32 ms·

A new wave of Linux applications

683 points by Vinnl 5y ago

Decabytes 5y ago
Looking forward to the improvements KDE will make in 2022!
jteppinette 5y ago
> An example is Flathub, where new applications using the most modern toolkits and UX strategy appear every day, providing "just works" alternatives to complex older FOSS software I go to Flathub. Click the first app I see. <App not found>
- vondur 5y ago
  What app was it?
  - bobthecowboy 5y ago
    Not OP, but I went to go look and found the Minecraft one (which was one of the six apps above the fold in "Popular") leads to that: https://flathub.org/apps/details/io.mrarm.mcpelauncher https://flathub.org/apps/details/io.mrarm.mcpelauncher ``` App Not Found No app with the ID io.mrarm.mcpelauncher was found on Flathub. Try searching for the app using the search bar above. ```
goldcountry 5y ago
That's cool and all, but who is actually out here using a linux phone?
- fartcannon 5y ago
  Hey there!
- fsflover 5y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24959506 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24959506 And I'm using a Pinephone as a daily driver, too.
  - Arnavion 5y ago
    (Note that kop316, who has the second comment there complaining about lack of MMS support, went on to implement MMS support themselves by writing mmsd-tng. Many distros added it recently and it supposedly should work with Phosh's Chatty and on SXMO.)
    - kop316 5y ago
      Yep, I wrote most of the support in for Chatty myself as well. Chatty works pretty well with MMS, and I have been using a Pinephone/Librem 5 full time for almost 2 months now.
- dleslie 5y ago
  I have a Pinephone. I tried, in earnest, to use it as a daily driver; but the software stack was hideously unperformant and the camera was just too awful. I have young kids; I need to take pictures quickly on occasion. I couldn't rely on the phone to do that, not by a long shot, and so it remains a pointless curiousity that I purchased.
  - taeric 5y ago
    I can't rely on any phone's camera for speed. Sucks to hear this one is even worse than normal.
    - dleslie 5y ago
      The camera is so bad that it's even a shame that they bothered adding it. The additional cost for the hardware clearly wasn't worth it.
      - floren 5y ago
        Seconded. It's been several years of development time and I still think I'd get better pictures with one of those cameras that saved pictures on floppy disks. I've bought two Pinephones and I hope things go well but man, I install Mobian and wonder what exactly their long term plan is... it runs like an absolute dog, worse than a $30 Android prepaid phone. The only way to get reasonable performance has been to use sxmo, which is ok for me but not the experience normal people want.
        fsflover 5y ago
        If you need a good camera, consider Librem 5 instead.
        seba_dos1 5y ago
        Note that while it's already possible to get really good looking photos out of L5 camera, there's still quite a lot of software work left to do for it to work in an effortless point-and-shoot fashion. It will come, just be aware it's not there yet.
- jcelerier 5y ago
  If my Jolla phone hadn't kicked the bucket i'd definitely still use it
  - m4rtink 5y ago
    I have Xperia 10 II with officially supported Sailfish OS as my primary device, with family member using Xperia X in similar capacity. :)
- kop316 5y ago
  I am. I have used a Pinephone with Mobian daily for a while, I am currently using a Librem 5 with PureOS. I only turned on my Android phone once since December, and that was to factory reset it since I wasn't using it.
- asddubs 5y ago
  I'm not, but I would love to some day. I fucking hate my android phone (and the iphone is just as terrible, in slightly different and often the same ways). Thank god for the people tinkering on pinephones and purism phones, paving the way for something less awful, with control in the hands of the user We're not there yet, but we won't ever be unless people put effort into it. The linux desktop used to suck, too
  - nomel 5y ago
    To me, phone os is an easy way to get to apps, switch between apps, and handle notifications. It appears to be something else for you. What is an ideal phone for you, and how would Linux help achieve that experience?
    - kelnos 5y ago
      Not the person you're replying to, but I have the same issue. The phone OS is indeed a way to get to apps for me. And the problem is that the "alternative" phone OSes don't have access to apps that I've woven into my day-to-day-life: banking apps, contactless payments, video streaming, music streaming, etc. None of these are available on platforms other than iOS or Android, unfortunately. Some of them have web experiences, but they're terrible on mobile when compared to their app. I, too, would love to run a mobile-optimized Linux desktop on my phone, but it's not about the desktop, it's about the apps and functionality it gives me access to. So I'm stuck with Android for the time being. What would be really cool is if these alt mobile OSes could perfectly emulate Android to the point that Google's SafetyNet would believe that everything is a-ok. Not sure if that's even technically possible, but could help bridge the gap and allow alternative OSes to gain some market share among people who aren't willing to give up many of their usual mobile apps. > What is an ideal phone for you, and how would Linux help achieve that experience? The main bits for me are privacy and control. I refuse to use an iPhone because I viscerally hate Apple's stranglehold over the platform. I very reluctantly use Android, hating that Google is always watching. A fully-open mobile OS where I get to choose what runs on it, how it runs, and what access it gets would solve both of those problems.
    - asddubs 5y ago
- goodpoint 5y ago
  A bunch of people are. If you compare the efforts of communities of volunteers against the investments in google/apple phones you can already call FOSS phones a big success.
  - goodpoint 5y ago
    The idiotic silent downvotes are unnecessary.
    - Arnavion 5y ago
      This board has a real hate-boner for the PinePhone for some reason. Any phone that isn't 100% as capable as a flagship iOS or Android gets defined as "not ready to be a daily driver", because people think their definition of "daily driver" is some universal constant that everyone abides by. The rest of us who happily use it as a daily driver apparently don't exist in their worldview. Already in this subthread there's "We're not there yet", "I couldn't conscientiously hand it to a non-techy", "It's nowhere near ready to be used as a phone outside of tinkering", "something that falls apart in their hands like wet sawdust", ...
      - goodpoint 5y ago
        I wonder if it's a sign of the HN crowd moving from startups to FAANGs. So much for the "hacker" news...
      - dang 5y ago
        > This board has a real hate-boner for the PinePhone for some reason What a strange thing to say. It's hugely popular on HN. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=pinephone%20comments%3E3&sort=byDate&type=story&storyText=none https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=pinephone&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
        Arnavion 5y ago
- pinephoneguy 5y ago
  I do. I run Fluxbox on PostMarketOS. I use dino with jmp.chat for mms. I use emacs diary+git for calendar. I have some custom power management service I wrote shortly after getting the phone so it gets long battery life. My bank and brokerage both have decent web sites. I'll never go back to a non-Linux phone, I'd rather not have a phone at all than tolerate the older mobile OSes.
- seba_dos1 5y ago
  I am, typing from my Librem 5 right now during my usual morning browsing.
- urthor 5y ago
  Unlikely to, soon. If I could flash Android hardware I would... one day. Phones are battery operated. Performance per watt is mission critical.
chakkepolja 5y ago
Rise in cross platform frameworks would be a positive trend. When I am writing a flutter application, I often run on desktop directly and resize to mobile shape. That works good enough unless I am writing a mobile-specific feature. This probably means most flutter apps can run on other linux based phones as well.
- treis 5y ago
  Cross platform frameworks have already risen in Electron. Every application I use at work runs on Linux. VS Code, Slack, Zoom, Postman, and others I can't think of are all Electron. And they all perform fine. The speed difference between JS and native is meaningless in 99% of cases given how fast modern CPUs are. RAM usage is similar. Everyone complains about it, but I've got 32 GB and I don't get above 8GB usage when using these apps.
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    Probably good for there to be competition in the cross-platform space. Maybe Electron is a little overly-bashed, but it's best when it's not the only game in town.
  - mwcampbell 5y ago
    Nitpick: Zoom isn't Electron-based on any platform AFAIK. On Linux it uses Qt. On Windows it uses its own fork of DuiLib [1]. I don't know about Mac. [1]: https://github.com/duilib/duilib https://github.com/duilib/duilib (apparently only documented in Chinese)
  - chakkepolja 5y ago
    I don't think any of the electron applications you mention have mobile-like UIs which can be easily ported to mobile linux. Also, flutter memory consumption is often 1/3 or 1/4 of the equivalent electron app, which is significant.
getcrunk 5y ago
One of the biggest drawbacks to me about Linux is the aesthetic quality. This gives me alot of hope. As the author said this might really well be a turning point.
- moron4hire 5y ago
  I've been really happy with Cinnamon on Linux Mint with the MintY-Dark themes.
  - debo_ 5y ago
    Zorin is also beautiful. I installed it on a whim, and it became my daily driver just because it felt so nice to me.
    - akselmo 5y ago
      I'm on Kubuntu (so KDE), been using it for over 6 months now. I am the kind of person that loves setting up the desktop and all the apps just like I want, so it has been perfect for me, although the defaults are pretty solid as well. The default Breeze theme also is really pretty, I went through all kinds of themes but eventually settled with Breeze due to how good it looks.
  - zelphirkalt 5y ago
