[rafram]

I assume this means accessibility is roughly zero. I'm sure it was a ton of fun for the engineers to write with something exciting and new, but the downsides of using a half-baked UI framework are significant.

I tried Halloy [1], an IRC client that's listed as the first showcase app on Iced's site. It's pretty, but it doesn't even support triple-click selection or context menus. There is no menubar on macOS.

Iced is very nice for an upstart UI framework - I don't want to minimize the amount of work that they've put into it, and how cool it is that they've gotten so far - but shipping a desktop environment based on it is shortsighted.

[1]: https://github.com/squidowl/halloy

[airstrike]

Halloy has context menus. https://images2.imgbox.com/20/05/yOa1IrVS_o.png

Iced has accessibility listed as the first item on its roadmap after the upcoming 0.13 release. https://whimsical.com/roadmap-iced-7vhq6R35Lp3TmYH4WeYwLM

You're misjudging an experimental library for not having every feature you could ever want before an 1.0 released without doing your diligence. The docs literally open with

    iced is a cross-platform GUI library focused on
    simplicity and type-safety. Inspired by Elm.
    
    Disclaimer
    ––––––––––
    iced is experimental software

https://docs.iced.rs/iced/

[rafram]

Not text editing context menus like any native app.

As I said, Iced looks awesome. But it's also, as you said, experimental. Using an experimental library for a DE could be a huge mistake, no matter how promising the roadmap is. Ideally you'd wait for the project to ship some of the non-negotiable things on the roadmap (accessibility, system menus, RTL text, keyboard navigation...) before tying your fortunes to it.

[airstrike]

I think native context menus are out of scope for iced and probably to be addressed upstream by winit. patches welcome.

at the risk of sounding like a fanboy, I encourage you to try to use iced as a library first to see how powerful it is in terms of performance, ergonomics and overall just the quality of its design. hecrj is a prolific coder and I'm confident I'm not alone in this assessment. I'm pretty bullish on the path ahead for the library given those fundamentals, and I can't speak for the COSMIC team but I imagine that assessment probably overlaps with theirs.

[rafram]

I mean text editing context menus (right-click a text field -> Undo, Redo, Cut, Copy, Paste). Iced, or at least Halloy, doesn't have those at all.

[airstrike]

You can definitely implement all of that in iced. The `text_editor` widget offers cut, copy, paste off-the-shelf and undo/redo would be a matter of keeping a stack of the "input changed" messages and popping off changes to undo/redo them.

The library is pretty low level so there's a bit of legwork that the developer needs to do in order to implement things that you get for free in, say, a browser. It's a tradeoff, but I think one that tends to provide more advantages than disadvantages.

[jorams]

Based on [1] it looks like System76 does actually think about accessibility, but it's not upstreamed yet.

[1]: https://github.com/iced-rs/iced/issues/552#issuecomment-2180...

[rafram]

That's encouraging!

[billmcneale]

What library that addresses your complaints do you think they should have used instead of iced?

[rafram]

GTK? Qt? They're not exciting, but they sure do work.

[billmcneale]

These are both terrible on macOS and Windows (they look ugly and are hard to build), and very poorly integrated in other languages than C/C++.

Way worse choices in my opinion.

[ranger_danger]

Hard disagree. I can't even tell the difference the majority of the time, and I work with Qt every day (and love it)... probably most other people can't tell either. I never found it hard to build, and as far as other languages go, I have had great success using it from both Python and Swift rather easily. I don't think there are any better choices for a stable and mature framework with anywhere near the feature set.

[tmtvl]

I don't think COSMIC is gonna be ported to OSX and Windows. In fact you can quote me on that, I'd rate the chances of me being wrong at infinitesimal.

[jasonvorhe]

And then it would be just another minimalist desktop environment trying to compete with Gnome.

[rafram]

Well, sure? Is that not what this already is? They could even write their GTK or Qt apps in Rust if they wanted to!

[WD-42]

Using a native toolkit built for Rust has massive productivity benefits when writing programs in Rust. Last I checked the GTK bindings for Rust were rough at best, I don't even know if they exist for QT.

[rafram]

The people using the DE don't care what programming language it's written in, so it's absurd to ask users to accept a rough/inferior/buggy/inaccessible system because an experimental UI library was more enjoyable for the developers.