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Comment by cyber_kinetist | Hacker News Reader

Then they would need to either

1) do the yak-shaving and create a whole new GUI stack in Rust (which would be an absolute boon to the Rust community but will be a tremendous effort), or

2) switch to Qt (and basically become KDE)

Thinking about it, maybe Sciter (https://sciter.com/) would be an okay foundation to build a DE in (lightweight stack, flexible theming, solid Rust bindings). But then it isn’t open source (only the interface is, you need to pay for source access), so maybe not.

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create a whole new GUI stack in Rust

Is there a reason iced is not good enough (other than not being accessible)?

https://iced.rs/

https://github.com/iced-rs/iced/issues/552

No stable release yet, and you generally want your DE to be the most dependable bug-free part of your software, especially if you are selling hardware with your own software pre-installed.

but looking good so far, gonna check this out for myself. I was rooting for azul, but iced seems to be further ahead

Input Method support? (A feature used in various East Asian languages by over a third of the world’s population)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_method

https://github.com/iced-rs/iced/pull/686

See the challenges of properly supporting IME in Druid, another Rust toolkit:

https://github.com/linebender/druid/issues/1308

I'm assuming Iced has no A11 support (these projects never do). Probably no RTL support. Possibly no reusable "system" widgets like open/save dialogs.

Can you clarify what you mean by "these projects never do"? Your comment comes across as dismissive. Especially since I already noted that it was lacking a11y in my original comment.

Anyway although a11y and i18n support have not been implemented, they are planned.

https://github.com/iced-rs/iced/issues/250

It wasn't meant as dismissive of the project. It's totally fine to write a UI library that has another focus (games, for example). I'm just tired of those projects being suggested as alternatives to native/GTK/Qt in discussions here and elsewhere.

If Iced actually gets cross-platform accessibility support, that's great! Very few projects have that today. More certainly wouldn't hurt. But until it does, you shouldn't base a DE on it.

Edit: The issue you linked to is about RTL support. That's also required, but doesn't touch on a11y.

My original comment mentioned and linked to the a11y issue.

Iced looks pretty cool but it's focused on being a cross-platform toolkit and will probably not ever be the best choice for making programs native to Linux, like a desktop environment. If you thought there were enough problems between GTK and Qt with skinning, fonts, keybindings, and all that stuff, adding another toolkit to the mix just makes it worse.

Iced is missing even basic features such as:

- Rendering multiple layers

- Creating multiple windows

- Multiline text layout and editing

Regarding 2, aren’t they basically gnome if they are using gtk, as per your logic?

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