caja VS cosmopolitan

I don't know if you are DE shopping, but I've been very happy for the past few years with the MATE Desktop Environment, which "...is the continuation of GNOME 2. It provides an intuitive and attractive desktop environment using traditional metaphors for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems."

https://mate-desktop.org/

Among a great number of things I really like, I will mention that Caja, the MATE version of GNOME 2's Nautilus file manager, still can still be switched to spatial mode.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_file_manager

Generally speaking, I too really liked GNOME 2.32 and its predecessors, and, as far as I'm concerned, MATE is as it describes itself.

I agree that there is a balance between customization and "cleanness" in design and implementation.

However, I think the GNOME 3 and 4 designers went too far and alienated many users:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torvalds-finds-gnome-3-4...

https://medium.com/@fulalas/gnome-42-the-nonsense-continues-...

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/wte7tr/gnomes_design...

https://linuxreviews.org/GNOME_Developers_have_Made_Their_Mo...

https://www.osnews.com/story/133955/gnome-to-prevent-theming...

When a designer's "coherent vision" eclipses the needs of the software's users then users get frustrated and either fork the project or go to another project. MATE (https://mate-desktop.org/), Cinnamon (https://github.com/linuxmint/Cinnamon), and Unity (https://unityd.org/) exist largely because of how far the GNOME 3 designers went and how they were not willing to compromise their "coherent vision":

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=121162

https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1910

https://web.archive.org/web/20101129161856/http://www.pcworl...

MATE

Mate https://mate-desktop.org/ would be decent for GTK apps. https://www.gtk.org

Arch devs endorsing MATE 😮

> Is there a WM out there that can do the basic quality-of-life functions of today's DEs? I'd love a simple, opinionated WM that takes the features we know are useful today (workspaces, expo mode, sensible file manager layouts, system trays) and gives them a color-adjustable window theme inspired by 90's aesthetics, with minimal compositing that can run fast on hardware as minimal as a prototype RISC-V board. Or really, what we need is a truly minimal DE. Something that doesn't care about GTK or Qt or Kvantum, and stays lean.

Mate desktop environment in my opinion comes closest to the simplicity of the Windows 95/GNOME 2 environments of the old: https://mate-desktop.org/.

Not sure how hardware-frugal it is since maintaining it under GTK 2 was not feasible and it's now developed against GTK 3 (with still maintaining the look and feel of GNOME 2).

Some people deliberately put mate on their PCs.

I have been using MATE for a couple of years now on an Intel Mac mini and it works... mostly. Things I am not a fan of: 1) Snap packages. For anyone that chimes in about how wonderful they are I have yet to see any evidence of that and, please, do show me how you launch OpenShot Video Editor because, well, it doesn't. 2) X-Windows. I'm sorry, but this should be brain-dead simple as running xhost+ on the device you want to receive the X application on, ssh to the other machine with -Y -C flags so you don't have to set the display variable (and you get compression) and then launch the application and it appears on the desktop session you are using. I've been doing this with UNIX machines since the first week I used one in 1992 or so (only I used telnet and set my display instead of using ssh but that's not the point). Anyway, it should work but almost never does without a mind-numbing around my crap to deal with. I keep a Raspberry Pi 4 running just for this purpose oh and ... 3) VNC. Should work. Does not without a lot of tinkering. Also 4) I recall that I had to take some extra steps so that users on the same MATE box could not see the contents of one another's home directories but this was a while back. The fact that it was ever set to allow users on the same system to view the contents of each other's home directories was and is insane.

The reality is a bit different, the work on Python 3.6 was checked into the Cosmopolitan repo and I have been able to use it for production workloads that are in pure python. [0]

As Cosmopolitan Libc has evolved, it has been possible to compile more software without modifications, and that includes latest Python through a project called superconfigure[1].

Last person who tried to reproduce it from scratch did it last week (granted it too them a few days of solid work) but in the end they ended with a portable binary with Python 3.11.9, brotli, ssl and asyncio for their work related project.[2]

[0] https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/tree/master/third_party...

Cosmopolitan https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan and https://justine.lol/cosmopolitan/index.html

Some genius realized that you can actually embed valid win32 programs inside valid posix shell scripts, and found a way to make a C cross-platform solution out of it, meaning that you can write C programs that compile to a single executable that will run on (quoting the site) Linux + Mac + Windows + FreeBSD + OpenBSD + NetBSD + BIOS

It all started from this post.

For this .args file, put one argument per line. This will run on start. You can use `/zip/mydepencency.anything` to read from files, but if you have an executable dependency you'll need to extract it first.

You can do this with any software you can compile with comsocc, by adding a call to LoadZipArgs[1] in the main function.

It'seasy to get started, your ideas will branch out as soon as you start playing with it.

[1]: https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/master/tool/args/a...

FWIW there is ongoing work with good progress to add websocket support to redbean (https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/pull/967)

Check out this comment by jart (cosmpolitan author) here: https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/issues/766#issuecomment...

it might help but not sure how comprehensive it is! would it be a bad idea for you to check out the source code of other popular emulators (maybe iTerm 2^0) ?

0: https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Agnachman%2FiTerm2%20ansi&...

The binary was compiled with Cosmopolitan Libc [0], and therefore the binary will execute natively on Linux, Mac, Windows, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and bare metal (BIOS boot).

I would call that portable.

[0] https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan

will go on my "to try" list where i already have cosmopolitan [2]. my last setup (windows) was shiv + wine + nsis (used that as pyinstaller had some issues)[2]

[1] https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/issues/141#issuecomment...