The Future of GTK+

I can't say I know all that much about graphical toolkits, but could we just fork GTK, using GTK2 as the base? Most of my applications use GTK2 and I'm pretty happy with this state of affair. The GTK3 ones tend to break things. But I really prefer the modular nature of GTK. When I need to use other toolkits, it tends to pull 50 libraries...

In my opinion of course. GNOME has always, even through the drama of KDE4, seemed klunky and inferior.

I suspect it's just that KDE's early pre-GPL licensing problems gave it a bad taste in people's mouths, even though it's always been a superior environment.

So from a sports-team point of view this is pleasing, but from a real person point of view it sucks to hear that 3rd party GTK applications are being strangled.

MATE does seem like the appropriate forking point, but are those developers really interesting in taking on that big a challenge in addition to simply maintaining a UI?

Around the year 2000, a big reason GTK became popular was licensing issues with Qt. But Qt has been licensed under LGPL (same license as GTK) for 5 years now and under GPL for a lot longer.

More language bindings has been mentioned as a reason, but are there languages one would want to write a GUI in which lack Qt usable bindings and do have usable GTK bindings? I once tried programming GTK in plain C, but trying to use objects using library functions and macros instead of using an OO language just felt awkward and led to hard to understand compile errors. I must say that I found PyQt a bit awkward as well, since it never really felt like you were programming Python: it was always clear it was Python code talking to a framework written in a different language. So it made me question the usefulness of GUI toolkit bindings in general.

Qt has better cross-platform support than GTK. The last time I used a GTK app (Inkscape) on Mac OS X, I had to run an X server and it looked really out of place; a quick web search suggests the X dependency is gone but integration with the native desktop is still minimal. GTK on X-less (framebuffer or EGL) embedded Linux is unmaintained as far as I know. I don't know the state of GTK on Windows because I haven't seriously used Windows in a long time.

Qt has a strategy for supporting touch devices (Qt Quick), seems to be on track supporting Wayland and is adapting its drawing model to better fit modern graphics hardware (scene graph instead of immediate drawing). GTK could be forked to keep compatibility with themes and non-GNOME applications, but it would require a lot of effort to keep up with current trends (not all of which are hypes that will blow over).

Another thing Qt has going for it is that the KDE libraries are being modularized, so instead of one big set of kdelibs there will be a lot of smaller libraries, some of which depend only on Qt and some which are connected to a whole lot of other KDE libraries (there are 3 tiers for different allowed dependencies). This means that some of the functionality developed in the KDE project becomes available to Qt applications without those applications having to tie themselves to the KDE desktop.

If I was in the same situation as these developers, I'd choose a 'Desktopless' toolkit. So-called 'Desktop Environments' are a total failure in Linux. Both the KDE and Gnome guys are trying to implement an operating system solely in userspace and it doesn't work so well.

Take the basic task of automounting for example. On my Gnome-based system (XFCE, which somehow makes use of GNOME daemons), it never works right. Sometimes it doesn't mount at all, sometimes it immediately mounts something I just unmounted etc. Come on man, it's 2014 and we're still dealing with this?

Since this stuff doesn't work so well, it changes constantly and you have to chase the GNOME/KDE guys just to make your application compile.

Tying your application to a desktop environment is a sure way to kill it. Now they're complaining about the GNOME stupidity, who knows KDE won't do the same thing? Money-backed big projects tend to attract tons of hippies and they really know how to mess up a good system. See firefox, gnome, systemd, chrome, etc.

GUI toolkits are a done deal. There is nothing left to be discovered with the current hardware. You can port them to newer features of graphics cards or X11 extensions but that's about it. The endless tail chasing Gtk+ and Qt does is nothing more than make-work. Come to think of it, if I just want to display some dialog and get some input, what drastical change has occured since the year 2000? Why can't we just use something done at that time for these basic tasks? Where is the need for updating the button-drawing code for the n-th million time?

I'd definitely go for a desktopless toolkit. There is nobody to mess it up and my program is likely to compile for a long time. There are tons of these: fox, fltk, wxwidgets, even java swing is a better choice than gnome+gtk. If you want advanced features like video playback or HTML display, it's a different matter but for an application which only needs standard controls? I'd never touch GTK or Qt.

I love the guy who starts out this post (http://igurublog.wordpress.com/2014/03/22/gtk-3-10-drops-menu-icons-and-mnemonics/) with "At the risk of turning this into the 'bad news blog'." That's telling right there - most of the news and changes in the world of GTK/Gnome involve taking things away that used to be there. They're driving that car right over the cliff, despite warnings to the contrary, and with an apparently even stronger suicidal zeal.

See ya later then. I was never a fan of Gnome after Gnome1, although I concede it was always the nicer looking system, visually and graphically. Gnome 1 was still a hacker's paradise, with the Sawfish window manager and tons and tons of configurable hackability. That's what I like in a DE. But I've always been a KDE guy, for other reasons (and still kind of prefer KDE3 to KDE4, actually - go Trinity!).

Sorry to see the GTK project get hijacked by the crazies over at Gnome. They sure made a mess of the Gnome desktop; too bad they're going to take GTK down with it as they sink the ship. The post I linked to above really is telling. They've lost all touch with reality and/or user needs. Meanwhile, QT is pretty cool, professionally managed, and although it's strongly tied to KDE, it hasn't been taken hostage by it, which means even if KDE screws the pooch there's hope the QT toolkit will remain useful and functional. If I'm not mistaken, too, it's getting faster and lighter weight/lower memory intensive. That's all good.

I've got other problems with the KDE desktop (like Akonadi and Nepomuk and their perpetually sucky rewrite of kmail) but the toolkit isn't one of them. Secretly though, I really wish the Etoile people would ramp it up and give us an interesting, third alternative. Meanwhile, I'm interested in checking out the new LXDE and the QT-Razor or QT-Light projects (or whatever they're called now, I forgot).