probonopd writes on Medium about Linux desktop usability, Haiku, FreeBSD-based Hello system, and simpler personal computing.
HN links it for Haiku impressions and Linux desktop usability arguments; commenters cite it to clarify the Hello system and Haiku's relationship.
Yes, I started klik about a decade ago, over time evolved and simplified the concept and renamed it to AppImage. Thanks for calling it a "lone island of sanity in the ocean of bad ideas on the Linux Desktop" ;-)
After having heard that "this is not how Linux works", I was about to give up when Linus Torvalds himself gave me the impression that maybe the idea wasn't entirely insane altogether.
As for what should be done, I don't think that doing the 1.001st distribution will make any significant difference. Building a system on top of the Linux kernel that is intended to be a platform might.
But then, building something entirely from scratch would require resources I clearly don't have. So how about this:
1. Take the most popular distribution as the basis (that would be Debian/Ubuntu probably)
2. Determine a set of "Core OS" functionality that is comparable to what Windows and macOS do out of the box, and decide that this will be shipped by the Core OS
3. Use distribution packages to install that Core OS into a filesystem image
4. Uninstall the package manager (because it is a tool for the maintainers of the Core OS, not meant for users)
5. Guarantee that only new APIs/ABIs will be added to the system, existing ones can be considered stable and will deprecated only after 5 years (or so) prior warning
6. Release the Core OS once a year (Core OS 2018, 2019, ...)
7. Apps come as bundles (e.g., Rox-style AppDirs or AppImages)
8. Maybe call the loader (ld-linux.so) differently…
My gripe with GTK3 are tiny, auto-hiding scroll bars.
And the abandoning of menus, which I guess is mostly encouraged by the GNOME HIG:
Menu bars increase the vertical footprint of an application’s user interface, introduce a large number of disclosure points, and function as a fixed set of inflexible options. For these reasons, header bars and header bar menus are generally recommended over menu bars, along with other design patterns for exposing controls on demand, such as selection mode, action bars, and popovers.
So, now that we have giant 4k screens, we are going to abandon menus. And I am not even a menu user, but they are great for discovering keyboard shortcuts and the the functionality provided by applications. Instead, we have header bar and hamburger menus that can only host a small subset of the items that normal menus could host. Shortcuts become hard to find and some applications provide some shortcut overlay, while in other applications you have to figure it out yourself.
If vertical footprint is a problem, offer the user to put the menu in the system tray macOS style.
Fun fact: the Xerox Star apparently had hamburger menus, application pull-down menus, and later the global menu are an evolution of the hamburger menu. It seems that we are going backwards again, without any clear rationale. Even if hamburger menus were more ergonomic, generations have been trained with the WIMP paradigm.
[1]…
3 days ago, I installed Haiku on bare metal: an old PC from ~2004. I was not aware that a new version was planned at that time, but the upgrade was completely smooth.
My idea when I installed Haiku was to make my own version of the "old computer challenge"[1], with an emphasis on using GUI apps.
Similarly to @probono (a FOSS dev), I also found Haiku "shockingly good"[2] at being a lightweight, responsive, easy-to-use desktop OS.
After some patching, I was even able to compile Tectonic[3], a modern LaTeX engine written in Rust, and Quaternion a Matrix client supporting E2EE[4]. All that running on a single core Athlon 64 and 1.5GB of RAM.
I posted some screenshots in a Mastodon threads if you are curious[5] (but my posts are in french sorry :/). And of course this comment is posted from Haiku!
[1]: https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2021-07-07-old-computer-challenge.html
[2]: https://medium.com/@probonopd/my-first-day-with-haiku-shockingly-good-8930cad4bbb0
[3]: https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/
[4]: https://github.com/quotient-im/Quaternion
[5]: https://mastodon.tedomum.net/@tgoldoin/109554115997967651
Which Ubuntu Linux? The gnome one or unity one?
I liked untiy too, it was almost perfect. But gnome3 messed it up for everyone.
Even though the unity desktop elements remain the same, unity still relies on gnome apps, like nautilus. I don't think I need to state the problems with gnome apps, you can read more about that here:
https://medium.com/@probonopd/make-it-simple-linux-desktop-usability-part-1-5fa0fb369b42
The Amiga had an equivalent: every visible icon was accompanied by a small metadata file appended with .info (More information here: http://krashan.ppa.pl/articles/amigaicons/). But it didn't 'pollute' the filesystem, and was far more manageable.
Haiku does things differently, and elegantly: https://medium.com/@probonopd/my-sixth-day-with-haiku-under-the-hood-of-resources-icons-and-packages-abec8d0e4ec6)
Speaking of Icons, I love that they spent considerable time to optimze those[1], including their own vector format so that they can store it in the metadata of the file, so that displaying large folders with unique files would be speedy.
[1]: https://medium.com/@probonopd/my-sixth-day-with-haiku-under-the-hood-of-resources-icons-and-packages-abec8d0e4ec6