8 ms·

A GTK+ 3 update

139 points by ognyankulev 8y ago

djsumdog 8y ago
I still really prefer GTK2 apps. The GTK3 file picker is awful, and I'm generally not a fan of apps that use the new fancy window borders like gedit. I'm glad Mate is around to keep maintaining gtk2/gnome2.
- j605 8y ago
  Mate has ported all of its application and the DE itself to gtk3. It can still keep the old look but use current technology :)
- app4soft 8y ago
  > I still really prefer GTK2 apps. The GTK3 file picker is awful I rather prefer Qt4 apps. Some Qt4 apps look uglier after migrating to Qt5.
  - laumars 8y ago
    That might be because you lost your qt4 theming config when you upgraded your DE to qt5, so qt4 has fallen back to defaults. On ArchLinux you can run `qtconfig-qt4` to configure the look and feel of qt4 applications.
    - livebsd 8y ago
      No, it's mostly because Qt5 apps also start to use QML widgets, which are quite a bit inferior in just about everything. Higher latency, a "touch like" feel (fatter borders in general, overall lower display density), respond in a different way (scrolling), and so on. I always was a great fan of both GTK2 (for the UI) and Qt4 (for the API). GTK3 made me switch to Qt4 for development. Qt5 brings some improvement, but as a user I absolutely hate QML.
      - laumars 8y ago
        I suspect your comment is tangical to the what myself and the GP were discussing as I don't really understand why qt5 using QML would affect the look and feel of existing legacy qt4 applications. Running qtconfig-qt4 and redefining the config I wanted did fix the "ugliness" of qt4 applications after I upgraded to KDE5 (or whenever it was KDE switched qt versions)
- avian 8y ago
  My gripe with GTK3 are tiny, auto-hiding scroll bars. After a long day at work they become impossible to use even with a mouse. Hitting them with a Wacom is basically impossible. What’s worse is that you can find many different recipes on the web on how to enlarge th scrollbars/disable auto-hide, and most of them don’t work or work only some of the time.
  - omeid2 8y ago
    "What’s worse is that you can find many different recipes on the web on how to fix X and most of them don't work", that is basically Gnome/GTK3 in a nutshell.
  - JasonFruit 8y ago
    I hate those scrollbars with a passion, and every time I copy over my configuration to get rid of them, I find it no longer works. I'm old and don't have my bifocals yet: don't make me squint for the scrollbars.
  - danieldk 8y ago
    My gripe with GTK3 are tiny, auto-hiding scroll bars. And the abandoning of menus, which I guess is mostly encouraged by the GNOME HIG: Menu bars increase the vertical footprint of an application’s user interface, introduce a large number of disclosure points, and function as a fixed set of inflexible options. For these reasons, header bars and header bar menus are generally recommended over menu bars, along with other design patterns for exposing controls on demand, such as selection mode, action bars, and popovers. So, now that we have giant 4k screens, we are going to abandon menus. And I am not even a menu user, but they are great for discovering keyboard shortcuts and the the functionality provided by applications. Instead, we have header bar and hamburger menus that can only host a small subset of the items that normal menus could host. Shortcuts become hard to find and some applications provide some shortcut overlay, while in other applications you have to figure it out yourself. If vertical footprint is a problem, offer the user to put the menu in the system tray macOS style. Fun fact: the Xerox Star apparently had hamburger menus, application pull-down menus, and later the global menu are an evolution of the hamburger menu. It seems that we are going backwards again, without any clear rationale. Even if hamburger menus were more ergonomic, generations have been trained with the WIMP paradigm. [1] https://medium.com/@probonopd/make-it-simple-linux-desktop-usability-part-1-5fa0fb369b42 https://medium.com/@probonopd/make-it-simple-linux-desktop-u...
- steanne 8y ago
  https://github.com/TomaszGasior/gtk3-mushrooms https://github.com/TomaszGasior/gtk3-mushrooms
  - livebsd 8y ago
    I really wished THIS would be the DEFAULT behavior of GTK3. If you read this in reverse, you realize how BROKEN GTK3 is compared to GTK2. It doesn't make any sense.
  - djsumdog 8y ago
    Oh wow. That's an amazing set of patches. Those should be in mainline.
- blattimwind 8y ago
