Free GUI: Development Tiers

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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.

Development tiers are about accentuating clear distinctions between defined sandboxes of development and contribution that correspond to:

• development skill
• language involvement
• portions of contribution
• clarity in packaging types and risks
• clarity in security levels of package contents
• stopping points for user investment of time and effort
• scopes with clarity
• skill ascension levels
• degrees of confidence and mastery
• clearly shared points of
• reversal
• swapping / modularity
• code interfacing
• management

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.

Free GUI: What is the Purpose?

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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. 

Free GUI: What is the Porpoise?

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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.

Free GUI: Core System Capabilities

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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.

Free GUI: Core Applications

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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.

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.

Free GUI: Application "Ecosystem"

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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.

Free GUI: Window Manager Capabilities

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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.

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 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. 

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.

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 (vs Crystal)

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This is specifically about the last post here. I forgot to talk about Nim (and Crystal). 

I think Nim and Crystal are more directly comparable to Swift, than they are 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 (or Crystal) could be a premier Linux applications language to dethrone C++ . . . in a tentatively serious hypothetical.