# Is Ruby ready to embrace new Linux face and UI realities? **URL:** \ **Category:** Ruby\ **Created:** [May 7, 2010, 11:14pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/is-ruby-ready-to-embrace-new-linux-face-and-ui-realities/188223 "2010-05-07T23:14:45Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![rooby](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/e9c0ed/32.png) [@rooby](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/rooby)\ **Post date:** [May 7, 2010, 11:14pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/is-ruby-ready-to-embrace-new-linux-face-and-ui-realities/188223/1 "2010-05-07T23:14:45Z")
I may be utterly out of line expecting sympathy for my concerns about Ruby’s readiness to move on to the new and upcoming GNOME-3 environments, but I need to point out that after I embarked on completing the Ruby/GTK2 Tutorial, I grew increasingly unhappy with the the GUI solutions currently available in Ruby on Linux platforms. Do not understand me wrong, there is an abundance of available GUIs one can use in Ruby, the most prominent are FXRuby, or Tk that should supposedly run on “any” platform, however, it would be absolutely vital for Linux to make Ruby feel at home in its native Gtk-x and GNOME-x environments, the issue which is at the moment far too much neglected! Also perhaps only due to its rather incomplete documentation, the Cairo graphic interface is rather poorly represented, and does not seem to be a working as an integral part of Ruby GUI experience on Linux platforms. The messy installation procedures and fixes required on Ubuntu in order to synchronise Ruby 1.9.1 and the GNOME-2 haunt us persistently to this day. The promises, such as GTK-OSX of GTK+2 on MacOSX, or a even RubyCocoa which became outdated in the shadows of a superior MacRuby almost before it saw the light of the day, nevertheless, convinced me more than a year ago, that I should have perhaps started thinking to prepare for departure from my favourable Linux platforms towards more “reliable” commercial ones. Apple’s famed reputation for their superior OO technologies inherited from another of his babies the NeXT, on which Steve Jobs modelled and rebuilt all modern Mac OS X platforms, made it easy for me to decide what should be my path away from Ruby on Linux. This move, however, turned out to be not only a miserable mistake, but also futile and a complete waste of almost a year of my time. As I was encouraged at the beginning, by authors of many Cocoa books and almost universally, by their blissfully misleading and contradictory statements, convincing a reader that transitioning to objective-C and Cocoa should be a snap, on one hand, but on the other, amazed by brainless clichés telling me “that programming is hard”, and that Cocoa could never be mastered due to its verbosity similar to human languages and its enormity that “comes to a total of several tens of thousands of pages of material” [name one language that has a dictionary of this size;^(]. So a year ago, when I ventured into Mac’s developer world, I ignorantly dismissed and brushed these “metaphorical claims” aside, until after the course of studying this over thirty years old and almost “idiotically” verbose OO monstrosity, I started to realize, how backward “old state of the art Cocoa” became today, and that Apple would do itself an incalculably large favour had it moved to MacRuby, which in turn would most likely destroy it, because nobody wold give a damn about their geriatric objective-C and outdated, fossilized and unnecessarily verbose Cocoa UI or API. That is perhaps why MacRuby for years can not move away from its 0.x release numbers. Again this is not to say, that Cocoa as an OT, and particularly from the OO/D perspective is in any way a bad product - far from it, it is still superior to anything I have seen so far, however, its implementation is totally out of date. Related to the above, I have two questions: (1) Does anybody know what is the status of Ruby 1.9.1, Ruby/Gtk and GNOME-2 in Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) and what are the plans for integration with future releases of GNOME 3.x. I guess, we still have a year before that happens, but that does not make me any less concerned, since there continued to be rather unpleasant surprises for some of us, who wanted to work with Ruby/Gtk on Ubuntu? (2) Will the shift to GNOME 3.0 shell in future Linux releases effect Ruby/Gtk and Ruby/Cairo? ---
**Author:** ![rooby](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/e9c0ed/32.png) [@rooby](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/rooby)\ **Post date:** [May 8, 2010, 2:46am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/is-ruby-ready-to-embrace-new-linux-face-and-ui-realities/188223/2 "2010-05-08T02:46:35Z")
On May 7, 5:14 pm, Igor P. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > (2) > Will the shift to GNOME 3.0 shell in future Linux releases effect > Ruby/Gtk and Ruby/Cairo? I do not know about GNOME 3, but I have always been under the impression that the ruby-gnome 2 bindings were pretty good. My use of them, albeit admittedly light and a while ago, was excellent. Honestly, if I could get some funding to do it I would work on GUtopIa ([http://github.com/rubyworks/gutopia](http://github.com/rubyworks/gutopia)), between that and Shoes maybe some nails could finally put in the Ruby GUI complaints that continually reoccur. But it’s a big project and I simply can’t devote that kind of time and energy for freebees anymore. ---
