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

[ssokolow]

Are you OK with it? Because you blame Gnome's developer for their refusal to merge patch which breaks their decision. Don't you think you have a huge bias against Gnome?

The only things I personally have against GNOME are...

• As a user, even as far back as the early 2000s, their vision just didn't do it for me, so I used something else. (Sometimes KDE, sometimes Xfce, sometimes E16 or Fluxbox with standalone tools, sometimes LXDE... but GNOME just didn't have the combination of features I wanted.)
• As a developer, I'd already migrated to Qt for my own development in the GTK+ 2.x era because I'd decided that using "the universally installed toolkit" wasn't worth having to deal with a toolkit that expected people to reinvent things like a tree-view widget that supports both multi-select and drag-and-drop and a toolbar widget that supports basic customization out of the bag.

If that's what you call "huge bias", then fine. I have a huge bias.

In this case, though, I'm just pointing out why other people, who maintain things that do depend on GTK are upset. The devs spent over a decade not disabusing people of their impression that GTK was meant to be common infrastructure, and now the GNOME team is saying "We don't want to maintain your use-case anymore!" when it's not cheap or easy to rewrite a big application on another toolkit or fork the toolkit.

[Khrundel]

The only things I personally have against GNOME are...
...
If that's what you call "huge bias", then fine. I have a huge bias.

I assume there are thousands of software projects which you don't like and therefore don't use.
I assume there are thousands of software projects which don't have some features, you need.
Do you so passionately hate every such project? I doubt it.
And please, don't say you don't hate gnome. Because blaming developers for not accepting a patch, which undermines their decision is something only blind hatred can justify. You saying you are developer? Will you accept a patch which will reverse your deliberate decision just because someone doesn't agree with it? That is simple question, can you honestly answer it?

[pal666]

KDE & QT are an European thing where RH has almost nothing to do with...

https://ev.kde.org/supporting-members/

so european and out of reach for rh that second spot of patrons is taken by google
you can find same google(and stab in the back from suse btw) here https://foundation.gnome.org/

By the way why throwing in KDE in here?

i thought it was largest "alternative desktop", i.e. i was trying to be generous with you

[ssokolow]

Do you so passionately hate every such project? I doubt it.
And please, don't say you don't hate gnome. Because blaming developers for not accepting a patch, which undermines their decision is something only blind hatred can justify. You saying you are developer? Will you accept a patch which will reverse your deliberate decision just because someone doesn't agree with it? That is simple question, can you honestly answer it?

The only emotion I've felt through this entire conversation is amusement at how obviously you're projecting.

The only thing I'm "blaming" GNOME for is spending over a decade allowing people to build trust that it's suitable as infrastructure to base non-GNOME projects on before changing their minds and, even then, I have no emotional stake in it. I'm just explaining why so many other people are upset.

[arQon]

"Our way or the highway" and variously abrasive or passive-aggressive as people when you disagreed. ...it just happened that, prior to GNOME 3, what they wanted was significantly more mainstream.

Pretty much. There was a comment on slashdot that I think summed things up well: namely, that every time something like this happens, it's always GNOME that's involved. Kind of like the "If everyone you meet is an asshole, maybe you're the asshole" aphorism.

Even if you take GNOME's *very* long history of just "being assholes" out of the equation though, it still very easy to see where System76 is coming from.
GNOME willfully breaks extensions with every release, and if you're on the hook to maintain hundreds or thousands of those, that's a LOT of your money that GNOME is wasting.
GNOME is doing everything it can to remove theming support solely because they're butthurt that everyone thinks their theme is trash. If you're trying to sell systems, especially at the boutique end of the market, that has a direct impact on how desirable those systems are to some users.
GNOME won't accept patches that restore or add functionality that doesn't fit with the GNOME manifesto of "only what WE want matters". That means you're carrying all that work out-of-tree and have to constantly keep patching upstream GNOME just to provide an acceptable desktop. Again, that's wasting S76's money for the sake of the GNOME team's pettiness, and some of that behavior may well be a point of differentiation that gets them sales, so they can't just abandon it.

I'm sure there's more, but any one of those points alone is enough to put S76 in an unpleasant position. Taken together, and especially so when considering the constant and consistent shitty attitude and behavior of the GNOME devs, it's no surprise at all that they would WANT to move away from GNOME: the only "surprising" part is that things have apparently now reached a tipping point where it's bad enough to actually spend the time and effort to do so.

Whether they can do that *successfully* or not is much more questionable. Building the DE is actually the trivial part: the hard part is dealing with all the other packages on a machine - like Firefox, for example, which uses its own version of GTK and hasn't managed to draw scrollbars correctly for roughly 9 out of the last 10 years. With GNOME now encouraging application developers to ignore any sort of standards, and *especially* not any user themes, S76 is going to have an even harder time getting their desktop to work "properly" as a whole than Ubuntu did with Unity. I don't see how they're going to manage it on their own, but I wish them luck, because GNOME has been driving the Linux desktop off a cliff ever since they started their GNOME3 temper tantrum, and they've made it very clear things are only going to continue to get worse from here.

