[HN Gopher] Pop _OS to use it own desktop environment, written i...
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Pop _OS to use it own desktop environment, written in Rust
Author : tuananh
Score : 135 points
Date : 2021-11-06 16:31 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (old.reddit.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (old.reddit.com)
| devwastaken wrote:
| I will uninstall that environment and install gnome. If you want
| gnome to be better, then contribute to it. If you can't, detail
| why. Rust does not magically solve compatibility with the various
| daemons and make your UI function smoothly. We do not need Linux
| divide, we need Linux vision.
| nhumrich wrote:
| They have tried to contribute to gnome. Non of their patches
| get accepted, pop_os currently ships with a fork of gnome. One
| of the reasons for this new DE, is because they have tried to
| contribute to gnome, and failed. And if they are going to have
| to maintain their own fork anyways, they might as well make
| their own thing.
| easton wrote:
| I've been waiting for 10 years for someone to nut up and make
| GNOME something for humans to use instead of something for
| Linux admins. With Red Hat and Canonical both throwing weight
| behind it, you think that would happen, but nope.
|
| At this point I just want someone to build a desktop
| environment that makes people not have to think about the word
| "desktop environment", and nobody seems to actually give a crap
| about that goal. Except for Google, which is why the only Linux
| on the desktop product that's successful is Chrome OS.
| esarbe wrote:
| My whole extended family runs on vanilla Fedora. Even my two
| surviving grandparents use Gnome as their desktop.
|
| They are perfectly happy. The only problem that arises from
| time to time are some weird-ass Windows applications that
| refuse to run with even Wine.
|
| Gnome is a smooth desktop that's easy to grasp and gets out
| of your way and definitively not aimed at Linux admins.
|
| For those there's tmux.
| jjcon wrote:
| >My whole extended family runs on vanilla Fedora. Even my
| two surviving grandparents use Gnome as their desktop.
|
| And then everyone stood and started clapping
| cercatrova wrote:
| Agreed, sometimes HN really does read like satire
| syshum wrote:
| >>If you want gnome to be better, then contribute to it.
|
| Really? because gnome is one of the most hostile communities to
| contributors there is. So not you can not just "contribute" to
| it.
|
| gnome devs are very very very opinionated, they are worse than
| Apple. it is gnome devs way, or it is wrong...
|
| yea no thanks
| kaba0 wrote:
| It's almost like they have a vision for a product and not
| every random feature that gets thrown at them fits into the
| picture.
|
| And frankly, I found a few cases where they were not
| rational, but more often then not, sticking to what they
| thought out did absolutely make sense. Like, in case of a DE,
| the whole UX is the product - so analogously it would be like
| accepting random contributions regarding your business logic
| in a CRUD app. These need planning.
|
| Also, I think their vision is actually really cool, I much
| prefer vanilla gnome to whatever mess windows created, and
| especially with a good touchpad, gnome's gestures are
| fantastic. So at least I am very thankful for their great
| work!
| esarbe wrote:
| Have you tried to contribute? I have in the past and never
| had any issues.
| syshum wrote:
| As long as your philosophy of what a desktop is matches
| exactly to what the core devs view gnome is, then I am sure
| your fine.
|
| But there are a reason by DE's like this new one, unity
| before it, and others that are either off shoots of gnome,
| or come from developers that are completely frustrated with
| the obtuse nature of the gnome team
|
| as was highlighted above, System76 ships a forked version
| of gnome with popos because none of their changes, their
| contributions, were not accepted by gnome.
|
| gnome is very opinionated about how users should use their
| desktops, how other software devs should write a
| application for gnome, and are unwilling to change in their
| positions even if the face wide scale community, user, or
| developer desire for the change.
|
| From my point of view gnome devs do not build gnome for the
| gnome community gnome devs build gnome for themselves, and
| if others use it ok, but they do not really care if they do
| jatone wrote:
| yes, and they are absolute nightmares to work with. which
| is fine its their project.
| jjcon wrote:
| >If you want gnome to be better, then contribute to it.
|
| It doesn't work that way. The gnome maintainers have certain
| ideals that IMO are out of sync with most users and they are
| completely hostile to most PRs. I've seen tons of PRs denied
| with bizzare rationales and crucial functionality ripped out of
| gnome in their efforts to 'streamline'. This leads to everyone
| having a laundry list of extensions that break or stop being
| maintained and it just isn't ideal or user-friendly. Want to do
| something as simple as drag a file to your desktop? Oh you need
| a gnome extension for that etc etc. We need more DE choices.
