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Chromium on Linux replacing GTK+
- m_ram 13y agodebs/rpms: http://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel http://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel
- pjmlp 13y agoAll seem to leaving GTK+ behind.
- baldfat 13y agoGTK+ looked old in 2003. Hasn't gotten better (Stares at XFCE).
- bliker 13y agoWhat? I think it looks better than ever http://i.imgur.com/PJdqYfT.png http://i.imgur.com/PJdqYfT.png
- sparkie 13y agoUntil they break your theme in the next minor release.
- sandGorgon 13y agoduude - what theme is that ? and what CSS skin for HN are you using ?
- work_account_2 13y agoI don't know about the gtk theme. Possibly part of the ElementaryOS project? The HN skin is actually a Chrome extension called Hacker News Extension Suite. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhancement-s/bappiabcodbpphnojdiaddhnilfnjmpm?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhanc...
- ufmace 13y agoHacker News Enhancement Suite chrome plugin. I've been using it for a few months, and it does a ton of handy little things.
- bliker 13y agoYep, both of you are correct HNES: https://github.com/etcet/HNES https://github.com/etcet/HNES Pretty much vanilla Elementary OS theme with Source Sans pro front.
- pjmlp 13y agoFully agree. I did some contributions to gtkmm around 2000, while seeing watching the typical C++ hatred from GTK+ C folks. Did write an article about Gtkmm for DDJ as part of it. Eventually it stop making sense to me.
- clarry 13y agoGiven that new UIs tend to look like crap, I consider that a feature. The only problem is that it doesn't look old enough.
- 72deluxe 13y agoWeird isn't it? First, everyone wanted it to look flat. Then Win3.11 had mild bevels. Then Win95 had more bevels and 3d look panels (sometimes recessed, which just involves drawing the two lines the other side of the panel...). And then things went really squidgy-looking with GNOME, and then it has gone flat again. I am not sure what people want. At least buttons look like buttons (unlike the way iOS and other mobiles OSes are going). Is it a button? Is it a plane? No, it's text! You end up bashing your screen as it isn't obvious what to press. My mum is really confused.
- vivab0rg 13y ago(sameless plug): MoonLion theme for elementaryOS https://github.com/vivaserver/MoonLion https://github.com/vivaserver/MoonLion
- nycticorax 13y agoYou can change many aspects of the look of GTK+ with themes. You can probably even make it look nice and flat, in keeping with the latest UI fads. Personally, I think XFCE looks nice out of the box (in Xubuntu, at least). And what's a better alternative? Unity and GNOME are both way too dumbed down for me, and KDE is both ugly (IMHO) and and quite buggy.
- girvo 13y agoAs someone who has only recently jumped into linux desktop development, what's the alternative? I mean, elementary have a nice fork but it's still GTK (albeit wrapped in Vala which takes the pain away), and don't get me started on KDE.
- clarry 13y agoTk
- jeorgun 13y agoYou can develop Qt apps without any dependency on KDE.
- 72deluxe 13y agoFLTK or wxWidgets. wxWidgets on Linux is actually wxGTK though, but it's pretty painless. Or you could use Qt, which doesn't really look native on other platforms. And another one: Xlib hahaha lol
- tenfingers 13y agoQt/GTK+/FLTK, depending on the language or footprint. Of those, Qt/FLTK offer very easy multi-platform development. GTK+ was always incredibly poor in anything but linux, and with GTK3 the footprint/performance is worse than Qt. wxWindows has a very ugly event table/dispatch mechanism, which somewhat reminds me of the old win32 api. On linux it even uses GTK+ for rendering. It used to make sense before Qt4 came, but nowdays I wouldn't use it.
- nly 13y agoGTK+ started making less sense for serious desktop development when Qt went LGPL in January 2009 and then went on to become highly modular in Qt5. The only 'advantage' GTK+ really has over Qt is that it's pure C, so there a lot more bindings for all the languages you're probably not going to use to write significant desktop software anyway.
- tenfingers 13y agoI cannot agree more. GTK+ still exists because that's one of the few pure-C toolkits left around. Qt, wx* and Fltk (which are arguably the other most popular widgets in order of popularity) are all C++. Not to mention that wxWindows on linux actually uses GTK+ for rendering, and it uses a terrible event table mechanism.
- adrianlmm 13y agoDon't you need to sign a CLA agreetment to contribute to Qt?
- keeperofdakeys 13y agoThis isn't really leaving GTK+ because of GTK+, this is recognising that using three different toolkits for different OSs is hard. ChromeOS would also be a huge reason.
