They can do this for the desktop environment programs but the vast majority of GUI programs for linux are going to use Gtk or Qt. Not having to do all the distro-side patches required to fix the GNOME dev's Gtk3 breakage (not sure if Qt is this way or not) will leave their distro much rougher than other distros when running non-Pop_OS programs.<p>Also, the fact that Iced Rust also targets the 'web' suggests to me it will not be a fully capable toolkit (as web cannot do what native can). Seems like they're going to be using this by themselves... and that's fine. Pop_OS has gone off on their own successfully before.
I don't know how much of a rewrite their Cosmic Desktop is meant to be, but Iced isn't ready for anything but small, simple utilities.
Known issues include a lack of partial rendering and thus high battery usage, no support for touchpad gestures and a lack of accessibility support.
Beyond that you have the rough edges and countless paper cuts that come with an unpolished and unproven toolkit.
People really seem to underestimate the amount of work that goes in to creating a "proper" desktop GUI toolkit. You basically need to build a webbrowser minus the JS engine.
Even Microsoft has given up and basically uses WebViews wherever possible.
Not sure why System76 is going this route... Everyone is clamouring for a high quality Linux laptop and instead they're using subpar Clevo laptops and creating a new distro (with a bad case of NIH) that no one asked for...<p>The hardware they did make seems nice (desktop case and keyboard), dunno why they aren't parleying that into making their own laptops. Like, why buy their current laptops over a ThinkPad (which you know will be supported by Fedora since that's still what's popular at IBM) or an HP/Dell developer laptop, or any of the other "known to work" laptops?
I love Iced (I have tried multiple other Rust GUI frameworks) but it is nowhere near production quality - the API changes often and documentation/ guides are almost non-existent. At least this was the case two months ago, not sure if something has changed after that.
My main issue with PopOS is that it's very problematic to upgrade. The situation that really annoyed me is that their gnome widgets have their own special style classes that are not supported by most universal themes, so the only way to get a good consistent experience is to use their default theme or spend hours tracking down the specific custom styles that need updating.<p>If you decide to go off the rails and replace some or most of the PopOS stuff (which I eventually did), it will work, but probably break on running the next major update. This happened to me twice and ultimately had me move on to other things.<p>If this new approach can solve that problem, then I think PopOS! will be a much more attractive option. I will probably not go back to using PopOS! (using tiling wms now), but I would have no issue recommending it.
If I understand the current capabilities of Iced correctly, and looking at their road map, there doesn't seem to be any support for assistive technologies.<p>So it looks like whatever System76 ends up developing won't be usable for people with disabilities?
Looking forward to trying this out. Should also give Iced a boost in popularity. I can't wait for the linux desktop to finally get rid of GTK and QT. Both have served us well but they are a product of a time long gone by.
Does this or any other newer toolkit have any support for accessibility?<p>I'm guessing the answer is no. This is the hill virtually all new UI toolkits die on.
This is great news for iced I'd say! Which is nice since it was the top candidate that came up for me when I researched how to GUI on a pinephone in rust. :)
I have tried iced for a few things, and was relatively satisfied. Felt very similar to a web-based react. I'm not a rust developer (but I do have C and other low-ish level experience), so there was a bit of a hurdle, but I was able to make things work.<p>I'm curious how using rust+iced will go for the level of integration in the desktop, and it's at least interesting.
Good. I bought Darter Pro recently and had to - business as usual under Linux - compile this and tweak that. Via things like their keyboard configurator[1] I was exposed to Rust's GTK bindings. It wasn't pretty: the mismatch between the obviously object-oriented GTK and Rust which doesn't do (and doesn't want to) OOP was glaring. I understand the appeal of Rust very well, and I'm happy they write their drivers and (parts of) firmware in it, but it's about as fit for OOP-based GUI as Go and Erlang. Which is to say - not very much.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/pop-os/keyboard-configurator" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/pop-os/keyboard-configurator</a>
I have used popos in the past and was very happy with it. The current install is stuck in an unupdateable mode because the underlying Ubuntu reached end of life. Once I get around to it I’ll gladly reinstall the latest.<p>What I liked then is the idea of privacy, which I didn’t spend a lot of time to verify and the ease with which I could play games like GTA V.
I wish someone would port wxWidgets to Rust. IMHO one of the best GUI toolkits out there. Easy to use and performant, works flawlessly on many (desktop) platforms.<p>Even better would be someone updating wxUniversal (the self-drawn version of wxWidgets) and porting it to Rust. This could be useful for a Linux desktop.
Hopefully integration story of other programming languages, like Python and JavaScript, with Iced Rust is nicer than with good old C/C++. This could make it an attractive target in ever shrinking desktop application industry.