GTK 4.4 Released With Continued NGL Improvements, Inspector By Default

[ssokolow]

When GNOME 3 messed up the desktop experience, people created MATE and Cinnamon as forks. But this time the mess is at GTK the groundwork, which is going to be a lot harder to fork....

*nod* So far, the most I've seen is the gtk3-classic patchset in AUR and the gtk3-nocsd
package on Ubuntu (by PCMan, author of PCManFM and originator of LXDE), both intended to revert GNOME-isms in non-GNOME GTK-based desktops... and PCMan is one of those people who started to port from GTK2 to GTK3 and decided "Eff it, I'm just going to port to Qt instead".

[chocolate]

Which is the dishonesty I was objecting to that you then quoted as "inciting a flamewar"! :P But, on to more important things...

I meant it in the context of accusing specific users of fanboyism, I should have phrased it better. As for the rest, I agree with you 100%.

Remember, this is NOT "open-source developers working hard on passion projects in their spare time", despite their constant PR pretenses, but EMPLOYEES.

Oh, I know. My post was implicitly ironic every time I wrote "volunteer" without quotes. The entirety of it served to sum up GNOME's general rhetoric.

In reality volunteers are absolutely excluded from GNOME, because they simply aren't part of the tribe, let alone making up the bulk of its contributors.

This is why I myself have sometimes referred to GNOME as a circlejerk (or tribe, as you say) despite using its software, suggesting it to people, and to this day remaining a user of its ecosystem while researching other shell/desktop options. I'm not a big fan of calling names, and I'm not proud of a lot of things I said in the past, but on the other hand, the receivers haven't shown any remorse themselves, judging by their ongoing GitLab activity. I personally want to avoid raising pitchforks against individuals like they did, as an organization, against R. Stallman. I don't want to risk falling as low as them on that front. I'll just accept that GNOME is composed of flawed people, as we all are, and see the good in what they do, and take it.
Too bad. I'm amazed they still put out any software at all, given how poisoned it seems to be as a work environment, let a lone a volunteering environment.

I wouldn't really care about it much, but there is absolutely no hope of this situation improving. This isn't "one bad apple" or any of the usual excuses that get trotted out every time a company gets "caught" - it's the corporate culture, through and through. Anyone unwilling to play along, anyone who admits that mistakes were made, is marginalized; and new staff learn from the example set by their new colleagues and the leaders: that lying, playing the victim, deflecting blame, and attacking the lusers is how to "win".

This seems to be spot on to me. You never see a new name come up unless it's backed by corporate money, which in itself wouldn't be so bad, except in this case it's required to get past the "tribe friction" in the first place. I've somewhat followed the discussions round GNOME Shell 40 and there have been several "nobodies" suggesting variations to the original, flawed design, but in the end that's exactly what we got. And some of the suggested stuff looked fairly alright. I believe at that time there were already live coding sessions implementing the original design while naive souls were trying to influence it through mockups on GitLab. That says all, to be honest.

GNOME has strategic value to RH, despite their minimal interest in the desktop market. Even if the RH in your head is the tiny independent operation of 20 years ago rather than the commercial entity it's actually been for a decade, you'd have to be naive beyond words to imagine that *IBM* would even think twice.

Unfortunately, my worldview hasn't been that candid since a long time ago. :')

Still, it's hardly the first time we've seen this, and it won't be anything like the last. I'm tired of it, and I'm especially tired of having to waste my time needing to *say* "Yes, this is a BAD thing" to people who are apparently either teen edgelords, sociopaths or paid shills. Time I'm done wasting for tonight.

Well, this is already the general consensus anyway. Just look at the emoji reactions on the subject issue thread. The "tribe" gets facepalms, the "nobodies" get thumbs up.

TL;DR - sign... more GNOME drama, dishonesty, and denigration and dismissal of users. Nothing will change.

Denigrated is exactly how GNOME has made me feel for far too long now. But curated GTK apps are mostly still fine, design-wise, and look beautiful. And libadwaita is indeed an important achievement both in consistency and functionality. And if GNOME Shell appeals to a newcomer, it's still the right thing to recommend purely out of FOSS principles.

