Flowblade 2.14 Video Editor Released, GTK4 Port Hopefully Ready Next Year

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Flowblade 2.14 Video Editor Released, GTK4 Port Hopefully Ready Next Year

Released this weekend is a new version of Flowblade, an open-source video editor for Linux systems. Flowblade brings some new features while the work to upgrade against the GTK4 toolkit remains ongoing and will hopefully be ready in 2025...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Flowblade-2.14-Released

[mxan]

GTK 4 doesn't do anything better than GTK 3, in fact it's worse in several aspects - no accessibility, no theming, blurry text rendering (Emanuelle Bassi response: "What makes you think sharpness is a metric?"), worse performance and tons of bugs with the new renderers they're forcing on everyone with GTK 4.14.

They should port to Qt instead, or collaborate with other projects to fork GTK 3.

[Eberhardt]

GTK 4 doesn't do anything better than GTK 3, in fact it's worse in several aspects - no accessibility, no theming, blurry text rendering (Emanuelle Bassi response: "What makes you think sharpness is a metric?"), worse performance and tons of bugs with the new renderers they're forcing on everyone with GTK 4.14.

They should port to Qt instead, or collaborate with other projects to fork GTK 3.

I've rarely read so many incorrect statements in just one sentence. I could go into the details, but I think you already decided for yourself that GTK4 is bad, so you don't care about the truth anyway. Surely all GTK devs are part of a conspiracy about making GTK a bad UI toolkit in order to ruin the Linux desktop.

[ssokolow]

I've rarely read so many incorrect statements in just one sentence. I could go into the details, but I think you already decided for yourself that GTK4 is bad, so you don't care about the truth anyway. Surely all GTK devs are part of a conspiracy about making GTK a bad UI toolkit in order to ruin the Linux desktop.

That may be true, but when one person is giving details and the other is just saying "wrong", the bystanders tend to assume the person with details is telling the truth.

(Also, I've actually seen the drama surrounding font rendering firsthand. I think I saw motion in the direction of things getting better a few months ago, but that "We're going to copy Apple's font rendering decisions without handing out free HiDPI displays to make the hardware that people have match what Apple's software was optimized for" part is true.)

[Eberhardt]

That may be true, but when one person is giving details and the other is just saying "wrong", the bystanders tend to assume the person with details is telling the truth.

I don't waste my time anymore disproving empty claims. Most people here know they're wrong and if they don't, a simple internet search is enough. He didn't provide evidence, so I don't bother with it either. I just happen to have used GTK4 as a developer for years and even made a small contribution at one point, but it seems that I'm still not as well informed about the topic as some forum members here.

[ssokolow]

I don't waste my time anymore disproving empty claims. Most people here know they're wrong and if they don't, a simple internet search is enough. He didn't provide evidence, so I don't bother with it either. I just happen to have used GTK4 as a developer for years and even made a small contribution at one point, but it seems that I'm still not as well informed about the topic as some forum members here.

That's fair. My understanding is that what's being referred to is:

• No accessibility: Wayland's accessibility story is still immature and GTK 4 is focused on being Wayland-first.
• No theming: People are upset that so many libhandy widgets were rolled into libadwaita where people writing non-libadwaita applications can't use them and feel that it's a passive-aggressive deprecation of non-libadwaita apps overall.
• Blurry text rendering: The situation I mentioned where, as one Reddit commenter put it, "to find [that gtk-hint-font-metrics=true exists], you have to go two levels deep in the bugtracker, and it's behind a closed door with the "Beware of the leopard" sign" (And I could be wrong, but given the talk I remember in the GTK issue tracker a few years ago, I think that option either didn't used to work well enough or there were some versions of GTK 4 where it was missing.)
• Worse performance: I can't speak to this, since I'm a KDE user who upgraded from PyGTK (GTK+ 2.x, because it was "the tookit everyone had installed for something") to PyQt 5 (Qt 5) for my own development (partly because I got fed up with reinventing things that Qt just gives you for free... most infamously, this). It wouldn't surprise me though. The addition of things like proper Unicode support made GTK+ 2.x slower than GTK+ 1.2.x.
• Tons of bugs with the new renderers they're forcing on everyone with GTK 4.14: Again, I can't speak to this. Due to the apparent inability of KDE's Breeze theme for non-libadwaita GTK 3 apps like Inkscape to disable the CSD shadows on context menus (which turn into giant black borders when mpv fullscreens on another monitor), I've been trying my darnedest to find comparable non-GTK replacements for all the GTK apps on my system since they started switching over to GTK 3 and it's likely Inkscape will be the only GTK thing left by the time something ports to GTK 4. (Heck, I'm hoping to evaluate Krita as a replacement for my GIMP workflow before GIMP 3 comes out and takes me off GTK+ 2.x for it.)

