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Comment by SyneRyder | Hacker News Reader

I guess it's easier to solve Erdos problems and improve the lower bound of the Riemann hypothesis, than it is to solve Linux desktop app distribution.

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LOL!

Though as someone who shipped commercial software on Linux, it wasn't that bad, you just had to ship everything other than the kernel.

LOL. Conveniently, electron is everything other than the kernel. Also, as much wasted RAM as an entire second instance of chrome that shares nothing, but oh well.

Yeah, but if you use Qt like I did, you're shipping libstdc++, some other crap and Qt.

Yeah, I was kind of surprised recently that there's no solid native way to build desktop apps on Linux! I was thinking I'd build something actually native with AI but then the options were QT or or gtk...

You don't care what were you trying to build but for a quick me alone Linux app I used Flutter. Honestly it's my go-to when I want to have a quick native app on any platform but dont want to bundle electron.

Flutter is solid choice, and Canonical seems to be putting weight behind it for Ubuntu as well. Canonical is also now the new lead maintainer of Flutter Desktop.

Well what does native mean? An XWindow? Native on gnome is different from native on kde or xfce or lxde…

Qt is as solid as it gets. It's very, very high quality. Much higher quality than Microsoft's frameworks on Windows.

How would you know? It's impossible to have done a thorough analysis of all the Windows UI frameworks, five have been released since I started typing...

Well yes, I was surprised by the situation in Windows too! So my stack is now split like this

- Apple: SwiftUI/AppKit

- Android: Jetpack

- Windows + Linux: Avalonia (C#)

Avalonia seems good so far. I couldn't do Qt because I can't deal with that qBittorrent look. GTK is aesthetically pleasing for me, but it only runs on Linux. Avalonia lets me target both of these UI-toolkit-less platforms with something native-ish. Flutter is probably good too, but I am using uniffi-rs and that doesn't generate Dart bindings AFAIK.

Would love to hear other options.

Isn't Qt themeable? I also recall at one point they "emulated" native widget look and feel in their own renderer but I might be misremembering.

It looks like you can

Indeed! I wrote my note-taking app with a block editor (like Notion) in Qt with QML for the UI and C++ for the logic and it's been an incredible experience![1]

[1] https://rubymamistvalove.com/block-editor

Very nice, thank you for sharing!

QT and GTK are as native (and solid, I guess) as it gets, since there's no "default" UI toolkit that's shipped along with the kernel, unlike e.g. Windows or macOS. Speaking of Windows, why do they even ship browser-UI apps as a part of the OS? Do they find native Windows UI development too hard or feature-limited even with LLM assistance?

Because Microsoft screwed up their native UI story. They are slowly starting to go native again with WinUI3, but Microsoft went through a rough period with UI frameworks, I mean how many do they have now all still "supported"? WinForms, WPF, MFC, WinUI, MAUI, etc.?

Yeah, I've lost track years ago. Still, if there is a "modern" one (WinUI 3, I guess), it should be possible to build a nice weather app in it. Anyway, I've just realized they ship a HTML-based UI in order to be able to serve HTML/JS-based ads through it.

I mean there is the no true linux argument, but covering the main stream desktops you basically have kde which is written with qt(so qt is native) or gnome which is written with gtk and both frameworks/DEs do implement other things besides "just" the gui, so you are native.

Qt is great. I also shipped on Windows and MacOS

> LOL. Conveniently, electron is everything other than the kernel. Also, as much wasted RAM as an entire second instance of chrome that shares nothing, but oh well.

Well, with RAM being so cheap, why bother trying to trying to be memory efficient? It's not like OpenAI has an infinite pool of "AI" software engineers to work on this...

Oh wait...

With the AI, we can finally have the year of desktop Linux.

Microsoft used to ship a Linux binary for Teams, but they stopped doing that. Guess the tech was lost.

Yes, except it only worked some of the time on some of the distros (mainly Ubuntu/Debian variants of a certain vintage).

I'm not usually one to defend Microsoft, but since Teams works great in a browser, I actually prefer it that way. My video conference doesn't need access to my whole filesystem and an opacity layer that prevents me from seeing what it does. I actually applaud them for supporting browsers as well as they do.

People don't really use push to talk in Teams (unlike Discord) and that's usually the dealbreaker because you can't have system wide keybinds.

It sucked.

Download Edge for Linux and use the PWA. It's still crap but at least it kind of works mostly.

I'm using teams-for-linux which is basically the browser version put in a wrapper so you get the notification are icon with the unread messages showing.

Keeps breaking in strange ways, though. Just like it always has. For example, it will randomly switch to light mode and the only way to recover dark mode is by selecting dark mode (which doesn't change anything) and then restarting. Restarting alone also doesn't do anything, mind you.

Yes... Just use DEB package files for any distro. Make a compatibility layer that is distro dependent so that it can come preinstalled on any distro. It converts the DEB package to a distro native package so that it doesn't fuck up existing packages or the existing distro-native package manager, and gives you the apt and dpkg commands . Unlike appimages and flatpaks it has no reviewer, no store and it can be installed just like EXEs on windows which is already the case for DEBs on debian and debian based distros. Would this work?

Yeah idk what OpenAI was thinking. Just going off their own claims… OpenAI must be filled with bozos to not be able to utilize their own supposed product capabilities…

Same with Anthropic and their "support" team, which seems to be Claude 0.1 run on a commodore 64 in the basement...

It's the exact opposite. They picked the easiest way, done countless times just fine by everyone else and still failed

Nonetheless, it's the year og the linux desktop!

AppImage, yawn.

I think they were joking...

What problems are there with appimages?

Yet I have to install a not very famous, maybe unmaintained daemon to get basic system integration

It is already pre installed in most distrosk

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