It looks really nice. Reminds me of MacOS X a bit, but I'm not complaining. I do hope to see a few new DE's hit the scene in the next few years that challenge our existing UX and UIs for Linux and operating systems in general. I feel like early Gnome 3 had some interesting features that I don't know if they're still on there or not. Like there was tight UI / DE integration to chat apps, to where you could talk around all your other active windows and then go back to what you were doing, regardless of Virtual Desktop being used at the moment.
It also reminds me (in a positive way) of Étoilé which seems to not be developed anymore, but had a similar Mac OS / NeXTStep inspired approach to design:
> helloSystem is a desktop system for creators with a focus on simplicity, elegance, and usability. Its design follows the “Less, but better” philosophy. It is intended as a system for “mere mortals”, welcoming to switchers from the Mac. FreeBSD is used as the core operating system. Please refer to https://github.com/helloSystem/hello if you would like to learn more about the ideas and principles behind hello.
Which is a funny thing to say because creators are results focused and not technology focused, so the likelihood that they would install this system is practically zero compared to ie consumers, who can still browse the web or watch movies without the big AAAA software suites.
> creators are results focused and not technology focused
When the technology gets in the way of the results there might be an incentive to switch.
I consider myself results-focused and use the best tool for the job without major ideological concerns (I'm fine with paying for proprietary software, etc) and used macOS for the past 5 years and Windows before that.
I originally switched away from Linux once I no longer had the time to tinker around, wanted things to "just work" and could afford to pay for the experience. I went to Windows 7 at the time.
When Microsoft decided that wasting the user's time is their new business model with Windows 8 and later, I switched to Mac, where at the time Apple was still happy to respect me and get out of my way provided I paid them money every so often (in the form of buying new machines - which I was more than happy to do so as it was worth it and I didn't really have a choice - Windows was no longer a viable alternative).
This has now changed. These premium-priced machines now come with a toy-like OS (new Big Sur UI that wastes space, and WTF is this new tab bar in Safari 15?) designed to nag you into consuming Apple services (poor-quality ones at that) rather than producing. They seem to have gone the same way Microsoft went.
At this point there's no other competitor to switch to, so this project might actually have some value.
Maybe, but there are 300 Linux distros plus Chromebooks for people who just want a web kiosk that can play movies. And saying something is focused on developers conjures images of desktops acting as a fancy tmux.
It means people who have fallen for the idea that Creators are people who work with html and css as apposed to working with food or bricks or paint or machines or dance or people or musical instruments or any other creative medium.
I'll definitely be digging into this more! Poking around the repo, and I stumbled onto this great resource, First Principles of Interaction Design[0]. Great stuff.
Thank you! I've seen this years ago, probably bookmarked it, but never gotten back to it. This should be its own HN submission.
EDIT: I've submitted it. Interestingly, it has been submitted before [1] but not generated any real discussion. I would think this is very relevant, and not often repeated, subject matter for a majority of HN readership.
>it has been submitted before [1] but not generated any real discussion
Side Note: Yea it's kinda weird, I also have seen this "phenomimom" a few times. Same story get submitted same "title/desc" zero or little discussions. Then BOOM next submit 100+ comments :)
XFCE certainly deserves to be counted as the 3rd variant.
Since 2004, I have been using only Linux on all my desktops and laptops.
In my opinion, KDE 3.5 was a much better desktop environment than any earlier or later Linux DE and also much better than any MS Windows version.
I am excluding from this comparison tiled WM's, as they belong to a different category, not directly comparable.
The reason is that KDE 3.5 was extremely customizable. I did not like KDE 3.5 in its default configuration, but I could change absolutely every behavior detail to match my personal preferences.
Unfortunately KDE 3.5 was followed by KDE 4.0, which retained only the name from KDE and it removed all the features that I liked in KDE 3.5.
I stayed with KDE 3.5 one or two years, but eventually I had to give up because it was far too difficult to update other parts of the system without breaking the old KDE.
The rescue came from XFCE, which does not include many features, but it covers all the basic needs and it is customizable enough to be able to make it never stand in my way.
In more than a decade of using XFCE I have never encountered any problem with any GUI application, regardless if it was originally intended for Gnome or KDE.
I have tried occasionally, from time to time, various KDE or Gnome versions, but I have never liked any of them, in comparison with XFCE.
