8 ms·

Is there any future for the GTK-based Desktop Environments?

72 points by rohshall 4y ago

wooque 4y ago
Yes, Xfce is working perfectly as it was for the last 7-8 years
com2kid 4y ago
So much fighting over how best to draw the UI that will launch various instances of the Chrome engine. Want to know why everything is written in Electron or as a web app? Because literally every desktop platform over the last decade has decided to play design and engineering games instead of just make a really solid stable base to write apps on top of.
- morsch 4y ago
  And then the calculator app, which is native, is wrapped up in some sort of isolating container that makes it take as long to start up as an electron app.
  - supramouse 4y ago
    you mean snap packages? I think the calculator is written in vala was pretty performant when I've used it the past
  - schipplock 4y ago
    I sometimes, by accident, launched LibreOffice Calc. It launched faster than the calculator app :). I believe they changed that. The calculator app isn't shipped in a snap package anymore.
  - sph 4y ago
    You're using the wrong isolating container ;) There's only one that is quite slow at startup, the other isn't.
    - nix23 4y ago
      Just imagine you need a container for the calculator.....
      - sph 4y ago
        Just imagine getting pwned by malware bundled in a calculator...
        nix23 4y ago
        What is the connection here? Why would you install the calculator not coming from your distribution?
        sph 4y ago
        Because there is a push for software developers to be able to package directly for end users. Without devolving into the usual flame war of whether it's a good idea or not, once you install any piece of software you incur some security risks. It's not like distro maintainers are a 100% guarantee there won't be a backdoor in the binary, and compiling software from source doesn't free you from risks either, unless you code-review everything you install. My point is, containerisation on Linux isn't necessarily slow—in fact it's unnoticeable if implemented correctly—and I prefer to default to having a decent amount of security by containerising as much software as I can, whatever the origin. Including, and especially software like the calculator, since it should not be able to do anything more than show a GUI and add numbers together.
        nix23 4y ago
        That's not what i asked, why do you trust a no name dev more then the distro your kernel is coming from? And do you really think flatpack prevents you from running packed malware?
        wander_homer 4y ago
- kelnos 4y ago
  I don't think that's really the reason for Electron's popularity. While GTK and Qt are cross-platform, my (limited, to be fair) experience with building for multiple platforms was that it was a huge pain in the ass, and Windows and macOS platform integration often felt clunky and out of place. The big draw for Electron is that we have way way way more web developers out there these days than native-code desktop UI developers, so it's easy to leverage those people and get results fairly quickly, even if the resulting apps don't really conform to any desktop's standard look-and-feel (which I guess avoids the uncanny valley effect of cross-platform toolkits that try to be native, but fail in subtle and not-so-subtle ways). People can even just (sorta) repackage their existing webapp, and end up with more or less a single code base for all desktop platforms + web. I do agree with you that most of the desktop platforms are pretty annoying to develop for if you want a solid, stable base, but I don't think that's the prevailing reason for Electron's uptake.
  - smegsicle 4y ago
    a big part of why browser engines are so unwieldy is the implied compatibility with every website ever, right? but the "way way more web developers" you mention are not, at least in the context of electron apps, interested in that feature except tangentially.. so while everyone knows a full web-ready browser engine is impractical to design from scratch, maybe a simplified engine that supports a conservative subset of best-practices web-style design is in order?
    - deleted 4y ago
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    - deleted 4y ago
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    - wffurr 4y ago
      That's a really interesting idea, but in practice you might find that the "conservative sunset" ends up being different for every toolkit and developer. Maybe something a bit opinionated, like a React Native-only runtime, could fit the bill here. Or in a sense, is this what Flutter is?
- skeletal88 4y ago
  Qt has stayed the same and KDE has been excellent, this is a probleem with GTK and Gnome based desktops
- imtringued 4y ago
  I once installed Linux with Gnome 3 on a USB stick and used that as my primary operating system for six months. My number one application was a web browser. I don't think I ever bothered installing anything other than code editors, language runtimes/compilers and steam. Gnome works just fine. The only annoyance was the breakage that Wayland introduced in 2016. Suddenly you couldn't screen capture the whole screen anymore. It's kinda the same issue as switching from python 2 to 3 but the difference here is that it is a major upgrade that is worth the effort. The reasons why python 3 isn't backwards compatible are incredibly petty for the most part. However, firefox has received Wayland support for screensharing and some people developed a plugin for OBS. Wayland works just fine now too.
- Bancakes 4y ago
  Rhetorical question? It's cheap and quick. Can be outsourced to the lowest lifeform that legitimately describes itself as a programmer.
onphonenow 4y ago
Fast windows 95 would have been fine. Instead the devs lost their minds w design craziness. VS Code and chrome pycharm etc means it’s not a huge deal - they are all x platform
- AnonymousPlanet 4y ago
  Not for people who are not mentally stuck in the 90s. I am very glad things have processed and have left the ugliness and usabilitly problems of Windows 95 in the past.
  - urn_piqoq 4y ago
    I'm in the opposite camp. I recall great monolithic software for media production from the 90's and think our modern web-centric view is "dumbed-down". There's a time and place for minimalism, but the term "power user" also has a meaning: your accumulated user-base that didn't leave. Windows post-Vista has forced me and countless others into never bothering again. The fact of a 90's MCSE certification means nothing when I blankly gaze at the visage of a "modern" Windows UI that tells me nothing of import. M$ basically told all their power users to go away.
    - AnonymousPlanet 4y ago
      I'm so harsh with Windows 95 here because back then I found out about other desktops (e.g. on Unix) that had better UI. Several workspaces, ability to drag windows not only by grabbing the title bar, clicking the scroll bar to the scroll place you need (instead of having to drag it all the way there), launching programs by other means than a non ending hierarchy of menus. Not to mention that anything not Windows was more stable. Also Unix/Linux was multi user and solid enough to run read services on the same machine (even if it was the same little piece of junk your Windows 98 had come with in the first place). Exploring the world beyond Windows felt like finally seeing how the real pros do it. That is why I absolutely can't understand the starry eyed reverence people have for sorry "OSes" like Windows 95/98. TLDR: Windows 95/98 wasn't the pinncacle of UI even when it came out, so it definitely isn't today.
ogogmad 4y ago
I'm using KDE5 at the moment, and it's essentially problem-free. It's got more features than I know what to do with, but this somehow doesn't detract from it but rather enhances it. KDE5 never seems to be the default choice of desktop environment for distros like Manjaro, but you're unlikely to go wrong picking it as your default option, if you're given that option.
- GekkePrutser 4y ago
  Doesn't SUSE have KDE by default? I use it on FreeBSD myself. It's an amazing desktop. I don't like gnome at all. It uses too much screen space (huge touch style window decorations) and doesn't have enough customisation for me. But KDE is perfect.
  - doubled112 4y ago
    OpenSUSE doesn’t have a default. SUSE uses and supports GNOME.
    - GekkePrutser 4y ago
      According to their own page KDE is the default desktop: https://en.opensuse.org/KDE https://en.opensuse.org/KDE > Default Desktop > Plasma Desktop from KDE is the default workspace on openSUSE.
      - doubled112 4y ago
        Strangely enough, from their desktop FAQ: https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Desktop_FAQ https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Desktop_FAQ > openSUSE installer provides three officially supported desktop options. There is no default choice Coming at this from another angle, their installer isn't super opinionated. The KDE radio button is at the top of the list on the desktop selection page. Does that make it the default choice? I guess it does by some definition.