  I genuinely do not comprehend how that file picker is still a thing. It's usability is a show-stopping bug of the entire framework and desktop. > Windows' file open/save dialogues are so far ahead of everything else that the competition seems like unusable garbage to me. I'm glad KDE/Qt chose to emulate these very closely on Linux. Wouldn't want a desktop where my only choice is Gnome's take at this. Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16324814 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16324814
bla2 8y ago
> GTK+ 3 stopped changing in drastic ways, which was well-received, and we are finally seeing applications moving from GTK+ 2. It's almost as if devs care more about stable APIs than about endless churn for minor features!
- jchw 8y ago
  I don't know if the GNOME/GTK folks will ever really understand, though. The thing is, it would be OK to have new features and even feature breaks. It's just, every GNOME release had a corresponding GTK release and a number of new things broke in GTK for it. You couldn't use a third party theme without waiting to see what was going to break next. There's no strong guarantees unlike with say, Qt, where generally speaking true API breaks are much rarer. People probably would've had less trouble and been less upset if Gnome wasn't in a privilege position and had to just be another user in the ecosystem.
  - vetinari 8y ago
    Number of new things broke == Theming. Which was specifically marked as unstable, together with a reason why it was marked unstable (being reworked with CSS). Gnome and other apps didn't break, because they weren't concerned about theming themselves.
    - r3bl 8y ago
      Having a modular desktop environment kind of loses its purpose if a module (theme, extension) can bring the entire user session down. Just this week, me upgrading a GNOME extension resulted in the user session completely crashing, getting me back to the login screen, and making me lose about half an hour of work. Now, of course, I could put the blame on the sole developer that developed that specific extension (one of the preinstalled ones in Ubuntu now), but I don't. I blame GNOME that a botched extension update lead to the entire session crashing, instead of doing something normal (like reverting to the previous version and showing "update failed").
      - 8y ago
thristian 8y ago
As much as I always like GTK2 as a solid workhorse, and GTK3 (although unstable) was adding actual improvements, I lost a lot of faith in the GTK team with their original hare-brained versioning scheme for GTK4. When they recanted that plan and announced that GTK 3.22 would be The Stable Version, I felt a bit better, and honestly it's been pretty great so far. Going back on that promise and saying that GTK 3.22 isn't actually The Stable Version after all feels a bit like a betrayal... but on the other hand, if gdk_window_move_to_rect() is the function I'm thinking of, all is forgiven. I was trying to create a custom popup the other day and (thanks to limitations in the GDK API) it wasn't possible under Wayland. Trying to dig into why, I found out that GDK had an API that did exactly what I wanted, which I couldn't use because it was internal and unstable. Assuming that API is gdk_window_move_to_rect(), this is the best news I've heard all day.
- duskwuff 8y ago
  > ... but on the other hand, if gdk_window_move_to_rect() is the function I'm thinking of, all is forgiven. Good news. From the article: "gdk_window_move_to_rect as public API"
coleifer 8y ago
For the applications I use, gtk3 did not add any significant improvement over gtk2. Often it was the opposite (goodbye menubars anyone?). It seemed like all my dank gtk themes broke every time there was a minor version bump.
- JasonFruit 8y ago
  And how, if all the menu bars are gone, can these GTK3 apps still waste more screen real estate than when they used GTK2?
- jhasse 8y ago
  Gtk3 still supports menubars.
- hapless 8y ago
  The only compelling reason to migrate to GTK 3 was the deprecation of GTK 2.
cocoa19 8y ago
Bring native windows please!
- app4soft 8y ago
  Which OS?
mastax 8y ago
A post about GTK on HN? I bet the comments section is full of people complaining about GTK and not talking about the post.
- dang 8y ago
  Perhaps, but please don't make the thread even worse with off-topic metacomplaints.
- Avshalom 8y ago
  you read the post? because it's just "hey remember how we said this was the stable version? it isn't now" which couldn't be more perfectly CADT if it tried.
  - mathw 8y ago
    And they've changed that policy, on a limited basis, specifically to help out the big projects who are now porting to GTK+3 as a result of that successful stability plan for 3.22. A project being responsive to the needs of its big users? Shocking and unacceptable.

