For many years I’ve been a fan of GTK. I started using linux with GTK1 was dominant, as I became a developer GTK2 took over, with beautiful themes and very usable widgets. I used GTK software, feeling that the philosophy of the people who write GTK apps matches my own: less fluff and more stability.
Then Gnome went off the rails. Ridiculous decisions like the one-window-per-folder file manager were made with utter disregard for real users’ opinion. Wasn’t very good for developers either, it got so bad that Gnome was entirely removed from Slackware – something I thought might be temporary but turned out to be a permanent decision.
Then GTK3 and Gnome3 came – both with apparently clear intentions but again inexplicable disregard for anyone not sharing their “vision”:
- Bugs were introduced (probably not on purpose) into GTK2 after GTK3 was released, and those bugs will never be fixed. For example I periodically get bug reports for one of my applications which I’ve traced down to GtkFileChooserButton and it’s a known issue noone will fix in GTK2.
- Huge parts of GTK2 have been deprecated, for example:
- The horizontal/vertical Box layout scheme, which is how you were supposed to do all layouts in GTK2, and despite the deprecation warnings from the compiler there has been no alternative layout mechanism identified in the documentation.
- The entire thread API, which is at the centre of any multi-threaded application. I don’t know if this was replaced with something else or dropped completely.
- The new library is clearly unfinished. For example the GtkAboutDialog is simply broken in the current version of GTK3.
- Serious bugs in GTK3 are ignored. For example I spent a day researching why they broke the scrollbars in GTK3, found that it was probably done accidentally (the new functionality doesn’t fit even their own designs), filed a bug, and five months later – still not so much as an acknowledgement that this is a problem.
To be honest I think the Gnome people were always a little too fond of making major experimental changes, but I always felt that GTK itself was a bastion of stability, like the Linux kernel, GCC, Apache, etc. With GTK3 that changed. Who’s running GTK now? I’ve no idea. I don’t know who was running it before either. I don’t know if it’s a leadership problem, a management problem, a financial problem, or even just a lack of technical knowhow (maybe some tech guru[s] left the project).
I spent some time porting one of my programs (Asunder) from GTK2 to GTK3, and the problems I ran into disgusted me so much that I rolled back the “upgrade”. I wasn’t the only one either.
If you have time (45 minutes) I recommend you watch this presentation by Dirk Hohndel at linux.conf.au, who with Linus Torvalds as a partner tried really hard to use GTK for their scuba diving application and eventually gave up in frustration. For me the highlight of the presentation was the comment on the GTK community: essentially noone in the project cares about anything other than their own goals, and their goals are not (as you might expect) to create an awesome toolkit, but rather to enable them to create Gnome3. That’s the only explanation I’ve heard or read that makes sense.
They’re not the only ones either. I’ve run a little unofficial survey of existing software to check how many people moved to GTK3, that was done relatively easily using these commands:
cd /usr/bin && for F in *; do ldd $F 2> /dev/null | grep gtk-x11-2.0 > /dev/null; if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then echo "$F"; fi; done
for F in *; do ldd $F 2> /dev/null | grep gtk-3 > /dev/null; if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then echo “$F”; fi; done
The result? 83 binaries using GTK2, and 68 using GTK3. You can’t read too much into those numbers – at least half of them are parts of XFCE (GTK2) or Gnome/Cinnamon (GTK3) but it’s telling to look at the list rather than the numbers. Essentially noone has moved to GTK3 except the Gnome projects and a couple of others. Hm, I wonder if they wonder why, or care…
Dirk and Linus went on and migrated their application to Qt, and they had a lot of praise for that community. I trust them on the community part, so I decided to consider Qt as a toolkit for my next project. I have, and I wasn’t entirely happy with what I found:
- Writing C++ in and of itself isn’t a major issue for me, but I dislike overdesigned frameworks and that’s what Qt is.
- Qt doesn’t use native widgets, and that explains why Qt apps never look native on any platform.
- In Qt5 (the latest) you have to use JavaScript and QML for the UI, which is a bit too big a jump for me.
- But it’s supposed to work much better on other platforms (like Windows and OSX), which I believe.
So with GTK3 in limbo for years and the future of Qt unclear – I don’t know what to do for my next app. The only other realistic option I found was wxWidgets, but I fear that’s built on top of GTK on Linux and it will simply inherit all the GTK3 problems. I’ve started creating a project in wxWidgets, but I am wary of investing a lot more time into it until I know how this relationship will work out.
The point of this blog post though was to bash the people currently running GTK, because they deserve it. Shame on you for breaking something that worked.