[billyswong]

Judging from the ticket thread, the "maintainers" seems to be in the thinking "code it yourself (and good luck if we accept your merge request) if you want to implement dual codepaths, one for animated text and one for static text, with also the detection and switching mechanism (and we will reject any merge request that only do a revert back to old style text rendering)". Meanwhile most consumers (and developers of other projects) that are suffering are thinking "just revert the codepath to the old one until you guys who care the 'wobble' so much implement the dual codepaths".

The blind rejection on hinting by "maintainers" also show why GTK still can't handle fractional scaling and why it likely never would (perhaps until some head-rolling happens). For fractional scaled UI in proper, UI element borders are supposed to either maintain integer pixel width and position themselves like applying font hinting to them (which is what Windows doing), or do subpixel AA on one direction and apply hinting to the orthogonal direction (which might surpass Windows in prettiness). But since they reject hinting this much, they tied their hand on proper fractional UI scaling.

When GNOME 3 messed up the desktop experience, people created MATE and Cinnamon as forks. But this time the mess is at GTK the groundwork, which is going to be a lot harder to fork....

[arQon]

This is the same gaslighting that is going on in issue threads.

Which is the dishonesty I was objecting to that you then quoted as "inciting a flamewar"! :P But, on to more important things...

By the time you reach the point where people are trumpeting their lies without any hint of shame, and then playing the victim when called on it, flamewars should be the *least* of anybody's concerns. There are much bigger systemic issues at work here. This just happens to be most recent result of those problems, and one that was ridiculous enough to actually make it to a *forum*. Not even an actual article, just a forum post.

How many times in the last 5-10 years do you think *exactly this same thing* has happened, with Classen jumping into bugtracker threads and shutting them down as "NOTABUG, WONTFIX, SHUT UP, SHUT UP, SHUT UP!" at the first sign the peons are daring to question the perfection of the GNOME team? I barely pay attention to GNOME, and even I've seen it dozens of times.
How about all the times GNOME devs have simply ignored bug reports entirely, for similar reasons of arrogance and inability to admit fault?

Remember, this is NOT "open-source developers working hard on passion projects in their spare time", despite their constant PR pretenses, but EMPLOYEES.
If nvidia released a driver that was this badly botched, and then refused to fix it, users would at least have multiple recourses, from bitching at nvidia support all the way up to "don't buy nvidia next time". When GNOME does it though, what are your options? Switch to a Qt-based desktop and have to retrain everyone / replace all your default apps / etc? Fork a billion lines of code written by people either so technically inept that they don't even see this is as a bug, or so dishonest that they're willing to lie about it, or both?

after all, it's volunteer work

Except it's not. And yet, even as someone involved enough to have had an account *here* for 5 years, you mistakenly think it is, and you're far from the only one. Shows how well the PR campaign was handled. In reality volunteers are absolutely excluded from GNOME, because they simply aren't part of the tribe, let alone making up the bulk of its contributors.

I wouldn't really care about it much, but there is absolutely no hope of this situation improving. This isn't "one bad apple" or any of the usual excuses that get trotted out every time a company gets "caught" - it's the corporate culture, through and through. Anyone unwilling to play along, anyone who admits that mistakes were made, is marginalized; and new staff learn from the example set by their new colleagues and the leaders: that lying, playing the victim, deflecting blame, and attacking the lusers is how to "win".

The "just fork it" line can't go anywhere. That's fine if all you're dealing with is a small project, and/or you can expect at least SOME of the current devs to be as frustrated as the users are with how things are going - but RedHat has poured millions into GNOME for years now, and the idea of a fork is no longer viable without either funding; or an unreasonable time commitment from actual volunteers, with a significant delay getting started.
Even if a new "sugar daddy" could be found, which isn't going to happen (Ubuntu is obviously the only candidate, and they already got burned with Unity), RH has more than enough clout to ensure that packages use "their" fork, and has already shown itself willing to "encourage" that among other *cough* "totally independent, honest" projects that they happen to fund.

GNOME has strategic value to RH, despite their minimal interest in the desktop market. Even if the RH in your head is the tiny independent operation of 20 years ago rather than the commercial entity it's actually been for a decade, you'd have to be naive beyond words to imagine that *IBM* would even think twice.

