In Road To Qt, Audacious Switches From GTK3 Back To GTK2

[oleid]

The guy who used to develop QtCurve-GTK3 had a good blog-post on that, with quotes from quite a few other gtk3 theme devs and some spectacular ones from GNOME devs.

It seems that since he wrote that many others have given up developing themes too - there are hardly any that are actively developed and work with recent gtk3 (and no, nothing that was made for gtk 3.6 works anymore). No more gtk3 apps on my desktop now.

Reading the answer of the GNOME devs makes me vomit :/

[psychoticmeow]

The guy who used to develop QtCurve-GTK3 had a good blog-post on that, with quotes from quite a few other gtk3 theme devs and some spectacular ones from GNOME devs.

It seems that since he wrote that many others have given up developing themes too - there are hardly any that are actively developed and work with recent gtk3 (and no, nothing that was made for gtk 3.6 works anymore). No more gtk3 apps on my desktop now.

All I see in that blog article is a bunch of idiots unable to grasp that the Gnome project wanted to try and work towards having a somewhat uniform presentation and actually getting some spit and polish applied to their user interfaces.

It's fine if you don't want that in your desktop environment, but at least acknowledge that the goal is worth it, and not pull out the "Microsoft-like" FUD.

What a load of inflammatory horse shit.

Reading the answer of the GNOME devs makes me vomit :/

Much of it is old, outdated and some of it is even out of context, so take what you read with a grain of salt.

[Karl Napf]

Why C?

It also needs a C API? Not that I want to use C, I?d prefer Go. But a C API would make it easier than C++ to use other languages, including Go.

Qt allows to create bindings based on object introspection data... there are lots of language bindings available for Qt, so apparently C is not a prerequisite for those. Check here: https://qt-project.org/wiki/Category:LanguageBindings

[Karl Napf]

All I see in that blog article is a bunch of idiots unable to grasp that the Gnome project wanted to try and work towards having a somewhat uniform presentation and actually getting some spit and polish applied to their user interfaces.

I fully understand that theme developers are pissed after having to kick their work into the bin a couple of times.

It is fine to not have interfaces for themeing, it is a giant "fuck you" to developers to include those and keep changing them without at least communicating that properly. "We are going to rewrite the themeing support, please be patient till we are done" is not too much to ask for considering that the devs writing themes spend a significant amount of time doing that.

[psychoticmeow]

I fully understand that theme developers are pissed after having to kick their work into the bin a couple of times.

It is fine to not have interfaces for themeing, it is a giant "fuck you" to developers to include those and keep changing them without at least communicating that properly. "We are going to rewrite the themeing support, please be patient till we are done" is not too much to ask for considering that the devs writing themes spend a significant amount of time doing that.

Problems with Gnome often seem to boil down to a lack of communication, they love IRC and mailing lists, yet as an outsider it's been incredibly difficult for me to get a picture of where information is kept and discussed. Hell, every six or so months I try to build an app using JavaScript and spend half an hour trying to find the damn API documentation... which doesn't really exist unless you're happy translating C documentation to JavaScript.

Where should that announcement happen though? There must be a mailing list for it...

[Karl Napf]

Problems with Gnome often seem to boil down to a lack of communication, they love IRC and mailing lists, yet as an outsider it's been incredibly difficult for me to get a picture of where information is kept and discussed. Hell, every six or so months I try to build an app using JavaScript and spend half an hour trying to find the damn API documentation... which doesn't really exist unless you're happy translating C documentation to JavaScript.

Where should that announcement happen though? There must be a mailing list for it...

The most obvious place would be the release notes and the release blog post. There always is some posting on gnome planet about how cool the release is. Adding a line saying "We want to continue to rework the theming" should not be too hard.

Plus people that spend hours and days on a project tend to know how the preferred way of communication of the people that maintain upstream. I doubt that this is a issue of communication channels, more of attitude and disregard of other peoples work. Most developers are well aware how much work they spent on their code. Unfortunately only very few care about the time other people spent. That is unfortunately true for a wide range of open source projects:-/

[ssokolow]

What is the point of another qt based music player? At least Clementine and Amarok should cover all the bases (the former for traditional music playing with all the network features, the latter for music browsing). It is kind of like how I'm not a fan of OpenShot porting to Qt when Kdenlive exists. It is completely redundant.

Last I checked, neither of those players could understand my playlist containing AAC, HSC, LDS, MIDI, SPC, GYM, NSF, GBS, MOD, IT, XM, S3M, STM, MP3, PSF1, PSF2, WavPack, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, SID, Wave, VOC, AU/SND, and WMA files. (Heck, Audacious has got my back if I ever decide to add in some 2SF or VTX files too.)

I'm still mad at the UADE devs for threatening to break the UADE API if the Audacious UADE plugin was kept in-tree, then letting it bitrot as the plugin API changed. Because of that bratty decision, I can only play Gobliiins32.dum without converting it by using the uade123 command-line tool.

[Luke]

Lots of us don't WANT to be forced to use someone else's theme

All I see in that blog article is a bunch of idiots unable to grasp that the Gnome project wanted to try and work towards having a somewhat uniform presentation and actually getting some spit and polish applied to their user interfaces.

