[Geany-Devel] Gtk2 vs Gtk3 (was. Re: A direction for Geany)

Dimitar Zhekov dimitar.zhekov at xxxxx
Thu Nov 14 18:33:03 UTC 2013


On Tue, 12 Nov 2013 15:27:20 -0800
Matthew Brush <mbrush at codebrainz.ca> wrote:

> Unless we're going to switch toolkits or someone is volunteering to 
> maintain a fork, there's really no logical reason to avoid the 
> inevitable, [switch to GTK+3]

I've heard this a lot when Vista came out. And it never got > 18%
market share.

> I'm curious if you asked the users complaining about not wanting to 
> "switch to a Gtk3-based desktop" whether they actually have libgtk3 
> installed anyway?

I do. Slower, looks ugly since Xfce has no theme support for it, and
is otherwise no different.

> side-by-side without any issues. Is it possible the users were just 
> expressing more GNOME-hate and directing it GTK3 instead or you think 
> they really are using super old desktop environments before Gtk3
> started being widely distributed?

The current Debian stable + testing:

gtk+2 packages: 2005 (seven months ago: 2795)
gtk+3 packages: 710 (seven months ago: 345)

So, we have 74% super old applications from before gtk+3 started being
widely distributed. :) Definitely better than 89% though.

The interesting thing is the death of 400 gtk+2 packages, too bad I
didn't keep a list to see what's going on. Either a big structural
change, or "the inevitable" may be something different that you think...

> I get the feeling a lot of people want to stick to gtk2 just because 
> they fear change (or got burned by GNOME3, which uses gtk3) rather than 
> being limited by technical reasons. Since the eventual change to gtk3 is 
> inevitable, if there's no actual technical reason not to, we should 
> probably get cracking on making it work as best as possible in Geany.

"We deprecated the widgets with icons" (buttons, menu items etc.)
"because we did some ugly hacks to hide the icons in these widgets
for GNOME3, and we want to cleanup the code by killing these widgets".

"We removed the stock icons because there are a lot of nice icon themes
novadays" (how are these related?) "and because... well, you can
change the accelerators for the standard actions (Open, Save, ...) now!"

Yes, Matthew, do I fear the changes in gtk+3. I believe there is no
need to explain or discuss what such attitute may lead to.

(As of GNOME 3, I only used it on a company computer for several days,
and it wasn't that bad. Certainly better than Windows 8, though not
something I'd install on my home machine.)

-- 
E-gards: Jimmy


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