8 ms·

They're making their desktop environment and apps into a walled garden on a platform like Linux. Most GTK4 apps won't be usable outside the intended desktop env

by _2paq 5y ago

They're making their desktop environment and apps into a walled garden on a platform like Linux. Most GTK4 apps won't be usable outside the intended desktop environment for which they're built. They also engage in carefully crafted doublespeak when it comes to things like extensions and user choice regarding configuration. Call it what you want but they certainly don't intend to play nice with anyone and have adopted the approach of "my way or the highway". Perhaps they're emboldened by all the corporate backing they have from Red Hat and SUSE. They also have the advantage of being the default DE on most distros. Hell, even distros like NixOS encourage users to use GNOME, which is absolutely insane when you think about it.

mechanical_bear 5y ago
I don’t know the intricacies of the politics at play here, so could you explain why this is “insane”?
- _2paq 5y ago
  I guess this is just my opinion but NixOS is probably the most esoteric Linux distribution I've used. Anyone who intends to use NixOS comfortably probably isn't apprehensive about configuration and customization, things which are the antithesis of everything GNOME stands for. I fail to see why GNOME, or any DE for that matter, is something that should be recommended by a distribution like NixOS.
  - SkyMarshal 5y ago
    Being the default and thereby “recommended” desktop in NixOS a lot different than in other distro’s. In other distro’s, to get a non-default desktop, you have to download a whole different distro “spin”, like Kubuntu. Or add the new desktop packages and manually configure them all. With NixOS you use the same install image, and just change two or three lines in the master configuration.nix file, and re/build. You can change back and forth between DE’s that use different window managers with a reboot, or between DE’s that use the same window manager with a relog [3]. Most the major desktops are supported in NixOS [1][2]. Gnome being the default means little, is easy to change should NixOS community ever form a consensus about changing the default (say in response to Gnome crossing some line), and is easy for end users to change any time. —— # Gnome services.xserver.enable = true; services.xserver.displayManager.gdm.enable = true; services.xserver.desktopManager.gnome.enable = true; —— # KDE services.xserver.enable = true; services.xserver.displayManager.sddm.enable = true; services.xserver.desktopManager.plasma5.enable = true; —— [1]:More info: https://nixos.org/manual/nixos/stable/index.html#sec-x11 https://nixos.org/manual/nixos/stable/index.html#sec-x11 [2]:Supported desktops: https://search.nixos.org/options?channel=21.11&from=0&size=50&sort=relevance&type=packages&query=DesktopManager https://search.nixos.org/options?channel=21.11&from=0&size=5... [3]:https://www.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/otnfq6/i3_or_sway_why_not_both_how_to_have_duel_window/ https://www.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/otnfq6/i3_or_sway_wh...
    - _2paq 5y ago
      I wasn't questioning NixOS's customisability. I was questioning the choice to promote GNOME as "recommended for most users" on the download page. https://nixos.org/download.html#nixos-iso https://nixos.org/download.html#nixos-iso There's no need for a distro like NixOS to do this. It only serves to lend weight to the arrogance displayed by GNOME.
    - spindle 5y ago
      Right, and I'm pretty sure you can use the same display manager with both (at least if it's lightdm), and then switching back and forth between gnome and KDE is literally a matter of switching between the words "gnome" to "plasma5" in one place.
    - asddubs 5y ago
      all you have to do is e.g. sudo apt-get install cinnamon on ubuntu, and then select cinnamon at the login screen after booting, and it'll work just fine. same for mate, plasma, etc. Same for debian, and most linux distros I've tried. installing another desktop isn't difficult at all, usually
      - bayindirh 5y ago
        Debian (and Ubuntu as a result) has "task-*-desktop" tasks (meta-packages) which install, configure and tune the whole distro for a new/additional desktop environment too.
pxc 5y ago
> even distros like NixOS encourage users to use GNOME, which is absolutely insane when you think about it. ? NixOS doesn't have a default desktop environment. At the same time, the graphical installation media images have always come with Plasma as long as I can remember, and the example desktop environment commented out in the template given by nixos-generate-config has likewise always been Plasma.
- _2paq 5y ago
  I'm taking about the "Recommended for most users" tag for the GNOME ISO. https://nixos.org/download.html#nixos-iso https://nixos.org/download.html#nixos-iso
  - pxc 5y ago
    Wow! I can't believe I've never noticed that. For many years, the only graphical installation disk was based on Plasma, and I think it also had that tag. NixOS only started shipping a GNOME iso for installation purposes a little over a year ago (for 20.09), and I kinda never noticed. Looks like the main reason GNOME is recommended for installation media at the moment is that it does a better job of autodetecting HiDPI displays, and then scaling appropriately: https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-homepage/pull/643 https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-homepage/pull/643 There are also some packaging issues for Qt with NixOS, because Qt plugins fundamentally rely on ‘impurity’ at runtime, and the Qt framework makes promises it doesn't keep about binary compatibility. Here are some of the relevant issues for historical context and some of the tradeoffs Nixpkgs developers have faced when it comes to handling Qt and KDE packaging: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/86369 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/86369 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/54525 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/54525 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/44047 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/44047 I realize that may not be a fully satisfying answer as to why the GNOME-based installation graphical ISO is recommended over the Qt one because one can imagine that the Qt packaging issue should be resolved some other way, or see the difficulty of packaging Qt plugins and applications in Nixpkgs as fundamentally a Nix defect. But I hope it makes that decision make more sense. FWIW, afaict Plasma is the more popular of the two major DEs on NixOS, and it's what I've always used on NixOS myself, including now. It is definitely usable.
