GTK+ 4 checklist (2019) | Hacker News Reader

GTK+ 4 checklist (2019)

wiki.gnome.org

22 pointshtfy9614 comments

A blog post from authors describing changes (2017): https://blog.gtk.org/2017/08/07/progress-towards-gtk-4/

I was really interested in this a couple of weeks ago, and tried to find information. But all the information is rather old (2017 / 2018) and there're also no up-to-date Youtube Videos that show it in action. They added new things like list views and popovers (apparently) but I found it tricky to see what that looks like, how it works, etc. Does somebody have more information on that?

If you are using Arch, you can install gtk4 (https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/gtk4/) from AUR and run:

    gtk4-demo

to see its appearance. GDK_BACKEND=wayland might be needed for I found x11 backend's pretty sluggish.

Debian users may install https://packages.debian.org/experimental/gtk-4-examples

RPM equivalent is gtk4-devel (here: version 3.98.2), provides /usr/bin/gtk4-demo and /usr/bin/gtk4-demo-application. I just tried them.

A pox on you, Gnome developers! You yet again broke the colour scheme. It comes as no surprise, you did so with (at least) versions 3.2, 3.4, 3.6, 3.16, 3.18… You have been doing that over such a long time (>9 years) and so often that even seasoned desktop environment developers working on infrastructure throw up their hands and walk away in disgust. See https://github.com/QtCurve/qtcurve-gtk3 and https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotti...

Gnome developers truly deserve the moniker of shame "cascade of attention deficit teenagers" because you absolutely do not take responsibility for the outcome of your decisions and refuse to acknowledge that environments other than Gnome exist where end users might want to run Gtk applications (e.g. Firefox).

Note: GTK+ has been renamed to GTK about a year back[0]. The title may better be updated.

[0] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2019-February...

> Constraint-based layout done

Wow! That's what I always wanted in a free desktop widget toolkit. Cool.

In another news, Qt pretend to keep all releases for the next 12 months, comercial only:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22812050

Why is GTK going back to constraint based layouts after Apple is going in the opposite direction?

You may find your answer in a PDF paper from here: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Layout-using-constraint-...

The paper is not very relevant, SwiftUI is not WinForm style absolute positioning.

Which direction is Apple going in and why? It'd be great if you could elaborate on this comment.

Edit: https://kean.github.io/post/swiftui-layout-system

Sounds like a near copy of the JavaFX layout system!

It sounds like the constraint based approach had problems with unsatisfiable or unstable solutions to the equations.

is it safe to assume this will fully support wayland? I don't see it mentioned by name.

I think it's tracked here: https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/Wayland/GTK%2B

That page hasn't been updated since late 2015, so I would assume basically all that work has been finished.

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