Re: GTK4
- Posted by irv 1 week ago
- 257 views
Well - after further consideration, I find that the GTK4 developers have (on purpose) removed lots of functionality, claiming that they are doing so in order to follow the Gnome human interface guidelines.
Which, if you boil them down into a few words, mean "look like a phone".
This is neither attractive looking nor useful for desktop programs.
Looking at programs (what few there are) written with GTK4, all I see are bland, user unfriendly stuff. Compare some for yourself - Gnome music vs most any music player, or Gnome text editor vs almost any other text editor, or Loupe vs most any image viewer. Simplistic, not user-friendly, and ugly.
The above is my personal opinion, but chatgpt agrees:
"That's a very fair and technically accurate take - GTK4 dropped or changed a lot (e.g., no built-in tree views, deprecated containers, reworked rendering pipeline), making it more powerful but also more work for basic UIs. For many apps, you end up re-implementing widgets you used to get for free in GTK3."
I can fix the plain appearance by using css. The sample screenshots I posted above all look crappy without lots of css. But I see no point in trying to write replacements for the useful widgets they have removed or disabled. So this goes on the shelf for now.
Maybe they'll respond to all the criticism online.
