5 ms·

As always, abandoning GTK (or libadwaita. ew.) for Qt is a welcome change. Good for them.

• cprecioso 14d ago
  It was using wxWidgets, not GTK directly IIRC
  • sph 14d ago
    Ah, the dream of "one UI toolkit to rule them all" was very much alive when wxWidgets got popular around the turn of the millennium
    • tosti 13d ago
      Back then it was wxWindows, but yes. Also I'm told it had a lot in common with MFC.
  • Joel_Mckay 14d ago
    Most people that have never maintained >=Qt5 projects assume free wxWidgets native cross platform OS interface support is less hassle. Refactoring the application core means their team should have forked the project to audacity-qt rather than inject long term Qt library and license dependency issues into the original package. Qt on occasion has proven to cause problems with license term changes, GL library bugs on Linux window managers no one ever fixes, and a chain of legacy build issues. Microsoft people tend to design around entertainment eye candy rather than functional long-term reliability. A interface use-case context pop-up isn't a design choice, but rather just chaotic depending on who is using the seat. The Audacity 3 interface certainly needed a lot of work, but nuking it for v4 re-write is simply packaging a different program as the original. Hopefully the remake works out. The odds are not in their favor though... =3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect
    • MrDOS 13d ago
      My understanding is that the Qt 6 build system is vastly easier to work with. Also, Audacity is not the first major FOSS project to successfully migrate from wxWidgets to Qt: Dolphin, the GameCube/Wii emulator, made a similar migration several years ago[0][1][2][3]. [0]: https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2017/06/03/dolphin-progress-report-may-2017/#qt-ie-patootie https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2017/06/03/dolphin-progress-rep... [1]: https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2018/02/03/dolphin-progress-report-january-2018/#irresistibly-qt https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2018/02/03/dolphin-progress-rep... [2]: https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2018/05/02/legend-dolphin-lens-between-worlds/ https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2018/05/02/legend-dolphin-lens-... [3]: https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2018/07/06/dolphin-progress-report-june-2018/#50-8279-remove-dolphinwx-by-spycrab0 https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2018/07/06/dolphin-progress-rep...
      • Joel_Mckay 13d ago
        >Qt 6 build system is vastly easier to work with. The Audacity team imported their existing Qt interface code from a previous project. Depending on the design, the code smell could have a lot of vestigial parts unrelated to the new project. I have always seen FOSS as the last stop for public domain software. It is supposed to become the stable road future kids walk down to become professionals. The Qt framework is often antithetical to that goal in my opinion. =3 Rule #3: popularity is not an indication of utility.
        • ihujonigyin 13d ago
          [flagged]
          • Joel_Mckay 13d ago
            Don't worry about it =3
      • germandiago 13d ago
        I recall (could be wrong, talk from the top of my head), VLC also did it years ago.
  • ezst 13d ago
    On a different corner of the open source ecosystem, PrusaSlicer, also a wxWidget project, just announced the first of its v3 releases with a full GUI rewrite, and what a blast from the past it was to have a X11, non-scaled, wrong font & dpi. It's really unfortunate that they didn't take the opportunity to switch to Qt