- teddyh 13y agoSo they’re replacing GTK+ with something called Aura. What is Aura? “The goal is to produce a new desktop window manager and shell environment”¹. So they’re doing another Unity? 1) http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/aura-desktop-window-manager http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/aura-des...
- darklajid 13y agoI still don't get what Aura is, but thought 'Oh, are they creating XUL now?' instead. So far these design documents aren't enough for me to understand what this is _actually_ for.
- checker659 13y agoThey have their own compositor and uses a model based around Views (yes, similar to NSView / UIView).
- tluyben2 13y agoSo I don't have to work with HTML/CSS then? I seem to have a disorder which makes me dislike a separate language for layout/design than the one I'm writing the other code in. And although I do a lot of it and am good at it, I don't like HTML/CSS at all; I have not seen a real world case outside documents and informative sites (which are documents anyway) where I could not build a more robust (and a lot faster) interface in less time in Cocoa with Objective C / C# / C++. No clue what is wrong with people trying to do everything in HTML/CSS. </rant> Anyway; being lazy; so this is kind of a GUI layer on top of HTML/CSS?
- pjmlp 13y agoFeel the same way, however most of the projects we are asked to work on require web UIs. :( If the browsers used something like XAML, with proper support for components, it would be great. Maybe web components will eventually get us there, but it is surely a very bumpy road to get to something that only now starts to resemble Smalltalk/Lisp environments.
- pervycreeper 13y agoI recently bought a chromebook, and was surprised at how nice the user experience was. Tasks like opening tabs and loading pages seemed subjectively faster than doing the same on my 4GHz desktop. I also like how my attention was never consumed by irrelevant details like it always is in a desktop os. In places where GNOME treats the user like an idiot by needlessly hiding useful functionality, Chrome makes specific tasks quick and painless. Surely, the fact that Chrome tries to do less, and benefits from a clean slate helps this, but there is still a very clear winner in this comparison. I'd use it (chrome os) a lot if it had decent native text editing, and wasn't a botnet. Hopefully a WM comparable in performance and UI design to Chrome's will be supported in GNU/Linux distros soon.
- abrezas 13y agowhat do you think is missing in text editing?
- agumonkey 13y agoI played with a c720p last week, I was impressed by the responsiveness of it, I assumed it was a good hardware basis and never thought the software architecture was different.
- netcan 13y ago"I'd use it (chrome os) a lot if it had decent native text editing" I'd buy one or two for relatives if it had skype. Seems chrome is one feature/app away for a lot of people. Reminds me of this. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html
- yukichan 13y agoI wonder if this will include the GDK+ used for the webrtc demo app. Probably not, but one can hope, that sample app is super buggy.
- jsnell 13y agoIt feels like a premature launch. When I got this from chrome-unstable a couple of weeks ago, it was a shock. Many styling problems, and widgets not working as expected. Some of the stuff that didn't work was pretty niche (e.g. horizontal scroll-wheels), so it's understandable nobody noticed it. But there's even stuff like central UI elements (tabs, the URL box) being rendered in some big, ugly and badly hinted font instead of the system font. Menu items having just insane amounts of whitespace, etc. There might be good technical reasons for the change, but on a UX level it feels unfortunate :-( I still remember how nice it felt to switch from Firefox to the initial Chrome Linux alphas. It might have been missing major functionality, but at least it looked and worked the way I expected a Linux desktop app to work instead of having the UI be just a little bit off in a dozen places. I'm sure they'll get it to a 99% state soon enough, but getting that last 1% looks like it could be a challenge.
- JamesMcMinn 13y ago"premature launch"..."chrome-unstable". This is not a launch. You are running the UNSTABLE build. What do you expect? Stop treating unstable and testing software like it's stable. The clue is in the name.
- jsnell 13y agoI'm not treating it as it's stable, but it's what's going to be released as stable in a fairly short while given the Chrome release cadence. I was hoping that they were going to let this bake for a bit more before making it the default. This post makes it clear that they aren't going to do that.
- awwaiid 13y agoThey don't seem to do a straight unstable -> stable path. I'm not completely sure, but I'm pretty sure I've seen features stay in unstable while stable releases keep happening.
- JamesMcMinn 13y agoGenerally, unstable things that appear in unstable channel will only appear in stable 6 months later. That's plenty of time to iron out bugs. Perhaps you should consider the beta channel?
- vecio 13y agoSome bugs for several years finally fixed. Still no HiDPI support.
- milliams 13y agoSo they're making their own thing rather than using something widely tested and used like Qt?
