Hacker News Reader

Comment by badsectoracula | Hacker News Reader

IMO Gtk4 (the one being wrapped) is terrible even on Linux :-P. Gtk peaked at Gtk2 and Gtk3 is passable with the right theme but i can't say i liked any Gtk4 program i've seen (fortunately Gtk4 doesn't seem to have much of an uptake so far).

View on HN

There are hundreds of apps on Flathub that already use GTK 4. Bottles, Easy Effects, Mission Center, Amberol, Celluloid, are all popular (more than 60,000 installs from Flathub) examples of apps that are using GTK 4. I personally use all of them and think they are some of the best looking apps available on Linux.

They are popular because they fill a need. Not because their UI experience is stellar or something.

Its not like you have a choice to run them with a non Gtk4 UI anyway

You have a choice to install a non GTK4 program with an identical function. And yet 60K people chose the GTK4 option. You may not like the UI, totally fine, but clearly plenty of people do when they're looking through a catalog of just screenshots and pick the GTK4 option.

please give me examples of programs that have exactly identical functions

Amberol? Celluloid? Mission Center? Practically every toolkit out there has one of each these apps before it even hits version 1.0 just as a demo of its capabilities. There's dozens if not hundreds.

Bottles has PlayOnLinux or Lutris. I'm not familiar enough with the Linux audio landscape to know any Easy Effects alternatives for it off the top of my head. Nobody's locked into anything or being forced into GTK4. Heck, Celluloid is just straight up a wrapper around MPV.

Bottles is much better designed than PlayonLinux (which is a dead project) or Lutris which have absolutely dreadful UX paradigms. They are not even equivalent piece of software, and that has nothing to do with GTK4.

Then let's take that one example off our friend upthread's list and I fully believe their point still stands very strong. Users use the GTK4 apps that devs chose GTK4 to build with, and that stands even when an app has competition in its space. The evidence given demonstrates that pretty clearly.

> There are hundreds of apps on Flathub that already use GTK 4

Might be that i also avoid flathub, but i haven't seen much use of Gtk4 in the applications i use myself.

> think they are some of the best looking apps available on Linux.

Ok, thanks for the information but i think otherwise, i dislike how Gtk4 looks. TBH i also think Gtk3 looks bad but i've got a theme for that. Perhaps i might find a decent Gtk4 theme too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com