It's a shame how far GTK is falling behind. From a user's perspective, I liked GTK2's smooth, clean interfaces much more than anything made in Qt, so much that I didn't even mind putting up with its insane APIs.
But now? GTK3 interfaces are horrible from an user's perspective – client-side decorations are a sin that we should know better than to repeat, plus a whole load of changes just for change's sake to spite users (the file chooser dialog has a much worse UX; mouse wheel support was widely gutted because apparently I'm supposed to want touch interfaces instead?) –, and the APIs are still as bad to use, most changes seem to have been made out of spite; a small shim would have allowed most programs to switch from GTK2 to 3 without code changes, had it not been for those.
Now I find myself increasingly switching to Qt programs. While the interfaces are still somewhat rougher than GTK2 ones and not as unified, it still beats GTK3 crap. That seems to be turning from "a reasonable toolkit for all X11 invironments" into "the official Gnome 3 toolkit, beg us if you want interoperability".
Client side decorations give way more space to the actual content than to waste space for an almost empty titlebar. It allows to combine the titlebar with content from the application itself. You regard them entirely off as a "sin". Very strong language but you don't explain _at all_!
For the file chooser, some never things that were never implemented were added recently: double vs single clicking, renaming and some other super old bug.
Regarding mouse wheel support: What basis do you say that 1) it was removed 2) it was made out of spite?
Too many people have way too much time talking down on the work of others. You go out of your way to imply that GNOME developers are intentionally evil. What the hell.
PS: I agree it needs way more developers. But that's nothing new.
Can you elaborate why "client-side decorations are a sin that we should know better than to repeat" ? From a subjective user perspective, I like them for enabling controls in titlebar, which paved the way for compact, elegant windows --i.e. height(clientside_titlebar_with_controls) < height(regular_titlebar + menubar + toolbar)--. What's objectively bad about them?
Other than that, describing GTK3 as "the official Gnome 3 toolkit, beg us if you want interoperability" seems pretty accurate. I personally enjoy the experience provided by GNOME 3, but will never, ever, use a GTK app under Windows or Mac OSX. They just look and feel terribly out of place.
However, does GTK have much choice given the resources at hand?
- With the Adwaita theme now being rolled into GTK itself, it's becoming clear the GNOME/GTK folks are not aiming at a good Mac/Windows experience, they're maximizing for Linux + the whole GNOME shebang.
- Could they do otherwise? Qt is backed by a big team at the Qt Company (ex Digia / Nokia / Trolltech) with commercial interest to support big $$$ Windows/Mac-based enterprise apps, while GTK seems maintained by a smaller core team of RedHat/Fedora folks, Canonical not so much, and individual contributors. I think they're just focusing.
Frankly, I don't care about GTK vs. Qt. From a user standpoint, what I wish for the most is that apps have a unified look and consistency. File dialog bookmarks should be synced. If I change theme in one, it should change theme in the other. If I change fonts in one, it should change fonts in the other. If I plug in a 4K display, all apps should scale DPI identically.
And from a programmer's standpoint, I wish we could end this battle already and someone just tell me what to use so that my app can become a part of everyone else's consistent look.
It really is. GTK can basically be used with any language, C bindings are extremely common and there are bindings for all my favorite languages, Go, Rust, C#, etc.
But the Windows compatibility of GTK is just horrendous. It seems to work now with the help of some people GTK 3+ can be used on Windows, but the icons sometimes don't work, transparency never works, expander window grippy thing doesn't look right, fonts look terrible, responsiveness is terrible, form fields look terrible and don't function normally, the list goes on and on.
At this point in time i feel the Linux world is split in two camps.
The "old" camp that has been with the ecosystem since the late 90s, and the new camp that came in with the post-dot-com/browser-war cheap and easy access to LAMP servers.
The former knows Linux from the kernel up, where the desktop is for the most part a way to deal with things that can't be represented in text.
The latter knows Linux from the desktop down, and want those shiny graphics everywhere.
GTK2 is of the old group, where tweaking and maximizing personal efficiency was king.
GTK3 is old the new group, where presenting some kind of top down design experiences is paramount.
Hell, it may not even be limited to Linux. Look at how Slack is getting all manner of attention, even though at its base it is IRC recreated. But now you can plaster every line with emoji(?!).
Damn it, i should not be feeling like a grumpy old geezer. I'm not even half way to retirement...
I kinda feel like Gnome/GTK peaked about 2001 or 2002, and has been in a steady decline ever since. OTOH, KDE/QT hit a local maxima around the same time, then dropped off, but has been improving for the past couple of years (with a few small ups and downs mixed in).
I've switched to KDE Plasma desktop on Fedora as my primary work environment now and couldn't be happier. If I wanted to write a native X app now, I'd definitely be thinking QT.
