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Comment by pmlnr | Hacker News Reader

> Take Mac away and high quality desktop apps will go away.

Well... no. Ubuntu, Gnome, KDE, XFCE; they are all high quality desktops. Don't mix the desktop with the applications you're running on it.

> We'll have to endure multi-platform Electron stuff.

Now that is indeed a real issue, and yes, ugh.

Edit: I've misread the original, sorry, so adding a few things: if you're using the default apps or the ones built for that specific environment only, you're good to go with GTK3, QT, whatever. The trouble comes when you mix these, but that is true even for the MacOS. Personally I really dislike the approach of Chrome, not giving a s* how it _should_ look like to look at least a little native.

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I don't know why, but MacOS feels more high-quality than the other desktops. I use Unity on all my computers and haven't run MacOS in years, but I think there's more "tearing" in Linux WMs. Things just don't feel like they stick together as much, sometimes the decorations will hang, the menus will disappear, there are blank icons in my notification bar, etc.

It looks great in screenshots, but the feeling is much inferior, a fact I lament.

I know exactly what you mean. Are the technical issues because of X or because of design decisions? I have to think it's because of X because I haven't seen an OS GUI that was as stable and as predictable as Windows/OSX. Edit: Or put another way, I always run into weird graphical/display issues using Linux desktop flavors, whether they've been on a desktop PC or in a VM.

Massive +1 to this. And enabling vsync manually in any flavor of linux I've ever used makes the framerate tank.

I don't know what magic MacOS does under the hood, but no other linux distro I've EVER used comes close, with the possible exception of Gnome. Unfortunately Gnome is ugly as sin.

I think his point was that the Apple/Mac ethos foster high quality design and attention to detail, which is applied when developers build apps for the Mac.

To be fair, so does elementaryOS. They really try to encourage developers to adopt their HIG.[1]

So much so that most developers using or targeting elementaryOS integrate their design really well.[2] For those that don't but still use GTK3, they also integrate quite well out of the box.

[1] - https://elementary.io/docs/human-interface-guidelines

[2] - https://quassy.github.io/elementary-apps/apps/

> Well... no. Ubuntu, Gnome, KDE, XFCE; they are all high quality desktops. Don't mix the desktop with the applications you're running on it.

Sure, but since last time I've started KDE, I got a ton of segfaults errors coming from all over the place (and not just nepomuk)... Well, if the desktop is fine but the wifi interface or the notification tray is segfaulting, I'm just gonna throw the whole thing.

They meant "apps that are high quality", not "apps for high-quality desktops".

Not really.

GNU/Linux doesn't have desktop stack capable of matching Objective-C, Swift frameworks both in feature set and related GUI tooling.

Because most people using linux on the desktop (thus the development target) value functionality over aesthetics.

Do I like it when things are pretty? Sure.

Do I need them to be pretty to get shit done? No

> Because most people using linux on the desktop (thus the development target) value functionality over aesthetics.

I know that is what drove me away.

Most just want a window manager for xterms.

Designers get bashed because they don't know what people want.

Performance on GUIs gets bashed, because what matters is doing xterms over remote X connections.

> Most just want a window manager for xterms.

Glances at 2nd and 3rd monitors

Well I can't argue there.

To hell with it, we need a shell which can handle multiple displays and scale tmux on them! :)

>value functionality over aesthetics.

Not much in that department, either. Nothing that beats the proprietary software staples, especially for creatives, that I happen to use: no Cubase, Pro Tools, Photoshop, Premiere, etc. Lots of apps ranging from "close but no cigar" to "why even try?".

If you're a developer, almost all the killer apps support Linux first. But you're right that this is the deal breaker

I am a developer and most of my killer tools have their place on macOS and Windows.

Compiling or getting the latest version of any kind of CLI dev tools on either platforms is considerably more difficult than Linux.

Not all developers care about UNIX CLI tools.

I care about CLI tools developed for macOS and Windows in mind, that take advantage of the respective OS APIs.

LLVM and vim work amazingly well on OS X.