- thefreeman 13y agoI don't think they are "making their own thing". From the post, it seems like this is already what they use on the other platforms. From what I gather, they are switching the Linux builds to use it as well so they don't have to duplicate development effort. I think that makes sense. It sounds like it might be rough and they seem to be aware of it; hence, the urgent call for testers.
- forgottenpaswrd 13y agoYeah, given that they have most of the code already done for drawing the browser screen(text, buttons, icons...), it probably makes sense for them to do so. With Qt they will depend on a different company with different interest in mind.
- blt 13y agoHuge GUI frameworks are overrated. They force you into their way of doing things. Then something newer and shinier supersedes them. If I had Chromium's developer power on my own projects I'd probably create custom GUI tools too.
- paulyg 13y agoThey already made their own thing for Chrome OS rather than use GTK/Gnome or Qt/KDE there. I find it sad that they felt the need to make their own UI engine vs being able to contribute the changes they feel they need to an existing project. I'm sure Google engineers will tell you that they need to move faster than they could working within the community of GTK or Qt. Plus they don't want Chrome OS to suck because they can't get features merged by the community. They are valid points. The resulting fragmentation just sucks. I assume Aura is open source. Given GTK's dropping adoption rate and a lot of people unhappy with the recent direction (design or lack of listening to current user base) of Gnome how long until someone writes a general purpose (not specific to Chrome OS) window manager/desktop environment on top of it?
- donniezazen 13y agoIt would be interesting to hear why they didn't pick something like Qt.
- 72deluxe 13y agoPerhaps to control their own destiny? They don't need that many controls. Only buttons, tabs and text boxes.
- Touche 13y agoHow does using an open-source UI framework surrender control? Seems far more likely NIH is the answer.
- 72deluxe 13y agoQt is not truly open source for other platforms though is it?
- Touche 13y agoWhat do you mean "other platforms"? Qt is GPL, or am I wrong?
- PuercoPop 13y agoAlthough you are technically wrong, it is LGPL, you are right. It is dually-licensed, but it doesn't vary according to the target platform.
- ptx 13y agoIn the olden days, only the X11 version was open source, but it was made available under the GPL on all supported platforms with Qt 4 and under the LGPL with Qt 4.5.
- tonyedgecombe 13y agoDoes Qt support hi-resolution displays on all platforms?
- ksk 13y agoGoogle knows that the Open Source development process while nice and warm and fuzzy, can get in your way when you don't own the entire development of the project - especially if this is a product that can impact your revenue. Others can arbitrarily (sometimes with good reason) block your feature pushes and slow down your product releases. They did the right thing forking webkit, keeping Android/Chromium in-house, and are doing the right thing here. - IMHO.
- izacus 13y agoHopefully this finally means retina display (HiDPI) support for Windows builds - currently Chrome is almost unusable on all high-res displays on Windows.
- nly 13y agoWhy don't they fix the issues with the current UI that aren't GTK+s fault before they go and ditch it and introduce a whole new world of pain? As far as I can tell, Chromium on Linux has been useless on high DPI screens since its inception. On my 15" laptop at 1920x1080 (just 140dpi) the fonts on browser tabs, and the tabs themselves, are too small and cannot be changed. I simply can't use the browser because of this. Firefox, which has its own abstraction layer but uses janky old GTK+2 under the hood, does just fine. I really don't care about extreme OpenGL rendering (laughable, aren't most accelerations disabled already due to driver whitelisting?) or the tiny fraction of the UI that is noticeably GTK+
- jeorgun 13y agoHigh-DPI support is coming with Aura (or, more accurately, being built on Aura; it looks like the high-DPI stuff will come slightly later): https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=143619 https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=143619
- finishingmove 13y agoGreat, but let's hope it doesn't start looking crap on regular DPI displays. You know, like those hipster websites that make your eyes bleed if you try to read them on anything other than a Retina display. "Most people I know use MacBooks anyway"
- hga 13y agoAt the same resolution on a 24" screen they're too small for my 80 year old father, and a bit hard on my eyes. A truly stunning oversight.
- kevingadd 13y agoChrome's not DPI aware on Windows either. I think they just don't care.
- username42 13y agoIs aura another competitor for mir and wayland ?
- optymizer 13y agoI found the last 2 comments in that thread ironic. One guy's asking why Aura is a window manager, and 'mike' says Aura is not a window manager, Ash is the window manager, but then proceeds to supply a link which has 'aura-window-manager' in the url! His link doesn't even mention the word 'Ash'.
- dschiptsov 13y agoThank god it is not Qt (following Ubuntu insanity) but something sane, small and good enough.
- mentaat 13y agohow is this different from skia - the cross platform graphics library for android and chrome?