139 points by ognyankulev 8y ago

I still really prefer GTK2 apps. The GTK3 file picker is awful, and I'm generally not a fan of apps that use the new fancy window borders like gedit. I'm glad Mate is around to keep maintaining gtk2/gnome2.

j605 8y ago
Mate has ported all of its application and the DE itself to gtk3. It can still keep the old look but use current technology :)
app4soft 8y ago
> I still really prefer GTK2 apps. The GTK3 file picker is awful I rather prefer Qt4 apps. Some Qt4 apps look uglier after migrating to Qt5.
- laumars 8y ago
  That might be because you lost your qt4 theming config when you upgraded your DE to qt5, so qt4 has fallen back to defaults. On ArchLinux you can run `qtconfig-qt4` to configure the look and feel of qt4 applications.
  - livebsd 8y ago
    No, it's mostly because Qt5 apps also start to use QML widgets, which are quite a bit inferior in just about everything. Higher latency, a "touch like" feel (fatter borders in general, overall lower display density), respond in a different way (scrolling), and so on. I always was a great fan of both GTK2 (for the UI) and Qt4 (for the API). GTK3 made me switch to Qt4 for development. Qt5 brings some improvement, but as a user I absolutely hate QML.
    - laumars 8y ago
      I suspect your comment is tangical to the what myself and the GP were discussing as I don't really understand why qt5 using QML would affect the look and feel of existing legacy qt4 applications. Running qtconfig-qt4 and redefining the config I wanted did fix the "ugliness" of qt4 applications after I upgraded to KDE5 (or whenever it was KDE switched qt versions)
avian 8y ago
My gripe with GTK3 are tiny, auto-hiding scroll bars. After a long day at work they become impossible to use even with a mouse. Hitting them with a Wacom is basically impossible. What’s worse is that you can find many different recipes on the web on how to enlarge th scrollbars/disable auto-hide, and most of them don’t work or work only some of the time.
- omeid2 8y ago
  "What’s worse is that you can find many different recipes on the web on how to fix X and most of them don't work", that is basically Gnome/GTK3 in a nutshell.
- JasonFruit 8y ago
  I hate those scrollbars with a passion, and every time I copy over my configuration to get rid of them, I find it no longer works. I'm old and don't have my bifocals yet: don't make me squint for the scrollbars.
- danieldk 8y ago
  My gripe with GTK3 are tiny, auto-hiding scroll bars. And the abandoning of menus, which I guess is mostly encouraged by the GNOME HIG: Menu bars increase the vertical footprint of an application’s user interface, introduce a large number of disclosure points, and function as a fixed set of inflexible options. For these reasons, header bars and header bar menus are generally recommended over menu bars, along with other design patterns for exposing controls on demand, such as selection mode, action bars, and popovers. So, now that we have giant 4k screens, we are going to abandon menus. And I am not even a menu user, but they are great for discovering keyboard shortcuts and the the functionality provided by applications. Instead, we have header bar and hamburger menus that can only host a small subset of the items that normal menus could host. Shortcuts become hard to find and some applications provide some shortcut overlay, while in other applications you have to figure it out yourself. If vertical footprint is a problem, offer the user to put the menu in the system tray macOS style. Fun fact: the Xerox Star apparently had hamburger menus, application pull-down menus, and later the global menu are an evolution of the hamburger menu. It seems that we are going backwards again, without any clear rationale. Even if hamburger menus were more ergonomic, generations have been trained with the WIMP paradigm. [1] https://medium.com/@probonopd/make-it-simple-linux-desktop-usability-part-1-5fa0fb369b42 https://medium.com/@probonopd/make-it-simple-linux-desktop-u...
steanne 8y ago
https://github.com/TomaszGasior/gtk3-mushrooms https://github.com/TomaszGasior/gtk3-mushrooms
- livebsd 8y ago
  I really wished THIS would be the DEFAULT behavior of GTK3. If you read this in reverse, you realize how BROKEN GTK3 is compared to GTK2. It doesn't make any sense.
- djsumdog 8y ago
  Oh wow. That's an amazing set of patches. Those should be in mainline.
blattimwind 8y ago
I genuinely do not comprehend how that file picker is still a thing. It's usability is a show-stopping bug of the entire framework and desktop. > Windows' file open/save dialogues are so far ahead of everything else that the competition seems like unusable garbage to me. I'm glad KDE/Qt chose to emulate these very closely on Linux. Wouldn't want a desktop where my only choice is Gnome's take at this. Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16324814 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16324814

