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Consolidating the Linux Desktop App Story: An Idea

36 points by jonobacon 9y ago

swiley 9y ago
I really don't understand the drive to make GNU/Linux a "consumer operating system." The consumers don't care and are happy with absolutely awful software. Shiny GUI toolkits that are a huge pain to develop for, and non-free software gos against what the people who use GNU/Linux now want. That's why ubuntu's unity stuff failed, because they chased after users who don't care and alienated the only ones that might use their product.
- mhall119 9y ago
  It's because Linux desktop users want to be able to use consumer software, and the only way they're going to get it is if Linux becomes a consumer operating system
  - merlijn_s 9y ago
    Yes! Developers are people too..
    - bjpbakker 9y ago
      I don't see anyone here who suggested they're not?
  - bjpbakker 9y ago
    Linux desktop has mostly been about using free software IMO. If you don't care about your freedom, why not run macOS? Most vendors of non-free software do support macOS (or viable alternatives are available). I strongly doubt many of them will even come to Linux. Because it requires more standard configurations. Apple had to make its main FS case insensitive before vendors like MS and Adobe were porting their software. I like having my own choice in configuring my system. That amd freedom is why I use Linux desktop.
    - wmf 9y ago
      A small nit here: the Mac has been case insensitive since 1984 and AFAIK Adobe actually started on Mac. But yeah, the main justification for an open-source power-user desktop OS is a backup plan in case macOS dies, which isn't a very good business case.
- jonobacon 9y ago
  > Shiny GUI toolkits that are a huge pain to develop for, and non-free software gos against what the people who use GNU/Linux now want. This is a yuuuge generalization. There are many Linux folks who want a slick consumer experience and there are many that want ratpoison and vim. :-) This idea doesn't take away from the requirements that people have for a non-consumer desktop.
marktangotango 9y ago
I was rolling my eyes reading this and then hit this, which is the real value of the article IMO: > few Linux platforms (if any?) had taken a series whack at building a consumer grade app and developer experience. We tried, it was not successful, and instead of digging up the past I would rather ensure we can inform the future. "What not to do, and how not to do it" are at least one valid take away from that whole era.
- merlijn_s 9y ago
  One of the big issues with their attempt was ~0 support or documentation for porting existing applications. Everything was focused around building an Ubuntu app from scratch using their custom qtquick-based SDK, but that's not what we needed. edit: for more info: This guy made a beautiful summary of the issues with the dev experience around Ubuntu (Touch): http://www.lieberbiber.de/2017/06/20/my-ubuntu-for-mobile-devices-post-mortem/ http://www.lieberbiber.de/2017/06/20/my-ubuntu-for-mobile-de... [starts from 6. "The life of an app developer was too hard."]
  - wmf 9y ago
    Since this thread is about the desktop, don't existing GNOME apps just work under Unity Desktop?
    - michaelmrose 9y ago
      Yes generally all apps designed for any desktop environment just work in others so long as supporting libraries are installed. A few points of division are pulseaudio and wayland. Pretty much everybody now uses pulse and while most apps will work in wayland I don't know of any that require it yet.
- revelation 9y ago
  The biggest takeaway from the era is that no one fucking bothers to write software for 10 different distributions with 15 different ideas on how the most trivial of things are to be accomplished. And here is this guy wanting to build number 16. There is an xkcd on this. This train has left the station.
tomc1985 9y ago
It is foolish to pursue consumer space in this age. The muggles want mobile. This is a wonderful opportunity for us original computer nerds... with the mainstream leaving for their terrible mobile devices computers can finally go back to being tools for power users. The appliance-like expectations of the mainstream was the worst thing that ever happened to traditional computing.
- SubiculumCode 9y ago
  In some ways, I COMPLETELY AGREE. UI 'cleanness' killing 'functionality' is so late 2000's, please. Let's move on. I use my box professionally and need to get shit done. I don't need bouncy. I don't need address bars that hide things and make it non-copyable. Yes, date-modified is a useful sort. Don't hide it like MS did. Yes terminals are awesome and should be front and center. Don't hide them and pretend they are embarrassing and try to hide them under some menu. But in other ways I disagree. There are plenty of options for the power-user to adapt their environment right now. How are we hurting? (Unless you are corporate and they restrict you to some gimped UI.
dcgudeman 9y ago
I would like to see the main distros collaborate on/ invest resources in an IDE for GNOME or w/e desktop environment they choose to standardize on. Seems like there is one already but I don't know how actively it is being developed (https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Builder https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Builder).
rjzzleep 9y ago
I still think the whole Linux Desktop problem can be summarized in one sentence: There is a lack of a simple desktop app development environment. Yes there is GTK and yes there QT. But regardless of how much people may hate Xcode, it allowed people to create solid desktop applications in a fraction of the time that was needed to do the same in either GTK or QT. It's better documented, it's smoother, it's easier to structure your application in terms of the framework rather than programming language. The whole thing is a little like the Rails vs. Flask or Go argument. Yes Flask is really cool, and in Go you can build really cool stuff and it's modular, you select a muxer and stitch it together, it does more requests per second, but if you just want to bash out a quick web application you're better off picking the first option. The app store is hard argument is so far down the line... If you look at all the things Apple did before they pushed their app store it almost doesn't matter.
- dcgudeman 9y ago
  I agree. I commented earlier about how I think they should pool their resources to create an Xcode for linux. Seems like one kind of already exists (https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Builder https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Builder) but I don't how much is being invested in it. And honestly I don't really care that much about the language or the UI framework so long as they just pick one.
  - rjzzleep 9y ago