stuaxo 5y ago
> Most GTK4 apps won't be usable outside the intended desktop environment for which they're built. There have always been apps more heavily integrated with GNOME vs GTK apps. Gtk4 is easier to port to other platforms, if anything it should be less painful than it has been before.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  > Gtk4 is easier to port to other platforms, if anything it should be less painful than it has been before. Oh, how desperately I wish this were true. My evidence is purely anecdotal, but I've found GTK4 to be almost completely unusable in my time working with it, so much so that I've basically decided to skip this release altogether and just stick with GTK3 for all intents and purposes. It started when I wanted to pull my Glade projects in to the new framework so I can build my apps with XML instead of writing it by hand... oops, that method has been unsupported. But don't worry! There's a replacement app right around the corner that's... not finished yet. Okay, I guess that's not a big deal, I'll just re-write everything by hand! Now it's compiling and doesn't look the least bit native on my system. And there are compositor issues. And the text looks ass-ugly too. Asking around on IRC, I was told everything from "use Flatpak" to "stop trolling" to "your workflow is unhealthy/insane/unsupported". It would appear that GTK4 is only intended for GNOME extremists, unfortunately. If there are any portability improvements I won't likely see them.
  - shatteredgate 5y ago
    If you depend on having a GUI builder then I agree it makes sense to wait for that to be stable before switching to GTK4. It's being worked on but progress is slow because of a severe lack of contributors. I don't know anything about compositor issues but it's aimed to give the text a substantial fix in GTK 4.6. >I was told everything from "use Flatpak" to "stop trolling" to "your workflow is unhealthy/insane/unsupported". It would appear that GTK4 is only intended for GNOME extremists, I don't see how that has anything to do with "extremists". The GNOME IRC is probably a bad place to ask for help with distro packaging, the focus is on Flatpak because that's realistically the only distro-agnostic packaging that upstream can support. For help with packaging apps for your distro you'd have better luck asking on your distro's IRC.
shatteredgate 5y ago
>They're making their desktop environment and apps into a walled garden on a platform like Linux. This is a rather empty statement as all these apps and the whole platform still continue to be open source. >Call it what you want but they certainly don't intend to play nice with anyone and have adopted the approach of "my way or the highway" I don't see how this is any different from how it was before. I've also found that KDE apps don't really work well outside of KDE, XFCE apps don't really work well outside of XFCE, etc. There is a clear line where an app developer has to decide if they're making a cross platform app (like LibreOffice, Blender, etc) or if they're making an app that integrates with a specific platform. Every single desktop I've ever seen has drawn this line somewhere because this is what users want, a KDE user prefers to use the KDE file manager and finds the GNOME file manager not so usable, a GNOME user prefers to use the GNOME file manager and finds the KDE file manager not so usable, etc. >Most GTK4 apps won't be usable outside the intended desktop environment for which they're built. I think you're confusing GTK4 with libadwaita, libadwaita is the library for GNOME apps that are only tested with GNOME and don't intend to be used outside it. GTK4 itself is not tied to any environment. And even then a developer could likely get libadwaita apps to work reasonably well in other environments with some porting work, similarly to how Krita depends on some KDE widgets and libraries but has been ported to other platforms. >They also engage in carefully crafted doublespeak when it comes to things like extensions and user choice regarding configuration. I don't understand, the stance on extensions has always been pretty obvious to me. Extensions are a third-party customization, they can work well and can do pretty much anything but because of that it's the user's responsibility to ensure their configuration is a working one.
- _2paq 5y ago
  > as all these apps and the whole platform still continue to be open source. I mean, what is that even meant to convey? Do you mean to say that one can always create hard forks of non-trivial packages like GTK or develop extensions for GNOME shell the change the way it works like the PopOS guys did? We all know how well that turned out. > I've also found that KDE apps don't really work well outside of KDE Funny, because I use i3wm on an old NAS and KDE apps like Spectacle, Gwenview, and Dolphin work fine and use whatever theme and font I tell them to use and don't make decisions for me by assuming I'm incapable of making them. Can't say the same for GTK4 GNOME apps. They're not built to be used outside GNOME because GNOME is now a "platform", which is just doublespeak for a walled garden. > the stance on extensions has always been pretty obvious to me. It's obvious to me as well — we don't care about GNOME extensions[^1]. It's rather unfortunate that the extension system exists at all. People waste so much time and resources on making elaborate extensions like the Pop Shell or Dash to Dock under the impression that their extensions are somehow welcome but then they have to keep fixing them after every new GNOME release. What's even worse is that unsuspecting users use these extensions. [^1]: https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2021/07/13/community-power-4/ https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2021/07/13/community-power-...
drdo 5y ago
Honestly, I think they are going in the right direction. The main problem with the Linux desktop has always been the insane fragmentation in my opinion. There's a million different options for every little thing and so developers don't have a platform they can count on and their option is to either provide reduced functionality (no integration with the desktop environment) or support a bunch of different things. And users don't get a polished JustWorks(TM) desktop experience.

