10 ms·

I know that open source and Linux in general don't need/want another DE, but selfishly... I really want System76 to succeed. They give me the same kind of feeli

by pkulak 5y ago

I know that open source and Linux in general don't need/want another DE, but selfishly... I really want System76 to succeed. They give me the same kind of feeling I had when Apple was kicking butt in the early 2000s. And I think that for them to become a general-audience company, they need to really own more of their software. They have some great ideas, and they've already plugin'ed Gnome to within and inch of it's life; it's time to move out on their own. And it's not like a new DE means apps won't work. DEs are just the window dressing and computer management. What I really wonder about is Wayland support. Is this going to be a brand-new DE that's X only? That would be a real shame. I know System76 has stuck doggedly to X because they sell so many NVidia cards, but NVidia supports GBM now.

UltraViolence 5y ago
I developed software for Mac OS X around 2005 and I can guarantee you that Apple certainly wasn't kicking butt back then and is probably even worse off today with OS X becoming bloated and full of cruft.
aidenn0 5y ago
The shell is implemented in GTK4, and the compositor depends on smithay[1], so I assume they plan for Wayland support. 1: https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-comp/blob/main/Cargo.toml#L19 https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-comp/blob/main/Cargo.toml#L...
- pkulak 5y ago
  Interesting, thanks. Guess they went that way because of Rust, but it would have been super cool to have another wlroots compositor on the block. EDIT: Just found this, which explains a bit: http://way-cooler.org/blog/2019/04/29/rewriting-way-cooler-in-c.html http://way-cooler.org/blog/2019/04/29/rewriting-way-cooler-i...
  - stjohnswarts 5y ago
    You never know what's possible in the future but I imagine right now they're working on the core features so supporting every compositor around is down the road a bit.
mariusmg 5y ago
> I really want System76 to succeed Succeed at what ? Re-implementing Gnome in Rust ?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- pkulak 5y ago
  Selling lots of Linux-based hardware that they design in-house. > Re-implementing Gnome in Rust That seems a bit disingenuous. It's all still GTK.
  - azangru 5y ago
    > lots of Linux-based hardware that they design in-house. Are their Clevo-based laptops designed in-house? If they are, why are they designed with such abysmal speakers, mediocre webcam and no attempt to go past the full-HD screen resolution? Why not design something cool like Framework?
    - pkulak 5y ago
      Nope, I don't consider those in-house. They are working on an in-house laptop, and if it ends up anything like their in-house desktops, it could be really nice.
      - macco 5y ago
        Do you have a source for that? This would really be a game changer. Unfortunately, you need a really great number of units, that building your own custom laptop hardware is feasible. I really which System76 success with that. I always thought, if Dell were smart, they would do their own Linux-based brand, where they would reuse parts from mainline Dell. Kind of how they produce gaming laptops.
        commoner 5y ago
        In November 2019, System76 announced that it would start designing and developing laptops in-house starting January 2020. The development process was estimated to take 2-3 years. The first generation of System76’s in-house desktop line (Thelio) took over 2 years to develop. - Article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/11/20/system76-will-start-designing-and-building-its-own-linux-laptops-beginning-january-2020/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/11/20/syste... - HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21586422 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21586422 If you have any suggestions for the laptop design, System76 is collecting feedback here: https://github.com/system76/laptop-suggestions https://github.com/system76/laptop-suggestions
wmf 5y ago
DEs are just the window dressing and computer management. That's how you end up in a situation where the contents of the window clash with the dressing because more and more apps can't be themed. If they want a consistent look they'll need to fork or write a whole new set of apps.