When QT first switched to LGPL, I hoped it would result in an explosion of interest in that environment. In hindsight, "explosion" would probably be an overstatement, but the K/QT world does seem to have been growing and improving since then.
I'd say good riddance GTK3. I really liked GTK1/2, to be honest. I liked the column-based (unixy) file dialogs, detachable menus that you could use as a poor-mans toolbars, and many minor tweaks.
The API was always horrendous (it still is!), but as user I liked it so I just coped as a developer anyway.
Since the full embrace of gnome, I started to dislike GTK2/3 more and more. The stupidity of file dialogs starting in "recents mode" also for save, to name one. Saving a file again? You see restarting at the top directory, just like in windows. Well, it's because the file dialogs don't have any saved state if you happen to destroy the dialog instance. A tweak that costs literally nothing to implement, but probably "not granma friendly"?
GTK3 is also downright slow. The new theming mechanism might be fancy, but objectively I have some UIs that I left at GTK2 intentionally for lower latency.
I re-evaluated QT4 as a user. The API and developer tools are just light-years ahead.
It's unfortunate that I cannot say I like the evolution of QT5.
Two things about Witeshark that I hadn't realised until recently but that changed my life:
- Wireshark has a Command Lime Interface that is very usable and incredibly useful to debug a machine you can only ssh to: tshark
- you can look at packets captured with tcpdump with Wireshark/tshark
Note that 2.0 still can be used with GTK. I'm a daily wireshark user and had to switch back to the GTK version - the Qt version is currently incredible buggy - at least on Windows.
I've found it locks up on Linux sometimes. Like I found Clementine when I was stuck on Windows. Having worked with QT, and it's asynchronous'ness, I can see it's easy to make dead lock mistakes, and I think that is probably what is happening.
Yeah, I've noticed a few issues, particularly with copying bytes via context menus, sometimes the sub menus don't appear. Ah well, overall I'm glad they went in this direction as now I can use it on my MacBook without having to get X11.
> There are many more keyboard shortcuts in Wireshark 2. The full list of those shortcuts can be found from the "Help" menu. In addition, individual windows have their own shortcuts, which can be listed from the window itself.
More keyboard shortcuts always makes me happy. Less usage of that tiny little touchpad on my laptop.
Watched someone via GoToMeeting try to use 2.0 yesterday on a Windows server. They couldn't start capture on the interface; start button grey'd out with no explanation. Installed the older version (1.12.8) and it worked perfectly. QT is great and all but I'll have to stick with the legacy stuff for a while.
I've used 2.0 on a Server 2016 TP4 and two different Windows 10 with zero problems. The person you've seen running it probably didn't install Winpcap or something along those lines, hence why installing 1.12.8 solved the issue.
My main criticism is that I don't get a separate window telling me the progress of the file loading. I work sometimes with big files and it takes a few seconds to load them. On 2.0 at first I didn't know what was going on, because there's only this very tiny progress bar at the bottom.
browser.html makes more sense. Web standards are, at this point, their own form of GUI toolkit, and why does Firefox need more than one? It is just bloat.
Please stop with the HTML5 UI madness. While HTML/CSS is, imo, a great UI toolkit, nobody wants a browser engine in every separate application. A browser engine that needs to be kept up to date with upstream on an extremely regular basis, separately for every app, lest you are vulnerable to whatever exploit of the month.
[+] [-] creshal|10 years ago|reply
But now? GTK3 interfaces are horrible from an user's perspective – client-side decorations are a sin that we should know better than to repeat, plus a whole load of changes just for change's sake to spite users (the file chooser dialog has a much worse UX; mouse wheel support was widely gutted because apparently I'm supposed to want touch interfaces instead?) –, and the APIs are still as bad to use, most changes seem to have been made out of spite; a small shim would have allowed most programs to switch from GTK2 to 3 without code changes, had it not been for those.
Now I find myself increasingly switching to Qt programs. While the interfaces are still somewhat rougher than GTK2 ones and not as unified, it still beats GTK3 crap. That seems to be turning from "a reasonable toolkit for all X11 invironments" into "the official Gnome 3 toolkit, beg us if you want interoperability".
[+] [-] bkor|10 years ago|reply
Client side decorations give way more space to the actual content than to waste space for an almost empty titlebar. It allows to combine the titlebar with content from the application itself. You regard them entirely off as a "sin". Very strong language but you don't explain _at all_!
For the file chooser, some never things that were never implemented were added recently: double vs single clicking, renaming and some other super old bug.
Regarding mouse wheel support: What basis do you say that 1) it was removed 2) it was made out of spite?