by _2paq 5y ago

mechanical_bear 5y ago

I don’t know the intricacies of the politics at play here, so could you explain why this is “insane”?

_2paq 5y ago
I guess this is just my opinion but NixOS is probably the most esoteric Linux distribution I've used. Anyone who intends to use NixOS comfortably probably isn't apprehensive about configuration and customization, things which are the antithesis of everything GNOME stands for. I fail to see why GNOME, or any DE for that matter, is something that should be recommended by a distribution like NixOS.
- SkyMarshal 5y ago
  Being the default and thereby “recommended” desktop in NixOS a lot different than in other distro’s. In other distro’s, to get a non-default desktop, you have to download a whole different distro “spin”, like Kubuntu. Or add the new desktop packages and manually configure them all. With NixOS you use the same install image, and just change two or three lines in the master configuration.nix file, and re/build. You can change back and forth between DE’s that use different window managers with a reboot, or between DE’s that use the same window manager with a relog [3]. Most the major desktops are supported in NixOS [1][2]. Gnome being the default means little, is easy to change should NixOS community ever form a consensus about changing the default (say in response to Gnome crossing some line), and is easy for end users to change any time. —— # Gnome services.xserver.enable = true; services.xserver.displayManager.gdm.enable = true; services.xserver.desktopManager.gnome.enable = true; —— # KDE services.xserver.enable = true; services.xserver.displayManager.sddm.enable = true; services.xserver.desktopManager.plasma5.enable = true; —— [1]:More info: https://nixos.org/manual/nixos/stable/index.html#sec-x11 https://nixos.org/manual/nixos/stable/index.html#sec-x11 [2]:Supported desktops: https://search.nixos.org/options?channel=21.11&from=0&size=50&sort=relevance&type=packages&query=DesktopManager https://search.nixos.org/options?channel=21.11&from=0&size=5... [3]:https://www.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/otnfq6/i3_or_sway_why_not_both_how_to_have_duel_window/ https://www.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/otnfq6/i3_or_sway_wh...
  - _2paq 5y ago
    I wasn't questioning NixOS's customisability. I was questioning the choice to promote GNOME as "recommended for most users" on the download page. https://nixos.org/download.html#nixos-iso https://nixos.org/download.html#nixos-iso There's no need for a distro like NixOS to do this. It only serves to lend weight to the arrogance displayed by GNOME.
  - spindle 5y ago
    Right, and I'm pretty sure you can use the same display manager with both (at least if it's lightdm), and then switching back and forth between gnome and KDE is literally a matter of switching between the words "gnome" to "plasma5" in one place.
  - asddubs 5y ago
    all you have to do is e.g. sudo apt-get install cinnamon on ubuntu, and then select cinnamon at the login screen after booting, and it'll work just fine. same for mate, plasma, etc. Same for debian, and most linux distros I've tried. installing another desktop isn't difficult at all, usually
    - bayindirh 5y ago
      Debian (and Ubuntu as a result) has "task-*-desktop" tasks (meta-packages) which install, configure and tune the whole distro for a new/additional desktop environment too.

