Ubuntu Developers Working Towards The Eventual Demotion Of GTK2

[Istanbull]

Many things are changing in this world; in the tech sector, things are moving especially fast. There are new device sizes and methods of interaction as well. These new form factors, for many, have replaced the PC. Try using gtk2 apps on a 4" touchscreen.. Try using gtk2 apps on a 27" 4k LCD. lemme know how that user experience is.

The gtk team is well aware of their past mistakes and so is Ubuntu. If Ubuntu wants to remain relevant (this can also be said as: If GNU Linux / Gnome wants a chance at becoming more prominent on the desktop) then Ubuntu needs to cut its losses, change its direction, cut the dead weight and move forward as it has a lot of ground to make up.

Trying to maintain backwards compatibility is a mistake both Windows and OSX share. Neither was able to adapt well enough to become prominent in the smartphone space. Repeating past mistakes with known outcomes is not going to lead to more prominence, nor more developers.. (Most companies / developers are not interested in writing code for an OS with such a low market share.)

I am totally looking forward to Ubuntu's new approach. Cut the dead weight. It's time to move on. Python 2, GTK 2 and X11 must be left in the past where they belong. They are not the right tools to build applications and platforms most of us will want to use in the future.

Moving forward means improvement, iteration, upgrading. The performance benchmarks and user polls on the things Canonical pulled out of it's ass and for GTK+3 tell a different story. There was nothing holding back GTK+2 from having those features implemented, in fact it would've taken less time than writing a new toolkit with a whole new CSS engine and codebase. I am in the view that the real problem is that these communities started preferring marketing over product (making releases that bring nothing new or good, reinventing things for the sake of being able to say "NEW!" without taking care of performance or usability etc). I switched to KDE5 for the time being as Qt5 brings actual improvements over Qt4.

[skewty]

The Ubuntu dev and design teams killed Ubuntu and it's userbase with their decisions. Unity, Amazon spyware, Mir, and now they're removing GTK+2. They need to bring back the old teams of devs and designers both in Gnome and Ubuntu projects.

Many things are changing in this world; in the tech sector, things are moving especially fast. There are new device sizes and methods of interaction as well. These new form factors, for many, have replaced the PC. Try using gtk2 apps on a 4" touchscreen.. Try using gtk2 apps on a 27" 4k LCD. lemme know how that user experience is.

The gtk team is well aware of their past mistakes and so is Ubuntu. If Ubuntu wants to remain relevant (this can also be said as: If GNU Linux / Gnome wants a chance at becoming more prominent on the desktop) then Ubuntu needs to cut its losses, change its direction, cut the dead weight and move forward as it has a lot of ground to make up.

Trying to maintain backwards compatibility is a mistake both Windows and OSX share. Neither was able to adapt well enough to become prominent in the smartphone space. Repeating past mistakes with known outcomes is not going to lead to more prominence, nor more developers.. (Most companies / developers are not interested in writing code for an OS with such a low market share.)

I am totally looking forward to Ubuntu's new approach. Cut the dead weight. It's time to move on. Python 2, GTK 2 and X11 must be left in the past where they belong. They are not the right tools to build applications and platforms most of us will want to use in the future.

[Istanbull]

The Ubuntu dev and design teams killed Ubuntu and it's userbase with their decisions. Unity, Amazon spyware, Mir, and now they're removing GTK+2. They need to bring back the old teams of devs and designers both in Gnome and Ubuntu projects.

[stqn]

Gtk 3 has much worse theme support than Gtk 2. This will only make Ubuntu worse.

(And yes for consistent theming between Qt and Gtk we need a Gtk 2 theme.)

[ssokolow]

Consistent looking Applications is something I value.

Using GTK2 apps in design is just emberrassing when you have dark theme and are working for Million Dollar clients.

It would require a Qt Inspector with Live Debugging and CSS edits for me to be swayed away from prefering GTK3 over Qt.

Consistent-looking applications is also something I value. That's why I do my best to limit my KDE desktop to Qt and GTK+ 2.x apps.

(QGtkStyle allows Qt apps to draw themselves using GTK+ 2.x themes but the only GTK+ 3.x equivalent (QGnomePlatform) merely copies the settings and requires someone to have written a theme with both GTK+ 3.x and Qt versions that I can tolerate having applied to my entire desktop.)

[ElectricPrism]

Consistent looking Applications is something I value.

Using GTK2 apps in design is just emberrassing when you have dark theme and are working for Million Dollar clients.

It would require a Qt Inspector with Live Debugging and CSS edits for me to be swayed away from prefering GTK3 over Qt.

[shmerl]

Good riddance. Now if only Audacity, Gimp, Inkspace and etc. could switch already. Preferably to Qt 5...

[r08z]

With debian testing you could run this much faster. Ubuntu is bad because it is bloated with shitty poettring software. If you remove networkmanager and unused systemd services your system will boot much faster and it will run much faster if you have a 1000hz non debug kernel. XFCE would run much better than all of this shit for sure. Linuxhippy's benchmark is awful because he should have run Tomb Raider because it runs the same everywhere.

/thread.

[tuuker]

Finally they wipe out libraries like old Python 2x and GTK2, time to bury ancient stuff and keep cleaner and smaller official release size.

[gufide]

Great, so now he has an official deputy

Be careful here. We are at the meta-trolling level in this forum.