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A comment on Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment. Parent comment

Re:Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment by sprash on Thursday January 13, 2022 @03:05PM (#29926059)
Also GTK4 means they are still at the mercy of GNOME which changes APIs often and without consideration for third parties.

Wasn't the whole point of the project to emancipate themselves from GNOME? If they rely on GTK they will fail.

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Re:Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment by cyber_kinetist on Thursday January 13, 2022 @03:13PM (#29926165)
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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Re:Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment by CameronNemo on Thursday January 13, 2022 @03:21PM (#29926283)
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

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Re:Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment by pure_simplicity on Thursday January 13, 2022 @03:41PM (#29926543)
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

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Re:Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment by hkmaxpro on Thursday January 13, 2022 @08:25PM (#29929442)
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

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Re:Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment by gnud on Thursday January 13, 2022 @04:27PM (#29927114)
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.
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Re:Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment by CameronNemo on Thursday January 13, 2022 @05:38PM (#29927978)
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

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Re:Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment by gnud on Thursday January 13, 2022 @07:01PM (#29928784)
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.

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Re:Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment by CameronNemo on Thursday January 13, 2022 @08:04PM (#29929277)
My original comment mentioned and linked to the a11y issue.
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Re:Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment by awrmc on Thursday January 13, 2022 @10:08PM (#29930165)
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.
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Re:Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment by nicoburns on Friday January 14, 2022 @04:40AM (#29932445)
Iced is missing even basic features such as:

- Rendering multiple layers

- Creating multiple windows

- Multiline text layout and editing

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Re:Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment by kaba0 on Thursday January 13, 2022 @03:32PM (#29926442)
Regarding 2, aren’t they basically gnome if they are using gtk, as per your logic?
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Re:Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment by mixedCase on Thursday January 13, 2022 @03:14PM (#29926178)
With the transition from version 3 to 4, GTK is now more focused on being a generic UI toolkit, with GTK4-based libadwaita now being the place to be for GNOME-specific patterns.
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Re:Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment by sprash on Thursday January 13, 2022 @03:31PM (#29926418)
History and experience tells a different story [1]. Never trust a library that is maintained by GNOME.

1.: https://github.com/thestinger/termite

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Re:Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment by awrmc on Thursday January 13, 2022 @09:43PM (#29930012)
Checking the response from the maintainer shows another different story: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=679658#c12

>Implementing keyboard selection inside vte means that every terminal based on vte benefits; adding only hooks for you means that all the other terminals get no benefit.

The patch being pushed wasn't going to help other projects. The developer of that project was working on a fork of the library but it appears it didn't get much use and was abandoned: https://github.com/thestinger/vte-ng

I don't see much more that anyone from GNOME could have done there.

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Re:Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment by addicted on Thursday January 13, 2022 @07:41PM (#29929104)
libadwaita exists solely to move Gnome specific stuff out of GTK into libadwaita.

And it's hard to see how an open source project with as many developers as Gnome/GTK have can have some secret agenda that is counter to what they are saying publicly and creating libraries and code publicly to implement.

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Re:Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment by lmm on Thursday January 13, 2022 @08:17PM (#29929385)
> it's hard to see how an open source project with as many developers as Gnome/GTK have can have some secret agenda

How many serious Gnome/GTK developers are there who are not IBM employees?

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Re:Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment by awrmc on Thursday January 13, 2022 @09:49PM (#29930055)
That question is a non-sequitur. But to give you a type of answer, most of libadwaita came out of Purism.
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Re:Exploring System76's New Rust Based Desktop Environment by bmarkovic on Friday January 14, 2022 @07:19AM (#29933570)
So XFCe == GNOME and LXDE is GNOME or KDE, depending on which version we're talking about?

UI toolkit doesn't equal a desktop environment. There is tons of stuff in the GNOME ecosystem (some of which it will make a lot of sense for System76 to reuse, no doubt) that can be entirely ignored when you're using GTK to, essentially, draw your UI widgets for you.

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