- nine_k 5y ago
  The irony is that the reason why authors claim when they remove theming is to have a consistent look. For some apps I don't care too much, because I run them in full screen anyway, and their specific look is adjusted to their function: IDEs, DAWs, even graphic editors. But if they do support DE-wide themes, I do appreciate that!
  - wmf 5y ago
    Yeah, GNOME should just admit that it's an OS and stop pretending to be a framework or DE or whatever.
    - SkyMarshal 5y ago
      They sort of do. https://os.gnome.org/ https://os.gnome.org/
  - notriddle 5y ago
    Consistent look? If you’re thinking of the website I’m thinking of [1], the screenshot they lead with isn’t just inconsistent. It’s broken, with light text on a white background. And I’ve seen apps fail in that same way for real when trying custom GTK themes. It’s the same reason web browsers can’t change the system CSS stylesheet without extreme measures like Reader Mode that strip almost all of the design work out of the site: it’s hard to mix design work from two different people (the application author and the theme author) without risking a total mess. [1]: https://stopthemingmy.app/ https://stopthemingmy.app/
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Not only that, you also end up with half baked applications because there isn't a consistent development stack so applications are stuck with UNIX IPC for communication about themselves. GNU/Linux apps will never have something like OLE 2.0 or XPC that actually works consistenly across desktops. There is D-BUS, but not everyone cares it is there.
btdmaster 5y ago
It seems to use wayland: https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-comp/blob/main/src/main.rs#L83 https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-comp/blob/main/src/main.rs#....
- gpm 5y ago
  Yet it also seems to be using an "x11 backend" (only) for now... not sure what to make of this without reading the code a lot closer. https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-comp/blob/main/src/backend/mod.rs https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-comp/blob/main/src/backend/...
  - mmstick76 5y ago
    It is Wayland only, and the X11 backend is for running applications in a nested X11 client.
pxc 5y ago
> I know that open source and Linux in general don't need/want another DE Unpopular opinion, but more DEs is fine and good, especially if they will have teams that are either (a) large or (b) well-funded. Plasma and GNOME are very good, and Unity was actually great to use in its heyday. Imo what we don't really need more of are the conservative, under-resourced 'classic look and feel' DEs like most of the minor players in the space. Those tend to end up incomplete and ill-performing, and there are already lots of them. I hope the existing ones thrive, but I don't think having more f them would do much good. But anything as good as the big two, but with a different focus? Let's see it!
- rjzzleep 5y ago
  If this DE has low resource usage and working freedesktop screensaver protocol implementation and idleness implementation but doesn't force me on their toolbar and window manage I'll take it immediately. Lxqt is the closest to allowing that because it wraps standard tools when possible, but this wrapping of standard tools also means that those tools don't really work. For example, I use slock for screenlocking, but there is actually no working third party freedesktop screensaver implementation that doesn't tie you into their DE. Xsecurelock seems to have hacks for it, but it can't even do something as simple as just showing an image without breaking with the wrong window compositor.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  > more DEs is fine and good, especially if they will have teams that are either (a) large or (b) well-funded. Or if they're interoperable. For instance, icewm doesn't have a screensaver of its own, but it just uses xscreensaver so it's fine.
- addicted 5y ago
  A DE is pointless without the apps that run on Linux. And that's the problem with the proliferation of DEs. Applications, which range from having no developers actively working on them, to the best teams at Microsoft working on them, have to handle yet another DE, and have to deal with the bugs raised by the users of yet another DE, etc. UI/UX is hard enough to begin with, but requiring devs to either maintain several UI/UXs, or try and come up with a design that works across the proliferation of DEs is highly counterproductive.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
