Yes. GNOME is better than ever, GTK4+Libadwaita is simply doing one: Looking perfect. The HIG are excellent, without GNOME I would be maybe 40% as productive as with it.
This. Now if only people start investing in UI\UX on linux desktop.
Is there any future for the GTK-based Desktop Environments?
21–30 of 142 posts
Re: Is there any future for the GTK-based Desktop Environments?
#22I was an Xfce core maintainer from around 2004 to 2009. In addition to my work on Xfce, I also built a media player, and played around with some other projects that never really went anywhere. GTK2 had its warts, but it was generally fairly easy to build things, and it was fairly easy to work around things when something didn't work the way I wanted. GTK3 changed a lot of this. Many things that were previously public…
This really echoes with me too, I have a semi-big (but not so popular, at least not any more) application [1] that has gone through GTK+ 1.x, ported to 2.x, ported to GTK3, that I feel I "should" port to GTK4 since it's out.
But I just can't be bothered to even try to prioritize that since all I read about v4 is anger, weird new libraries with strange names ("libadwaita" sounds like a Disney character library) and stuff.
It really felt back in the day like the developers bringing out GTK+ 2.x where, like, on the case and really doing good clever work to bring out a solid platform for application development, and for a while (at least to me, but I was very biased even then) it was the mainstream/default/major choice in Linux GUI application development. Sure some people liked Qt but GTK felt like the home turf.
[1] The strangely-named "gentoo" file manager; I don't even think the site is up, sorry.
Re: Is there any future for the GTK-based Desktop Environments?
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think that's really the reason for Electron's popularity. While GTK and Qt are cross-platform, my (limited, to be fair) experience with building for multiple platforms was that it was a huge pain in the ass, and Windows and macOS platform integration often felt clunky and out of place. The big draw for Electron is that we have way way way more web developers out there these days than native-code desktop UI de…
a big part of why browser engines are so unwieldy is the implied compatibility with every website ever, right? but the "way way more web developers" you mention are not, at least in the context of electron apps, interested in that feature except tangentially.. so while everyone knows a full web-ready browser engine is impractical to design from scratch, maybe a simplified engine that supports a conservative subset of…
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Re: Is there any future for the GTK-based Desktop Environments?
#24The tone of that article makes sure that I stop reading after 2 paragraphs.
Re: Is there any future for the GTK-based Desktop Environments?
#25So much fighting over how best to draw the UI that will launch various instances of the Chrome engine. Want to know why everything is written in Electron or as a web app? Because literally every desktop platform over the last decade has decided to play design and engineering games instead of just make a really solid stable base to write apps on top of.
And then the calculator app, which is native, is wrapped up in some sort of isolating container that makes it take as long to start up as an electron app.
you mean snap packages? I think the calculator is written in vala was pretty performant when I've used it the past
Re: Is there any future for the GTK-based Desktop Environments?
#26> Systemd, gnome 3, I think that it is Red hat that ruined the desktop experience in the last decade by imposing terrible choices on everyone else...
As for systemd... while I believe that there have been questionable decisions (why was a replacement of ntpd needed?), at least it's gotten easier to introduce dependencies as part of software startups - e.g. it's relatively trivial to add a dependency on an NFS mount for a server program, which was ... a complex mess to put it lightly before.
My biggest gripe with systemd unit files is that there are at least four ways of specifying dependencies (Wants, BindsTo, After, Requires) and the semantics are not easily understandable.
Re: Is there any future for the GTK-based Desktop Environments?
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think that's really the reason for Electron's popularity. While GTK and Qt are cross-platform, my (limited, to be fair) experience with building for multiple platforms was that it was a huge pain in the ass, and Windows and macOS platform integration often felt clunky and out of place. The big draw for Electron is that we have way way way more web developers out there these days than native-code desktop UI de…
It's way easier to develop and customize a user interface with the building blocks found in a browser, rather than doing the same with Gtk or QT. To the extent that those have gotten easier, they are emulating html+js+css.
I don't know about Qt but at least GTK's docs are terribly bad. Even more so when you want to develop using a language that isn't C.
Re: Is there any future for the GTK-based Desktop Environments?
#28>That KDE Plasma 5 is finally usable and stable, after having decided to stop pushing the ridiculous plasmoids on the user (were they liking the Windows Desktop Gadgets, or they were simply idiots?), is like having an old whore finally becoming a respectable woman. It’s hard to forget the developers’ idiotic decisions, though. I don’t like to be Microsoft’s guinea pig, why should I be KDE’s? This attitude describes w…
It’s OSS you are no one’s guinea pig. If you don’t want to participate you don’t have to use it if the ones who participate want to try other things switch and don’t complain like a old male whore on the sidelines.
>If you don’t want to participate you don’t have to use it
This has nothing to do with OSS though. You can switch from a closed sources solution too.
The problem is you investment and attachment to certain things.
Re: Is there any future for the GTK-based Desktop Environments?
#29Given non-GNOME developers' frustration with increasingly GNOME-centric releases of GTK, and given some of the licensing issues surrounding Qt (such as the one-year delay for FOSS releases of the toolkit: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25748335 ), I believe the time is ripe for a BSD-licensed GUI toolkit for X11 and Wayland that uses server-side decorations and tries to be as unopinionated as possible in or…
> uses server-side decorations and tries to be as unopinionated as possible
You are contradicting yourself. Some people think decorations should be server-side others think client-side. So it seems what is better is an opinion.
Re: Is there any future for the GTK-based Desktop Environments?
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's way easier to develop and customize a user interface with the building blocks found in a browser, rather than doing the same with Gtk or QT. To the extent that those have gotten easier, they are emulating html+js+css.
I don't know about Qt but at least GTK's docs are terribly bad. Even more so when you want to develop using a language that isn't C.
I'm not sure how they've kept up, as I haven't used Qt in some time, but back in the 4.x days the documentation was absolutely stellar. Extremely thorough and almost every non-trivial feature came with code samples. I couldn't for the life of me understand why anyone was using GTK at the time.