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

[Guest]

Flatpak is wasting disk space, download speed and security.

Waste of disk space?
Yes, why have two runtimes? a native one and flatpak one.
waste of download speed?
Correct. Refer to the answer of the first question.
Security?
This is wrong. Flatpak is excellent for security. Sandboxing generally is. The only issue is that people are way too obsessed with security beyond what is really required. Even Linus Torvalds criticized security freaks and idolizing security experts.

I've seen people go out of their ways to try to make Windows XP users upgrade because it will limit malware spread. And that's completely retarded. Windows XP SP3 was very usable with very little points of pain. If hardware upgrades were not required, I would still use XP SP3.

[Vistaus]

> 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.

If your code is written in C, you can use autoport to port from GTK3 to 4: https://github.com/baedert/autoport

[Vistaus]

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.

Now I know you're a Debian lover and promoter, but this post sounded very much like an ad.

[FastCode]

As a gtk-sharp 3 user, I welcome all these changes. Anything that makes widgets less memory hungry is very welcome.

[Ray_o]

When you install Debian, you need to install wicd and alsamixerqui and remove networkmanager and pulseaudio. If you want to have a stable system.

Debian sid with xfce, networkmanager and pulseaudio and my system is very stable.

[Weasel]

Even Linus Torvalds criticized security freaks and idolizing security experts.

"Even"? It's just a sensible thing to do in this case. Paranoid wackos are not sane.

[rmfx]

They can break as many things as they want as long as they make Gtk4 future proof and better designed. Many devs moan about the compatibility but if you want a solid system you need time to time to break the dusty backward compatibility severly in order to implement new features the right way. I hope they go this way.

[starshipeleven]

I've seen people go out of their ways to try to make Windows XP users upgrade because it will limit malware spread. And that's completely retarded. Windows XP SP3 was very usable with very little points of pain. If hardware upgrades were not required, I would still use XP SP3.

usability and security are two different things. XP was a cesspool security-wise even when it was supported. Using it on any device accessing the internet is retarded.

[xiando]

I'm not excited. gtk4 will probably break everything and be a lot worse given the Gnome ToolKit developers track-record. That's not what it's named but that's basically their view. They make some changes to gtk and make changes to gnome so that it still works and when everything else breaks as a results it's all fine.

As an example of annoying, it used to be possible to change the toolbar icon sizes and other icon sizes in gtk3 applications with a settings.ini line like
gtk-icon-sizes="gtk-large-toolbar=48,48:gtk-small-toolbar=32,32:gtk-menu=32,32:gtk-dialog=48,48:gtk-button=32,32:gtk-dnd=32,32anel-applications-menu=32,32anel-directory-menu=32,32"

This still works with gtk2, it used to work with gtk3 but the GTK developers decided that having configuration options may be confusing and make various GNOME/GTK desktops look differently so that feature was removed. In KDE programs it's as simple as right-clicking the toolbar and selecting Icon size (and you can choose globally in systemsettings5).

I could go on listing features gtk doesn't have not because there was no patch or code to implement it and not because it didn't use to have the feature, there's so many features that are not there either because they were rejected or removed.

I know this sounds harsh but after watching the development of gtk over the years I would be happy if everyone in control of that toolkit died in a horrible car accident. Either less controlling people would take over or everyone would switch to Qt, either way the situation would improve.

GTKs file-picker has been a running joke since 2004 https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=141154

[Britoid]

I'm not excited. gtk4 will probably break everything and be a lot worse given the Gnome ToolKit developers track-record. That's not what it's named but that's basically their view. They make some changes to gtk and make changes to gnome so that it still works and when everything else breaks as a results it's all fine.

It won't break anything. If an app hasn't been updated for GTK4 yet, and which the changes are much minor compared to GTK 2->3, it will still compile against GTK 3.