[PLUG] What's so bad about gtk2? What is the justification for migrating to gtk3?

Tom tgrom.automail at nuegia.net
Mon Feb 25 01:37:49 UTC 2019


Hello, I wanted to ask what is there technical reason for switching to
gtk3/4 or porting programs to those newer gtk version from gtk2?

As far as I've seen gtk2 is rock solid stable and mature. While gtk3
can't keeps breaking after every minor update, receives patches every
other day from some fix, completely rips out the perfectly good theming
engine for something based on web standards (while the web is insane
right now with web2.0 and 'webapps') for native *nix programs, appears
to copy Apple OSX's graphical interface rather than be it's own thing,
and is heavily integrated into the GNOME 3 desktop rather than being a
standalone graphical toolkit.

In addition to this you have forced animations, lack of
configurability, and a general feel of 'move fast and break things'
mentality rather than a 'slow and steady wins the race' development
style.

It introduces Touch-screen style computing concepts on workstations
that really shouldn't belong like hamburger buttons and dropping
essential UI components like menubars.

Just as an example of me not being the only one with these feelings,
Audacious, a popular media player ported themselves back to gtk2 after
many of problems like these.

Some others include Claws-Mail, KiCAD, LibreOffice, Gvim, Pale Moon
Browser, Netsurf Browser, and various other productivity utilities.

Some programs have migrated to using QT5, which is certainly better
than GTK3 or 4 but still a step down from gtk2 instead of simply
maintaining the gtk2 version.

Why? Why push to move to gtk3? What's so wrong or different about gtk2
that it can't be used in now or patched?

I personally find myself having to fork some programs that remove gtk2
support in favor of gtk3 and maintaining them myself. Like Gajim for
example. The 0.16.X release was perfect. The newer release is not
nearly as stable and looks extremely tacky, and hides things behind 3
layers of animated sliding hamburger buttons.


My productivity is extremely important to me as a *nix (Linux
and BSD) user and if there is not a valid or compelling enough reason
to switch to these newer gtk versions, as much effort as it would be I
will indeed fork and maintain projects like XFCE 4.12, Gajim 0.16.X,
claws-mail, Gpredict myself.

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