They recently moved to gtk4 (or are planning to?). I wonder what would be the difference between gtk3 and gtk4 apps in terms of latency and performance.
Funny how with anything on the internet there's always Ayes and Nays. It's almost hilarious to me about humans that "the market always segments" into all these trivial seeming (but decidedly important if you have skin in the game) choices.
I'm not questioning at all the importance of UI and UX in any way. It's fundamental. These visual virtual environments are the primary tools we humans use every day for our information manipulation snow-shoveling knowledge work. They have to be refined and have exquisite ergonomics tailored to our every whim. That's undeniable and it's not surprising at all that people have strong preferences.
I just think it's funny that people can't seem to agree, on anything. The market always segments.
Example from my business: we build a remote browser that has a kind of real time streaming optimized for adapting many bandwidth conditions to reduce lag (which often occurs by trading away raw framerate). For some people (normally the security conscious crowd), this is perfect. For other people (the app virtualization crowd) this is terrible: they want silky smooth high framerate remote streaming. I suppose people get could lectures about trade-offs, but it really is a kind of enjoyable thing: there's always something to work on.
An advantage of being open source is people can tweak it to their needs as much as they want. There's no bottlenecks in the system besides what you want to do, and how much compute and bandwidth you can throw at it. It can be as fast and smooth, or as resource efficient and minimal as you want.
Hahaha, really? It's been my desktop since I started using Linux in the 2000s. It's great! It presents windows, has a small set of high quality built in applications (file browser, application launcher, etc), has a big and flexible set of keyboard shortcuts, and other than that, it just gets out of your way.
Other DEs like to shove themselves in your way -- put your mouse in the corner of the screen? Something shows up! Hit a wrong keyboard button? Something shows up! Open the application launcher? It's fullscreen, baby! Do something to a window? Here's some jiggly wiggly animations!
XFCE just does what it needs to do, quietly, with no fuss. It's fantastic.
> I just think it's funny that people can't seem to agree, on anything. The market always segments.
Well, I guess I'm just proving your point :)
Now I just need hardware to run it on local. Can you suggest some? M1 ARM is out...so what should I get?
At one point in time I used it because I couldn't afford a decent computer and XFCE used fewer resources (so my slow computer would be a little more responsive). Eventually I went back to it because it was familiar and it gets the job done.
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=790677#c6
I think 4 plans to kill theming too.
Not having to periodically scrape the crud off the rollers has been such a boon to me.
Such a person may have used a desktop, but desktops are foreign to them.
Killing theming and removing features when they do not have a serviceable usable alternative does not make it more "accessible", it is just the standard "we know it better because we study the behavior of a large group of users" excuse that they give to treat it everyone by the lowest common denominator - just like Apple.
That being said, I will shamefully echo the words of the GNOME maintainers; their goal was not to "kill theming". They wanted to stop distros from shipping themes by default, which was arguably just as deranged but at least somewhat understandable. Nowadays we have stuff like Gradience too, which lets you theme LibAdwaita apps. You're still forced to use the ugly old Adwaita buttons, though.
So... make of it as you will. I left GNOME completely after the GNOME 40 update, I sympathize with people who hate the current desktop. The toolkit itself is "fine" in my unprofessional developer opinion.
If XFCE ever adopts the GTK4 ugly topbar cancer I'll switch to KDE and the entire K application suite and never run a GTK application again.