Hacker News Reader

Comment by _2paq | Hacker News Reader

> Libadwaita is the library you use when you're targetting GNOME.

> If you want to target something other than GNOME, you don't want to use libadwaita.

Does GTK4 provide any viable model of development if one doesn't want to target GNOME or elementary? I, for one, haven't seen a non-trivial GTK4 app that doesn't use libadwaita or libgranite and the more I discuss this online, the more I suspect that this is intended but unspoken behavior.

Even LibreOffice has now decided to use libadwaita. Does that mean LibreOffice's GTK version is only intended for GNOME? If yes, GTK4 is basically a toolkit for GNOME masquerading as a general purpose toolkit.

View on HN

> Does GTK4 provide any viable model of development if one doesn't want to target GNOME or elementary?

It's possible to make apps using GTK3 without libhandy, so I don't see why you couldn't make apps using GTK4 without libadwaita.

Technically, libadwaita is just a bunch of widgets. Apparently it's a very useful bunch of widgets.

> Even LibreOffice has now decided to use libadwaita. Does that mean LibreOffice's GTK version is only intended for GNOME?

I guess so. Either that, or they're intending to use libadwaita in an “off-label” way.

> If yes, GTK4 is basically a toolkit for GNOME masquerading as a general purpose toolkit.

The whole reason libadwaita's widgets are not just part of GTK is so that GTK doesn't have to cater to GNOME, and can be a more general-purpose toolkit. Libadwaita 1.0 was just released last month, so presumably it will take some time for that to come to fruition.

As someone with firsthand experience in this field: it's not worth your time. Getting GTK4 to work in other desktops is a shitshow in the first place (it has horrible rendering issues on x11/Plasma configs), but all of the good stuff like gtk::Builder and connect-closures have been removed, making imperative development an enormous pain in the ass. If you still manage to make an app despite that mess, you'll be left with horrible font rendering issues that can only be fixed with a very specific Flatpak configuration (hope you didn't want to run your own app natively!) and by the time you've got it all figured out you'll probably be looking into Qt.

Please, just use GTK2 or GTK3 if you're planning on making non-GNOME apps. GTK4 is simply not finished yet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com