3 ms·

I agree that yet another desktop is not needed. Jeff Booth's recent book discusses that a challenger needs a 10x advantage to overtake a large incumbent. Can an

• sjcoles 5y ago
  Feels like we're in a bit of a local minima when it comes to the design and functionality of a desktop. Getting out of that local minima will take a lot of effort. I don't know if there's much advantage to give outside of a paradigm switch in how windowing works a la tiling. Even then tiling isn't for everyone or every task. I do have many users in my day job on Linux laptops/VDI (Gnome 3/Mate) with no experience prior and they have adapted fantastically. So much easier to support than Windows.
• southerntofu 5y ago
  > Can another desktop, this with Rust, bring 10x? I believe so. Rust is a much higher-level language than C so it's easier to hack on, but at the same time has much stronger guarantees. Overall, its type system prevents many many bugs (it is my personal experience that when code compiles, it just works) and enables "fearless refactoring" which for something as complex as a desktop environment is a killer feature. I don't know if counting on GTK as a toolkit is a good choice (though it has certain benefits eg for accessibility) but for sure writing a desktop environment in Rust is an interesting experiment.