I also work professionally with MS Windows, but I have never seen any advantage there. For example, the modern Windows Explorer has a user interface far worse than any file manager that I have been using on Linux and launching an application from the Windows Start menu is far slower and more inconvenient that the kind of menus I am using in XFCE.
It mentions and links to Haiku in the wiki as Hello done consenquently. Does this means Hello is the concept and Haiku the implementation? Should I install and try Haiku instead https://www.haiku-os.org/
Where you saw the link? They aren't related in any way. Haiku is an independent operating system inspired by BeOS. Hello is FreeBSD with an interface inspired by macOS. But you should give Haiku a try. Creator of Hello liked it[0].
Good to see another OS shell written in Qt ! It's definitely the most used base platform for GUI shells at this point.
That's a rather good sign for the longevity of the platform !
It is also the only surviving C++ toolkit from C++ GUI Frameworks from the 1990's.
Microsoft can talk as much as they feel like from using WinUI from C++, but their C++ loving team club just messed up the whole tooling. Don't touch it unless feeling nostalgic about using ATL tooling from 2000's.
C++ Builder is great, but given its history and Windows focus, naturally only an option for enterprises with deep pockets.
wxWidgets and JUCE were never part of OS stacks.
Qt is really the only one left, with a quite cool development experience.
I am also migrating my last C++/WinRT endeavour into Qt LTS 6.2, ironically so, as it was originally started on Qt 5.0. :)
> I am also migrating my last C++/WinRT endeavour into Qt LTS 6.2, ironically so, as it was originally started on Qt 5.0. :)
yeah, every time I started a project on a non-Qt stack I always ended up porting it to Qt at some point later. Recently started an Android/Kotlin thing and it's so much more complicated than Qt with so many randomly moving under-engineered parts (android.R.layout.simple_list_item_1 ? come on...) that I feel it's definitely going to go that way too.
The Android API is primarily geared towards constructing GUIs declaratively in XML, and as with anything infected with the XML plague, it's a huge bloated mess half of which is braindead useless.
I honestly can't blame anyone for screaming in horror and running away to ReactJS, or just anything else.
XML is like democracy, anything else that tries to replace it, does a lousy job getting comments, schema validation, streaming parser libraries and IDE tooling.
May I be safe from React as much as possible.
In any case, Composer just hit stable for all of those Kotlin lovers.
Maybe XML could be the right tool for some jobs, it's just that the entire industry have searched for these jobs for the past two decades, and very few have turned up.
In other words, it's a solution looking for a problem, and it's still looking.
GUI construction? XML is the wrong tool here again, but not for lack of trying. Tech powerhouses Google and Microsoft got caught up in the hype as well. The results, the Android API and XAML, speak for themselves, negatively.
> XML is like democracy
No it's not. Please don't bring politics into technical discussions, it clouds your judgement.
It's so arrogant to make a "welcoming" system for people based on FreeBSD. Arrogant because it assumes the system and its ecosystem of packages will never break and the user will never have to troubleshoot. Either that or they have amazing restore capabilities. Which is something I'd like to see in BTRFS on Linux now that it's being used in Fedora by default.
Because once they inevitably have to troubleshoot they'll discover a much smaller community with much fewer blogs and articles about it than Linux.
Disclaimer, I was a BSD fanboy from 2003 until about 2012.
> Arrogant because it assumes the system and its ecosystem of packages will never break and the user will never have to troubleshoot.
Everything breaks. FreeBSD, Linux, NT, Darwin; every OS breaks and requires troubleshooting. And yes, it can be nice to have more blogs to reference, but I think you're overestimating both how much it matters and how few blogs talk about FreeBSD.
> Either that or they have amazing restore capabilities.
My FreeBSD system's never failed me, and if one uses pkg quarterly (not ports) you have not more problems than you have in any other linux distro.
And speaking about btrfs...man that's some unwelcoming filesystem, i tested Kubic out some month ago, one of the node filled it's fs to 98%, i cleaned it up, rebooted and the result? Un-bootable OS...thanks btrfs.
https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/
It looks really nice. Reminds me of MacOS X a bit, but I'm not complaining. I do hope to see a few new DE's hit the scene in the next few years that challenge our existing UX and UIs for Linux and operating systems in general. I feel like early Gnome 3 had some interesting features that I don't know if they're still on there or not. Like there was tight UI / DE integration to chat apps, to where you could talk around all your other active windows and then go back to what you were doing, regardless of Virtual Desktop being used at the moment.