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

[capnbfg]

It's called logic. As you yourself noted, lots of Distros ship with Gnome. That wouldn't be the case if nobody wanted to use it. Why bother installing a distro, just to switch DEs, when you can just install one with a DE you actually like? And there wouldn't be any development for Distros nobody uses. Or why should Distros keep defaulting to GNOME when they know pretty much every user switches to another DE anyways? This isn't Windows

That's a fairly long winded way of saying "no". Talk is cheap; I asked for data.

Also, you're posing rhetorical questions, but these questions actually have legitimate answers that undermine your argument.

Why not just install a distro with a DE you actually like? Well, one big reason is because enterprise software support is often tied to a specific distro, namely RedHat. That's exactly why both my past and present employers used CentOS; it was essentially the free version of RedHat. Just move /etc/centos-release to /etc/redhat-release, edit the contents to say it's RedHat, and the expensive CAD software is none the wiser. Fortunately, the option of switching DEs exists. It enables us to meet our platform requirements while also offering the user an interface that makes them happy and productive.

Why default to Gnome if users will just switch to something else? Because the people developing and maintaining the distro get to make that choice. Clearly they prefer that DE and believe it is the best fit for their project. And yet they still enable users who have a different preference to switch DEs.

I'll pose the reverse question: why would distros offer an easy way to change the DE if they believed like you that nobody should do that?

[Quackdoc]

I found Gnome to be the most sexy DE offering a good balance of eye candy and minimalism. I like it's design language. I just wish they'll eventually move to rust. I also hope pop_os to achieve the same high level of UX/language design.
I hate though this fragmentation, so much efforts wasted instead of co-operate towards the Year of the Great Linux

gnome + pop cooperation is something very unlikely to happen lol.

[horizonbrave]

I found Gnome to be the most sexy DE offering a good balance of eye candy and minimalism. I like it's design language. I just wish they'll eventually move to rust. I also hope pop_os to achieve the same high level of UX/design language.
I hate though this fragmentation, so much efforts wasted instead of co-operating towards the Year of the Greater Linux.. but I guess that's just human capitalist nature

[Artim]

Do you have any data to back up these opinions? I've been searching for any reputable source attesting to relative market share among the various DEs and so far have come up empty handed. The best I can find are vague claims like "one of the most popular" or "arguably the most popular". In other words "this is my opinion but I have no proof". If you have some data to share, I'd love to see it.

I don't doubt that Gnome has a lot of installs due to which distros include it as the default, but I do question how many users actually like Gnome or stick with Gnome when given a choice.

Anecdotally, here's what I have seen.

I'm an EE at a large tech company. Our company issued laptops run Windows, but for security reasons all development work is done inside a CentOS VM on a remote server. When the transition from Gnome2 to Gnome3 happened a couple years ago, the complaints were overwhelming and many users switched to KDE since it was the only other choice we were given. About 6 months later IT forced all the remaining Gnome users over to MATE and disabled Gnome altogether, due to the sheer volume of complaints they were getting.

Prior to this job I worked at a startup company (only 20 people at our local office), where engineering was my primary role and IT was my secondary role. I personally hand-built most of the machines in our compute cluster. All were running CentOS. When we upgraded to CentOS 7 I anticipated the backlash and prepped all the desktop workstations with KDE, MATE, and Gnome3 Classic. Disk space was no concern, so why not offer the users interactive selection of their DE? One user was a die hard KDE fan who predictably chose that. Another user gave Gnome a serious try, but after about a week he gave up and switched to MATE. The rest quickly chose MATE.

I know a few people who use Linux at home, I know far more people who use Linux professionally, and I cannot name a single person who prefers Gnome3. Personally, I tried it long ago and quickly moved on. I've also experimented with KDE, LXDE, MATE, and Cinnamon. These days I'm mainly an XFCE user. Our home NAS runs openSUSE with LXDE, but that is the exception. My primary desktop PC, our backup server, our TV PC, our laptop, and my daughter's netbook all run Xubuntu. Recently my wife switched from Windows 10 to Kubuntu. I haven't used that enough yet to decide whether I like it better than Xubuntu, but I can already confidently say that it's better for me than Gnome.

