On Today's Show!
- Configs are not the enemy! It's how they are used!
- What are Free GUI profiles? What do they do?
- What is Meant by "Angles of Development"?
Saturday, September 19, 2026
Free GUI: Configs, Profiles, and Dev Angles
Modern FLOSS Application Languages
This post is looking at a few selected languages of interest to me. The primary focus is languages that are good candidates for modern graphical application development in the world of FLOSS. I primarily look for things that can work with GTK4, or that have their own dedicated GUI toolkit that is highly FLOSS oriented, and more pointedly, very FOSS compatible.
- automatic safety (garbage collection or other method)
- does not use a web engine
- high efficiency
- good for desktop applications
- forward looking features
Thursday, September 10, 2026
Free GUI: Realm of Usage
Recapping the intended uses of Free GUI is in order, including some elaboration on its relationship to the potential rise of AI development.
I wrote a post about a term I use: "Realm of Usage" or "Usage Realm." (Not sure how, but it got deleted.) This will help a little in describing these ideas.
Sunday, September 6, 2026
Free GUI: Development Tiers
("Development Tiers" pertain to the use of Free GUI tools to develop alternative equivalents to full desktop applications. There are many other uses of Free GUI, so this post is really not actually about the full Free GUI idea, although it sounds like that.)
Detailing Free GUI's concepts of development tiers is dangerous, because there is a lot that can conflict before the acts of finalizing design and then further creating a real world implementation.
The concept of inventing development tiers like this is extremely alien to any existing development techniques. Multiple major aspects of Free GUI hugely converge around these tiers to create new positive trade-offs of development and sharing workflows, and systemic coding optimizations.
Friday, September 4, 2026
AI as an Extension of Machine Learning
AI is not strictly unintelligent. It is not exclusively fraudulent in the sense of it being un-AI.
Yet the marketing of AI is deceptive and confusing by design.
Friday, August 28, 2026
Free GUI: What is the Purpose?
In the broadest sense, the purpose of Free GUI is to enhance an alternative method for developing and accomplishing graphical UI tasks on the desktop and other end-user devices, and to expand the potential of the new and unique positive trade-offs of such a system's capabilities and workflows.
There are numerous subsidiary and secondary purposes and/or positive side effects that can play into the design strategies of the system for this goal.
Wednesday, August 26, 2026
Free GUI: What is the Porpoise?
The porpoise is an orca, also known as a killer whale. It is a toothead whale, because it toots out the top of its head. Just kidding; it is a toothed whale, because it has teeth.
Tuesday, August 25, 2026
Free GUI: Core System Capabilities
Core system capabilities is referring to anything that smooths out system workflow and workflow between applications and development, such as:
- copy / paste and other typical functions
- data type / format recognition between applications
- system keystroke recognition
- other input recognition
- core graphical functions
- common application assets
- common graphical tooling
- common data formats and tooling
Most of these things sound pretty regular. But this post is more about discussing the system capabilities that make the difference between this Free GUI concept of system capabilities, and what has existed to this point. The differential between these is about the concept of what capabilities can (and should) be moved from the application level, to being taken on as generic capabilities of the larger containing desktop environment.
Friday, August 21, 2026
Free GUI: Core Applications
Major desktop environments develop "core applications" that use the right GUI tools to make them ultra-compatible with the environment. This typically consists of a couple system utilities, a settings manager, a file manager, and a terminal emulator.
Free GUI's equivalent alternative to developing core applications is a set of assistive tools for creating its special form of custom applications.
The form that these tools come to exist in is a large contributing factor in why the application ecosystem generally is so up in the air.
But I am going to describe these ideas in this post (and maybe some more posts) and attempt to describe their respective reasoning.
Wednesday, August 19, 2026
How I See the Zig Language
"Zig" rhymes with "dig", because Zig digs deeper. It has more detail in memory management, and it has its own independent compiler with its portability that bring different levels of potential.
It is (playfully) the final dig, as in A, B, C, D, . . . Zig.
Monday, August 10, 2026
Free GUI: Application "Ecosystem"
The aforementioned application "ecosystem" is the most moving-est of the moving targets in this ideation of Free GUI. It is kind of a blind list of disconnected wants that likely overlap with each other, and are very hard to express in words (as UX design already is, let alone when it's a venture into new territory.)
The point is to hone in on the purpose that these ideas intend to collectively accomplish - a beating heart that ties them together to make them jive and click to produce something special. A killer whale is big, but a beached whale is too big and too slow, not to mention pretty morbid boys.
