Translation: no one should ever attempt to innovate on the Linux desktop. GNOME is the epitome of software development and everyone else should quietly give up. If GNOME can't fix an issue, no one can. Only GNOME has the god-given right to make decisions on how desktops are developed for Linux. There can only be one party. The One Desktop principle. Contribute to your party leader, or else...

2y ago

Actual manufacturers of laptops / desktops

Jump

Michael Murphy (S76) @lemmy.world 2y ago

This would be more appropriate over on https://lemmy.world/c/system76

We do manufacture our Thelio desktops at our factory in Denver. We also offer tour guides for anyone that wants to schedule to see how everything is manufactured and assembled.

Our laptops are not entirely Clevo though. Some of them are manufactured by Emdoor. These companies do not sell systems directly to retail consumers, so they are not technically rebranded. They do work with us to give us the necessary schematics and documentation so that we can port our Coreboot firmware to them.

Either way, their quality is no better or worse than any other ODM out there. In fact, I've had Dell, ASUS, and Lenovo laptops with lesser quality than a Clevo. It will largely depend on the model that you buy as to what materials are used. I distinctively remember some YouTube reviewers mistakenly assuming some models were using plastic, when they were actually using magnesium alloy.

2y ago

Wayland - QEMU (virt-manager) fullscreen is not actual fullscreen

Jump

Michael Murphy (S76) @lemmy.world 2y ago

The Wayland session of GNOME in Pop!_OS is not supported precisely because there a lot of unresolved issues.

COSMIC isn't yet in alpha, but you can try it there when we release alpha images. That will be a supported path for Wayland in 24.04

2y ago

COSMIC: The Road to Alpha

Jump

Michael Murphy (S76) @lemmy.world 2y ago

It is Wayland only, and fractional scaling is already supported by our toolkit since the beginning.

2y ago

COSMIC: The Road to Alpha

Jump

Michael Murphy (S76) @lemmy.world 2y ago

We will be adding integrations to our theme engine to automatically generate themes for GTK3, GTK4, and libadwaita.

2y ago

COSMIC: The Road to Alpha

Jump

Michael Murphy (S76) @lemmy.world 2y ago

The GTK4 project was cancelled for multiple reasons. We originally began working on Relm4 to use GTK4 for COSMIC applets. While others on the team were also experimenting with alternative Rust GUI libraries.

It required a lot of effort to patch GTK4 to support the Wayland layer shell protocol. Getting those patches merged into GTK4 was also taking a much longer time. There were long delays between code reviews; and they also wanted a series of much larger refactoring changes to be made to GTK4 before exposing the layer shell feature. It was much easier to get layer-shell working with iced, as it is a much leaner and concise code base.

GTK does not support fractional scaling, which is something we want our applets to support on day one. This was one of our major concerns. A concern that didn't apply to iced.

It was also exceedingly difficult to create custom widgets with GTK in Rust. Even those of us with years of experience considered it to be unreasonably difficult. So it was not feasible to expect new hires on the team to be able to comfortably develop COSMIC components with it. In comparison, our team was able to develop custom widgets with iced with much less effort and with greater flexibility, so the demand for iced grew stronger.

At the end of the day, GTK is not a Rust toolkit, and its API is cumbersome to adapt to Rust. Use of GTK would always be a compromise that lessens the developer experience for COSMIC app and applet development. A compromise that would eventually require us to rewrite everything in a native Rust GUI library the moment it would become possible to do so.

Since we are developing a desktop environment from the ground up anyway, we decided that there would be much more value for our time if we contribute to the Rust ecosystem and utilize iced to make a fully featured GUI library for application development.

2y ago

COSMIC: The Road to Alpha

Jump

Michael Murphy (S76) @lemmy.world 2y ago

It would certainly be easier for them to port COSMIC because there are very few dependencies on shared C libraries. Cargo links all Rust libraries statically, so it's easier to maintain and update components. This will depend how open they are to accepting Cargo and Rust into their ecosystems.

2y ago

COSMIC: The Road to Alpha

Jump

Michael Murphy (S76) @lemmy.world 2y ago

The keyword is alternative. All first party applications are written natively with our libcosmic toolkit, which is based on iced-rs. We are using a fork of iced though because we needed to implement a custom runtime with the sctk (smithay client toolkit) for COSMIC applet development, but our desktop applications will use the original winit runtime.