4 ms·

The issue with Linux is that nothing is part of the system. There's no single standard GUI toolkit. There's no single standard windowing system. There's way too

The issue with Linux is that nothing is part of the system. There's no single standard GUI toolkit. There's no single standard windowing system. There's way too many variations of everything.

herbst 5y ago
Some of us don't call that an issue ;) it just makes discussions about what's possible more complicated
badsectoracula 5y ago
This isn't really an issue, you just need people to agree around doing some common stuff (even if they do their own stuff elsewhere). And this is really not that dissimilar under Windows: nowadays you have a lot of different GUI toolkits and applications still need to "opt-in" and explicitly support stuff like scaling, so you have a lot of applications that do not do that.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  They don't even agree with what they are supposed to support from freedesktops.org. On Windows, Win32 doesn't do that by default because it would break backwards compatibility from those Windows 95 binaries being run on a Windows 10 2021 edition, so it must be a conscious decision to enable it. UWP and WinUI work just fine.
  - badsectoracula 5y ago
    Yeah but practically nobody really uses UWP so it doesn't count :-P
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      Windows 11 will change that, as everything gets merged back into Win32 and WinUI takes its place as official UI framework, even for .NET applications.
vetinari 5y ago
For decades, the standard windowing system was X11; and not just for Linux, for other systems as well. The issue was elsewhere - it provided standardized wire protocol and you could not break it. It could extend it, but applications not aware of the extension would be not able to benefit. Windows and Mac on the other hand kept the protocol proprietary and you had to use supplied libraries, you could not talk to the display server directly. So Microsoft and Apple could update these libraries; on Linux, there was no such option, all the apps using wire protocol instead of client libraries would be left out in the dark.

The issue with Linux is that nothing is part of the system. There's no single standard GUI toolkit. There's no single standard windowing system. There's way too many variations of everything.

herbst 5y ago

Some of us don't call that an issue ;) it just makes discussions about what's possible more complicated

badsectoracula 5y ago

This isn't really an issue, you just need people to agree around doing some common stuff (even if they do their own stuff elsewhere). And this is really not that dissimilar under Windows: nowadays you have a lot of different GUI toolkits and applications still need to "opt-in" and explicitly support stuff like scaling, so you have a lot of applications that do not do that.

pjmlp 5y ago
They don't even agree with what they are supposed to support from freedesktops.org. On Windows, Win32 doesn't do that by default because it would break backwards compatibility from those Windows 95 binaries being run on a Windows 10 2021 edition, so it must be a conscious decision to enable it. UWP and WinUI work just fine.
- badsectoracula 5y ago
  Yeah but practically nobody really uses UWP so it doesn't count :-P
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Windows 11 will change that, as everything gets merged back into Win32 and WinUI takes its place as official UI framework, even for .NET applications.

vetinari 5y ago

For decades, the standard windowing system was X11; and not just for Linux, for other systems as well. The issue was elsewhere - it provided standardized wire protocol and you could not break it. It could extend it, but applications not aware of the extension would be not able to benefit. Windows and Mac on the other hand kept the protocol proprietary and you had to use supplied libraries, you could not talk to the display server directly. So Microsoft and Apple could update these libraries; on Linux, there was no such option, all the apps using wire protocol instead of client libraries would be left out in the dark.