ReactOS Working On A Community Windows OS

[TheSoulz]

The X-Server or Wayland has nothing to do with the problem. Try to integrate your Application in the Desktop, you has to do it for each desktop and distribution. Not even a single Contextmenu entry is a cheap thing. Even in one Application you has a huge amount of fragmentation. e.g. Thunar in Ubuntu has gio Support but the Debian version not.

The Desktops are huge static blobs without a proper way to integrate (Change the Source is not a option) you apps. Even a entry in the Systemsettings can be a mess.

There is no common base.

arent there abstraction layers to deal with this stuff?
something like SDL?

[justmy2cents]

There is zero progress. The fragmentation of the Desktops is progressing well. Everyone has its own APIs (if APIs for an integration exist.) If you want to write a program thats nice integrated in the Desktop, you has todo it for each Desktop and Distribution again.

A GUI-Application is not only a window.

as much as i'm the one always bashing gnome on this topic, especially since gnome is the culprit for this claim. not even close to truth. if you take away gnome, you can write nicely integrated app no matter what toolkit you use

btw. gnome in 3.12 finally fixed worst bug in that regard where AppMenu shows on windows if you chose so and dialog buttons can be made default at bottom. now, there are only 3 real show stoppers in that regard exist... rest are just annoying deviations
- notification area crap design
- apps running in tray
- and newly introduced the appgroups clusterfuck
note, that even though i name 3, tray is the only real problem. rest can simply be avoided

i think tray can be solved by extension, but until it is possible to be solved from default gnome i say it is unfixed. if they blessed extension into default gnome, then i'd call it fixed

as far as API goes, it is the same on Windows. hell, even windows it selfs have more different APIs, not to mention that most development tools like delphi completely reinvented it again and again

[brosis]

(snip)
- Application Interopability: Have you ever seen something like OLE in Linux Desktop world?
(snip)

Agreed with all, except this.
DBus(ex-Bonobo).
Its everywhere and en route to kernel now.....

[egrath]

Fonts render best with just RGB and no hinting at all.

I agree to some point - fonts look great and as intended without hinting and subpixel rendering - but at the cost of increased bluriness (at least on current low dpi displays). You need additional filtering to make it sharper again. And exactly here comes a problem within the Rendering Library of current Desktops [FreeType]. To get the optimum result you need to apply different filters according to the background you render the font on. FreeType has no clue about the background and always returns the rendered Glyph with th e given filter applied (lcdfilter option in fontconfig). OS X's renderer does this thing.

[brosis]

The X-Server or Wayland has nothing to do with the problem. Try to integrate your Application in the Desktop, you has to do it for each desktop and distribution. Not even a single Contextmenu entry is a cheap thing. Even in one Application you has a huge amount of fragmentation. e.g. Thunar in Ubuntu has gio Support but the Debian version not.

The Desktops are huge static blobs without a proper way to integrate (Change the Source is not a option) you apps. Even a entry in the Systemsettings can be a mess.

There is no common base.

The common base is this: As long as one is free to fork, there will be fragmentation. And the ability to fork is...
I let the definition of good or bad to you.

[mmstick]

I agree to some point - fonts look great and as intended without hinting and subpixel rendering - but at the cost of increased bluriness (at least on current low dpi displays). You need additional filtering to make it sharper again. And exactly here comes a problem within the Rendering Library of current Desktops [FreeType]. To get the optimum result you need to apply different filters according to the background you render the font on. FreeType has no clue about the background and always returns the rendered Glyph with th e given filter applied (lcdfilter option in fontconfig). OS X's renderer does this thing.

What blurriness? Maybe you should get your eyes checked because my font has never been blurry without using hinting, and I even like to set my font to extremely small sizes on my 'low-dpi' display. I don't see what a background has to do with how fonts are rendered here. Set your font to use anti-aliasing, use RGB sub-pixel geometry, and set hinting to none -- done. Furthermore, I use Qt and GTK programs extensively and have never noticed them to look different at all. In a GTK DE, Qt uses the exact same font settings as your GTK font settings.

[Dukenukemx]

KDE, Unity, and GNOME 3 are doing that pretty well. Where did you get this idea that it isn't? If you want to argue that all Linux distros should be equal, then you are making an argument that is logically flawed.

Gnome3 and Unity to me look the same. Both look amazing, but function as bad as Windows 8. KDE does work amazingly well, and looks great, but I always use XFCE for performance and lack of issues. XFCE really needs to improve the way their UI looks, at least by default. Cause it looks like someone took Mac OSX and gave it to the artist who styled Windows 95.