nopenopenopeno 5y ago
I left PopOS and never looked back when I needed nvidia-docker to do some deep learning work and learned they had knowingly made it difficult to impossible to reliably use nvidia-docker with PopOS, and they recommended their own unmaintained project that doesn’t even intend to be a replacement for nvidia-docker. It couldn’t have been more useless to me. Breaking compatibility with Ubuntu-compatible dev tools is one thing, but the lack of awareness or consideration of tooling standards is evidence that Pop_OS! is not for me.
- stonogo 5y ago
  They occasionally have driver mismaatches between the upstream containers and the distro-provided driver. This happens because nVIDIA only supports Ubuntu LTS releases and Pop moves faster. I solved it forever by pinning nvidia's repos to a higher priority. Otherwise I can't figure out what "unmaintained project" you're talking about, or what "tooling standards" are.
  - ShamelessC 5y ago
    They are most likely referring to `tensorman` https://support.system76.com/articles/tensorman/ https://support.system76.com/articles/tensorman/ which is regrettably premised on the notion that you have any intention of using Tensorflow in the first place. Unfortunately, the `tensorman` article shows up first (after several complaint/support threads) in a google search result for the subject https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=nvidia%20docker%20pop%20os https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=nvidia%20docker%20pop%... In all actuality, the correct article to reference is https://support.system76.com/articles/cuda/ https://support.system76.com/articles/cuda/ but alas, this is presently broken on PopOS 21.04 unless you pin nvidia's repo's as you've suggested. At the very least, an unpleasant experience. Probably some blame to be shared by system76 and nvidia.
    - nopenopenopeno 5y ago
      It wouldn’t be a significant if the Pop OS developers weren’t telling users that they don’t need nvidia-docker. Of course, they can tell users whatever they want, but I’m not going to trust their OS if this is how they plan to handle things like this.
javier2 5y ago
I don't mind system76 succeeding, that would be great, but I have not really liked any of their laptop offerings. I also really don't want another half funded DE for Linux. I really wish they would dedicate these resources to improving GNOME and gtk instead. Things like VRR, DPI scaling, touchpad behaviour, prioritising wifi driver bugs, basic things like copy/paste interactions between apps, screen sharing et.al. are still less than great experiences on Linux and is more important to improve than a new half baked UI.
- mmstick76 5y ago
  If what we want is a rewrite of GNOME with COSMIC features, that's not going to happen with GNOME. We already submit patches to GTK, and GTK4 is gaining layer-shell protocol support as a result. Screen sharing is already made easy with Pipewire. I've not seen any issues with copy/paste between applications. WiFi driver issues can only be fixed by kernel driver developers with hardware documentation for the exact model of the PCI device they're writing a driver for. The same goes for touchpad drivers, but I've not had any issues with them on our laptops. We sell systems where we can vouch for the quality of the driver support in Linux for the WiFi and touchpad.
  - awrmc 5y ago
    In my opinion, you're wasting your time with layer shell. The design of it is very X11-like and flawed. Panels setting their own position is problematic and prevents the shell from doing layout updates in one pass. You'll want to drop it eventually and use a private shell similar to the way it's done in weston.
southerntofu 5y ago
I agree there's an old-school Apple feel to it. The difference may be that System76 is concerned with user freedom: from coreboot to COSMOS they intend to produce and support FLOSS. I think if Apple had embraced free software early in its history, it could have known a much brighter future (err, present?). Hell, even HyperCard may still be alive and kicking.

