System76 Reportedly Developing Their Own Rust-Written Desktop, Not Based On GNOME

[MartinN]

While I love innovation, when people get afflicted by NIH syndrome, oft times they underestimate the level of effort required to bring something useful to fruition. I personally think it's a great idea they're gonna use Rust, but they'd be foolish if they didn't leverage something like wlroots, which while it may not be Rust, would save them tons of code they'd end up writing anyway... so do what a smart person/company does-take the best of everything and integrate, rather than reinvent. The 'integrate' part can be the Rust glue...and build from there. Writing a full blown DE from scratch is asking for trouble unless you're Microsoft or something....

[lectrode]

mdedetrich

Teggs

Mario Junior

having watched the ltt linux challenge part 1 on floatplane, i can confirm that linus started out with popos, but switched to manjaro kde after the installation of steam on popos removed his desktop. he did *not* have the same issue after switching to manjaro

[Myownfriend]

Why do you think they are asking now? So that when nobody customizes Gnome anymore, they will maintain a theming engine nobody uses?
Sure, nothing has been done yet, but you can look at the direction they're taking, look at their past history and see the dots are connected pretty well

What do you mean "nobody uses"? They aren't complaining about user themes and user themes are incredibly popular.

[omer666]

lol, all they needed is to theme apps in different color to differentiate themselves from others. what business they have to do with ergonomics?

Well as far as I know Pop_OS also has additional tiling capacities compared to Gnome, among other things. Thinking some company designing a new desktop environment could have new ideas isn't too far fetched if you ask me.

[F.Ultra]

ah: your failure at simple reading comprehension explains the first part.
There's no "conspiracy stuff" in there, and again, this is 101-level. The more you change the behavior of random pieces of the system, the more likely it is that a company will outsource setting it up and/or maintaing it rather than doing it in house. This is literally RH's entire business model. Do you think the FOSS fairy just gives them stacks of cash to thank them for their kernel contributions? (Which, admittedly, would be nice. :P).

That is most definitely not RH:s business model at all since they sell support and not outsourcing.

[finalzone]

Those aren't a matter of difficulty, it's a matter of business. It's more profitable to use an existing product than hire developers to maintain yours. But System76 isn't a typical business, they want to make a good product, not please investors. GNOME3 is not a good product. Neither is KDE (but at least they try).

The problem looks like how System76 handles business by repeating the same mistake previous vendors did rather than effectively contributing to the existing ecosystem like Endless and Purism are doing with GNOME as an example. Currently, we only have System76's views yet one of GNOME contributors shared an experience with System76 employees Phoronix should share in an article: https://blogs.gnome.org/christopherd...o-collaborate/ so we, readers, can properly analyze the statement.

According to that blog, System76 seemly bad actions is nothing new much like how they did with LVFS from which Richard Hughes approached them to collaborate back to 2018, Canonical with bugs related issues when System76 refused to port their fix upstream back to 2019 and GNOME with GNOME Shell and the theme related issue.

[Mez']

While I love innovation, when people get afflicted by NIH syndrome, oft times they underestimate the level of effort required to bring something useful to fruition. I personally think it's a great idea they're gonna use Rust, but they'd be foolish if they didn't leverage something like wlroots, which while it may not be Rust, would save them tons of code they'd end up writing anyway... so do what a smart person/company does-take the best of everything and integrate, rather than reinvent. The 'integrate' part can be the Rust glue...and build from there. Writing a full blown DE from scratch is asking for trouble unless you're Microsoft or something....

It's not NIH when you wanted to contribute to what existed so as to bring your vision to the table but you have been dismissed.
Gnome is following a developer-centric path while companies such as Canonical or System76 are much more toward making average Joes' life easier. These vision are contradictory and only layouts/options/customizations can get them to co-live successfully. But the Gnome Team has built a walled garden and refuses just that.
Hence, it is in no way NIH since they won't invent the same thing at all.

[Mez']

That's clearly not the only problem because I doubt users care all that much that distro devs are being asked not to make their own themes. The problem is that a lot of the people talking about this have seemingly been convinced that Gnome devs have or will remove theming which they haven't.

Personally, although I like some of the themes that some distros provide, Yaru especially looks good, I feel like the Gnome devs have a very valid concern. And if there is a distro out there that feels like not having their custom theme completely robs them of their uniqueness then that says more of the distro than anything.

Actually, they discouraged theming even further, and they introduced "recoloring" instead. It would be alright to only modify highlight colors and such if adwaita wasn't such a terrible theme.
Most people don't like adwaita and will want to use a less amateurish feeling theme. The problem remains.

[mdedetrich]

mdedetrich

Teggs

Mario Junior

having watched the ltt linux challenge part 1 on floatplane, i can confirm that linus started out with popos, but switched to manjaro kde after the installation of steam on popos removed his desktop. he did *not* have the same issue after switching to manjaro

Yup, although to be the fair the issue was not with popos specifically but apt + a broken steam package (you can see the details here https://www.reddit.com/r/pop_os/comm..._pc_to_pop_os/). Popos actually maintains a fork of apt and they just updated apt so its not possible to uninstall your desktop even via the terminal. The steam package was only broken for a few hours and unfortunately Linus was doing the video at that exact time.

Another thing to note is that if you used the PopOS's GUI to remove steam at the the time the package was broken, it wouldn't have let you. It was only via the apt CLI that it allowed you to do this (and even then it provided a prompt saying "Are you sure you really want to do this").

In any case, PopOS fixed the issue and they also updated their live ISO so this doesn't happen again.

[ssokolow]

According to that blog, System76 seemly bad actions is nothing new much like how they did with LVFS from which Richard Hughes approached them to collaborate back to 2018, Canonical with bugs related issues when System76 refused to port their fix upstream back to 2019 and GNOME with GNOME Shell and the theme related issue.

And, according to this blog post from a not-insignificant Solus person, GNOME developers are being provably disingenuous about their interactions with System76, so a single blogs.gnome.org post isn't going to cut it... especially when GNOME devs have a history of getting a whole bunch of different GTK-using projects' backs up.

What's more likely? That there's a big conspiracy against GNOME to paint them as assholes or that they're just assholes?