    I just switched back to XFCE on my desktop, because panel launchers cannot be properly configured in a simple way. Too bad usability made all the good looks useless. And I feel a renewed assuredness, that XFCE is the most productive DE for me. I had it configured in 10 minutes and it does everything I want in the way I want. Also XFCE these days can also look nicely. Still, usability (and that includes being able to configure things easily) is king and I cannot stand it, if I cannot configure annoyances away.
    - moron4hire 5y ago
      Panels are indeed a gigantic pain in the ass to configure. It is possible, but I feel like I have to go to three completely unrelated places each time I want to. And I can never remember which place is the one to go to. How does XFCE do with high-DPI displays? My only other complaint with Cinnamon is that the window controls are a tad small. It's been a long time since I used XFCE.
traverseda 5y ago
I have to say I just don't like Gnome's design. The shift away from text and towards more and more abstract icons, the "don't theme my app movement", removing features I consider pretty essential like typeahead.... Maybe mobile is where their weird (to me) design choices will finally shine though. Also looking forward to what KDE can accomplish in this space.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
  I love Gnome's design. Maybe I'd make title bars skinnier and add corner tiling?
- kitsunesoba 5y ago
  The “don’t theme my app” thing just tells me that GNOME/GTK+/Adwaita aren’t built in a way that gracefully handles theming, or that devs building apps with them are doing things like hard coding colors when they should be using dynamic system colors such as those provided by UIColor[0] in UIKit. [0]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uicolor/ui_element_colors https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uicolor/ui_e...
  - akselmo 5y ago
    I feel like partially the movement happened because some themes made the apps unusable and then instead of blaming the theming, users blamed thee app developers instead.
    - kitsunesoba 5y ago
      In some cases badly designed themes (like dark gray labels on black backgrounds) are the culprit, but most often it’s a result of the app developers hard coding colors in their UI elements assuming all users will be using a similar theme. That’s not only bad for custom theme users, it’s bad for accessibility since there’s no way for increased contrast modes to modify the hard coded colors. Apps really just shouldn’t hard code colors.
      - 5y ago
smoldesu 5y ago
History is back around to repeating itself. I'm an avid Linux user (and even a developer who uses GTK pretty regularly), but the recent developments surrounding GNOME, Flatpak and their related libraries has not made me optimistic for the future of Linux applications. GTK4 is really bad. It launched with horrible text rendering issues (still unfixed, 10+ months later), broke compatibility with a number of basic features, and then had those features replaced by the GNOME middleware known as libadwaita. libadwaita is in a "functional" release state, but still lacks support for custom stylesheets, basic desktop integration on non-GNOME desktops and has it's own litany of bugs that accompany it. Fair enough for brand-new software, but the state of GTK4 is unacceptable and borderline impossible to use on a daily basis. If you're a developer, things only get worse. Gone are the days of fast app development with gtk::Builder workflows, and now Glade has been thrown by the wayside with no replacement. Talk about a second-class developer experience. And then there's the strange omissions that the GNOME team insists on; some issues are marked as WONTFIX since they can be mitigated with Flatpak. Some features (like appindicators) have been ignored completely because they don't align with the GNOME desktop's vision. The general demeanor of the team has been my-way-or-the-highway, so making suggestions mostly gets you labelled as a troll in their gitlab and sees you forcibly removed if you don't give up and assimilate into their opinion. Flatpak itself is becoming the new Wayland. With more than 600 open issues on Github and outstanding issues like random data deletion, portal malfunctioning, compositor glitches, security holes and more, it's less like the "one package manager to rule them all" and more like "snap but it doesn't work". It's slow, doubles the dependencies that you store on your system (!!!) and doesn't integrate with your desktop unless you go out of your way to install questionable third party hacks that forward your native stylesheet and XDG options. I'd honestly rather use AppImage if given the option. The future of app development on Linux is bleaker than ever. Fragmentation is at an all-time-high, and the technology that was supposed to fix it only fanned the flames into an unsalvageable dumpster fire. If you are a Linux developer planning on shipping an app, please stay on GTK2/3 for the sake of your users. I outright refuse to run GTK4, libadwaita or Flatpak on any of my systems. Nothing I've seen recently changes my opinion on that. Dead dove, do not eat.
- allisdust 5y ago
  Only if you are hung up on gnome of course. Plenty of alternatives that work out of the box in desktop space and flatapps aren't really needed really as one click with much less issues is possible many gui package managers. First option for anyone coming from other OS should be kde. Defaults are sane and customizations are easy to do. Frankly I really don't know why all distros provide gnome by default. There are neither helping themselves nor the broader linux desktop community by shipping something that's broken in so many ways.
BoysenberryPi 5y ago
If I wanted to get into linux phone development, what's a good entry point into this?
- kop316 5y ago
  I would ask, what is it you want to do? Linux phone development is more or less the same as linux development, just with a computer that has a smaller screen and a modem.
  - selfhoster11 5y ago
    That's not quite accurate. What about power management, signal stability and coverage? Those need to be accounted for too.
    - kop316 5y ago
      I mean...that's why I said "more or less". There are of course differences, but a lot of app development can be done on a linux system and a cross compiler.
      - selfhoster11 5y ago
        Signal and power management make or break a phone. My Nokia N900 makes for an excellent Linux phone (I have been unironically using it as my daily driver for communication, and the battery has been replaced recently too), but what really kills it is that its battery life is very unpredictable. Sometimes it lasts 36h on a single charge when in standby, and sometimes a fraction of that. I cannot trust it to last me a whole day without a charger. Other older phones that I tried last year (ranging from very old Nokia's to Blackberries with 3G) all had issues with call quality and even with random signal loss. I couldn't reliably stay connected with my family, which frustrated everyone. Your application/mobile OS likely uses mobile data in some fashion, definitely uses up some CPU cycles (in foreground or background), may trigger high-powered modes in the cell radio through its usage patterns, or might miss incoming messages entirely. Testing on real untethered hardware, even as a final check, is needed to see that what you built isn't a frustrating paperweight that cannot fulfill the function of a phone.
seltzered_ 5y ago
This could be less about device convergence and more about UX improvements and design coherence among apps. Some examples of what's been happening: - Touchpad gestures through various efforts: https://linuxtouchpad.org https://linuxtouchpad.org - Gnome: libAdwaita: https://blogs.gnome.org/alexm/2021/12/31/libadwaita-1-0/ https://blogs.gnome.org/alexm/2021/12/31/libadwaita-1-0/ - Core workflows getting better first-class approaches rather than being another app to install: (e.g. screenshots & screenrecording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewC1Zc-5qPQ&t=2s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewC1Zc-5qPQ&t=2s ) - Visual improvements proposed to larger complex apps like libreoffice: https://mobile.twitter.com/ChristianOhrfan/status/1472015987314761734 https://mobile.twitter.com/ChristianOhrfan/status/1472015987... I wouldn't recommend it to everyone but it'd definitely interesting to see as someone who came from being a fairly invested mac user - I track personal workflows between OSes here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/148zTJUwfVv9xfDcpSoH3mF-c4vqV3CqyEWXuqaAiXoA/edit?usp=drive_web&ouid=115795755008503287756 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/148zTJUwfVv9xfDcpSoH3...
- nikodunk 5y ago
  Excellent links - thank you so much for the resources. I'm very excited to see what the Pinephone Pro brings as a platform to build towards in this regard. I'm already eyeing shipping some apps on Flathub! I hope the React Native => Flathub pipeline gets built out, similar to what Ubuntu is doing with Flutter => Snap. Exciting times!
  - FpUser 5y ago
    I am very displeased by Snap being shoved down one's throat on Ubuntu. This has caused me to actually abandon Ubuntu completely. Linux mint and Debian now.
    - GekkePrutser 5y ago
      Me too. The app startup times in particular make it a pain. And the pollution of the mount table and worse integration an annoyance. I still use it for servers as everything I use is available in apt anyway. But some desktop packages are only in snaps now.
nailer 5y ago
> An example is Flathub, where new applications using the most modern toolkits and UX strategy appear every day, providing "just works" alternatives to complex older FOSS software,, in a boom similar to that seen around 2012 on Apple's Mac App Store. Damn that’s sad to read - for those unaware, Linux had one of the first app stores ever in about 2002 (Click n Run on Lindows/Linspire).
- spitfire 5y ago
  Interestingly NeXTStep (which became Apple) did it back in the 1991. http://www.kevra.org/TheBestOfNext/SWCatalogs/page274/page274.html http://www.kevra.org/TheBestOfNext/SWCatalogs/page274/page27... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_AppWrapper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_AppWrapper Also, I remember back in 1996 when quake came out you could buy the shareware CD which came with all of IDs games locked. You called up a number and paid to get an unlock code. Very, very quickly a serial generator started floating around.
  - nailer 5y ago
    Idstuff! I remember that.
floren 5y ago