    That looks like glib. Which is kind of nasty in my opinion. At some point they pushed for Vala, it makes the whole thing a bit more pleasent. But personally I had a feeling it was on life support the entire time. Some bindings were plain broken and impossible to fix, interop had really crappy documentation. At some point I just gave up. (I'm mixing IDE with language/lib right now, but for Gnome it does go hand in hand IMHO)
  - merlijn_s 9y ago
    With the flatpack integration, Builder really has the potential to become the Xcode for Linux. I hope that Ubuntu starts to support Builder. Ubuntu tried something similar with qtcreator and the Ubuntu sdk, but that was a really bad experience. Let's hope that the switch to Gnome also means that Ubuntu switch their efforts to Builder.
gabrielcsapo 9y ago
Correct me if I am wrong but wouldn't the best move forward just be supporting and tuning https://electron.atom.io https://electron.atom.io to make it more performant and supported on linux? Yes it is a battery killer, but I can see it being better if everyone put their tasks to making that a non issue. edit: why the down votes? This is a platform agnostic framework. I understand the performance is bad, but the one reason that linux doesn't have the same applications as windows and OSX is the window manager. A lot of amazing apps have been created using electron which has allowed people to even remotely think about moving over.
- merlijn_s 9y ago
  Programming languages or platforms aren't the issue. Software packaging and distribution is. Porting is easy. Getting your software to users is hard. Look at the Minecraft pocket edition (and its Windows 10 respin), one of the devs said that it would be trivial to port that to desktop Linux but they would have to set up their own payment and distribution system, which just isn't worth it for that tiny market.
  - gabrielcsapo 9y ago
    Github, Gitlab, Bitbucket, it would be great if these platforms had an option to allow non-technically users to install software from them. It would eliminate the need for developers to push to a software platform.
- JohnTHaller 9y ago
  Browser-based apps still kinda suck. Battery-wise, UI-wise in terms of integration, accessibility-wise, etc. And they're a huge step down in programming language availability vs native apps.
  - gorkonsine 9y ago
    Exactly. If using Linux means getting stuck with apps that are horrifically slow and your battery life is awful, whereas just switching to Mac or Windows eliminates these problems, that's not going to make Linux a very attractive alternative.
nisa 9y ago
Unpopular opinion: Ditch everything GNOME, glib, vala, GTK and focus on making KDE, Qt, QML first class software. QML is powerful and is quite fast and can at least be made fast. KDE needs UI and design polish but the foundations are IMHO more sane than GNOME ever was. Move the good stuff from GNOME over to KDE. E.g. kio-slaves and gvfs should be one stable solid pluggable piece of software. And document that well - Good tools are already there - Qt is documented, QtCreator is usable, KDevelop is fine software - merge the efforts to make that platform fast and sane and secure. Also please stop that CADT stuff[1]. Won't happen, but one can dream. 1: http://nullrefer.com/?www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html http://nullrefer.com/?www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html Edit: jwz doesn't like hacker news. removed referer.
- dtzWill 9y ago
  FWIW jwz redirects to something unfortunate, here's the same page via nullrefer.com which seems to do the trick: http://nullrefer.com/?www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html http://nullrefer.com/?www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html and on archive.org: http://web.archive.org/web/20170702194030/https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html http://web.archive.org/web/20170702194030/https://www.jwz.or...
  - nisa 9y ago
    Thank you! Didn't saw that.
- dukoid 9y ago
  BTW: Miguel, Gnome creator, now officially works works at MS
- flukus 9y ago
  First Qt would need to be written in C so it's usable from other languages. The list of broken Qt bindings is much longer than the list of working ones. That or the language bindings need to be part of Qt itself so they can be maintained instead of abandoned. Qml is an awful xml+javascript layer on top of qt that adds nothing but unnecessary complication to building UI's. Using Qt directly is much simpler. > QtCreator is usable Funny, last time I tried it was literally unusable. The new project dialog expanded beyond the height of the screen and all I could do was kill the process.
evv 9y ago
Sorry, but I believe this effort is doomed to fail if you don’t provide compatibility with the open web. It is the only online app distribution environment that has really thrived, other than Apple’s and Google’s. Of course you could do this easily with electron apps. Too much bloat? Fine- go with a ReactNative/NativeScript approach with a JS VM controlling native UI. Hate JS? Fine- compile to it from your language of choice. Refuse to use a runtime? Fine- compile to webassembly. There is no excuse for not having compatibility with the open web. As a developer, I have no interest in building for Linux- I need to go where the users are. But if I can develop a nice web app that can be deployed natively to Linux and mobile platforms- sign me up!
- iBelieve 9y ago
  The big problem with web apps as first-class citizens is UI inconsistency. What I love about native desktop apps is that they should all follow well-defined user interface guidelines and all use the same toolkit/theme. With web apps, you don't get that - every web app uses its own fonts, its own styles, its own UI structure and navigation.
  - wmf 9y ago
    But no major desktop app [1] follows the guidelines because they think branding and novelty trumps consistency. [1] Except apps written by the OS developer.
    - flukus 9y ago
      > [1] Except apps written by the OS developer. I assume you mean apple? Because even the apps built into windows 10 are completely inconsistent with one another or any platform standard.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    Meh, the real problem is bloat (in memory and CPU cycles) and integration with the larger ecosystem. the web has been developed to exist inside a browser, not on the desktop.
digi_owl 9y ago
The real elephant in the room is not a single platform, we already have that (Linux+Gnu+X11). What is missing is STABILITY. The kind of stability we see over at Windows where win32 binaries from the 9x era can run on Windows 10. The kind of stability one have achieved with the bedrock of Linux (and that Torvalds gets ragged on for defending), but that the DE devs piss on every time they make a new weekend project. App stores are a distraction, single platform (more like distro monoculture, it seems to me) is a distraction, And Gnome+Wayland is the last people you want to entrust with anything related to stability (you can get Qt working on things that get GTK screaming about missing dependencies).

