4 ms·

I feel it's somewhat a deeper change. Older developers are getting kids and have very limited / no time to allocate for open source development (unsupported fin

by keyle 10y ago

I feel it's somewhat a deeper change. Older developers are getting kids and have very limited / no time to allocate for open source development (unsupported financially). Younger developers are chasing the golden goose on the web/mobile, or banging frameworks until sunrise. They feel like old c++ codebase etc. are like old ruins, in deep dark caverns. They wouldn't touch any of it. They're anti-mailing-list and pro-slack. There is a huge gap between the two. It's as if new generations come in and they want to make their own mark. And there is what's sexy ("getting rich yo") and what's completely unsexy ("let's pick up grand pa's code and move it forward on my mac book pro").

scrollaway 10y ago
It's not like you can't make desktop development "sexy", though. You could, but we're not there yet. Qt is a pretty amazing framework (yes, I'm biased). You can write apps in Python, but Python is a clusterfuck for shipping anything cross-platform or any kind of desktop apps. My vision for LXQt was to very much have a modern desktop (targeting recent tech such as fingerprint readers, wayland etc), while retaining some design patterns from the classic desktop ("classic" taskbar or global menu, icon-based desktop grid, etc) without trying to reinvent "desktop shells". Working on the desktop doesn't always mean using ancient tech, nor solving ancient problems - FWIW I'm probably younger than the average HN demographic. We tried having/creating solid developer tooling, good documentation, a decent-looking website but there's only so much you can do when you're lacking manpower in every area. Nearly all my time was spent doing developer outreach.
- keyle 10y ago
  Yes I really like your vision of desktop. And I'm not saying desktop dev is unsexy. I'm a designer/ux/ui developer. There is tons of sexy stuff to do. Just look at the VFX of scifi movies and take cues (http://www.aspenexcel.com/ http://www.aspenexcel.com/), desktop is stuck in the past and could move forward. What I meant is: the code base is ancient to them. The unsexy monolithic code base that's not running on the cloud and doesn't emulate itself 3 times before running. No new developer fresh of the boat wants to pick up large projects codebase, they want to write funky new code from scratch with tons of bugs, because that's where the fun lies when you're not paid.
  - scrollaway 10y ago
    Yah I got what you were saying. It just annoys me that this is the state we're in. I share your love for UX and UI development. For what it's worth, the LXQt project could really use people like you dedicating a few hours now and then on drafting app designs, filing UX issues, etc. If you're ever interested, file an issue on the tracker[0] and cc me (@jleclanche) on it. https://github.com/lxde/lxqt/issues https://github.com/lxde/lxqt/issues
    - acchan 10y ago
      How do you feel about elementary OS? [0] They spend a lot of effort on UX and it's the project I personally believe has the most chance to push Free Software to a wider audience, but on the other hand it's yet another project contributing to fragmentation. I'm not sure where they stand wrt XDG, but I bet if you asked them for help with UX and designing stuff, they would love to collaborate. [0] https://elementary.io https://elementary.io
      - scrollaway 10y ago
        I like that they're doing some good UX work (although it's really just copying apple's HIG... and style), but again it's not very interesting to have a group of people working on apps, when the apps themselves look like crap on any other desktop. On LXQt, I made sure there was no NIH. All the apps that came out of LXQt were lightweight alternatives to bloated stuff from KDE and were "in scope" of the desktop environment. Whereas Elementary includes an Email client. To put things in context: An email client is office software. It's such a burden to maintain that Mozilla dropped support for theirs (Thunderbird), despite its massive userbase. People work on what they want to work I suppose, but we're talking about apps that are never going to be used outside of that one particular desktop. That one desktop out of god knows how many, since everybody is working on their own piece. Are there really so many different ways to do a lightweight tabbed text editor with syntax highlighting in GTK, that Scratch, gedit and Leafpad all need to exist? Or can we admit there's a problem?
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reddotX 10y ago
i'm old and i never liked mailing lists
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by keyle 10y ago

scrollaway 10y ago

It's not like you can't make desktop development "sexy", though. You could, but we're not there yet. Qt is a pretty amazing framework (yes, I'm biased). You can write apps in Python, but Python is a clusterfuck for shipping anything cross-platform or any kind of desktop apps. My vision for LXQt was to very much have a modern desktop (targeting recent tech such as fingerprint readers, wayland etc), while retaining some design patterns from the classic desktop ("classic" taskbar or global menu, icon-based desktop grid, etc) without trying to reinvent "desktop shells". Working on the desktop doesn't always mean using ancient tech, nor solving ancient problems - FWIW I'm probably younger than the average HN demographic. We tried having/creating solid developer tooling, good documentation, a decent-looking website but there's only so much you can do when you're lacking manpower in every area. Nearly all my time was spent doing developer outreach.

keyle 10y ago
Yes I really like your vision of desktop. And I'm not saying desktop dev is unsexy. I'm a designer/ux/ui developer. There is tons of sexy stuff to do. Just look at the VFX of scifi movies and take cues (http://www.aspenexcel.com/ http://www.aspenexcel.com/), desktop is stuck in the past and could move forward. What I meant is: the code base is ancient to them. The unsexy monolithic code base that's not running on the cloud and doesn't emulate itself 3 times before running. No new developer fresh of the boat wants to pick up large projects codebase, they want to write funky new code from scratch with tons of bugs, because that's where the fun lies when you're not paid.
- scrollaway 10y ago
  Yah I got what you were saying. It just annoys me that this is the state we're in. I share your love for UX and UI development. For what it's worth, the LXQt project could really use people like you dedicating a few hours now and then on drafting app designs, filing UX issues, etc. If you're ever interested, file an issue on the tracker[0] and cc me (@jleclanche) on it. https://github.com/lxde/lxqt/issues https://github.com/lxde/lxqt/issues
  - acchan 10y ago
    How do you feel about elementary OS? [0] They spend a lot of effort on UX and it's the project I personally believe has the most chance to push Free Software to a wider audience, but on the other hand it's yet another project contributing to fragmentation. I'm not sure where they stand wrt XDG, but I bet if you asked them for help with UX and designing stuff, they would love to collaborate. [0] https://elementary.io https://elementary.io
    - scrollaway 10y ago
      I like that they're doing some good UX work (although it's really just copying apple's HIG... and style), but again it's not very interesting to have a group of people working on apps, when the apps themselves look like crap on any other desktop. On LXQt, I made sure there was no NIH. All the apps that came out of LXQt were lightweight alternatives to bloated stuff from KDE and were "in scope" of the desktop environment. Whereas Elementary includes an Email client. To put things in context: An email client is office software. It's such a burden to maintain that Mozilla dropped support for theirs (Thunderbird), despite its massive userbase. People work on what they want to work I suppose, but we're talking about apps that are never going to be used outside of that one particular desktop. That one desktop out of god knows how many, since everybody is working on their own piece. Are there really so many different ways to do a lightweight tabbed text editor with syntax highlighting in GTK, that Scratch, gedit and Leafpad all need to exist? Or can we admit there's a problem?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

reddotX 10y ago

i'm old and i never liked mailing lists

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[deleted]

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