These applications look really pretty and all, but for my selfish purposes, I just really want real goddamn scrollbars back. I use a mouse that doesn't have a scroll wheel, but for the life of me I've been unable to figure out how to make applications like Firefox just give me a real scroll bar on the side of the window that's thick enough to grab without fiddly pixel-hunting.
- ugjka 5y ago
  Why do you use a mouse without a scrollwheel?
  - bitcharmer 5y ago
    I'd love to see OP's response to that. I don't think I have seen anyone using a mouse without a scroll wheel for at least a decade.
    - throwaway889900 5y ago
      Middle mouse button + dragging works fine, faster than scrolling in some situations.
    - stilisstuk 5y ago
      I have a be trackball and a vertical mouse. Both expensive. Both without proper scroll. Many trackwheels on are also slow at of you want to flick many pages down. I rely mostly in keyboard.
      - chrisseaton 5y ago
        > Many trackwheels on are also slow at of you want to flick many pages down. This is why the Apple Magic Mouse is so great - it's essentially a phone surface instead of physical buttons.
  - floren 5y ago
    I use the acme text editor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor) for work every day. It makes heavy use of mouse chords, so I need 3 real buttons on the mouse, and it's hard to find a mouse with 3 real buttons and a scrollwheel which doesn't get in the way of the buttons. I've got a Kensington Expert Mouse trackball which works pretty well, but at the end of the day an old Logitech PS/2 mouse plugged into a converter is my go-to.
mostlysimilar 5y ago
Web application interfaces have already been ruined for desktop users by trying to serve both mobile/touch and desktop/mouse. It would be a real shame if other native software followed suit.
- fsflover 5y ago
  It can also be done well, see videos here: https://puri.sm/posts/converging-on-convergence-pureos-is-convergent-welcome-to-the-future/ https://puri.sm/posts/converging-on-convergence-pureos-is-co....
  - einpoklum 5y ago
    It's not at all obvious it can be done well, as the input methods are different, and the UI should match them. At any rate, the video establishes how it is done poorly. Terrible GNOME UI, lots of empty space, functionality mostly hidden from the user, if not completely inaccessible.
golergka 5y ago
Strange that electron isn't mentioned here. I develop a desktop application that targets macos, windows and linux, so it is a full-fledged linux app — but without such an effective cross-platform toolkit I don't think we would have resources to support Linux at all.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jcelerier 5y ago
  I am almost alone and I develop https://ossia.io https://ossia.io for Mac/Win/Linux in C++ with Qt without issues.
- ognarb 5y ago
  I develop many applications in my spare time for Linux, macOS, windows, haikuOs, freeBSD without Electron and just Qt and Kirigami. https://apps.kde.org/neochat/ https://apps.kde.org/neochat/ https://apps.kde.org/kalendar/ https://apps.kde.org/kalendar/ https://apps.kde.org/kontrast/ https://apps.kde.org/kontrast/ https://apps.kde.org/koko/ https://apps.kde.org/koko/
bearbearbear 5y ago
quanticle 5y ago
Furthermore, the variety of projects that are enabling convergence on their applications is growing at a fast rate, with KDE, GNOME, Nitrux, Elementary and Jingling among others shifting their interest on mobile-ready and touch-friendly applications for the future of Linux. So, in other words, Linux desktop applications are going the same way as "desktop" applications on Windows and MacOS. I put "desktop" in sarcasm quotes, because so many of these apps are just upscaled mobile apps, which retain the giant buttons and low information density suitable for a 6" touchscreen even when they're scaled up to a 24" monitor. If this is the future, I hate it.
- fsflover 5y ago
  No, GNU/Linux phones can run desktop applications scaled down in such a way that they stay usable. See examples here: https://puri.sm/posts/converging-on-convergence-pureos-is-convergent-welcome-to-the-future/ https://puri.sm/posts/converging-on-convergence-pureos-is-co....
  - hughrr 5y ago
    Yeh that worked out really well for the last two platforms who tried it… Microsoft produced apps that no one used because they were horrible on all devices. Apple conceded defeat and we have different interfaces on each device class.
    - fsflover 5y ago
      They did not scale down desktop apps. They created completely incompatible mobile OSes. https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Frequently-Asked-Questions#83-why-will-the-librem-5-succeed-when-previous-linux-phones-failed https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque...
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      The recent "scaling down" of Linux Gtk+ apps also encompasses "diferent interfaces". Look at some of the convergence examples, and you'll see all sorts of widgets merge, move around and disappear behind "alternate" views as window sizes shrink, then come back as the windows enlarge again. It's a fully responsive interface that merges both styles of interaction seamlessly.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
aidenn0 5y ago
I have a pinephone. KDE demos well, but it feels like bug whack-a-mole with each pmOS upgrade. The native browser seems to be missing kwallet integration, and Firefox alternates between working and not; in particular the on screen keyboard hardly ever works with it. sxmo actually works as advertised, but it's not exactly a mainstream UX. I couldn't figure out how to get it to sleep automatically, so the first time you forget to sleep it your battery dies.
- pinephoneguy 5y ago
  I've found just doing everything yourself and sticking as close as possible to a normal desktop config works best.
jfb 5y ago
What if you don't want the same applications with the same interface modalities on different devices? Shouldn't we be much more concerned about data portability than application portability?
- fsflover 5y ago
  GNU/Linux phones are about FLOSS. Of course the apps have the data portability, too.
- nine_k 5y ago
  This just doubles the UI development effort.
  - jfb 5y ago
    More than doubles it, because there are a variety of phone sizes, tablets, monitors, &c. But that's OK! Build the best thing, don't settle.
    - nine_k 5y ago
      The choice is usually not between building a great thing or a sub-par thing, but between building anything at all or not bothering.
  - account42 5y ago
    You don't really get around that with convergent applications either. That is, unless your idea of convergence is "lowest common denominator for everyone".
    - chaorace 5y ago
      (it usually is)
  - berkes 5y ago
    ... rather than doubling both the UI dev effort and the domain logic effort.
kuon 5y ago
I love that some work is going into UI design, but there are a few things I really dislike in gnome apps. For example using a hamburger menu instead of a regular menu or icons instead of text for buttons.
- dcminter 5y ago
  Combined with the fact that without the top menu bar you can no longer use the Alt-combinations to get to the corresponding menu (e.g. Alt-F for file menu). Motor-memory is hard to reprogram so I'm not a fan of the latest Gnome "usability" choices.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  Don't worry, you can theme it to be exactly how you prefe- oh wait
superkuh 5y ago
Convergence? How many times do we have to go through this? No one wants convergence. It's the worst of both worlds. Keep the hobbled UI and gimped network workarounds on mobile where they belong.
- dmix 5y ago
  Easy to say that when you have a full-time dev team vs a solo open source developer. Getting it out the door is step 1, a team can always build purely mobile, tablet, and TV versions if they want, in addition to your desktop (and possible server apps).
habosa 5y ago
These apps look very nice, I am happy to see this movement. But this is HN so ... allow me to go a bit off topic and complain. Why is is so freaking hard to install an app on Linux (Ubuntu)? There's nothing in the software center, and when I find an app I want I am just pointed to a .tar.gz or something. I want a file I can double-click and end up with a launchable icon representing that app in my dock later. I would also like to be able to update that app easily in the future. I have yet to have this experience with an app I wanted despite using Ubuntu for years. This is why I have given up and just started using Windows with WSL. Then I can have all the command-line tools I like and also a sane app installation experience.
- kodah 5y ago
  You might like Pop!_OS or Elementary's app store (they're the same.) It supports .deb and Flathub packages.
- drekipus 5y ago
  what's wrong with the ol' "sudo apt install foo" outdated packages are the problem of the distro, not of the tool. the whole reason I went from windows -> linux was because I could just type in what I want, rather than having to go looking around for dumb things on sites that no longer exist.
  - habosa 5y ago
    That installs a binary tool I can run at the command line. Which is great for a lot of things. It's not great for a web browser or a calculator. I want an app. I want it to have an icon I can click on and a button to close it. I don't want logs in my terminal or zombie processes and I don't want to have to remember the name/path of a binary.
    - unknown2374 5y ago
      sudo apt-get install firefox ?
    - hprotagonist 5y ago
w4rh4wk5 5y ago
Please just give me the option to turn the hamburger menu into a regular menu bar.
xyst 5y ago
the apps look very "apple"-esque
- bitigchi 5y ago
  Yet they work in a totally different manner (not in the better sense).
eric4smith 5y ago