| Shared404 wrote:
| Wonder how much relation between this and Orbital from Redox [0].
|
| [0] https://www.redox-os.org/
| vorpalhex wrote:
| ElementaryOS did this with their Pantheon and it's the reason I
| moved from them to Pop_OS. Their apps were generally useless or
| broken, critical basic settings (fractional DPI, per monitor dpi,
| etc) were missing and weird bugs abound. I had to install the
| dconf editor just to get the damn screen readable on my XPS.
|
| Pop_OS at the moment is just about perfect since it's just a well
| tuned gnome theme basically. So far I've only hit one bug and one
| odd default setting.
| nrabulinski wrote:
| It's not a well-tuned GNOME theme, it's a GNOME fork. System76
| tried to contribute to GNOME for years but their patches didn't
| get accepted so it's understandable they don't want to stay
| tied to it.
| thevagrant wrote:
| They should switch their efforts to KDE then. Gnome has long
| held back linux desktop
| bobajeff wrote:
| I say if they want to do it I welcome it. Yes, distro specific
| desktop environments can and do suck often. And this one might
| not be an exception.
|
| Worst case is the their distro starts sucking and you'll need to
| look for another one. But isn't that what we're all used to now?
| YPPH wrote:
| Link to relevant comment:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/pop_os/comments/qnvrou/will_pop_os_...
| Croftengea wrote:
| What Linux desperately needs in order to gain at least some
| recognition on a desktop is less desktop environments, not more.
| jjcon wrote:
| One that actually works well and a hundred half broken ones is
| better than just one hundred half broken ones.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| We don't need less DEs, we need one with a low learning curve
| that happens to be usable by power users too, and one that can
| serve as the face of the OS in public. There's nothing like
| that yet.
| dqpb wrote:
| I've had two System 76 laptops in the last 3 years. With the
| first one, I found PopOS! to be very glitchy, and battery life
| was less than 1 hour. About a year in the hardware failed. I then
| got a second newer System76 laptop and with that one the hardware
| failed within 6 months.
|
| Recently I bought a new Dell XPS, installed Ubuntu, and it works
| perfectly.
|
| I really wanted to like System76, but I've lost all faith in them
| and will never buy from them again.
| thevagrant wrote:
| Opensuse Tumbleweed also works well on the XPS (in case you get
| bored of Ubuntu)
| worldmerge wrote:
| I miss Unity. It was leaps and bounds better than Gnome. Wish
| Canonical never killed it. Whatever System76 makes will be better
| than Gnome. System76's implementation of Gnome is the best I've
| used.
| dopu wrote:
| Totally agree here. Having a functional menu bar on the level
| of Unity or macOS is an excellent design choice, imo. I've
| always felt like Gnome just wastes that space, causing
| everything to be crammed into an application's title bar in an
| inconsistent way or into a hamburger menu.
| nabakin wrote:
| Unity, as I remember it, was insanely laggy and unperformant
| bananamerica wrote:
| Fragmentation, that's what Linux need...
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Linux has dozens if not hundreds of desktop environments, one
| more is not going to break the camel's back.
| bananamerica wrote:
| Sure, I never said it would.
| noahtallen wrote:
| I think we are reading your original comment as "this will
| create fragmentation in the Linux ecosystem which will be
| bad," but Linux is already extremely fragmented, and a new
| DE will probably not have any impact. (In other words,
| what's the point of your original comment, then.)
|
| I'd say that fragmentation is a natural result of the
| flexibility possible with Linux. So it's an unsolvable
| "problem" as long as the key benefit of Linux (flexibility
| and choice) still exists.
| jatone wrote:
| its really not as bad as people say. linux has same
| pretty reasonable standards that DEs all implement.
|
| most things you need for a DE run as daemons.
|
| the biggest pieces that cause problems are UI theming and
| application distribution. theming is less of an issue
| these days since applications just do their own thing
| anyways.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Great, what desktop Linux needs, yet another DE, written in a
| language whose GUI ecosystem is miles behind something like
| SwiftUI, WPF, WinUI, Qt, Jetpack Compose, Flutter.
