GTK4 Seeing Text Entry Improvements, Easier To Create Custom Entry Widgets

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GTK4 Seeing Text Entry Improvements, Easier To Create Custom Entry Widgets

Adding to the big list of changes to find with the yet-to-be-released GTK4 toolkit is some refactoring around the entry widgets to improve the text entry experience as well as making it easier to create custom entry widgets outside of GTK...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GTK4-Entry-Improvements

[Candy]

> Adding to the big list of changes to find with the yet-to-be-released GTK4 toolkit

I understand that sentences as follows:

"You are fucked if you try porting your programs from GTK3 to GTK4 or even worse, if you still have some old GTK2 programs around that needs to be portetd"

That's why I try porting my old programs to gtk_object_builder and making usage of Glade for GUI, to avoid messing around with the Toolkit as much as possible.

I also started using wrapper functions in my own code, so I can direct the function calls to either GTK2, GTK3, GTK4 that are located inside subdirs of my own projects. That way I can prevent from messing around in my *own* code.

It was already a big nightmare to get correct widget sizes and positions back, when I moved one of my projects (with a free positioning container) from GTK2 to GTK3, where I realized that all my buttons that used to have 17x17 pixels became 25x25 pixels due to style sheets of the toolkit. It was a nightmare to fix that.

[Britoid]

https://fosspost.org/opinions/are-gt...th-their-plans

This breaks existing API and that the gtk project does all the time. Divide and conquer is the strategy of redhat to keep the gnome3 desktop a live and prevent the Linux desktop success. I have dreamed to port the Xfce desktop to Vulkan. The Vulkan API seems to be quite stable.

The article complains about broken GTK themes which is something that's repeatedly been said isn't supported.

Anyway, the rest of the article is redundant because Flatpak is now a thing and you can easily choose what GTK version you want no matter what the host version is.

[Candy]

Flatpak is now a thing and you can easily choose what GTK version you want no matter what the host version is.

A door openeer for many big and not yet to be throughly measurable problems to come.

[cybertraveler]

https://fosspost.org/opinions/are-gt...th-their-plans

This breaks existing API and that the gtk project does all the time. Divide and conquer is the strategy of redhat to keep the gnome3 desktop a live and prevent the Linux desktop success. I have dreamed to port the Xfce desktop to Vulkan. The Vulkan API seems to be quite stable.

I'm glad that article was written as there was a time when the GTK devs were being unreasonable IMO, however that story is now old and no longer applies to either GTK+ 3 or GTK 4.

GTK+ 3 stabalised the API at version 3.22.

Details here:
https://blog.gtk.org/2016/09/01/vers...romise-in-gtk/

They did release GTK+ 3.24 but the developer Emmanuele Bassi confirmed that 3.24 is backwards compatible with 3.22. He said:

Yes; only new API was added, as requested by applications like Inkscape and
Firefox. There are new deprecations, to ease porting to GTK4, but they can be
disabled. Finally, no theming chages.

source: https://blog.gtk.org/2018/06/23/a-gt...e/#comment-322

So GTK+ 3 is now stable and awesome. It wasn't in the past, but those days are over as judged by their promise and their actions since making the promise.

As for GTK 4: it's a major change so there should be no assumption that it will be in any way backwards compatible. I'm sure the devs are going to some effort to make porting GTK+ 3.x apps to GTK 4 somewhat easier, but I do not fault them at all if they fail to achieve this. In-fact my preference is that they should be ruthless with major changes in order to make each new major version as awesome as possible. However, I think that once a major version is released, it should remain near 100% backwards compatible between successive minor releases: which is what the devs have promised.

I hope you are on the side of truth and now that you know that GTK+ 3.22 is stable you wont tell people otherwise. For that matter, GTK+ 2.24 is also a fixed stable platform and GTK 4.x should be a stable platform from the moment it his 4.0 on release.

[cybertraveler]

Same big job ahead for Xfce developers when they ported from gtk2 to gtk3. Communists like redhat force people to work. The Xfce desktop is ready, it does not need any new features from a toolkit.

1. How is Redhat communist? Communist implies worker or government control over the means of production.

2. How are Redhat forcing people to work? Do they have a gun to the head of some developers? If so, we should send help to those poor developers! /s

3. Xfce devs were not forced to upgrade to GTK+ 3 and they are not forced to upgrade to GTK 4. GTK+ 3 is a nice toolkit IMO. It has a decent set of widgets, it's themeable, has lots of bindings, is a stable API and supports Wayland. I doubt it's going anywhere anytime soon. Even GTK+ 2.x is present on tons of GNU/Linux desktops today.

4. So you're not going to comment about the fact I provided you some new information correcting your old information? If someone corrects me with links to decent information, I like to say something like "ah, thanks. I didn't know that."

[Britoid]

Flatpak is wasting disk space, download speed and security.

https://flatkill.org/

Debian has fast and secure package servers around the world. Debian provides more than a pure OS: it comes with over 51000 packages, precompiled software bundled up in a nice format for easy installation on your machine.

Hows Debian MITM vulnerabilities going that they said were not a security issue and then turned out they indeed were.

And I would hardly call rpms/debs a nice format for installing desktop software.

1. How is Redhat communist? Communist implies worker or government control over the means of production.

2. How are Redhat forcing people to work? Do they have a gun to the head of some developers? If so, we should send help to those poor developers! /s

3. Xfce devs were not forced to upgrade to GTK+ 3 and they are not forced to upgrade to GTK 4. GTK+ 3 is a nice toolkit IMO. It has a decent set of widgets, it's themeable, has lots of bindings, is a stable API and supports Wayland. I doubt it's going anywhere anytime soon. Even GTK+ 2.x is present on tons of GNU/Linux desktops today.

4. So you're not going to comment about the fact I provided you some new information correcting your old information? If someone corrects me with links to decent information, I like to say something like "ah, thanks. I didn't know that."

You can't reason with a person who has no concept of it.

[Candy]

And I would hardly call rpms/debs a nice format for installing desktop software.

Then Linux is clearly the wrong choice for you. People leave Windows and macOS because there are things that they don't like. And yet there are people coming from these platforms and try to turn the thing that is different into yet another Windows and macOS. Sad!

You don't have to use rpm or deb, if you think that this isn't the right way to install desktop apps. Then feel free to leave. But take your stuff with you and stop bothering us.

[fedoragnome]

https://fosspost.org/opinions/are-gt...th-their-plans

This breaks existing API and that the gtk project does all the time. Divide and conquer is the strategy of redhat to keep the gnome3 desktop a live and prevent the Linux desktop success. I have dreamed to port the Xfce desktop to Vulkan. The Vulkan API seems to be quite stable.

Xorg is communist and old, so Xfce is communist. Gnome 3 is modern and clean, plain ALSA is terrible, for people who compile 1000Hz kernels.

[cybertraveler]

Candy - I think there is space for all types in GNU/Linux. It doesn't have to be us vs them. Often it can be "one distro for them and a separate one for us" peacefully co-existing. Sometimes it can even be both combined: IE a system which uses both an old school repository system but also with Flatpaks/snaps/appimages on top.

Personally I like the old school repository systems, but I've also long wanted something just like Flatpak which will allow developers to publish their software in one format which will be widely installable on most GNU/Linux systems. I'm very much hoping the two worlds can live side by side.

Also: I think certain applications are especially well suited to Flatpaks. For instance: proprietary, binary-only video games. Sandboxed (your game doesn't need to access your personal docs). Theming isn't an issue. Dependencies are all included. The tech isn't quite ready yet IMO, but it's getting close.