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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Long time i3 user, recently switched to Hyprland+Wayland. I just don’t like mice, don’t enjoy using them, and I find the snappiness and responsiveness of keyboard-centric workflows very fun and enjoyable.

    I am a software developer, and I am very impatient when it comes to my tools: I like my feedback cycles and interactions to be as tight as possible. This limited study from 2015 showed that developers, on average, spend ~26% of their productive time on stuff that is not related to either code editing or comprehension, including 14% spent on UI interactions. Tiling window manager allows me to streamline most of these interactions through hotkey bindings and shell automation, >!so I prefer spending literal months polishing my dotfiles instead!<





  • My first encounter with Linux was in 2007, I installed Kubuntu Gutsy Gibbon on my dad’s computer out of curiosity - I was intrigued by a notion of free OS you can deeply customize.

    I have spent countless hours fiddling with the system, mostly ricing (Compiz Fusion totally blew my mind) and checking out FOSS games.

    Decades later I switched to Linux full-time. After 12 years of daily driving OS X and working as a developer, I wanted a customizable and lean OS that is easy to maintain and control. Chose Arch, then Nix, havent looked back ever since.




  • I’m in the same boat - only started getting into Nix a couple months ago, with no proper engagement in the community yet

    I liked the breakdown posted by another user above. As far as I understood (I hope others will correct me) is that:

    1. One person, who happens to be a well-respected long-time contributor, was dismissive of others’ concerns about accepting funding from a MIC company.
    2. They got suspended for 6 weeks due to being affiliated with said company (?) and not having disclosed it properly.
    3. They went on Reddit to write about the situation, grossly misrepresenting it in their favor, turning their contributor cred into vocal support in reddit comments.
    4. All of that is happening while the community as a whole is struggling with scalability and transparency of organization, as well reaching an ethical consensus on the funding question.




  • It’s not that native UIs are lagging behind, there is a whole set of reasons.

    TL;DR: browsers, as opposed to desktop apps, are stardartized - because they were originally designed to display and deliver text documents. We were never supposed to build complex application UIs on a web stack.

    First, there is no standard way of making native UI on a desktop. Every OS uses it’s own solution, while Linux offers several different ones. Browsers rely on a set of open standards developed specifically for the web, and even there not everything works exactly the same.

    Second, browsers are designed to draw a very specific kind of UI through a very specific rendering mode - they run an immutable hierarchy of elements through layouting and painting engines. It works great for documents, but it becomes extremely unweildy for most other things, which is why we have an entire zoo of different UI implementations (crutches, most of them) for browsers.

    On the desktop we often make a choice of what UI technology would fit best our purpose. For a game engine I would use an immediate-mode UI solution like ImGUI, for the ease of prototyping, integration and fast iterations.

    For consumer software I might choose between something like QT or GTK for robust functionality, reliable performance, acessibility and community support. Mobile platforms come with their own native UI solutions.

    For data-intensive UIs and heavy editors (e.g. CAD, video and music production, games) I might need to designan entirely new rendering pipeline to comply with users requirements for ergonomics, speed, latency etc.

    It is also easy to notice that as a team or employer, it is often much easier to hire someone for web stack, than for native development. Simply put, more people can effectively code in JS, so we get more JS and tech like Electron enables that.

    If you are interested in a single solution that will get you nice results in general, no matter the platform - you might see some success with projects like Flutter or OrbTK.

    UI rendering in general is a deep and very rewarding rabbit hole. If you are in the mood, this article by Raph Levien gives a good overview of existing architectures: https://raphlinus.github.io/rust/gui/2022/05/07/ui-architecture.html