Is there any future for the GTK-based Desktop Environments?

A preface: I use GNOME and KDE on separate devices. I have tried i3 and intend to return to it when graced with more time to customise it. Importantly, I used GNOME before GTK3 happened.

I mention the above as preface because I see these kinds of posts on this website a lot and they are very misleading, and I believe I have the credentials to explain why.

If you skim the original article you could be forgiven for thinking that it is a well researched and justified piece of writing, but I would like to challenge that. In particular, I note that a lot of 'evidence' for the claims of GTKs downfall are hinged in the author's preexisting expectations (and bizarre tangents - who gives a shit about title bars one way or another in a conversation about software maintenance? Scope pls).

One very revealing assumption by the author is the idea that a major release of a community project such as GTK3 should be free of bugs. This seems very obvious to an end user. 'Of course a major release should be stable! What are you saying? I need my servers to be reliable so I can feed my kids! Not everyone lives in fantasy land like you, plaguepilled!'

But there are actually two assumptions being made here. The first is that major releases of FOSS should be free of bugs and not corrected with time, and the second assumption is that this is no harder to accomplish than for a commercial entity.

However, crucially, the open source software community has had a huge shortage of maintainers for at least a decade now. Look up your favourite utility, then look up the team supporting it: often it is one person who is very, very over it. This can contribute to the phenomenon of fixes that come after the major release, not with it.

In fact, this single fact can explain why major projects that 'weren't broken' seemingly 'choose' to self sabotage. The GNOME team are not stupid. They are heavily under-resourced. The same can be said for KDE and even the Linux kernel teams. If that bothers you, it is far more productive to actually contribute your time to fixing the issue than simply describing it while waxing lyrical about how all these modern devs have simply 'lost the way'.

But I am here to contend that the idea of flawless FOSS is itself bizarre. Wealth inequality is a major issue in 2022 and proposing that the existing body of skilled software engineers should provide enterprise level software, consistently, without pay, is insane. If you care about software support and are not paying, and you do not yourself write FOSS software, you are at best a hypocrite, and at worst attempting to exploit people.

I am a fan of FOSS and want it to be better, but this article is not the way to that future.

OpenBSD went that route, and when they introduced pledge(2) and later unveil(2), they've applied these to every single program in the base system (over the course of a single release cycle!).

There's absolutely zero reason for bc(1) to accept network connections, or for grep(1) to execve(2) into arbitrary programs. But both of these programs need to process and interpret arbitrary input, which makes them potential targets for exploits.

You don't technically "need" security, just like you don't "need" seatbelts... until you actually are in an accident.

https://man.openbsd.org/pledge; https://man.openbsd.org/unveil

you really compare something like pledge and unveil with flatpack and snap's? Completely different goal's...

I'm so harsh with Windows 95 here because back then I found out about other desktops (e.g. on Unix) that had better UI. Several workspaces, ability to drag windows not only by grabbing the title bar, clicking the scroll bar to the scroll place you need (instead of having to drag it all the way there), launching programs by other means than a non ending hierarchy of menus. Not to mention that anything not Windows was more stable. Also Unix/Linux was multi user and solid enough to run read services on the same machine (even if it was the same little piece of junk your Windows 98 had come with in the first place).

Exploring the world beyond Windows felt like finally seeing how the real pros do it. That is why I absolutely can't understand the starry eyed reverence people have for sorry "OSes" like Windows 95/98.

TLDR: Windows 95/98 wasn't the pinncacle of UI even when it came out, so it definitely isn't today.

Because there is a push for software developers to be able to package directly for end users. Without devolving into the usual flame war of whether it's a good idea or not, once you install any piece of software you incur some security risks. It's not like distro maintainers are a 100% guarantee there won't be a backdoor in the binary, and compiling software from source doesn't free you from risks either, unless you code-review everything you install.

My point is, containerisation on Linux isn't necessarily slow—in fact it's unnoticeable if implemented correctly—and I prefer to default to having a decent amount of security by containerising as much software as I can, whatever the origin. Including, and especially software like the calculator, since it should not be able to do anything more than show a GUI and add numbers together.