71–80 of 142 posts
So much fighting over how best to draw the UI that will launch various instances of the Chrome engine. Want to know why everything is written in Electron or as a web app? Because literally every desktop platform over the last decade has decided to play design and engineering games instead of just make a really solid stable base to write apps on top of.
> My ultimate prediction is that within about three years after GTK 5 is released, touchscreens will go out of vogue haven't they already ? I remember buying much more easily a computer with a touchscreen in 2011 than today, at some point every other model had it, but now it feels like NVidia's 3D Vision in its end times. Same for tablets, when I check analytics for my website, tablet use is pretty much zero.
Given non-GNOME developers' frustration with increasingly GNOME-centric releases of GTK, and given some of the licensing issues surrounding Qt (such as the one-year delay for FOSS releases of the toolkit: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25748335 ), I believe the time is ripe for a BSD-licensed GUI toolkit for X11 and Wayland that uses server-side decorations and tries to be as unopinionated as possible in or…
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This. Now if only people start investing in UI\UX on linux desktop.
Honestly, the real hurdle now seems to be the support for paid apps. It's such a taboo in the Linux world, for some reason [1], but thankfully Flatpak and Flathub are working towards that goal [2], which ElementaryOS already explored. I want small, high quality apps like macOS has. I want to make a living building open source software that can be supported and bought commercially—no, donations and sponsoring isn't go…
Given non-GNOME developers' frustration with increasingly GNOME-centric releases of GTK, and given some of the licensing issues surrounding Qt (such as the one-year delay for FOSS releases of the toolkit: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25748335 ), I believe the time is ripe for a BSD-licensed GUI toolkit for X11 and Wayland that uses server-side decorations and tries to be as unopinionated as possible in or…
I'm using KDE5 at the moment, and it's essentially problem-free. It's got more features than I know what to do with, but this somehow doesn't detract from it but rather enhances it. KDE5 never seems to be the default choice of desktop environment for distros like Manjaro, but you're unlikely to go wrong picking it as your default option, if you're given that option.
Doesn't SUSE have KDE by default? I use it on FreeBSD myself. It's an amazing desktop. I don't like gnome at all. It uses too much screen space (huge touch style window decorations) and doesn't have enough customisation for me. But KDE is perfect.
> My ultimate prediction is that within about three years after GTK 5 is released, touchscreens will go out of vogue haven't they already ? I remember buying much more easily a computer with a touchscreen in 2011 than today, at some point every other model had it, but now it feels like NVidia's 3D Vision in its end times. Same for tablets, when I check analytics for my website, tablet use is pretty much zero.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think that's really the reason for Electron's popularity. While GTK and Qt are cross-platform, my (limited, to be fair) experience with building for multiple platforms was that it was a huge pain in the ass, and Windows and macOS platform integration often felt clunky and out of place. The big draw for Electron is that we have way way way more web developers out there these days than native-code desktop UI de…
a big part of why browser engines are so unwieldy is the implied compatibility with every website ever, right? but the "way way more web developers" you mention are not, at least in the context of electron apps, interested in that feature except tangentially.. so while everyone knows a full web-ready browser engine is impractical to design from scratch, maybe a simplified engine that supports a conservative subset of…