Comment by Orygin

Comment by Orygin 4 days ago

31 replies

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> UI framework balkanization has always been, and remains a hideous mess

I thought you were talking about Windows there. There are 4 (5?) different UI paradigms within Windows, and doing one thing sometimes requires you to interact with each of them.

At least on Linux, with GTK/KDE, you can pick a camp and have a somewhat consistent experience, with a few outliers. Plus many apps now just use CSD and fully integrate their designs to the window, so it's hopeless to have every window styling be consistent.

I never had to mind X vs Wayland when starting user applications tho.

wackget 4 days ago

If we're talking about mass adoption of Linux then there really has to be no concept of even "picking a camp". The vast majority of users - even techy people - will not understand what a window manager is, never mind be capable of choosing one.

Yes, there are many UI implementations in Windows but they are almost totally transparent to the user (no pun intended), and they can all run on the same system at once.

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  • Joe_Cool 4 days ago

    Hard disagree. You can run the same programs on any DE or Window Manager or even without one (on pure X11 for example). That's not a hurdle it's a feature.

    Users who don't know about the feature can just use a pre-configured system like Mint Cinnamon and never know about any of these things.

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    • andai 4 days ago

      Yeah I wanted to say, for people who don't care, there's Linux Mint. (I used to spend all my time tinkering with the DE, now I prefer to spend zero!)

      Except even with Linux Mint you have to choose which one ;)

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    • iwanttocomment 4 days ago

      Nope.

      Linux user for decades, but headless since the early aughts. Decided to dip my toes back into the desktop space with Mint Cinnamon.

      I can mirror or run lots of phone apps on Windows or macOS, but ironically, not Linux. I decide to run an Android emulator so I can use some phone-only apps.

      I read up on reviews, then download and install Waydroid as the top contender.

      Does Waydroid work? No. It fails silently launching from the shortcut after the install. Run it from the command line, and, nope, it's a window manager issue. Mint Cinnamon uses X11, not Wayland, and Waydroid apparently needs... Wayland support.

      OK, I log out, log into Mint with Wayland support, then re-launch Waydroid. My screen goes into a fugue state where it randomly alternates between black and the desktop. Try a variety of things, and I guess this is just how it is. Google and try any number of fixes, end up giving up.

      Yes, that's my old pal Linux on the Desktop. Older, faster and wiser, but still flaky in precisely the same ways.

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      • Joe_Cool 4 days ago

        You can't run X11 programs on Wayland without Xwayland.

        Likewise you cannot run Wayland programs on X11 without a wayland compositor like Cage (a wayland kiosk) or Weston. Both run as a window on X11 inside of which Waydroid works just fine.

        It's an odd complaint that incompatible software is incompatible.

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      • nehal3m 4 days ago

        Headless daily driver? Hardcore. What do you use for a browser?

        I've tried it as a challenge for a couple of days (lynx, mutt, some other TUI stuff) and it made some things like Vim stick (although that may have as much to do with that challenge as Tridactyl did). But I couldn't last longer than a week. It does free you from the burden of system requirements. CPU: Optional.

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      • [removed] 3 days ago
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      • hparadiz 4 days ago

        That's cause you're using a distro like mint which is using older builds of stuff.

        Get yourself a most recent plasma 6 Wayland setup with pipewire for audio. It even has rdp server now.

        What's most likely happening is your user space app wants the newer API but you're running old builds from two years ago.

        It will continue to degrade for you unless you fully switch to a Wayland DM.

        Anything built on X11 is basically deprecated now and no one is building on it anymore.

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    • zahlman 4 days ago

      > You can run the same programs on any DE or Window Manager or even without one (on pure X11 for example)

      The Flatpaks I've tried don't seem to understand this, however.

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  • array_key_first 4 days ago

    The same is true of Linux - GTK3 apps runs just fine on Plasma, and so do GTK4, and Qt 5, and Qt 6, and X11 apps, and on.

