Free GUI: Containerized Apps (Plus Segues)

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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 could expand to 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.

Free GUI: Browser Engine

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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.)

More on Free GUI

Some additional random thoughts and ideas around Free GUI.

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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.

Staying Grounded on Free GUI

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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.)

For GUI to Be Free for Non-Developers

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(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.)

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.

Fermi Paradox: Some Intuitions

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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.

The Fermi Paradox

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The Fermi paradox remains interesting because of the thoughts and ideas that it is associated with. These ideas will continue to provoke, despite its paradox not persisting to today.

Of course as paradoxes go, they "want" to dissolve themselves . . . just as long as it is the relevant thoughts and/or discoveries that get applied.

An Obvious Take on FOSS Funding

The idea of trying to create institutions that are not corrupt, and who have the right priorities does not require any particularly ingenious skill - just people with a clue, who also have the willpower. 

That simple thing for FOSS will be what people call cult behavior. But it's just what all institutions with particular interests do - look out for their interests. For FOSS, that includes a much stronger focus on funding smart infrastructure chains and pathways. - Looking for logical gaps in applications and tools, and trying to fill them in.

In the case of FOSS, there is not a singular institutional form (as in non-profit, for-profit). If for-profits can do it, then more power to them. If non-profits can do it, then more power to them.

If development community can be see a mutual benefit to contribution, then more power to them for building the same things that the FOSS institutions are building: even the for-profits.

Nim vs Swift

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This is specifically about the last post here. I forgot to talk about Nim. I think Nim is more directly comparable to Swift, than it is to Zig, such that it would be treated much more like a highly performant applications language like C++ is treated.

It's not like Nim clearly falls out of bounds of being a systems language, but I do not think that Nim has a clear enough focus on systems programming to be like C, Rust, and Zig.

So, the reason to bring this up is to ask the question of whether Nim or Swift should be the premier Linux applications language to dethrone C++ . . . in a tentatively serious hypothetical.

Swift and Zig

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Swift seems like one of the biggest opportunities for the Linux application development world. It seems to pair nicely with Zig in a few ways.

In general, Swift complements systems languages pretty well from a feature perspective. It means that systems languages are for systems programming, and Swift is for applications. And Swift does scripting well too.

• Swift and Zig are a really good fit for Linux contexts.
• They are good with each other in terms of feature coverage.
• Swift should get good interoperability from Zig, maybe Rust too
• It should also be worked on in a serious and dependable way, by a group other than Zig and/or Swift - a group who is interested in piecing all these things together, that also intends to sustain their work for a while.
• Part of this effort is to make Swift seriously interoperable with Zig on Linux, as well as make Swift very interoperable with a serious native Linux GUI tool like Qt or GTK, or maybe Iced if that pairing is not too strange of an abstraction or too far away from native performance and code translation.

Command Wiki: Backend Development

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The elephant in the room is the plan for backend development.

This is a strange question in the real world, because I don't know how invested I am personally going to be in this project. I tend to write the ideal situation, but in reality could actually fall back quite a bit, to the closest thing I can do at a given time.

Of course falling back to different technologies is terrible, because it does not create an application that could serve as a foundation towards the more ideal one.

Command Wiki: Personal Development Intentions

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If I personally start this project, it will definitely have to go through one or two iterations of experimental development first, so I can learn the ropes. The full version of this application is too large a project for one individual to develop. I will have to see how it pans out personally.

I am not upset by people trying to build something like this. My advice is to not do it yourself if you are not actually in love with the idea itself, as opposed to seeing a way to charge for plugins or chop the application up.

Messages can be sent to this blog to consult about its ideas if so desired. I am trying to make enough sense about it to transmit its vision.

Command Wiki: High Level Structure

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"High Level Structure" could also be read, "High Layer Structure". It is about the expression of data structures that is made possible at the UX layer. It is specifically about how the application's users can create things at the frontend, as opposed to low layer backend programming code of the application. 

This is inclusive of:

• GUI UX tools
• Text-based syntax coding and markup UX
• Abstract models / logic models / relationship models

The concept of this high level structure is to provide basic means to creating more emergent complexity from it. It's about using these tools to provide the maximum amount of practical usability within the confines of non-professional level coding. These tools include GUI tools, markup syntax, coding syntax, and pre-configured models of abstract data representations.

A Viewpoint on Secular Atheist Community

Somebody should really get on the secular community deal especially if there's not too much aggression towards it. The brights idea seemed a little weird, but then again I don't remember very many details about it. But primarily the idea is to shield it from being showy, loud, and ridiculous - something that most "things" in today's world have not managed to avoid. Keep it real and based.

Command Wiki: Daily Driving and Plugins

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As a natural consequence to fulfilling its educational objectives, this application would also be good at serving as a daily driver. There will always be new and old information that remains on the periphery of users' minds, and there will always be new things to learn in the future.

Having the ability to serve as a way to connect knowledge with implementing the knowledge is like note taking, but it becomes something of a different animal as a whole. It's more multi-purpose than note taking.

Terminal Command and Scripting Wiki

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3 stages of learning are:

1. mimicking and memorization
2. static perceived understanding and memorization with awkward dynamism
3. working dynamic understanding with owned knowledge and context.

(1. Child 2. Teenager 3. Adult)

This description of learning stages are major in the process of going from child to adult, but they are still very descriptive of adult learning, especially when learning very new or alien skillsets.

Almost zero software applications are built to transition users between these phases of learning.

No Names for Native Linux GUI

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There has probably never been such a thing as what I am talking about: You know, a "complete" native GUI stack for Linux, and then it's possible that a complete GUI stack could encompass more for native Linux than one would for web or Windows ever had.

I suppose the primary thought of this post can be summed up with a question. Once an idea of what the heck a native GUI stack constitutes, then: Are there really existent, let alone great, native Linux GUI stacks even right now in 2025?

OSS is Broken - Create FOSS Community and Infrastructure

FOSS can get unnecessarily political. It can get too religious. But there's a better alternative to being the opposite extreme of those things, which is barely acknowledged or understood, disjointed, and non-existent.

FOSS needs a motherload of attention and infrastructure and teamwork of a grassroots community of individuals and small organizations that are conscious of

• a novel, FOSS-pertinent developer compensation model
• a developer contribution model to fit with the compensation model
• an ethically charged zeitgeist
• an equal measure of pragmatism
• common sense vision 
• (a goldy locks zone between overly specific and disjointed.)