Pop _OS to use it own desktop environment, written in Rust
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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.
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.
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.
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.
The trend for bigger margins in Gnome and MacOS (to unify Desktop UI toward mobile UX) is triggering my OCD and looks childish and unusable (lost of space and distraction for the eyes).
KDE customization options are immense. With minimal effort and without applying a global custom theme you can change window decoration, color theme and use Breeze Dark/Light as a default.
I put the taskbar on the top, resize it and the result is pretty close to what I am used to work with (Mac OS X), simple dock to the mix and customize some keyboard keys and voala - professional user interface:)
Tried to use it anyway, but it's unmaintained and instable now.
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?)
Pop_OS has added a lot of this crucially missing UX. If they can build a better mouse trap, I wholeheartedly welcome it.
What do you mean?
I'm glad that System76 wants to create their own DE, with actual graphics/UX designers.
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.
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.
So System76 is going to go NIH. Let's see how that goes.
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.
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.
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. :)
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.
I guess that here we really need to figure out which end users we are talking about, to understand what they actually want.
To me, and perhaps some others, DEs like XFCE are pretty close to perfection - low resource usage, good performance, good usability, decent customization (as long as you don't want to do anything fancy, just get your windows to show up in a panel or two, and add a few widgets for resource display, clock, language switching etc.).
To users like me, the finer points of the DEs out there that have more fancy graphical elements or in depth customization, like KDE, are pretty much lost or are not really relevant. In my experience, most of the problems with the modern Linux desktop experience are created by the software, that has inconsistent element placements, varying button sizes, different UI frameworks altogether and so on. However, as long as the software works, i also don't find myself caring too much, even if things could be better.
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.
https://boilingsteam.com/which-linux-distro-for-gaming-q2-20...
those distos have undeniably won the server market.
But they also don't really care about the desktop market as a result.
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.
I want fast gnome 3 without the crashes, and consistent modern ui themes across my apps.
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.
It is absolutely not an interesting distro in itself, from a technical point of view.
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.
Linux can't even win the software developer wars. How is OSX, which can barely run docker, has a linux incompatible CLI, and requires relearning keybindings if you come from windows or linux desktops, and is steadily jailing its applications into a store, winning the desktop OS wars among software devs that are probably all running linux derivatives in K8s or VMs?
A good team that knows DEs and the current DE codebases can probably work wonders.
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.
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.
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.
Their business model is rebadging hardware and ensuring it will run Linux well. Their value add is in working on proper hardware support for these devices in Linux and in replacing the proprietary Clevo BIOS.
I'll gladly pay more for that!
But Pop_OS in general (and now this DE) seem to be straying far afield. I will never use either. To the extent that these endeavors raise their unit prices, they risk pushing customers to directly buy a Clevo or another rebadge.
Windows has centuries of engineering hours poured into it. It works and is reliable. There's no reason to throw it away and use Linux. If you think Linux is free, wait until you see how much you pay per year in salaries for people whose whole job is to manage this OS.
Also, all existing DEs suck in some way or another. KDE is too bloated and slow. XFCE is too minimal. Gnome has countless bugs, and its performance is questionable.
KDE has so many useful libraries [1] that can be used to build trailored desktops, like LXQt.
SwiftUI still requires leaning back into Cocoa/AppKit due to missing functionality.
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.
I'm new to Linux. I've been happy with my Lemur Pro laptop. System76 seems to have a solid reputation but things do happen. System76 warranty and support has been rock solid with all my questions.
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.
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!
Rust solves many things, but in this case, there is little that it solves other than being ‘Written in Rust™’ 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?
A fundamental issue in the Linux desktop ecosystem and a line has to be drawn which guarantees a complaining user on an exotic distro or a fork of another one.
As for Windows, and Mac they are supported on the latest versions 100% of the time.
Another way to look at it, is through the "long now" lens--like, what software will survive maybe 100 or 1000 years from today? I think companies and closed-source software will die in that length of time, while open source will persist. That doesn't help us now though.