- smegsicle 4y ago
  isn't slackware sticking with them for the default environment?
ggm 4y ago
Feels like 80/20 class problem. 80% working, same effort to close 80% of the remaining 20% and recurse enough times you wind up burned out. Now add rewrites and factionalism and dissent. They don't love and nurture each other and they don't love their users either. I used to care. As a user I can't buy into it any more.
mavu 4y ago
The tone of that article makes sure that I stop reading after 2 paragraphs.
- hvdijk 4y ago
  I did not last even two paragraphs: I clicked through on "Ubuntu MATE cannot be trusted" and found something better summarised as "I tried getting away with calling people idiots on Ubuntu MATE forums in a bizarre social experiment and cannot deal with them not putting up with that."
  - Narann 4y ago
    Same, it's disturbing: * OP: "If a distro with 60k packages cannot accommodate one or three extra packages for an official flavor, then someone is an idiot, and that idiot is not me." * Moderator came and ask to not talk like this. * OP: "Censorship, simply because I used the word “idiot” without naming anyone in particular!", and OP continue. * Moderator close the tread. * OP: "Then the little Stalin closed my thread". This is not serious. OP doesn't named anyone but hide himself with a general attack to package maintainer (maybe this maintainer is alone). Hiding its attitude behind word meaning is something my 9 years old son is starting to do and I try to explain him its not a valid excuse. OP should revise it's social expectations. It's hard enough to keep big open source projects on rails without having childish attitude like this.
    - exfascist 4y ago
      I'm anti censorship and post ideas controversial enough to get banned from here pretty often but personal attacks are just stupid. There's no reason for that.
- deng 4y ago
  Yeah, the tone of the article makes me think that there might be a great future for GTK-based Desktop Environments ahead.
cmacleod4 4y ago
Just use Tk, problem solved :-) - https://tkdocs.com/ https://tkdocs.com/
anthk 4y ago
I use Fluxbox (slightly tweaked Zukitre theme), lxappearance, Tango2 icons and Rox filer with a bunch of plugins among Rox-Lib under ~/lib. 90% CLI oriented but with common sensical GUI plugins and settings. The best of both words, and a "DE" with unmatched speeds.
- ensiferum 4y ago
  Another fluxbox user here. I've basically ran the same configuration for nearly 15 years now. Everything is in muscle memory and never changes. Totally the best UX
jchw 4y ago
I agree with some of this, though it is perhaps a bit overly harsh at times. Frankly, I’m not terribly impressed by the direction that Qt has taken either, though. This puts the open source desktop in a pretty unfortunate place…
- qalmakka 4y ago
  I'm not that enthused about where Qt is heading but it's arguably in better hands than GTK+, that's for sure. First, Qt isn't strictly tied with KDE - it has its own life by itself, without KDE libraries at all, and a vibrant ecosystem that uses it for automotive and cross-platform desktop apps. Second, while the Qt Company has decided to stop releasing LTS releases as open source, KDE has a binding agreement that allows KDE to release Qt on a BSD license, were the Qt company intentioned to close it down(https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation/ https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation/). Since the whole LTS shenanigan happened, KDE has shown to be quite competent at maintaining its own set of patches for Qt5, which most distributions nowadays have adopted. If Qt were ever to become closed source again, it would probably face a very strong competitor in a BSD or Apache-licensed fork from KDE. The Qt Company sells its licenses mostly to people that want to use GPL-covered Qt modules in closed source apps, so they really cannot let that to happen.
  - jchw 4y ago
    Yeah, the KDE Free Qt arrangement is pretty unique and makes it significantly less likely that there will be a rapid dropoff in Qt open source. This became important because the modern Qt company is awful. That said, I still think the direction of Qt has kind of sucked. QtWidgets is mostly stagnating, and Qt Quick is not really appealing to me…
    - qalmakka 4y ago
      On the bright side, PySide has finally been adopted by Qt as its official bindings, and it has made PyQt largely redundant. I find it simplifies a lot Qt app development on desktop, and it has the potential to attract a lot of new developers to the platform. While QtWidgets are stagnating and Qt Quick is arguably very "HUD"-centric and barebones for desktop development, there are nice portable UI toolkits such as KDE's Kirigami popping out that are very usable even without KDE.
kelnos 4y ago
I was an Xfce core maintainer from around 2004 to 2009. In addition to my work on Xfce, I also built a media player, and played around with some other projects that never really went anywhere. GTK2 had its warts, but it was generally fairly easy to build things, and it was fairly easy to work around things when something didn't work the way I wanted. GTK3 changed a lot of this. Many things that were previously public were now considered private implementation details. Much of that was perfectly understandable (necessary, even), but occasionally this meant that there were things you could do in GTK2, but just couldn't in GTK3 (or could, but doing so was a huge pain in the ass). GTK3 deprecated or outright removed some things in GTK2, and it wasn't often clear what the supported replacement was supposed to be. The theming/styling system was completely replaced, which meant redoing themes, and any app that used theming APIs had to have that part completely rewritten. On occasion I would report issues to the GTK folks, or would watch issues others had reported that I was interested in, and responses were all over the map, from helpful and welcoming, to actively hostile. What became very clear was that the GTK developers, over time, started only caring about the GNOME use cases. If you were using GTK for something non-GNOME, the GTK developers did not care about you, and would not reverse decisions that (incidentally or otherwise) broke your ability to do what you wanted to do. I get it: as an open source developer, you have your own priorities, and you're usually not beholden to your users for features or any particular work. I certainly did not care for it when people not contributing to my software would demand I do things for them. But man, did it suck to constantly feel like the rug was getting pulled out from under me. I haven't touched GTK4 yet, but judging from what I've read about it, I really don't want to. I used Qt a bit around the early '00s, and kinda liked it, but didn't love it (granted, I'm sure things are unrecognizably different now, for better or worse). Regardless, these days I have zero interest in writing C++. (To be perfectly honest, I have little interest in writing C either.) My hope is that one of the pure-Rust UI toolkits will take off, but at the same time that doesn't help existing C/C++ projects, since new-language rewrites are painful and often counter-productive. And on top of that, it just sucks to have more UI toolkit proliferation, which makes it harder to style things so the various apps on your desktop look reasonably consistent with each other. Of course, my happy place would be Xfce rewritten to use a modern UI toolkit that is not GTK (or Qt, for that matter). (I would prefer Rust, but see above re: new-language rewrites.) But if we all thought the GTK2->GTK3 effort for Xfce took a really long time, rewriting using a new toolkit (let alone a new language) would likely take a decade. We were always understaffed when I was involved, with Xfce being a spare-time, volunteer, passion project for everyone involved (I believe one guy was paid for a while to work on Xfce-related things, but not for all that long). Not sure how much that's changed, but I wouldn't expect much corporate backing, despite Olivier (the project lead) working for Red Hat.
new_user_final 4y ago
>That KDE Plasma 5 is finally usable and stable, after having decided to stop pushing the ridiculous plasmoids on the user (were they liking the Windows Desktop Gadgets, or they were simply idiots?), is like having an old whore finally becoming a respectable woman. It’s hard to forget the developers’ idiotic decisions, though. I don’t like to be Microsoft’s guinea pig, why should I be KDE’s? This attitude describes why there is no future for Linux desktop.
- ogogmad 4y ago