**Author:** ![rooby](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/e9c0ed/32.png) [@rooby](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/rooby)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2010, 7:53pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/is-ruby-ready-to-embrace-new-linux-face-and-ui-realities/188223/3 "2010-05-10T19:53:58Z")
> (1) > Does anybody know what is the status of Ruby 1.9.1, Ruby/Gtk and GNOME-2 > in Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) and what are the plans for integration with > future releases of GNOME 3.x. I guess, we still have a year before that > happens, but that does not make me any less concerned, since there > continued to be rather unpleasant surprises for some of us, who wanted > to work with Ruby/Gtk on Ubuntu? I think if you want GUI for Ruby that’s stable, etc., it might be a good idea to look at some of the JRuby integrations. But that’s just me. GL! -rp [http://wiki.github.com/rdp/ruby\_tutorials\_core/ruby-gui-toolkit-comparison](http://wiki.github.com/rdp/ruby_tutorials_core/ruby-gui-toolkit-comparison) ---
**Author:** ![rooby](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/e9c0ed/32.png) [@rooby](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/rooby)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2010, 7:53pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/is-ruby-ready-to-embrace-new-linux-face-and-ui-realities/188223/4 "2010-05-12T19:53:48Z")
Thank you, for your suggestions. Roger, yours might be particularly insightful. However, I am more interested in pure [X.org](http://X.org), GTK, GNOME and Cairo versions. It is likely that these will catch up with Apple’s far too long domination in this area, within a year or so. With all due respect to multitude of choices, one can find for Ruby GUIs, I strongly believe the only one that has a chance to minimiye if not eliminate Apple’s domination is Ruby/Gtk/GNOME on native Linux platforms. But currently there are far too many discrepancies and bugs in Ruby Gtk implementation. When, more than a year ago, I was writing the “Ruby/GTK2 Tutorial” ([http://ruby-gnome2.sourceforge.jp/hiki.cgi?tut-gtk](http://ruby-gnome2.sourceforge.jp/hiki.cgi?tut-gtk)) I discovered many problems in Ruby implementation. You can find most of the trouble areas in the tutorial table of contents, which I marked with the exclamation mark signs. I think time has come, to address these problems, and I am looking for ways to get involved in trying to help and if possible contribute to the project. However, I am afraid, that the spirit of the nineties is gone, and what Thomas S. (7rans) said perfectly exposes the spirit which represents an undeniable problem. Because of this I believe, that today we would have much better chances of getting anything done under the umbrella of a well coordinated semi commercial effort, as Thomas has hinted. But in that case, we’d be better off addressing also the question of modernising X, and perhaps take it over from the IBM & Co. bunch, who I believe are doing far too little in this respect. I am very much in favour of getting Ubuntu’s Mark Shuttleworth involved. It should not be hard to convince him, that a Ruby is more superior and a better fit to handle GUI as well as OS maintenance, and indeed development issues than Python. There should be enough evidence of that. I believe a strong case could be built on what I hinted in my opening statement. Namely, that Cocoa’s design is superior to that of [X.org](http://X.org) / Gtk. Particularly important fact here is that Ruby feels very natural and far better implementation language than Objective-C in that environment. A language like Ruby, would eliminate most of the unnecessary clutter in Cocoa Foundation library. Also Cairo should be made integral part of X or Gtk. I guess I am advocating a substantial rewrites in both Ruby and X, to reflect on the superior Cocoa design and particularly adopting many of its design patterns, but avoid the unnecessary complexity, Apple created coupling Cocoa with the external requirements imposed by the Interface Builder. ---
**Author:** ![rooby](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/e9c0ed/32.png) [@rooby](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/rooby)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2010, 11:30am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/is-ruby-ready-to-embrace-new-linux-face-and-ui-realities/188223/5 "2010-05-09T11:30:03Z")
Ruby Gnome support is quite ok. Problem is … the guys are doing this mostly because of fun and love of ruby. Gnome upstream doesn’t really support ruby too much - python is much more favoured. This is more a general statement - I know that some gnome devs do support and use ruby quite a bit. If there would be more people willing AND able to contribute on the code side of things, I am sure things would improve quickly. Apple has established a niche, and even though Objective-C sucks it will stay there for a long time to come. (Apple would be stupid to kill their own niche)