Fedora 29 Xfce Might Upgrade To 4.13 Desktop Packages

[M@GOid]

I believe that (relatively) small projects like XFCE cannot exist on their own, they depend on infrastructure like GTK. So if the foundation you build in is changing, you have to change with it.

For example, if XFCE was intended for a 10 year server distro like Red Hat, you can relax and only fix bugs. But XFCE use cases also includes distros that change every year, or 6 months in the case of Ubuntu/Fedora. Wayland, Pulseaudio, SystemD, etc, all those things always updating, can make things difficult if you intend to stick with old tech like GTK2.

So some distros might chose to purge XFCE packages from their repos, if they cannot use what is in place on modern distros. Look at KDE 3, for example. People will say that in its last days, it was light, consumed less RAM, was feature full and stable. But today, no one want to touch that, because it would be a dependency hell to integrate on modern distros. There will be a time in the future, were GTK 2 will not be available (as default) anymore, so if XFCE want to be part of a selection of DE to choose from, they will have to be able of utilizing the infrastructure in place, and that means GTK 3.

[starshipeleven]

Wayland, Pulseaudio, SystemD, etc, all those things always updating, can make things difficult if you intend to stick with old tech like GTK2.

*sYsTèmD

[waxhead]

While GTK3 is probably an improvement in many ways it is definitively NOT an improvement in usability and I agree with both Weasel and Candy in their point of views. GUI's today seem to be designed by cellphone hipsters that have ZERO and I mean ZERO understanding of what makes a sensible and usable GUI.
if it looks "good" from a distance this is all that matters for these weird people. They apparently never use it and don't care about consistency since they happily jump on to the next GUI adventure because they need to improve , and redesign, and make new concepts all the time.

I actually think that we are soon enough people to start a small organization TGR - The-GUI-Resistance - anyone with me?

[Weasel]

I agree with most of your points, but do note that GTK3 has one improvement over GTK2: support for hidpi. Yes, I know that there is some kind of workaround for GTK2, but for the average user, who just wants a working desktop out-of-the-box, hidpi by default is certainly a nice improvement in GTK3 over GTK2. (me not included, btw, as my screen is 1920x1080)

That's something I can't argue with -- so thanks for answering my question! (yes, again, it was not rhetorical, even if it seemed like a smartass question, it wasn't). I mean the user himself can make decisions then whether such improvements are worth it or not, so it's good piece of info.

Actually this is not entirely true!

Xfce worked but the software was neither finished nor was it solid. Infact Thunar had long time issues with various versions with glib. Whenever it entered some file copying or other stuff the thing simply crashed. It took the developers quite a long time figuring out the cause and working around it.

What I like to explain is this: With the conversion to Gtk3 the people who were working on the code also took the time cleaning the code up. Removing deprecated and old junk and opened up the code for the next iteration that may come in the future. A much cleaner and solid code base than before (more or less).

Does it give any benefits to the end user ? Comparing to 4.12 ? Dunno. Debian most likely still use 4.10 with their current distros.

Was the port necessary ? Dunno! Blame it to the people who wrote Gtk+

I do blame it on the GTK people, all the time (but not the topic). Cleaning the code rarely has any real improvement to the usage of the software, it's mostly for development purposes. It's a good thing, but it is completely off the topic we're talking about.

We're not talking about XFCE's internal changes here, but rather the fact that 4.13 might be included in Fedora 29, and there "code maintenance" means exactly *zero* since the development isn't even done in Fedora to begin with!

On BeOS or AmigaOS, people rearely update their toolkits. Though on Amiga there were a bunch like Intuition, GadTools, MUI, Reaction ... only to name some prominent ones. People wrote Programs using all kind of Toolkits. But nowadays people seem to be settling with either MUI or Reaction as their default Toolkit. Once written and 20 years be it like this. Some classes get added but nothing removed. No major API changes or major rewrites.

