Live data from Hacker News

Firefox nightlies for Linux are now using Gtk+3

glandium.org

71–80 of 129 posts

Re: Firefox nightlies for Linux are now using Gtk+3

#71

Disasterous :( For me, it has begun from evince and deadbeef, now firefox is on its way to follow. The problem is that I am unable to find any compact gtk-3 theme that looks like xfce-b5 theme for gtk-2. Xfce theming engine seems to be broken under gtk>=3.8. The only possibility is to recreate theme from scratch and pray that nothing would be broken when minor bumps again. Hell, I am unable to find any theme compact…

What's the problem with deadbeef? It supports both GTK+2 and GTK+3 interfaces - GTK+2 is even the default and considered more stable since most of deadbeefs developers prefer that one. Edit: Regarding Evince, there's Atril. It's the GTK+2 evince fork from the mate developers.

You've made my day, thank you so much! Atril is really what I've been looking for.

Regarding deadbeef, yeah, it was mentioned mostly on emotional basis. I had some troubles building gtk2 plugin on my home machine, good chances that it was problem with inconsistent building environment, yet no problems with building simple gtk2 apps or deadbeef gtk3 plugin. I haven't dug deeply though. At work, I just use slightly older deadbeef version with gtk2 plugin :)

Re: Firefox nightlies for Linux are now using Gtk+3

#72
post #67

Disasterous :( For me, it has begun from evince and deadbeef, now firefox is on its way to follow. The problem is that I am unable to find any compact gtk-3 theme that looks like xfce-b5 theme for gtk-2. Xfce theming engine seems to be broken under gtk>=3.8. The only possibility is to recreate theme from scratch and pray that nothing would be broken when minor bumps again. Hell, I am unable to find any theme compact…

I was prepared to whine about exactly that. There is literally no gtk3 theme that, simultaneously: - Is not flat and generally grey or dark blue. It's as if everyone Apple fanboy who was rejected by Apple's UX department is now making GTK themes. - Is not frickin' ginormous. I know multitasking is frowned upon now that we have tablets, but I have a bloody 27" screen, I want more than one window on it at the same time…

That gtk3 maintainers position on backward-compatibility really puzzles me. May be I am wrong, but theming engine is a vital part of an UI toolkit - you need to represent all the fancy widgets somehow in a way appropriate to the user. Yet they keep on breaking things almost each minor, leading a lot of theme creators to quit. Might be the real underlying cause of our whines...

Nevertheless, I don't see any other way than point out to the problem again and again, when each important piece of software is going to switch to gtk3. World does not stop on gtk3, there is Qt, which can handle gtk2 theme engines pretty much seamlessly (at least, from my experience), without breaking things at each release.

Re: Firefox nightlies for Linux are now using Gtk+3

#73
post #67

Disasterous :( For me, it has begun from evince and deadbeef, now firefox is on its way to follow. The problem is that I am unable to find any compact gtk-3 theme that looks like xfce-b5 theme for gtk-2. Xfce theming engine seems to be broken under gtk>=3.8. The only possibility is to recreate theme from scratch and pray that nothing would be broken when minor bumps again. Hell, I am unable to find any theme compact…

I was prepared to whine about exactly that. There is literally no gtk3 theme that, simultaneously: - Is not flat and generally grey or dark blue. It's as if everyone Apple fanboy who was rejected by Apple's UX department is now making GTK themes. - Is not frickin' ginormous. I know multitasking is frowned upon now that we have tablets, but I have a bloody 27" screen, I want more than one window on it at the same time…

I find that gtk3 themes are easy to tweak (and more so than gtk2 ones), have you tried to look at the (pseudo-)css and modify it to suit your taste?

Re: Firefox nightlies for Linux are now using Gtk+3

#75
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does. The GTK3 version of Firefox already shipped with Fedora 21 (last December), and has been scrolling very smoothly ever since.

I'm surprised, the Fedora maintainer told me Fedora wouldn't ship with Gtk+3 Firefox before 22.

I'm not a regular Fedora users, but I was following this enough to notice that it was not default until version 22. There were builds for testing via copr (like PPAs for Fedora).

