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I don't know how much of a rewrite their Cosmic Desktop is meant to be, but Iced isn't ready for anything but small, simple utilities. Known issues include a la

I don't know how much of a rewrite their Cosmic Desktop is meant to be, but Iced isn't ready for anything but small, simple utilities. Known issues include a lack of partial rendering and thus high battery usage, no support for touchpad gestures and a lack of accessibility support. Beyond that you have the rough edges and countless paper cuts that come with an unpolished and unproven toolkit. People really seem to underestimate the amount of work that goes in to creating a "proper" desktop GUI toolkit. You basically need to build a webbrowser minus the JS engine. Even Microsoft has given up and basically uses WebViews wherever possible.

mmstick76 4y ago
The COSMIC desktop isn't ready for anything either so they're a perfect match made for each other. There's no better time to invest in a new GUI library than doing so as you're already building a new desktop from scratch. Imagine how much money and effort would be wasted if we settled for GTK4 today and then later had to rewrite everything to Iced after someone else did the work for us. System76 would rather push the envelop and resolve this chicken & egg scenario instead of waiting around for consensus. People also underestimate the talent that works at System76 and the amount of work required to bring Iced up to speed. Iced has already proven itself, and its using an architecture (Elm) which has also already proven itself. It's the best way to develop a GUI in Rust, without a doubt. Jeremy has developed an entire desktop OS from scratch, including making a GUI toolkit for it, so it's not like we're oblivious to the effort required. Iced already has a fully functioning layout and rendering system so that webbrowser and JS engine analogy is complete. There's just a handful of features that are missing that are either partially implemented or we've already got 5 developers working on it full time to do the rest.

mmstick76 4y ago

The COSMIC desktop isn't ready for anything either so they're a perfect match made for each other. There's no better time to invest in a new GUI library than doing so as you're already building a new desktop from scratch. Imagine how much money and effort would be wasted if we settled for GTK4 today and then later had to rewrite everything to Iced after someone else did the work for us. System76 would rather push the envelop and resolve this chicken & egg scenario instead of waiting around for consensus. People also underestimate the talent that works at System76 and the amount of work required to bring Iced up to speed. Iced has already proven itself, and its using an architecture (Elm) which has also already proven itself. It's the best way to develop a GUI in Rust, without a doubt. Jeremy has developed an entire desktop OS from scratch, including making a GUI toolkit for it, so it's not like we're oblivious to the effort required. Iced already has a fully functioning layout and rendering system so that webbrowser and JS engine analogy is complete. There's just a handful of features that are missing that are either partially implemented or we've already got 5 developers working on it full time to do the rest.