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| would be amazing if they made a modern alternative to qt and
| gnome. somethign with a reactive model like swift-ui or react
| itself
| pjmlp wrote:
| After catching up with 20 years of tooling for GNOME and Qt.
|
| SwiftUI still requires leaning back into Cocoa/AppKit due to
| missing functionality.
| nabakin wrote:
| I'll be surprised if they aren't binding to a graphical
| framework in another language. Probably GTK or Qt
| pjmlp wrote:
| Probably, but then it will be just another binding and then
| is the question if anyone will bother to create Pop_OS
| specific apps.
| [deleted]
| nwah1 wrote:
| Terrible business decision. Existing DEs have centuries of
| collective engineering hours poured into them. They work. They
| are free. There is no compelling reason to throw that all away.
| Likely a new system will be worse along every metric of concern
| for the foreseeable future.
| e3bc54b2 wrote:
| It has been more than 10 years since Maverick Meerkat. About
| time to repeat the mistakes of the past.
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| Yep - Linux folks like repeating the same mistakes over and
| over.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| I disagree, I loved unity. I miss it a lot while using gnome
| shell.
|
| Tried to use it anyway, but it's unmaintained and instable
| now.
| timellis-smith wrote:
| I think unity matured nicely, but natty in particular was
| just about unusable.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| Why? There's Ubuntu spins of every DE, what's currently unique
| about Pop_OS? Sometimes being different is better than actually
| being better.
| lousken wrote:
| Even though I'd like to see Rust everything I agree,
| considering the amount of issues even the major DE have I find
| it very unlikely that system76 would be able to do any better.
| Improving the current DEs would be much smarter not just in
| terms of compatibility
| jatone wrote:
| eh you don't seem to realize how shitty current (GTK/Qt)
| toolkits are from developer ergonomics.
| kaba0 wrote:
| But you can't really not use these toolkits -- they do an
| astonishing amount of work that you simply can't replace
| without years of work.
|
| The actual graphical part is easy, as well as using an
| existing toolkit. Writing a new one from scratch is
| ridiculously hard (but I guess they can reuse some libs?)
| lousken wrote:
| I am not a dev, but talking with them and using tons of
| apps I'd say I haven't seen a good desktop GUI toolkit from
| anyone yet
| elromulous wrote:
| I don't totally agree. This can work. Gnome and kde have a
| larger mission. They need to be everything for everyone. They
| need to work on many different archs. You end up either special
| casing everything, or being the lowest common denominator.
| Pop_os is carving out its own niche. System76 can just focus on
| what its customers want. And its customers are a much smaller
| subset from all of the users/systems running kde/gnome.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I'd expect System76 customers to use their machines for the
| same range of tasks as most other desktop Linux users.
| Perhaps they don't need to support as wide a range of
| hardware, but how much does that matter for a DE?
| canadaduane wrote:
| There's an open space to fill right now for "switchers"
| coming from Mac OS, with a high expectation of polished
| experience when they invest more than $2k into their main
| driver hardware. These new Linux users don't want "choice
| at all costs" (the current vibe I get from the community)
| but rather, "good design that just works", with a Mac OS
| expectation origin. I think this explains why System76
| chose Gnome over KDE, and why they built Cosmic. If their
| users aren't satisfied with Gnome's (somewhat inflexible)
| constraints, then the natural choice is to piecemeal
| develop a better DE for customers.
| jjcon wrote:
| Wholeheartedly agree. Gnome in particular I have been very
| disappointed/baffled by in the past few years. Killing off
| desktop icons, system tray/status icons, pushing out global
| menu bars. Not to mention the way they handle HiDPI and
| fractional scaling is atrocious.
|
| Pop_OS has added a lot of this crucially missing UX. If they
| can build a better mouse trap, I wholeheartedly welcome it.
| kaba0 wrote:
| > Not to mention the way they handle HiDPI and fractional
| scaling is atrocious.
|
| What do you mean?
| _game_of_life wrote:
| Nobody should try anything new in the DE space because more
| mature things have been established with far more engineering
| hours?
|
| That's odd to me. You don't think they'll look at the design
| and learn from the advances made during those centuries of
| hours? That's hardly throwing it all away.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _Existing DEs have centuries of collective engineering hours
| poured into them._
|
| Some of hem have even thrown a lot of that collective
| engineering hours away by deciding to rewrite entire parts!
|
| > _They work._
|
| Arguably, but I say they sometimes don't. That alone is worth
| considering alternatives.
|
| > _There is no compelling reason to throw that all away._
|
| Sure there is. This one is written in rust and the others
| support javashit.