36 points by jonobacon 9y ago

I really don't understand the drive to make GNU/Linux a "consumer operating system." The consumers don't care and are happy with absolutely awful software. Shiny GUI toolkits that are a huge pain to develop for, and non-free software gos against what the people who use GNU/Linux now want. That's why ubuntu's unity stuff failed, because they chased after users who don't care and alienated the only ones that might use their product.

mhall119 9y ago
It's because Linux desktop users want to be able to use consumer software, and the only way they're going to get it is if Linux becomes a consumer operating system
- merlijn_s 9y ago
  Yes! Developers are people too..
  - bjpbakker 9y ago
    I don't see anyone here who suggested they're not?
- bjpbakker 9y ago
  Linux desktop has mostly been about using free software IMO. If you don't care about your freedom, why not run macOS? Most vendors of non-free software do support macOS (or viable alternatives are available). I strongly doubt many of them will even come to Linux. Because it requires more standard configurations. Apple had to make its main FS case insensitive before vendors like MS and Adobe were porting their software. I like having my own choice in configuring my system. That amd freedom is why I use Linux desktop.
  - wmf 9y ago
    A small nit here: the Mac has been case insensitive since 1984 and AFAIK Adobe actually started on Mac. But yeah, the main justification for an open-source power-user desktop OS is a backup plan in case macOS dies, which isn't a very good business case.
jonobacon 9y ago
> Shiny GUI toolkits that are a huge pain to develop for, and non-free software gos against what the people who use GNU/Linux now want. This is a yuuuge generalization. There are many Linux folks who want a slick consumer experience and there are many that want ratpoison and vim. :-) This idea doesn't take away from the requirements that people have for a non-consumer desktop.

marktangotango 9y ago

I was rolling my eyes reading this and then hit this, which is the real value of the article IMO: > few Linux platforms (if any?) had taken a series whack at building a consumer grade app and developer experience. We tried, it was not successful, and instead of digging up the past I would rather ensure we can inform the future. "What not to do, and how not to do it" are at least one valid take away from that whole era.