Until there is as “simple” to use an app like Preview on the Mac, most of these new generation apps are garbage. I’ve just switched to Ubuntu on a workstation I have lying around. And man, is it hard to use for just normal everyday use. Yes, it has the basics covered, but like many others my job has a lot of simple image manipulation related stuff. Convert pdf to png. Assemble multiple images into a pdf. Quickly share with someone else over chat. Normal productivity stuff. Take a simple thing like screen capture - you have to remember to save the screen that you captured otherwise it just sits there doing nothing in the screen capture app. The thing that saves most Linux desktops for office productivity workers — is Firefox and Chrome. Otherwise, outside of programmers and highly specific use cases, hardly anyone would use a Linux desktop. And that’s kudos to the fact that so much of what we do these days is in a browser. But if you look at the small pieces of software to do everyday things - they are awful. Dropbox barely works in a sustainable way. I have to keep pulling out my laptop every now and then to do simple office productivity things. Yeah yeah, I know that Apple is a trillion dollar company that had a room full of people just working on the screen capture feature alone. And yeah, I use Linux every day for programming. But Brah, all the little widgets and do-da’s need some serious polishing.
- jcelerier 5y ago
  > Take a simple thing like screen capture - you have to remember to save the screen that you captured otherwise it just sits there doing nothing in the screen capture app. idk with KDE this seems to work ? I hit screen capture and spectacle shows up and saves it to images.
  - heavyset_go 5y ago
    Can confirm this works on Plasma. There's also Flameshot[1], which is cross platform, that works really well and has pretty much every feature you could ask for in a screenshot app. [1] https://flameshot.org/ https://flameshot.org/
- SevenDucks 5y ago
  I love Ubuntu
haroldflowers 5y ago
I've been a long time linux desktop user, recently switched over to macOS after getting fed up from not being able to do many basic "productivity" related tasks, without having to open a terminal, search for a package on google, fiddle with some config, do a rain dance, etc... Skimming through just the blog post and some of the comments on this thread gives me a bit of a flashback thinking of all of the headaches I've endured __trying__ to get Linux to work for simple stuff like document management, PDF markup, synced notes, calendars, display scaling, general performance things, etc.. This was fun and interesting at first, but after a while there were diminishing returns. Believe me, I really wanted it to work, I love Linux (as a server). It hit me at some point that life is brief, and technology should probably be making my life easier, not more difficult.. So I switched to macOS. That aside, it is really important for progress on this front so that we don't have a total monopoly, and kudos to anyone working in the space. Fighting the good fight.
- HatchedLake721 5y ago
  Amen. Engineers like to tinker. From installing custom ROM on their phones, to deciding which JavaScript router to use along with other 99 packages to run a blog. We’ve all been there. But sometimes the time comes, where you just want to be as productive as possible or focus on other things. And that’s when things like Ruby on Rails or iPhone start look interesting. They just work, and let you focus on creating value, rather than feeding your inner pedantic tinkerer.
  - gman83 5y ago
    Does the IPhone just work though? My wife has one and I always find it a pain to deal with. Simple things like playing videos often don't work with VLC (never had this problem with Android) so I have to use Handbrake to convert it to a format that the Iphone will accept. Same thing with audiobooks, MP3 versions don't work I have to convert them to M4B for some reason.
    - MereInterest 5y ago
      My sense is that it "just works" if and only if you've completely bought into the Apple ecosystem. If you want to back up your photos onto iCloud, Apple has made it easy. If you want to periodically back up your photos onto an external hard drive, Apple shrugs and says that you should manually copy them over.
dekhn 5y ago
OK who let GPT3 write an article again? This reads like it was written in non-english and then inexpertly translated.
- anderspitman 5y ago
  I read that as "GTK3" for a second and it made me giggle.
- ducktective 5y ago
  right? I was blaming my attention span...
musicale 5y ago
I love that PinePhone keyboard case and really want one for the iPhone. :D
pingsl 5y ago
I use Windows/MacOS/Linux(Ubuntu) on a regular base. As a ordinary end user, I feel 1. Windows software are usually good at product function design. 2. Mac has a better enforcement on overall UX. The visual across different software (from different vendors) are much consistent. 3. Linux desktop is unfortunately still missing above 2 points. Some Linux distro provides really good visual, but it only applies to its built–in programs. If you'd like to switch to the external programs, the system visual might be fragmented. I really hope in this new wave people could make some consensus on the visual of Linux desktop.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Teknoman117 5y ago
  > I really hope in this new wave people could make some consensus on the visual of Linux desktop. Consensus over the whole scope of open source?? That's never going to happen.
  - pingsl 5y ago
    I mean the consensus about the visual/UX style like we have on Windows or Android. It's not that hard, I believe.
    - Kbelicius 5y ago
      On windows and android was consensus reached between all interested parties or was consensus reached within microsoft/google?
      - pingsl 5y ago
        > On windows and android was consensus reached between all interested parties or was consensus reached within microsoft/google? This is exactly the number 1 challenge for Linux Desktops: hard to coordinate with each party, then we end up hundreds of different distros.
MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
bgdkbtv 5y ago
I think this is a great opportunity to make some good money with apps for Linux if marketed properly.
livinglist 5y ago
why hasn't anybody mention Vala programming language? it's a really good and convenient language for making GNOME apps.
ISK18 5y ago
n
jillesvangurp 5y ago
I have an Manjaro linux based laptop that I got a few months ago after my mac died. It was supposed to be temporary until I could get my hands on one of the new m1 pro's but I ended up liking the experience. It's fast. The hardware doesn't throttle. And most things I need run fine on it. In case you are wondering, I got myself a Samsung Galaxy book with 16GB i5 and SSD which was discounted very nicely during the pre-christmas sales to about 700EUR. Bargain and excellent value for money. Don't get me wrong, Linux is still a massive PITA to set up properly. Forget about using it without ever seeing a command line. But, I can deal with that and I've googled my way to success when it let me down a few times to get things going. It's kind of depressing though that things like keyboard, sound, gpus, desktop sharing, touchpads, etc. just don't work in a sane way out of the box. I had issues with all of those with things either not working or just being mis-configured. One thing that helped a lot is that a lot of proprietary applications can be installed via snap and games can be installed via Steam. Some OSS ones as well. I installed slack, signal, vs code and a few other things that way. And where that failed me, I was able to find some community AUR packages for things like webex and Chrome. Flatpak seems like it should do similar things to snap but mostly packages seem easier to find for snap. I don't really care about the philosophical differences between both. I'll use what works. A problem with both is hardware support. E.g. the Darktable snap is completely pointless because it lacks opencl support; the flatpak one has the same issue. I had to wait for the official package to be updated by Manjaro when they did their yearly release at Christmas. That took a few weeks after Arch updated upstream within a day or so. I have a GPU, why would I not want to use it? This is just flat out moronic. I actually had some fun playing some Steam games that long stopped working in the mac version of steam (64 bit only) via proton. Very easy to setup and install. And to my surprise the Intel xe gpu actually isn't that bad. And of course GPUs work fine with Steam. It seems software distribution is no longer blocked on distribution gate keepers not keeping packages up to date. I don't like to read about an update and then have to wait for it for six months while some non affiliated developers second guess all the testing and fixing that already happened upstream by the people that actually created the software. IMHO modern distributions should push out most end user applications to snap, flatpak, or whatever and focus only on the stuff that absolutely can't work via those. That simplifies things for both developers, distribution maintainers, and end users. Distributions aren't really adding any value here (the opposite I would argue). That will rapidly achieve what three decades of dozens of linux distributions reinventing the light over and over again never achieved: a homogeneous market for distributing end user Linux applications (OSS and closed source). Given that a lot of those can be cross compiled to mac, windows, chrome os, android, and whatever, that is not a small market either. We are already starting to see some of that. A lot of SAAS software actually is based on things like Electron and creating a snap for that is not that hard. You'd be a fool not to. Even if it's less than 1 percent of your users, it's still worth doing.
iostream24 5y ago
Re: missing toolkit for less capable devices. Fltk. There’s a lovely rust crate rs-fltk too. Fltk is stack-based (no heap allocation) and parents own their children. When a parent window goes out of scope, poof, memory cleaned up. Fltk is also easy to use. In C and C++ land there’s fltk-config utility that will automagically set compiler and linker flags etc. There’s a lovely fltk book that the rust crate links to in its extensive documentation. There are plenty of even lower resource options like littleVGL, which only needs a drawing routine.
ho_schi 5y ago
Gtkmm3 with C++ works well for me. I'm looking now on Gtk(mm)4 and Libadwaita. They improved the docs recently but the C++ documentation is kind of separated.
bluebit 5y ago
2022 is finally the year of Linux!
DoingIsLearning 5y ago
Is there a reason why the Emsembles App in the example shown looks so visually similar to other apps built with python's framework Kivy? Do they share any libraries, or is it just coincidence that the UX converges?
NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago
I don't think Purism gets enough credit in this article. They've dumped a lot of time, money, and effort into developing Phosh and other tools that make this possible.

