Why I'm Building Open But Polished
So I have written about my current project a million times in the past 3 days since I realise the problem I have is a problem I can solve with my programming skills.
Actually. If I'm going to start from the beginning of this. My first experience with computers was a chromebook at my primary school, then a windows 7 toshiba laptop my grandmother owned. Then a brand new m2 macbook air when I started highschool. That same year I bought my own gaming laptop with money I'd been saving for about 18 months. Then a 2 years later I moved across the country, to a public school now. 2020 thinkpad x13 yoga, I loved it, in fact I loved it soo much that when I had my own job and was looking for a netbook laptop of my own, I bought a second hand identical model. Year 10, school laptops are now hp probooks, they are soo fucking horrible I hate them. And 8 months ago I switched to linux on my personal thinkpad.
Ever since I left my old school, I have genuinly missed the software there. Fusion 360, logic pro, photoshop(actually it was all of CC) and just macbooks in general. I have none of that on linux, and my current school only gives us fusion 360. Which doesn't even run on linux so really I use freecad and kicad to do all my engineering.
Now, what is it about macbooks that I miss? Well first of all, an aluminum unibody is much nicer than a magnesium body bolted together. but I cant change the hardware of my laptop because I may have a job, but I also have expensive hobbies. So software, I think really apple is a software company that sells hardware as well. mac os is soo polished and every first party tool is soo well integrated, and there is a first part tool for every normal thing. Safari is actually nice, pages, freeform, mail, finder, airdrop, music, tv, books, logic, final cut, garage band. And the important thing is that it has first party and therefor first class apps.
On linux. I'm currently rocking fedora sway spin with rofi and waybar and a bunch of bash scripts attached to keyboard shortcuts to do what I would argue are simple things like switch light and dark theme.
So. The solution is quite simple. copy apple Build a suite of first class linux apps that have a consistent UX and design language. I'm calling this open but polished.
Yes, the end goal of this project would likely be a linux distribution. And I am sure if you asked someone how they would go about designing a suite of apps with a consistent design language they might tell you to build a UI library. But no, I am not thinking about any of that at this point. This weekend, I started building a settings app. and so far i have a dozen UI components pasted into a markdown file with small descriptions, and an app that can change the power profile of my laptop.