I sort of liked GTK back in the day when it was still the Gimp Tool Kit first and foremost. When it was 1999 and your other choices were a broken Lesstif, an early C++ centric Qt, clumsy Tk, and pre-Cambrian Xaw, it was nice to have something full-featured and tasteful.
Now I hesitate to pull in a GTK app because it won't theme right (I want to use the same bitmap fonts I liked in 1999, but apparently Pango stopped supporting them) and runs the risk of convincing the package manager to dump several gigs of GNOME crud on my drive.
I gather even the GIMP itself no longer tracks current GTK-- it's become solely in service to GNOME and their absurd UI whims (* * * * client side decorations)
I'm with you - I was kind of happy with GNOME2 back in the day, but the forecoming of what was going to be GNOME3 made me jump out that ship and became a refugee in KDE.
It's a shame the Linux ports of Chrome and Firefox are written in GTK because of the reasons you mentioned. Once I heard some guy at GNOME talking about porting Firefox directly to Wayland - which sounds kind of bollocks for a pedestrian like me - but if it's possible, I hope that they succeed and Firefox can become a toolkit-agnostic web browser.
But at the same time I wonder about projects like Xfce and if they ever decide to move away from GTK, like LXDE did. I mean, a fusion between Xfce and Enlightenment would be awesome.
GNOME always seemed to be a solution chasing a problem, particularly once the licensing fears for Qt/KDE were settled.
But now it's one of the things Red Hat seems to impose on the world. Feels like everything controversial comes out of them or Canonical. I guess they have the commercial cash to prop up things like GNOME and Wayland and systemd and snaps until they gain traction, while more community-focused products can't break the world for no reason.
porting Firefox directly to Wayland
I'm trying to understand what that even means.
Meh, /g/ on 4chan which is where this post is from, is mostly bitter racists angry that can't pelt everyone with racial and homophobic slurs in the community. They literally think banning hate speech in CoCs is akin to brutal Stalinist oppression.
Isn't this just an ad hominem? You aren't disagreeing with the point, just saying you dislike the creed that said it.
True. But still /g/ is pretty tame and people mostly discuss tech stuff like this post. Now /b/, /pol/ and /int/ are another matter.
Gnome is written by, just hear me out, Malus workers in their offtime who got screamed at by Steve Jobs for misplacing a button by a few pixels. They wanted to write a Mac interface without some tech dictator breathing down their neck, but with the same philosophy of "we know what's best for the users".
Gnome is good as it doesn't had a lot of complexity and looks nice out of the box.
I do wish the gnome devs would be a little more flexible. However, I also wish KDE had a dumb mode that disables the customization. Xfce4 has a kiosk mode
From your little comment we can tell that YOU think you know what's best for the user :) Keep it up.
Ah, a gnome lover trying to use reverse psychology. Cute.
They wanted to write a Mac interface
macOS windows have minimize buttons and a dock that's not just visible when opening a launcher.
I don't think I hate something as much as I hate client side decorations, "minimal" interfaces and the whole GNOME 3+ theming.
how about you stop being an entitled brat?
This Post and the Comments here are a prime example why i will never opensource any of my Projects.
Too many people here that feel like the Developers owe them something.
Wait until you see how people talk about closed source projects they have paid for.
Same thing, except you will owe them something.
I open source all of my projects. Most people I encounter are reasonably polite, but of course even my most popular is used by a tiny fraction of the number of Gnome users. In any case, I long ago stopped caring about being beholden to users. Often they're doing me favors and finding issues I haven't, and some even provide useful analysis that saves me work. A few provide contributions. But at the end of the day, I do what I do for me, and anyone else who benefits from it provides a small dose of dopamine from being useful.
I regularly fork projects and implement changes I want; I also file PRs, but in the case the upstream author has different opinions about it, requiring work I don't think it's necessary, I just let it go and maintain my own fork.
This is not Ideal Open Software Development, with many people contributing to a common goal. It's fractured and selfish. But the other way, it becomes work, and nobody's paying me for this, and so I give no fucks.
My mental health improved drastically once I stopped emotionally caring about the opinions of my users. I still care about the technicalities, but only insofar as they affect me or I deem them to be a superior solution. Key to this is not engaging emotionally; if I'm not interested in working on it, I just say so: I have other priorities, but an happy to review and maybe accept PRs.
You can just ignore them you know
Or I can just save myself the effort.
It's BTW funny how no one here criticizes the behavior I mentioned but instead attacks my conclusion I draw from that behavior. Which only further solidifies my decision.
you as a developer owe them nothing. You can just be a dick. It's allowed.
I would like the feedback to know why people do not like my project and if I feel like I should care about that perspective.
Further, gnome is hard to ignore, and getting harder all the time. Beyond being the default, even when I go to the trouble of switching the desktop, certain applications in GTK will bring the Gnome design language wherever it goes, and it's deviated enough to not be possible to theme into consistency. It's design decisions permeate the distributions and create some headaches even when you make a fair effort to opt out of it.
that is unironically amazing and the Foss Community needs people like you. And if i ever use one of your Projects, I'll be sure to donate to you.
But: That's you and not me. I don't have the Time or Energy to maintain Projects for other people. My Projects are usually for my exact Usecase and that only. I don't have the Energy or will dealing with people saying "doesn't work for me" or "please update" or "please add [Feature that i don't need]"
They still need funding
