C bindings and APIs generally work much better in Rust because the language works a lot more like C than it does C++.
Qt depends a lot on C++ class inheritance, and even does some preprocessing of C++ files to generate code in those classes. That’s obviously not possible when using Rust. And it looks like you need a fair bit of unsafe there and there to use it at all too.
Meanwhile, GTK being a C library, its integration with Rust is much more transparent and nice.
So if you’re making a GUI Rust app, you’re just kind of better off with GTK at the moment. It’s significantly easier and nicer.
Having made the choice to use GTK for a Rust project years ago - before a lot of the more Rust-friendly frameworks were around - this is exactly why I chose it. Nothing to do with DEs or any of that, just looking for a better coding experience. Now I’d probably choose one of the several Rust-focused solutions that have popped up though.
For a DE to succeed it just has to succeed over lots of alternatives in some features.
GNOME
is widely developed and protected, as it is the default on Fedora (with Redbat) and Ubuntu (Canonical). It is kinda fancy but its main focus seems to be a new “material-ish” simplified and streamlined Desktop.
Just not with transparency, thin animations, blur, 3D Backgrounds, an actually working, goodlooking and existing panel/dock, Apps that actually use your huge top bar used for decorations. Compared to macOS or something.
So you could say its design philosophy is inspired by macOS, but with many different ideas like that “Virtual Desktops or die”. But its basically macOS but less fancy, with a material-ish design like Android 13. I hate both hahaha.
KDE
Then there is KDE, which is really at the edge to look like the extremely outdated look of Windows 10 with these ugly rectangles everywhere, this no-round-corners fetish back in the day, “rectangles are elegant and good UI”. Such a completely weird step back in Style from Windows7, with less colors everywhere.
I have to say though, that Windows11, apart from a lot of stuff like their new design framework for Apps that wastes space, while also in part just already look really fancy, looks way better than KDE 5.
So KDE is now in the position to develop own ideas, but they pretty much go in the same direction as in windows, their new panel changer applet by Niccolo is veery similar to that, and it looks awesome! So I am certain the KDE6 will improve in Design a lot, even though I think I havent yet tried a KDE6 Plasma where projects like Dolphin where already ported to KDE6.
Projects like Dolphin are just great. I found it so strange and new back then to use a file manager with a name XD but funny, that Dolphin, Nemo and Thunar all come from the sea. Dolphin, Ocular, Spectacle, Ark, Kfind, KDE-Partitionmanager, Gwenview (something like Gimp but just for light editing, while still being in an unsafe language with security holes everywhere). These are all just great and unique software projects.
XFCE, MATE, Budgie, Cinnamon
Afaik these are all using GTK, so you could see them as outdated GNOME forks. Maybe thats very mean though, I see that Budgie will soon have Wayland, so I consider it an actively maintained Desktop.
I honestly can’t say much of the other environments, although I guess XFCE is based, had an okayish Design language that is at a solid base between Windows7 and some old Android.
Maybe if you tweak it it gets really modern, but I have looked enough Linux Scoop to know that every DE can look fancy with the amazing Community Designs. Actually Desktops should let random nontechnical Designers that dont understand Git make their Design. Like, no Code touching at all, just images please.
LXDE, LXQt, Window managers
Okay so these are basically energy saving DEs. They dont support lots of stuff simply, with their Design being at Windows XP or earlier. If you dont even have a menubar, that doesnt have to be styled.
So the Desktops maybe for old hardware and energy saving. If they have Wayland, so they can easily be used as the Window Manager of a Desktop, some Distro, Budgie or so, is looking to use an existent Windowmanager as their own. Just not with their own big Design Language, so they can make it “the Budgie Window Manager” without much problems.
I tried Fedora Sway and that was basically broken? My mouse was deduplicating and spamming the screen full with mouse symbols, meanwhile I could look at that… modern and colorful Titlebar, no Viridis or whatever actually thought through Color pallet of child crayon colors on a rectangle Bar with Terminal Font? Who wouldnt love this much “basedness”? But it broke, so yeah uninstalled that.
Cosmic, Hyprland
Now here come new projects, that actually have Designers working on them. Aaand in the Case of Cosmic it is entirely written in a damn safe language.
Okay its fair to say that Hyprland is a cool looking Window Manager, but Cosmic is doing something insane here.
Nearly all these bullshit old buggy File managers are in some C/C++ code, that just always breaks.
These are often 15 years old projects, they said “they cleaned up the packages” just by porting them to Qt6! Imagine what background changes they just left, because they would actually need to cleanup everything?
So Rust. Slint is said to be Qt-like, but not relying on C++, making it an incredible pain to write in Rust as you need to do some OOP translation that I dont understand because I am not in IT.
So Cosmic is doing something crazy and kinda new. Their interface was starting basically as a GNOME extension, quite literally. And there are many people layering just that package on their Fedora Silverblue (or future secureblue?)
But it is still basically imitating GNOME, with GTK support being one of the first GUI Framework integrations to come. They are doing nice material android-y things with their apps, and I imagine they are going in some direction here. Much like Android actually.
So COSMIC is a great beginning, but I think Rewriting something similar to Qt, with loots of frameworks and GUI Interface creation tools would be a statement. Like the Qt Creator, its crazy, a bit like this stupid TinkerCad but actually working and not being Windows-only and blocking Adblockers without even displaying Ads.