  The analogy involving whores becoming respectable women is kind of messed up. I'm not sure if I'm going to trigger the anti-political correctness crowd by saying something that's politically incorrect for the anti-political correctness crowd.
  - hamoid 4y ago
    That's where I stopped reading.
- throwmeariver1 4y ago
  It’s OSS you are no one’s guinea pig. If you don’t want to participate you don’t have to use it if the ones who participate want to try other things switch and don’t complain like a old male whore on the sidelines.
  - konart 4y ago
    >If you don’t want to participate you don’t have to use it This has nothing to do with OSS though. You can switch from a closed sources solution too. The problem is you investment and attachment to certain things.
    - throwmeariver1 4y ago
      Yeah, the differences is if heh wants to change something for the better he can try.
JCWasmx86 4y ago
Yes. GNOME is better than ever, GTK4+Libadwaita is simply doing one: Looking perfect. The HIG are excellent, without GNOME I would be maybe 40% as productive as with it.
- konart 4y ago
  This. Now if only people start investing in UI\UX on linux desktop.
  - sph 4y ago
    Honestly, the real hurdle now seems to be the support for paid apps. It's such a taboo in the Linux world, for some reason [1], but thankfully Flatpak and Flathub are working towards that goal [2], which ElementaryOS already explored. I want small, high quality apps like macOS has. I want to make a living building open source software that can be supported and bought commercially—no, donations and sponsoring isn't good enough. I want companies being able to sell their software on Linux through the integrated app store, now that it's finally become good enough. 1: Plenty Linux users think FOSS means never having to pay for software, or that commercial software will kill us all and it's morally wrong. I strongly disagree. 2: https://discourse.flathub.org/t/seeking-contractors-for-work-on-flathub-project/1889 https://discourse.flathub.org/t/seeking-contractors-for-work...
    - konart 4y ago
      1: I don't get it either. For some reason Krita is okay, but selling your app in some sort of Store is not...
    - dTal 4y ago
      It's "supported" just fine now. You certainly don't need some centralized app store or weird quasi-distro. As you say, it's 100% a cultural problem. No amount of technical effort will change that Linux users expect their software to be open source, and that in practice you cannot sell open source software.
- exfascist 4y ago
greatgib 4y ago
<<So, if GTK+ 3 flopped, how are we where we are today, with GTK+ 3 suddenly being forced down our throats? It turns out it was probably started by Red Hat.>> Systemd, gnome 3, I think that it is Red hat that ruined the desktop experience in the last decade by imposing terrible choices on everyone else...
- mschuster91 4y ago
  As for systemd... while I believe that there have been questionable decisions (why was a replacement of ntpd needed?), at least it's gotten easier to introduce dependencies as part of software startups - e.g. it's relatively trivial to add a dependency on an NFS mount for a server program, which was ... a complex mess to put it lightly before. My biggest gripe with systemd unit files is that there are at least four ways of specifying dependencies (Wants, BindsTo, After, Requires) and the semantics are not easily understandable.
- ginko 4y ago
  I agree. Red Hat to me almost feels like a corporate trojan horse taking over open source projects to undermine them from within.
linguae 4y ago
Given non-GNOME developers' frustration with increasingly GNOME-centric releases of GTK, and given some of the licensing issues surrounding Qt (such as the one-year delay for FOSS releases of the toolkit: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25748335 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25748335), I believe the time is ripe for a BSD-licensed GUI toolkit for X11 and Wayland that uses server-side decorations and tries to be as unopinionated as possible in order to allow for different visions of the desktop instead of imposing a particular vision through the toolkit. In fact, starting such a project is something I've been considering for a long time. If only had GNUstep (http://www.gnustep.org/ http://www.gnustep.org/) been the toolkit for the Linux desktop instead of the Qt vs GTK/GNOME wars; this would have saved a lot of drama regarding toolkits. Back in the mid-2000's it appeared that the matter was settled during the KDE 3 and GNOME 2 days; a lot of people seemed to be happy with these desktops, and those who preferred non-GNOME Gtk desktops and applications had plenty of options. However, ever since GNOME 3 the GNOME developers have been able to mold GTK to its vision at the expense of other GTK users who didn't share GNOME's vision. Qt is less opinionated, but its stewardship is up to the whims of whatever company that owns it. GNUstep is free from these issues, but it never received mass adoption. Come to think about it, maybe instead of a new toolkit, maybe we should look into GNUstep some more and consider investing our developer resources into building a GNUstep desktop ecosystem. But I'm curious about what other people are thinking.
- legulere 4y ago
  > uses server-side decorations and tries to be as unopinionated as possible You are contradicting yourself. Some people think decorations should be server-side others think client-side. So it seems what is better is an opinion.
  - linguae 4y ago
    Good point. "As unopinionated as possible" should be the emphasis. Perhaps the toolkit could support both types of decorations, with flags that enforce which decoration policy is used.
  - esjeon 4y ago
pengaru 4y ago
Programming GTK+ programs in C is rather unpleasant in my limited experience. Despite the set of signals supported by widgets being a fixed part of the documented API, there aren't even explicitly typed-checked function signatures for callbacks appropriate for those signals. The docs tell you what the function signature needs to be for a specific signal like "clicked", but since all the callbacks basically get thrown into a generalized dictionary of void * keyed by signal name hanging off gobject, there's literally ZERO type checking of the callbacks your program installs on signals. Segfaults because your callback had the wrong parameter types/arity for the signal you connected is the norm, and that's arguably the best scenario. You can also install a callback on a signal that expects a gboolean return, and your callback returns void, welp, no segfault, but unpredictable behavior. It's kind of awful, there won't be any compile-time errors when making these mistakes, despite being C. It feels like someone learned how to implement a dictionary then made gobject and built a GUI on top of it with dictionaries all the way down. I don't want runtime dictionaries used for representing any set of things known at compile-time. Fine, use dictionaries for runtime-defined signals, but why the hell am I suffering this way for the things fully known by the toolkit before I even started writing my GTK+ program? Sigh. I may as well just write javascript.
- sph 4y ago
  Modern versions of GTK+ support Rust, Python and Javascript. I love GNOME, but I think there's a decent group of people that would like a Rust-based GTK+ desktop environment. https://github.com/gtk-rs/gtk3-rs https://github.com/gtk-rs/gtk3-rs
  - pengaru 4y ago
    This isn't some C problem, this is a GTK+ problem. There's no need to be throwing all this up-front known crap into a runtime constructed dictionary. If the widget has a "clicked" signal, there should be a typedef of the callback function appropriate for that signal and the widget struct should have a clicked_cb member for a list of callbacks of that type. Then there should simply be a unique function for installing the callback on that signal on a widget. At least then the compiler can tell you when you're mixing up callbacks<->signals for API-defined signals. It's not even complicated.
syntheweave 4y ago