[Weasel]

I've rarely read so many incorrect statements in just one sentence. I could go into the details, but I think you already decided for yourself that GTK4 is bad, so you don't care about the truth anyway. Surely all GTK devs are part of a conspiracy about making GTK a bad UI toolkit in order to ruin the Linux desktop.

And nothing he said was wrong. Keep simping.

[Mateus Felipe]

Did someone use this editor and can share their experience?

Video editing in Linux, at least if we consider open source alternatives, has always been terrible.

The better editor I used was Kdenlive, but it still was very featureless and crashed often. I also used Open shot and another one that I don't remember the name.

'Ive never heard of this Flowblade before.

[sophisticles]

Did someone use this editor and can share their experience?

Video editing in Linux, at least if we consider open source alternatives, has always been terrible.

The better editor I used was Kdenlive, but it still was very featureless and crashed often. I also used Open shot and another one that I don't remember the name.

'Ive never heard of this Flowblade before.

I have tried it but I can't see why anyone would want to use it.

In order of preference:

1) FCP on Mac

2) Adobe Premiere

3) Lightworks, works on Linux but do not recommend it

4) Resolve, works on Linux but do not recommend it

5) Vegas, and cheaper variants

6) Shotcut, for me, the best open source, legally free option, prefer using it on Windows but have used it on Linux as well

7) Avidemux, I use this all the time, if some development money was put into this project, would probably be pro grade.

8) Everything else.

[Eberhardt]

That's fair. My understanding is that what's being referred to is:

• No accessibility: Wayland's accessibility story is still immature and GTK 4 is focused on being Wayland-first.
• No theming: People are upset that so many libhandy widgets were rolled into libadwaita where people writing non-libadwaita applications can't use them and feel that it's a passive-aggressive deprecation of non-libadwaita apps overall.
• Blurry text rendering: The situation I mentioned where, as one Reddit commenter put it, "to find [that gtk-hint-font-metrics=true exists], you have to go two levels deep in the bugtracker, and it's behind a closed door with the "Beware of the leopard" sign" (And I could be wrong, but given the talk I remember in the GTK issue tracker a few years ago, I think that option either didn't used to work well enough or there were some versions of GTK 4 where it was missing.)
• Worse performance: I can't speak to this, since I'm a KDE user who upgraded from PyGTK (GTK+ 2.x, because it was "the tookit everyone had installed for something") to PyQt 5 (Qt 5) for my own development (partly because I got fed up with reinventing things that Qt just gives you for free... most infamously, this). It wouldn't surprise me though. The addition of things like proper Unicode support made GTK+ 2.x slower than GTK+ 1.2.x.
• Tons of bugs with the new renderers they're forcing on everyone with GTK 4.14: Again, I can't speak to this. Due to the apparent inability of KDE's Breeze theme for non-libadwaita GTK 3 apps like Inkscape to disable the CSD shadows on context menus (which turn into giant black borders when mpv fullscreens on another monitor), I've been trying my darnedest to find comparable non-GTK replacements for all the GTK apps on my system since they started switching over to GTK 3 and it's likely Inkscape will be the only GTK thing left by the time something ports to GTK 4. (Heck, I'm hoping to evaluate Krita as a replacement for my GIMP workflow before GIMP 3 comes out and takes me off GTK+ 2.x for it.)

Thanks for doing the job of debunking your statement yourself.

In your own words you say, that accessibility exists (albeit not in an ideal state), that theming is not a problem of GTK4 itself, blurry text rendering has a fix (AFAIK the workaround isn't necessary since quite some time now), you have no idea about performance because you don't use GTK4 apps and the same story regarding the bugs.

TL;DR you made all claims up, despite actually knowing they were wrong for the most part.

I get it that you don't like GTK4. I don't like the look and feel of Qt for instance. But I know that's just a question of personal taste. I would never rant about KDE stuff because I rarely use it and I think they are doing a great job, it's just not for me.