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A recent post about a Gemini browser built with libadwaita got me curious and I wish it hadn't.
Every time I look at the tech under Gnome it makes me vomit a little, so I don't. But then time goes by and I forget. Then I look again and I vomit yet again.
Gtk is just a terrible monstrosity, a Frankensteinian monster with bizzare bolted on object model that clearly stinks, and a weird xml layer to describe GUI objects what we used to call "controls", and some weird html/css like fragments just to make coding unbearable.
Add to that confusing 'properties' often inhereted from way up (and sometimes initialized from xml, other times peogrammatically, but on occasions overridden by various user configuration documents and styling from the system) and no type safety requiring much casting magic and your development grinds to a halt. Just like html with several layers of css, it takes forever to figure out what color some component takes on, or why it's 10 pixels over from where you expect it.
I've learned to appreciate and even enjoy C, but perhaps for a project like this it's not a good match? Take Common Lisp, for instance -- a world class object model debugged and tested decades ago by some of the smartest people in the world, and you can store data as native sexps, and it's gazillions of times better for intaractive prototyping... But that's too sensible for gnome.
But most importantly everything built with this looks like s***. White space is unwieldy and weird. Everything looks haphazard and stupid like a bad web page. All the wonderful things desktop applications had are gone. Actually it looks like a mix of 90s Windows shareware and a bad phone app. And if you try to make it look nicer or have more complicated needs like the Gimp it'll take you 10 years to roll out the next version.
Long ago I switched to Xubuntu because my desktop turned into a horrible mess overnight. I wish I'd stop looking back, but like picking a scab, it is sometimes hard to stop myself. Ugh, I have to find some mouthwash...
Nov 22 · 4 weeks ago
I also don't like GNOME and GTK; there are many problems. Some programs use GTK, but I do not use it for my own programs. I do not use a desktop environment at all. (Other desktop environments and widget libraries also have problems, but they are usually not as bad as GNOME and GTK, it seem to me.)
👻 darkghost · Nov 22 at 21:31:
You know, I think the description of 90s Windows shareware and a webpage is a pretty accurate description for the progression of the UI. It was an uglier version of KDE for a long while and now it's a tablet phone interface thing that everyone was chasing back in the early 2010s.
🐝 undefined · Nov 23 at 07:00:
Yeah, that's been my experience with it as well. In general, ui has been the biggest source of pain on any project i've done so far. Imgui seems like the best approach simply because it's easiest to reason about and doesn't require using extra languages/frameworks/layout files. But then when you want to make it look decent it turns into a giant mess anyway. I'm doing a project right now that tries to solve some of that, but there's only so much you can really do, it seems.
🚀 stack [OP] · Nov 23 at 15:00:
Whenever I write terminal code, there is a small crafuffle with handling command-line arguments and it's smooth sailing from there on. With a GUI, the interface coding and then debugging just never ends. The GUI and keeping the extra state and dealing with its vagaries takes up maybe 90% of the code, and along with the libraries, glue, 'resources', and other such crap, approaching 100% of the binaries.
Something is very wrong with how we do things.
🐝 undefined · Nov 23 at 16:31:
@stack I don't think there is, fundamentally. Sure, most ui libraries are n't great but even if you had better ones there's just a lot of things you need to write if you want the final product to look nice and polished. I guess if you look at it from the compression/entropy point of view there's just not that much additional simplification you could do without losing data.
🚀 stack [OP] · Nov 23 at 16:58:
I think the desire to "look polished" is the root of evil. I don't get it.
Microsoft and Apple are selling products to computer illiterate idiots, statistically, and need to prioritize gloss over substance.
And then, I watch open source enthusiasts, working for free, copying the idiotic GUIs for even simplest apps, for no good reason. Or even worse, to fool some idiot investors. But mostly, no rational reason. Sometimes even copying perfectly working software just to say it's written in Rust or Go...
That's how you get 100MB abominations, with a tiny subset of 'dd' functionality, just to write an SD image with 'polish'. What a joke! These clowns actually have funding and employees! They've been 'developing' that magnum opus for years!
I get that something explicitly graphic, Photoshop, or a video editor, needs a good deal of GUI. But most things really need a lot less, if any.
It's a tragedy that we, somewhat outside the commercial prison, are so brainwashed that we just want to copy Windows.
🐝 undefined · Nov 24 at 04:53:
@stack No, I agree with you on that it's kinda silly to spend a bunch of time making a worse wrapper for a unix command, useful as it may be. It's that IF you need ui, there isn't a way around writing a lot of code. And if you make everything super simple and get rid of customization, you risk making people make suboptimal decisions with what they have instead of what they would really want (often happens with tui's for example). And then there's console programs that should've been graphical but decided that they know better, with the worst offender being gdb.
🌻 softwarepagan · Nov 25 at 04:54:
I'm really just here for the comments. I actually really like Gtk as an end-user but hate Gtk4 and GNOME as well. I also really hope the alternative being proposed here isn't just "more shitty Electron nonsense." Anyway, I'll just be over here enjoying being able to change my accent color systemwide with one setting.
When I want a non tiling wm I do go with Gnome because it is fairly snappy, has good wayland support and mostly stays out of the way. What makes me really angry is KDE. It always finds a way to hinder either keyboard or mouse navigation or just showing me way too much info. But I don't like Gnome. I like sway, and even more so awesomewm back when X wasn't just the name of a shitshow online.
What makes me angry sometimes - it's no reaction from maintainers to feedback. It looks like nobody there interested in community opinion. They've dropped dash menu, make impotent Desktop feature, removed even turn-off button once, etc. Thoughts, I like there CSS only, not the frontend or development API. Thoughts about Iced, with COSMIC, at least it provides 'create new file' feature, lol.
One reason I do application for this DE it's because I'm still using it and won't adapt to different UI like Electron apps - every time surprising me by unexpected behavior.
🚀 stack [OP] · Dec 15 at 17:18:
Years ago, I remember, upgrading my Ubuntu to find that instead of a sensible desktop I had something like an insane, giant phone app, with weird panels. I immediately ran to lubuntu and later to xubuntu.
🐝 undefined · Dec 16 at 05:19:
@stack You mean unity? To me that's kind of nostalgic, since that was the first time I've ever tried linux. Ended up breaking that install shortly after lmao. Took me about 5 years to learn how to not break things. I remember seing tux racing in the ubuntu store and thinking "man, linux sucks".
👻 darkghost · Dec 16 at 10:38:
Unity came before Gnome 3. A lot of designers were chasing this convergence GUI, trying to find the GUI that was desktop and mobile. Windows 8 was also a symptom of this. Turns out this whole mouse pointer interface really isn't compatible with dragging fat greasy meat digits on polished gorilla glass. Windows learned this lesson. Gnome hasn't yet.