There's something missing from the analysis, which I believe is quite important: There are only a few applications complex enough to push these toolkits to their limits, and that's not a case of "developers craving such a toolkit and not getting it". Most of the things people were going to write native for in the past have been absorbed into the browser; and many new applications are written with a more ground-up concept of UI that needs to start from the beginning with a lower level framework(e.g. game engines). Without that ambient demand pulling toolkits forward, they're going to revert to the needs of desktop environments - a problem which was already solved mostly adequately back in the 2000's and now is in a product churn cycle. The complaints of Linux desktop users haven't been about the desktop UI in quite some time; it's been other parts of the stack with friction that sometimes surfaces to the desktop(e.g. input devices under Wayland, or the entire landscape of audio session management), but not the basics of windowing and presentation. Every time Linux faces big coordination challenges to stand up a more robust overall system, a "Ship of Theseus" method of getting first a political consolidation and then replacement has appeared. This can be traced at least as far back as the appearance of udev, and more recent examples include PulseAudio, systemd, Pipewire, and Wayland. One can see this taking place on both the GNOME and KDE fronts too: both had their toolkits come up out of an environment where GUI hadn't yet been commoditized, and therefore the stakeholders were broad. Over two decades on, consolidation has taken place, and that's gradually reached a point where it does impact the "alternative desktops" like Xfce. The overall maintenance budget for old code isn't infinite, though. We can leverage the past, but only if we're still doing the same things we needed in the past. And I don't think the desktop is staying the same; the move towards touchscreens was a fashion, but the approaches to UX are generally going away from creating a space shuttle control panel, and instead looking for a way to configure more targeted workspaces. Which means that toolkit needs are changing as a result.
- jart 4y ago
  Apple doesn't change. Chrome doesn't change. They both look exactly the same as when they were introduced. What makes platforms strong is stability and consistency. Linux desktop projects are more likely to get funded the more disruptive they are and the more likely it is they'll alienate supporters and cause drama. Like gnome's big shift circa 2014 to tablet first interfaces. If we consider that Linux desktop users are the smartest and most technically advanced computer users in the world, then it's quite a slap in the face to force them to use a gimmicky gui intended for toys as their workstation. The most advanced computer users deserve the most advanced desktop. Sadly that's not the world we live in. Hopefully someday we can liberate the technical class from this orwellian treatment of continual destruction of identity.
jcelerier 4y ago
> My ultimate prediction is that within about three years after GTK 5 is released, touchscreens will go out of vogue haven't they already ? I remember buying much more easily a computer with a touchscreen in 2011 than today, at some point every other model had it, but now it feels like NVidia's 3D Vision in its end times. Same for tablets, when I check analytics for my website, tablet use is pretty much zero.
- sph 4y ago
  Tablets and mobile phones are computers with a touchscreen, and they're more popular than ever. You might not see many in your niche, but the laptop and desktop PC are a smaller and smaller pie of everyday computing.
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    Many high-end laptops these days have touch screens that can be flipped over to use them as tablets. That's exactly the kind of use GNOME 3 was developed for.
- SSLy 4y ago
  Most iPads will be detected as Macs, while other tablets are… not very relevant, like you've noticed.
denismi 4y ago
Yep, Nautilus is "unusable" without the compact view. Idiotic hyperbole like this is where I stop reading. How can I take anything beyond that seriously?
- fnord123 4y ago
  Septembrians don't know what to take seriously. These kinds of strong opinions feel useful for people new to the scene so they can certainly influence a lot of people. Hopefully they can see comments like 'gtk+3 wasn't even backwards compatible with gtk+2' for what they are. (i.e. no shit, hence the major version change).
jart 4y ago
I think there's a future for STLWRT. All was right with the world when Linux looked like this: https://www.linglom.com/images/Linux/ChangeIPAddress/1.png https://www.linglom.com/images/Linux/ChangeIPAddress/1.png I still run RHEL5 and use it everyday. I don't even consider it that old.
- jl6 4y ago
  This is also the reason why I use XFCE. It hasn’t materially changed for years and is just fine.
- formerly_proven 4y ago
  Hot take: Only having menus are bad UX because they force the human to search for things instead of making the computer search. I have zero fond memories of trying to find options in the giant menu structures of larger applications. I especially don't understand the reverence of the old-style start menus without a search field many seem to have.
  - jl6 4y ago
    The way I use XFCE is to mark all the applications I use as favorites so they appear on the top level menu, then it’s just two clicks to launch anything, way quicker than click-then-type-to-search.
plaguepilled 4y ago
A preface: I use GNOME and KDE on separate devices. I have tried i3 and intend to return to it when graced with more time to customise it. Importantly, I used GNOME before GTK3 happened. I mention the above as preface because I see these kinds of posts on this website a lot and they are very misleading, and I believe I have the credentials to explain why. If you skim the original article you could be forgiven for thinking that it is a well researched and justified piece of writing, but I would like to challenge that. In particular, I note that a lot of 'evidence' for the claims of GTKs downfall are hinged in the author's preexisting expectations (and bizarre tangents - who gives a shit about title bars one way or another in a conversation about software maintenance? Scope pls). One very revealing assumption by the author is the idea that a major release of a community project such as GTK3 should be free of bugs. This seems very obvious to an end user. 'Of course a major release should be stable! What are you saying? I need my servers to be reliable so I can feed my kids! Not everyone lives in fantasy land like you, plaguepilled!' But there are actually two assumptions being made here. The first is that major releases of FOSS should be free of bugs and not corrected with time, and the second assumption is that this is no harder to accomplish than for a commercial entity. However, crucially, the open source software community has had a huge shortage of maintainers for at least a decade now. Look up your favourite utility, then look up the team supporting it: often it is one person who is very, very over it. This can contribute to the phenomenon of fixes that come after the major release, not with it. In fact, this single fact can explain why major projects that 'weren't broken' seemingly 'choose' to self sabotage. The GNOME team are not stupid. They are heavily under-resourced. The same can be said for KDE and even the Linux kernel teams. If that bothers you, it is far more productive to actually contribute your time to fixing the issue than simply describing it while waxing lyrical about how all these modern devs have simply 'lost the way'. But I am here to contend that the idea of flawless FOSS is itself bizarre. Wealth inequality is a major issue in 2022 and proposing that the existing body of skilled software engineers should provide enterprise level software, consistently, without pay, is insane. If you care about software support and are not paying, and you do not yourself write FOSS software, you are at best a hypocrite, and at worst attempting to exploit people. I am a fan of FOSS and want it to be better, but this article is not the way to that future.
- lelanthran 4y ago
Bessie69 4y ago
[flagged]
seba_dos1 4y ago
All I got out of this blog post is that its author appears incredibly toxic. There's no need to waste your time with it.
rkangel 4y ago
As a consumer of desktop environments (and not a GUI application developer) I think that GTK based desktop environments are in the best place they have ever been and Linux as a DE for 'normal' people is a reasonable option in a way it never has been in the past. Gnome on Fedora is a solid experience. It works well out of the box, it's performant, intuitive, well designed and good looking. I'm sure it rubs some developers the wrong way (there are always some) but based on my (small sample size) observation of people using it, it seems to be intuitive. It's not just Gnome - Wayland is part of the picture because it makes things like multi-monitor more reliable too. We're past the performance issues that the current version of Gnome had to start with, and Wayland is continually having the issues eliminated (once the last few screen sharing ones are dealt with there won't be loads to complain about).
hulitu 4y ago
"Is the Linux desktop heading south?" There is a whole world out there. I use fvwm as a "desktop environment" with MC as file manager. I also find the idea of "desktop environment" a bit old. Even on windows 10 every programm behaves differently. Even MS is not able to have a unique look and feel in its own programms.