683 points by Vinnl 5y ago

Decabytes 5y ago

Looking forward to the improvements KDE will make in 2022!

jteppinette 5y ago

vondur 5y ago
What app was it?
- bobthecowboy 5y ago
  Not OP, but I went to go look and found the Minecraft one (which was one of the six apps above the fold in "Popular") leads to that: https://flathub.org/apps/details/io.mrarm.mcpelauncher https://flathub.org/apps/details/io.mrarm.mcpelauncher ``` App Not Found No app with the ID io.mrarm.mcpelauncher was found on Flathub. Try searching for the app using the search bar above. ```

goldcountry 5y ago

That's cool and all, but who is actually out here using a linux phone?

fartcannon 5y ago
Hey there!
fsflover 5y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24959506 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24959506 And I'm using a Pinephone as a daily driver, too.
- Arnavion 5y ago
  (Note that kop316, who has the second comment there complaining about lack of MMS support, went on to implement MMS support themselves by writing mmsd-tng. Many distros added it recently and it supposedly should work with Phosh's Chatty and on SXMO.)
  - kop316 5y ago
    Yep, I wrote most of the support in for Chatty myself as well. Chatty works pretty well with MMS, and I have been using a Pinephone/Librem 5 full time for almost 2 months now.
dleslie 5y ago
I have a Pinephone. I tried, in earnest, to use it as a daily driver; but the software stack was hideously unperformant and the camera was just too awful. I have young kids; I need to take pictures quickly on occasion. I couldn't rely on the phone to do that, not by a long shot, and so it remains a pointless curiousity that I purchased.
- taeric 5y ago
  I can't rely on any phone's camera for speed. Sucks to hear this one is even worse than normal.
  - dleslie 5y ago
    The camera is so bad that it's even a shame that they bothered adding it. The additional cost for the hardware clearly wasn't worth it.
    - floren 5y ago
      Seconded. It's been several years of development time and I still think I'd get better pictures with one of those cameras that saved pictures on floppy disks. I've bought two Pinephones and I hope things go well but man, I install Mobian and wonder what exactly their long term plan is... it runs like an absolute dog, worse than a $30 Android prepaid phone. The only way to get reasonable performance has been to use sxmo, which is ok for me but not the experience normal people want.
      - fsflover 5y ago
        If you need a good camera, consider Librem 5 instead.
        seba_dos1 5y ago
        Note that while it's already possible to get really good looking photos out of L5 camera, there's still quite a lot of software work left to do for it to work in an effortless point-and-shoot fashion. It will come, just be aware it's not there yet.
jcelerier 5y ago
If my Jolla phone hadn't kicked the bucket i'd definitely still use it
- m4rtink 5y ago
  I have Xperia 10 II with officially supported Sailfish OS as my primary device, with family member using Xperia X in similar capacity. :)
kop316 5y ago
I am. I have used a Pinephone with Mobian daily for a while, I am currently using a Librem 5 with PureOS. I only turned on my Android phone once since December, and that was to factory reset it since I wasn't using it.
asddubs 5y ago
I'm not, but I would love to some day. I fucking hate my android phone (and the iphone is just as terrible, in slightly different and often the same ways). Thank god for the people tinkering on pinephones and purism phones, paving the way for something less awful, with control in the hands of the user We're not there yet, but we won't ever be unless people put effort into it. The linux desktop used to suck, too
- nomel 5y ago
  To me, phone os is an easy way to get to apps, switch between apps, and handle notifications. It appears to be something else for you. What is an ideal phone for you, and how would Linux help achieve that experience?
  - kelnos 5y ago
    Not the person you're replying to, but I have the same issue. The phone OS is indeed a way to get to apps for me. And the problem is that the "alternative" phone OSes don't have access to apps that I've woven into my day-to-day-life: banking apps, contactless payments, video streaming, music streaming, etc. None of these are available on platforms other than iOS or Android, unfortunately. Some of them have web experiences, but they're terrible on mobile when compared to their app. I, too, would love to run a mobile-optimized Linux desktop on my phone, but it's not about the desktop, it's about the apps and functionality it gives me access to. So I'm stuck with Android for the time being. What would be really cool is if these alt mobile OSes could perfectly emulate Android to the point that Google's SafetyNet would believe that everything is a-ok. Not sure if that's even technically possible, but could help bridge the gap and allow alternative OSes to gain some market share among people who aren't willing to give up many of their usual mobile apps. > What is an ideal phone for you, and how would Linux help achieve that experience? The main bits for me are privacy and control. I refuse to use an iPhone because I viscerally hate Apple's stranglehold over the platform. I very reluctantly use Android, hating that Google is always watching. A fully-open mobile OS where I get to choose what runs on it, how it runs, and what access it gets would solve both of those problems.
  - asddubs 5y ago
goodpoint 5y ago
A bunch of people are. If you compare the efforts of communities of volunteers against the investments in google/apple phones you can already call FOSS phones a big success.
- goodpoint 5y ago
  The idiotic silent downvotes are unnecessary.
  - Arnavion 5y ago
    This board has a real hate-boner for the PinePhone for some reason. Any phone that isn't 100% as capable as a flagship iOS or Android gets defined as "not ready to be a daily driver", because people think their definition of "daily driver" is some universal constant that everyone abides by. The rest of us who happily use it as a daily driver apparently don't exist in their worldview. Already in this subthread there's "We're not there yet", "I couldn't conscientiously hand it to a non-techy", "It's nowhere near ready to be used as a phone outside of tinkering", "something that falls apart in their hands like wet sawdust", ...
    - goodpoint 5y ago
      I wonder if it's a sign of the HN crowd moving from startups to FAANGs. So much for the "hacker" news...
    - dang 5y ago
      > This board has a real hate-boner for the PinePhone for some reason What a strange thing to say. It's hugely popular on HN. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=pinephone%20comments%3E3&sort=byDate&type=story&storyText=none https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=pinephone&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
      - Arnavion 5y ago
pinephoneguy 5y ago
I do. I run Fluxbox on PostMarketOS. I use dino with jmp.chat for mms. I use emacs diary+git for calendar. I have some custom power management service I wrote shortly after getting the phone so it gets long battery life. My bank and brokerage both have decent web sites. I'll never go back to a non-Linux phone, I'd rather not have a phone at all than tolerate the older mobile OSes.
seba_dos1 5y ago
I am, typing from my Librem 5 right now during my usual morning browsing.
urthor 5y ago
Unlikely to, soon. If I could flash Android hardware I would... one day. Phones are battery operated. Performance per watt is mission critical.

chakkepolja 5y ago

Rise in cross platform frameworks would be a positive trend. When I am writing a flutter application, I often run on desktop directly and resize to mobile shape. That works good enough unless I am writing a mobile-specific feature. This probably means most flutter apps can run on other linux based phones as well.

treis 5y ago
Cross platform frameworks have already risen in Electron. Every application I use at work runs on Linux. VS Code, Slack, Zoom, Postman, and others I can't think of are all Electron. And they all perform fine. The speed difference between JS and native is meaningless in 99% of cases given how fast modern CPUs are. RAM usage is similar. Everyone complains about it, but I've got 32 GB and I don't get above 8GB usage when using these apps.
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  Probably good for there to be competition in the cross-platform space. Maybe Electron is a little overly-bashed, but it's best when it's not the only game in town.
- mwcampbell 5y ago
  Nitpick: Zoom isn't Electron-based on any platform AFAIK. On Linux it uses Qt. On Windows it uses its own fork of DuiLib [1]. I don't know about Mac. [1]: https://github.com/duilib/duilib https://github.com/duilib/duilib (apparently only documented in Chinese)
- chakkepolja 5y ago
  I don't think any of the electron applications you mention have mobile-like UIs which can be easily ported to mobile linux. Also, flutter memory consumption is often 1/3 or 1/4 of the equivalent electron app, which is significant.

getcrunk 5y ago

One of the biggest drawbacks to me about Linux is the aesthetic quality. This gives me alot of hope. As the author said this might really well be a turning point.

moron4hire 5y ago
I've been really happy with Cinnamon on Linux Mint with the MintY-Dark themes.
- debo_ 5y ago
  Zorin is also beautiful. I installed it on a whim, and it became my daily driver just because it felt so nice to me.
  - akselmo 5y ago
    I'm on Kubuntu (so KDE), been using it for over 6 months now. I am the kind of person that loves setting up the desktop and all the apps just like I want, so it has been perfect for me, although the defaults are pretty solid as well. The default Breeze theme also is really pretty, I went through all kinds of themes but eventually settled with Breeze due to how good it looks.
- zelphirkalt 5y ago
  I just switched back to XFCE on my desktop, because panel launchers cannot be properly configured in a simple way. Too bad usability made all the good looks useless. And I feel a renewed assuredness, that XFCE is the most productive DE for me. I had it configured in 10 minutes and it does everything I want in the way I want. Also XFCE these days can also look nicely. Still, usability (and that includes being able to configure things easily) is king and I cannot stand it, if I cannot configure annoyances away.
  - moron4hire 5y ago
    Panels are indeed a gigantic pain in the ass to configure. It is possible, but I feel like I have to go to three completely unrelated places each time I want to. And I can never remember which place is the one to go to. How does XFCE do with high-DPI displays? My only other complaint with Cinnamon is that the window controls are a tad small. It's been a long time since I used XFCE.

traverseda 5y ago

I have to say I just don't like Gnome's design. The shift away from text and towards more and more abstract icons, the "don't theme my app movement", removing features I consider pretty essential like typeahead.... Maybe mobile is where their weird (to me) design choices will finally shine though. Also looking forward to what KDE can accomplish in this space.

