ugh, the state of gui toolkits on linux is just sad

the nice:

• qt4 is thankfully gone for good
• afaict, qt5 => qt6 is not a difficult upgrade, and UIs tend to be fairly consistent between the two, so there’s nothing to complain about there
  qwidget apps generally feel pretty decent

the not nice:

• gtk2 can’t die fast enough (gimp )
• gtk4, despite being filled with cool tech, is somehow a huge regression from gtk3, again
  the default theme is different and afaict they’ve just removed theming support entirely
• qtquick creates another rift in UI consistency
  despite KDE’s best efforts to create a compatibility layer for qstyle, there are unfixable impedance mismatches which cause problems with some themes
• e-fucking-lectron

at this point we’re basically competing with windows for how many GUI toolkits will “coexist” on a single platform

xdg pls harmonize this shit thanks

@novenary hmmm... I don't have any experience with qt4, but yeah, qt5 has been pretty solid and I hope qt6 will be too.

As for GTK 2, I don't think it was that bad. I know it's old, but it's not the worst option. as for GTK 4, I agree that it's a huge regression from GTK 3. I don't know why, but GTK 3 seems like a good enough compromise for some reason. Probably for themes and stuff like that.

As for other toolkits, I haven't really bothered with Enlightenment's toolkit. It seems to remain a niche. Electron deserves to get every copy of its source code deleted and the last drive that contains that to be thrown in an active volcano. Also, let's not talk about that stuff in Wayland, it's really a mess.

@getimiskon >I hope qt6 will be too
a bunch of applications have already upgraded and I can't even tell which ones, they're pretty much the same (some can even run on both)

gtk2 had pretty good UX, the problem is that by now almost everything has upgraded to gtk3 so it just feels out of place (and has no wayland support, which means no scaling among other things)
I agree though that gtk3 is fairly okay, despite a few annoyances that aren't strictly unfixable

I didn't mention EFL because I forgot it even existed lol, does anything use it outside of enlightenment and tizen?

there's also a bunch of newer toolkits that see little use (at least for now) like slint
I have mixed feelings about those, because they're good under the hood but create more UX inconsistencies, but they're also cross-platform and will get used on other OSes anyway so

@novenary except from a few applications I use, I haven't really seen qt6 being used that much yet (although I think I'll consider to give Plasma 6 a try in the future). But like Plasma 5, the switch will take quite some time.

As for GTK 2, I know, I use quite a few applications that use GTK 2, like GIMP and claws-mail (I think it still uses that). The UX is really good. I don't get why they fucked it up so hard since 2011 and never really fixed it since then.

Also something I really hate is client-side decorations. I don't like that feature at all. I prefer having a consistent theme in all the applications I use, and CSD makes it a huge pain in the ass. KDE makes it painless. GNOME doesn't. And to make the pain even worse, Wayland lets applications to use CSD if they want to, even if on X11 they may not use it. I have seen that on PCManFM.

Oh, by the way, I like that labwc uses server-side decorations by default, another reason I really like this window manager.

@novenary opportunity to hate on GIMP detected
deploying rage with the power of ten thousand suns;!!

@jackemled @novenary hey they've been planning to release gimp 3.0 with gtk3 for like 1 or 2 months, they apparently just fucked up their schedule :/

@schrottkatze @novenary I don't know what that means. GIMP is just bad. It's like "oh yeah you can do ANYTHING with this tool" & then you can actually only cut & paste & the other buttons are just decoration. Yes, you can do anything just by cutting & pasting, but that's extremely tedious & difficult & you shouldn't do it that way.

@jackemled @novenary ...what?
gimp 3.0 = next major version

and yes you can do a lot more? (but yes, the UX is abysmal)

@schrottkatze @novenary I don't know what gtk is & I don't think it matters here. GIMP only cuts & pastes, the other buttons don't do anything. If you select the paintbrush tool it usually doesn't do anything, unless you get really lucky, then it colors a few pixels, but only once & you have to restart GIMP to get more pixels to color. Be careful not to make any mistakes because the eraser doesn't work at all.

@jackemled @novenary
(mentioned that (gtk3) because this thread was about ui toolkits and mentioned GIMP bc it still currently uses gtk2... anyway)

that is certainly a new one.
the buttons work fine for me with (to my knowledge after using gimp for a few years) 2 exceptions buried in a few submenus

would you be interested in trying to figure out what might cause this?

@jackemled @novenary (also don't get me wrong, i don't like gimp, it has a fuckload of problems all over the place. but that's something that i've never seen before, usually it works okay in my experience)

@novenary @getimiskon technically budgie is going to use EFL for some reason. i dont know why anyone would use that, looking at Enlightenment i just see a goofy ass desktop environment that shouldnt have been around since 2010 but still is somehow?? and it supports wayland?? and honestly looks kinda cool but its been too buggy every time i tried it;;;
and i have honestly not seen anyone use it ever and ive seen people use fucking windowmaker… (absolutely subjective observation)
welp i suppose the reason would be because samsung is supporting it, and using EFL in their embedded stuff where usually qt is used but qt is really expensive to use commercially (look at their automotive licensing :3) and efl is presumably free

@mayu I think I heard about Budgie trying to switch toolkits, but haven't seen anything interesting from them yet. Maybe I'm just not keeping up with what they're doing. Enlightenment is nice looking, some applications have nice features (like Terminology), but it's not that great as a desktop environment. Yeah, too buggy.

Also, I like WindowMaker, but it's just not usable, for me at least. Maybe on a desktop PC it would work somewhat better.
@novenary