pxc 5y ago

> even distros like NixOS encourage users to use GNOME, which is absolutely insane when you think about it. ? NixOS doesn't have a default desktop environment. At the same time, the graphical installation media images have always come with Plasma as long as I can remember, and the example desktop environment commented out in the template given by nixos-generate-config has likewise always been Plasma.

_2paq 5y ago
I'm taking about the "Recommended for most users" tag for the GNOME ISO. https://nixos.org/download.html#nixos-iso https://nixos.org/download.html#nixos-iso
- pxc 5y ago
  Wow! I can't believe I've never noticed that. For many years, the only graphical installation disk was based on Plasma, and I think it also had that tag. NixOS only started shipping a GNOME iso for installation purposes a little over a year ago (for 20.09), and I kinda never noticed. Looks like the main reason GNOME is recommended for installation media at the moment is that it does a better job of autodetecting HiDPI displays, and then scaling appropriately: https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-homepage/pull/643 https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-homepage/pull/643 There are also some packaging issues for Qt with NixOS, because Qt plugins fundamentally rely on ‘impurity’ at runtime, and the Qt framework makes promises it doesn't keep about binary compatibility. Here are some of the relevant issues for historical context and some of the tradeoffs Nixpkgs developers have faced when it comes to handling Qt and KDE packaging: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/86369 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/86369 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/54525 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/54525 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/44047 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/44047 I realize that may not be a fully satisfying answer as to why the GNOME-based installation graphical ISO is recommended over the Qt one because one can imagine that the Qt packaging issue should be resolved some other way, or see the difficulty of packaging Qt plugins and applications in Nixpkgs as fundamentally a Nix defect. But I hope it makes that decision make more sense. FWIW, afaict Plasma is the more popular of the two major DEs on NixOS, and it's what I've always used on NixOS myself, including now. It is definitely usable.

stuaxo 5y ago

> Most GTK4 apps won't be usable outside the intended desktop environment for which they're built. There have always been apps more heavily integrated with GNOME vs GTK apps. Gtk4 is easier to port to other platforms, if anything it should be less painful than it has been before.