2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
I love Gnome's design. Maybe I'd make title bars skinnier and add corner tiling?
kitsunesoba 5y ago
The “don’t theme my app” thing just tells me that GNOME/GTK+/Adwaita aren’t built in a way that gracefully handles theming, or that devs building apps with them are doing things like hard coding colors when they should be using dynamic system colors such as those provided by UIColor[0] in UIKit. [0]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uicolor/ui_element_colors https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uicolor/ui_e...
- akselmo 5y ago
  I feel like partially the movement happened because some themes made the apps unusable and then instead of blaming the theming, users blamed thee app developers instead.
  - kitsunesoba 5y ago
    In some cases badly designed themes (like dark gray labels on black backgrounds) are the culprit, but most often it’s a result of the app developers hard coding colors in their UI elements assuming all users will be using a similar theme. That’s not only bad for custom theme users, it’s bad for accessibility since there’s no way for increased contrast modes to modify the hard coded colors. Apps really just shouldn’t hard code colors.
    - 5y ago

smoldesu 5y ago

History is back around to repeating itself. I'm an avid Linux user (and even a developer who uses GTK pretty regularly), but the recent developments surrounding GNOME, Flatpak and their related libraries has not made me optimistic for the future of Linux applications. GTK4 is really bad. It launched with horrible text rendering issues (still unfixed, 10+ months later), broke compatibility with a number of basic features, and then had those features replaced by the GNOME middleware known as libadwaita. libadwaita is in a "functional" release state, but still lacks support for custom stylesheets, basic desktop integration on non-GNOME desktops and has it's own litany of bugs that accompany it. Fair enough for brand-new software, but the state of GTK4 is unacceptable and borderline impossible to use on a daily basis. If you're a developer, things only get worse. Gone are the days of fast app development with gtk::Builder workflows, and now Glade has been thrown by the wayside with no replacement. Talk about a second-class developer experience. And then there's the strange omissions that the GNOME team insists on; some issues are marked as WONTFIX since they can be mitigated with Flatpak. Some features (like appindicators) have been ignored completely because they don't align with the GNOME desktop's vision. The general demeanor of the team has been my-way-or-the-highway, so making suggestions mostly gets you labelled as a troll in their gitlab and sees you forcibly removed if you don't give up and assimilate into their opinion. Flatpak itself is becoming the new Wayland. With more than 600 open issues on Github and outstanding issues like random data deletion, portal malfunctioning, compositor glitches, security holes and more, it's less like the "one package manager to rule them all" and more like "snap but it doesn't work". It's slow, doubles the dependencies that you store on your system (!!!) and doesn't integrate with your desktop unless you go out of your way to install questionable third party hacks that forward your native stylesheet and XDG options. I'd honestly rather use AppImage if given the option. The future of app development on Linux is bleaker than ever. Fragmentation is at an all-time-high, and the technology that was supposed to fix it only fanned the flames into an unsalvageable dumpster fire. If you are a Linux developer planning on shipping an app, please stay on GTK2/3 for the sake of your users. I outright refuse to run GTK4, libadwaita or Flatpak on any of my systems. Nothing I've seen recently changes my opinion on that. Dead dove, do not eat.

allisdust 5y ago
Only if you are hung up on gnome of course. Plenty of alternatives that work out of the box in desktop space and flatapps aren't really needed really as one click with much less issues is possible many gui package managers. First option for anyone coming from other OS should be kde. Defaults are sane and customizations are easy to do. Frankly I really don't know why all distros provide gnome by default. There are neither helping themselves nor the broader linux desktop community by shipping something that's broken in so many ways.

BoysenberryPi 5y ago

If I wanted to get into linux phone development, what's a good entry point into this?

kop316 5y ago
I would ask, what is it you want to do? Linux phone development is more or less the same as linux development, just with a computer that has a smaller screen and a modem.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  That's not quite accurate. What about power management, signal stability and coverage? Those need to be accounted for too.
  - kop316 5y ago
    I mean...that's why I said "more or less". There are of course differences, but a lot of app development can be done on a linux system and a cross compiler.
    - selfhoster11 5y ago
      Signal and power management make or break a phone. My Nokia N900 makes for an excellent Linux phone (I have been unironically using it as my daily driver for communication, and the battery has been replaced recently too), but what really kills it is that its battery life is very unpredictable. Sometimes it lasts 36h on a single charge when in standby, and sometimes a fraction of that. I cannot trust it to last me a whole day without a charger. Other older phones that I tried last year (ranging from very old Nokia's to Blackberries with 3G) all had issues with call quality and even with random signal loss. I couldn't reliably stay connected with my family, which frustrated everyone. Your application/mobile OS likely uses mobile data in some fashion, definitely uses up some CPU cycles (in foreground or background), may trigger high-powered modes in the cell radio through its usage patterns, or might miss incoming messages entirely. Testing on real untethered hardware, even as a final check, is needed to see that what you built isn't a frustrating paperweight that cannot fulfill the function of a phone.

seltzered_ 5y ago

This could be less about device convergence and more about UX improvements and design coherence among apps. Some examples of what's been happening: - Touchpad gestures through various efforts: https://linuxtouchpad.org https://linuxtouchpad.org - Gnome: libAdwaita: https://blogs.gnome.org/alexm/2021/12/31/libadwaita-1-0/ https://blogs.gnome.org/alexm/2021/12/31/libadwaita-1-0/ - Core workflows getting better first-class approaches rather than being another app to install: (e.g. screenshots & screenrecording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewC1Zc-5qPQ&t=2s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewC1Zc-5qPQ&t=2s ) - Visual improvements proposed to larger complex apps like libreoffice: https://mobile.twitter.com/ChristianOhrfan/status/1472015987314761734 https://mobile.twitter.com/ChristianOhrfan/status/1472015987... I wouldn't recommend it to everyone but it'd definitely interesting to see as someone who came from being a fairly invested mac user - I track personal workflows between OSes here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/148zTJUwfVv9xfDcpSoH3mF-c4vqV3CqyEWXuqaAiXoA/edit?usp=drive_web&ouid=115795755008503287756 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/148zTJUwfVv9xfDcpSoH3...

nikodunk 5y ago
Excellent links - thank you so much for the resources. I'm very excited to see what the Pinephone Pro brings as a platform to build towards in this regard. I'm already eyeing shipping some apps on Flathub! I hope the React Native => Flathub pipeline gets built out, similar to what Ubuntu is doing with Flutter => Snap. Exciting times!
- FpUser 5y ago
  I am very displeased by Snap being shoved down one's throat on Ubuntu. This has caused me to actually abandon Ubuntu completely. Linux mint and Debian now.
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    Me too. The app startup times in particular make it a pain. And the pollution of the mount table and worse integration an annoyance. I still use it for servers as everything I use is available in apt anyway. But some desktop packages are only in snaps now.

nailer 5y ago

> An example is Flathub, where new applications using the most modern toolkits and UX strategy appear every day, providing "just works" alternatives to complex older FOSS software,, in a boom similar to that seen around 2012 on Apple's Mac App Store. Damn that’s sad to read - for those unaware, Linux had one of the first app stores ever in about 2002 (Click n Run on Lindows/Linspire).

spitfire 5y ago
Interestingly NeXTStep (which became Apple) did it back in the 1991. http://www.kevra.org/TheBestOfNext/SWCatalogs/page274/page274.html http://www.kevra.org/TheBestOfNext/SWCatalogs/page274/page27... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_AppWrapper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_AppWrapper Also, I remember back in 1996 when quake came out you could buy the shareware CD which came with all of IDs games locked. You called up a number and paid to get an unlock code. Very, very quickly a serial generator started floating around.
- nailer 5y ago
  Idstuff! I remember that.

