GTK 4.0 Toolkit Officially Released

[Anarchy]

We can certainly debate whether it's feasible to use C++ for library development, but for application development, using C is really inefficient, and even C++ is not so attractive given the success of electron-based VSCode.
Thus, while the core part of Gnome ecosystem might be Okay, the applications part may not be able to lure enough new developers.

For most apps, something along the way of electron, react native or flutter might be the way long term. they're definitely much easier to use for developing GUIs and offer quick solutions for most problems. Maybe someone who needs to do something specific will have to use java, gtk or qt, but the vast majority of homies will just stick to the dumbest simplest multiplatform toolkit. This is kinda already happening with apps such as vscode and slack -- they're kinda awful and look weird, but no one really cares.

[muncrief]

Good lord, can we finally use variables in themes? Or are we still stuck with hard coding thousands of colors, transparencies, sizes, and other parameters the good old fashioned 1980's way?

[poncho524]

Will they actually bother w decent documentation now?

[Sonadow]

I looked at the GTK4 widget demos, and none of them jumped out at me as something I wanted to have or use in all the OSS apps I already know, and like using. My desktop is already sufficiently sexy enough, thank you very much.

Just when desktop environments like XFCE, MATE and Pantheon were settling in very nicely to GTK3, this churn had to tortuously come along and very possibly majorly set back the deliverable productivity of a very large pile of developers, package maintainers, and distro maintainers, for no really compelling reason for the end user.

That intensely high productivity cost of retooling a huge number of the widgets in apps will very likely beleaguer the OSS world for years and years. And the popularity of Desktop Linux will probably still, at that future time, be pegged right at the 2% desktop marketshare it's always had for a very long time now.

I implore any OSS developer whose salary is not bankrolled by the likes of Redhat/IBM to just continue using GTK3 for as long as feasibly possible, pretending GTK4 had never been invented, until you are pretty much dragged kicking and screaming.

With that kind of mindset, you should just stick with GTK1 and Qt1.

[calc]

I'm not sure this is a programming language problem. It looks like there's no community around the gtk/gnome project, it's just red hat employees with a few contributions by canonical, debian and collabora. I guess it's fine as long as red hat is alive, but this doesn't look that great beyond that. Very disappointing, by looking at these figures I don't even see the point of making gtk4 in the first place.

That's exactly what it looks like, without Red Hat and Canonical it would likely die.

The long decline after 2010 until the uptick in 2018 also marks when Ubuntu had stopped using Gnome and switched to Unity with 11.04 until they switched to Gnome 3 with 17.10.

[oleid]

Good lord, can we finally use variables in themes? Or are we still stuck with hard coding thousands of colors, transparencies, sizes, and other parameters the good old fashioned 1980's way?

GTK theming is fully CSS based. I'm not a web designer, however, if I recall correctly,
CSS is a big variable definition itself, isn't it?

[waitman]

"With that kind of mindset, you should just stick with GTK1 and Qt1."

Are these better than Motif?

[You-]

, for no really compelling reason for the end user.[/B]

There are plenty of new features for developers. these will eventually impact the end users too.

One direct benefit is potentially better performance. Look at the fishbowl demoand compare it with GTK3. hundreds of icons in GTK slow it down, while GTK4 can handle thousands.

The changes in data structure and list models etc should also help massively ease and speed up many use cases.

[pal666]

is it still based on c?

its c++ bindings is still better than qt

[pal666]

You’re saying open source as though to imply the project isn’t funded by corporations and has full time staff.

the real question is how much did you pay for it in return for taking your stupid ideas into consideration?