Saturday, August 8, 2026
Free GUI: Window Manager Capabilities
This post here mentioned some things about a window position API. This post is about describing some more API specifics and window manager capabilities.
I make a low key distinction between "capabilities" and "features" here, because capabilities could emerge into various custom features, or they could be prevented from becoming available to a use-case or workflow. It would all depend on any given system's configuration and scripting.
Saturday, August 1, 2026
Free GUI: Containerized Apps (Plus Segues)
A desktop and application menu should be able to recognize and handle designations of containerized GUI applications to maintain a UX that makes sense with their usage context and priority.
Containers in this context might be used for handling favored application versions, or alternating versioning, or handling applications with multiple different configurations. This might also be useful in a development context. It might apply to making something like Docker or Podman more convenient on the desktop.
Sunday, July 26, 2026
Free GUI: Browser Engine
Free GUI needs a browser engine that can work with a system-wide customizable toolbar system, and whatever other system-wide features that get incorporated into the application ecosystem infrastructure. (spoken with a mockingly nerdy lisp while pushing your over-sized glasses back up your nose.)
Sunday, July 19, 2026
Saturday, July 18, 2026
The Fast-Track Philosophy
The fast-track philosophy is very much about mitigating a chasm between advanced capability, and a perceived chaos of freedom. Perhaps one might reference the book: "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" to understand something about this tendency of FLOSS software. I don't know if that really fully embodies the issue per se, but I think it is related.
The general concept is presented kind of like FLOSS is the Universe, and its limitations in production are like the speed of light, in that there is some natural law preventing it from building highly organized software. It is only capable of creating a bunch of disparate little street venues (a "bazaar"), as opposed to a highly architect-ed system (a cathedral). This is a real can of worms.
Saturday, July 11, 2026
Staying Grounded on Free GUI
Best way to sum up grounding my last post is that it is a lot more hyperbole than I usually engage in on this blog. Still, I am very tempted to continue and to go full-on hard-sell and branding with this idea.
Free GUI is a reference to an idea for a new way of doing GUI for an OS desktop environment, as well as an application ecosystem. It is a series of standards, and an implementation of a user-facing GUI toolkit - as opposed to a graphical toolkit like GTK, Iced, or QT.
It is such an intense idea that by comparison to other desktops, it is emotionally closer to the idea of something like the RedoxOS project, although RedoxOS is an OS. The comparison is that it is a long term project that probably does not get truly seen for a proportionally long period across the time span of its development. This is different than a project like Hyprland has been for instance, where many people are using it early on, while it is still being very actively developed and changed.
(As a sidenote, RedoxOS is just about to get seen a lot more, if/when it gets general Linux VM support.)
Sunday, June 7, 2026
For GUI to Be Free for Non-Developers
(Non-Developers AND Developers)
There is no great way to get UX right in a concise way. (It is possible to do better yes) Also very relevant is that really good UX requires too much specific attention, and then it gets locked in every time you think you have it just perfect.
- Good UX is expensive and difficult in the short term and confining in the longterm.
- Good UX typically requires strange means of gathering user data
- After the fact, there're too few or too many biased deciders to go through for UX changes.
- improvements are not objective. Too many people that will be heartbroken, even if the UX wasn't well thought out in the first place. Misguided familiarity even with flaws. Results in group choice paralysis
- disconnected purposes of software influence what constitutes good design without examination
Thus, if you want to get a single, concise UX, you will be handicapping Linux.
UX for Linux does not only bare the typical problem of pleasing all people, all the time. It caries an additional challenge of there being more options of what to do on Linux, given its very many purposes and user types, and a desired propensity towards freedom and options. Thus, if you want to get a single, concise UX, you are effectively handicapping Linux.
The solution is for there to be at least one or two options (For a DE, and compatible Toolkit) that are about being more-or-less Windows replacements, but then to have a new advanced toolkit for a DE and application ecosystem that is built on the idea of applications that share a common method for making customizations to the UX, small and large. (Obviously still compatible with old application ecosystems.)
Thursday, June 4, 2026
Community FLOSS
There are many ways to do FLOSS organization that can be done at the same time, meaning that the FLOSS world can contain organization models that encourage small teams of developers to make money off of applications at the same time that there can also be ideas and infrastructure that encourage much more distributed development organization, where monetary compensation is of a much lower priority.
Saturday, March 14, 2026
Fermi Paradox: Some Intuitions
All Posts Tagged: Fermi Paradox
This is a somewhat tongue-in-cheek blog, and this is just some spitballing intuitions on the topic.
This is not supposed to come off as a complete battle of the banal versus the banal, but that might not be far from the effect. Let's see if this post can deliver something meaningful.