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Comment by cabalamat | Hacker News Reader

Seems a bit odd that the Windows version has a GUI but not the Linux one. Building a GUI on top of Tk (like Python does) would probably not be hard.

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>Windows version has a GUI but not the Linux one

Not odd at all, in fact, just another consequence of the ridiculous fragmentation in Linux scene

Rebol had both (and more) decades ago, so it does seem odd to me Red doesn't given how much of it was inspired by that. IIRC its original concept was "open-source rebol".

It's original concept was not just "open source" (no hyphen required, nor is it "opensource" :), but to be a much better Rebol than Rebol - which itself was a neat concept and implementation by Carl Sassenrath, also creator of the Amiga OS.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sassenrath

Sadly, they (Red) seem to have gone the crypto-funding way a few years ago.

I had used Rebol for writing small programs a while ago, and it was fun. The Rebol software was also very light, at under 1 MB, IIRC, for both the Windows and Linux versions.

Why would fragmentation imply you can't have a GUI? You would just pick one toolkit and depend on it being there (unless you statically link it). Setting it up correctly is then the job of the user or distributors.

There is libgtk, aside from breaking changes between versions, some projects just don't want to "put up" with arbitrary decisions of upstream. Hence QT and KDE for example. But that has LGPL issue.

Until a major backer steps up and funds a project with amounts that is comparable to what MS or Apple spends on their GUI, the Linux on desktop is not happening.

My bet is on QT if anyone is listening.

And yet the same ridiculous fragmentation doesn't prevent Python from having a GUI that works on Python.

There is a Linux GUI! I’ve used it — it seems to work fine.

Not true, Linux version has GTK-based GUI.

I remember seeing some progress on the Gtk port on the blog, i think I tried last year with some success

It seems they do have `view` for Linux.

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