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A new wave of Linux applications

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Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#491

Post by NGRhodes »

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…

If Libadwaita optionally extended GTK (based on desktop preferences) so that when Gnome apps are used on other desktops they can fall back to GTK or other inherited UI, that would be great, but at the moment, Libadwaita is a hard dependency (when used), which makes Gnome applications more different (than not using Libadwaita) on other desktops.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#492

Post by account42 »

grey_earthling wrote: post #286
selfhoster11 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Please read the letter all the way to the end. This is aimed at distributions breaking apps by default, not tinkerers playing with their own setup. https://stopthemingmy.app/

Distributions act as agents of the user precisely to allow you to have more options where otherwise customization would be too much effort or too technical for individual users. Taking existing applications and combining them into a cohesive experience is the entire point of having different distributions.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#493

Post by chippiewill »

cudder wrote: post #477
aerique wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Even worse. On MacOS the scrollbars are invisible by default, and only appear while you scroll, plus a second or so after stopping. So to grab a scrollbar in MacOS you first have to scroll the document to make the scrollbar appear. Then you have under two seconds to move the pointer on top of the narrow scrollbar so it expands allowing you to grab it before it disappears again.

Been a while since I used a Mac, but I'm fairly certain there was a system level setting for whether scrollbars are always visible or not.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#494

Post by chrismorgan »

_2paq wrote: post #451
chrismorgan wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My least favourite thing about GNOME is that it has co-opted GTK and sabotaged it so that even determined developers stand no chance of achieving native look and feel on other platforms and desktop environments. The G in GTK now ( de facto , not de jure ) stands for GNOME. (Expressed otherwise: I kind of have to use parts of GNOME because it has infected GTK and it’s much more difficult to avoid GTK than to avoid the…

With the advent of libadwaita, GTK really is GNOME toolkit. Most advocates are really deceptive when they talk about this and say GTK4 is agnostic to platforms but I haven't come across a single non-trivial GTK4 app that isn't based on libadwaita. Even LibreOffice is becoming a libadwaita app. The GUI ecosystem on Linux is mostly dead. I'm trying to switch to CLI and TUI apps for all of my tasks. If they don't exist,…

I don’t think libadwaita is a problem in the direction you’re saying at all—it’s a comparatively slim layer mostly of additional components that should generally not be all that difficult to make optional if you desire. And you can easily use GTK without it if you want.

Rather, I think the problem is that libadwaita hasn’t gone far enough. The advertised theory is that GTK is agnostic, and libadwaita gets you GNOME HIG stuff, but the fact of the matter is that GTK is still heavily GNOME. Their attitude to overlay scrollbars is a good example (though hardly the only one): they deliberately removed the admittedly-clumsy system-wide configurability that was present in GTK 3 (not sure if themes were able to control it before, but I think not, which was itself a regression from GTK+ 2), and have declared that overlay scrollbars are a feature of GTK 4 and there will be no attempt to comply to system conventions, or any way for users to change the behaviour; individual apps can still control it, but there will be no conventional way of switching this, which de facto means that almost no apps will provide any switch for it, and so users that want real scrollbars or want platform convention compliance are left high and dry. They also deliberately dismantled the module loading technique, which was a way of fixing things GTK made a mess of and allowing improved platform conformance support, including things like global menus (it was admittedly technically unsound, but it worked).

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#495

Post by zozbot234 »

audidude wrote: post #299
jeroenhd wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been experimenting with gtk-rs, but the GTK ecosystem is really difficult to get right. The examples are few and far between, and the type exceptions the macro DSL throws are very difficult to parse. All the necessary components are there, but there just aren't enough guides out there to get started. I tried looking into how existing applications use the ecosystem, but experienced GUI developers pull tons of dep…

Assuming you meant "GNOME" Builder rather than GtkBuilder (the template loader for GTK), I'm the author of it and can help figure out what is going wrong on your system wrt not compiling anything. Just file an issue on gitlab and I'll take a look. Usually when we come across bugs like this it's related to distro packaging as we have no hand in that and the Flatpak packages I maintain generally do-as-advertised.

Is GNOME Builder intended to be usable as a general-purpose IDE, beyond just developing GNOME applications? It seems like with a bit of work it could be a very nice alternative to the usual picks.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#496

Post by goodpoint »

Arnavion wrote: post #347
goodpoint wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idiotic silent downvotes are unnecessary.

This board has a real hate-boner for the PinePhone for some reason. Any phone that isn't 100% as capable as a flagship iOS or Android gets defined as "not ready to be a daily driver", because people think their definition of "daily driver" is some universal constant that everyone abides by. The rest of us who happily use it as a daily driver apparently don't exist in their worldview. Already in this subthread there's…

I wonder if it's a sign of the HN crowd moving from startups to FAANGs.

So much for the "hacker" news...

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#497

Post by floatboth »

curt15 wrote: post #481
floatboth wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A dedicated tray is a concept tied to windows 95 style UX. I hope the new designs are more about standardizing ways to indicate various statuses and actions of "the app" broadly, without dedicated status icons. For example download progress is still only an Ubuntu Unity protocol that KDE also supports because they can but it's all not freedesktop standard.

How about applications that are controlled entirely from their status icon, like dropbox or vpn apps? Fedora, which normally champions GNOME, is beginning to acknowledge that status icons are here to stay whether GNOME designers like them or not: https://pagure.io/fedora-workstation/issue/246

How about desktops that don't have anywhere to put status icons? i.e. what if I don't want to have any panels? Working as a normal window should be an option in all applications.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#498

Post by floatboth »

account42 wrote: post #489
floatboth wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand (ha) it does not require any aiming. I can super+drag windows into "aero snap" targets in milliseconds because I don't have to spend any time on finding the header bar.

Which makes it a great addition to title bar dragging but not a replacement.

I use it exclusively, don't remember the last time I looked for the title bar.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#499

Post by Shorel »

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…

That's because scrollwheels are way too clicky and not scrolly enough.

You feel every click, and it is translated to aproximately a three line scroll in the document.

It is a very discrete signal, instead of a continuous signal.

Touchpads have this right, the scroll is very smooth, and you can scroll by tiny amounts if you want.

In a way, it is a limitation of the 25+ years old technology. Why it has not been updated to something smoother is a mystery to me.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#500

Post by dotancohen »

rjzzleep wrote: post #408
kodah wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

libadwaita and Kirigami are huge improvements for the desktop app ecosystem from what I've seen as a user. When I started to delve into desktop applications I quickly realized there's a couple hurdles I face: 1. QT was an ecosystem shock to me. I barely knew what to do to get started and got lost easily. 2. Do these applications work outside of Linux; more directly, do they have dynamic dependencies? From my experien…

libAdwaita is an attempt at providing a consistent framework for making GUI applications in Linux. People commenting on MacOS UX often forget that people creating Mac GUI applications aren't magically better at doing UX than Linux users. It's orders of magnitude easier to make ok looking GUI applications on a mac. Besides the fact that cocoa on mac has evolved over a decade(when linux people were busy constantly rein…

  > People commenting on MacOS UX often forget that people creating Mac GUI applications aren't magically better at doing UX than Linux users.
It's not magic. It's attraction. Just like magnets. People who _care_ about UX are more likely to use a Mac than any Linux distro. Independently but related, those who use a Mac are far more likely to care about UX than the average Linux user.

I say that as someone who dremels their phone and earbuds to make them easier to use, yet still prefers a Debian desktop.

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