merlijn_s 9y ago
One of the big issues with their attempt was ~0 support or documentation for porting existing applications. Everything was focused around building an Ubuntu app from scratch using their custom qtquick-based SDK, but that's not what we needed. edit: for more info: This guy made a beautiful summary of the issues with the dev experience around Ubuntu (Touch): http://www.lieberbiber.de/2017/06/20/my-ubuntu-for-mobile-devices-post-mortem/ http://www.lieberbiber.de/2017/06/20/my-ubuntu-for-mobile-de... [starts from 6. "The life of an app developer was too hard."]
- wmf 9y ago
  Since this thread is about the desktop, don't existing GNOME apps just work under Unity Desktop?
  - michaelmrose 9y ago
    Yes generally all apps designed for any desktop environment just work in others so long as supporting libraries are installed. A few points of division are pulseaudio and wayland. Pretty much everybody now uses pulse and while most apps will work in wayland I don't know of any that require it yet.
revelation 9y ago
The biggest takeaway from the era is that no one fucking bothers to write software for 10 different distributions with 15 different ideas on how the most trivial of things are to be accomplished. And here is this guy wanting to build number 16. There is an xkcd on this. This train has left the station.

tomc1985 9y ago

It is foolish to pursue consumer space in this age. The muggles want mobile. This is a wonderful opportunity for us original computer nerds... with the mainstream leaving for their terrible mobile devices computers can finally go back to being tools for power users. The appliance-like expectations of the mainstream was the worst thing that ever happened to traditional computing.

SubiculumCode 9y ago
In some ways, I COMPLETELY AGREE. UI 'cleanness' killing 'functionality' is so late 2000's, please. Let's move on. I use my box professionally and need to get shit done. I don't need bouncy. I don't need address bars that hide things and make it non-copyable. Yes, date-modified is a useful sort. Don't hide it like MS did. Yes terminals are awesome and should be front and center. Don't hide them and pretend they are embarrassing and try to hide them under some menu. But in other ways I disagree. There are plenty of options for the power-user to adapt their environment right now. How are we hurting? (Unless you are corporate and they restrict you to some gimped UI.

dcgudeman 9y ago

I would like to see the main distros collaborate on/ invest resources in an IDE for GNOME or w/e desktop environment they choose to standardize on. Seems like there is one already but I don't know how actively it is being developed (https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Builder https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Builder).

rjzzleep 9y ago

I still think the whole Linux Desktop problem can be summarized in one sentence: There is a lack of a simple desktop app development environment. Yes there is GTK and yes there QT. But regardless of how much people may hate Xcode, it allowed people to create solid desktop applications in a fraction of the time that was needed to do the same in either GTK or QT. It's better documented, it's smoother, it's easier to structure your application in terms of the framework rather than programming language. The whole thing is a little like the Rails vs. Flask or Go argument. Yes Flask is really cool, and in Go you can build really cool stuff and it's modular, you select a muxer and stitch it together, it does more requests per second, but if you just want to bash out a quick web application you're better off picking the first option. The app store is hard argument is so far down the line... If you look at all the things Apple did before they pushed their app store it almost doesn't matter.

dcgudeman 9y ago
I agree. I commented earlier about how I think they should pool their resources to create an Xcode for linux. Seems like one kind of already exists (https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Builder https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Builder) but I don't how much is being invested in it. And honestly I don't really care that much about the language or the UI framework so long as they just pick one.
- rjzzleep 9y ago
  That looks like glib. Which is kind of nasty in my opinion. At some point they pushed for Vala, it makes the whole thing a bit more pleasent. But personally I had a feeling it was on life support the entire time. Some bindings were plain broken and impossible to fix, interop had really crappy documentation. At some point I just gave up. (I'm mixing IDE with language/lib right now, but for Gnome it does go hand in hand IMHO)
- merlijn_s 9y ago
  With the flatpack integration, Builder really has the potential to become the Xcode for Linux. I hope that Ubuntu starts to support Builder. Ubuntu tried something similar with qtcreator and the Ubuntu sdk, but that was a really bad experience. Let's hope that the switch to Gnome also means that Ubuntu switch their efforts to Builder.

gabrielcsapo 9y ago

Correct me if I am wrong but wouldn't the best move forward just be supporting and tuning https://electron.atom.io https://electron.atom.io to make it more performant and supported on linux? Yes it is a battery killer, but I can see it being better if everyone put their tasks to making that a non issue. edit: why the down votes? This is a platform agnostic framework. I understand the performance is bad, but the one reason that linux doesn't have the same applications as windows and OSX is the window manager. A lot of amazing apps have been created using electron which has allowed people to even remotely think about moving over.

