Pop_OS Cosmic Desktop to Make Use of Iced Rust Toolkit Rather Than GTK
phoronix.com
phoronix.com
Also, the fact that Iced Rust also targets the 'web' suggests to me it will not be a fully capable toolkit (as web cannot do what native can). Seems like they're going to be using this by themselves... and that's fine. Pop_OS has gone off on their own successfully before.
Re: web - isn't the purpose of WASM to make possible in web environments that which is possible on desktop environments?
These days I style my Qt/KDE apps all Breeze on GNOME and vice versa when I am on KDE, because unfortunately icon sets just don’t match up and I've run into 'invisible buttons' issues way to often.
As long as both are in dark/light mode I find this way less annoying than having to hope for a good enough tooltip on mouse over (or just tap and see on mobile).
Of course you would be able to, just don't expect the theming to match, the menus to have similar structures, dialogs having buttons in predictable places, etc.
> isn't the purpose of WASM to make possible in web environments that which is possible on desktop environments?
I don't think so. I think this is the purpose of all the new Web APIs more than WASM. The sandboxing and the inability to call out to the system is crippling for GUIs in WebAssembly. It works well if you control the drawing and are able to output raw data to a <canvas>, but it's a hassle. WASM works the best for things like opencv or dlib, but I think the GUI for the apps compiled to WASM will need to be written in JS for quite some time, if not forever.
I think nearly all Linux users - and most Mac/Windows users who don't remember how things were back in the XP or classic Mac era - don't realize these are even goals or something that has ever existed.
People also underestimate the talent that works at System76 and the amount of work required to bring Iced up to speed. Iced has already proven itself, and its using an architecture (Elm) which has also already proven itself. It's the best way to develop a GUI in Rust, without a doubt. Jeremy has developed an entire desktop OS from scratch, including making a GUI toolkit for it, so it's not like we're oblivious to the effort required.
Iced already has a fully functioning layout and rendering system so that webbrowser and JS engine analogy is complete. There's just a handful of features that are missing that are either partially implemented or we've already got 5 developers working on it full time to do the rest.
The hardware they did make seems nice (desktop case and keyboard), dunno why they aren't parleying that into making their own laptops. Like, why buy their current laptops over a ThinkPad (which you know will be supported by Fedora since that's still what's popular at IBM) or an HP/Dell developer laptop, or any of the other "known to work" laptops?
Eh, after suffering through many Gnome We-Know-Best design decisions, I would be happy for a new entrant in the space that was user focused on creating the best possible experience. An immensely tall order, but I think the demand is there.
I'm not necessarily against a new distro and new desktop but it does seem like they're abandoning hardware for no apparent reason...
I laughed out loud at that. In fact TBH I didn't just laugh, I guffawed.
Thanks for the entertainment. :-D
https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/17/linux_desktop_feature...
My personal preference, and what I'm writing on right now, is Unity.
I am also very fond of the ROX Desktop.
What would I really like to see? Well, barring attempts to just rip up everything and start again for no good reason, I think there would be a lot of mileage in recreating some of the classic UIs of the past that many people have loved.
* Classic MacOS was a sublime UI, with a lot of subtle non-obvious features. In its way it was far more polished than Mac OS X, even now.
* OS/2 2.x's Workplace Shell was not one of my personal favourites, but it had some excellent design features, and was loved by many.
* I have an Amiga but I never was a big fan back in the day, but a good solid modern Amiga Workbench clone would have some mileage, and as I said in the article, there are already FOSS implementations, just not for xNix.
* GEM is FOSS now. Why not recreate DR's multitasking GEM/X on Linux, or any of the late-era multitasking GEM desktops from the Atari ST, such as Thing or TeraDesk?
One of my favourite UIs is undergoing a pretty good re-implementation effort, in the form of NeXTspace:
https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace
There are more than half a dozen non-Windows-like desktop metaphors. Is that enough for you or shall I find some more? :-)
Literally the only devices they could use without incident were Android and iOS.
Generally a pretty good experience. I thought initially why bother with another distro, but it seems to be a good experience for me.
The Clevo machines are decent. I appreciate the matt screen and easy open/ replaceable parts (my fan succumbed to dog fur....)
Making a laptop from the ground up is hard. They do plan to do their own laptop but that's a very hard thing to do, specially doing it with profit. That is a move that could be company ending.
> creating a new distro (with a bad case of NIH) that no one asked for
I didn't ask for a lot of things that I like. And PopOS is great.