Still, it's hardly the first time we've seen this, and it won't be anything like the last. I'm tired of it, and I'm especially tired of having to waste my time needing to *say* "Yes, this is a BAD thing" to people who are apparently either teen edgelords, sociopaths or paid shills. Time I'm done wasting for tonight.

TL;DR - sign... more GNOME drama, dishonesty, and denigration and dismissal of users. Nothing will change.

[ssokolow]

Let's make a noise about switching to another toolkit because...

It's not that I have anything ideologically against GNOME... I'm just sticking to the de facto standard UI elements that evolved through the 90s and 2000s as something you could expect in common between Windows, macOS, Qt, GTK, and various more minor toolkits.

As GNOME drags GTK-based apps off that common ground, I replace them with alternatives that have stayed in the common ground... same way that, were I on Windows, I'd actively look to reconfigure or replace anything that adopted that annoying Ribbon.

[onlyLinuxLuvUBack]

My eyesight is going bad is there a difference in the images ?
Wont increasing the font size fix any issue?

[grok]

wow
WTF
Font rendering has always been great on GTK2 and GTK3, even in grayscale which you need when your monitor doesn't have subpixels. The hinting setting was there.
So the fix is, use GTK2 and GTK3 software.
Perhaps Debian 11 has no GTK4 software?
I won't mind if some things switch to GTK4, e.g. Gnome headerbar stuff. Why? Because I find these good enough as "applets" such as the calculator. Try calculator, Maps, games on a normal desktop. It's ok. You get to keep the menu bar and title bar on everything else.

A big thank you to those of you who are grinding your teeth and nails while either this will be fixed before I suffer it or I will be able to ignore it.

[reba]

I always hate when people say that. Imagine if that were common place:

Doctor: “Don't complain about your broken leg if you can't put a cast on it yourself!!!”
Garage: “Don't complain about your brakes not working if you can't fix them yourself!!!”
Government: “Don't complain about your house being destroyed by an uncommon hurricane/tsunami/flood if you can't fix it yourself!!!”

In this case it's more like:

"Don't complain about the hole I shot through your eye if you can't fix it yourself."

[Vistaus]

Another stupidity is, some people act like "don't complain if you can't fix it yourself" is a valid response for all bugs.

I always hate when people say that. Imagine if that were common place:

Doctor: “Don't complain about your broken leg if you can't put a cast on it yourself!!!”
Garage: “Don't complain about your brakes not working if you can't fix them yourself!!!”
Government: “Don't complain about your house being destroyed by an uncommon hurricane/tsunami/flood if you can't fix it yourself!!!”

[Vistaus]

It's bad, yes, but let's not turn this into a flamewar as almost always happens in GNOME and KDE threads. Aren't we just a bunch of blind people throwing stones at each other?

Fact is, someone doing volunteer work for which you should be unconditionally grateful does not want you to call such a problem a "bug" or a "regression". So you're deprived of the only useful terms to describe such a thing from the get-go. And the tone they use to do that is nothing short of lapidary.
How should the discussion go forward? How can it be considered inclusive and welcoming? Somewhat of a rhetorical question, but I honestly don't know what the expectation is.

Then there's the intellectual dishonesty of not acknowledging the new renderer made it into final, released software in users' computers while not being able to actually render glyphs that the previous renderer handled just fine (billyswong's comment).

One can appreciate the GNOME ecosystem, the apps, the interface guidelines, the achievements of GTK and libadwaita, all the beautiful things... but there is just no commitment to a well-defined set of goals and no accountability whatsoever.
This is the toolkit powering the "standard" enterprise desktop and you're expected to be sorry for bringing these problems up to the volunteers, as if you shouldn't dare annoy them with your real-world scenarios and usecases. Luckily, this is too big to just shield away from an individual's infantile, concealed idea of code purity, which is what I imagine is going on.

Talk about these things? The place is "hostile". Ask something on their GitLab and there's no response ready? The discussion is "heated". Reminds me of another kind of garden decoration.

I get that they are mostly a bunch of volunteers, but there are quite a few volunteers around and readibility should be a top priority. If you can't read text, then how are you supposed to use it? So IMHO, even if they are limited to volunteers, they should allocate more volunteers to work on making text readable.