4 ms·

System76 should build a Rust GUI framework. I can't think of many other companies that are better positioned than them.

mixedCase 5y ago
Doesn't seem like there'd be any good reason to do it. Gtk4 has great low and high level bindings in the form of gtk-rs and relm.
- adamnemecek 5y ago
  There's a very good reason. GTK never looks very good. Also it uses paradigms that are just not idiomatic in Rust.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  Writing GTK4 apps sucks, at least in Rust. They removed so many idiomatic ways to build apps, and all you're left with is a shitty component system that forces you to write incomprehensible UI layout code instead of leaving it to JSON/XML languages that are much better suited to the process. In any case, gtk-rs's bindings after 9.0.0 are hardly usable, and require me to re-write entire apps just to get them to launch in the new and "improved" GTK4 wrapper, now with incredibly blurry text, compositor issues and broken stylesheets... sigh. I, for one, would love to see someone fork GTK3 for desktop purposes. GTK4's development has almost entirely been predicated by the GNOME team (despite how hard they deny it), and additions like libadwaita has made GTK unusable for many. After Pop_OS! was publically harassed by the GNOME team, I kinda expected them to take that project up. I can settle for a desktop fork all the same though.
  - mixedCase 5y ago
    Sounds like you want high level bindings, instead of gtk-rs. Have you tried relm4? > and additions like libadwaita has made GTK unusable for many Could you expand on that?
    - smoldesu 5y ago
      > Sounds like you want high level bindings, instead of gtk-rs. Have you tried relm4? No, because as of 9.0.0 it was perfectly capable of building ergonomic UIs and works with external tools like Glade. It used to have plenty of features, now it does not. I haven't tried relm4 because I'm not going to write any apps for GTK4 while it's still broken (egregious text rendering issues, assistive tools like Cambalanche are completely unfinished and unusable in production, inconsistent compositor blocking, etc.) Plus, relm still doesn't fix the issue of how horrible it is to write GTK code inside a language as restrictive as Rust. With previous versions of gtk-rs you could at least circumvent that by drawing a definitive line between GUI code, builder code, and functional code (what is this, the future?), but now it's all been homogenized into .rs files and endless method calls. What a great development experience! [/s] > Could you expand on that? libadwaita has done nothing but further fracture the Linux landscape while pushing the onus onto me, the developer, to re-write the app to look native on other systems. On GTK2 and 3, I could write once, deliver to any platform and have it look as native as any other system utility. It's flexibility is what gave it it's value, since it was mostly just an open-source widget standard that could be used on any system you please. Unfortunately, now that the GNOME team has become the primary development leader of the GTK project, and projects like libadwaita do more harm than good for the desktop userspace as a whole. It provides me basically no value as a developer, and all of the "muh accessibility" and "muh dependability" arguments are total bunk. GTK3 was arguably more accessible since people with vision impairments could activate high-contrast or complimentary stylesheets that enabled them to... actually use the device. Nowadays, my only option is to assimilate into their brown blob UI or get thrown out for being "wrong". Does that seem like Linux to you?
      - awrmc 5y ago
        That seems like a lot of revisionist history. From what I've seen GTK never had good cross-platform development support. Programs like GIMP and Inkscape always looked and behaved very oddly to me on other platforms. The little support that's there is because interested parties contributed it. If this is what you want, it's self-defeating to refuse to contribute it. If you do not want to use Rust, you can always use another language like Python or Javascript. I might be misunderstanding because the rest of your complaints are jumping around a lot, it would be easier to understand what you're talking about if you shared some code illustrating what the problem is.

Doesn't seem like there'd be any good reason to do it. Gtk4 has great low and high level bindings in the form of gtk-rs and relm.

adamnemecek 5y ago
There's a very good reason. GTK never looks very good. Also it uses paradigms that are just not idiomatic in Rust.
smoldesu 5y ago
Writing GTK4 apps sucks, at least in Rust. They removed so many idiomatic ways to build apps, and all you're left with is a shitty component system that forces you to write incomprehensible UI layout code instead of leaving it to JSON/XML languages that are much better suited to the process. In any case, gtk-rs's bindings after 9.0.0 are hardly usable, and require me to re-write entire apps just to get them to launch in the new and "improved" GTK4 wrapper, now with incredibly blurry text, compositor issues and broken stylesheets... sigh. I, for one, would love to see someone fork GTK3 for desktop purposes. GTK4's development has almost entirely been predicated by the GNOME team (despite how hard they deny it), and additions like libadwaita has made GTK unusable for many. After Pop_OS! was publically harassed by the GNOME team, I kinda expected them to take that project up. I can settle for a desktop fork all the same though.
- mixedCase 5y ago
  Sounds like you want high level bindings, instead of gtk-rs. Have you tried relm4? > and additions like libadwaita has made GTK unusable for many Could you expand on that?
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    > Sounds like you want high level bindings, instead of gtk-rs. Have you tried relm4? No, because as of 9.0.0 it was perfectly capable of building ergonomic UIs and works with external tools like Glade. It used to have plenty of features, now it does not. I haven't tried relm4 because I'm not going to write any apps for GTK4 while it's still broken (egregious text rendering issues, assistive tools like Cambalanche are completely unfinished and unusable in production, inconsistent compositor blocking, etc.) Plus, relm still doesn't fix the issue of how horrible it is to write GTK code inside a language as restrictive as Rust. With previous versions of gtk-rs you could at least circumvent that by drawing a definitive line between GUI code, builder code, and functional code (what is this, the future?), but now it's all been homogenized into .rs files and endless method calls. What a great development experience! [/s] > Could you expand on that? libadwaita has done nothing but further fracture the Linux landscape while pushing the onus onto me, the developer, to re-write the app to look native on other systems. On GTK2 and 3, I could write once, deliver to any platform and have it look as native as any other system utility. It's flexibility is what gave it it's value, since it was mostly just an open-source widget standard that could be used on any system you please. Unfortunately, now that the GNOME team has become the primary development leader of the GTK project, and projects like libadwaita do more harm than good for the desktop userspace as a whole. It provides me basically no value as a developer, and all of the "muh accessibility" and "muh dependability" arguments are total bunk. GTK3 was arguably more accessible since people with vision impairments could activate high-contrast or complimentary stylesheets that enabled them to... actually use the device. Nowadays, my only option is to assimilate into their brown blob UI or get thrown out for being "wrong". Does that seem like Linux to you?
    - awrmc 5y ago
      That seems like a lot of revisionist history. From what I've seen GTK never had good cross-platform development support. Programs like GIMP and Inkscape always looked and behaved very oddly to me on other platforms. The little support that's there is because interested parties contributed it. If this is what you want, it's self-defeating to refuse to contribute it. If you do not want to use Rust, you can always use another language like Python or Javascript. I might be misunderstanding because the rest of your complaints are jumping around a lot, it would be easier to understand what you're talking about if you shared some code illustrating what the problem is.