When we started development towards GTK+ 4, we laid out a plan that said GTK+ 3.22 would be the final, stable branch of GTK+ 3. And we’ve stuck to this for a while.
I has served us reasonably well – GTK+ 3 stopped changing in drastic ways, which was well-received, and we are finally seeing applications moving from GTK+ 2.
But, GTK+ 4 is taking its time to mature (more on that in another post), and some nice new features (such as font variation support, or Emoji completion) languish unused in master. We also get requests for critical APIs from some of the ported applications.
Therefore, we have decided that it is better to change course and allow a limited amount of new features and API in GTK+ 3.x, by doing a GTK+ 3.24 release in September.
I’m not even remotely versed enough in the world of GTK+ to say anything meaningful about this, but it does seem like a welcome move for developers and users of GTK+ alike.
I don’t understand why emoji completion is even getting dev time for the new GTK 4.
But, I appreciate the over all plan to keep things more reliably stable
https://blog.gtk.org/2018/06/23/a-gtk-3-update/
Edited 2018-06-25 20:25 UTC
Because most modern GUI applications are likely to include them, so for a toolkit to be complete a developer would want this.
One of the things that stops me from using lighter Web UI frameworks is the fact they are incomplete in some fundamental way.
I mean, look at it the other way. If there is a developer who wants to tackle emoji completion, and the GTK project will accept that as an addition to their toolkit, is that really a waste of development time?
For some people yes. They think, that he should drop his work and make better scheduler. Even if he don`t know what it is, how does it work, and that he could brick it because of lack of skills. But hey, at least he don`t do things, that I don`t like, isn`t it?
It doesn’t work like that, supposedly is a community developer, not a paid one, then it is either a contribution with whatever he wants or no contribution at all.
He knows. He’s pointing out the unreasonable expectations of some people.
EDITED: Wrong reply button.
Edited 2018-06-26 17:06 UTC
Its not so much as a “Why are you individual developer working on trival things?” But a “Why aren’t you gnome project working on more important things?”. If you are, list them. Sell them. Sell your progress. Don’t highlight terribly dumb features. Highlight useful features that app developers and users want.
Edited 2018-06-28 16:54 UTC
They brought emojis a big step forward and deprecated a whole list of other things that people have been using for ages, such as stock icons and GtkAction because it does not fit into their world view of how desktop applications should look like mobile apps.
Little wonder there is such an urge in the user community to fork GTK.
Yes, these deprecations are really bad. A few weeks back I updated some code from 2 to 3, and the amount of useful UI functionality which was deprecated or dropped entirely was not amusing. A painful and protracted downgrade.
If they wanted to go full touch-based, then they should have taken a leaf out of the Qt book, and created a parallel set of touch widgets and left the desktop controls well alone. I can’t even use the scrollbars properly anymore. They are just a few pixels wide. On a 4k display. Makes no sense, it’s almost completely unusable.
I hope they’re not planning to repeat the GTK-2 to GTK-3 (in)compatibility horror. Let’s at least allow GTK-4 and GTK-3 applications to be compiled and run on the same computer, eh?
Not sure what you’re talking about there… GTK+-2 and GTK+3 apps were always able to co-exist. Even today, there are a few apps still using GTK+-2 running happily alongside all the GTK+-3 code… about the only limitation is that you can’t run both of them in the same process…
Way back when GTK-3 was starting, it was a non-option for me (and seemingly for a lot of applications that I used) because there were file name/location clashes between the two, so it wasn’t possible to have both libraries and headers installed at the same time. It’s why GTK-2 desktops persisted for so long after GTK-3 ones were available. Clearly that’s a situation that has resolved over time, but before it did I bailed out to OS-X.
Please more client side decorations! Do away with window manager control.
Or don’t.
https://github.com/PCMan/gtk3-nocsd
Thanks. That’ll be useful when I get around to upgrading off my Lubuntu/Kubuntu 14.04 LTS hybrid setup.
(Though, given that it was written by PCMan and I rely on Lubuntu maintainers to configure my GTK+-side stuff in a reasonable way, it might be installed by default when I upgrade.)
I truly do not want to troll about the merits of one against the other, but I am convinced the rift between them halted Desktop Linux on its tracks.
Not only they require different mindsets for programming (to each his own), but they look different, work differently and have given rise to two different desktop environments with patchy compatibility, plus a mass of arguably redundant applications based on one toolkit or another, often foregoing desktop integration. Anad all this has split an already minor user community into tiny-sized dice.
Maybe that is the way things are supposed to be: with freedom comes variety and freedom of choice; with authority comes unification. And this seems to be true at every scale; it is sad, and it is good. I only wish (only wish) that the centrifugal impulse that blows libertarian groups apart were somewhat compensated by a centripetal force of consensus and agreement that helped build larger groups to fight the gravity of authoritarian unification.
(edit) Sorry about the title — it has seeped in from an old post, dunno how, and I cannot change it.
Edited 2018-06-26 10:28 UTC