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Comment by chrismorgan | Hacker News Reader

GNOME co-opted and sabotaged GTK for anyone that’s not GNOME. GTK used to be capable of being fairly OS-neutral, and was certainly quite neutral within Linux and so became the widget toolkit of choice for diverse desktop environments and worked well thus; but over time GNOME has taken it over completely, and the desires of other desktop environments are utterly ignored. The GNOME Foundation has become a very, very bad custodian for GTK.

As you say, the old GTK is dead. GNOME murdered it. I mourn it.

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Yeah, I don't disagree with anything you've said. Still though, I use GTK because it works and think the pushback against it is silly. GTK was never destined to be the cross-platform native framework. If that was attainable, people would have forked GTK 2 (for what?) or GTK 3 (too quirky). Now we're here, and the only stakeholders on the project is the enormously opinionated GNOME team.

They've made a whole lot of objective and subjective missteps in the past, but I don't think it's fair to characterize them as an evil party here. They did the work, they reap the rewards, and they take the flak for the myriad of different ways the project could/should have gone.

The problem with the GIMP team is not that they're enormously opinionated, but that they're WRONGLY opinionated.

It's not that they're the evil party, it's just that they should stop feeling so sorry for themselves that so few people want to use their image editor because of its terrible user interface caused by the fact that they refuse to listen to their users, and it has a terribly offensive name that they refuse to change.

At least they still have a fanatical following of MAGA incel edgelords and ESR sycophants who love it BECAUSE it has an offensive name, so they still have that hard core fanbase to appeal to.

They're as self-sabotaging as RMS himself, and they don't deserve to play the victim or to have a pity party, especially when they try to throw it for themselves.

GIMP has about 3-4 part-time developers and no designers. They have no resources to redesign the user interface even though it's been wanted for a long time. It's taken them an extremely long time just to get GIMP 3 out the door and that's just a port without any major UI changes. But I agree otherwise, the horrible name is completely on them.

No, that's an outlandish conspiracy theory and completely ahistorical. GTK was always developed on Linux first, and before it was used by GNOME it had a lot of GIMP-specific functionality that didn't extend well to other apps. Want to know why? Because GIMP and GNOME developers were the only ones contributing. Those "diverse desktop environments" almost always took from GNOME and contributed very little back. That's fine to do it but they need to accept that they don't call the shots when they do that. They don't get to pull their funding and then complain someone else is being a bad custodian, it doesn't work like that.

> Those "diverse desktop environments" almost always took from GNOME and contributed very little back.

Now that's an ahistorical conspiracy theory. Those diverse desktop environments contributed hugely to GTK, GNOME just didn't use their work or consider it helpful unless it directly related to their desktop... and of course none of that work will relate to their desktop. Nobody is going to fully "kiss the ring" unless they get something out of it, and even back in the GTK3 days it was plainly clear that GNOME didn't care about you if you didn't care about GNOME.

Now, GNOME's "coup" or "killing" of GTK is completely fine by Open Source standards. Even encouraged. I don't stand against the concepts of what they're doing, but they could have done a lot better than fighting third-parties tooth-and-nail. GNOME should be a proud project that leads the GNU movement, and instead it was reduced to a bunch of squabbling supremacists that made their userbase an adversary. I say all that as someone who quite likes modern GTK and writes apps in it.

>Now that's an ahistorical conspiracy theory

No? Where exactly do you think I've theorized about the existence of a conspiracy? Because I've actually said the exact opposite: there isn't a conspiracy and no one is cooperating at all. There's no evil group of developers secretly planning to sabotage everything. It's just the usual bad communication and planning that happens with a distributed team.

>Those diverse desktop environments contributed hugely to GTK, GNOME just didn't use their work

Can you name what any of these contributions were? Because I've never seen them. I've seen contributions here and there, lots of minor bug fixes, but nothing major.

>Nobody is going to fully "kiss the ring" unless they get something out of it

Avoid this rhetoric please. These open source projects are a volunteer collaboration. No one's kissing any rings or trying to get something out of the maintainers, other than the usual: everyone helps each other write and maintain the code.

>but they could have done a lot better than fighting third-parties tooth-and-nail. GNOME should be a proud project that leads the GNU movement

I really don't know what you're talking about here, but disagreeing about technical things isn't "fighting tooth-and-nail". That's a normal part of any project.

Personally I don't think anyone should care about leading the GNU movement, that's been plagued by petty infighting and drama since the very beginning.

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