[zokier]

There is a murky gray zone between actively malicious and fully privacy respecting applications. Applications in this zone are more prevalent in closed source software, and Linux is increasingly being used to run such software.

[notalaser]

I think this is what I'm not getting :-). To someone who's so sick of dealing with GTK3 and xdg and everythingd breakage that I'm contemplating getting a Mac more seriously than when I saw the PowerMac G5 specs, the idea that someone who needs to run this sort of applications would not rather run Windows or OS X is unthinkable. I mean, after every point release in GTK 3, I would rather run Windows...

[oneplane]

I'm not entirely sure what GTK or GTK point releases have to do with it. Isn't it just a programming framework with a GUI?

[notalaser]

It's a very popular one. However, for the last couple of years, minor releases of a supposedly stable branch included backwards-incompatible changes that broke applications and themes. Basically, upgrading from 3.8 to 3.10 resulted in applications looking funny and some of them crashing. Quite a few application and theme developers ended up calling quits -- stopped maintaining their applications, kept on using GTK 2 or switched to Qt.

This caused a lot of negativity in the open source community. It's a shame, because on a technical level, it's actually very good. Its developers have, more recently, attempted to address this problem and their plan looks like it should work. However, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and we haven't had much time to eat it yet :-).

It's unfair to blame my frustration with Linux lately solely on GTK, too, I'm sorry if I gave that impression. A lot more factors are at work here. GTK has just been very representative of this mindframe lately.

[vetinari]

> minor releases of a supposedly stable branch included backwards-incompatible changes that broke applications and themes.

No, the releases broke only themes and exactly that was communicated - that the CSS engine was work in progress and that themes were going to be broken.

Those, who didn't want to listen complained afterwards. Color me surprised.

[notalaser]

Just from memory, changes in the way GTK handles geometry hints broke stuff in a bunch of applications, such as ROX Terminal. I think that was in 3.20. I haven't really followed development after 3.16 or so, I try to avoid GTK 3 applications when I can.

The decision to include "work in progress" code in stable releases is also a little questionable.