Help with hosed LC UI on Ubuntu

[Richard Gaskin]

Mark Talluto wrote:

 > This is a view of 6.6.2 RC6 on my Mint installation via VMware
 > Fusion.
 > http://www.canelasoftware.com/pub/rev/mint%20linux.png

Looks like you're getting theme adoption there, so that much is good.

And thankfully Hanson at RunRev confirmed my issue this morning, so at 
least it's not me:
<http://quality.runrev.com/show_bug.cgi?id=12607>

Now that they have the issue reproduced, no doubt Fraser or Mark will be 
able to figure out how to handle the new UI libs for Ubuntu in 14.04 
(doesn't happen in earlier Ubuntu versions).


 > It is very important that LiveCode runs well on Linux.  The server
 > world is all about Linux.  We need to elegantly be able to support
 > running LiveCode on 64 bit, headless installations of Linux.

And as important as it is for servers, there's enough of an audience 
using desktop Linux (far more than the number of Mac users when Steve 
Jobs returned to Apple) that an open source toolkit could do wonders in 
the many charter schools and other places where Linux is very widely used.


 > Any work that the team can do to improve the look and compatibility
 > issues we are facing would be much appreciated.

See my comment #8 at the bug report linked to above.

I've discussed this in my Community meetings with the team as well, and 
they see the value in using Linux themselves more in-house, but haven't 
yet felt comfortable taking on what will be initially a productivity hit.

For the others here who don't use Linux daily, let me clarify that the 
productivity hit is with using LiveCode on Linux, not with Linux itself.

Firefox, Thunderbird, GIMP, Blender - pretty much every multi-platform 
app is as graceful to use on Linux as it is on OS X and Windows.

But due to historical considerations, the LC Linux engine has been slow 
to adopt newer UI stuff on Linux, and in many cases this has left us 
with IDE limitations in areas where the engine was fixed long ago but 
the IDE not brought up to date to take advantage of it.

For example, imagine how tedious it would be if every click in LC's 
Tools palette had to be made twice.  On OS X and Windows we click only 
once because the raisePalettes is set to true by default, but on Linux 
raisePalettes it set to false (no, really) so we click once to bring the 
window forward and a second time to activate what we're clicking on.

A very long time ago there were issues with raisePalettes in some 
environments, but those apparently went away a long time ago.

If at least one person on the IDE team used Linux daily, all these 
little things would be seen and addressed.

Hopefully that'll happen soon.


--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World
  LiveCode training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
  Webzine for LiveCode developers: http://www.LiveCodeJournal.com
  Follow me on Twitter:  http://twitter.com/FourthWorldSys