[Khrundel]

The only emotion I've felt through this entire conversation is amusement at how obviously you're projecting.

What am I projecting? My hatred of GNOME?
No. It's pretty clear you just hate GNOME and take side in every conflict against them.
Look how you describe this situation:

The only thing I'm "blaming" GNOME for is spending over a decade allowing people to build trust that it's suitable as infrastructure to base non-GNOME projects on before changing their minds and, even then, I have no emotional stake in it. I'm just explaining why so many other people are upset.

Is this a honest and clear description? No. It intentionally made vague to look like there "must be fire". Here is clear description: they've rejected a patch which tried to reverse their strategic decision for fixing theming.

Ok, lets check if your accusation holds water even in your wording. So, they've made some big change which harms other people expectation. Is this a sin? Well, lets look into your earlier confession:

• As a developer, I'd already migrated to Qt for my own development in the GTK+ 2.x era because I'd decided that using "the universally installed toolkit" wasn't worth having to deal with a toolkit that expected people to reinvent things like a tree-view widget that supports both multi-select and drag-and-drop and a toolbar widget that supports basic customization out of the bag.

Have I read correctly? You've made a decision to switch a toolkit without considering your current users who may not want to install Qt or who liked gtk look and feel? Will you accept a patch reversing to last version, which uses gtk?

Or it is GNOME who have no rights to do changes, not you?

I don't expect you will answer as you've ignored 2 same question, but admit to yourself: your criticism of GNOME is utter hypocrisy.

[mdedetrich]

so your speculation is fud and it's going to be the opposite, right?
btw, what makes you think that rest of gnome contributors don't have incredibly talented engineers or don't put effort into user experience?

I was just pointing out how ludicrous your logic is. But to entertain your point, Gnome doesn't care about user experience because its not their market, they care primarily about developer experience (which explains almost all of their controversial changes).

System76 however actually sells laptops to non technical users with their own distro, in other words their bottom line actually indirectly depends on user experience for users, otherwise they sell less laptops.

[Khrundel]

But to entertain your point, Gnome doesn't care about user experience because its not their market, they care primarily about developer experience (which explains almost all of their controversial changes).

No, it is System76 who doesn't care about their own customers experience. Otherwise they wouldn't ship theme which breaks applications. They care only about first impression of not being another cheap Debian/Ubuntu clone.

What they could do to cope with GNOME libadwaita decision?
1. They could ship adwaita, limiting their branding to splash screens and default wallpaper.
2. They could use GNOME's suggested solution: recolored adwaita, which wouldn't break app's layout
3. They could add their own "platform" library, libpop or libcosmic instead of libadwaita, with their own theming engine, and maintain a port of every GNOME app to this library.
What they suggested instead? To whitelist their "pop" theme, so user will not be able to select own theme, but pop!os would ship with "blessed" brand theme. (see: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/4230 )
I wonder how anyone can support their point.

[mmstick]

No, it is System76 who doesn't care about their own customers experience. Otherwise they wouldn't ship theme which breaks applications.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I have less theming issues with Pop than I do with Adwaita. Dark theme just works in a lot of applications that don't work very well in Adwaita Dark. For that matter, the only theming issues I'm aware of today is BOINC. And that's just because they hard code custom background colors without also changing the color of fonts against those custom backgrounds. So dark themes will struggle unless the theme includes a custom rule for that application.

What they suggested instead? To whitelist their "pop" theme, so user will not be able to select own theme, but pop!os would ship with "blessed" brand theme. (see: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/4230 )

Actually, this allows an application developer who does not want their application to be "broken" by a low-effort theme to define what themes they will personally allow to be used with their application. So the user will be able to use their favorite theme if that theme is supported by the application developer. As opposed to abolishing theme support altogether and not allowing the user or developer to have the choice at all.

[Khrundel]

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I have less theming issues with Pop than I do with Adwaita.

"Extraordinary claims"?

Looks like you know more about GTK theming than app developers: ( https://stopthemingmy.app/ ) "This is aimed at distributions breaking apps by default"
and even System76 developers ( https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/4230 ) "GTK themes can introduce issues in applications which do not support them."

Dark theme just works in a lot of applications that don't work very well in Adwaita Dark.

Maybe that is because GNOME currently doesn't support theming? Some GNOME apps, terminal for example, allows you to switch light/dark themes, most of them don't. Adwaita dark, when forced from gnome tweak tools, doesn't contain per-application tweaks, so no wonder it doesn't work with some apps expecting adwaita only.
Whole this thing started from GNOME's effort to add support for limited global theming, such as dark and high contrast. With externally forced "foobar" theme this would be impossible, how gnome's configurator would know that foobar is light and it has dark variant foobar-dk? So they've disabled external theming for their libadwaita platform