Because thinkpads are made by Lenovo who has a long history of shipping their devices will malware and backdoors in them, often in exchange for money. They've demonstrated again and again that they are willing to sell out the privacy and security of the people who buy their products if they can line their own pockets doing it. They've even put malware in UEFI so that users who reinstall their OS get reinfected over and over again.
The most famous of their abuses was "Superfish" and when the truth about superfish came out they fiercely denied there was any security risk to anyone ("we have thoroughly investigated this technology and do not find any evidence to substantiate security concerns”), then as the bad press continued they eventually admitted it was a problem and said they'd stop shipping devices infected by it, but people were still getting infected devices more than a month later (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/03/two-w...).
They published removal instructions so customers could rip the malware out of their system themselves, but the instructions they provided didn't actually fix the problem so all they did do was give people a false sense of security while leaving them vulnerable. Once third parties realized this and the bad press started again, they published revised instructions for removing it, but they were again caught still giving instructions that left many users vulnerable!! (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/20/lenovo-ap...)
I'm not convinced that this change is a good idea for Pop_OS, but I'll take the problems this could end up causing over handing my money and my security over to Lenovo any day.
If you decide to go off the rails and replace some or most of the PopOS stuff (which I eventually did), it will work, but probably break on running the next major update. This happened to me twice and ultimately had me move on to other things.
If this new approach can solve that problem, then I think PopOS! will be a much more attractive option. I will probably not go back to using PopOS! (using tiling wms now), but I would have no issue recommending it.
So it looks like whatever System76 ends up developing won't be usable for people with disabilities?
Seems like there is a plan to address the issue as part of the larger S76 project.
Ubuntu is trying to go centralized control with Snap.
Fedora is like a sibling comment says, doing just enough to coast on a desktop.
I'm using openSUSE right now, so can't complain there.
The failure to adopt Inferno in its day showed we as an industry got stuck on the unixy API and we've never managed to advance beyond that to this day.
Edit: trim rant way down.
I'm guessing the answer is no. This is the hill virtually all new UI toolkits die on.
"Comments like this do not read as genuine concern. It is designed to cast doubt on a project before it is even close to release, and the kinds of people liking this are evidence of it being passive aggressive FUD posing as concern. COSMIC will absolutely support a11y on release!"
https://twitter.com/jeremy_soller/status/1576682150836830208
I'm curious how using rust+iced will go for the level of integration in the desktop, and it's at least interesting.
Honestly excited to see what happens here :)
What I liked then is the idea of privacy, which I didn’t spend a lot of time to verify and the ease with which I could play games like GTA V.
https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/cant-update-old-ubuntu-versio...
And then there are people like me that prefer to spend their money on parties like this.
It was this pivot move that allowed them to be were they are in the world of Linux distributions taking over big iron UNIX on the server room.
And now Red-Hat is basically owned by the same vendor as AIX, z/OS and i.
Every few years, a new Linux desktop distro pops up because the old one somehow faceplanted.
I also don't see Pop_OS supplanting any of the big 3...
I can also confidently say that most people using Pop aren't using it because of the theme, and Pop!_OS is actually marketed to STEM and developers rather than gamers. It's just that a lot of PC gamers like what Pop!_OS has to offer to them, so it seems that way by word of mouth.
I think Ubuntu and Fedora are both unsuitable for this purpose too, because both have a track record of pushing out dodgy stuff before it's ready (like Fedora shipping SystemD in 2011.) And Ubuntu particularly has a track record of pushing shit that's obviously DOA, like Mir, Unity, or snap. At least when Fedora does something like ship SystemD before the kinks are worked out, what they chose does eventually become the mainstream. But you're still a guinea pig with Fedora, making it a poor choice for an OEM distro.
Yes because the future is OpenSUSE MicroOS aka ALP. Rolling release, immutable system, all apps are containerized (Flatpak and Toolbox/Podman). Using it right now, easily best Linux desktop to date, even with a few bugs here and there.
Ubuntu and Fedora, for all the bugs and shit they've pulled over the years, are still way more usable than pretty much any other Linux desktop outside the big 3...
Perhaps you meant Debian?
Red Hat and SUSE do go back nearly 30 years. Only Slackware is as old, AFAIK.
This is what I'm wondering about, but I'll take your word for it. Thanks!
Even better would be someone updating wxUniversal (the self-drawn version of wxWidgets) and porting it to Rust. This could be useful for a Linux desktop.