Hello, came here after seeing the post on OMG! Ubuntu! I would prefer Gnome/WebKit. I personally use Linux full time as my daily driver. Use Chrome but I know Webkit has advantages.
Regarding the open source aspect, I could be on the minority but I personally dont mind paying for software that is Linux compatible, Heck, Steam and the games arent open source.
Looking forward to it, would pay for the life tiime license once releases.
Even though I’m a KDE user and dislike GNOME, I think this should be WebKit based. If that means GTK, so be it. If anything, I’d push to avoid libadwaita because it doesn’t play well with other DEs. That said, no matter what is picked, I'm looking forward to testing this!
Dev update: We have decided the direction to be Webkit GTK with libadwaita for the most native look possible.
Yeah, native GTK would be better. Ghostty (a terminal emulator) recently hit version 1 and within weeks, had moved away from Libadwaita due to it looking terrible on anything other than Gnome.
hawdini Yep, libadwaita only looks good on Gnome it looks bad on just about everything else and there are a ton of users not using Gnome and many of those will not use apps that have libadwaita. This is limiting the potential reach of Orion on Linux. Native GTK will look decent on all desktop environments and window managers.
Correct me if I'm wrong but don't the majority of GTK3 and GTK4-powered distributions now support Libadwaita and, thus, the vast majority of Linux desktop users are covered adequately?
Dustin That is not a vast majority of Linux desktop users anymore. KDE has made a big comeback since SteamOS. It is the most common desktop on Arch, it has recently been brought to the same level on Fedora due to popularity, and has long been a popular choice on others. The packages we maintain show this with the versions that are pulled. GTK may still be a higher percentage, but it is not a good idea for a very sizable group. To top it off it still does not look native on GTK2/3, just better than it did.
Huge fan of Libadwaita. It is a good start. Doesn’t Brave support GTK and Lib on Linux? Brave looks pretty in-place on Fedora using either theme option.
Hey, just signed up for the lifetime plan, very excited for Orion for Linux! I’ve got an iPhone so I’m enjoying Orion so far on here too.
My vote is for libadwaita, but given the COSMIC is on the horizon, it might be better to go pure GTK.
I have noticed that COSMIC seems to have some kind of magic under the hood that makes GTK, Qt, and native COSMIC/Rust apps blend in better than in every other desktop environment I’ve tried. Might be worth looking into what they’re doing, since I think a large portion of the GNOME user base will be open to switching to COSMIC when it’s done!
Keep up the good work!
Edit: I also think it would be wise to make an Orion- of sorts, where you strip out the proprietary code that you’ve made allowing ff/chrome extensions. That could be fully open source and would allow the browser to be in repos and maybe even the default browser in the medium term. People are ready to ditch FF.
Then, there could be a very tasteful message when someone tries to add an extension letting them know they need the proprietary version. Maybe this could be a module that can just be downloaded, or maybe you need to have a separate repo and instructions how to add it for the most popular distros. In any case, this presents Orion as a FOSS friendly browser, doesn’t have paywalls or anything that would put off Linux/FOSS evangelists. Just one tasteful hint how to get the full version, and from there people can move on to Orion+ if they want search and the other perks.
I think that’s the most linux friendly approach.
Very interested to see where it's coming ! Libadwaita or not (I'm a bit biaised for libadwaita as I'm a GNOME user, but in all case if there is cooperation between different player in the space everybody will win !), a new WebkitGTK browser is interesting, the landscape was a bit barren since Midori became a Firefox fork (there was Ouch, an Arc Browser clone, but it doesn't seem very active anymore)
hawdini Looks like it's the opposite for Ghostty, the devs seem to be removing the possibility to buid it without libadwaita : https://ghostty.org/docs/install/release-notes/1-1-0#gtk:-forcing-a-dependency-on-libadwaita (but they have now a SSD setting that replace that for other desktop)
+1 for libadwaita. At work we use SLES and RHEL, both coming with GNOME and really enjoy the harmony of everything fitting together with beautiful UI design. Ghostty, that uses liabdwaita by default, looks very similar to the Mac counterpart and many team members switch between operating systems without losing their muscle memory.
I also enjoy that all GTK 4 apps are being rendered using Vulkan and the GPU for performance. And since GTK uses CSS for styling, an Orion theme store would be possible without a custom theming engine.
GTK 4 without libadwaita is very generic and not suited for any modern apps that care about UI. You have to implement the freedesktop dark mode option, accent colors, animations yourself while libadwaita comes with these out of the box. Ghostty is not a UI-first application so they have the resources to maintain multiple codebases that use a handful of widgets. I think you have to choose whether you want to be a beautiful app or a mediocre app that looks somewhat native on desktops that lack modern design direction.
Unfortunately, if it does go libadwaita, I'm out. Gnome is not the only DE or Linux or is it the only modern desktop, that is not true in any way, shape or form.
clintre The 'modern' and ready desktops at the moment are: GNOME, KDE and Elementary.
Cinnamon, XFCE, Budgie and the others are either abandoned, not maintained enough or have a tiny userbase. Most of them still don't support Wayland. Building applications around ecosystems that are decades behind is silly. Cosmic is not ready and won't be for many years. Tiling window managers benefit from adaptive toolkits like libadwaita and kirigiami as they scale nicely and small windows.
Only those 3 have any design direction at all. Cinnamon and XFCE's design is literally 'old GNOME'. Especially since many of their apps are forks of the old GNOME ones, following GNOME's old HIG. Mint is slowly modernizing its design to follow the modern GNOME one https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=4811
Webkit is only available on GTK so kirigami is out. But even if it wasn't the design difference between the two is miles long. Compare https://developer.gnome.org/hig/guidelines.html and https://develop.kde.org/hig/.
Elementary has its own HIG https://docs.elementary.io/hig and its own widget library, but libadwaita accommodates for it https://github.com/GNOME/libadwaita/blob/main/src/adw-application.c#L124.
There's at least 320 libadwaita apps mostly made by solo developers https://arewelibadwaitayet.com/ with new ones coming out every day https://flathub.org/?category=new, I would say libadwaita is extremely popular among developers and users.
