this post was submitted on 04 May 2024
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I sort of liked GTK back in the day when it was still the Gimp Tool Kit first and foremost. When it was 1999 and your other choices were a broken Lesstif, an early C++ centric Qt, clumsy Tk, and pre-Cambrian Xaw, it was nice to have something full-featured and tasteful.
Now I hesitate to pull in a GTK app because it won't theme right (I want to use the same bitmap fonts I liked in 1999, but apparently Pango stopped supporting them) and runs the risk of convincing the package manager to dump several gigs of GNOME crud on my drive.
I gather even the GIMP itself no longer tracks current GTK-- it's become solely in service to GNOME and their absurd UI whims (* * * * client side decorations)
I'm with you - I was kind of happy with GNOME2 back in the day, but the forecoming of what was going to be GNOME3 made me jump out that ship and became a refugee in KDE.
It's a shame the Linux ports of Chrome and Firefox are written in GTK because of the reasons you mentioned. Once I heard some guy at GNOME talking about porting Firefox directly to Wayland - which sounds kind of bollocks for a pedestrian like me - but if it's possible, I hope that they succeed and Firefox can become a toolkit-agnostic web browser.
But at the same time I wonder about projects like Xfce and if they ever decide to move away from GTK, like LXDE did. I mean, a fusion between Xfce and Enlightenment would be awesome.
GNOME always seemed to be a solution chasing a problem, particularly once the licensing fears for Qt/KDE were settled.
But now it's one of the things Red Hat seems to impose on the world. Feels like everything controversial comes out of them or Canonical. I guess they have the commercial cash to prop up things like GNOME and Wayland and systemd and snaps until they gain traction, while more community-focused products can't break the world for no reason.
I'm trying to understand what that even means.