|
| > _Likely a new system will be worse along every metric of
| concern for the foreseeable future_
|
| Ahh you must have short sightedness. It won't be hard to
| improve performance of a few key metrics:
|
| * reduced crashiness * reduced memory footprint * improved UI
| responsiveness * cold boot to desktop time
|
| It shouldn't be that hard to be an improvement over Gnome in
| memory utilization or KDE in crashiness.
| tuananh wrote:
| it's a bold move. yes. from business perspective, a new DE
| would not bring much benefits unless it's hugely successful.
| adamnemecek wrote:
| If nothing else it's good advertising.
| pxc wrote:
| They need maintaining this to somehow be less work than
| maintaining GNOME Shell extensions
| young_unixer wrote:
| All existing DEs suck, partly because programmers don't know
| how to design UI/UX, partly because the one project with actual
| graphics designers (GNOME) wants to do something completely
| different than what most end users want.
|
| I'm glad that System76 wants to create their own DE, with
| actual graphics/UX designers.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| I think GNOME actually gets a lot right, perhaps even more
| than KDE for the average use case, but has a few high
| visibility misses and perhaps suffers from muddled focus by
| trying to also accommodate smartphones.
|
| With a few key changes like bringing back the minimize button
| by default, integrating the dash-to-dock extension by
| default, and dropping the crusade against proper menubars
| it'd be easily the most well rounded and DE with the most
| usable out-of-the-box experience.
|
| KDE shares the problem of muddled focus between desktop and
| mobile, but instead of lacking functionality instead has
| issues with its design feeling somewhat amateur, as well as
| bad defaults. KDE can be great if tuned extensively but
| without tuning it's a mess.
|
| I do agree that's it's good to have more players in the DE
| space, because no existing option has fully cracked it and
| more options is always good. It would be nice if more DEs
| shared work between each other (is it really necessary for
| there to be 3+ forks of Nautilus?) but oh well.
|
| What I want to see most is a new UI library. Qt is nice from
| a technical perspective, but it being tied to C++ and thus
| lacking quality, up to date, idiomatic bindings for other
| languages really hurts it, as does its licensing shuffle. GTK
| is wonderfully flexible because it has bindings for almost
| every language ever, but comes with frequent breaking changes
| and forced GNOMEisms, and feels awkward outside of Linux. The
| ideal UI library would have GTK's flexibility with QT's
| technical strengths and platform adaptivity.
| turbinerneiter wrote:
| I always had dash to dock and all the other small common
| tweaks that everyone makes.
|
| Until about a half year ago, when I decided to stay vanilla
| on a fresh install. After a week, I forgot why I needed all
| these tweaks.
|
| I think the far majority people, myself included, can't
| even tell the difference in UX quality (as long as it is
| above a certain level) and will mostly like or dislike
| based on what they are used to.
| esarbe wrote:
| I think you hit it spot on.
| thevagrant wrote:
| Personally I think if KDE had half the resources that were
| put into Gnome by various distros over the years, Linux
| desktop would be a solved problem.
|
| So System76 is going to go NIH. Let's see how that goes.
| simion314 wrote:
| >partly because the one project with actual graphics
| designers (GNOME) wants to do something completely different
| than what most end users want.
|
| We should learn our lessons and don't trust some designer
| that probably does not use the project to design good UX, a
| designer should use the project(app or webpage or DE heavily)
| before deciding ro remove some feature just because he read
| in a book that too much options can cause issue to some
| mythical average user.
| pxc wrote:
| > All existing DEs suck
|
| I feel almost the opposite. I think Plasma and GNOME are both
| really good, and some others I haven't bothered to try yet
| because I'm pretty happy on Plasma (Budgie, Pantheon) seem
| thoughtfully designed and reasonably featureful. Plus there
| are good tiling WMs you can use on any of them!
|
| I feel like there are more good options on Linux than
| anywhere else. macOS has designers galore and it falls flat
| on core window management functionality, like its stupid
| minimize/maximize behavior, lack of window snapping, lack of
| tiling, lack of click-anywhere resizing, and other DE basics,
| like configuring global keyboard shortcuts.
|
| But I welcome System76's effort, too! I hope it's so good it
| makes me switch. :)
| petepete wrote:
| I think GNOME's detractors are really vocal but the vast,
| vast majority of users are happy, or they'd be using KDE.