merlijn_s 9y ago
Programming languages or platforms aren't the issue. Software packaging and distribution is. Porting is easy. Getting your software to users is hard. Look at the Minecraft pocket edition (and its Windows 10 respin), one of the devs said that it would be trivial to port that to desktop Linux but they would have to set up their own payment and distribution system, which just isn't worth it for that tiny market.
- gabrielcsapo 9y ago
  Github, Gitlab, Bitbucket, it would be great if these platforms had an option to allow non-technically users to install software from them. It would eliminate the need for developers to push to a software platform.
JohnTHaller 9y ago
Browser-based apps still kinda suck. Battery-wise, UI-wise in terms of integration, accessibility-wise, etc. And they're a huge step down in programming language availability vs native apps.
- gorkonsine 9y ago
  Exactly. If using Linux means getting stuck with apps that are horrifically slow and your battery life is awful, whereas just switching to Mac or Windows eliminates these problems, that's not going to make Linux a very attractive alternative.

nisa 9y ago

Unpopular opinion: Ditch everything GNOME, glib, vala, GTK and focus on making KDE, Qt, QML first class software. QML is powerful and is quite fast and can at least be made fast. KDE needs UI and design polish but the foundations are IMHO more sane than GNOME ever was. Move the good stuff from GNOME over to KDE. E.g. kio-slaves and gvfs should be one stable solid pluggable piece of software. And document that well - Good tools are already there - Qt is documented, QtCreator is usable, KDevelop is fine software - merge the efforts to make that platform fast and sane and secure. Also please stop that CADT stuff[1]. Won't happen, but one can dream. 1: http://nullrefer.com/?www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html http://nullrefer.com/?www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html Edit: jwz doesn't like hacker news. removed referer.

dtzWill 9y ago
FWIW jwz redirects to something unfortunate, here's the same page via nullrefer.com which seems to do the trick: http://nullrefer.com/?www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html http://nullrefer.com/?www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html and on archive.org: http://web.archive.org/web/20170702194030/https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html http://web.archive.org/web/20170702194030/https://www.jwz.or...
- nisa 9y ago
  Thank you! Didn't saw that.
dukoid 9y ago
BTW: Miguel, Gnome creator, now officially works works at MS
flukus 9y ago
First Qt would need to be written in C so it's usable from other languages. The list of broken Qt bindings is much longer than the list of working ones. That or the language bindings need to be part of Qt itself so they can be maintained instead of abandoned. Qml is an awful xml+javascript layer on top of qt that adds nothing but unnecessary complication to building UI's. Using Qt directly is much simpler. > QtCreator is usable Funny, last time I tried it was literally unusable. The new project dialog expanded beyond the height of the screen and all I could do was kill the process.

evv 9y ago

Sorry, but I believe this effort is doomed to fail if you don’t provide compatibility with the open web. It is the only online app distribution environment that has really thrived, other than Apple’s and Google’s. Of course you could do this easily with electron apps. Too much bloat? Fine- go with a ReactNative/NativeScript approach with a JS VM controlling native UI. Hate JS? Fine- compile to it from your language of choice. Refuse to use a runtime? Fine- compile to webassembly. There is no excuse for not having compatibility with the open web. As a developer, I have no interest in building for Linux- I need to go where the users are. But if I can develop a nice web app that can be deployed natively to Linux and mobile platforms- sign me up!

iBelieve 9y ago
The big problem with web apps as first-class citizens is UI inconsistency. What I love about native desktop apps is that they should all follow well-defined user interface guidelines and all use the same toolkit/theme. With web apps, you don't get that - every web app uses its own fonts, its own styles, its own UI structure and navigation.
- wmf 9y ago
  But no major desktop app [1] follows the guidelines because they think branding and novelty trumps consistency. [1] Except apps written by the OS developer.
  - flukus 9y ago
    > [1] Except apps written by the OS developer. I assume you mean apple? Because even the apps built into windows 10 are completely inconsistent with one another or any platform standard.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Meh, the real problem is bloat (in memory and CPU cycles) and integration with the larger ecosystem. the web has been developed to exist inside a browser, not on the desktop.

digi_owl 9y ago

The real elephant in the room is not a single platform, we already have that (Linux+Gnu+X11). What is missing is STABILITY. The kind of stability we see over at Windows where win32 binaries from the 9x era can run on Windows 10. The kind of stability one have achieved with the bedrock of Linux (and that Torvalds gets ragged on for defending), but that the DE devs piss on every time they make a new weekend project. App stores are a distraction, single platform (more like distro monoculture, it seems to me) is a distraction, And Gnome+Wayland is the last people you want to entrust with anything related to stability (you can get Qt working on things that get GTK screaming about missing dependencies).