The end of the nice GTK button

Re:The end of the nice GTK button by ho_schi on Friday March 25, 2022 @04:36AM (#30799800)

I've never seen any consistency MS-DOS, Win9x and WinNT. The worst offender is Microsoft itself with the file-browser, settings and office-suits. They don't maintain and evolve their toolkit, they just add new ones and recommend to use them instead:

  Win32: Win32, Windows Forms, WPF, MAUI, UWP, WTL, WinUI, MFC and probably more   
  Gtk: Gtk+, Gtk2+, Gtk3+, Gtk4
  Qt: Qt1, Qt2, Qt3, Qt4, Qt5, Qt6

Gtk and Qt didn't just maintain but provides major upgrades and changes. People complained that Gtk changed stuff, which is unfair. The various feature removals in GNOME3 after the first release provided bigger problems. I'm rather sure the changes between Qt major release also require work from developers. Custom theming is an issue with Gtk but also something I cannot recommend as developer and user. It is complicated on toolkit side and faulty on user side. Qt seems do to better in this regard but the user side problems remain. Apple just says just no to theming at all. I've also never felt the desire to theme Gtk because it looked good by default since Gtk3+ and even backported to some stuff to Gtk2+. There is of Java and Swing, yes, but I'm afraid the first error was including a toolkit into a language library.

With Gtk and their HIG most stuff looks decent and usable. Windows? Nobody cares about the HIG. Micrsoft provides more toolkits than I know. And a lot developers just do whatever they want on Windows. Or worse, they use Electron. Microsoft Teams is the worst "application" in this regard.

By the way:

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787

The font rendering issue. I recommend ignoring the blaming (users) and ignoring (developers) on both sides and instead reading the details involved. Looks like mostly intended and used during development on HiDPI-Displays and they need people experienced in font drawing matters. Some fixes are landing already. Taking into account how much effort was put in Harfbuzz, Freetype, Pango and Cairo I think they can only learn from this - being more careful and keeping backward compatible solutions alongside until the new stuff is working fine for all.

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Re:The end of the nice GTK button by pjmlp on Friday March 25, 2022 @06:03AM (#30800273)

The big difference is that with any of the Windows toolkits, an application written on their heyday will keep working today, good luck doing the same with any Linux toolkit.

Also only Qt is comparable in the full stack experience offered by Windows frameworks (and MacOS/Android/iOS/...), with the caveat it is anyway cross platform and not Linux specific.

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