| Gigachad wrote:
| There is a lot of truth in this. If gnome really was
| unusable and critically broken, why is it the default on
| almost every distro.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| GNOME is not the only criterion people use to choose a
| distribution. I choose my distributions based on package
| managers, hardware support, and stability. For package
| managers I only feel good with dpkg or pacman, which
| automatically eliminates a lot of other distros. Not all
| of the remainder has his hardware support, and out of
| that, not all of those have good stability (with updates,
| or software bugs). This means that for me, all that
| remains on the playing field are Arch Linux (because I'm
| more willing to tolerate it), and Ubuntu derivatives.
|
| If the price of having to use e.g. Ubuntu is having to
| run Gnome, I'll pay it just to get the other benefits.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Most distros provide DE versions and yet the gnome one is
| more popular with all other factors the same.
| esarbe wrote:
| It would still be less work to build on that foundations.
| Heck, System76 couldn't even bother to pony up the theming
| specification they were supposed to do for KDE and Gnome.
| Never happened.
|
| If they don't even have the resources to work on the toolkit
| level, how do they expect to get the resources to work on a
| full desktop stack?
|
| Bad call, imho. But hey - I think Rust is an excellent
| choice.
| canadaduane wrote:
| Their approach seems to be piecemeal, so I don't think
| there is a risk of empty promises here. My guess (based on
| following their dev comments for a few months) is that they
| are just going to replace the components most diverging
| from their desktop vision, until it's a new desktop
| environment.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| I'm gonna go down in the flames here but Unity was great. It
| was very stable for one thing. I never had an issue that I do
| with literally every single other DE that exists. XFCE is
| stable but customization is a time consuming affair. KDE is
| riddled with bugs. Cinnamon doesn't get enough support and
| thus has issues with various software (recently like not
| being able to run Factorio via steam or having bloated font
| in KeepassXC), and GNOME is like a happy medium between KDE
| and XFCE. Unity just worked. Out of the box like Windows and
| MacOS. It made me sad cannonical decided to drop it. It was
| the first real dedicated support to a DE that Linux decidedly
| needed.
| edgyquant wrote:
| I agree, I loved unity and miss it.
| addicted wrote:
| Yes, but this is in Rust.
|
| More seriously, it's an interesting decision. The linked thread
| has no information about why they would have made such a
| choice, and I doubt they made this decision lightly.
|
| I'm curious to see how they tackle this problem.
| jatone wrote:
| its really not that hard. existing stuff make this a fairly
| easily solvable problem.
|
| all you need for a DE is basically the wayland server, an
| application launcher, system tray, and settings programs.
|
| I've been building one myself over the last couple months on
| top of sway (so I don't even need the wayland server). and
| its day to day useable for myself. two/three solid dedicated
| engineers can build one fairly quickly (2 - 3years).
|
| hardest part is the UI toolkit, and there are some reasonable
| choices in rust. they're young but decent bases to get
| started.
| kaba0 wrote:
| Aren't most of the rust toolkits immediate mode ones? It is
| probably not the best idea for a DE that has to run 0-24,
| as that would kill the battery very very fast.
| Shared404 wrote:
| In addition, based on the last time I looked at System76's
| Github, they have a lot of in house Rust talent already.
|
| This is including the guy doing Redox OS - which means
| there's even some experience writing a DE in Rust, though
| not a Linux DE.
| obiwan14 wrote:
| If other people had the same attitude, we'd all still be using
| Symbian or be writing programs in Fortran. The Cinnamon desktop
| was started long after GNOME and KDE, yet it's now much better
| than both.
| lumost wrote:
| They all crash, eat performance, or ugly.
|
| I want fast gnome 3 without the crashes, and consistent modern
| ui themes across my apps.
| kaba0 wrote:
| Gnome 41 hasn't crashed on me in a very long time. Was it
| perhaps something bad with an extension? (Though I believe it
| doesn't crash the whole thing usually)
| peakaboo wrote:
| Pop OS is the best Linux desktop right now for new users.
| Imagine if they would have decided to not built it at all.
| Quite a loss for Linux users in general.
|
| And now they want to build something new from scratch... The
| possibilities are pretty huge. In a few years we could have
| something that is faster and better looking than mac os for
| Linux, with innovative new features that doesnt exist in mac os
| or Windows.
|
| Also great to see this happen from System76 and not Google or
| Microsoft. The culture of a company is super important for what
| it produces.
| kaba0 wrote:
| I mean, Pop OS is just ubuntu with a few tweaks here and
| there -- not taking away from them but let's be honest.
