Budgie Desktop To Begin Decoupling From GNOME, Will Use Qt

[leipero]

What feels weird to you is probably the very thing that draws me towards it. To me, it's Gnome that "feels" kinda toy-ish and incomplete. Thank God we can both have our cake

Yeah, thank developers and people who contribute to it in one way or another . I've tried to use KDE, and i really like how Plasma DE looks (not as much as how GNOME looks, but for me it's on 2nd place after GNOME/Flashback/Budgie). In terms of features, I dislike lack of option for file and program history, it just keeps tracking and i don't like that. While on GNOME you have options that remove tracking globaly and in nautilus etc. history feature "automagically" disappears . Removing such essential features from KDE is what draws me away from it (besides feeling of kwin), sure there are ways to disable them, but you shouldn't go trough all sort of nonsense to do such simple and important task.

[Guest]

GNOME 3.24 gets the idea of less is more, and a consistent interface that has a ways to go compared to OS X but beats the pants off all other options for Linux. Qt for specific apps is fine. I'm used to it. If it becomes more like KDE I'll gut it out of my system.

Who cares? KDE beats those both in probably every aspect. OS X is shit.

[ldo17]

The subtle spacing and typography accompanied by a color palette that manages to be inoffensive but not banal stunned me. The best part was that it was just a fU¢%!ng settings window!
Obviously it's just my opinion, but it really surprised me how seriously ms seems to be taking design.

You mean, this “flat” design where you can’t tell what is a button and what isn’t?

[ldo17]

Vista used more memory than the far less graphically advanced Linux desktops, which were running with a fraction of Vista's functionality...

KDE was already doing multiple desktops back then--something that Microsoft only figured out with Windows 10. And the Windows version isn’t compatible with all applications.

Where do you think these new ideas in Linux graphics are coming from?

As far as I’m aware, the whole Compiz/Desktop Effects thing is unique--no other platform has anything like it.

[ryangorley]

Aesthetic preferences aside, I think these debates about which OS shell is better than another usually boil down to whether the interface does what one wants in the way they expect. Or in other words, the interface is predictable. As far as computer interfaces are concerned, predictability is a function of 1) a user's prior experience; 2) understandable visual cues; and 3) internal consistency.

The first of these--a user's prior experience--is entirely subjective. It is why these debates hilariously and inevitably end with someone arguing that GUIs are altogether an abomination. No one is more right about what they expect, based upon what they have previously used, than another. You can however judge an interface by how predictable it is in this regard for its intended users.

The second of these--understandable visual cues--is more objective, but it is still subject to cultural bias. While it may be almost universally understood that the color green means yes/ok/go and red means no/bad/stop, it wasn't always so. When an interface is attempting to do something that its users haven't experienced before, its success can be measured by how well it avoids those cues that are less universal, and employs those cues that are more.

The last of these--internal consistency--is entirely objective. Once the interface has chosen (or created) its own rules, it can be objectively evaluated by how well it keeps to these rules. The better it does, the more predictable it will be for its users. I find the shortcomings here, that arise due to a lack of thoughtfulness, most frustrating. While not always (but sometimes) due to a lack of thoughtfulness, I think GNU/Linux shells and applications have the greatest distance to go to reach parity with their proprietary counterparts in this regard.

The Solus/Budgie team are really on the right track as far as creating an interface that scores highly (for me at least) by these three measures. I use Solus for hours each day, and while the Budgie shell has some areas where it could certainly improve, I am excited about where it is going.

[liam]

You mean, this “flat” design where you can’t tell what is a button and what isn’t?

Luckily it's pretty much all about taste

[liam]

KDE was already doing multiple desktops back then--something that Microsoft only figured out with Windows 10. And the Windows version isn’t compatible with all applications.



As far as I’m aware, the whole Compiz/Desktop Effects thing is unique--no other platform has anything like it.

And os/2 offered virtual desktops 20 years ago.
Mac had them 30 years ago.
As for compiz, there are predecessors.

http://apple.wikia.com/wiki/Quartz_Extreme

http://www.osnews.com/story/21247/pt_XI_Bling_and_Compositing

[anda_skoa]

I work in the automotive industry and we use Qt extensively(all the car manufacturers' infotainment systems that I know of moved to Qt. Cars from China were the only one in the world not using Qt and now they switch too).

It generally seems to be the toolkit of choice for embedded systems with touch screens, not just automotive.

We also use QML extensively and we have exactly 0 lines of JavaScript code.

Theoretically a binding is also JavaScript code, but I understand what you meant:
any half sophisticated project will have most functionality in C++.

Remember that with QML you automatically get:
- Beautiful UIs(debatable?)
- The UI is GPU accelerated(animations...)
- Cross-platform and works with different display servers: Wayland, X11...
- Supports OpenGL, Software Raster, DirectX, Vulkan(experimental) - all automatically selected for you based on the platform and driver support(default behavior that can be changed if desired).
- Good support for animations
- Theming
- Native support for HighDPI
- Native support for multi-screen
- Good API(debatable?)

Actually you get all of that with QtQuick(2). QML does not depend on any UI at all.

Cheers,
_

[anda_skoa]

Or restricting ourselves to QML only UIs, making life harder for those building so-called native widgets apps.

You are likely aware of that but since some people are not: QML does not imply using QtQuick as the UI technology.
BlackBerry10 uses a module/library called Cascades, one could create a module for QtWidgets, etc.

QML can work with anything as an element type as long as it is derived from QObject (directly or indirectly) and default constructable.

Cheers,
_

[Ansla]

I didn't just get out of one bed to fall right into the next one.

If I understand this correctly you are concerned about KDE Frameworks breaking API/ABI? That is not the case, they have the same policy about it as Qt itself https://community.kde.org/Frameworks/Policies.