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Comment by xalava | Hacker News Reader

Just on time for GTK 4. Pretty ironic considering that GTK stands for Gimp ToolKit.

And Inkscape only updated to 3 earlier this year. I wish the GTK devs would realize that these applications are the life blood of their toolkit. Calculators, calendars, and even mail apps can be popped out easy peasy when they need to be. Applications like GIMP, Inkscape, and Ardour take years to become usable and competitive.

this is problem #1 of Linux Desktop. Toolkits and Libraries constantly changing and reinventing the wheel. Actually a big part of developing an GTK App is actually catching up with the API changes. As a proof of this see the early how-tos of GTK 3.0 and 3.2 and see the recent ones and see how much it changed.

There were plenty of apps changing from GTK to Qt awhile ago i suspect GTK4 will be the next. As for Gimp and Inkscape it will probably take another decade to catch up.

Call me a noob but why should this problem exist even today ? Why are APIs such grossly incompatible with previous gens such that a complete overwrite is necessary?

Well i think GNOME and even GTK has very few contributors and mainly sponsored by RH and other companies. I suspect they are often getting paid to develop features for subcontracting and other times they want to "modernize" the toolkit and they just write a new API with additional features. We have seen this during DBus introduction, GSettings, Clutter etc... etc... Plus GTK+ is C plus lots of boil plate code to make it "object oriented" which turns to be even a bigger pain when pure GTK+ apps need to update their APIs to catch up with the latest.

But imo this is a general trend on Linux except for the Kernel where Linus and co do a great job to prevent API breakage. The others not so much.

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