Also GTK4 means they are still at the mercy of GNOME which changes APIs often and without consideration for third parties.
Wasn't the whole point of the project to emancipate themselves from GNOME? If they rely on GTK they will fail.
Wasn't the whole point of the project to emancipate themselves from GNOME? If they rely on GTK they will fail.
1) do the yak-shaving and create a whole new GUI stack in Rust (which would be an absolute boon to the Rust community but will be a tremendous effort), or
2) switch to Qt (and basically become KDE)
Thinking about it, maybe Sciter (https://sciter.com/) would be an okay foundation to build a DE in (lightweight stack, flexible theming, solid Rust bindings). But then it isn’t open source (only the interface is, you need to pay for source access), so maybe not.
Is there a reason iced is not good enough (other than not being accessible)?
but looking good so far, gonna check this out for myself. I was rooting for azul, but iced seems to be further ahead
Anyway although a11y and i18n support have not been implemented, they are planned.
If Iced actually gets cross-platform accessibility support, that's great! Very few projects have that today. More certainly wouldn't hurt. But until it does, you shouldn't base a DE on it.
Edit: The issue you linked to is about RTL support. That's also required, but doesn't touch on a11y.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_method
https://github.com/iced-rs/iced/pull/686
See the challenges of properly supporting IME in Druid, another Rust toolkit:
- Rendering multiple layers
- Creating multiple windows
- Multiline text layout and editing
And it's hard to see how an open source project with as many developers as Gnome/GTK have can have some secret agenda that is counter to what they are saying publicly and creating libraries and code publicly to implement.
How many serious Gnome/GTK developers are there who are not IBM employees?
>Implementing keyboard selection inside vte means that every terminal based on vte benefits; adding only hooks for you means that all the other terminals get no benefit.
The patch being pushed wasn't going to help other projects. The developer of that project was working on a fork of the library but it appears it didn't get much use and was abandoned: https://github.com/thestinger/vte-ng
I don't see much more that anyone from GNOME could have done there.
UI toolkit doesn't equal a desktop environment. There is tons of stuff in the GNOME ecosystem (some of which it will make a lot of sense for System76 to reuse, no doubt) that can be entirely ignored when you're using GTK to, essentially, draw your UI widgets for you.