[DonHopkins]

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!)

[pjmlp]

GTK stand for The GIMP Toolkit, as it was originally used to write GIMP, which actually started as a MOTIF application.

When GNOME adopted GTK as its foundation, there was a clear separation between GTK and the GNOME libraries, back in the 1.0 - 2.0 days.

Eventually GNOME needs became GTK roadmap.

The rest one can find on the history books.

[smoldesu]

> Eventually GNOME needs became GTK roadmap.

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.

[chrismorgan]

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.

[smoldesu]

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.

[DonHopkins]

The problem with the GIMP team is not that they're enormously opinionated, but that they're WRONGLY opinionated.

It's not that they're the evil party, it's just that they should stop feeling so sorry for themselves that so few people want to use their image editor because of its terrible user interface caused by the fact that they refuse to listen to their users, and it has a terribly offensive name that they refuse to change.

At least they still have a fanatical following of MAGA incel edgelords and ESR sycophants who love it BECAUSE it has an offensive name, so they still have that hard core fanbase to appeal to.

They're as self-sabotaging as RMS himself, and they don't deserve to play the victim or to have a pity party, especially when they try to throw it for themselves.

[play_ac]

GIMP has about 3-4 part-time developers and no designers. They have no resources to redesign the user interface even though it's been wanted for a long time. It's taken them an extremely long time just to get GIMP 3 out the door and that's just a port without any major UI changes. But I agree otherwise, the horrible name is completely on them.

[play_ac]

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.

[smoldesu]

> Those "diverse desktop environments" almost always took from GNOME and contributed very little back.

Now that's an ahistorical conspiracy theory. Those diverse desktop environments contributed hugely to GTK, GNOME just didn't use their work or consider it helpful unless it directly related to their desktop... and of course none of that work will relate to their desktop. Nobody is going to fully "kiss the ring" unless they get something out of it, and even back in the GTK3 days it was plainly clear that GNOME didn't care about you if you didn't care about GNOME.

Now, GNOME's "coup" or "killing" of GTK is completely fine by Open Source standards. Even encouraged. I don't stand against the concepts of what they're doing, but they could have done a lot better than fighting third-parties tooth-and-nail. GNOME should be a proud project that leads the GNU movement, and instead it was reduced to a bunch of squabbling supremacists that made their userbase an adversary. I say all that as someone who quite likes modern GTK and writes apps in it.

[play_ac]

>Now that's an ahistorical conspiracy theory

No? Where exactly do you think I've theorized about the existence of a conspiracy? Because I've actually said the exact opposite: there isn't a conspiracy and no one is cooperating at all. There's no evil group of developers secretly planning to sabotage everything. It's just the usual bad communication and planning that happens with a distributed team.

>Those diverse desktop environments contributed hugely to GTK, GNOME just didn't use their work

Can you name what any of these contributions were? Because I've never seen them. I've seen contributions here and there, lots of minor bug fixes, but nothing major.

>Nobody is going to fully "kiss the ring" unless they get something out of it

Avoid this rhetoric please. These open source projects are a volunteer collaboration. No one's kissing any rings or trying to get something out of the maintainers, other than the usual: everyone helps each other write and maintain the code.

>but they could have done a lot better than fighting third-parties tooth-and-nail. GNOME should be a proud project that leads the GNU movement

I really don't know what you're talking about here, but disagreeing about technical things isn't "fighting tooth-and-nail". That's a normal part of any project.

Personally I don't think anyone should care about leading the GNU movement, that's been plagued by petty infighting and drama since the very beginning.

[DonHopkins]

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):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38233793

(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:

https://scoop.upworthy.com/meet-the-man-who-is-making-icelan...

Elon Musk apologises after mocking laid-off Twitter worker, questioning his disability:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-03-08/elon-musk-haraldur-th...

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:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38237231

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:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38238274

Somebody used the phrase "Easy as pie” in a discussion about user interface design so I had to chime in:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38239113

Discussion about HTML Web Components, in which I confess my secret affair with XML, XSLT, obsolete proprietary Microsoft technologies, and Punkemon pie menus:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38253752

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38263171

Comment on how Blender earned its loads of money and support by being responsive to its users.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38232404

Dark puns about user interface toolkits and a cheap shot at Motif, with an analogy between GIMP and Blender:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38263088

A content warning to a parent who wanted to know which videos their 8-year-old should watch on YouTube to learn Blender:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38288629

Posing with a cement garden gnome flipping the bird with Chris Toshok and Miguel de Icaza and his mom at GDC2010:

https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=299606531754&set=a.5173...

https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=299606491754&set=a.5173...

https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=299606436754&set=a.5173...

[vore]

It was clearly a typo you could choose to ignore charitably instead of nitpick. Also, what is the rest of this comment and how is it related to GTK?

[DonHopkins]

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.

[DonHopkins]

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.

[pjmlp]

Oopsie I touched a nerve.

[DonHopkins]

You HAD to mention MOTIF! ;) There's a reason I call it BLOATIF and SLOWTIF...

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398...

>The Motif Self-Abuse Kit

>X gave Unix vendors something they had professed to want for years: a standard that allowed programs built for different computers to interoperate. But it didn’t give them enough. X gave programmers a way to display windows and pixels, but it didn’t speak to buttons, menus, scroll bars, or any of the other necessary elements of a graphical user interface. Programmers invented their own. Soon the Unix community had six or so different interface standards. A bunch of people who hadn’t written 10 lines of code in as many years set up shop in a brick building in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that was the former home of a failed computer company and came up with a “solution:” the Open Software Foundation’s Motif.

>What Motif does is make Unix slow. Real slow. A stated design goal of Motif was to give the X Window System the window management capabilities of HP’s circa-1988 window manager and the visual elegance of Microsoft Windows. We kid you not.

>Recipe for disaster: start with the Microsoft Windows metaphor, which was designed and hand coded in assembler. Build something on top of three or four layers of X to look like Windows. Call it “Motif.” Now put two 486 boxes side by side, one running Windows and one running Unix/Motif. Watch one crawl. Watch it wither. Watch it drop faster than the putsch in Russia. Motif can’t compete with the Macintosh OS or with DOS/Windows as a delivery platform.