I remember one of your earlier replies where you said that Microsoft never changes API. Instead they add new functions but maintain compatibility with old stuff, so the things still work.

On Linux this doesn't seem to be a valid approach. Things get changed. Concepts get changed. Stuff gets re-implemented and people follow.

Nah, it's a perfectly valid approach on Linux. Good to know that BeOS and AmigaOS are also sane OSes, thumbs up, I wasn't aware of it.

People have this misconception that it's Microsoft vs the world that do it, but no, it's Linux vs the world. More specifically, it's the Linux userland library developers who are the black sheep. This "approach" would work just fine on Linux, they just don't want to, and I don't want to use bad words now but you know my opinion of them...

Well it's unfair to say "Linux" is not sane, because the kernel (Linux) is perfectly fine. And so are many of the userland libraries. It's just some of them and unfortunately they're very uhm "essential", like toolkits, that have insane policies.

[ThanosApostolou]

Awesome decision in my opinion. I've been using the xfce 4.13 gtk3 packages in manjaro both with my desktop and laptop for the last 3 weeks. Everything works perfectly (even the zoom feature)! Fedora maintainers might find a few issues but there are many months until the next release, so if this change happens fast, then it will be easy to find 2-3 patches to workaround them. In my opinion, the biggest improvements come with xfwm4 4.13 which doesn't cause any serious performance issues (in contrast with 4.12 in certain systems) and it has xpresent support (it also handles CSD gtk apps perfectly but I don't remember if there's any difference to 4.12 version). This change will bring more testers for xfce 4.13 (xubuntu 18.10 will also have most packages updated to 4.13) and bring the 4.14 release closer!

[Adarion]

Ah, good old XFCE. I don't use RH/Fedora, but in general XFCE should be a little more active, release more often. If there is a shortcoming, a bug, or a dependency on an ancient lib, that is no longer officially supported by upstream, it takes ages until you have a release where this is fixed.
And just switching to gtk+:3 may be some work, but I doubt it will improve user experience very much.

Other than that XFCE is valuable when you just need a rather simple desktop and like keep requirements low.

[bwat47]

Stability improvements when it crashes on zoom as you said?

For what?

Seriously, how about naming an actual improvement from 4.12 other than something like "but it uses GTK3" which is completely useless for the usage.

XFWM 4.13 now supports tear free compositing with xpresent or opengl. This is a massive improvement, and if I was an XFCE user it would be reason alone to upgrade imo (I currently use MATE which already supports xpresent)



Also, regarding the posts in this thread where people are claiming GTK3 will destroy usability or something, the move to GTK3 doesn't necessarily mean much will change UI wise (unless the developers doing the port choose to change things)

For example, after MATE moved to GTK3 the interface is 99.9% exactly the same. All the apps have traditional menubars, there are no overlay scrollbars etc... you'd be hard pressed to spot any differences.

I think people are confusing 'Gnome 3' and their very simplified modern UI style with 'GTK3' the toolkit.

You can 100% still have traditional desktop apps with menubars etc... with gtk3. Moving to GTK3 does not mean the apps being turned into gnome style apps. Unless the devs decide they want to change the UI design during the port, moving to GTK3 is largely an 'under the hood' type change.

[Weasel]

XFWM 4.13 now supports tear free compositing with xpresent or opengl. This is a massive improvement, and if I was an XFCE user it would be reason alone to upgrade imo (I currently use MATE which already supports xpresent)

Dunno, I never had tearing with xfwm and OpenGL, but I didn't use it that much because the zoom couldn't "lock" the screen and prevent it from moving when touching the edges, which is really annoying when you zoom a lot for some cases. Not sure if they changed that recently, maybe I should try xfwm again. Compiz is a good example of what a proper "power zoom" functionality should be like. Compiz also allows you to zoom on a specific Window (matching its size) and lock it, with just shortcuts.

[cen1]

Oh I am sure upgrading to dev packages won't backfire..