With Gnome developers basically ignoring the community I'm imagining that many are looking to kde or at least creating a fork of gtk.
Is there a third way? We have Wayland now. X.Org will soon be deprecated.
Why not have a desktop that renders applications according to some variant of xml? CSS is trash and need not be included. JSON can be used for window decorations and whatnot.
Every application is just a service listening on a particular port. The visual stuff is all defined in the xml variant with styling options in JSON.
Wouldn't this be a truly portable and standards abiding desktop? Why is no one working on this?
Application devs shouldn't have to concern themselves with designing buttons and UI shit in C. Let the XML document layout and JSON options handle that.
>We have Wayland now It's gonna be a horror if we switch to Wayland entirely. >Why not have a desktop that renders applications according to some variant of xml AFAIK, Windows .NET applications and Qt do this. >Application devs shouldn't have to concern themselves with designing buttons and UI shit in C. Let the XML document layout and JSON options handle that. It looks like you want Electron-powered desktop
Sebastian Gomez
Not exactly. JavaScript is cancer. I would never want applications developed in that garbage.
All I'd want is to move the visual concerns out of application logic and instead specify what you want using some kind of xml (or even markdown) and JSON in place of CSS.
The application just listens on a port for events like a button being pushed. You use ports for communication like sending notifications to a tray or to the desktop.
The language the apps are coded in doesn't matter. The communication is what is more important.
Like Alan Kay when he created OO. Objects aren't important. How they communicate and interact is more important.
Transmission has this capability. You can open a tab and look at the status of your torrents...yet transmission is written in C.
This is an ideal model for application development as it separates concerns. You don't necessarily need to open a Firefox tab to browse your files.
Instead the visual representation of the application itself is specified by in a markup language rather than painstakingly rendered in C.
This allows applications and the desktop to be easily themed. It also allows for faster application development since you don't have to concern yourself with coding pretty shit.
If we want the year of the Linux desktop we need to make developing applications in Linux easy and portable. Fuck all UI libraries.
Easton Baker
>If we want the year of the Linux desktop we need to make developing applications in Linux easy and portable. Linux desktop has much more serious issues than application development. It is already easy and portable with Qt (well, as far as it gets with C++, but I am not sure anyone writes desktop application in other language than some C-flavor, e.g. C++, C#, Java). >The language the apps are coded in doesn't matter. GTK and Qt have language bindings. It looks like you want some universal UI library, but that's rather a bad idea. Let's see: >You use ports for communication like sending notifications to a tray or to the desktop. but the system can even not have a tray or a desktop, it can be some plain and simple window manager. Anyway, there already exists freedesktop.org which is somewhat aimed to unification of Linux desktop.
Adam Kelly
holy shit this post formatting is cancer
Charles Powell
Cinnamom is the fork gnome2 should have been in the first place.
Jason Perez
What do you care? I was posting from my phone. Contribute to the thread, you fucking whiny tumor.
Jaxon Fisher
I wouldn't say that I want a universal UI binary. I'd want to create a variant of XML that we can all agree on for specifying the visuals of an application. Maybe that variant is QT's qml? I'm not sure because I haven't really messed with it but it would certainly be better to use something that already exists rather than reinventing the wheel. Free software is about cooperation after all.
What we would need is some kind of backend software that is able to translate XML into something visual. It would be nice to be able to cooperate with Gnome and QT to accomplish this. We would basically need something that compiles this xml along with application code. We would be able to target QT or GTK.
So there wouldn't be a universal binary, per se, but it would be a sort of universal compiler with different DE's as targets. Although this is difficult with Gnome being an autistic moving target.
Another option is to render the XML in real-time like web browsers do but this is far more resource intensive than just creating a binary. The benefit would be portability. Although when you really think about it, every binary that is compiled in this manner will just contain a tiny renderer that is able to read that XML.
As for freedesktop.org, I would aim to be as compliant as possible, but I wouldn't want to be limited by their specifictions. Freedesktop can't possibly cover every use-case.
I was inspired by Firefox OS. You were supposed to be able to code your apps in HTML, CSS, and JS but JS is cancer. CSS is poorly thought out shit and HTML needs a lot more as it is still thinking of the web in terms of hypertext when we are dealing with diverse forms of media not just text.
As for the system tray, it can be a standalone app. You just specify a small rectangle sitting in the lower-left of the screen. It listens on an unused port and accept communication only from localhost.
In my mind, this all makes perfect sense, but I'm quite shit at explaining things.
Xavier Robinson
You should have forked Red Star DE by now.
David Lopez
why is Sup Forums flooded arrogant phoneposters >post tech support/garbage thread >behave like on a foreign forum, often ignore board/site rules and practices >get instantly offended by any negative comment
Hunter Hall
FUCK OFF NON-CONTRIBUTOR
Isaac Rogers
case in point
Parker Richardson
I see you also like
the perfect prose formatting.
With such a patrician taste,
let me say,
you made your post
a joy for my eyes
and a tear for my butt.
>t. user, a letter to OP, February 11
Carson Morgan
You summoned me from the other thread. Your idea is immature. XML and JSON is just nastiness you don't need. Qt/QML is probably the best paradigm for writing desktop applications.
Parker Peterson
>reddit spacing
Luis Price
I'm not explicity dead-set on JSON and XML. I just used them to better articulate my idea. I'll have to look further into qml.
>immature Why is my idea immature? It seems pretty based, if you ask me. Applications use existing infrastructure to communicate. They use simple markup (qml if you like) for the visuals (like html does for web pages). Idk it seems easier to create a calculator using markup with events than it does to specify everything in C.
James Torres
underrated image
Nathaniel Bennett
Red Star uses KDE.
Adrian Davis
Idiots, don't underestimate XML, many desktop environments use it for its settings.
Nathan Phillips
I'm the OP. Do you like my idea, user?
Michael Walker
Yes, sounds rational. I thought someone had done it already.
Every single one of your posts is about simplifying development
>we should use xml instead of painstaking C!
I don't get the point of this. You want it to be customizable? Or themeable? Use a WM, they're written in C because native code has a smaller footprint.
Luke Bailey
Simplifying development is a good thing. Shorter development time, less bugs, less bugchasing, and easier maintenance. Performance is not the only thing to be considered here.
Adam Young
LOL look at this newfag phoneposting and reddit spacing at the same time. Get the fuck out faggot
Lucas Taylor
Underrated post. OP is a faggot
John Ortiz
The idea of a good DE is incompatible with the Linux OS.
You'll replace everything with lightweight alternatives anyways. If you don't, why didn't you just install OS X?