bla2 8y ago

> GTK+ 3 stopped changing in drastic ways, which was well-received, and we are finally seeing applications moving from GTK+ 2. It's almost as if devs care more about stable APIs than about endless churn for minor features!

jchw 8y ago
I don't know if the GNOME/GTK folks will ever really understand, though. The thing is, it would be OK to have new features and even feature breaks. It's just, every GNOME release had a corresponding GTK release and a number of new things broke in GTK for it. You couldn't use a third party theme without waiting to see what was going to break next. There's no strong guarantees unlike with say, Qt, where generally speaking true API breaks are much rarer. People probably would've had less trouble and been less upset if Gnome wasn't in a privilege position and had to just be another user in the ecosystem.
- vetinari 8y ago
  Number of new things broke == Theming. Which was specifically marked as unstable, together with a reason why it was marked unstable (being reworked with CSS). Gnome and other apps didn't break, because they weren't concerned about theming themselves.
  - r3bl 8y ago
    Having a modular desktop environment kind of loses its purpose if a module (theme, extension) can bring the entire user session down. Just this week, me upgrading a GNOME extension resulted in the user session completely crashing, getting me back to the login screen, and making me lose about half an hour of work. Now, of course, I could put the blame on the sole developer that developed that specific extension (one of the preinstalled ones in Ubuntu now), but I don't. I blame GNOME that a botched extension update lead to the entire session crashing, instead of doing something normal (like reverting to the previous version and showing "update failed").
    - 8y ago

thristian 8y ago

As much as I always like GTK2 as a solid workhorse, and GTK3 (although unstable) was adding actual improvements, I lost a lot of faith in the GTK team with their original hare-brained versioning scheme for GTK4. When they recanted that plan and announced that GTK 3.22 would be The Stable Version, I felt a bit better, and honestly it's been pretty great so far. Going back on that promise and saying that GTK 3.22 isn't actually The Stable Version after all feels a bit like a betrayal... but on the other hand, if gdk_window_move_to_rect() is the function I'm thinking of, all is forgiven. I was trying to create a custom popup the other day and (thanks to limitations in the GDK API) it wasn't possible under Wayland. Trying to dig into why, I found out that GDK had an API that did exactly what I wanted, which I couldn't use because it was internal and unstable. Assuming that API is gdk_window_move_to_rect(), this is the best news I've heard all day.

duskwuff 8y ago
> ... but on the other hand, if gdk_window_move_to_rect() is the function I'm thinking of, all is forgiven. Good news. From the article: "gdk_window_move_to_rect as public API"

coleifer 8y ago

For the applications I use, gtk3 did not add any significant improvement over gtk2. Often it was the opposite (goodbye menubars anyone?). It seemed like all my dank gtk themes broke every time there was a minor version bump.

JasonFruit 8y ago
And how, if all the menu bars are gone, can these GTK3 apps still waste more screen real estate than when they used GTK2?
jhasse 8y ago
Gtk3 still supports menubars.
hapless 8y ago
The only compelling reason to migrate to GTK 3 was the deprecation of GTK 2.

cocoa19 8y ago

Bring native windows please!

app4soft 8y ago
Which OS?

mastax 8y ago

A post about GTK on HN? I bet the comments section is full of people complaining about GTK and not talking about the post.

dang 8y ago
Perhaps, but please don't make the thread even worse with off-topic metacomplaints.
Avshalom 8y ago
you read the post? because it's just "hey remember how we said this was the stable version? it isn't now" which couldn't be more perfectly CADT if it tried.
- mathw 8y ago
  And they've changed that policy, on a limited basis, specifically to help out the big projects who are now porting to GTK+3 as a result of that successful stability plan for 3.22. A project being responsive to the needs of its big users? Shocking and unacceptable.