Another observation: Linux does eventually settle on standards, but the "maturation timeline" is so much longer than Mac/Windows (10 years?) that nothing "cool" (from a commercial perspective) happens on desktop Linux. But it does eventually work out--like the systemd standard that has emerged in the past decade, or Wayland (probably still 2 years away), or pipewire audio (also probably a year away).
Linux enables a complementary but different type of 'support': bleeding-edge homebrew experimentation (see the many raving custom keyboard fans and their software, for example), and wrap-everything products (such as Steam using Linux inside for their latest gaming console).
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?
From a fan of the Classic MacOS
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).
I would not be surprised if this new DE will serve for both Linux and RedoxOS.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And then everyone started clapping
Oh, sorry. You got a point?
My point is that I can make stuff up too! If you need evidence that linux is just not ready for non-technical user prime time just take a look at the ltt video from yesterday:
Because that kind of shit also happens on Windows. With administrative access, you can always kill your machine.
What Linux lacks and what Windows has more then enough is informal support services. You know, that person in the family that just knows their way around computers, that does computer stuff.
(Almost) every elderly person above a certain age is lost when it comes to computers. Most people alive cannot be trusted to install an application - not on Windows, not on Linux and not even on OS X (well, maybe on OS X nowadays, because you cannot install unsigned software these days) because all that software might be compromised. Every time you let a software on to your system, you can potentially brick it. And then you need a solid understanding of what's going on.
For most people, computers are black boxes whose internal state is a mystery that is far too complex to be explored. They have no interest in exploring these mysteries. They have work to do; forms to fill, letters to write. And these people need the aforementioned informal support they can turn to whenever they need to diverge from the well-trodden paths. It doesn't depend on the operating system, but on the surrounding support system.
That's why I don't consider that video evidence that Linux isn't ready for prime time, just as I wouldn't consider a video of someone bricking their Windows as evidence that Windows isn't ready for prime time.
These people just need someone they can ask for help. For my family - that me.
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
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
Well, yes. They are the devs. It's their project and so they get to decide what goes in. That not different with any other project.
> obtuse nature of the gnome team
That has been often repeated, but has not been my experience. Yes, the Gnome developers, such as any good team - has a clear vision of what their product should be and a process they are following. Most of the time, there are excellent reasons for their decisions. Sometimes technical, sometimes pragmatic. In some cases it's just aesthetics. But that's not different from any other free/open source projects. There are dozens of projects that are forked and forked again because of aesthetic, technical, social or idealistic differences.
> 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.
Well, that's .. good, I guess? I mean, that System76 have forked version of Gnome that confirms more to their vision of a desktop.
That's the beauty of free/open software; no one is beholden to a single company calling the shots.
> 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
I would argue that the Gnome developers very much are a part of the Gnome community. Yes, they build it for themselves, or for the companies paying them to build it.
The primary commercial contributors to Gnome - companies like Endless, Redhat, Ubuntu, SuSE - are not single-mindedly interested in Gnome's market share. They have larger offerings, of which Gnome is only a part. They have nothing to gain from - say - Gentoo switching to Gnome (except maybe additional developers, but that's not a given). Why should
To be clear here the comment I replied to, that you then replied to was about "why do we need another DE, just contribute to gnome"
I explained why, your attempt at "refuting" my position is "well they do not need to accept your contributions because it is their project"
This is amazing circular logic...
You are correct they are free to run their project however they want, and we are free to fork or create other DE's that meet our needs.. but again this was a comment about linux getting yet another DE, and the growing compliant that linux has too many DE's
Linux has too many DE's because projects like gnome have a narrow focus that only care about their own goals and give 2 shits less if you do not agree with them. That is fine... but then people need to stop saying "dont fork, contribute"
> detail why
which you dind't. You just answered with a general attack on the Gnome devs saying - I paraphrase - that they are arseholes that don't to your bidding.
