Hacker News Reader

Comment by MatthiasPortzel | Hacker News Reader

I have mixed feelings about Cosmic.

On one hand, the amount of fragmentation on desktop Linux is absurd. On Mac and Windows the desktop environment is synonymous with the operating system. On Linux, you can run one of 30 different desktop environments on the same distribution. This means that userspace bugs can manifest for any desktop-distro combination.

On the other hand, System76 is well positioned to create a desktop environment that is cohesive and complete since they’re trying to sell computers running them. Linus on the server has financial backing, and Linux on the desktop has precious little.

View on HN

Linux is a bazaar. Very chaotic, nothing is ever perfect, but there is something for everyone that sets foot.

There are dozens of GUI libraries and platform toolkits available to both Mac and Windows. In fact, there are plenty of GTK and Qt applications floating around on these platforms. As well as a lot of applications using custom frameworks. Then of course the unfortunate web-apps-as-desktop-apps pipeline in the form of Electron. Fragmentation is a very loaded and derogatory term used to express disdain for the openness and freedom that open source desktops have. Fragmentation is a strength of open source.

I'm sorry, but windows itself, let alone applications are anything but consistent. There are still corners of the UI that have a look and feel dating back to NT4/Win9x. And some of the new functionality is oddly worse UX.

In terms of fragmentation, gnome and kde are the vast majority of configurations. Even other DE are likely using the underlying graphics library.

Given the level of customization that System 76 has to do with gnome for every release, it's probably easier for them to just create something more congestive for their designs.

And given that they actually sell and support hardware, are far more likely to make better choices for more general users than a lot of other DE in my opinion.

I do wish they'd make a deal with framework to get it with Pop as an in the box option supported by System 76... I'd pay a bit extra for that.

> I'm sorry, but windows itself, let alone applications are anything but consistent. There are still corners of the UI that have a look and feel dating back to NT4/Win9x. And some of the new functionality is oddly worse UX.

A typical KDE or GNOME system is more coherent than either Windows or (at least as I'm using it) macOS. On Windows, built-in GUIs don't even use all the same look-and-feel. On macOS, some vital third-party apps (e.g., Contexts) don't even respect dark mode in their configuration windows.

Sure, KDE is in itself more coherent than the Windows DE. But the point is that there's only one DE for Windows. And even if it's incoherent there's just one to develop for.

Linux has hundreds probably, maybe more.

But there isn't just one to develop for... There's over half a dozen loosely connected design patterns over time. You have win32, the office/win 2k expansions, the modern ribbon, winui, winforms over win32, and now fluent, and Maui. All depending on what you're writing in and targeting.

It's not significantly better and combined with Mac and Linux a large reason many apps are using a skinned browser engine. You get better developer ergonomics for scaling, languages, screen readers, general accessibility and portability over many dedicated UI component libraries.

MAUI could have seen massive adoption with a Linux target (even if just gtk). It's not the biggest in terms of users, but it's become very large in terms of developer mindshare. Without it, it's an also ran.

I'm not a fan of gtk or QT. I don't really care for the shortcomings of most options at this point. Everything kinda sucks. Skia may gain traction and patch the missing pieces, but who knows.

Right now, when is the only mostly safe option for cross platform general desktop apps. Which is weird.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com