smoldesu 5y ago
> Gtk4 is easier to port to other platforms, if anything it should be less painful than it has been before. Oh, how desperately I wish this were true. My evidence is purely anecdotal, but I've found GTK4 to be almost completely unusable in my time working with it, so much so that I've basically decided to skip this release altogether and just stick with GTK3 for all intents and purposes. It started when I wanted to pull my Glade projects in to the new framework so I can build my apps with XML instead of writing it by hand... oops, that method has been unsupported. But don't worry! There's a replacement app right around the corner that's... not finished yet. Okay, I guess that's not a big deal, I'll just re-write everything by hand! Now it's compiling and doesn't look the least bit native on my system. And there are compositor issues. And the text looks ass-ugly too. Asking around on IRC, I was told everything from "use Flatpak" to "stop trolling" to "your workflow is unhealthy/insane/unsupported". It would appear that GTK4 is only intended for GNOME extremists, unfortunately. If there are any portability improvements I won't likely see them.
- shatteredgate 5y ago
  If you depend on having a GUI builder then I agree it makes sense to wait for that to be stable before switching to GTK4. It's being worked on but progress is slow because of a severe lack of contributors. I don't know anything about compositor issues but it's aimed to give the text a substantial fix in GTK 4.6. >I was told everything from "use Flatpak" to "stop trolling" to "your workflow is unhealthy/insane/unsupported". It would appear that GTK4 is only intended for GNOME extremists, I don't see how that has anything to do with "extremists". The GNOME IRC is probably a bad place to ask for help with distro packaging, the focus is on Flatpak because that's realistically the only distro-agnostic packaging that upstream can support. For help with packaging apps for your distro you'd have better luck asking on your distro's IRC.

shatteredgate 5y ago

>They're making their desktop environment and apps into a walled garden on a platform like Linux. This is a rather empty statement as all these apps and the whole platform still continue to be open source. >Call it what you want but they certainly don't intend to play nice with anyone and have adopted the approach of "my way or the highway" I don't see how this is any different from how it was before. I've also found that KDE apps don't really work well outside of KDE, XFCE apps don't really work well outside of XFCE, etc. There is a clear line where an app developer has to decide if they're making a cross platform app (like LibreOffice, Blender, etc) or if they're making an app that integrates with a specific platform. Every single desktop I've ever seen has drawn this line somewhere because this is what users want, a KDE user prefers to use the KDE file manager and finds the GNOME file manager not so usable, a GNOME user prefers to use the GNOME file manager and finds the KDE file manager not so usable, etc. >Most GTK4 apps won't be usable outside the intended desktop environment for which they're built. I think you're confusing GTK4 with libadwaita, libadwaita is the library for GNOME apps that are only tested with GNOME and don't intend to be used outside it. GTK4 itself is not tied to any environment. And even then a developer could likely get libadwaita apps to work reasonably well in other environments with some porting work, similarly to how Krita depends on some KDE widgets and libraries but has been ported to other platforms. >They also engage in carefully crafted doublespeak when it comes to things like extensions and user choice regarding configuration. I don't understand, the stance on extensions has always been pretty obvious to me. Extensions are a third-party customization, they can work well and can do pretty much anything but because of that it's the user's responsibility to ensure their configuration is a working one.

_2paq 5y ago
> as all these apps and the whole platform still continue to be open source. I mean, what is that even meant to convey? Do you mean to say that one can always create hard forks of non-trivial packages like GTK or develop extensions for GNOME shell the change the way it works like the PopOS guys did? We all know how well that turned out. > I've also found that KDE apps don't really work well outside of KDE Funny, because I use i3wm on an old NAS and KDE apps like Spectacle, Gwenview, and Dolphin work fine and use whatever theme and font I tell them to use and don't make decisions for me by assuming I'm incapable of making them. Can't say the same for GTK4 GNOME apps. They're not built to be used outside GNOME because GNOME is now a "platform", which is just doublespeak for a walled garden. > the stance on extensions has always been pretty obvious to me. It's obvious to me as well — we don't care about GNOME extensions[^1]. It's rather unfortunate that the extension system exists at all. People waste so much time and resources on making elaborate extensions like the Pop Shell or Dash to Dock under the impression that their extensions are somehow welcome but then they have to keep fixing them after every new GNOME release. What's even worse is that unsuspecting users use these extensions. [^1]: https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2021/07/13/community-power-4/ https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2021/07/13/community-power-...

drdo 5y ago

Honestly, I think they are going in the right direction. The main problem with the Linux desktop has always been the insane fragmentation in my opinion. There's a million different options for every little thing and so developers don't have a platform they can count on and their option is to either provide reduced functionality (no integration with the desktop environment) or support a bunch of different things. And users don't get a polished JustWorks(TM) desktop experience.