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helloSystem / hello

Desktop system for creators with a focus on simplicity, elegance, and usability. Based on FreeBSD. Less, but better!
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Reach out to persons who might be interested in this project #10

Open probonopd opened 4 years ago

probonopd commented 4 years ago

Hello. if you are mentioned here, that is because I thought, based on previous work, that you might be interested in this project. Feel free to look around here (especially in the Wiki) and comment. Of course it would be great if you'd like to contribute (with thoughts, design, code, or otherwise). In case you are not interested that is of course fine too, please don't be offended for having been mentioned here. Thanks!

yatima1460 commented 4 years ago

I think some design pillars to follow should be written, like general ideas: "what is a good design is what will be good in the future, not what is good now"

This can already prevent ugly stuff like DLL Hell, indexing searching software instead of crawling ones, software that prefers to save memory and be slower than use 1GB and be super fast and stuff like that..

Like we are near the point where SSDs will be as fast as DDR2 and this means suddenly having 1TB of RAM for the average consumer soon

jancborchardt commented 4 years ago

Ohh, pretty cool! :) I don’t have so much time currently, but if you are interested in more designers having a look at it or maybe getting some contributors, please:

Have fun!

thecheis commented 4 years ago

Hi! As I said you in Twitter, this project is very interesting. I consider my knowledges are very small, but I have some proposals for brainstorming. I'll contact you by mail or Twitter DM. :)

Seeya!

vermaden commented 3 years ago

Thanks you for invite to the party.

Interesting initiative ...

To not reinvent everything in bad style (as Lumina did being ugly as ...) if it would be up to me I would start with something between Elementary OS and Ubuntu MATE with Global Menu on top of the screen (like on macOS). GhostBSD and NomadBSD also made nice efforts here. I did not liked FuryBSD. TrueOS and PC-BSD was always a disaster when it comes to look and feel.

Also I really liked that FVWM theme with buttons/bars on side of the window instead of the top of the window: https://www.box-look.org/p/1018264/ https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/8xdvu5/fvwm_images_words/ https://www.reddit.com/r/unixart/comments/8tgddl/fvwm_images_words/

This makes sense as most screens are 16:9 so having lower (less width) windows make better use of these panoramic screens.

I would also focus the initial loading stage of the OS as this is where its most ugly on FreeBSD.

Personally I have modified FreeBSD without recompiling to minimum but still early boot process is ugly. Later is better (less unneeded info).

Here is how it looks like now (sorry for poor video quality - recorded with my potato smartphone): http://www.mediafire.com/file/oygqxc28jhw0j87/freebsd-boot-1-3-bios-geli.mp4/file http://www.mediafire.com/file/ul7hhb4ov4h84ul/freebsd-boot-2-3-geli-xdm.mp4/file http://www.mediafire.com/file/sx7ed9qssf0t56y/freebsd-boot-3-3-xdm-x11.mkv/file

Steps needed to configure: https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2018/03/29/freebsd-desktop-part-1-simplified-boot/

The worst is the First Part, I would prefer just that:

Password:

... and when letter D (for DEBUG) or V (for VERBOSE) would be held during boot then FreeBSD would switch into verbose boot.

Also really oldschool messages about kernel and modules loading after the loader(8) menu are useless for every boot.

From available file manager I find CAJA (most dense view in LIST mode) and THUNAR (with its mass rename option) to be the best graphical file managers available currently.

If I would have to choose toolkit then I would choose GTK every single time against QT or something else. QT is just plain fucking ugly. It only looks nice when run in whole KDE.

Not sure how that helps but thats my $0.02 in the topic.

Regards.

probonopd commented 3 years ago

Thanks you for invite to the party.

Welcome. Thank you very much for taking the time to respond.

I would start with something between Elementary OS and Ubuntu MATE with Global Menu on top of the screen

Is it coincidence that you are saying this?

Right now, we have

I did not liked FuryBSD

In which regard? FuryBSD is reinventing itself as a toolkit to build Live ISOs. it offers many different editions with various desktop environments. So I am using it as the Live ISO build tool.

