My GUI Toolkit and Desktop Environment, Built from Scratch Specifically for FreeBSD

[blackbird9]

So if I wanna install this thing and try it out on my freebsd 14.3 or 15.0 box, is there a way to do that? Or is it too early in development for that?

 

[steveriemannx]

I’m not entirely sure how useful my project would be to xtd in its current form.

We’re both using fluent, chainable styles. xtd relies on multiple backends (Qt5, GTK3, GTK4, FLTK, etc.), while my framework doesn't need to use a thirdparty backend and already supports Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, Android, iOS, macOS, and WebAssembly, its just a matter of building it for those platforms and fixing whtever bugs appear.

If you were to integrate my project into xtd, it would essentially mean placing xtd abstraction layer on top of my abstraction layer. It would likely make more sense to combine efforts directly and build a larger, unified project rather than layering one system on top of another.

Yes, I very much agree with your point of view.

Ideally, FreeBSD would have its own native GUI framework similar to the BSD permissive license, with dependent components also under a similar BSD permissive license, and use this to develop a desktop environment, forming a desktop operating system. But the reality is that the ideal situation does not exist.

I just think that having both native options and custom drawing methods are necessary, like MAUI using native frameworks and Avalonia using Skia for custom drawing. At the same time, the Avalonia team is also adding an Avalonia backend to MAUI to implement desktop support for Linux and Mac.

What I am looking forward to is a complete FreeBSD operating system with a GUI library and desktop environment under a permissive license. I hope to be able to contribute according to my own abilities. Adding it as an XTD backend is only a long-term idea for after the system matures.

By the way, nim_duilib(https://github.com/rhett-lee/nim_duilib) is another GUI framework that uses Skia for rendering based on SDL3 and supports all major desktop platforms.