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I like the very entertaining and thorough documentation. However this just shows that FOSS GUI programming is in such a dire state that people have to resort to

by sprash 5y ago

I like the very entertaining and thorough documentation. However this just shows that FOSS GUI programming is in such a dire state that people have to resort to TUIs because it is so much easier to develop for and to deploy.

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
Is that really a FOSS issue?
- sprash 5y ago
  The abandonment of established interfaces happens on purpose on proprietary platforms to force customers to upgrade. The abandonment of established interfaces happens on FOSS platforms equally as frequent without any obvious purpose.
  - lavabiopsy 5y ago
    I'm not sure what you mean? I would suggest to take a look at the release notes for the newest Qt or GTK for example, if you want to see what the purpose of various changes are.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
    > The abandonment of established interfaces happens on FOSS platforms equally as frequent without any obvious purpose. My laptop literally has CDE installed on it, using motif, indistinguishable from how it looked and acted decades ago. GTK is not the world.
    - lavabiopsy 5y ago
      There are reasons for the changes in GTK, though you may not agree with them, if you are confused about some then feel free to check the release notes. Or you can ask and I may be able to explain. But if you don't have any issues with motif and it works for you then that's great.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
        I was just using GTK as (the poster child of) a toolkit that does change things. It's not my preference at all, but in its own world it's fine.
mbreese 5y ago
The choice between TUI vs GUI is far from that simple. It’s too reductive to say that TUIs are common in FOSS because the state of GUI programming is in such disarray. TUIs are easier to deploy and the GUI landscape is fragmented. But the only reason why TUIs are common is because the users are comfortable with them. I think that the proportion of users who are comfortable at a command line is much higher with Linux, BSD, or even macOS users than other OSs. If the users weren’t comfortable using a CLI or TUI, there would be a bigger push to unify the GUI landscape. Otherwise no programs would get written because they wouldn’t be used.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Maybe I should dust off my Turbo Vision and Clipper manuals.
shirro 5y ago
There is a lack of good documentation but that is not the whole story. Both the Gnome and KDE desktops have a huge amount of software running on them despite the barriers. Writing for a modern native GUI strongly favours an OO language like a c#/Dart/Swift/Vala/Java. And it isn't just the language but the ABI. A java or gobject or c++ gui library doesn't always map well onto another language. There is a lot of code out there where adding a GUI isn't trivial or fun. Tk used to fill this gap a bit but it fell out of fashion. It is trivial to output formatted text to a terminal from any language with some ANSI escape codes. It also easy to do templating and html to provide a web interface.
- H8crilA 5y ago
  An HTML server is a pretty good UI for a lot of things. That is if a text config file is insufficient. Also, terminal apps are great! Where would I be without a decent terminal text editor? Certainly not SSH'd into some cloud instance.

by sprash 5y ago

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago

Is that really a FOSS issue?

sprash 5y ago
The abandonment of established interfaces happens on purpose on proprietary platforms to force customers to upgrade. The abandonment of established interfaces happens on FOSS platforms equally as frequent without any obvious purpose.
- lavabiopsy 5y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean? I would suggest to take a look at the release notes for the newest Qt or GTK for example, if you want to see what the purpose of various changes are.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  > The abandonment of established interfaces happens on FOSS platforms equally as frequent without any obvious purpose. My laptop literally has CDE installed on it, using motif, indistinguishable from how it looked and acted decades ago. GTK is not the world.
  - lavabiopsy 5y ago
    There are reasons for the changes in GTK, though you may not agree with them, if you are confused about some then feel free to check the release notes. Or you can ask and I may be able to explain. But if you don't have any issues with motif and it works for you then that's great.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
      I was just using GTK as (the poster child of) a toolkit that does change things. It's not my preference at all, but in its own world it's fine.

mbreese 5y ago

The choice between TUI vs GUI is far from that simple. It’s too reductive to say that TUIs are common in FOSS because the state of GUI programming is in such disarray. TUIs are easier to deploy and the GUI landscape is fragmented. But the only reason why TUIs are common is because the users are comfortable with them. I think that the proportion of users who are comfortable at a command line is much higher with Linux, BSD, or even macOS users than other OSs. If the users weren’t comfortable using a CLI or TUI, there would be a bigger push to unify the GUI landscape. Otherwise no programs would get written because they wouldn’t be used.

pjmlp 5y ago
Maybe I should dust off my Turbo Vision and Clipper manuals.

shirro 5y ago

There is a lack of good documentation but that is not the whole story. Both the Gnome and KDE desktops have a huge amount of software running on them despite the barriers. Writing for a modern native GUI strongly favours an OO language like a c#/Dart/Swift/Vala/Java. And it isn't just the language but the ABI. A java or gobject or c++ gui library doesn't always map well onto another language. There is a lot of code out there where adding a GUI isn't trivial or fun. Tk used to fill this gap a bit but it fell out of fashion. It is trivial to output formatted text to a terminal from any language with some ANSI escape codes. It also easy to do templating and html to provide a web interface.

H8crilA 5y ago
An HTML server is a pretty good UI for a lot of things. That is if a text config file is insufficient. Also, terminal apps are great! Where would I be without a decent terminal text editor? Certainly not SSH'd into some cloud instance.