by pkulak 5y ago

UltraViolence 5y ago

I developed software for Mac OS X around 2005 and I can guarantee you that Apple certainly wasn't kicking butt back then and is probably even worse off today with OS X becoming bloated and full of cruft.

aidenn0 5y ago

The shell is implemented in GTK4, and the compositor depends on smithay[1], so I assume they plan for Wayland support. 1: https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-comp/blob/main/Cargo.toml#L19 https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-comp/blob/main/Cargo.toml#L...

pkulak 5y ago
Interesting, thanks. Guess they went that way because of Rust, but it would have been super cool to have another wlroots compositor on the block. EDIT: Just found this, which explains a bit: http://way-cooler.org/blog/2019/04/29/rewriting-way-cooler-in-c.html http://way-cooler.org/blog/2019/04/29/rewriting-way-cooler-i...
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  You never know what's possible in the future but I imagine right now they're working on the core features so supporting every compositor around is down the road a bit.

mariusmg 5y ago

> I really want System76 to succeed Succeed at what ? Re-implementing Gnome in Rust ?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
pkulak 5y ago
Selling lots of Linux-based hardware that they design in-house. > Re-implementing Gnome in Rust That seems a bit disingenuous. It's all still GTK.
- azangru 5y ago
  > lots of Linux-based hardware that they design in-house. Are their Clevo-based laptops designed in-house? If they are, why are they designed with such abysmal speakers, mediocre webcam and no attempt to go past the full-HD screen resolution? Why not design something cool like Framework?
  - pkulak 5y ago
    Nope, I don't consider those in-house. They are working on an in-house laptop, and if it ends up anything like their in-house desktops, it could be really nice.
    - macco 5y ago
      Do you have a source for that? This would really be a game changer. Unfortunately, you need a really great number of units, that building your own custom laptop hardware is feasible. I really which System76 success with that. I always thought, if Dell were smart, they would do their own Linux-based brand, where they would reuse parts from mainline Dell. Kind of how they produce gaming laptops.
      - commoner 5y ago
        In November 2019, System76 announced that it would start designing and developing laptops in-house starting January 2020. The development process was estimated to take 2-3 years. The first generation of System76’s in-house desktop line (Thelio) took over 2 years to develop. - Article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/11/20/system76-will-start-designing-and-building-its-own-linux-laptops-beginning-january-2020/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/11/20/syste... - HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21586422 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21586422 If you have any suggestions for the laptop design, System76 is collecting feedback here: https://github.com/system76/laptop-suggestions https://github.com/system76/laptop-suggestions

wmf 5y ago

DEs are just the window dressing and computer management. That's how you end up in a situation where the contents of the window clash with the dressing because more and more apps can't be themed. If they want a consistent look they'll need to fork or write a whole new set of apps.

nine_k 5y ago
The irony is that the reason why authors claim when they remove theming is to have a consistent look. For some apps I don't care too much, because I run them in full screen anyway, and their specific look is adjusted to their function: IDEs, DAWs, even graphic editors. But if they do support DE-wide themes, I do appreciate that!
- wmf 5y ago
  Yeah, GNOME should just admit that it's an OS and stop pretending to be a framework or DE or whatever.
  - SkyMarshal 5y ago
    They sort of do. https://os.gnome.org/ https://os.gnome.org/
- notriddle 5y ago
  Consistent look? If you’re thinking of the website I’m thinking of [1], the screenshot they lead with isn’t just inconsistent. It’s broken, with light text on a white background. And I’ve seen apps fail in that same way for real when trying custom GTK themes. It’s the same reason web browsers can’t change the system CSS stylesheet without extreme measures like Reader Mode that strip almost all of the design work out of the site: it’s hard to mix design work from two different people (the application author and the theme author) without risking a total mess. [1]: https://stopthemingmy.app/ https://stopthemingmy.app/
pjmlp 5y ago
Not only that, you also end up with half baked applications because there isn't a consistent development stack so applications are stuck with UNIX IPC for communication about themselves. GNU/Linux apps will never have something like OLE 2.0 or XPC that actually works consistenly across desktops. There is D-BUS, but not everyone cares it is there.

btdmaster 5y ago

It seems to use wayland: https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-comp/blob/main/src/main.rs#L83 https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-comp/blob/main/src/main.rs#....

gpm 5y ago
Yet it also seems to be using an "x11 backend" (only) for now... not sure what to make of this without reading the code a lot closer. https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-comp/blob/main/src/backend/mod.rs https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-comp/blob/main/src/backend/...
- mmstick76 5y ago
  It is Wayland only, and the X11 backend is for running applications in a nested X11 client.

pxc 5y ago

> I know that open source and Linux in general don't need/want another DE Unpopular opinion, but more DEs is fine and good, especially if they will have teams that are either (a) large or (b) well-funded. Plasma and GNOME are very good, and Unity was actually great to use in its heyday. Imo what we don't really need more of are the conservative, under-resourced 'classic look and feel' DEs like most of the minor players in the space. Those tend to end up incomplete and ill-performing, and there are already lots of them. I hope the existing ones thrive, but I don't think having more f them would do much good. But anything as good as the big two, but with a different focus? Let's see it!

