Project "XDG ng"

Purpose of project "XDG-ng"

• Improve the usability of desktop environments for end users
• Allow for features previously lacking in desktop environments
• Remove layers of legacy crust
• Remove reliance on GLib
• Make debugging and development faster, simpler, and more fun

Potentially of interest to

• Haiku
• SerenityOS
• Fyne
• Draco Desktop Environment (@rodlie)
• GNUstep
• ravynOS

Basically all desktop environments that are not firmly rooted in XDG land.

• Likely not interested: Red Hat, Fedora, GNOME, Gtk, Flatpak, Wayland (firmly in XDG land)
• Possibly not interested: KDE? (currently in XDG land)

Prior Art

XDG

freedesktop.org (formerly known as X Desktop Group, hence XDG) specifications

• Define how most desktop environments currently work under the hood
• Address most areas needed to put together desktop environments
• Are decades old and do not make best use of contemporary technology, e.g., extended attributes
• Lack concepts integral to the desktop user experience, e.g., application bundles and global menus
• Make things that should be simple complicated or impossible
• Seem to be retrofitted to explain how Glib works, are not designed in the Unix philosophy

Haiku (inspired by BeOS)

To be written; see https://medium.com/@probonopd/my-sixth-day-with-haiku-under-the-hood-of-resources-icons-and-packages-abec8d0e4ec6

GNUstep (inspired by NeXTSTEP, OPENSETP, and Mac OS X)

To be written; see https://medium.com/@probonopd/my-sixth-day-with-haiku-under-the-hood-of-resources-icons-and-packages-abec8d0e4ec6

Approach

• Start from first principles - the objects that the desktop user experience consists of
• Think entirely independently of any particular existing desktop environment
• Propose simpler, more robust, more contemporary solutions for each of the XDG specifications, ideally in less than 10% of the length and complexity of the corresponding XDG specification
• Propose solutions for areas the XDG specifications fail to address

First Principles

Objects

User sees

• Applications
• Documents
• Folders
• Windows
• Icons

The system (also) sees

• Processes
• Files
• Directories

Verbs

• Launch an application
• Open a document (with an application)

Properties

• Each application has a version
• Different versions of the same application can coexist on the system
• Each document has a certain format (the MIME Type which describes the format of the content)
• Each document has been created by a particular application (the Creator)
• Applications have icons; different versions of the same application can have different icons
• Documents have icons; these describe the Creator and/or the format (a "GIMP PNG" may have a different icon than a "Krita PNG"
• Applications and Documents can be freely moved around in the file system using the file manager; they cannot be assumed to be at fixed locations in the filesystem

Associations

• By default, documents should be opened with the Creator
• Individual documents (not all document that happen to be in the same format) may need to be associated to different applications (or even application versions)