Wireshark 2.0 Released, UI Rewritten In Qt5

[asdfblah]

I think the Qt version wastes less space.

Old


New

[W.Irrkopf]

Why bother porting it to Qt5?
It worked good in GTK.

Could you please elaborate what you mean by that? In case it means "It worked good in GTK on my personal Linux machine under GNOME" you may be correct. Unfortunately it works "correcter" with GTK2 (unmaintained) than with GTK3. Next thing is maintainablility: GTK-develpers continuously break the API and thus have made it impossible to compile Wireshark against a 5 year old version of GTK and a current version without putting version dependent compilation paths into the source:
wireshark/git/ui/gtk(master)$ grep GTK_CHECK_VERSION * | wc -l
424 (the actual count would be much higher without the hacks in old-gtk-compat.h, hiding most cases)
wireshark/git/ui/qt(master)$ grep QT_VERSION_CHECK * | wc -l
61
The reason this is done is that Wireshark needs to run (and thus build) in a current version on even the oldest still supported RHEL.

It doesn't work remotely as well on Wndows, where there are (or at least were) problems that the GTK port to Windows is or was unmaintained.

Last but not least: Worked good is one thing, looks good and integrates well with the working envirionment (Various Linux desktops plus Wndows plus MacOS) is another place where the Qt version outperforms the GTK one in the eyes of most developers and most users that have provided feedback on the Qt development versions

[dsvensson]

You can't be serious.

Your screenshot refers to the GTK 2 version, not the GTK 3 version that existed in a branch long before they decided to go ahead with the QT rewrite. I've been using the GTK 3 version just fine on OS X with all the proper integrations 3.x provides. It looked good, and with some effort in theming it could have looked native, as Ximian Studio demonstrates. They had some pretty horrific code issues though in the old UI that was unrelated to GTK, which made multiple windows impossible due to global state. That was imho a bigger issue. As I can nothing but guess, my guess would be that in 6 months of efforts the Wireshark team could have finished the GTK 3 port and with the help of Ximian (that reached out in the blog post that announced the QT port) finished the polish of the OS X looking theming. The rest of the 1.5 years could have been spent on getting rid of the global state, and ofc new feature development, bug fixes and polishing. Now users have lived with a very crippled QT version together with a nasty old GTK 2 version for 2 years. Hopefully the project remains strong and we can forget these 2 years of darkness. I have nothing against it being QT now, just that it was a waste of time.

[Steffo]

The reason for switching to Qt:

https://blog.wireshark.org/2013/10/switching-to-qt/

[edmon]

Your screenshot refers to the GTK 2 version, not the GTK 3 version that existed in a branch long before they decided to go ahead with the QT rewrite. I've been using the GTK 3 version just fine on OS X with all the proper integrations 3.x provides. It looked good, and with some effort in theming it could have looked native, as Ximian Studio demonstrates. They had some pretty horrific code issues though in the old UI that was unrelated to GTK, which made multiple windows impossible due to global state. That was imho a bigger issue. As I can nothing but guess, my guess would be that in 6 months of efforts the Wireshark team could have finished the GTK 3 port and with the help of Ximian (that reached out in the blog post that announced the QT port) finished the polish of the OS X looking theming. The rest of the 1.5 years could have been spent on getting rid of the global state, and ofc new feature development, bug fixes and polishing. Now users have lived with a very crippled QT version together with a nasty old GTK 2 version for 2 years. Hopefully the project remains strong and we can forget these 2 years of darkness. I have nothing against it being QT now, just that it was a waste of time.

gtk is ugly, just a poor effort to imitate mac

[dsvensson]

gtk is ugly, just a poor effort to imitate mac

Well, what you're saying then is that OS X looks ugly, and that's a different issue.

You have QT on OS X here, with Wireshark 2.0:

https://blog.wireshark.org/2015/11/let-me-tell-you-about-wireshark-2-0/

And GTK on OS X here, with Xamarin Studio:

https://xamarin.com/studio

[TheBlackCat]

You have QT on OS X here, with Wireshark 2.0:
https://blog.wireshark.org/2015/11/l...wireshark-2-0/

That is not on Os X.

[TheBlackCat]

Your screenshot refers to the GTK 2 version, not the GTK 3 version that existed in a branch long before they decided to go ahead with the QT rewrite. I've been using the GTK 3 version just fine on OS X with all the proper integrations 3.x provides. It looked good, and with some effort in theming it could have looked native, as Ximian Studio demonstrates. They had some pretty horrific code issues though in the old UI that was unrelated to GTK, which made multiple windows impossible due to global state. That was imho a bigger issue. As I can nothing but guess, my guess would be that in 6 months of efforts the Wireshark team could have finished the GTK 3 port and with the help of Ximian (that reached out in the blog post that announced the QT port) finished the polish of the OS X looking theming. The rest of the 1.5 years could have been spent on getting rid of the global state, and ofc new feature development, bug fixes and polishing. Now users have lived with a very crippled QT version together with a nasty old GTK 2 version for 2 years. Hopefully the project remains strong and we can forget these 2 years of darkness. I have nothing against it being QT now, just that it was a waste of time.

If Os X support was the only reason to switch to Qt, then you might have a point. But if you actually read the article explaining why they made the switch, you would see that was only one of several reasons.