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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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GNOME 47.2 Officially Released with Various Bug Fixes and Improvements - 9to5Linux (9to5linux.com)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Fun fact, roughly half of gnome-shell codebase is written in JavaScript.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I know that extensions are mostly written in js, but why codebase? Any legacy reason I wonder?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

From what I can gather

JS is system agnostic, doesn't require compilation or multiple dependency binaries, as opposed to say Python.
JS is widely understood, could get more contributors.
JS is a good enough scripting language made with UI stuff in mind.

I also see people lamenting that lua wasn't chosen, so there's that.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

İf it works good enough for my laptop phone and pc then it's good enough for everyone else

Besides, it wouldn't have made much of a massive difference if it was lua or js, but even lua has it's issues leading to people preferring other versions of lua

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

JS is system agnostic, doesn’t require compilation or multiple dependency binaries, as opposed to say Python.

Can you expand on that? How does JS have less requirements than Python?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

While it's true that both python and js are interpreted languages, making them highly portable, JS at that time was a very lightweight language with a robust runtime offered by mozjs, that was built to be easy to embed into other systems, while python was designed for being the framework in which you build apps directly, hence requiring deeper dependencies.

Sources:

https://blog.fishsoup.net/2008/10/22/implementing-the-next-gnome-shell/#comment-1691

https://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2008/09/09/embeddable-languages-an-implementation/

https://www.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/120edc0/comment/jdgwyoq/

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Is that bad?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It's fun

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

And that's a fact

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

A rock fact

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Oh that's why cinnamon (fork of Gnome 3) uses a ton of JavaScript.