6 ms·

Xfce, the "Just Works" of Linux desktop environments not only the DE itself but also its suite of apps like Thunar. They recently moved to gtk4 (or are plannin

Xfce, the "Just Works" of Linux desktop environments not only the DE itself but also its suite of apps like Thunar. They recently moved to gtk4 (or are planning to?). I wonder what would be the difference between gtk3 and gtk4 apps in terms of latency and performance.

donkeybeer 3y ago
gtk4 is not good. They have been killing more features and forcing more ui wierdness like overlay scrollbars, etc https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=790677#c6 https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=790677#c6 I think 4 plans to kill theming too.
- CuteDinosaur 3y ago
  I don't understand most of this decisions.
  - rglullis 3y ago
    Think of it as the product of the new generation of techies who had their first contact with computers after Mac OSX was released, and now all they can/want to do is emulate Apple and their HIG.
    - robinsonb5 3y ago
      It's more than that - it's a new generation of techies who grew up in a "mobile first" world, and view the mouse as an archaic input device.
      - rglullis 3y ago
        I'd be inclined to agree with you, but it's hard to me to believe that all these kids went to college (or got some type of computer training) only by working with their phones/tablets.
        robinsonb5 3y ago
        It's not that they only use their phones/tablets, it's that the phone/tablet is the first tool they reach for, the default device, and UI conventions from that space feel correct and natural to them, just as they feel clumsy and jarring to me. (How old am I? Old enough that I still use an opto-mechnical mouse with a ball, because I still like the extra weight and inertia it has over a pure optical mouse!)
        bitwize 3y ago
        How can you prefer that? Not having to periodically scrape the crud off the rollers has been such a boon to me.
        bitwize 3y ago
        The youngest had to be taught, as part of intro to CS, how files and directories worked. Such a person may have used a desktop, but desktops are foreign to them.
    - smoldesu 3y ago
      GNOME is primarily about making Free Software that is highly accessible. The desktop and GTK toolkit both predate OSX, so I'm not really sure what the purpose of the comparison is.
      - rglullis 3y ago
        This criticism is for the more recent versions of GTK. Killing theming and removing features when they do not have a serviceable usable alternative does not make it more "accessible", it is just the standard "we know it better because we study the behavior of a large group of users" excuse that they give to treat it everyone by the lowest common denominator - just like Apple.
        smoldesu 3y ago
        Yeah, that much I generally agree with. Many of the 'opinionated' decisions that came with GTK4 are either regressions or strange and inflexible. That being said, I will shamefully echo the words of the GNOME maintainers; their goal was not to "kill theming". They wanted to stop distros from shipping themes by default, which was arguably just as deranged but at least somewhat understandable. Nowadays we have stuff like Gradience too, which lets you theme LibAdwaita apps. You're still forced to use the ugly old Adwaita buttons, though. So... make of it as you will. I left GNOME completely after the GNOME 40 update, I sympathize with people who hate the current desktop. The toolkit itself is "fine" in my unprofessional developer opinion.
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      To be fair GNOME was always about following Apple's HIG, while at the same time bringing Microsoft ideas into UNIX (Evolution/Outlook, Bonobo/COM,...)
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - sprash 3y ago
    It's sabotage.
keepamovin 3y ago
I didn't know people used xfce as their main desktop, I had only experienced it because it's easy and resource light to set up for VNC. It's cool to see people singing its praises. It was always definitely adequate for my 'remote development with desktop GUI' needs. Funny how with anything on the internet there's always Ayes and Nays. It's almost hilarious to me about humans that "the market always segments" into all these trivial seeming (but decidedly important if you have skin in the game) choices. I'm not questioning at all the importance of UI and UX in any way. It's fundamental. These visual virtual environments are the primary tools we humans use every day for our information manipulation snow-shoveling knowledge work. They have to be refined and have exquisite ergonomics tailored to our every whim. That's undeniable and it's not surprising at all that people have strong preferences. I just think it's funny that people can't seem to agree, on anything. The market always segments. Example from my business: we build a remote browser that has a kind of real time streaming optimized for adapting many bandwidth conditions to reduce lag (which often occurs by trading away raw framerate). For some people (normally the security conscious crowd), this is perfect. For other people (the app virtualization crowd) this is terrible: they want silky smooth high framerate remote streaming. I suppose people get could lectures about trade-offs, but it really is a kind of enjoyable thing: there's always something to work on. An advantage of being open source is people can tweak it to their needs as much as they want. There's no bottlenecks in the system besides what you want to do, and how much compute and bandwidth you can throw at it. It can be as fast and smooth, or as resource efficient and minimal as you want.
- coldpie 3y ago
  > I didn't know people used xfce as their main desktop Hahaha, really? It's been my desktop since I started using Linux in the 2000s. It's great! It presents windows, has a small set of high quality built in applications (file browser, application launcher, etc), has a big and flexible set of keyboard shortcuts, and other than that, it just gets out of your way. Other DEs like to shove themselves in your way -- put your mouse in the corner of the screen? Something shows up! Hit a wrong keyboard button? Something shows up! Open the application launcher? It's fullscreen, baby! Do something to a window? Here's some jiggly wiggly animations! XFCE just does what it needs to do, quietly, with no fuss. It's fantastic. > I just think it's funny that people can't seem to agree, on anything. The market always segments. Well, I guess I'm just proving your point :)
suprjami 3y ago
Last I checked (6 months ago) there was no plan or capacity to move off the GTK3 version they're currently using. If XFCE ever adopts the GTK4 ugly topbar cancer I'll switch to KDE and the entire K application suite and never run a GTK application again.

donkeybeer 3y ago

gtk4 is not good. They have been killing more features and forcing more ui wierdness like overlay scrollbars, etc https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=790677#c6 https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=790677#c6 I think 4 plans to kill theming too.

