There seems to be a trend lately of people switching over to BSD operating systems. Having read some blog posts on the matter and now given the recent system-d controversy, I'm genuinely curious to give FreeBSD or OpenBSD a go as my main OS.

For those who have switched over to BSD, what are some problems you've encountered and/or what are some things you miss?

Recently, Ian Lance Taylor, one of the most productive contributors to Go and, IIRC, the original author of gccgo, has written a very interesting comment on his view of the language:

(…) Go intentionally has a weak type system, and there are many restrictions that can be expressed in other languages but cannot be expressed in Go. Go in general encourages programming by writing code rather than programming by writing types. (…)

I found this distinction, writing code vs. writing types, very insightful. In my experience, in a language like Rust or (modern fancy) C++ the programmer is constantly forced to think about types, while when I program in Go or C, I almost never think about them. Types are, in fact, almost always obvious. It is also interesting that languages like Haskell and Idris explicitly expect the programmer to program with types.

What do you think?

In the rare chance you haven't heard of Flutter, here's the link: https://flutter.io

Flutter just officially left beta with v1.0 December 4, last year. The code is written in Dart, and deploys on Android, and iOS (and will run natively on the rumored Fuchsia OS).

So for those of you that have used Flutter or are currently using Flutter.

• What are you working on?
• Why'd you choose Flutter?
• What do you like about Flutter?
• And what do you dislike about Flutter?

I'll start:

I'm working on a niche art app. I myself do not do that type of art, but knowing people that do, I wanted to create a tool to fill in the lackluckster market for Chromebooks and Android.
I chose Flutter because:

• I wanted to try something new, and what newer than something that was (at the time) in beta?
• Custom Views in Android are a hassle.
• I will be able to release on both Android and iOS (semi-)natively without having to code it twice.

Here's what I like about Flutter:

• Layouts are really simple.
  (though you can easily let it get clustered if you don't think too much about it.)
• Design isn't an afterthought.
  Animations are built in (and simple), themes aren't hard-coded, and Material Components get more attention here. (Still waiting for Shapes on Android)
• It's fast by design.
  Flutter uses its own custom rendering engine (Skia). I've never experienced any stutter with the built-in components, and when I caused lag (with heavy I/O) Flutter/Dart had tools in place for me to narrow down exactly what was causing it.

What I don't like about Flutter:

• It has poor mouse/trackpad support.
  Right clicks, not a thing. I can workaround this with a double-click/long-click, but for a desktop OS, this isn't optimal. Scrolling, that's panning, this should be differentiated. There's a difference between using a scrollwheel and moving finger around on the screen. According to Flutter there is not. There's also currently no support for mouse hovers which I have needed very much.
  There is a pull-request for adding support for all of these, but the developer hasn't done anything since code review.
• Keyboard support, while there, is lackluster.
  Ctrl, Shift, Alt. These have to be gotten with the meta code. There's no built-in function for checking those. Text fields don't support the tab key to navigate. And text formatting (bold, italic, etc.) isn't possible with text fields without the use of a library (or making it yourself).

I was trying to think of a third dislike, but I can't. My complaints are on missing APIs for Chromebooks. That's it. I really like Flutter, I plan on using it more, and if they won't add support for mouse/keyboard, maybe I'll have to contribute.

I'd love to hear what your thoughts about it is.

Between the recent discussions on the Useful Shell Scripts thread, and some of the tangents on the Desktop Usability thread, I thought it might be an interesting idea to have a desktop screenshot sharing / unixporn thread where we talk about our setups, preferred applications, and share some pointers. This doesn't specifically have to be a Unix circlejerk though. If you have a Windows/Android/ChromeOS/TempleOS setup with some novel innovations, you're more than welcome to share too.

Hey Tildes, I got a job directly supervising a small team of 4 software developers. I'm very excited at the prospect and would like to put my best foot forward. To that end, I would like to have a discussion around a few topics. Feel free to expand the scope if you believe the conversation would be beneficial. I'm sure I won't be the last person to be in this position. I've done research, read, and watched videos regarding several of these questions; however, since Tilde prioritizes high-quality discussion, I thought it would be a fun opportunity to chat with others about these topics.

• As a member of a software development team, what are things that your supervisor has done that has had the greatest (a) positive and (b) negative impact?
• Supervisors, when you joined your new team, what was your methodology for reviewing the team, projects, and processes? What was the scenarios behind your review and the outcome? What would you do differently?

Hey y'all, first time actually posting something here! Just curious what editor people use, whether its for coding, writing, or just the occasional note, whatever. I've gone through most of the well-known ones (vim, emacs, atom, vs code for starters), but only ever really messed around with vim enough to like it, and I've also been trying out gedit for the last little while and really liking it, but I'm curious to see what other people use!

Hey all,
I've been studying Common Lisp recently, and as far as I can see, this is a pretty capable, mature language. Moreover, Lisp has been around since the 60s and it doesn't see much usage (as far as I'm aware) outside of Emacs Lisp and AutoLISP. What gives?

I've been using Solus for years now as my main driver, but I think I may be switching to Arch soon. Or at least, start using Arch on my laptop, and keep Solus on my desktop. The main reason I wanna give Arch a try is because of how minimal it can be. I don't need a lot of applications, and I like to have the least amount of software installed on my machine as I can. Plus, distro-hopping is a disease, and it's time I try something new, haha.

So, I was just curious what DE people are using with Arch. Ideally I want something very minimal, but not too ugly. I liked using Budgie with Solus, so I may very well just use Budgie with my Arch install, but I thought I would see if anyone has any recommendations first! Thanks!

I feel that the mobile user interfaces has been developed and changed immensly compared to desktops, when it comes iOS and Android. While Windows has pushed some controversial but interesting features, macOS and Linux DEs has been kind of stagnant. Has desktop interfaces reached its peak form? Or is there more developments to come?