8 ms·

XFCE released in 2014 has significantly less bugs than XFCE today: and that's all due to Gtk3 being broken underneath. Things are going to get much harder as t

XFCE released in 2014 has significantly less bugs than XFCE today: and that's all due to Gtk3 being broken underneath. Things are going to get much harder as the Gtk foundations keep being eroded away by the GNOME people removing features and options from Gtk. And they're basically hard coding in wayland spec now, no considerations for X. The Gtk based DEs like XFCE/MATE/Mint/etc need to band together and fork/mantain Gtk3 if they have any hope of surviving long term or even fixing the multiple bugs introduced by progressive removal of Gtk features (like the 2014 breaking of gtkfilechooserwidget.c so you can't paste in file paths).

mouse_ 3y ago
Waiting for the first RedHat+Gnome lawsuit against nerds trying to maintain old software
- LaSombra 3y ago
  How so? It's all FOSS.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
tristan957 3y ago
X is in maintenance mode. All new development happens around Wayland. It makes complete sense for GTK to focus on Wayland. COSMIC, MATE, XFCE, Cinnamon, Budgie, and Pantheon are all shipping at least some support for Wayland. What features and options of GTK have been eroded by GNOME? Do you really think XFCE, MATE, and Mint have resources to maintain a GTK fork? Why don't you maintain the GTK fork? GTK maintenance is partially paid for by Red Hat and Endless, among a few other organizations. I think it is really interesting how every time GNOME and GTK get mentioned on this site, you are quick to post negative comments.
- kaladin-jasnah 3y ago
  I never knew Endless was funding GTK development. The last time I heard about Endless OS was years ago.
  - tristan957 3y ago
    Like I said partially. Other organizations include Igalia, Collabora, and the GNOME Foundation, just off the top of my head.
- superkuh 3y ago
  New is not better (wayland cannot abolutely position new windows, cannot do mouse keyboard sharing (except via non-standard libei which different waylands reject, etc). Unchanging is not broken (X11 works just fine, just because it's not constantly getting new code doesn't mean it stops working). The primary features I'm missing focus around the way GNOME developers believe files should be interacted with. They believe the file chooser should be a search interface and making things like pathbar the only option and removing filename-entry, and the entire gsettings for it, are part of this. GNOME developers have drastically changed the GUI for file selection so that typing, pasting, or entering filepaths has been made difficult. Everything has to be done through the automagic "search" (which often bugs out) or mouse interface. This would be fine as defaults, but they've literally removed the former options in gsettings to config a gtk application's behavior. They say these are "private" and we should never have been using them all. All bugs since 2014 marked "wontfix" and community patches rejected. Basically, GNOME is anti-keyboard. I think that the gross changes to Gtk3 over the past 10 years have been minimal and that yes, a group of a dozen people could maintain it in it's static form and prevent further eroding of features. I compile my own Gtk3 with fixes for the gtkfilechooserwidget.c that have been rejected by the Gtk team ("gtk3 is frozen" "filechooser is too much spaghetti, any change fixing one thing would break another"). Maybe even apply some of the many community fixes that the GNOME developers consistent reject and ignore (just look at the Arch Gtk3 fixes patch set). Can they develop and add new features like new renderers and support for Wayland? No, but that is not needed. I don't appreciate you turning this into a personal issue, that's generally against HN tos.
qwery 3y ago
> XFCE released in 2014 has significantly less bugs than XFCE today The Thunar of today's auto-sized column behaviour irks me, I always end up with a horizontal scrollbar even though the content doesn't actually extend beyond the view. Can't think of anything else buggy. I think I first used XFCE in 2018, but it must have been spectacular in 2014. > XFCE/MATE/Mint/etc need to band together and fork/mantain Gtk3 I'm curious if you have any reason to think that the people working on these projects have any interest in forking Gtk? They are using it (as is?), presumably they aren't that unhappy about it. > the multiple bugs introduced by progressive removal of Gtk features It really annoys me when software updates break my workflow, but it's easy to see how "add new shiny thing" (= progress) often wins out over "tread carefully" (= stagnation). The way you are referring to such changes as bugs is misleading though.
- superkuh 3y ago
  >The way you are referring to such changes as bugs is misleading though. The deprecation and removal of keyboard inputs literally results in a bug that generates an error message, https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/5872 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/5872 This is a microcosm for the Gtk3/4 pivot to mouse only as a whole: they don't care about the bugs caused for people who use keyboards. And DE's like XFCE/MATE/etc are unable to fix these bugs because they're Gtk bugs.
  - qwery 3y ago
    I don't see how that issue demonstrates what you are claiming. The error message is confusing, yes. Calling it a clear-cut bug is a stretch. The way you are referring to "bugs" is still misleading. > This is a microcosm for the Gtk3/4 as a whole. Is it? Where is the war on keyboards? Where is the resistance to working patches? Where is the ignored justification for your preferred behaviour?
    - superkuh 3y ago
      >Is it? Where is the war on keyboards? Where is the resistance to working patches? Where is the ignored justification for your preferred behaviour? On #gtk straight out of the typing fingers of the devs. In the form of the non-merged fixes in Arch for Gtk3. And in the bug tracker but you can't see all the closed and deleted bugs. As for "preferred" there's no preferences allowed by modern Gtk anymore. The gsettings for setting preferences were removed which lead to the bug.
jwells89 3y ago
I wonder if it might be time for a new “boring” UI framework. GTK often gets selected over Qt because it’s so much easier build high quality idiomatic language bindings for, has a good selection of widgets out of the box, and doesn’t rock the boat following a plain old imperative model like has been used for ages. With that in mind, there’s probably room for a new imperative UI framework that’s designed to be easy to bind to and is highly “batteries included”. It wouldn’t aim to be revolutionizing anything, but would let you build things with minimal fuss or churn on your terms (with allowance for well-defined “happy paths”, of course).
- Gualdrapo 3y ago
  I was gonna say "How about EFL? It's C after all", but in my concept Enlightenment and XFCE have similar philosophies - one could dream about a fusion between those two..