CuteDinosaur 3y ago
I don't understand most of this decisions.
- rglullis 3y ago
  Think of it as the product of the new generation of techies who had their first contact with computers after Mac OSX was released, and now all they can/want to do is emulate Apple and their HIG.
  - robinsonb5 3y ago
    It's more than that - it's a new generation of techies who grew up in a "mobile first" world, and view the mouse as an archaic input device.
    - rglullis 3y ago
      I'd be inclined to agree with you, but it's hard to me to believe that all these kids went to college (or got some type of computer training) only by working with their phones/tablets.
      - robinsonb5 3y ago
        It's not that they only use their phones/tablets, it's that the phone/tablet is the first tool they reach for, the default device, and UI conventions from that space feel correct and natural to them, just as they feel clumsy and jarring to me. (How old am I? Old enough that I still use an opto-mechnical mouse with a ball, because I still like the extra weight and inertia it has over a pure optical mouse!)
        bitwize 3y ago
        How can you prefer that? Not having to periodically scrape the crud off the rollers has been such a boon to me.
      - bitwize 3y ago
        The youngest had to be taught, as part of intro to CS, how files and directories worked. Such a person may have used a desktop, but desktops are foreign to them.
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    GNOME is primarily about making Free Software that is highly accessible. The desktop and GTK toolkit both predate OSX, so I'm not really sure what the purpose of the comparison is.
    - rglullis 3y ago
      This criticism is for the more recent versions of GTK. Killing theming and removing features when they do not have a serviceable usable alternative does not make it more "accessible", it is just the standard "we know it better because we study the behavior of a large group of users" excuse that they give to treat it everyone by the lowest common denominator - just like Apple.
      - smoldesu 3y ago
        Yeah, that much I generally agree with. Many of the 'opinionated' decisions that came with GTK4 are either regressions or strange and inflexible. That being said, I will shamefully echo the words of the GNOME maintainers; their goal was not to "kill theming". They wanted to stop distros from shipping themes by default, which was arguably just as deranged but at least somewhat understandable. Nowadays we have stuff like Gradience too, which lets you theme LibAdwaita apps. You're still forced to use the ugly old Adwaita buttons, though. So... make of it as you will. I left GNOME completely after the GNOME 40 update, I sympathize with people who hate the current desktop. The toolkit itself is "fine" in my unprofessional developer opinion.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    To be fair GNOME was always about following Apple's HIG, while at the same time bringing Microsoft ideas into UNIX (Evolution/Outlook, Bonobo/COM,...)
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- sprash 3y ago
  It's sabotage.

keepamovin 3y ago

I didn't know people used xfce as their main desktop, I had only experienced it because it's easy and resource light to set up for VNC. It's cool to see people singing its praises. It was always definitely adequate for my 'remote development with desktop GUI' needs. Funny how with anything on the internet there's always Ayes and Nays. It's almost hilarious to me about humans that "the market always segments" into all these trivial seeming (but decidedly important if you have skin in the game) choices. I'm not questioning at all the importance of UI and UX in any way. It's fundamental. These visual virtual environments are the primary tools we humans use every day for our information manipulation snow-shoveling knowledge work. They have to be refined and have exquisite ergonomics tailored to our every whim. That's undeniable and it's not surprising at all that people have strong preferences. I just think it's funny that people can't seem to agree, on anything. The market always segments. Example from my business: we build a remote browser that has a kind of real time streaming optimized for adapting many bandwidth conditions to reduce lag (which often occurs by trading away raw framerate). For some people (normally the security conscious crowd), this is perfect. For other people (the app virtualization crowd) this is terrible: they want silky smooth high framerate remote streaming. I suppose people get could lectures about trade-offs, but it really is a kind of enjoyable thing: there's always something to work on. An advantage of being open source is people can tweak it to their needs as much as they want. There's no bottlenecks in the system besides what you want to do, and how much compute and bandwidth you can throw at it. It can be as fast and smooth, or as resource efficient and minimal as you want.

coldpie 3y ago
> I didn't know people used xfce as their main desktop Hahaha, really? It's been my desktop since I started using Linux in the 2000s. It's great! It presents windows, has a small set of high quality built in applications (file browser, application launcher, etc), has a big and flexible set of keyboard shortcuts, and other than that, it just gets out of your way. Other DEs like to shove themselves in your way -- put your mouse in the corner of the screen? Something shows up! Hit a wrong keyboard button? Something shows up! Open the application launcher? It's fullscreen, baby! Do something to a window? Here's some jiggly wiggly animations! XFCE just does what it needs to do, quietly, with no fuss. It's fantastic. > I just think it's funny that people can't seem to agree, on anything. The market always segments. Well, I guess I'm just proving your point :)

suprjami 3y ago

Last I checked (6 months ago) there was no plan or capacity to move off the GTK3 version they're currently using. If XFCE ever adopts the GTK4 ugly topbar cancer I'll switch to KDE and the entire K application suite and never run a GTK application again.