72 points by rohshall 4y ago

Yes, Xfce is working perfectly as it was for the last 7-8 years

So much fighting over how best to draw the UI that will launch various instances of the Chrome engine. Want to know why everything is written in Electron or as a web app? Because literally every desktop platform over the last decade has decided to play design and engineering games instead of just make a really solid stable base to write apps on top of.

morsch 4y ago
And then the calculator app, which is native, is wrapped up in some sort of isolating container that makes it take as long to start up as an electron app.
- supramouse 4y ago
  you mean snap packages? I think the calculator is written in vala was pretty performant when I've used it the past
- schipplock 4y ago
  I sometimes, by accident, launched LibreOffice Calc. It launched faster than the calculator app :). I believe they changed that. The calculator app isn't shipped in a snap package anymore.
- sph 4y ago
  You're using the wrong isolating container ;) There's only one that is quite slow at startup, the other isn't.
  - nix23 4y ago
    Just imagine you need a container for the calculator.....
    - sph 4y ago
      Just imagine getting pwned by malware bundled in a calculator...
      - nix23 4y ago
        What is the connection here? Why would you install the calculator not coming from your distribution?
        sph 4y ago
        Because there is a push for software developers to be able to package directly for end users. Without devolving into the usual flame war of whether it's a good idea or not, once you install any piece of software you incur some security risks. It's not like distro maintainers are a 100% guarantee there won't be a backdoor in the binary, and compiling software from source doesn't free you from risks either, unless you code-review everything you install. My point is, containerisation on Linux isn't necessarily slow—in fact it's unnoticeable if implemented correctly—and I prefer to default to having a decent amount of security by containerising as much software as I can, whatever the origin. Including, and especially software like the calculator, since it should not be able to do anything more than show a GUI and add numbers together.
        nix23 4y ago
        That's not what i asked, why do you trust a no name dev more then the distro your kernel is coming from? And do you really think flatpack prevents you from running packed malware?
        wander_homer 4y ago
kelnos 4y ago
I don't think that's really the reason for Electron's popularity. While GTK and Qt are cross-platform, my (limited, to be fair) experience with building for multiple platforms was that it was a huge pain in the ass, and Windows and macOS platform integration often felt clunky and out of place. The big draw for Electron is that we have way way way more web developers out there these days than native-code desktop UI developers, so it's easy to leverage those people and get results fairly quickly, even if the resulting apps don't really conform to any desktop's standard look-and-feel (which I guess avoids the uncanny valley effect of cross-platform toolkits that try to be native, but fail in subtle and not-so-subtle ways). People can even just (sorta) repackage their existing webapp, and end up with more or less a single code base for all desktop platforms + web. I do agree with you that most of the desktop platforms are pretty annoying to develop for if you want a solid, stable base, but I don't think that's the prevailing reason for Electron's uptake.
- smegsicle 4y ago
  a big part of why browser engines are so unwieldy is the implied compatibility with every website ever, right? but the "way way more web developers" you mention are not, at least in the context of electron apps, interested in that feature except tangentially.. so while everyone knows a full web-ready browser engine is impractical to design from scratch, maybe a simplified engine that supports a conservative subset of best-practices web-style design is in order?
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  - wffurr 4y ago
    That's a really interesting idea, but in practice you might find that the "conservative sunset" ends up being different for every toolkit and developer. Maybe something a bit opinionated, like a React Native-only runtime, could fit the bill here. Or in a sense, is this what Flutter is?
skeletal88 4y ago
Qt has stayed the same and KDE has been excellent, this is a probleem with GTK and Gnome based desktops
imtringued 4y ago
I once installed Linux with Gnome 3 on a USB stick and used that as my primary operating system for six months. My number one application was a web browser. I don't think I ever bothered installing anything other than code editors, language runtimes/compilers and steam. Gnome works just fine. The only annoyance was the breakage that Wayland introduced in 2016. Suddenly you couldn't screen capture the whole screen anymore. It's kinda the same issue as switching from python 2 to 3 but the difference here is that it is a major upgrade that is worth the effort. The reasons why python 3 isn't backwards compatible are incredibly petty for the most part. However, firefox has received Wayland support for screensharing and some people developed a plugin for OBS. Wayland works just fine now too.
Bancakes 4y ago
Rhetorical question? It's cheap and quick. Can be outsourced to the lowest lifeform that legitimately describes itself as a programmer.

onphonenow 4y ago

Fast windows 95 would have been fine. Instead the devs lost their minds w design craziness. VS Code and chrome pycharm etc means it’s not a huge deal - they are all x platform

AnonymousPlanet 4y ago
Not for people who are not mentally stuck in the 90s. I am very glad things have processed and have left the ugliness and usabilitly problems of Windows 95 in the past.
- urn_piqoq 4y ago
  I'm in the opposite camp. I recall great monolithic software for media production from the 90's and think our modern web-centric view is "dumbed-down". There's a time and place for minimalism, but the term "power user" also has a meaning: your accumulated user-base that didn't leave. Windows post-Vista has forced me and countless others into never bothering again. The fact of a 90's MCSE certification means nothing when I blankly gaze at the visage of a "modern" Windows UI that tells me nothing of import. M$ basically told all their power users to go away.
  - AnonymousPlanet 4y ago
    I'm so harsh with Windows 95 here because back then I found out about other desktops (e.g. on Unix) that had better UI. Several workspaces, ability to drag windows not only by grabbing the title bar, clicking the scroll bar to the scroll place you need (instead of having to drag it all the way there), launching programs by other means than a non ending hierarchy of menus. Not to mention that anything not Windows was more stable. Also Unix/Linux was multi user and solid enough to run read services on the same machine (even if it was the same little piece of junk your Windows 98 had come with in the first place). Exploring the world beyond Windows felt like finally seeing how the real pros do it. That is why I absolutely can't understand the starry eyed reverence people have for sorry "OSes" like Windows 95/98. TLDR: Windows 95/98 wasn't the pinncacle of UI even when it came out, so it definitely isn't today.

ogogmad 4y ago

I'm using KDE5 at the moment, and it's essentially problem-free. It's got more features than I know what to do with, but this somehow doesn't detract from it but rather enhances it. KDE5 never seems to be the default choice of desktop environment for distros like Manjaro, but you're unlikely to go wrong picking it as your default option, if you're given that option.