|
| It is absolutely not an interesting distro in itself, from a
| technical point of view.
| Zababa wrote:
| Maybe we'll finally get thumbnails in the file picker though.
| BoysenberryPi wrote:
| I remember when PopOS was first announced and everyone was like
| "terrible decision, just use one of the many distros already
| out there." Yet, PopOS is now one of the most popular and most
| recommended distros out there.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| Is it helping their business though?
| nicolaslem wrote:
| Without downplaying the work put on Pop_OS, anyone can start
| an Ubuntu derivative distro in a few hours. Writing a DE from
| scratch is something else entirely, Ubuntu famously tried and
| it went nowhere.
| BoysenberryPi wrote:
| It is a completely different undertaking but my point is,
| I'm willing to give System76 credit here and wait and see
| how this plays out instead of jumping to cynical
| conclusions about how terrible this will be.
| xkcd-sucks wrote:
| It seems Canonical can make even worse decisions - for me it
| was going all in on snap
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >Yet, PopOS is now one of the most popular and most
| recommended distros out there.
|
| among enthusiasts on the internet possibly, but in terms of
| real world usage it is ubuntu/debian/centos etc.. followed by
| a long list of nothing.
|
| there's always a new distro for tinkerers but five years
| later you never hear of it again, and when you invest into
| building an entire Desktop Environment that's supposed to
| compete with Gnome or KDE you're probably looking at that
| timescale before it's even competitive.
| tomnipotent wrote:
| It's a gaming survey with mostly reddit users, so may be
| skewed.
|
| https://boilingsteam.com/which-linux-distro-for-
| gaming-q2-20...
| bccdee wrote:
| It's part of establishing a brand for themselves. They want to
| be the face of the modern linux desktop. They've done a good
| job of this already with the tweaks they've made to GNOME (I
| run Pop_OS and I have had a very positive experience it), but
| if they really want to establish themselves, they need to
| create a branded experience all their own, a la ElementaryOS. A
| custom DE would go a long way towards providing that. It's also
| an opportunity to address and fix a lot of the UX mistakes
| other DEs have made, which is likely to generate lots of buzz
| (as evidenced by this thread).
| ddlutz wrote:
| You could say this about anything that has been around right?
| Basically an argument to say "Don't innovate, X has been around
| for a long time and works!"
| alexmcc81 wrote:
| I wonder what toolkit they will use. I guess since they will be
| using Rust, it's easier to use bindings to GTK instead of Qt
| which is C++.
|
| KDE has so many useful libraries [1] that can be used to build
| trailored desktops, like LXQt.
|
| [1] https://develop.kde.org/products/frameworks/
| fyzix wrote:
| They should just fork deepin and improve it. It's the best
| looking DE imo. Zorin is also good in terms of ease of use for
| newbies.
| rvz wrote:
| Yet another DE for Linux, which is another thing they desperately
| need to solve the fundamental fragmentation and inconsistent UI /
| UX in many Linux distros.
|
| Rust solves many things, but in this case, there is little that
| it solves other than being 'Written in Rust(tm)' and will still
| interface with the same buggy C libraries used in other DEs.
|
| Unless it is all in Pure Rust, What is the point of this?
| nbzso wrote:
| Actually there is a market for this in my view.
|
| Pop_OS has an useful Gnome implementation, I liked especially the
| option to switch from normal to tiled windows (and I hate
| childish UI/UX of Gnome). If they pull this off I am willing to
| pay for it.
|
| I hate the new direction of Mac OS UI. They have forgotten what
| made them beloved from UI/UX perspective and I have no interest
| anymore in "vertical integration" for ruling the world.
|
| So, if System76 invests in learning the best practices (and
| especially the old Apple HIG documentation) they can create the
| Real Linux Desktop revolution.
|
| Just focus on serious minimalism, accessibility and traditional
| interface paradigms without trying to be liked by the masses or
| following any "trend".
|
| As a designer I love their identity. They have the courage to
| create difference in a world filled with mediocrity, conformism
| and wishful "colorful" thinking.
| cgh wrote:
| Just to add to this, System 76 have released a Gnome extension
| that gives Gnome a nice tiling implementation that I find quite
| productive. The usual distros have it packaged in their repos.
|
| More info: https://github.com/pop-os/shell
|
| After installing the package, you'll need to log out and back
| in and enable it in Extensions.
| rsyring wrote:
| > Just focus on serious minimalism, accessibility and
| traditional interface paradigms without trying to be liked by
| the masses or following any "trend".