Also I really liked that FVWM theme with buttons/bars on side of the window instead of the top of the window

Never seen that before. Makes sense if you are not interested in having a title on top of the window, which I find very useful.

I would also focus the initial loading stage of the OS as this is where its most ugly on FreeBSD

Indeed. I can bring down the verbosity of the early stages very much as I had done here, but as soon as the userland starts loading, the early boot splash disappears...

It would be much nicer to have a boot animation ("spinner") though. And a way to just keep v or s pressed during boot, like on the Mac. I guess we'd need a kernel hacker for that....

From available file manager I find CAJA (most dense view in LIST mode) and THUNAR (with its mass rename option) to be the best graphical file managers available currently.

I went for a custom Qt-based one: https://github.com/helloSystem/Filer/

QT is just plain fucking ugly. It only looks nice when run in whole KDE.

It is fully themable. In fact I have started (slightly) theming it in https://github.com/helloSystem/QtPlugin/. Note the rounded corners on buttons. It's just a proof-of-concept so far. The whole visual experience can be changed!

Thanks a lot for your input. Let's see if we can put something decent together. I'd be especially interested in exposing ZFS functionality in the file manager in a very "natural" way.

vermaden commented 3 years ago

You know what I use on top of my screen, this:

https://vermaden.files.wordpress.com/2019/12/shot-res-small.jpg

First is INFORMATION BAR that gives me all needed information so I do not need to open terminal everytime and check it. Second is OPENNED WINDOWS/APPLICATIONS and on WHICH DESKTOP so I do not need PLANK for example.

The Globel Menu kinda breaks this thing without providing anything (for me). But I assume that most people would prefer Global Menu instead of my setup as they are more 'casual' and do not have such specific needs.

If Global Menu has rounded corners or not does not matter to me.

SerenityOS does not have rounded courners on the Global Menu for example: https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity

FuryBSD did not feel polished not it did look very well comparing to GhostBSD or NomadBSD.

I'd be especially interested in exposing ZFS functionality in the file manager in a very "natural" way.

First OpenSolaris with Nautilus from GNOME2 and now OpenIndiana with MATE (GNOME2 fork) with Caja (Nautilus fork) provide Time Slider as a companion to ZFS in graphical menu:

About QT versus GTK comparision, take a look at Transmission QT and Transmission GTK: https://i.imgur.com/3pJXy3X.png

How ugly the QT buttons are on the QT side. They are perfect on GTK side.

When LibreOffice 6 was built against GTK then it looked really nice. Now with LibreOffice7 the QT is default engine and take a look how horroible the menu/tabs now look like, disaster:

https://i.imgur.com/2vs7dop.png

I have been using 'open' desktop for more then 17 years, 15 on FreeBSD and in any given time in that periond GTK ALWAYS looked better (or properly) then QT. I literally HATE anything QT based. The only thing that looked 'acceprable' on QT was Opera 12 ... and its dead unfortunatelly.

About file manager take a look at Caja versus Thunar:

https://i.imgur.com/RWqoCY5.png

CAJA has smaller margins between files in list mode which meas less wasted space. I was not able to force THUNAR to do the same.

I am not interested in 'ICON' mode. Also the THUMBNAIL preview is a lot better at CAJA side. I am not able to maje THUNAR thumbnails bigger which made THUNAR pretty unusable here.

https://i.imgur.com/x0kRLWQ.png

And last but not least. If you want to build this using QT, then do it in QT, I am not here to sabotage that project in any way that I think is better, I just share what my thoughts are based on many years of experience, nothing more.

Hope that helps.

Regards.

probonopd commented 3 years ago

Thanks @vermaden. The trouble with Gtk is that it seems to be developed mainly by Gnome people for Gnome and the rest of the Red Hat stack. As with Gnome itself, it looks beautiful, but design is how it works, not how it looks...

Great pointers regarding the ZFS GUIs. I wish PC-BSD was still a thing.

grahamperrin commented 3 years ago

I wish PC-BSD was still a thing.

R.I.P. the forum. So many useful points of reference.