In Road To Qt, Audacious Switches From GTK3 Back To GTK2

[oleid]

• A stable api. Gnome has been removing stuff they don't use from gtk. They haven't kept api stable either.

If that is the "point of major releases", then how is this a complaint about Qt? GTK+ does that to. However, GTK+ they also breaks API in minor releases. Not everything, but some things.

They deprecate stuff in minor releases and remove stuff in mayor releases. In minor releases, even the ABI is stable. I can run GTK+2 apps, which where compiled some 10 years ago (if I add symbolic links to the library file names).

• Native look on gnome/kde/lxqt/windows/mac. Doing that will expand their audience greatly. It's also nice to be able to use your favorite media player no matter which os you are currently on. (Allot of people duel boot)

The last time I checked, GTK looked native on Windows and MacOS (apart from the global menu).

Gnome3 (hard dependencies on systemd anyone?)

Oh not again this urban legend.



By the way: considering the double decoration I found this bug report:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=729721

So it seems, that this issue is going to be ironed out in a more generic way. One reason less for reverting to GTK2.

[stqn]

Qt should be the new standard, really. But it needs to drop the proprietary version. Become the "SDL of desktop applications".

It also needs a C API? Not that I want to use C, I?d prefer Go. But a C API would make it easier than C++ to use other languages, including Go.

[kigurai]

[LIST][*]Native look on gnome/kde/lxqt/windows/mac. Doing that will expand their audience greatly. It's also nice to be able to use your favorite media player no matter which os you are currently on. (Allot of people duel boot)

I am not sure why everyone is so upset about "native look". I, like a lot of people, dual boot, and I don't think any of the applications I use in Windows could be said to have a "native look". A lot of applications simply have "their own look". So why is it so bad that GTK apps look like GTK apps, and Qt apps look like Qt apps?
Granted, I too would love if all applications I use would look like they belonged to a unified whole. But this has *never* been the case over the decades I've been using computers, regardless of OS or DE. To me it feels more like coming up with arguments to why Gtk is bad, because, you know, the Internet has decided that all things related to GNOME suck.

[Grawp]

So tired of these hyperbolic statements (and decisions) about Gtk+!

If you just read the forums and angry devs, it would sound as if Gtk+3 is completely unsable, breaks everything on every version, is designed only for GNOME (and tablets?!), while Qt was a perfect frameworks that works everywhere and is a pleasure to use.

The fact is that Qt has its own set of costs: you must use C++ (which not everybody likes), and it uses a very strange C++ preprocessor at that. It also breaks APIs upon every major release (that's the point of major releases, you know). For sure, Gtk+ gives me some headaches, but so does Qt, as does Cocoa, WxWidgets, Swing, MFC, the Android UI, Ext JS, etc.

Let me tell you a secret: the countless widget frameworks out there all offer pretty much the same set of features, and no particular one is that much better than the others.

Gtk+ has some really good things going for it: it is based on C (many of us prefer that over C++, it definitely offers much better debuggabality), but allows to use the Vala/Genie languages (which are great and turn into C code), it has very good cross-language binding support, is forward-looking enough that it supports Wayland and some mobile technologies, and is backed by a big-enough project that you know that it will continue being developed and fixed. I've found that upgrading my apps (written in Genie) from Gtk+2 to Gtk+3 was not so hard at all, as hard as any major revision upgrade.

But, yeah, let the Audacious devs use whatever they like. I'll continue using it because it's a great app.

You know, when you disregard STL (which QT doesn't use anyway) and compare just the languages the old 98 C++ is from 99% just syntax sugar on top of C and early compilers translated C++ to C! You can think of operators as ordinary functions (which they almost are), structs as hidden pointers, templates as big juicy macros.....

[oleid]

You know, when you disregard STL (which QT doesn't use anyway) and compare just the languages the old 98 C++ is from 99% just syntax sugar on top of C and early compilers translated C++ to C! You can think of operators as ordinary functions (which they almost are), structs as hidden pointers, templates as big juicy macros.....

Personally, I like C++, however, I see the need for a toolkit with a good C API, as there are still languages out there, which can't link to C++ code.

Considering Qt: I like STL and I don't like that Qt doesn't use it. I know this used to be due to historic deficits of STL implementations, but it's not the case anymore.

[Alliancemd]

Re

Well, that was always a problem with GTK, it is developed by Gnome developers for the Gnome desktop environment. If you use GTK for something else you will meet only ignorance from them...
They needed client side decoration for Gnome, they change GTK to do that...

Qt is a different story, it has no development ties to KDE, KDE is a separate project, Qt the same... And when it comes to the community and documentation, Qt and GTK are just the opposite... And it's understandable, since Qt was always a product for the clients to develop software and they always concentrated on support and documentation while GTK was never intended to be used outside of "Gnome on Linux".

[TheBlackCat]

They deprecate stuff in minor releases and remove stuff in mayor releases. In minor releases, even the ABI is stable. I can run GTK+2 apps, which where compiled some 10 years ago (if I add symbolic links to the library file names).

Tell that to theme developers.

[oleid]

Tell that to theme developers.

I've no experience with GTK+ theme engine development. Can't comment on that...

[FLHerne]

The guy who used to develop QtCurve-GTK3 had a good blog-post on that, with quotes from quite a few other gtk3 theme devs and some spectacular ones from GNOME devs.

It seems that since he wrote that many others have given up developing themes too - there are hardly any that are actively developed and work with recent gtk3 (and no, nothing that was made for gtk 3.6 works anymore). No more gtk3 apps on my desktop now.

[ua=42]

The last time I checked, GTK looked native on Windows and MacOS (apart from the global menu).

Ummmm. Nope. GTK doesn't adjust (automatically) depending on your desktop. Even when the theme is set correctly (manually by the program writer or by the user), the save/open/etc dialogs don't look native. This is actually a much more PITA on linux where you can change what desktop you are using. If you use a non-defualt color config in kde... forget ever having gnome apps look good at all.

I can run GTK+2 apps, which where compiled some 10 years ago

Thats the problem. We're talking about GTK 3, not gtk 2. If they had kept the old policy of not removing interfaces, then very few developers would be switching as the only major concern would be the non-native look when not using a gtk based desktop.

They deprecate stuff in minor releases and remove stuff in mayor releases.

Yes. Bugfix (3.x.x) releases are stable. The removal/changing of behavior/apis during 3.x release is the problem. Most api's only add features for stable releases and only remove stuff after many many many years of it being in the api in a major release. Gtk 2 didn't remove interfaces, only added. They waited until Gtk 3 to come out to remove api's. Same with python, they didn't remove anything until version 3 (and won't again until there is a version 4). This saves people who want to use your api allot of headaches. GTK hasn't been doing that and it's a major reason that developers have been leaving gtk.