It's fine if you don't want that in your desktop environment, but at least acknowledge that the goal is worth it, and not pull out the "Microsoft-like" FUD

That "uniform presentation" is incompatable with what I want on my desktops, I've had to put a lot of work into reverting unwanted UI changes while using current libraries, kernels, and drivers. The only excuse I will accept for that filechooser is if it uses CONSIDERABLY less resources. At least as it is open source in a worst-case scenario I could build it myself with the icons replaced, I suspect we will be seeing such builds down the line, with various distros building their own versions of GTK3 to replace hardcoded GNOME themes with their own hardcoded themes. Ahh yes: fork city made necessary by hardcoding themes both distros and users want to change!

Proper theming support should be considered a prerequiste to the release of a finished version of something like GTK for inclusion in released versions of distros. Hardcoded themes are OK in alpha versions, just as I might hardcode things in early versions of a program but make them configurable for the finished version. I regard the program as unfinished as long as anything someone else might need to change is hardcoded-even in a shell script.

GNOME's advice NOT to use GTK3 in applications seems to be good at this point, I just hope the MATE team is sucessful in porting GTK2 to Wayland. That will then become the go-to version of GTK, and with luck will be the one GTK4 evolves from.

GNOME should think long and hard about what they are doing. They won't drive anyone to Windoze, that is true, but it is simply amazing how distros like UbuntuStudio have had to ditch the tablet-inspired interfaces for DE's like XFCE that are actually compatable with what they are doing. The huge popularity of Cinnamon, MATE, XFCE, LXDE, and even GNOME having to release a classic interface all show how many desktop and laptop users don't what a tablet style UI. On top of that, tablet users have also declared that the new UI's don't actually work that well for a touch interface either.

There is one point here involving Microsoft: I can't believe how dumb MS must have been to not see the hornet's nest stirred up by the GNOME and Unity controversies, and bring out their own tablet-inspired interface in Windows 8. Unlike GNOME, MS has lost buckets and buckets of money because of "Metro" or "Modern" to the point of also costing computer makers big bucks as people decide to forget buying anything that comes with Windows 8. GNOME need not worry about pushing anyone to Windows 8!

[kigurai]

all show how many desktop and laptop users don't what a tablet style UI. On top of that, tablet users have also declared that the new UI's don't actually work that well for a touch interface either.

As far as I know, NO ONE in the Gnome camp has claimed that G3 is a tablet interface, or was designed for that. I believe you can find quotes about "playing better with touch screens" or something, but for anyone who actually use Gnome 3 it is very obvious that the design is made for keyboard and mouse.

[psychoticmeow]

That "uniform presentation" is incompatable with what I want on my desktops, I've had to put a lot of work into reverting unwanted UI changes while using current libraries, kernels, and drivers. The only excuse I will accept for that filechooser is if it uses CONSIDERABLY less resources. At least as it is open source in a worst-case scenario I could build it myself with the icons replaced, I suspect we will be seeing such builds down the line, with various distros building their own versions of GTK3 to replace hardcoded GNOME themes with their own hardcoded themes. Ahh yes: fork city made necessary by hardcoding themes both distros and users want to change!

What's this about hardcoded themes? Adwaita isn't hard coded. And why should you, or anybody not part of their project have say in how their project runs? If you want a say, then you need to be a contributor. But you've already said it is incompatible with what you want, then you should probably contribute to something else instead of spending your time dick waving about how 'awful' it is.

GNOME should think long and hard about what they are doing. They won't drive anyone to Windoze, that is true, but it is simply amazing how distros like UbuntuStudio have had to ditch the tablet-inspired interfaces for DE's like XFCE that are actually compatable with what they are doing.

Blah blah, tablet-inspired, blah blah, not good for real work. Yawn. I'll keep using this desktop environment to do actual fucking work just fine.

The huge popularity of Cinnamon, MATE, XFCE, LXDE, and even GNOME having to release a classic interface all show how many desktop and laptop users don't what a tablet style UI. On top of that, tablet users have also declared that the new UI's don't actually work that well for a touch interface either.

So Gnome is a bad desktop because alternatives exist. Got it, brilliant argument. And Gnome, a desktop interface, doesn't live up to life as a tablet interface. Wow, I wonder if Gnome might not be a freaking tablet interface you moron.

There is one point here involving Microsoft: I can't believe how dumb MS must have been to not see the hornet's nest stirred up by the GNOME and Unity controversies, and bring out their own tablet-inspired interface in Windows 8. Unlike GNOME, MS has lost buckets and buckets of money because of "Metro" or "Modern" to the point of also costing computer makers big bucks as people decide to forget buying anything that comes with Windows 8. GNOME need not worry about pushing anyone to Windows 8!

While almost everyone here has been willing to have an actual discussion about what is broken, you've come in with the FUD guns blazing. Maybe next time you post, you could put some thought into it instead of recycling this trash?

And you still have not answered my earlier question about how a failing on your custom theme to support symbolic icons in a manner that suits you became the failure of Gnome to do... what exactly?