What's a Tolkit? And why two of them? I thought GTK was the Toolkit, GIMP was the Image Manipulation Program, and Gnome was the desktop Network Object Model Environment. Am I a revisionist here? (I certainly have my reservations about them!)
Exactly? If you're still holding out for GTK to be a non-Linux toolkit in 2023 then you're either an incredibly misguided contributor and/or ignorant of the history behind the toolkit. The old GTK does not exist anymore, you either use GNOME's stack or you don't.
GNOME co-opted and sabotaged GTK for anyone that’s not GNOME. GTK used to be capable of being fairly OS-neutral, and was certainly quite neutral within Linux and so became the widget toolkit of choice for diverse desktop environments and worked well thus; but over time GNOME has taken it over completely, and the desires of other desktop environments are utterly ignored. The GNOME Foundation has become a very, very bad custodian for GTK.
As you say, the old GTK is dead. GNOME murdered it. I mourn it.
Yeah, I don't disagree with anything you've said. Still though, I use GTK because it works and think the pushback against it is silly. GTK was never destined to be the cross-platform native framework. If that was attainable, people would have forked GTK 2 (for what?) or GTK 3 (too quirky). Now we're here, and the only stakeholders on the project is the enormously opinionated GNOME team.
They've made a whole lot of objective and subjective missteps in the past, but I don't think it's fair to characterize them as an evil party here. They did the work, they reap the rewards, and they take the flak for the myriad of different ways the project could/should have gone.
No, that's an outlandish conspiracy theory and completely ahistorical. GTK was always developed on Linux first, and before it was used by GNOME it had a lot of GIMP-specific functionality that didn't extend well to other apps. Want to know why? Because GIMP and GNOME developers were the only ones contributing. Those "diverse desktop environments" almost always took from GNOME and contributed very little back. That's fine to do it but they need to accept that they don't call the shots when they do that. They don't get to pull their funding and then complain someone else is being a bad custodian, it doesn't work like that.
Dude, I know. I've been implementing user interface toolkits since the early 80's, but I've still never heard of a "Tolkit", which you mentioned twice, so I asked you what it was -- are you making a silly pun like "Tollkit" for "Toolkit" or "Lamework" for "Framework" or "Bloatif" for "Motif" and I'm missing it? No hits on urban dictionary, even. And also you still haven't explained whether I'm a revisionist or not.
Just like you, I love to write articles about user interface stuff all the time, too. Just in the past week:
My enthusiastic but balanced response to somebody who EMPHATICALLY DEMANDED PIE MENUS ONLY for GIMP, and who loves pie fly, but pushed my button by defending the name GIMP by insisting that instead of the GIMP project simply and finally conceding its name is offensive, that our entire society adapt by globally re-signifying a widely known offensive hurtful word (so I suggested he first go try re-signifying the n-word first, and see how that went):
(While I would give more weight to the claim that the name GIMP is actually all about re-signifying an offensive term if it came from a qualified and empathic and wheelchair using interface designer like Haraldur Ingi Þorleifsson, I doubt that’s actually the real reason, just like it’s not white people’s job to re-signify the n-word by saying it all the time...)
Meet the man who is making Iceland wheelchair accessible one ramp at a time:
The article about redesigning GIMP we were discussing credited Blender with being the first to show what mouse buttons do what at the bottom of the screen, which actually the Lisp Machine deserves credit for, as far as I know:
I made a joke about how telling GIMP developers to make it more like Photoshop was like telling RMS to develop Open Software for Linux, instead of Free Software for GNU/Linux, and somebody took the bait so I flamed about the GIMP developer’s lack of listening skills:
Discussion about HTML Web Components, in which I confess my secret affair with XML, XSLT, obsolete proprietary Microsoft technologies, and Punkemon pie menus:
Deep interesting discussion about Blender 4.0 release notes, focusing on its historic development and its developer’s humility and openness to its users’ suggestions, in which I commented on its excellent Python integration.
How was it clearly a typo when he repeated it with exactly the same spelling and capitalization, two times in a row?
And neither of those things are even toolkits like GTK: "GIMP Tolkit" is an image editor, and "GNOME Tolkit" is a desktop environment.
And even if you ignore the two typos and the two mis-namings, his whole point is factually incorrect, and jdub was correct
and not a revisionist when he said "That is ahistorical, and the misnaming doesn't help make your point".
I'm simply giving him the benefit of the doubt, and asking him to explain what he means, or why not only his main point was wrong, but also why he got both of the names wrong two times in a row, and thinks an image editor and a desktop environment are incorrectly spelled toolkits.
And he still hasn't explained, or admitted he made two typos and misnamed two projects in a row while trying to make an incorrect point, while claiming to be an expert tech writer, and accusing someone who was correct of being a revisionist, so the jury is still out. But your theory it's clearly a typo just doesn't wash. Maybe they're the names of his own forks, or maybe he's just a charlatan, who knows? ;) Why don't you ask him yourself.
Because he was incorrectly nitpicking himself, and was wrong to call somebody else a revisionist without citing any proof, while he was factually incorrect himself, and offering an appeal to authority of himself as a writer and "random Gtkmm contributor" instead. I too have lots of strong opinions about GTK, GNOME, and GIMP, so I am happy for the opportunity to write them up, summarize them, and share them.
You'll have to read the rest of the comment and follow the links to know what it says, because I already wrote and summarized it, and don't want to write it again just for you, because I don't believe you'd read it a second time if you didn't read it the first time. Just use ChatGPT, dude.
Then you will see that it has a lot to do with GTK and GNOME and GIMP, even including exclusive photos of Miguel de Icaza and his mom with a garden gnome flipping the bird.