System76's Pop!_OS COSMIC Desktop To Make Use Of Iced Rust Toolkit Rather Than GTK

[phoronix]

Phoronix: System76's Pop!_OS COSMIC Desktop To Make Use Of Iced Rust Toolkit Rather Than GTK

System76 has been developing their own COSMIC desktop as the next evolution for their Pop!_OS Linux distribution built atop an Ubuntu base. Interestingly with this big COSMIC desktop undertaking, which is being written in the Rust programming language, they have decided to shift away from using the GTK toolkit to instead make use of Iced-Rs as a Rust-native, multi-platform graphical toolkit...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/COSMIC-Desktop-Iced-Toolkit

[middy]

i would complain about yet another toolkit fragmentation, but with gnome really turning GTK into a gnome focused toolkit, and how hard other big projects like gimp has had to port over to GTK3 (we are on GTK4 now), if iced is a simple, fast to pick up toolkit, maybe it can replace GTK as the non strictly gnome focused toolkit for applications.

since moving over to KDE i really like QT now, but i see a lot of people concerned over how its licensed. if iced can fill that spot as a universal toolkit for linux that be great. gtk kinda seemed like it was for a long time.

[cooperate]

It isn’t worth it to write a new toolkit just because of the rust meme. I’m getting Canonical NIH flashbacks. We all loved Unity and Mir, right?

[relsi1053]

Their decisions are amazing.I hope their efforts will be fruitful.

[nist]

Gtk is for Gnome toolkit. And it is for compositing enabled, mostly. Heavy applications such as Firefox and Thundirbird show black artifact from time to time just because the gtk3 libs are slooooooow, and use too much the 3d infrastructure. This is one of the reasons the Qt5 libs are way faster.

[relsi1053]

i would complain about yet another toolkit fragmentation, but with gnome really turning GTK into a gnome focused toolkit, and how hard other big projects like gimp has had to port over to GTK3 (we are on GTK4 now), if iced is a simple, fast to pick up toolkit, maybe it can replace GTK as the non strictly gnome focused toolkit for applications.

since moving over to KDE i really like QT now, but i see a lot of people concerned over how its licensed. if iced can fill that spot as a universal toolkit for linux that be great. gtk kinda seemed like it was for a long time.

agreed,
but qt and kde framework doesn't have any license problem, the only restriction is that free version of qt lts comes one year minus one day later than commercial version.I think we have to wait for the future results.

[relsi1053]

Gtk is for Gnome toolkit. And it is for compositing enabled, mostly. Heavy applications such as Firefox and Thundirbird show black artifact from time to time just because the gtk3 libs are slooooooow, and use too much the 3d infrastructure. This is one of the reasons the Qt5 libs are way fast.

the thing about qt programs is the framework is on another professional level than gtk and similar toolkits

[Eberhardt]

It's not very surprising given their choice to not use libadwaita. IMO libadwaita is a huge step forward in usability for developers in the GTK ecosystem. Without it, I would look for alternatives too.

I assume they might regret this decision in the future because this likely will (much like Flutter) not feel very "native".

[relsi1053]

It's not very surprising given their choice to not use libadwaita. IMO libadwaita is a huge step forward in usability for developers in the GTK ecosystem. Without it, I would look for alternatives too.

I assume they might regret this decision in the future because this likely will (much like Flutter) not feel very "native".

That's right, after the theme crisis, I've recently come to like libadwaita.
but they are trying new approach that makes gtk apps look non-native

[Vasant1234]

Linux is just too fragmented to be successful. There are already too many toolkits and even the ones that are available have no concept of backward compatibility. I read about Gnome team rewriting their gtk+3 apps to support gtk+4.