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by traverseda 1982 days ago
That's fine, and I get that gnome is a platform. The problem is that they're forcing their platform's choices on every GTK-3 app, which makes it really annoying for people who use GTK (not gnome) apps but which don't like the Gnome platform.

The problem is that GTK was used as a generic toolkit, and they've added a bunch of weird customization's to make it work better with their platform. That fucked over a lot of people who used that toolkit on non-Gnome platforms, and for non-Gnome uses.

Most people using GTK didn't sign up to be part of the gnome platform. Firefox isn't a gnome app. They (and everyone else) assumed it was being developed as a generic and cross-platform gui toolkit. Bit of a bait and switch there.

The tight integration between gnome (the platform) and GTK (the cross-platform GUI toolkit) seems an awful lot like a betrayal, like taking something that was for everyone and well.. taking it. Making it all about themselves, and burning the commons so other people can't use it. Or at least like a heavy-handed attempt to force people to write Gnome apps instead of GTK apps.

2 comments

I'm confused how that's related, the issue you're talking about is in the file manager, not GTK. I don't believe any of the primary nautilus maintainers are also primary GTK maintainers, at least not anyone in that issue. (Please correct me if I'm wrong about that)

But, since I've said this before, I'll say it again: If the other people who use the toolkit want to have input, they need to contribute more. AFAIK there are zero non-GNOME devs working full time on GTK. I hope that changes, i.e. I hope the other desktops can find funding to send more designers and developers to collaborate with the GNOME people so everyone can have their say. That is the real issue here, I think it's incorrect to suggest that anything was "taken." It's open source, there isn't anyone who's going to take the code away from you unless you blatantly violate the license.

Maybe your distro patches it, but last I checked typeahead wasn't available in GTK-file-picker. It uses recursive search instead.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/839

Also: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=748672

The GTK devs were saying that they wanted a flag shared between nautilus and the file picker that would enable/disable typeahead. Unfortunately nautilus refuses to implement that flag, which I think means we're all still relying on forks for that feature.

So you're not really allowed to solve one without solving the other, last I checked.

So yeah, the issues is very much in both, and you can't solve the issue with GTK without solving it in Gnome.

>So you're not really allowed to solve one without solving the other

The final comments from the developer directly contradicts this claim:

>I'd be happy to review a merge request that added the ability to disable recursive search in the file chooser using a GSettings option ... I was thinking more along the lines of having a key in the file chooser settings schema that would be observed by Nautilus.

The idea there is that the key should be in a standard location read by nautilus (or some other GTK file manager) if it also decides to implement that feature. Edit: I also should note that it appears there was not even initial consensus about this, the other GTK developer seemed to be skeptical at first.

Their are some striking similarities between how systemd and Gnome interact with the community. Disregard for portability, feature creep, the way they attempt to monopolize their respective 'markets' and the way they treat everyone that disagrees. Those are all worrying. And the company behind systemd and with significant stakes in gnome (RedHat) recently showed how well they treat open source projects that stop being valuable for them as a company.
That's entirely unfair. We contributed a couple of changes to systemd and they went through without problems.

systemd does have a very opinionated code style, but that's not much different from (say) Linux kernel.