I've seen articles and reviews about System76 hardware and Pop!_OS, and I conceptually I love what they're doing. But frankly, the only reason I haven't experimented with Pop!_OS is because the default DE is Gnome. I'm really interested to see what they do for their own DE.

It's called logic. As you yourself noted, lots of Distros ship with Gnome. That wouldn't be the case if nobody wanted to use it. Why bother installing a distro, just to switch DEs, when you can just install one with a DE you actually like? And there wouldn't be any development for Distros nobody uses. Or why should Distros keep defaulting to GNOME when they know pretty much every user switches to another DE anyways? This isn't Windows

[Nozo]

Why shouldn't we care? A system that looks chaotic because every app users another UI toolkit looks simply unprofessional. So especially a Distro that wants former Windows users as their users, that shouldn't be the goal

Third party app developers also use their own toolkits even on Windows, why don't you say anything against them? And as i said before, if you want a dictatorship, there is already iOS for that, where you have even a SINGLE web rendering engine, and web browser developers are forced to use what are basically Safari wrappers, including Mozilla itself, that is the price to pay if you want uniformity.

And since you said about solutions, what solutions? Because then there is that Linux is not the only OS that uses these toolkits, which would mean that *BSDs and Illumos would also have to disappear, which is impossible, and i mention them because those are the choices that several Linux users are considering in the case of a Linux desktop cataclysm. So certain proposals from people like Artem S. Tashkinov are impossible, as it is on the same level as asking Apple, Microsoft, and other prorietary OSes vendor to abandon their own developments and come together to make the "single and best proprietary operating system" no one will or should pay attention to what a random guy on the internet says, and the reasons for it are very powerful.

[Nozo]

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.

Precisely the failure of CDE and Motif was due apart from the issue of proprietary licenses, the lack of differentiation was also a huge factor, if you want to have a minimal chance of success and/or earn a niche, you must differentiate from the rest, simple. Or would you use ReactOS instead of the real thing (Windows)? Obviously not, that's why you use the original and that's it, that's what any sane person will do, no matter how pedantic this sounds.

If other operating systems like FreeBSD for example want to beat Linux on the desktop, they will have to create their own widget toolkits as well. For simple reasons of self-sufficiency, and it's what can happen if what certain people want to happen happens, many developers from other desktop environments will migrate to some BSD, create new things there and come to Linux, frustrating those people's plans, just see what happened with TrueOS and Lumina DE. I can't imagine how will be with widget toolkits. Your OS will never get anywhere if relies on a third-party ecosystem

[mmstick]

how are the iced folk to work with? I assume pretty good?

Very friendly community

[Quackdoc]

We're actually working on improving that right now, along with adding multi-line text support. We have a prototype that's using rustybuzz for text shaping and rusttype for rendering. Work is also being done on locating fonts to cache and fall back on when the default font is missing glyphs. This work will be upstreamed once it's complete.

how are the iced folk to work with? I assume pretty good?

[mmstick]

I built a couple of the iced example apps to check, and it doesn't render fonts correctly either. However, unlike GTK there's probably not an ideological opposition to correct rendering on desktops and budget laptops, and they'd probably be more welcoming of external contribution than the GTK people are.

We're actually working on improving that right now, along with adding multi-line text support. We have a prototype that's using rustybuzz for text shaping and rusttype for rendering. Work is also being done on locating fonts to cache and fall back on when the default font is missing glyphs. This work will be upstreamed once it's complete.

[yump]

I built a couple of the iced example apps to check, and it doesn't render fonts correctly either. However, unlike GTK there's probably not an ideological opposition to correct rendering on desktops and budget laptops, and they'd probably be more welcoming of external contribution than the GTK people are.