If you want a good looking UI with good performance and lack of problems, get XFCE Mint. The people at Mint, know how to make any UI look good.

[justmy2cents]

- Look and Feel across the Application Landscape. Take a look at the different GUI Toolkits currently in use. Every application written with another toolkit looks a little bit different to the user. Especially the font related stuff - run a Qt,KDE,Java application on Ubuntu and see for yourself that it doesn't look that good.

you mean like windows apps do? take a careful look and you'll notice same things. Each programming tool more or less reinvented whole widget sets. Not to mention you don't need to look than MS Office and Windows. Look and feel completely different. also, same crappy and non integrated look of that java app will also be on windows .

- Font rendering in general. I know that it's a subjective field but have you ever heard of someone yelling about the font rendering in Windows with Cleartype? OSX is another thing because it tries to make fonts look as intended compared to windows.

I really fail to see something wrong with fonts on linux.

- Keyboard shortcuts. Many, many applications have different bindings for same funcationality. It's not a problem of the OS itself because developers are free to bind to whatever they want, but i have more often seen this in Linux applications than in Windows/OS X ones.

actually, windows fares the worst here. Just remember how many different Exit shortcuts have you seen. That is not based on OS at all, it is lack of awareness from coders side.

- Application Interoperability: Have you ever seen something like OLE in Linux Desktop world?

my work is more or less coding cross platform apps and i worked with most IPC systems so far and i must say working with dbus was nicest experience of all by miles. dbus is now longtime standard on linux for all toolkits, where windows still deviates like crazy. DDE (ok, it is dead), COM, Remoting... which one is default and used everywhere? are they even remotely compatible? as far as dbus awesomeness goes, you only need to look at https://wiki.gnome.org/action/show/A...redirect=DFeet to see how great it really is. not to mention dbus works on all systems, including windows

[tga.d]

This project always seemed pretty pointless to me. Anyone who wants to switch from Windows to another OS either does it because they want a better OS or they want to use a FOSS OS. And if you want a high quality OS or an established FOSS OS, you're going to have to use some Unix-based OS. But then they might need some old Windows programs that they need to run. If only there was some FOSS version of Windows... Oh hey, there's ReactOS! But ReactOS is just a clone of Windows, so it's not high quality nor established, since it's not Unix-based. If only there were some way ReactOS could be based on established Unix principles but still run Windows apps... Oh wait, that's WINE.

So literally any development that is done on ReactOS is development that would be better spent on WINE. In fact, IIRC, ReactOS even uses WINE for their Win32 API, so the only thing they're providing is the kernel and DE, and last I checked, we've already got plenty of those.

[Spittie]

Hi,

i have to agree to Nille. Linux on the Desktop currently has serious problems which IMHO have to be solved before people which are currently used to Windows and OSX see it as a real competitor.

- Look and Feel across the Application Landscape. Take a look at the different GUI Toolkits currently in use. Every application written with another toolkit looks a little bit different to the user. Especially the font related stuff - run a Qt,KDE,Java application on Ubuntu and see for yourself that it doesn't look that good.
- Font rendering in general. I know that it's a subjective field but have you ever heard of someone yelling about the font rendering in Windows with Cleartype? OSX is another thing because it tries to make fonts look as intended compared to windows.
- Keyboard shortcuts. Many, many applications have different bindings for same funcationality. It's not a problem of the OS itself because developers are free to bind to whatever they want, but i have more often seen this in Linux applications than in Windows/OS X ones.
- Application Interopability: Have you ever seen something like OLE in Linux Desktop world?

Eventually Linux will come to the desktop at some time of the future for more people than now, but there's a huge amount of work to do.

egrath

Since everyone is replying
- I agree that this is a problem. But it's not only on Linux, use Windows and you'll see that everything look different here as well.
The only platform that has managed to get a common look is OSX, and even there there is the occasionally odd application.
- Font rendering, I can partially agree. It got much better lately, and many distributions have started to ship with decent configurations out of the box. I'm usually very picky regarding fonts, and nowadays I puke only when I see something very badly configured (arch/gentoo, for their nature, make it way to easy to fuck up to users that don't know/don't care much).
And since everyone is talking about their favorite font rendering: OSX is good on retina/high-dpi display, otherwise I find it blurry as fuck. XP and older version of Windows were TERRIBLE. Windows vista and newer are decent/good with ClearType enabled. Linux can go from as bad as Windows XP to way better than Windows 7, depending on the configuration.
- Agree as well, this actually feels worse than on Windows. Mostly because on Windows applications try to copy the default shortcuts, while on Linux everyone copy their DE (and every DE does whatever it want).