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That's precisely the point! It would be really nice for applications to be able to operate agnostic from the DE's decisions about UX and design. Applications wa

That's precisely the point! It would be really nice for applications to be able to operate agnostic from the DE's decisions about UX and design. Applications want something much more high level: button here, scroll bar there, text input here. It's the DE's job to make such things accessible and look pretty. If you think about it, that's precisely why the web is a popular user interface target: the application has a much higher level interface, and all those concerns are, correctly, handled at a different abstraction layer.

antihero 1y ago
No it is the developer's job to make things be nice and work well. We've gone past pretending to be native shit for pretty much everything. We define our own design styles and language since the web took off.
jon-wood 1y ago
I don’t think it’s possible to build a generic UI across DEs, at least if you actually want them to feel native. They’ve all got different standards, so while Gnome might have a button here, a text box here, and scroll bar there on KDE a scroll bar here, text box here, and then the button might make more sense.
- AndyKelley 1y ago
  My point is that the application doesn't have to care if it's running in Gnome or KDE. It just speaks Wayland protocol and then it gets a Window and some UI in it. The gnome window manager / KDE window manager then makes that UI properly native. Consider input methods. That clearly belongs in the window manager process, not each application process. The application should simply ask for a text box, and then receive events when the text in the box changes. The fact that I'm typing Japanese into a fancy UI shouldn't make any difference to the application, other than what text it receives from the widget events. And that should all be possible in a small, static executable, that is speaking the Wayland protocol, and has zero dependencies other than networking syscalls.
  - codethief 1y ago
    I like the idea but, having built many UIs for many different applications over the years, I doubt it would work for anything non-trivial. The thing is, as soon as your UI reaches a certain level of complexity you need tight control over the look and feel, especially over the positioning of UI components relative to each other. Unfortunately, the latter depends a lot on how exactly your UI components look and behave. For example, your text input box's label might be displayed to the left of the box, to the top, or it might be one of those floating labels that are displayed inside the box but move to the top border as soon as you focus the box. Depending on that, you would choose the spacing to neighboring text boxes and buttons differently, and maybe also arrange things differently altogether, because of different space requirements. In other words: Your application would need to know what exactly the Wayland "UI layer" is going to display in order to send it precise instructions. But then your abstraction is very leaky.
  - antihero 1y ago
    > makes that UI properly native That's five words with unimaginable complexity.

antihero 1y ago

No it is the developer's job to make things be nice and work well. We've gone past pretending to be native shit for pretty much everything. We define our own design styles and language since the web took off.

jon-wood 1y ago

I don’t think it’s possible to build a generic UI across DEs, at least if you actually want them to feel native. They’ve all got different standards, so while Gnome might have a button here, a text box here, and scroll bar there on KDE a scroll bar here, text box here, and then the button might make more sense.

AndyKelley 1y ago
My point is that the application doesn't have to care if it's running in Gnome or KDE. It just speaks Wayland protocol and then it gets a Window and some UI in it. The gnome window manager / KDE window manager then makes that UI properly native. Consider input methods. That clearly belongs in the window manager process, not each application process. The application should simply ask for a text box, and then receive events when the text in the box changes. The fact that I'm typing Japanese into a fancy UI shouldn't make any difference to the application, other than what text it receives from the widget events. And that should all be possible in a small, static executable, that is speaking the Wayland protocol, and has zero dependencies other than networking syscalls.
- codethief 1y ago
  I like the idea but, having built many UIs for many different applications over the years, I doubt it would work for anything non-trivial. The thing is, as soon as your UI reaches a certain level of complexity you need tight control over the look and feel, especially over the positioning of UI components relative to each other. Unfortunately, the latter depends a lot on how exactly your UI components look and behave. For example, your text input box's label might be displayed to the left of the box, to the top, or it might be one of those floating labels that are displayed inside the box but move to the top border as soon as you focus the box. Depending on that, you would choose the spacing to neighboring text boxes and buttons differently, and maybe also arrange things differently altogether, because of different space requirements. In other words: Your application would need to know what exactly the Wayland "UI layer" is going to display in order to send it precise instructions. But then your abstraction is very leaky.
- antihero 1y ago
  > makes that UI properly native That's five words with unimaginable complexity.