A new wave of Linux applications

Post by _2paq » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 9:25 AM UTC

grey_earthling wrote: post #220

smoldesu wrote: post #12

History is back around to repeating itself. I'm an avid Linux user (and even a developer who uses GTK pretty regularly), but the recent developments surrounding GNOME, Flatpak and their related libraries has not made me optimistic for the future of Linux applications. GTK4 is really bad. It launched with horrible text rendering issues (still unfixed, 10+ months later), broke compatibility with a number of basic featu…

> libadwaita is in a "functional" release state, but still lacks support for custom stylesheets, Libadwaita is an implementation of GNOME's design, analogous to libgranite in elementary OS. This includes the visual design. GNOME only has one style, Adwaita (which means “the only one”!). If you don't want to use GNOME's design, you don't want to use libadwaita. > basic desktop integration on non-GNOME desktops Libadwa…

Post by einr » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 9:34 AM UTC

account42 wrote: post #472

floren wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 haven't used a mouse where you couldn't press the scroll wheel to get a midle click in a long time.

Post by berkes » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 9:37 AM UTC

theteapot wrote: post #420

seltzered_ wrote: post #18

This could be less about device convergence and more about UX improvements and design coherence among apps. Some examples of what's been happening: - Touchpad gestures through various efforts: https://linuxtouchpad.org - Gnome: libAdwaita: https://blogs.gnome.org/alexm/2021/12/31/libadwaita-1-0/ - Core workflows getting better first-class approaches rather than being another app to install: (e.g. screenshots & screen…

What's a core workflow in this context?

Post by cudder » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 9:42 AM UTC

aerique wrote: post #455

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.

Those modern, 1-pixel wide, scrollbars that only expand when you manage to hover over them are a pox on usability. And I say this as someone with a mouse with scrollwheel. They make it hard to see the size of a document and as you said: operating the scrollbar is fiddly. You can't just grab it. First you have to make it expand, then you have to move the mouse again to grab it, but don't move the mouse too much or the…

Post by curt15 » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 9:46 AM UTC

stickfigure wrote: post #81

kitsunesoba wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The “don’t theme my app” thing just tells me that GNOME/GTK+/Adwaita aren’t built in a way that gracefully handles theming, or that devs building apps with them are doing things like hard coding colors when they should be using dynamic system colors such as those provided by UIColor[0] in UIKit. [0]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uicolor/ui_e...

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".