35
Just found out that you can CTRL+T in fedora's installation GUI to browse web pages in firefox, amazing!
(programming.dev)
this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2026
35 points (97.3% liked)
Linux
13228 readers
221 users here now
A community for everything relating to the GNU/Linux operating system (except the memes!)
Also, check out:
Original icon base courtesy of lewing@isc.tamu.edu and The GIMP
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
What you discovered is that today's mediocre developers implement everything in web browsers, or web brower-like frameworks like Electron, and set them up to masquerade as normal applications, but with 100x the disk, RAM and CPU footprint.
My 2nd most hated trend in modern programming. (Behind AI forced into everything.)
I ran into a consequence of Fedora doing that. Their installer application crashes when running under an old GTX1060 with Nouveau's nShitia drivers in live USB mode.
Oh is that why that happens? I just thought Nouveau drivers were incompatible with old Nvidia cards.
looking at you Discord. hell also looking at you vesktop, equibop, whatever "better" discord client is out there. majority are just electron web apps.
You see, that's why when I need to use Discord, I just use it in the browser anyway. No need to install an app that's just going to be a browser tab in disguise.
Let's be honest, it's the easiest. I've been trying to write UIs in pure rust and python recently and let me tell you, it's a drag.
Some frameworks don't even support writing your own components, some don't allow reusing parts of the UI, some don't even have proper layout engines you can modify, theming can be difficult, others dont have reactive values, most don't have a fast dev loop (make a change, see it, repeat), and so on. I've even tried using game engines like Godot and Bevy.
We like complaining about Electron, but let's be serious, as bad as it is, the other stuff is worse.
Writing stuff in a proper gui framework using the tools we've had for decades is not really that bad, it's just not what all the tutorials are for. CSS can be an absolute pig to get things just so, or was until quite recently.
CSS is terrible, no doubt about it, but the problem is exactly that: native GUI frameworks haven't changed in the way they work. Why else do you think electron became popular? Obviously there was reason for it
Well, I do get what he means...
I'm working with heavily themed Qt as a frontend in a rather large project.
Qt Creator (and QML) wasn't available at the start of the project and can't be used, as the code base isn't designed to run on just any machine and is linked to some RT threads.
Would be quite an effort to get the GUI working alone with mock interfaces and things.
So changing something, doing a recompile and see the layout scrambled is quite a downer.
In general I also hate the trend to electron & co "applications", but I still envy a friend of mine working with homepages, when he just needs to refresh the browser to see his changes.
Until I remember working on a homepage 20 years ago and the slight differences between browser were a major pain in the ass.
So, I guess, it's choose your poison...
I haven't really had the opportunity to look into modern C++ GUI Frameworks - and only slightly followed Qt changes, as most of them aren't relevant for the project.
Can anyone recommend something to look into?
Would be nice to have a good starting point, whenever I start something new.
What RT interfaces do electron apps let you use ;)
I'm confused why Qt Creator wasn't available - is this project old enough to vote or was there some technical reason :P
Only if you use electron. There are lots of light(er) weight alternatives.