Comment by shevy-java
4 hours ago
Are people still using gtk?
I started to learn it back then via ruby-gtk2. It was not the best experience but I learned several key things pertaining to widgets and the UI. Then came gtk3; it was in some ways worse than GTK2, but it also brought a few improvements such as the partial CSS support. I always miss that when I use e. g. wxwidget.
Then came GTK4 though and things changed. Tons of old things broke or no longer worked. Simple things such as main_window_widget.move(0, 0) for top-left positioning (I added an alias to this, .top_left in ruby and that worked nicely); there are work-arounds to get the old behaviour, but this is just one example of so many more things that were eliminated. GTK4 is a GNOMEy-toolkit and GTK5 will be even worse since it will be wayland-only.
"Interacting" with the GNOMEy-GTK devs is a total waste of time and I am hardly the only one who had that experience. For GNOMEys it may be a useful platform, but GTK no longer is a general toolkit really, despite claims by the current GTK devs otherwise. Why would we non-GNOMEys want to keep GTK on life support? There really needs to be a toolkit that can work in a much more de-centralized way. Sadly I also don't have a good idea here, since funding is an issue and GUIs seem to have taken a huge hit ever since the world wide web became dominating.
Well, it is what was always considered to be a default toolkit. Sure, I like Qt and prefer such apps but you got a have the GTK installed anyway. It was always difficult to have general toolkit with it when you depend on dozens of dependencies, collection of libraries, not big fat libraries like in Qt, that you can deploy.
GTK4 changed a lot though, like they do not even try anymore, deprecated font dialog because that is better done with XDG portals, but such thing does not even exist. How will that work on macOS and Windows, it cannot? Or what they did with the menus. Toolkits should be user oriented and should not have vision, it just needs to work and provide controls, events, etc., you cannot even position windows in macOS and Windows with GTK4, that is not toolkit that works for users.
I am working on the IUP fork here https://github.com/gen2brain/iup-go , one toolkit to handle them all, and I did my best for GTK4 backend, but from 14 drivers/backends I worked on, it was the worst experience and I had to fight battles with it.
> Are people still using gtk?
Manifestly yes. There's even a list of GTK4/Adwaita apps available here: https://arewelibadwaitayet.com/
McCLIM is better
GTK3 has nice, conventional looking interfaces. Developing for it always felt insane, but the advent of AI has completely removed the friction so I've had Claude build me quite a few apps using it because I like the look and it's easy to navigate.