Re: Firefox nightlies for Linux are now using Gtk+3

#76
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was prepared to whine about exactly that. There is literally no gtk3 theme that, simultaneously: - Is not flat and generally grey or dark blue. It's as if everyone Apple fanboy who was rejected by Apple's UX department is now making GTK themes. - Is not frickin' ginormous. I know multitasking is frowned upon now that we have tablets, but I have a bloody 27" screen, I want more than one window on it at the same time…

That gtk3 maintainers position on backward-compatibility really puzzles me. May be I am wrong, but theming engine is a vital part of an UI toolkit - you need to represent all the fancy widgets somehow in a way appropriate to the user. Yet they keep on breaking things almost each minor, leading a lot of theme creators to quit. Might be the real underlying cause of our whines... Nevertheless, I don't see any other way…

Yeah. I still manage to live in a gtk2-only world for now, but mostly because I don't really need too many GUI programs (I can't remember the last time I opened something other than Thunderbird, Firefox, Emacs, and whatever pdf reader and image viewer I have lying around) but that's obviously not sustainable.

Unfortunately, GTK3 (and, for that matter, much of the modern Linux user-side development ecosystem) is increasingly hostile. Frequent, often unwarranted changes (implemented through code of dubious quality), crap documentation (when it exists). It feels increasingly like developing for (and using) OS X or Windows, just without the good parts that we all secretly covet, like Visual Studio and Interface Builder and the MSDN.

Re: Firefox nightlies for Linux are now using Gtk+3

#77

Disasterous :( For me, it has begun from evince and deadbeef, now firefox is on its way to follow. The problem is that I am unable to find any compact gtk-3 theme that looks like xfce-b5 theme for gtk-2. Xfce theming engine seems to be broken under gtk>=3.8. The only possibility is to recreate theme from scratch and pray that nothing would be broken when minor bumps again. Hell, I am unable to find any theme compact…

Try Clearlooks-Phénix https://github.com/jpfleury/clearlooks-phenix

It's quite mature and available in number of distros. I'm pretty happy with it since I've discovered it.

Re: Firefox nightlies for Linux are now using Gtk+3

#78
post #67

Disasterous :( For me, it has begun from evince and deadbeef, now firefox is on its way to follow. The problem is that I am unable to find any compact gtk-3 theme that looks like xfce-b5 theme for gtk-2. Xfce theming engine seems to be broken under gtk>=3.8. The only possibility is to recreate theme from scratch and pray that nothing would be broken when minor bumps again. Hell, I am unable to find any theme compact…

I was prepared to whine about exactly that. There is literally no gtk3 theme that, simultaneously: - Is not flat and generally grey or dark blue. It's as if everyone Apple fanboy who was rejected by Apple's UX department is now making GTK themes. - Is not frickin' ginormous. I know multitasking is frowned upon now that we have tablets, but I have a bloody 27" screen, I want more than one window on it at the same time…

I'm currently using Greybird[0] under XFCE, but I'll keep my mouth shut since it's both blue and grey with black desktop panels ;) The widgets sizing and layout is decent though

Honestly I haven't seen anything GTK+ based that looks as good as KDE (4.x).

[0] http://shimmerproject.org/our-projects/greybird/

Re: Firefox nightlies for Linux are now using Gtk+3

#79
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was prepared to whine about exactly that. There is literally no gtk3 theme that, simultaneously: - Is not flat and generally grey or dark blue. It's as if everyone Apple fanboy who was rejected by Apple's UX department is now making GTK themes. - Is not frickin' ginormous. I know multitasking is frowned upon now that we have tablets, but I have a bloody 27" screen, I want more than one window on it at the same time…

I find that gtk3 themes are easy to tweak (and more so than gtk2 ones), have you tried to look at the (pseudo-)css and modify it to suit your taste?

Yeah, but the backend seems to be buggy, the documentation is not up-to-date and basically half the things that work in 3.x break mysteriously in 3.(x + 1).

Meanwhile I can use a gtk2 theme from 2006 without any problems (and it doesn't make my desktop look like a kid's HD drawing). As long as I can do that, I have very little motivation to put up with gtk3's crap.

Re: Firefox nightlies for Linux are now using Gtk+3

#80
post #16

Chrome used GTK2 as that was current at the time, and when we looked into GTK3 we concluded that it'd be a pain to target both simultaneously (the point of the new major version number is that the API changed) and that as long as we were supporting old distros (e.g. "Long Term Support" versions) we should keep GTK2. These days, those older versions are dying away, but Chrome doesn't use much GTK anyway. I wonder how…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN