, the "don't theme my app movement", removing features I consider pretty essential like typeahead.... Maybe mobile is where their weird (to me) design choices will finally shine though. Also looking forward to what KDE can accomplish in this space.

The "don't theme my app" movement is really harmful to the application ecosystem. Especially true for users with partial visual impairments, but also for other users that want to have a consistent style on their desktops or phones.

Not to mention, some people just want to theme their desktop. To make the computer feel like it's theirs.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#204

Post by aliher1911 »

floren wrote: post #62
ugjka wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you use a mouse without a scrollwheel?

I use the acme text editor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor) for work every day. It makes heavy use of mouse chords, so I need 3 real buttons on the mouse, and it's hard to find a mouse with 3 real buttons and a scrollwheel which doesn't get in the way of the buttons. I've got a Kensington Expert Mouse trackball which works pretty well, but at the end of the day an old Logitech PS/2 mouse plugged into…

I also struggled to find a mouse with a decent wheel that you can click without moving it off which is handy in CAD's. Gave up in the end and switched to using thumb button for middle click. But there's an option to get one of 3DConnexion CAD Mouse's if you can swallow the price tag.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#205

Post by eric4smith »

Until there is as “simple” to use an app like Preview on the Mac, most of these new generation apps are garbage.

I’ve just switched to Ubuntu on a workstation I have lying around. And man, is it hard to use for just normal everyday use.

Yes, it has the basics covered, but like many others my job has a lot of simple image manipulation related stuff.

Convert pdf to png. Assemble multiple images into a pdf. Quickly share with someone else over chat. Normal productivity stuff.

Take a simple thing like screen capture - you have to remember to save the screen that you captured otherwise it just sits there doing nothing in the screen capture app.

The thing that saves most Linux desktops for office productivity workers — is Firefox and Chrome. Otherwise, outside of programmers and highly specific use cases, hardly anyone would use a Linux desktop.

And that’s kudos to the fact that so much of what we do these days is in a browser.

But if you look at the small pieces of software to do everyday things - they are awful.

Dropbox barely works in a sustainable way.

I have to keep pulling out my laptop every now and then to do simple office productivity things.

Yeah yeah, I know that Apple is a trillion dollar company that had a room full of people just working on the screen capture feature alone.

And yeah, I use Linux every day for programming. But Brah, all the little widgets and do-da’s need some serious polishing.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#206

Post by selfhoster11 »

asddubs wrote: post #34
dleslie wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not Beta. At the time I purchased it, it wasn't even Alpha. Beta, as a game developer, implies to me that there's a few outstanding show-stoppers but on the whole the product is safe to show to eager end-consumers who are willing to tolerate some rough edges. The PinePhone isn't even that, yet; I couldn't conscientiously hand it to a non-techy and ask them for feedback because I'm not even sure it would reliably…

Seems like you're just arguing semantics. The pinephone is very clearly advertised as aimed at developers

Do you think even a developer will want to use something that falls apart in their hands like wet sawdust as a daily driver? As a developer, hell no. I'll give Linux phones a couple more years before I try that.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#207

Post by chillfox »

patmorgan23 wrote: post #170
floren wrote: post #36

These applications look really pretty and all, but for my selfish purposes, I just really want real goddamn scrollbars back. I use a mouse that doesn't have a scroll wheel, but for the life of me I've been unable to figure out how to make applications like Firefox just give me a real scroll bar on the side of the window that's thick enough to grab without fiddly pixel-hunting.

Touch users don't use the scroll bar, they just swipe up/down.

Because you can’t use the scroll bar on mobile, it’s impossible to get hold of.

Swiping is a pain if you need to jump up and down on larger pages.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#208

Post by selfhoster11 »

weberer wrote: post #28
BoysenberryPi wrote: post #14

If I wanted to get into linux phone development, what's a good entry point into this?

Create a new virtual machine and set the window size to 720x1440 with 2x scaling (or just 360x720) which is what the Pinephone uses. Everything else is the same as desktop Linux, just compiled for ARM.

A touchscreen is probably needed for this. Human fingers are huge and you need to design for that in mind.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#209

Post by malermeister »

traverseda wrote: post #9

I have to say I just don't like Gnome's design. The shift away from text and towards more and more abstract icons, the "don't theme my app movement", removing features I consider pretty essential like typeahead.... Maybe mobile is where their weird (to me) design choices will finally shine though. Also looking forward to what KDE can accomplish in this space.

GNOME has design zealots similar to Apple, but with more bizarre choices.

Their whole crusade against tray icons and a usable task list have been painful to deal with. Do they just not like multitasking??

It's sad too, because there's a lot of nice UI/UX in there, it's just buried under all sorts of crazy choices. Thankfully, there's extensions to restore some of the missing functionality.

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1160/dash-to-panel/

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/2890/tray-icons-reloa...

These two fix those weird design decisions and make GNOME a pretty good desktop.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#210

Post by mappu »

Tmpod wrote: post #186
Klonoar wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust and GTK3/4 are fairly well supported, no? I know QT is a bit more of a pain to do from Rust, but I wanna say that's possible too... though nowhere near as evident as gtk-rs.

For Qt (QML/QtQuick; Widgets are no linger the preferred method afaik) you have qmetaobjects-rs, which is reeally nice.

QML is practically electron - it's runtime interpreted declarative UI plus a Javascript engine.

QML still has only rudimentary support for AOT compilation. Both the old qmlcompiler and the new qmlsc compiler are commercial-only: https://www.qt.io/blog/the-new-qtquick-compiler-technology . LGPL users only get the interpreter.

Widgets is still the 'Real Qt'. Some very modern, responsive-layout desktop apps like Telegram are written entirely with Widgets.

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