GekkePrutser 4y ago
Doesn't SUSE have KDE by default? I use it on FreeBSD myself. It's an amazing desktop. I don't like gnome at all. It uses too much screen space (huge touch style window decorations) and doesn't have enough customisation for me. But KDE is perfect.
- doubled112 4y ago
  OpenSUSE doesn’t have a default. SUSE uses and supports GNOME.
  - GekkePrutser 4y ago
    According to their own page KDE is the default desktop: https://en.opensuse.org/KDE https://en.opensuse.org/KDE > Default Desktop > Plasma Desktop from KDE is the default workspace on openSUSE.
    - doubled112 4y ago
      Strangely enough, from their desktop FAQ: https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Desktop_FAQ https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Desktop_FAQ > openSUSE installer provides three officially supported desktop options. There is no default choice Coming at this from another angle, their installer isn't super opinionated. The KDE radio button is at the top of the list on the desktop selection page. Does that make it the default choice? I guess it does by some definition.
smegsicle 4y ago
isn't slackware sticking with them for the default environment?

ggm 4y ago

Feels like 80/20 class problem. 80% working, same effort to close 80% of the remaining 20% and recurse enough times you wind up burned out. Now add rewrites and factionalism and dissent. They don't love and nurture each other and they don't love their users either. I used to care. As a user I can't buy into it any more.

mavu 4y ago

The tone of that article makes sure that I stop reading after 2 paragraphs.

hvdijk 4y ago
I did not last even two paragraphs: I clicked through on "Ubuntu MATE cannot be trusted" and found something better summarised as "I tried getting away with calling people idiots on Ubuntu MATE forums in a bizarre social experiment and cannot deal with them not putting up with that."
- Narann 4y ago
  Same, it's disturbing: * OP: "If a distro with 60k packages cannot accommodate one or three extra packages for an official flavor, then someone is an idiot, and that idiot is not me." * Moderator came and ask to not talk like this. * OP: "Censorship, simply because I used the word “idiot” without naming anyone in particular!", and OP continue. * Moderator close the tread. * OP: "Then the little Stalin closed my thread". This is not serious. OP doesn't named anyone but hide himself with a general attack to package maintainer (maybe this maintainer is alone). Hiding its attitude behind word meaning is something my 9 years old son is starting to do and I try to explain him its not a valid excuse. OP should revise it's social expectations. It's hard enough to keep big open source projects on rails without having childish attitude like this.
  - exfascist 4y ago
    I'm anti censorship and post ideas controversial enough to get banned from here pretty often but personal attacks are just stupid. There's no reason for that.
deng 4y ago
Yeah, the tone of the article makes me think that there might be a great future for GTK-based Desktop Environments ahead.

cmacleod4 4y ago

Just use Tk, problem solved :-) - https://tkdocs.com/ https://tkdocs.com/

anthk 4y ago

I use Fluxbox (slightly tweaked Zukitre theme), lxappearance, Tango2 icons and Rox filer with a bunch of plugins among Rox-Lib under ~/lib. 90% CLI oriented but with common sensical GUI plugins and settings. The best of both words, and a "DE" with unmatched speeds.

ensiferum 4y ago
Another fluxbox user here. I've basically ran the same configuration for nearly 15 years now. Everything is in muscle memory and never changes. Totally the best UX

jchw 4y ago

I agree with some of this, though it is perhaps a bit overly harsh at times. Frankly, I’m not terribly impressed by the direction that Qt has taken either, though. This puts the open source desktop in a pretty unfortunate place…

qalmakka 4y ago
I'm not that enthused about where Qt is heading but it's arguably in better hands than GTK+, that's for sure. First, Qt isn't strictly tied with KDE - it has its own life by itself, without KDE libraries at all, and a vibrant ecosystem that uses it for automotive and cross-platform desktop apps. Second, while the Qt Company has decided to stop releasing LTS releases as open source, KDE has a binding agreement that allows KDE to release Qt on a BSD license, were the Qt company intentioned to close it down(https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation/ https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation/). Since the whole LTS shenanigan happened, KDE has shown to be quite competent at maintaining its own set of patches for Qt5, which most distributions nowadays have adopted. If Qt were ever to become closed source again, it would probably face a very strong competitor in a BSD or Apache-licensed fork from KDE. The Qt Company sells its licenses mostly to people that want to use GPL-covered Qt modules in closed source apps, so they really cannot let that to happen.
- jchw 4y ago
  Yeah, the KDE Free Qt arrangement is pretty unique and makes it significantly less likely that there will be a rapid dropoff in Qt open source. This became important because the modern Qt company is awful. That said, I still think the direction of Qt has kind of sucked. QtWidgets is mostly stagnating, and Qt Quick is not really appealing to me…
  - qalmakka 4y ago
    On the bright side, PySide has finally been adopted by Qt as its official bindings, and it has made PyQt largely redundant. I find it simplifies a lot Qt app development on desktop, and it has the potential to attract a lot of new developers to the platform. While QtWidgets are stagnating and Qt Quick is arguably very "HUD"-centric and barebones for desktop development, there are nice portable UI toolkits such as KDE's Kirigami popping out that are very usable even without KDE.

kelnos 4y ago

I was an Xfce core maintainer from around 2004 to 2009. In addition to my work on Xfce, I also built a media player, and played around with some other projects that never really went anywhere. GTK2 had its warts, but it was generally fairly easy to build things, and it was fairly easy to work around things when something didn't work the way I wanted. GTK3 changed a lot of this. Many things that were previously public were now considered private implementation details. Much of that was perfectly understandable (necessary, even), but occasionally this meant that there were things you could do in GTK2, but just couldn't in GTK3 (or could, but doing so was a huge pain in the ass). GTK3 deprecated or outright removed some things in GTK2, and it wasn't often clear what the supported replacement was supposed to be. The theming/styling system was completely replaced, which meant redoing themes, and any app that used theming APIs had to have that part completely rewritten. On occasion I would report issues to the GTK folks, or would watch issues others had reported that I was interested in, and responses were all over the map, from helpful and welcoming, to actively hostile. What became very clear was that the GTK developers, over time, started only caring about the GNOME use cases. If you were using GTK for something non-GNOME, the GTK developers did not care about you, and would not reverse decisions that (incidentally or otherwise) broke your ability to do what you wanted to do. I get it: as an open source developer, you have your own priorities, and you're usually not beholden to your users for features or any particular work. I certainly did not care for it when people not contributing to my software would demand I do things for them. But man, did it suck to constantly feel like the rug was getting pulled out from under me. I haven't touched GTK4 yet, but judging from what I've read about it, I really don't want to. I used Qt a bit around the early '00s, and kinda liked it, but didn't love it (granted, I'm sure things are unrecognizably different now, for better or worse). Regardless, these days I have zero interest in writing C++. (To be perfectly honest, I have little interest in writing C either.) My hope is that one of the pure-Rust UI toolkits will take off, but at the same time that doesn't help existing C/C++ projects, since new-language rewrites are painful and often counter-productive. And on top of that, it just sucks to have more UI toolkit proliferation, which makes it harder to style things so the various apps on your desktop look reasonably consistent with each other. Of course, my happy place would be Xfce rewritten to use a modern UI toolkit that is not GTK (or Qt, for that matter). (I would prefer Rust, but see above re: new-language rewrites.) But if we all thought the GTK2->GTK3 effort for Xfce took a really long time, rewriting using a new toolkit (let alone a new language) would likely take a decade. We were always understaffed when I was involved, with Xfce being a spare-time, volunteer, passion project for everyone involved (I believe one guy was paid for a while to work on Xfce-related things, but not for all that long). Not sure how much that's changed, but I wouldn't expect much corporate backing, despite Olivier (the project lead) working for Red Hat.

new_user_final 4y ago

>That KDE Plasma 5 is finally usable and stable, after having decided to stop pushing the ridiculous plasmoids on the user (were they liking the Windows Desktop Gadgets, or they were simply idiots?), is like having an old whore finally becoming a respectable woman. It’s hard to forget the developers’ idiotic decisions, though. I don’t like to be Microsoft’s guinea pig, why should I be KDE’s? This attitude describes why there is no future for Linux desktop.

ogogmad 4y ago
The analogy involving whores becoming respectable women is kind of messed up. I'm not sure if I'm going to trigger the anti-political correctness crowd by saying something that's politically incorrect for the anti-political correctness crowd.
- hamoid 4y ago
  That's where I stopped reading.
throwmeariver1 4y ago
It’s OSS you are no one’s guinea pig. If you don’t want to participate you don’t have to use it if the ones who participate want to try other things switch and don’t complain like a old male whore on the sidelines.
- konart 4y ago
  >If you don’t want to participate you don’t have to use it This has nothing to do with OSS though. You can switch from a closed sources solution too. The problem is you investment and attachment to certain things.
  - throwmeariver1 4y ago
    Yeah, the differences is if heh wants to change something for the better he can try.