I then tried to get more detail and asked explicitly for your experiences with contributing to Gnome, because I didn't have bad experiences at all. So far, you didn't tell me if and what you tried to contribute or what exactly your experiences were.
> This is amazing circular logic...
If anything, it amazing lack at deflection. Common, spit it out. Where did the bad Gnome devs touch you?
> Linux has too many DE's because projects like gnome have a narrow focus that only care about their own goals and give 2 shits less if you do not agree with them. That is fine... but then people need to stop saying "dont fork, contribute"
Nowhere in this thread was this expressed. Instead it was "Why cannot you contribute" to which you just answer with a stale old general and lame excuse ("They have a narrow focus and only care about their own goals" - no really, to they? The meanies!) that can be applied to every open source project out there.
I'm sick and tired of people dumping on the Gnome devs. They are doing a great job and a promising idea of a desktop that goes beyond the desktop of the 80ies and 90ies. Almost all of the complaints come from people that have neither the interest nor the ability to truly contribute and find it easier to simply complain and bitch about. Sad!
If you truly want to contribute and better Gnome - convince them!
Start by fixing papercuts and show them that you are able. Get involved at the design stage and bring in your brilliant ideas. Take over responsibility in the team and make sure that your good decision making powers are acknowledged in the team.
Don't just jump in from the side with your one-trick-pony issue, shouting in their faces and then complain an moan if they don't immediately obey. That's lame.
Which seems for both gnome, and now windows even means "Lets look at what Apple is doing and copy them"
I hate Mac OS, I do not want to use a Mac, if I did I would buy a Mac. The fact that gnome wants to mirror their style and function to that of Apple is the problem I (and MANY MANY MANY others) have and they do not see to have any desire to change.
>Nowhere in this thread was this expressed.
It has been expressed mutiple points in this thread, and is the over arching implication in "why dont you just contribute to make gnome better"
The reason is because "better" is subjective and subjectively people like the popos devs that are making their own DE's and others that have walked away from gnome feel gnome is worse, not better, and the people that control gnome have no interest in making it "better" for users like me.
That's an accusation that gets thrown around from time to time. In what aspect do you think that Gnome is copying Apple/Mac?
> It has been expressed mutiple points in this thread, and is the over arching implication in "why dont you just contribute to make gnome better"
I'm only talking about the thread back to the root of the discussion that we're (hopefully) having. It's possible that this was expressed somewhere else in this HN discussion but not by me and not by the OP (of the thread).
> the people that control gnome have no interest in making it "better" for users like me.
Well, yes. They don't. In my opinion, that has multiple reasons:
1) There are no 'users like me'.
Let me explain. There's a bunch of very vocal (former/one-time/ongoing) Gnome users that are unhappy with various "things" that Gnome is doing. But these "things" are never the same and there is no agreement on how it ought to be done, just that Gnome is doing it "wrong". So there's no 'making it "better" for users like me". Any change could be loved by one part of that unhappy group, disliked by another, loathed by a third and seen as beside-the-point for the remainder. There are no "users like me".
2) No pitching in.
When I hear people complaining about Gnome, about the devs and how awful they are and how mean, I seldom (never?) get any links to examples of bad interactions. It at all, I get pointers to the gitlab.gnome.org bug tracker where there's a bunch of complaints from the peanut gallery about how bad the Gnome devs are. Most of the complains come from users that have did not contribute to Gnome whatsoever. Except the complaints and rants and insults. I do have an idea why the Gnome devs would rather ignore the input of such users.
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!
I am glad you think gnome vision is cool and good. I do not not. vanilla gnome3 was really terrible IMO and basically unusable. I moved away from gnome when ti came out, I have not messed with gnome40 much but what I have seen they are continuing down the same path and are much to Mac OS like for me.
I prefer DE's like MATE, XFCE, Budgie or these days even move to tilling window managers..