floren 5y ago

These applications look really pretty and all, but for my selfish purposes, I just really want real goddamn scrollbars back. I use a mouse that doesn't have a scroll wheel, but for the life of me I've been unable to figure out how to make applications like Firefox just give me a real scroll bar on the side of the window that's thick enough to grab without fiddly pixel-hunting.

ugjka 5y ago
Why do you use a mouse without a scrollwheel?
- bitcharmer 5y ago
  I'd love to see OP's response to that. I don't think I have seen anyone using a mouse without a scroll wheel for at least a decade.
  - throwaway889900 5y ago
    Middle mouse button + dragging works fine, faster than scrolling in some situations.
  - stilisstuk 5y ago
    I have a be trackball and a vertical mouse. Both expensive. Both without proper scroll. Many trackwheels on are also slow at of you want to flick many pages down. I rely mostly in keyboard.
    - chrisseaton 5y ago
      > Many trackwheels on are also slow at of you want to flick many pages down. This is why the Apple Magic Mouse is so great - it's essentially a phone surface instead of physical buttons.
- floren 5y ago
  I use the acme text editor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor) for work every day. It makes heavy use of mouse chords, so I need 3 real buttons on the mouse, and it's hard to find a mouse with 3 real buttons and a scrollwheel which doesn't get in the way of the buttons. I've got a Kensington Expert Mouse trackball which works pretty well, but at the end of the day an old Logitech PS/2 mouse plugged into a converter is my go-to.

mostlysimilar 5y ago

Web application interfaces have already been ruined for desktop users by trying to serve both mobile/touch and desktop/mouse. It would be a real shame if other native software followed suit.

fsflover 5y ago
It can also be done well, see videos here: https://puri.sm/posts/converging-on-convergence-pureos-is-convergent-welcome-to-the-future/ https://puri.sm/posts/converging-on-convergence-pureos-is-co....
- einpoklum 5y ago
  It's not at all obvious it can be done well, as the input methods are different, and the UI should match them. At any rate, the video establishes how it is done poorly. Terrible GNOME UI, lots of empty space, functionality mostly hidden from the user, if not completely inaccessible.

golergka 5y ago

Strange that electron isn't mentioned here. I develop a desktop application that targets macos, windows and linux, so it is a full-fledged linux app — but without such an effective cross-platform toolkit I don't think we would have resources to support Linux at all.

deleted 5y ago
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jcelerier 5y ago
I am almost alone and I develop https://ossia.io https://ossia.io for Mac/Win/Linux in C++ with Qt without issues.
ognarb 5y ago
I develop many applications in my spare time for Linux, macOS, windows, haikuOs, freeBSD without Electron and just Qt and Kirigami. https://apps.kde.org/neochat/ https://apps.kde.org/neochat/ https://apps.kde.org/kalendar/ https://apps.kde.org/kalendar/ https://apps.kde.org/kontrast/ https://apps.kde.org/kontrast/ https://apps.kde.org/koko/ https://apps.kde.org/koko/

bearbearbear 5y ago

quanticle 5y ago

Furthermore, the variety of projects that are enabling convergence on their applications is growing at a fast rate, with KDE, GNOME, Nitrux, Elementary and Jingling among others shifting their interest on mobile-ready and touch-friendly applications for the future of Linux. So, in other words, Linux desktop applications are going the same way as "desktop" applications on Windows and MacOS. I put "desktop" in sarcasm quotes, because so many of these apps are just upscaled mobile apps, which retain the giant buttons and low information density suitable for a 6" touchscreen even when they're scaled up to a 24" monitor. If this is the future, I hate it.

fsflover 5y ago
No, GNU/Linux phones can run desktop applications scaled down in such a way that they stay usable. See examples here: https://puri.sm/posts/converging-on-convergence-pureos-is-convergent-welcome-to-the-future/ https://puri.sm/posts/converging-on-convergence-pureos-is-co....
- hughrr 5y ago
  Yeh that worked out really well for the last two platforms who tried it… Microsoft produced apps that no one used because they were horrible on all devices. Apple conceded defeat and we have different interfaces on each device class.
  - fsflover 5y ago
    They did not scale down desktop apps. They created completely incompatible mobile OSes. https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Frequently-Asked-Questions#83-why-will-the-librem-5-succeed-when-previous-linux-phones-failed https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque...
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    The recent "scaling down" of Linux Gtk+ apps also encompasses "diferent interfaces". Look at some of the convergence examples, and you'll see all sorts of widgets merge, move around and disappear behind "alternate" views as window sizes shrink, then come back as the windows enlarge again. It's a fully responsive interface that merges both styles of interaction seamlessly.

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aidenn0 5y ago

I have a pinephone. KDE demos well, but it feels like bug whack-a-mole with each pmOS upgrade. The native browser seems to be missing kwallet integration, and Firefox alternates between working and not; in particular the on screen keyboard hardly ever works with it. sxmo actually works as advertised, but it's not exactly a mainstream UX. I couldn't figure out how to get it to sleep automatically, so the first time you forget to sleep it your battery dies.

pinephoneguy 5y ago
I've found just doing everything yourself and sticking as close as possible to a normal desktop config works best.

jfb 5y ago

What if you don't want the same applications with the same interface modalities on different devices? Shouldn't we be much more concerned about data portability than application portability?

fsflover 5y ago
GNU/Linux phones are about FLOSS. Of course the apps have the data portability, too.
nine_k 5y ago
This just doubles the UI development effort.
- jfb 5y ago
  More than doubles it, because there are a variety of phone sizes, tablets, monitors, &c. But that's OK! Build the best thing, don't settle.
  - nine_k 5y ago
    The choice is usually not between building a great thing or a sub-par thing, but between building anything at all or not bothering.
- account42 5y ago
  You don't really get around that with convergent applications either. That is, unless your idea of convergence is "lowest common denominator for everyone".
  - chaorace 5y ago
    (it usually is)
- berkes 5y ago
  ... rather than doubling both the UI dev effort and the domain logic effort.

kuon 5y ago

I love that some work is going into UI design, but there are a few things I really dislike in gnome apps. For example using a hamburger menu instead of a regular menu or icons instead of text for buttons.

dcminter 5y ago
Combined with the fact that without the top menu bar you can no longer use the Alt-combinations to get to the corresponding menu (e.g. Alt-F for file menu). Motor-memory is hard to reprogram so I'm not a fan of the latest Gnome "usability" choices.
smoldesu 5y ago
Don't worry, you can theme it to be exactly how you prefe- oh wait

superkuh 5y ago

Convergence? How many times do we have to go through this? No one wants convergence. It's the worst of both worlds. Keep the hobbled UI and gimped network workarounds on mobile where they belong.

dmix 5y ago
Easy to say that when you have a full-time dev team vs a solo open source developer. Getting it out the door is step 1, a team can always build purely mobile, tablet, and TV versions if they want, in addition to your desktop (and possible server apps).

habosa 5y ago

These apps look very nice, I am happy to see this movement. But this is HN so ... allow me to go a bit off topic and complain. Why is is so freaking hard to install an app on Linux (Ubuntu)? There's nothing in the software center, and when I find an app I want I am just pointed to a .tar.gz or something. I want a file I can double-click and end up with a launchable icon representing that app in my dock later. I would also like to be able to update that app easily in the future. I have yet to have this experience with an app I wanted despite using Ubuntu for years. This is why I have given up and just started using Windows with WSL. Then I can have all the command-line tools I like and also a sane app installation experience.

kodah 5y ago
You might like Pop!_OS or Elementary's app store (they're the same.) It supports .deb and Flathub packages.
drekipus 5y ago
what's wrong with the ol' "sudo apt install foo" outdated packages are the problem of the distro, not of the tool. the whole reason I went from windows -> linux was because I could just type in what I want, rather than having to go looking around for dumb things on sites that no longer exist.
- habosa 5y ago
  That installs a binary tool I can run at the command line. Which is great for a lot of things. It's not great for a web browser or a calculator. I want an app. I want it to have an icon I can click on and a button to close it. I don't want logs in my terminal or zombie processes and I don't want to have to remember the name/path of a binary.
  - unknown2374 5y ago
    sudo apt-get install firefox ?
  - hprotagonist 5y ago

w4rh4wk5 5y ago

Please just give me the option to turn the hamburger menu into a regular menu bar.

xyst 5y ago

the apps look very "apple"-esque

bitigchi 5y ago
Yet they work in a totally different manner (not in the better sense).