    Sure they all look slightly different, but it's definitely worse on Windows in that regard.

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  • Orygin 4 days ago

    > Yes, there are many UI implementations in Windows but they are almost totally transparent to the user (no pun intended), and they can all run on the same system at once.

    Just like Linux. You can run most if not all apps in any DE. Yes gnome will look ugly, but that's gnome's way of doing things. If you pick a decent DE, you will have most basic apps using the same styling, and the rest have CSD anyway.

    Each GUI toolkit has its own specialties, but you'll use at most two of them, and they will be kept in separate apps. (Apart from flatpak portals which use gtk instead of the system's).

    Windows has 3-5 different UI/UX layers within the same application ... And the rest have CSD anyway, so they look the same no matter the OS.

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  • anon291 4 days ago

    > Yes, there are many UI implementations in Windows but they are almost totally transparent to the user (no pun intended), and they can all run on the same system at once.

    I mean this is a solved problem on linux using modern distributions like NixOS or even 'normal' distros with flatpak, appimage, etc. I haven't had to deal with anything like this in years.

    The windows UIs are way more different than linux was. There was a time in the 90s where UIs were expected to follow platform specifics. These days, most UIs don't and they're almost kind of like the branding. Thus, this is not as big a deal as you're making it out to be. If anything, things like the gnome apps and gtk4 are more consistent than any windows app.

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  • estimator7292 4 days ago

    No, it's not about users picking a camp, it's about developers.

    It's been a long, long time since I've seen an application utterly fail to load because it's a GTK/QT/etc framework running under a totally different DE.

    Gnome apps look ugly as hell under KDE[0], but they still work. As a user, you don't need to know or care in any way. It'll run on your machine.

    [0]I don't know if they're ugly because of incompatibility or if that's just How Gnome Is. I suspect the latter

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reddalo 4 days ago

>many apps now just use CSD

If there's something I hate about Linux, it's CSD (Client-Side Decorations, in case people don't know what it is).

If I wanted all my apps to look different from each other, I'd use macOS. I want a clean desktop environment, with predictable window frames that are customizable and they all look the same. CSD destroys that.

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  • conorbergin 4 days ago

    Having no CSD at all is unacceptable on small screens IMHO, far too much real estate is taken up by a title bar, you can be competitive with SSD by making them really thin, but then they are harder to click on and impossible with touch input. At the moment I have firefox setup with CSD and vertical tabs, only 7% of my vertical real estate is taken up by bars (inc. Gnome), which is pretty good for something that supports this many niceties.

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  • BizarroLand 4 days ago

    Conversely, I don't want all of my apps to look identical to each other. I want to be able to tell with a submoment of a glance what app I am working on or looking for without having to cognitively engage to locate it, breaking my state of flow in the process.

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    • uKVZe85V 4 days ago

      You're defeating your own point. CSD in practice breaks a basic feature of the desktop : knowing at first glance which of the windows will receive whatever you type on the keyboard.

      For eons the standard was: the only one with the title bar showing the theme accent color. That is consistent, predictable, keeps the user in the flow.

      With CSD each app does whatever inconsistent thing they can fancy. You type and oops deleted something in the wrong window.

      Alas now even many default SSD setups fail at this (selected and non-selected windows look pretty much the same) and keyboard-first workflow is much hindered.

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  • noisem4ker 4 days ago

    Linux doesn't mean GNOME.

    KDE favors server-side decorations.

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    • reddalo 4 days ago

      I know, in fact I'm using Linux Mint.

      The problem is that sometimes you need to use a GNOME app that looks completely out of place.

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  • Orygin 4 days ago

    I mean, most apps I use daily, no matter the OS, have CSD. Teams, Spotify, Slack, Firefox, Postman, IntelliJ etc...

    Doesn't matter which OS they all have different styles. I can understand it's not liked by everyone, but that ship has sailed and no "big" app will use SSD anymore.

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