|
| IMO, XFCE is pretty close to that. But I had to give it up for
| Cinnamon b/c I had lots of problems with multi-monitor support
| and different configurations (different monitors at work than
| at home). It was also buggy and the whole DE would crash
| sometimes when unplugging monitors. But in terms of a minimal,
| approachable, and accessible UX, I think they nailed it.
| esarbe wrote:
| Gnome is an excellent desktop. It's focused on serious
| minimalism, accesiblity and on getting-the-heck-out-of-your-way
| when you are doing stuff.
|
| Lovin' it. I'm very happy they broke away from the 'traditional
| interface paradigms'. I always have to suppress a giggle when I
| see people using other desktop juggling their windows, playing
| "Window Manager" all the time.
|
| Gnome gets rid of that. Just use all app in full screen and
| never touch your mouse again.
| kymaz wrote:
| I don't like fullscreen applications. I don't like tiling
| window managers. I have large screens so I can see more and
| do more not less. The last thing I want is full screen.
| yokoprime wrote:
| Full screen is terrible when multitasking. It's usually why I
| have to put my phone down and do something on my desktop
| computer instead.
| kaba0 wrote:
| It has a sane half-tile option as well. You rarely need to
| divide up the screen more than that.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Gnome has been the only Linux DE I find tolerable. At first I
| was bothered and installed a bunch of extensions to tweak
| stuff but then I realised it was all meaningless
| modifications to make it look like other DEs and that I can
| be just as productive on stock gnome.
| longstation wrote:
| I think as long as it follows the freedesktop specification [1]
| and can work with existing apps and other DEs (for example, when
| you have two DEs installed, you don't want they fight each
| other), it's not a bad thing.
|
| [1]https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/
| monocasa wrote:
| I don't have a great feeling about this. They put up the job
| posting for this last month, and since they're in CO, they have
| to post a salary range. $90k-$110k. Even in Denver, that's
| absurdly low. You'd expect $150k at the low end. Feels ripe for
| something half baked from a new grad who doesn't know better.
| tomdell wrote:
| Something tells me they can get away with paying a bit less and
| still attract experienced candidates who would like to work at
| a small company with a mission they believe in while working in
| their preferred language/framework.
| monocasa wrote:
| I mean, I'm a developer in Denver writing Rust and get paid
| $265k. $90k-$110k is what the body shops writing Java that
| won't ever work the way it's supposed to written by fresh
| bootcamp grads for a new insurance company every six months
| pay out here.
| jerednel wrote:
| You seem to be an exception?
| https://www.builtincolorado.com/salaries/dev-
| engineer/softwa...
| monocasa wrote:
| Built in Colorado is sort of a front for the VCs here; I
| don't trust those numbers, knowing the salary of about 40
| or so engineers out here in 20 different companies.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Assuming they are happy with fully remote work, $90-110k is an
| obscene amount for a developer role in parts of the EU.
| pxc wrote:
| I remember how Unity fell apart back in the day. But while
| Canonical still felt they had the resources to back it, it was
| pretty good, imo.
|
| Maybe a few dedicated people can produce something good.
|
| From an end user perspective, I don't see any reason not to
| welcome this. If I don't like it, I can just keep using Plasma.
|
| Best of luck to System76 with this effort!
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Do they know what they're getting into?
| _game_of_life wrote:
| Oh man, I just did a thesis on using a memory safe language like
| Rust for the kernel.
|
| The consensus in research was that Rust is extremely promising
| for designing a next gen memory safe OS. Some data structures are
| troubling to implement (paging table, etc.) but the benefits are
| significant.
|
| This is just a DE but if it's a sign of more things to come
| potentially over the next decade I am very excited.
|
| Linux is always going to be fragmented, and other OS (ex.
| Android) are either already integrating some Rust or are strongly
| considering it (ex. Microsoft).
| panick21_ wrote:
| The lead engineer of System76 is the guy doing RedoxOS and lots
| of firmware in Rust as well.
|
| I would not be surprised if this new DE will serve for both
| Linux and RedoxOS.
| _game_of_life wrote:
| Fork yeah, that's very exciting, thank you for the info.
|
| I'm not a Rustacean but these memory related CVEs need to
| stop. Any small steps toward a memory safe(r) OS is good news
| to me!
| steveklabnik wrote:
| I too am quite exited about both this WM and general kernels in
| Rust. Exciting times.
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