eric4smith 5y ago

Until there is as “simple” to use an app like Preview on the Mac, most of these new generation apps are garbage. I’ve just switched to Ubuntu on a workstation I have lying around. And man, is it hard to use for just normal everyday use. Yes, it has the basics covered, but like many others my job has a lot of simple image manipulation related stuff. Convert pdf to png. Assemble multiple images into a pdf. Quickly share with someone else over chat. Normal productivity stuff. Take a simple thing like screen capture - you have to remember to save the screen that you captured otherwise it just sits there doing nothing in the screen capture app. The thing that saves most Linux desktops for office productivity workers — is Firefox and Chrome. Otherwise, outside of programmers and highly specific use cases, hardly anyone would use a Linux desktop. And that’s kudos to the fact that so much of what we do these days is in a browser. But if you look at the small pieces of software to do everyday things - they are awful. Dropbox barely works in a sustainable way. I have to keep pulling out my laptop every now and then to do simple office productivity things. Yeah yeah, I know that Apple is a trillion dollar company that had a room full of people just working on the screen capture feature alone. And yeah, I use Linux every day for programming. But Brah, all the little widgets and do-da’s need some serious polishing.

jcelerier 5y ago
> Take a simple thing like screen capture - you have to remember to save the screen that you captured otherwise it just sits there doing nothing in the screen capture app. idk with KDE this seems to work ? I hit screen capture and spectacle shows up and saves it to images.
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  Can confirm this works on Plasma. There's also Flameshot[1], which is cross platform, that works really well and has pretty much every feature you could ask for in a screenshot app. [1] https://flameshot.org/ https://flameshot.org/
SevenDucks 5y ago
I love Ubuntu

haroldflowers 5y ago

I've been a long time linux desktop user, recently switched over to macOS after getting fed up from not being able to do many basic "productivity" related tasks, without having to open a terminal, search for a package on google, fiddle with some config, do a rain dance, etc... Skimming through just the blog post and some of the comments on this thread gives me a bit of a flashback thinking of all of the headaches I've endured __trying__ to get Linux to work for simple stuff like document management, PDF markup, synced notes, calendars, display scaling, general performance things, etc.. This was fun and interesting at first, but after a while there were diminishing returns. Believe me, I really wanted it to work, I love Linux (as a server). It hit me at some point that life is brief, and technology should probably be making my life easier, not more difficult.. So I switched to macOS. That aside, it is really important for progress on this front so that we don't have a total monopoly, and kudos to anyone working in the space. Fighting the good fight.

HatchedLake721 5y ago
Amen. Engineers like to tinker. From installing custom ROM on their phones, to deciding which JavaScript router to use along with other 99 packages to run a blog. We’ve all been there. But sometimes the time comes, where you just want to be as productive as possible or focus on other things. And that’s when things like Ruby on Rails or iPhone start look interesting. They just work, and let you focus on creating value, rather than feeding your inner pedantic tinkerer.
- gman83 5y ago
  Does the IPhone just work though? My wife has one and I always find it a pain to deal with. Simple things like playing videos often don't work with VLC (never had this problem with Android) so I have to use Handbrake to convert it to a format that the Iphone will accept. Same thing with audiobooks, MP3 versions don't work I have to convert them to M4B for some reason.
  - MereInterest 5y ago
    My sense is that it "just works" if and only if you've completely bought into the Apple ecosystem. If you want to back up your photos onto iCloud, Apple has made it easy. If you want to periodically back up your photos onto an external hard drive, Apple shrugs and says that you should manually copy them over.

dekhn 5y ago

OK who let GPT3 write an article again? This reads like it was written in non-english and then inexpertly translated.

anderspitman 5y ago
I read that as "GTK3" for a second and it made me giggle.
ducktective 5y ago
right? I was blaming my attention span...

musicale 5y ago

I love that PinePhone keyboard case and really want one for the iPhone. :D

pingsl 5y ago

I use Windows/MacOS/Linux(Ubuntu) on a regular base. As a ordinary end user, I feel 1. Windows software are usually good at product function design. 2. Mac has a better enforcement on overall UX. The visual across different software (from different vendors) are much consistent. 3. Linux desktop is unfortunately still missing above 2 points. Some Linux distro provides really good visual, but it only applies to its built–in programs. If you'd like to switch to the external programs, the system visual might be fragmented. I really hope in this new wave people could make some consensus on the visual of Linux desktop.

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Teknoman117 5y ago
> I really hope in this new wave people could make some consensus on the visual of Linux desktop. Consensus over the whole scope of open source?? That's never going to happen.
- pingsl 5y ago
  I mean the consensus about the visual/UX style like we have on Windows or Android. It's not that hard, I believe.
  - Kbelicius 5y ago
    On windows and android was consensus reached between all interested parties or was consensus reached within microsoft/google?
    - pingsl 5y ago
      > On windows and android was consensus reached between all interested parties or was consensus reached within microsoft/google? This is exactly the number 1 challenge for Linux Desktops: hard to coordinate with each party, then we end up hundreds of different distros.

MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago

bgdkbtv 5y ago

I think this is a great opportunity to make some good money with apps for Linux if marketed properly.

livinglist 5y ago

why hasn't anybody mention Vala programming language? it's a really good and convenient language for making GNOME apps.

ISK18 5y ago

jillesvangurp 5y ago

I have an Manjaro linux based laptop that I got a few months ago after my mac died. It was supposed to be temporary until I could get my hands on one of the new m1 pro's but I ended up liking the experience. It's fast. The hardware doesn't throttle. And most things I need run fine on it. In case you are wondering, I got myself a Samsung Galaxy book with 16GB i5 and SSD which was discounted very nicely during the pre-christmas sales to about 700EUR. Bargain and excellent value for money. Don't get me wrong, Linux is still a massive PITA to set up properly. Forget about using it without ever seeing a command line. But, I can deal with that and I've googled my way to success when it let me down a few times to get things going. It's kind of depressing though that things like keyboard, sound, gpus, desktop sharing, touchpads, etc. just don't work in a sane way out of the box. I had issues with all of those with things either not working or just being mis-configured. One thing that helped a lot is that a lot of proprietary applications can be installed via snap and games can be installed via Steam. Some OSS ones as well. I installed slack, signal, vs code and a few other things that way. And where that failed me, I was able to find some community AUR packages for things like webex and Chrome. Flatpak seems like it should do similar things to snap but mostly packages seem easier to find for snap. I don't really care about the philosophical differences between both. I'll use what works. A problem with both is hardware support. E.g. the Darktable snap is completely pointless because it lacks opencl support; the flatpak one has the same issue. I had to wait for the official package to be updated by Manjaro when they did their yearly release at Christmas. That took a few weeks after Arch updated upstream within a day or so. I have a GPU, why would I not want to use it? This is just flat out moronic. I actually had some fun playing some Steam games that long stopped working in the mac version of steam (64 bit only) via proton. Very easy to setup and install. And to my surprise the Intel xe gpu actually isn't that bad. And of course GPUs work fine with Steam. It seems software distribution is no longer blocked on distribution gate keepers not keeping packages up to date. I don't like to read about an update and then have to wait for it for six months while some non affiliated developers second guess all the testing and fixing that already happened upstream by the people that actually created the software. IMHO modern distributions should push out most end user applications to snap, flatpak, or whatever and focus only on the stuff that absolutely can't work via those. That simplifies things for both developers, distribution maintainers, and end users. Distributions aren't really adding any value here (the opposite I would argue). That will rapidly achieve what three decades of dozens of linux distributions reinventing the light over and over again never achieved: a homogeneous market for distributing end user Linux applications (OSS and closed source). Given that a lot of those can be cross compiled to mac, windows, chrome os, android, and whatever, that is not a small market either. We are already starting to see some of that. A lot of SAAS software actually is based on things like Electron and creating a snap for that is not that hard. You'd be a fool not to. Even if it's less than 1 percent of your users, it's still worth doing.

iostream24 5y ago

Re: missing toolkit for less capable devices. Fltk. There’s a lovely rust crate rs-fltk too. Fltk is stack-based (no heap allocation) and parents own their children. When a parent window goes out of scope, poof, memory cleaned up. Fltk is also easy to use. In C and C++ land there’s fltk-config utility that will automagically set compiler and linker flags etc. There’s a lovely fltk book that the rust crate links to in its extensive documentation. There are plenty of even lower resource options like littleVGL, which only needs a drawing routine.

ho_schi 5y ago

Gtkmm3 with C++ works well for me. I'm looking now on Gtk(mm)4 and Libadwaita. They improved the docs recently but the C++ documentation is kind of separated.

bluebit 5y ago

2022 is finally the year of Linux!

DoingIsLearning 5y ago

Is there a reason why the Emsembles App in the example shown looks so visually similar to other apps built with python's framework Kivy? Do they share any libraries, or is it just coincidence that the UX converges?

NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago

I don't think Purism gets enough credit in this article. They've dumped a lot of time, money, and effort into developing Phosh and other tools that make this possible.