JCWasmx86 4y ago

Yes. GNOME is better than ever, GTK4+Libadwaita is simply doing one: Looking perfect. The HIG are excellent, without GNOME I would be maybe 40% as productive as with it.

konart 4y ago
This. Now if only people start investing in UI\UX on linux desktop.
- sph 4y ago
  Honestly, the real hurdle now seems to be the support for paid apps. It's such a taboo in the Linux world, for some reason [1], but thankfully Flatpak and Flathub are working towards that goal [2], which ElementaryOS already explored. I want small, high quality apps like macOS has. I want to make a living building open source software that can be supported and bought commercially—no, donations and sponsoring isn't good enough. I want companies being able to sell their software on Linux through the integrated app store, now that it's finally become good enough. 1: Plenty Linux users think FOSS means never having to pay for software, or that commercial software will kill us all and it's morally wrong. I strongly disagree. 2: https://discourse.flathub.org/t/seeking-contractors-for-work-on-flathub-project/1889 https://discourse.flathub.org/t/seeking-contractors-for-work...
  - konart 4y ago
    1: I don't get it either. For some reason Krita is okay, but selling your app in some sort of Store is not...
  - dTal 4y ago
    It's "supported" just fine now. You certainly don't need some centralized app store or weird quasi-distro. As you say, it's 100% a cultural problem. No amount of technical effort will change that Linux users expect their software to be open source, and that in practice you cannot sell open source software.
exfascist 4y ago

greatgib 4y ago

<<So, if GTK+ 3 flopped, how are we where we are today, with GTK+ 3 suddenly being forced down our throats? It turns out it was probably started by Red Hat.>> Systemd, gnome 3, I think that it is Red hat that ruined the desktop experience in the last decade by imposing terrible choices on everyone else...

mschuster91 4y ago
As for systemd... while I believe that there have been questionable decisions (why was a replacement of ntpd needed?), at least it's gotten easier to introduce dependencies as part of software startups - e.g. it's relatively trivial to add a dependency on an NFS mount for a server program, which was ... a complex mess to put it lightly before. My biggest gripe with systemd unit files is that there are at least four ways of specifying dependencies (Wants, BindsTo, After, Requires) and the semantics are not easily understandable.
ginko 4y ago
I agree. Red Hat to me almost feels like a corporate trojan horse taking over open source projects to undermine them from within.

linguae 4y ago

Given non-GNOME developers' frustration with increasingly GNOME-centric releases of GTK, and given some of the licensing issues surrounding Qt (such as the one-year delay for FOSS releases of the toolkit: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25748335 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25748335), I believe the time is ripe for a BSD-licensed GUI toolkit for X11 and Wayland that uses server-side decorations and tries to be as unopinionated as possible in order to allow for different visions of the desktop instead of imposing a particular vision through the toolkit. In fact, starting such a project is something I've been considering for a long time. If only had GNUstep (http://www.gnustep.org/ http://www.gnustep.org/) been the toolkit for the Linux desktop instead of the Qt vs GTK/GNOME wars; this would have saved a lot of drama regarding toolkits. Back in the mid-2000's it appeared that the matter was settled during the KDE 3 and GNOME 2 days; a lot of people seemed to be happy with these desktops, and those who preferred non-GNOME Gtk desktops and applications had plenty of options. However, ever since GNOME 3 the GNOME developers have been able to mold GTK to its vision at the expense of other GTK users who didn't share GNOME's vision. Qt is less opinionated, but its stewardship is up to the whims of whatever company that owns it. GNUstep is free from these issues, but it never received mass adoption. Come to think about it, maybe instead of a new toolkit, maybe we should look into GNUstep some more and consider investing our developer resources into building a GNUstep desktop ecosystem. But I'm curious about what other people are thinking.

legulere 4y ago
> uses server-side decorations and tries to be as unopinionated as possible You are contradicting yourself. Some people think decorations should be server-side others think client-side. So it seems what is better is an opinion.
- linguae 4y ago
  Good point. "As unopinionated as possible" should be the emphasis. Perhaps the toolkit could support both types of decorations, with flags that enforce which decoration policy is used.
- esjeon 4y ago

pengaru 4y ago

Programming GTK+ programs in C is rather unpleasant in my limited experience. Despite the set of signals supported by widgets being a fixed part of the documented API, there aren't even explicitly typed-checked function signatures for callbacks appropriate for those signals. The docs tell you what the function signature needs to be for a specific signal like "clicked", but since all the callbacks basically get thrown into a generalized dictionary of void * keyed by signal name hanging off gobject, there's literally ZERO type checking of the callbacks your program installs on signals. Segfaults because your callback had the wrong parameter types/arity for the signal you connected is the norm, and that's arguably the best scenario. You can also install a callback on a signal that expects a gboolean return, and your callback returns void, welp, no segfault, but unpredictable behavior. It's kind of awful, there won't be any compile-time errors when making these mistakes, despite being C. It feels like someone learned how to implement a dictionary then made gobject and built a GUI on top of it with dictionaries all the way down. I don't want runtime dictionaries used for representing any set of things known at compile-time. Fine, use dictionaries for runtime-defined signals, but why the hell am I suffering this way for the things fully known by the toolkit before I even started writing my GTK+ program? Sigh. I may as well just write javascript.

sph 4y ago
Modern versions of GTK+ support Rust, Python and Javascript. I love GNOME, but I think there's a decent group of people that would like a Rust-based GTK+ desktop environment. https://github.com/gtk-rs/gtk3-rs https://github.com/gtk-rs/gtk3-rs
- pengaru 4y ago
  This isn't some C problem, this is a GTK+ problem. There's no need to be throwing all this up-front known crap into a runtime constructed dictionary. If the widget has a "clicked" signal, there should be a typedef of the callback function appropriate for that signal and the widget struct should have a clicked_cb member for a list of callbacks of that type. Then there should simply be a unique function for installing the callback on that signal on a widget. At least then the compiler can tell you when you're mixing up callbacks<->signals for API-defined signals. It's not even complicated.

