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> GNOME 3, available on Linux since 3.0 in the spring of 2011, is finally available in the official FreeBSD tree as of November 2014. The three and a half year

> GNOME 3, available on Linux since 3.0 in the spring of 2011, is finally available in the official FreeBSD tree as of November 2014. The three and a half year delay is thanks to the upstream GNOME project’s years-long fight against any operating system that doesn’t have a penguin for a mascot. It took several years and a vastly waning userbase, then suddenly they care about portability again. Sure, okay. Either way, it’s here and you can install it from x11/gnome3. Well thats interesting...

swiley 10y ago
Gnome 3 came default on one of the Debian disks I installed a year ago. That was when I stopped using Debian.
gens 10y ago
GNOME3 is also in a fight against any linux system that doesn't use systemd.
qwertyuiop924 10y ago
Gnome3 is in a fight againt anybody who doesn't just want to look at the pretty colors. It really doesn't do anything right.
- cm3 10y ago
  And even if you don't use GNOME3, Gtk3 is now required by Firefox, including Firefox gtk3 bugs, which will be fixed in Firefox. Most importantly the many regressions of Gtk3 itself. Gtk3 was a good refactoring to support Wayland and HiDPI, but it's not stable or fast yet for everyone, like Gtk2 has been. I accept the fact when gtk devs argue that gtk2 has many architectural bugs, but day to day as a user I don't notice them, and I very much prefer the old file dialog, for instance. Gtk3 may be faster in theory due to GPU acceleration as a possibility, but when Gtk 3.20 for a split second shows a black rectangle for each new dialog while it's opening, I have a hard time taking their gpu acceleration argument seriously. I tried building Firefox 48 with gtk2, but it crashed in the file dialog, while the gtk3 build is slower and introduces gui regressions (yes, I've reported the gtk3 bugs). Right now I cannot move past Firefox ESR with gtk2, and I hope I can still use Firefox next year. What I'm saying is that GNOME3's stack (especially Gtk3) doesn't seem to work outside GNOME3 as compatibly as Gtk2 does, and it may be what's intended, if past communication from the GNOME dev team is any indication.
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    The GNOME dev team is where people go when they can't put in work in systemd. The days when it was good are long gone. GTK3 drags in way too much of gnome for comfort, but I don't want to drop all GTK3 apps, so I have to put up with it.
    - cm3 10y ago
      Actually, if you build GTK3 yourself, it doesn't need anything more than a current default GTK2 distro package does, but you'll lose features like colord support. My experience is with Gentoo USE flags, but I believe FreeBSD ports has options for packages that do the same and are the original inspiration for USE flags, so one should be able to use a lean GTK3 and GTK2 on FreeBSD. When GTK3 and even Qt5 go user-unfriendly and dev-unfriendly ways, it's no wonder there's many immediate mode ui library projects that are popular or actively developed Haskell FLTK bindings.
      - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
        Just use Tk. Or wx. They're both well supported, cross platform, and if you use ttk, you can even have your app look good. And native. For WM, I use i3. If you don't mind tiled, I'd highly reccomend it. It's great, the docs are great, and the config file is easy to understand, so after the base setup, you don't have to worry about it. XFCE, TWM and sawfish are pretty cool, if you're not into tiled.
        cm3 10y ago
        > Just use Tk. Or wx. Yes, Tk just works for gui and is underappreciated. wx's default backend is gtk (2 or 3) and they have an experimental Qt5 backend now, which is unsurprising given GTK3's state. So wx doesn't help, unless you can make the Qt backend work (Qt5 is so modular that it's often a pain).
        clarry 10y ago
        Tk is pretty and lean but I never felt comfortable using it in C code. A native C toolkit would be nice.

swiley 10y ago

Gnome 3 came default on one of the Debian disks I installed a year ago. That was when I stopped using Debian.

gens 10y ago

GNOME3 is also in a fight against any linux system that doesn't use systemd.

qwertyuiop924 10y ago

Gnome3 is in a fight againt anybody who doesn't just want to look at the pretty colors. It really doesn't do anything right.

cm3 10y ago
And even if you don't use GNOME3, Gtk3 is now required by Firefox, including Firefox gtk3 bugs, which will be fixed in Firefox. Most importantly the many regressions of Gtk3 itself. Gtk3 was a good refactoring to support Wayland and HiDPI, but it's not stable or fast yet for everyone, like Gtk2 has been. I accept the fact when gtk devs argue that gtk2 has many architectural bugs, but day to day as a user I don't notice them, and I very much prefer the old file dialog, for instance. Gtk3 may be faster in theory due to GPU acceleration as a possibility, but when Gtk 3.20 for a split second shows a black rectangle for each new dialog while it's opening, I have a hard time taking their gpu acceleration argument seriously. I tried building Firefox 48 with gtk2, but it crashed in the file dialog, while the gtk3 build is slower and introduces gui regressions (yes, I've reported the gtk3 bugs). Right now I cannot move past Firefox ESR with gtk2, and I hope I can still use Firefox next year. What I'm saying is that GNOME3's stack (especially Gtk3) doesn't seem to work outside GNOME3 as compatibly as Gtk2 does, and it may be what's intended, if past communication from the GNOME dev team is any indication.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  The GNOME dev team is where people go when they can't put in work in systemd. The days when it was good are long gone. GTK3 drags in way too much of gnome for comfort, but I don't want to drop all GTK3 apps, so I have to put up with it.
  - cm3 10y ago
    Actually, if you build GTK3 yourself, it doesn't need anything more than a current default GTK2 distro package does, but you'll lose features like colord support. My experience is with Gentoo USE flags, but I believe FreeBSD ports has options for packages that do the same and are the original inspiration for USE flags, so one should be able to use a lean GTK3 and GTK2 on FreeBSD. When GTK3 and even Qt5 go user-unfriendly and dev-unfriendly ways, it's no wonder there's many immediate mode ui library projects that are popular or actively developed Haskell FLTK bindings.
    - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
      Just use Tk. Or wx. They're both well supported, cross platform, and if you use ttk, you can even have your app look good. And native. For WM, I use i3. If you don't mind tiled, I'd highly reccomend it. It's great, the docs are great, and the config file is easy to understand, so after the base setup, you don't have to worry about it. XFCE, TWM and sawfish are pretty cool, if you're not into tiled.
      - cm3 10y ago
        > Just use Tk. Or wx. Yes, Tk just works for gui and is underappreciated. wx's default backend is gtk (2 or 3) and they have an experimental Qt5 backend now, which is unsurprising given GTK3's state. So wx doesn't help, unless you can make the Qt backend work (Qt5 is so modular that it's often a pain).
      - clarry 10y ago
        Tk is pretty and lean but I never felt comfortable using it in C code. A native C toolkit would be nice.