Jade: New Linux Desktop Built On Python, HTML5 & JavaScript

[starshipeleven]

HTML5, CSS, Javascript....all that's missing is Chromium and it's an Electron derived desktop.

It's running on webkit, I think you can call it "electron derived desktop" safely.

[starshipeleven]

performig fine is a really vague term.

A GUI just needs to be fast enough for human response times, once it is fast enough for that the discussion on speed becomes a pissing contest.

If we were talking of software doing any meaningful work I would agree. But we are talking of just beating human reaction times here. Even bloated shit like GNOME or not really light things like KDE Plasma run fast enough for a GUI. I mean, think about wobbly windows man. It's silky smooth on even bullshit hardware (as long as it supports OpenGL 2.0).

i will say that i have no clue what or how or on what it runs and i will never know that because i lost all interest to follow anything in that project when i saw html and desktop in the same sentence. i think reading car and square wheels would make more sense to me

No offence, but why should I care about your opinion when I have seen personally that web technologies can run well enough for a desktop?

[kpedersen]

Can people stop faffing with the silly GUI stuff, we all go back to Gnome 2 and concentrate 100% of our developer efforts on drivers such as ACPI so... y'know, Linux actually works on hardware?

(I joke... I don't want Javascript developers near kernel modules, just keep playing in the npm and pip playpen )

[carewolf]

yeah, it will be totally snappy, … as snappy on a Epyc 16-core as good old classic C/C++ stuff was on a 600 MHz Athlon ;-)

The problem with HTML and CSS is that it doesn't multithread. Well on top of being slow and retarded for desktop work.

[carewolf]

A GUI just needs to be fast enough for human response times, once it is fast enough for that the discussion on speed becomes a pissing contest.

If we were talking of software doing any meaningful work I would agree. But we are talking of just beating human reaction times here. Even bloated shit like GNOME or not really light things like KDE Plasma run fast enough for a GUI. I mean, think about wobbly windows man. It's silky smooth on even bullshit hardware (as long as it supports OpenGL 2.0).

No offence, but why should I care about your opinion when I have seen personally that web technologies can run well enough for a desktop?

No, it matters to battery life. At least as soon as you have mouse interface instead of a touch interface. Whenever the mouse moves it needs to do a hittest to find out which elements it is over, to get the right cursor type and activate hover effects, ect. Hittesting is really slow and inefficient in HTML5 (in theory it can be optimized in webkit/blink, but it is not trivial to do so without breaking stuff and no one who has tried has managed to it). It is so bad that on touch interfaces the input spec was changed so that hittesting will only be performed where you first put down your finger and not updated on finger moves.

[starshipeleven]

Can people stop faffing with the silly GUI stuff, we all go back to Gnome 2 and concentrate 100% of our developer efforts on drivers such as ACPI so... y'know, Linux actually works on hardware?

(I joke... I don't want Javascript developers near kernel modules, just keep playing in the npm and pip playpen )

They can't realistically do that any more than I can, javascript is high-abstraction language designed with dealing with user interfaces and data management.

Anything related to an OS kernel is hard even for C and (true) C++ programmers.

It would be like asking to an electrician to design a PC motherboard. That's completely in another ballpark.

[starshipeleven]

No, it matters to battery life. At least as soon as you have mouse interface instead of a touch interface. Whenever the mouse moves it needs to do a hittest to find out which elements it is over, to get the right cursor type and activate hover effects, ect. Hittesting is really slow and inefficient in HTML5 (in theory it can be optimized in webkit/blink, but it is not trivial to do so without breaking stuff and no one who has tried has managed to it). It is so bad that on touch interfaces the input spec was changed so that hittesting will only be performed where you first put down your finger and not updated on finger moves.

Yay! The first critique that isn't based on bullshit assumptions but on actual experience in the field. I like that.

[ElectricPrism]

Good maybe they can modularize app back ends to be UI independent so that apps can have a HTML UI, GTK or Qt. Then the apps can be available over the LAN or WAN introducing new opportunities like multi-user on a single shell.

[jacob]

yeah, it will be totally snappy, … as snappy on a Epyc 16-core as good old classic C/C++ stuff was on a 600 MHz Athlon ;-)

Which is as snappy as it needs to be for good usability. On the other hand it won't have the memory leaks, buffer overflows, null pointer crashes, race conditions and other goodies that usually come with C/C++ code.

[justmy2cents]

A GUI just needs to be fast enough for human response times, once it is fast enough for that the discussion on speed becomes a pissing contest.

If we were talking of software doing any meaningful work I would agree. But we are talking of just beating human reaction times here. Even bloated shit like GNOME or not really light things like KDE Plasma run fast enough for a GUI. I mean, think about wobbly windows man. It's silky smooth on even bullshit hardware (as long as it supports OpenGL 2.0).

i wasn't talking as much about speed as i was about poor performance in all aspects from browser with long standing tasks. just leaving simple semi active web page in chrome very soon becomes resource hog

wobbly windows run on gl based compositor and it is basically just deforming square with texture on it. how is that even connected? you might want to try running compositor on cpu though, you might be surprised how shitty performance will be even on some big bad beast for effects like wobbly windows

No offence, but why should I care about your opinion when I have seen personally that web technologies can run well enough for a desktop?

no offence taken at all

you should just realize that truth you spoke goes both ways