syntheweave 4y ago

There's something missing from the analysis, which I believe is quite important: There are only a few applications complex enough to push these toolkits to their limits, and that's not a case of "developers craving such a toolkit and not getting it". Most of the things people were going to write native for in the past have been absorbed into the browser; and many new applications are written with a more ground-up concept of UI that needs to start from the beginning with a lower level framework(e.g. game engines). Without that ambient demand pulling toolkits forward, they're going to revert to the needs of desktop environments - a problem which was already solved mostly adequately back in the 2000's and now is in a product churn cycle. The complaints of Linux desktop users haven't been about the desktop UI in quite some time; it's been other parts of the stack with friction that sometimes surfaces to the desktop(e.g. input devices under Wayland, or the entire landscape of audio session management), but not the basics of windowing and presentation. Every time Linux faces big coordination challenges to stand up a more robust overall system, a "Ship of Theseus" method of getting first a political consolidation and then replacement has appeared. This can be traced at least as far back as the appearance of udev, and more recent examples include PulseAudio, systemd, Pipewire, and Wayland. One can see this taking place on both the GNOME and KDE fronts too: both had their toolkits come up out of an environment where GUI hadn't yet been commoditized, and therefore the stakeholders were broad. Over two decades on, consolidation has taken place, and that's gradually reached a point where it does impact the "alternative desktops" like Xfce. The overall maintenance budget for old code isn't infinite, though. We can leverage the past, but only if we're still doing the same things we needed in the past. And I don't think the desktop is staying the same; the move towards touchscreens was a fashion, but the approaches to UX are generally going away from creating a space shuttle control panel, and instead looking for a way to configure more targeted workspaces. Which means that toolkit needs are changing as a result.

jart 4y ago
Apple doesn't change. Chrome doesn't change. They both look exactly the same as when they were introduced. What makes platforms strong is stability and consistency. Linux desktop projects are more likely to get funded the more disruptive they are and the more likely it is they'll alienate supporters and cause drama. Like gnome's big shift circa 2014 to tablet first interfaces. If we consider that Linux desktop users are the smartest and most technically advanced computer users in the world, then it's quite a slap in the face to force them to use a gimmicky gui intended for toys as their workstation. The most advanced computer users deserve the most advanced desktop. Sadly that's not the world we live in. Hopefully someday we can liberate the technical class from this orwellian treatment of continual destruction of identity.

jcelerier 4y ago

> My ultimate prediction is that within about three years after GTK 5 is released, touchscreens will go out of vogue haven't they already ? I remember buying much more easily a computer with a touchscreen in 2011 than today, at some point every other model had it, but now it feels like NVidia's 3D Vision in its end times. Same for tablets, when I check analytics for my website, tablet use is pretty much zero.

sph 4y ago
Tablets and mobile phones are computers with a touchscreen, and they're more popular than ever. You might not see many in your niche, but the laptop and desktop PC are a smaller and smaller pie of everyday computing.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  Many high-end laptops these days have touch screens that can be flipped over to use them as tablets. That's exactly the kind of use GNOME 3 was developed for.
SSLy 4y ago
Most iPads will be detected as Macs, while other tablets are… not very relevant, like you've noticed.

denismi 4y ago

Yep, Nautilus is "unusable" without the compact view. Idiotic hyperbole like this is where I stop reading. How can I take anything beyond that seriously?

fnord123 4y ago
Septembrians don't know what to take seriously. These kinds of strong opinions feel useful for people new to the scene so they can certainly influence a lot of people. Hopefully they can see comments like 'gtk+3 wasn't even backwards compatible with gtk+2' for what they are. (i.e. no shit, hence the major version change).

jart 4y ago

I think there's a future for STLWRT. All was right with the world when Linux looked like this: https://www.linglom.com/images/Linux/ChangeIPAddress/1.png https://www.linglom.com/images/Linux/ChangeIPAddress/1.png I still run RHEL5 and use it everyday. I don't even consider it that old.

jl6 4y ago
This is also the reason why I use XFCE. It hasn’t materially changed for years and is just fine.
formerly_proven 4y ago
Hot take: Only having menus are bad UX because they force the human to search for things instead of making the computer search. I have zero fond memories of trying to find options in the giant menu structures of larger applications. I especially don't understand the reverence of the old-style start menus without a search field many seem to have.
- jl6 4y ago
  The way I use XFCE is to mark all the applications I use as favorites so they appear on the top level menu, then it’s just two clicks to launch anything, way quicker than click-then-type-to-search.

plaguepilled 4y ago

A preface: I use GNOME and KDE on separate devices. I have tried i3 and intend to return to it when graced with more time to customise it. Importantly, I used GNOME before GTK3 happened. I mention the above as preface because I see these kinds of posts on this website a lot and they are very misleading, and I believe I have the credentials to explain why. If you skim the original article you could be forgiven for thinking that it is a well researched and justified piece of writing, but I would like to challenge that. In particular, I note that a lot of 'evidence' for the claims of GTKs downfall are hinged in the author's preexisting expectations (and bizarre tangents - who gives a shit about title bars one way or another in a conversation about software maintenance? Scope pls). One very revealing assumption by the author is the idea that a major release of a community project such as GTK3 should be free of bugs. This seems very obvious to an end user. 'Of course a major release should be stable! What are you saying? I need my servers to be reliable so I can feed my kids! Not everyone lives in fantasy land like you, plaguepilled!' But there are actually two assumptions being made here. The first is that major releases of FOSS should be free of bugs and not corrected with time, and the second assumption is that this is no harder to accomplish than for a commercial entity. However, crucially, the open source software community has had a huge shortage of maintainers for at least a decade now. Look up your favourite utility, then look up the team supporting it: often it is one person who is very, very over it. This can contribute to the phenomenon of fixes that come after the major release, not with it. In fact, this single fact can explain why major projects that 'weren't broken' seemingly 'choose' to self sabotage. The GNOME team are not stupid. They are heavily under-resourced. The same can be said for KDE and even the Linux kernel teams. If that bothers you, it is far more productive to actually contribute your time to fixing the issue than simply describing it while waxing lyrical about how all these modern devs have simply 'lost the way'. But I am here to contend that the idea of flawless FOSS is itself bizarre. Wealth inequality is a major issue in 2022 and proposing that the existing body of skilled software engineers should provide enterprise level software, consistently, without pay, is insane. If you care about software support and are not paying, and you do not yourself write FOSS software, you are at best a hypocrite, and at worst attempting to exploit people. I am a fan of FOSS and want it to be better, but this article is not the way to that future.

lelanthran 4y ago

Bessie69 4y ago

[flagged]

seba_dos1 4y ago

All I got out of this blog post is that its author appears incredibly toxic. There's no need to waste your time with it.

rkangel 4y ago

As a consumer of desktop environments (and not a GUI application developer) I think that GTK based desktop environments are in the best place they have ever been and Linux as a DE for 'normal' people is a reasonable option in a way it never has been in the past. Gnome on Fedora is a solid experience. It works well out of the box, it's performant, intuitive, well designed and good looking. I'm sure it rubs some developers the wrong way (there are always some) but based on my (small sample size) observation of people using it, it seems to be intuitive. It's not just Gnome - Wayland is part of the picture because it makes things like multi-monitor more reliable too. We're past the performance issues that the current version of Gnome had to start with, and Wayland is continually having the issues eliminated (once the last few screen sharing ones are dealt with there won't be loads to complain about).

hulitu 4y ago

"Is the Linux desktop heading south?" There is a whole world out there. I use fvwm as a "desktop environment" with MC as file manager. I also find the idea of "desktop environment" a bit old. Even on windows 10 every programm behaves differently. Even MS is not able to have a unique look and feel in its own programms.