Linux

That KDE Plasma 5 is finally usable and stable, after having decided to stop pushing the ridiculous plasmoids on the user [...] is like having an old whore finally becoming a respectable woman.

Yeah, I stopped reading here.

Why on Earth are these nonsense blog rants constantly upvoted here?

It is essentially an unlettered rant that conflates the author's UI and toolkit preferences with an objective view.

It doesn't even provide a useful comparison to the evolution of QT to provide for a meaningful reference of its implied assertion that the evolution of GTK is too rapid for devs.

This article can pretty much be summed up as I don't like GTK or Gnome so I'm going to just present them being shit as a factual statement. I use Arch and KDE btw.

Gnome 3 released close to 13 years ago and was announced 16 years ago. At some point, people need to stop crying about the UX changes and get the fuck over it.

If you don't like it, use something else and stop being so entitled.

Most of the GTK environments seem to be doing fine. Most of them seem headed to Wayland as well with the maturity of GTK in Wayland making that easier. Cinnamon will be ready for Wayland in a few months with both XFCE and MATE likely to have something out next year.

Incredibly, GIMP itself may finally get off GTK+ 2. They claim that GIMP 3 will launch in February. We will see how long it takes to get to GTK4. I think the transition will be easier. The jump from 2 to 3 was a big one.

COSMIC of course is going its own way with the Iced toolkit.

On the app side, GTK seems to still be a very popular option.

In terms of conclusions, I do not see mainstream resistance to new GTK versions. Some people balked at GNOME 3 but GNOME today seems more popular than ever. MATE faithfully kept the old GNOME experience but has migrated to newer GTK. It was not a rebellion against the toolkit.

❤️ GTK and Gnome.

I swear the same people that complain about Gnome3+ also complain about Wayland.

Both projects put a lot of thought into their controversial decisions, they're attempting to learn from their mistakes.

There comes a point where you need to adapt to change. And both these projects have proven their changes are beneficial.

If I develop anything with a GUI I use GTK4. It has a bit of a learning curve to it but honestly I've come to like it.

I am currently creating a program for simulating networks and the drawing area is great for drawing the actual simulation because it basically allows you to have a cairo area as a widget so your possibilities there are basically unlimited and cairo is just a great drawing API.

Also gtk is basically the only modern GUI toolkit that can be used with C, which is great because it is pretty much the only language I know well enough to program a big application with. (But GObject still feels like black magic to me)

Not sure about the similarities here, but I actually love GTK when it comes to app design. It's one of the things I miss about Linux in Windows. (Yes, I'm a Windows user—not by choice, though.) About the only thing I hate about it is that for some reason a lot of GTK app designers think a simpler design should mean less functionality. Gimme my damn right-click context menus dammit! >_<

I recently started exploring wayland and arch, installing a compositor (Hyprland) and module by module as a go. It's unnecessarily hard but I'm learning a lot from it.

The thing that surprised me the most is the amount of components and projects that are GTK based. I always thought that GTK was a Gnome thing, but it's very much alive outside it as well.

GNOME isn't based around GTK, it uses a fork of Clutter that now lives inside of Mutter.

(seriously, tldr. also, wat, GTK is better than ever and has a bright future.)

the person who wrote this post is so full of hate and contempt. I find myself quite disinterested in reading.

If you love gtk2 so much why don't you marry it?

:P I love developing with Qt but Ill take gnome over KDE most days.

The article is very long and going in all directions, can I get a tldr of the point the author is trying to make?

I know I'm part of the minority in liking the Gnome 3+ designs, but with so many people lamenting the death of GTK+2, why don't they fork the toolkit? It's not as if you'll break any compatibility by backporting fixes and extending the classic UI components.

Perhaps you'll need to rename your project (except for the system libraries) to avoid trademark issues, but if all the developers came together, I'm sure you could write a drop-in replacement for the old GTK+2 libraries. Such a project may have some difficult tasks ahead of it (bringing Wayland support and fractional scaling, for example) but they can copy Gnome's homework, they don't need to invent everything from scratch.

Clickbait title, no thanks. GTK is alive and doing very well, considering all the major distributions use GNOME or a fork of it.

KDE has major Windows syndrome. No amount of polishing that turd will make me ignore the fundamental user unfriendliness that is nested text drop-downs.