mouse_ 3y ago

Waiting for the first RedHat+Gnome lawsuit against nerds trying to maintain old software

LaSombra 3y ago
How so? It's all FOSS.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

tristan957 3y ago

X is in maintenance mode. All new development happens around Wayland. It makes complete sense for GTK to focus on Wayland. COSMIC, MATE, XFCE, Cinnamon, Budgie, and Pantheon are all shipping at least some support for Wayland. What features and options of GTK have been eroded by GNOME? Do you really think XFCE, MATE, and Mint have resources to maintain a GTK fork? Why don't you maintain the GTK fork? GTK maintenance is partially paid for by Red Hat and Endless, among a few other organizations. I think it is really interesting how every time GNOME and GTK get mentioned on this site, you are quick to post negative comments.

kaladin-jasnah 3y ago
I never knew Endless was funding GTK development. The last time I heard about Endless OS was years ago.
- tristan957 3y ago
  Like I said partially. Other organizations include Igalia, Collabora, and the GNOME Foundation, just off the top of my head.
superkuh 3y ago
New is not better (wayland cannot abolutely position new windows, cannot do mouse keyboard sharing (except via non-standard libei which different waylands reject, etc). Unchanging is not broken (X11 works just fine, just because it's not constantly getting new code doesn't mean it stops working). The primary features I'm missing focus around the way GNOME developers believe files should be interacted with. They believe the file chooser should be a search interface and making things like pathbar the only option and removing filename-entry, and the entire gsettings for it, are part of this. GNOME developers have drastically changed the GUI for file selection so that typing, pasting, or entering filepaths has been made difficult. Everything has to be done through the automagic "search" (which often bugs out) or mouse interface. This would be fine as defaults, but they've literally removed the former options in gsettings to config a gtk application's behavior. They say these are "private" and we should never have been using them all. All bugs since 2014 marked "wontfix" and community patches rejected. Basically, GNOME is anti-keyboard. I think that the gross changes to Gtk3 over the past 10 years have been minimal and that yes, a group of a dozen people could maintain it in it's static form and prevent further eroding of features. I compile my own Gtk3 with fixes for the gtkfilechooserwidget.c that have been rejected by the Gtk team ("gtk3 is frozen" "filechooser is too much spaghetti, any change fixing one thing would break another"). Maybe even apply some of the many community fixes that the GNOME developers consistent reject and ignore (just look at the Arch Gtk3 fixes patch set). Can they develop and add new features like new renderers and support for Wayland? No, but that is not needed. I don't appreciate you turning this into a personal issue, that's generally against HN tos.

qwery 3y ago

> XFCE released in 2014 has significantly less bugs than XFCE today The Thunar of today's auto-sized column behaviour irks me, I always end up with a horizontal scrollbar even though the content doesn't actually extend beyond the view. Can't think of anything else buggy. I think I first used XFCE in 2018, but it must have been spectacular in 2014. > XFCE/MATE/Mint/etc need to band together and fork/mantain Gtk3 I'm curious if you have any reason to think that the people working on these projects have any interest in forking Gtk? They are using it (as is?), presumably they aren't that unhappy about it. > the multiple bugs introduced by progressive removal of Gtk features It really annoys me when software updates break my workflow, but it's easy to see how "add new shiny thing" (= progress) often wins out over "tread carefully" (= stagnation). The way you are referring to such changes as bugs is misleading though.

superkuh 3y ago
>The way you are referring to such changes as bugs is misleading though. The deprecation and removal of keyboard inputs literally results in a bug that generates an error message, https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/5872 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/5872 This is a microcosm for the Gtk3/4 pivot to mouse only as a whole: they don't care about the bugs caused for people who use keyboards. And DE's like XFCE/MATE/etc are unable to fix these bugs because they're Gtk bugs.
- qwery 3y ago
  I don't see how that issue demonstrates what you are claiming. The error message is confusing, yes. Calling it a clear-cut bug is a stretch. The way you are referring to "bugs" is still misleading. > This is a microcosm for the Gtk3/4 as a whole. Is it? Where is the war on keyboards? Where is the resistance to working patches? Where is the ignored justification for your preferred behaviour?
  - superkuh 3y ago
    >Is it? Where is the war on keyboards? Where is the resistance to working patches? Where is the ignored justification for your preferred behaviour? On #gtk straight out of the typing fingers of the devs. In the form of the non-merged fixes in Arch for Gtk3. And in the bug tracker but you can't see all the closed and deleted bugs. As for "preferred" there's no preferences allowed by modern Gtk anymore. The gsettings for setting preferences were removed which lead to the bug.

jwells89 3y ago

I wonder if it might be time for a new “boring” UI framework. GTK often gets selected over Qt because it’s so much easier build high quality idiomatic language bindings for, has a good selection of widgets out of the box, and doesn’t rock the boat following a plain old imperative model like has been used for ages. With that in mind, there’s probably room for a new imperative UI framework that’s designed to be easy to bind to and is highly “batteries included”. It wouldn’t aim to be revolutionizing anything, but would let you build things with minimal fuss or churn on your terms (with allowance for well-defined “happy paths”, of course).

Gualdrapo 3y ago
I was gonna say "How about EFL? It's C after all", but in my concept Enlightenment and XFCE have similar philosophies - one could dream about a fusion between those two..