Too many people have way too much time talking down on the work of others. You go out of your way to imply that GNOME developers are intentionally evil. What the hell.
PS: I agree it needs way more developers. But that's nothing new.
[+] [-] ronjouch|10 years ago|reply
Other than that, describing GTK3 as "the official Gnome 3 toolkit, beg us if you want interoperability" seems pretty accurate. I personally enjoy the experience provided by GNOME 3, but will never, ever, use a GTK app under Windows or Mac OSX. They just look and feel terribly out of place.
However, does GTK have much choice given the resources at hand?
- With the Adwaita theme now being rolled into GTK itself, it's becoming clear the GNOME/GTK folks are not aiming at a good Mac/Windows experience, they're maximizing for Linux + the whole GNOME shebang.
- Could they do otherwise? Qt is backed by a big team at the Qt Company (ex Digia / Nokia / Trolltech) with commercial interest to support big $$$ Windows/Mac-based enterprise apps, while GTK seems maintained by a smaller core team of RedHat/Fedora folks, Canonical not so much, and individual contributors. I think they're just focusing.
[+] [-] dheera|10 years ago|reply
And from a programmer's standpoint, I wish we could end this battle already and someone just tell me what to use so that my app can become a part of everyone else's consistent look.
[+] [-] dubcanada|10 years ago|reply
But the Windows compatibility of GTK is just horrendous. It seems to work now with the help of some people GTK 3+ can be used on Windows, but the icons sometimes don't work, transparency never works, expander window grippy thing doesn't look right, fonts look terrible, responsiveness is terrible, form fields look terrible and don't function normally, the list goes on and on.
[+] [-] digi_owl|10 years ago|reply
The "old" camp that has been with the ecosystem since the late 90s, and the new camp that came in with the post-dot-com/browser-war cheap and easy access to LAMP servers.
The former knows Linux from the kernel up, where the desktop is for the most part a way to deal with things that can't be represented in text.
The latter knows Linux from the desktop down, and want those shiny graphics everywhere.
GTK2 is of the old group, where tweaking and maximizing personal efficiency was king.
GTK3 is old the new group, where presenting some kind of top down design experiences is paramount.
Hell, it may not even be limited to Linux. Look at how Slack is getting all manner of attention, even though at its base it is IRC recreated. But now you can plaster every line with emoji(?!).
Damn it, i should not be feeling like a grumpy old geezer. I'm not even half way to retirement...
[+] [-] 72deluxe|10 years ago|reply
No great loss.
[+] [-] mindcrime|10 years ago|reply
I've switched to KDE Plasma desktop on Fedora as my primary work environment now and couldn't be happier. If I wanted to write a native X app now, I'd definitely be thinking QT.
When QT first switched to LGPL, I hoped it would result in an explosion of interest in that environment. In hindsight, "explosion" would probably be an overstatement, but the K/QT world does seem to have been growing and improving since then.
[+] [-] heinrich5991|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tenfingers|10 years ago|reply
The API was always horrendous (it still is!), but as user I liked it so I just coped as a developer anyway.
Since the full embrace of gnome, I started to dislike GTK2/3 more and more. The stupidity of file dialogs starting in "recents mode" also for save, to name one. Saving a file again? You see restarting at the top directory, just like in windows. Well, it's because the file dialogs don't have any saved state if you happen to destroy the dialog instance. A tweak that costs literally nothing to implement, but probably "not granma friendly"?
GTK3 is also downright slow. The new theming mechanism might be fancy, but objectively I have some UIs that I left at GTK2 intentionally for lower latency.
I re-evaluated QT4 as a user. The API and developer tools are just light-years ahead.
It's unfortunate that I cannot say I like the evolution of QT5.
[+] [-] ultramancool|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dorfsmay|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kurtz79|10 years ago|reply
Jokes aside (sorry), it's an absolute godsend when trying to debug embedded systems.
[+] [-] noselasd|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bkor|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jabjoe|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ultramancool|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaybosamiya|10 years ago|reply
More keyboard shortcuts always makes me happy. Less usage of that tiny little touchpad on my laptop.
[+] [-] topspin|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NetStrikeForce|10 years ago|reply
My main criticism is that I don't get a separate window telling me the progress of the file loading. I work sometimes with big files and it takes a few seconds to load them. On 2.0 at first I didn't know what was going on, because there's only this very tiny progress bar at the bottom.
[+] [-] shmerl|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nwah1|10 years ago|reply
https://github.com/mozilla/browser.html
[+] [-] NelsonMinar|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] WhitneyLand|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scrollaway|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geofft|10 years ago|reply
https://www.cloudshark.org/captures/184a2df0b16d
[+] [-] mahouse|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jkot|10 years ago|reply