rjzzleep 5y ago
If this DE has low resource usage and working freedesktop screensaver protocol implementation and idleness implementation but doesn't force me on their toolbar and window manage I'll take it immediately. Lxqt is the closest to allowing that because it wraps standard tools when possible, but this wrapping of standard tools also means that those tools don't really work. For example, I use slock for screenlocking, but there is actually no working third party freedesktop screensaver implementation that doesn't tie you into their DE. Xsecurelock seems to have hacks for it, but it can't even do something as simple as just showing an image without breaking with the wrong window compositor.
yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
> more DEs is fine and good, especially if they will have teams that are either (a) large or (b) well-funded. Or if they're interoperable. For instance, icewm doesn't have a screensaver of its own, but it just uses xscreensaver so it's fine.
addicted 5y ago
A DE is pointless without the apps that run on Linux. And that's the problem with the proliferation of DEs. Applications, which range from having no developers actively working on them, to the best teams at Microsoft working on them, have to handle yet another DE, and have to deal with the bugs raised by the users of yet another DE, etc. UI/UX is hard enough to begin with, but requiring devs to either maintain several UI/UXs, or try and come up with a design that works across the proliferation of DEs is highly counterproductive.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

nopenopenopeno 5y ago

I left PopOS and never looked back when I needed nvidia-docker to do some deep learning work and learned they had knowingly made it difficult to impossible to reliably use nvidia-docker with PopOS, and they recommended their own unmaintained project that doesn’t even intend to be a replacement for nvidia-docker. It couldn’t have been more useless to me. Breaking compatibility with Ubuntu-compatible dev tools is one thing, but the lack of awareness or consideration of tooling standards is evidence that Pop_OS! is not for me.

stonogo 5y ago
They occasionally have driver mismaatches between the upstream containers and the distro-provided driver. This happens because nVIDIA only supports Ubuntu LTS releases and Pop moves faster. I solved it forever by pinning nvidia's repos to a higher priority. Otherwise I can't figure out what "unmaintained project" you're talking about, or what "tooling standards" are.
- ShamelessC 5y ago
  They are most likely referring to `tensorman` https://support.system76.com/articles/tensorman/ https://support.system76.com/articles/tensorman/ which is regrettably premised on the notion that you have any intention of using Tensorflow in the first place. Unfortunately, the `tensorman` article shows up first (after several complaint/support threads) in a google search result for the subject https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=nvidia%20docker%20pop%20os https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=nvidia%20docker%20pop%... In all actuality, the correct article to reference is https://support.system76.com/articles/cuda/ https://support.system76.com/articles/cuda/ but alas, this is presently broken on PopOS 21.04 unless you pin nvidia's repo's as you've suggested. At the very least, an unpleasant experience. Probably some blame to be shared by system76 and nvidia.
  - nopenopenopeno 5y ago
    It wouldn’t be a significant if the Pop OS developers weren’t telling users that they don’t need nvidia-docker. Of course, they can tell users whatever they want, but I’m not going to trust their OS if this is how they plan to handle things like this.

javier2 5y ago

I don't mind system76 succeeding, that would be great, but I have not really liked any of their laptop offerings. I also really don't want another half funded DE for Linux. I really wish they would dedicate these resources to improving GNOME and gtk instead. Things like VRR, DPI scaling, touchpad behaviour, prioritising wifi driver bugs, basic things like copy/paste interactions between apps, screen sharing et.al. are still less than great experiences on Linux and is more important to improve than a new half baked UI.

mmstick76 5y ago
If what we want is a rewrite of GNOME with COSMIC features, that's not going to happen with GNOME. We already submit patches to GTK, and GTK4 is gaining layer-shell protocol support as a result. Screen sharing is already made easy with Pipewire. I've not seen any issues with copy/paste between applications. WiFi driver issues can only be fixed by kernel driver developers with hardware documentation for the exact model of the PCI device they're writing a driver for. The same goes for touchpad drivers, but I've not had any issues with them on our laptops. We sell systems where we can vouch for the quality of the driver support in Linux for the WiFi and touchpad.
- awrmc 5y ago
  In my opinion, you're wasting your time with layer shell. The design of it is very X11-like and flawed. Panels setting their own position is problematic and prevents the shell from doing layout updates in one pass. You'll want to drop it eventually and use a private shell similar to the way it's done in weston.

southerntofu 5y ago

I agree there's an old-school Apple feel to it. The difference may be that System76 is concerned with user freedom: from coreboot to COSMOS they intend to produce and support FLOSS. I think if Apple had embraced free software early in its history, it could have known a much brighter future (err, present?). Hell, even HyperCard may still be alive and kicking.