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

[mulenmar]

Rewrite it in Ru-- aw c'mon I can't even make the joke.

And yes, I'm one of those people who'd been waiting for an alternative to GNOME's neo-Windows approach and KDE's so-many-options-yet-what's needed-isn't-stable (*cough* color correction applet for Debian *cough*) for some time. Then I found XFCE.

...then Debian upgraded to a new release which no longer had the silly bug in the clock applet forcing you to either deal with 24hr format time, or manually editing the config and then write-protecting it before restarting the applet, so now I can use it without added effort to prevent the config getting purged, so I don't see a need for all the split efforts.

Cinnamon is usually great, and MATE is wonderful, but both duplicate effort in XFCE's exact niche, while starving the existing project of needed developers and optimizers.

(And don't quote the Cathedral vs Bazaar to me, or argue that devs can pick what they want on their own unpaid time, when the cathedral's burned down and the bazaar's shopkeepers are fighting over too-scanty supply lines, thanks. If devs want to be egotistical enough to refuse to work with others if they aren't high up in a makes-them-feel-special NIH project, they can stick to emulators instead of critical infrastructure.)

[MrCooper]

Heavy applications such as Firefox and Thundirbird show black artifact from time to time just because the gtk3 libs are slooooooow,

I understand Firefox & Thunderbird mostly use their own custom toolkit, they use GTK3 mainly to get toplevel windows. So they’re not really suitable for any conclusions about GTK3. (I’m using both applications with the native Wayland backend, and I don’t remember seeing any black artifacts)

and use too much the 3d infrastructure.

Rather the opposite. GTK3 is mostly software rendering. GTK4 uses OpenGL for all its drawing, and it’s much faster.

[Quackdoc]

What features are you talking about exactly? Lmao

I tried wayfire but man, this was not usable in any kind of way.

wayfire does have some neat gimicks, but some things I miss dearly are snapping to the edges when ctrl dragging, and having easy themeing and stuff. but that being said, it's fast, the effects are kinda useful actually, I can have a terminal command on another virtual workspace and just peak at it using the cube effect. and the basics are all there. being based on wlroots, it has the same blood as sway, meaning a lot of the sway related apps work fine too, I can have pretty nice features like mpv-paper for video background, a lot of the wlroots specifc apps work great too.

[Danny3]

I wonder why they didn't want to use Qt?
It's just because Qt wants C++ and doesn't support Rust?
anyway, good for them experimenting, but I'm afraid they will get nowhere near KDE Plasma and ohter KDE software quality.
They should've rather join KDE efforts, improve it to have HDR support too and then making a high quality theme for it that matches their needs.
This Linux DEs fragmentation is insane and it's keeping Linux behind.
I wish we had, besides all these experiments a high-quality and advanced desktop environment that fits most purposes.
I think KDE Plasma is the closest to that.

[Quackdoc]

I wonder why they didn't want to use Qt?
It's just because Qt wants C++ and doesn't support Rust?
anyway, good for them experimenting, but I'm afraid they will get nowhere near KDE Plasma and ohter KDE software quality.
They should've rather join KDE efforts, improve it to have HDR support too and then making a high quality theme for it that matches their needs.
This Linux DEs fragmentation is insane and it's keeping Linux behind.
I wish we had, besides all these experiments a high-quality and advanced desktop environment that fits most purposes.
I think KDE Plasma is the closest to that.

QT apps look like poop. KDE looks dated, and no ammount of skinning fixes that, QT apps look very stiff in general. I honestly do not think QT is capable of good looking and aesthetically pleasing UI IMO

[mirmirmir]

Bubble is yours.
Actually, it´s the sand you buried your head into.

There is a massive amount of people who just barely cope with Gnome or KDE, and wants something more convincing. But you need to read and have an open mind to acknowledge it.

Be opend minded, delusional boy. Most people dont care about your lil fight

[brent]

This seems like a super short-sighted decision. Most so-called alternative UI toolkits are very much lacking in internationalization/localization features, accessibility integration and the like. These are things are hard problems that take a lot of time to get right, yet you cannot cannot just ignore them nowadays. GTK and Qt are "bloated" for legitimate reasons.

[Quackdoc]

This seems like a super short-sighted decision. Most so-called alternative UI toolkits are very much lacking in internationalization/localization features, accessibility integration and the like. These are things are hard problems that take a lot of time to get right, yet you cannot cannot just ignore them nowadays. GTK and Qt are "bloated" for legitimate reasons.

seems like something pop would have throughly gone over, so I doubt it's an issue for iced, or if it is, not one pop would find insurmountable. not to mention if GTK or QT are a standard, then the standard has a very low bar

[brent]

seems like something pop would have throughly gone over, so I doubt it's an issue for iced, or if it is, not one pop would find insurmountable. not to mention if GTK or QT are a standard, then the standard has a very low bar

There's no text shaping, or any other more basic support for internationalized text:

https://github.com/iced-rs/iced/issues/250

https://github.com/iced-rs/iced/issues/33

There's no specific accessibility support:

https://github.com/iced-rs/iced/issues/282

https://github.com/iced-rs/iced/issues/552

Input methods (IMEs) are not really supported either, so good luck inputting Japanese and the like:

https://github.com/iced-rs/iced/issues/979

Yeah no. This toolkit is garbage tier. Making something that looks neat is simple, and that is what many of these alternative toolkits achieve. Making it work well for everyone is hard and I don't know a single alternative UI toolkit that gets this even halfway right.

[nist]

I understand Firefox & Thunderbird mostly use their own custom toolkit, they use GTK3 mainly to get toplevel windows. So they’re not really suitable for any conclusions about GTK3. (I’m using both applications with the native Wayland backend, and I don’t remember seeing any black artifacts)



Rather the opposite. GTK3 is mostly software rendering. GTK4 uses OpenGL for all its drawing, and it’s much faster.

Same issues can happen with regular gtk3 applications. These artifacts where more frequently years ago.

The Gtk3 libs do use opengl.

Faster or smoother? It's not the same.