It would probably be “Qt stuff + Rust + Translation”, as the Qt people will likely not switch to Rust just like that. But having the core Apps, Kwin, the panel rewritten in Rust, that would be incredible.
Kwin is already working kinda well, but now there is the Cosmic Desktop with whatever WM and they could just reuse that and adapt it a bit.
So yeah, its a big deal for Interface Frameworks to rewrite all their stuff in another, extremely different language.
a few reasons I think, the QT bindings are split between cxx-qt and qmetaobject-rs . Neither of which are super great IMO, but even if they were, we have UI frame works like slint and egui which are already becoming quite good, slint has a good native look that resembles QT so people wanting that design can use that instead.
NOTE: When Qt is installed on the system, the native style uses Qt’s QStyle to achieve native looking widgets.
I’m not that familiar with KDE’s styling, but if I remember well it should just be a Qt style, so it should work.
Regarding rewriting Dolphin, I think in theory you could do that, in practice it’s probably pretty challenging given the amount of features Dolphin has.
It’s worth stating that QT is an optional backend and is only used for native styling, even the pure rust, Native styling still looks close to native. QT is fully optional and is not a dep even for linux apps
Privacy, Windows 11, and the fact that my system is more stable running Linux. I could count on a BSOD happening once or twice a week due to a driver issue with Windows 10. I still get strange crashes on Linux, but much less often.
I was all in on the Apple Eco System. I had a MacBook Pro, Apple TV, Iphone, Apple Watch etc. Then my 2010 MacBook Pro stopped getting updates because Apple said its hardware couldn’t keep up with the new features they were adding.
I loved that thing. I had put extra RAM in it and replaced the Hard Drive with an SSD. Even though Apple said it was ‘too old to receive support’, it ran like a dream for several more years when I installed Linux on it. It was great for my constant distro hopping. I used it until it died in 2021.
I think it was around 2017 when Apple stopped supporting that generation of MacBook. High Sierra was the last Mac OS version to get native support. At that stage, I already had to use third party apps to do things like set ‘night mode’ to reduce eye strain at night and control my Apple TV because Apple refused to add these features natively.
Now in late 2023, you couldn’t pay me to use an Apple Product. I’m all in on FOSS. I went from an Iphone to a Fairphone. From A MacBook Pro and Apple TV to a Tuxedo Aura 15, Steam Deck and running my own Jellyfin server on an Asus laptop with a headless Ubuntu installation.
I also went from iMessage to Signal, Apple Keychain to Bitwarden, Safari to Firefox etc
I have Fedora installed on my main desktop but I don’t use that much these days. My gf has been hinting at getting me Fairbuds XL for Christmas and I honestly can’t wait for the day that Linux will be viable instead of Android.
TL;DR Apple’s greed drove me to try Linux, and now I’m never going back lol
I heard about it off and on, but this was the days in dial-up and downloading an ISO to install Linux was too expensive in time and bandwidth . I had discovered at my local Office Depot, a Mandrake Linux box set so I splurged on that and got my first taste of Linux then. I also was able to surf the web and learn how to install it manually, but it didn’t make any sense at all and was too complex. For Mandrake, I didn’t care for it. It wasn’t until later on when I started working with hosting sites, that I got used to Centos and Ubuntu for servers. I even had Mac OSX for a while, which taught my about the directory structure, but I went back to Windows until around 2015ish when I jumped ship and went to Linux fulltime. I worked technical support and the servers were Linux based so I had learned a lot more doing that and got very comfortable with it. I then jumped through different distros to where I am now (Arch). I firmly hold belief though that Arch isn’t the best and no distro is truly the superior one. Instead, whatever Linux distro you use, if it does what you need it to do, then so be it!
To answer the question though, what pushed me toward Linux was really the whole push toward Windows 10 being more loaded down with the pushed tracking and advertisements that comes with the Windows Territory. Plus - I grew to love the command line and it’s sort of my second home now.
windows 8 that came with my core i3 laptop. did not jump into the windows10 bandwagon for all the bad things i was hearing about it. gave up when some apps start doing crazy stuff because os is old. mucked around with mint, and distro hopping from usb. mind-blown. now i’ve acquired a fairly new laptop and dual booted with debian12. has never done a random restart on it for months (due to force-it-down-your-throat-win-update). i still use a win laptop for work and some games, but that will never touch my personal computer. it’s fun reading all the comments here. thanks :)
I was in 6th grade and wanted to know more about computers. I thought being a computer programmer would be a cool job one day. I’d heard Linux was difficult to install and use and thought hey, that’ll help me learn. So I had my parents get me a copy of Mandrake 6. It was perfect because I had the free time to play with it and figure stuff out by making mistakes and fixing them without the pressure of having to do really important work.
I do preach the good word of FOSS, but only to those who are in a position to appreciate the suggestion and benefit from it.
I wanted to update my family PC (technically, but I don’t think anyone else apart from me used it). Windows XP licence was too expensive for me as a kid and I found a CD ROM in my library with a FOSS OS advertised on it.
Fast forward to now, and I have been using Linux almost exclusively for 15 years now (some Windows usage needed for work or gaming)
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