Considering vim has no required dependencies, I would be very concerned if it didn't work on OS X.

GTK? QT? And, since we're talking elementary, Vala?

GTK has been fairly hostile to non-Gnome usage since the GTK 3 era; they keep on breaking backwards compatibility for applications that use it, don't care about whether apps can be used on non-Gnome desktop environments, etc. I don't think it's all that polished either.

I instantly believe you, based on my experience of the fiasco that is Gnome 3, but can you share some examples of this?

Have fun reading,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10757985

Wish I hadn't asked now. Talk about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Not really, they don't even cover half of these ones

https://developer.apple.com/reference/

Not to mention the related GUI tooling.

Where is Instruments on QtCreator, for example.

You have valgrind and many other tools instead of "Instruments".

The GNOME project itself [1] has a lot of projects which compete with what you linked. Sure, Apple has a few billion dollars to dump into development every year, so you have to adjust for scale.

[1] https://developer.gnome.org/references

None of them has the polish of a full working desktop stack like macOS.

Once upon a time, around 2000-2, I did some minor contributions to Gtkmm.

Yeah. See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12854983

I know GNU/Linux since 1995, eventually one gets tired of being part of the 3% desktop usage.

I'm still young and naive :P

> GNU/Linux doesn't have desktop stack capable of matching Objective-C, Swift frameworks both in feature set and related GUI tooling.

Qt alone exceeds the feature set, has more GUI tooling, and is multi-platform. That's just Qt, and the same could be said for GTK. I'm not slinging mud at Obj-c and the frameworks Apple maintains, but they are not unique snowflakes without equal.

Sorry but no,

https://developer.apple.com/reference/

I can find tons of entries without parity in Qt.

And their current trend to invent a different flavor of JavaScript every few releases, no thanks.

GTK+ supports both of those languages. Also, macOS's "tooling" is XCode, so Linux's tooling is superior by default.

If you think that, then you don't have any idea of what a fully working desktop stack for GUI developers looks like.

GTK+ is no competition for these APIs:

https://developer.apple.com/reference/

well the not-fully-working desktop stack for Linux devs seems to work just fine for them. I've certainly never had a problem with it. I've never had a problem with the Apple kit either but it's nothing to write home about. The only thing I've seen Apple do that I did think was really cool is the package signing.

"well the not-fully-working desktop stack for Linux devs seems to work just fine for them"

Because they don't care about stuff like GUI. And it shows.

Sorry, but this old argument never washed with me. Certainly before Gnome 3 and Unity, the UX was considerably nicer than on my Mac, and in fact those old DEs are still much nicer to use than Yosemite, and the new ones are much worse precisely because they abandoned good design in favour of the Apple kool-aid.

I'm going to leave it there before the mist descends, but basically as far as I'm concerned Apple couldn't design a paper bag without fucking it up.

Where Linux sucked was in the distros' constant "improvement" of core features that weren't broken in order to be first past the post. For example PulseAudio was introduced before it actually worked with most hardware configurations, and nobody cared about the cool new features it came with. Ubuntu deciding to adopt KDE4 before it was ready for general release was another stupid decision. In fact, I'm basically talking about Ubuntu and Gnome.

Hence why no one bothers with desktop GNU/Linux, as for many even Electron apps are good enough.

How thorough of a survey have you done?

I have used Gtk+, wxWidgets, Qt, KDeveloper, once upon a time between 1995 and around 2004.

Still use GNU/Linux on my travel netbook and of course, some of our servers run it. Last time I used Qt in anger was 5.3, while trying to do a mobile project that I eventually ported to pure native APIs.

Do you know of any other frameworks, besides those that cover all of these ones?

https://developer.apple.com/reference/

Nope. Desktop application development in Linux is indeed pretty terrible. I was honestly just curious as to your background.

Read my comment above (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12854556)

> Ubuntu, Gnome, KDE, XFCE; they are all high quality desktops.

well... no. Speaking as long-time Linux user who tried all of this and in the end using i3 to avoid constant stream of bugs from DE.

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