[NekkoDroid]

> the consequences have been to introduce a situation where, for the first time in quite a long period, large swathes of significant, widely-used programs are no longer capable of fitting in on non-GNOME desktops.

I still am looking for this magical theme that makes QT apps feel like it fits on a GNOME desktop. Like, not matter how much you theme, the UX is going to be different and that can't really be changed without rewriting the entire app in a different toolkit with the target UX in mind.

GNOME and KDE UX are completely different. One gives you the bare necessaties of options mostly behind a hamburger menu and a nice amount of padding, while the other throws every option and the kitchen sink at you with a relativly high dencity of content. They target different people, which is fine as no size fits all.

[simion314]

>I still am looking for this magical theme that makes QT apps feel like it fits on a GNOME desktop.

Qt does the work to integrate with Windows and OSX, by this I do not mean that it paints the exact shame of border colors on the buttons but more deeper integration, like integrating with the native System Tray, desktop APIs, the correct order of OK/Cancel buttons.

For linux the Qt devs are aware that each distribution has it's own colors,, fonts and crap so it would be a waste to target only a distro say Red Hat.

KDE did the work to make GTK apps integrate as much as possible but I think GNOME did zero work to integrate Qt or KDE apps and they tried sabotaging everyone else by removing the Tray or the server decoration.

I am not that type of user that needs all apps to have the exact same buttons otherwise my brain segfaults, I use KDE apps, GTK apps, Java apps, Electron apps. What I want from this apps is to use same Open File Dialogs and not be like GTK where the native GTK file picker has a weird sorting option for files and folders that do not match any other popular and sane system.

Also I remember GNOME guys claiming that you do not need thumbnails in the File Picker, that you are doing it wrong and the reality was that it was not easy to add the feature so they preferred to push that excuse that you are doing it wrong.

[NekkoDroid]

> KDE did the work to make GTK apps integrate as much as possible but I think GNOME did zero work to integrate Qt or KDE apps and they tried sabotaging everyone else by removing the Tray or the server decoration.

Sure it's nice I guess if they have their own theme for GTK apps, but if their own QT Kirigami apps look like this[1] on other desktop they should probably focus more on that than on apps not made with their UI framework.

> What I want from this apps is to use same Open File Dialogs

From what I remember it uses the xdg-portal for opening the file dialog, so either this has been fixed a while ago or the portal was misconfigured to use the GTK dialog (on the DE side).

> Also I remember GNOME guys claiming that you do not need thumbnails in the File Picker, that you are doing it wrong and the reality was that it was not easy to add the feature so they preferred to push that excuse that you are doing it wrong.

All I remember is that there were multiple times over the years when patches were sent and when changes were requested each time the submitter just vanished but I might be misremembering.

[1] https://imgur.com/a/dolphin-on-PUvU0ze

[josefx]

> All I remember is that their were multiple times over the years when patches were sent and when changes were requested each time the submitter just vanished but I might be misremembering.

The original bug report contained multiple comments pointing out that a file chooser is not a full blown file browser and that it either should not display or cause the creation of new thumbnails.

> and when changes were requested each time the submitter just vanished but I might be misremembering.

Like the guy who stopped responding after only a year of complete radio silence from the GNOME devs?

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=141154&

[crashdancer]

>The original bug report contained multiple comments pointing out that a file chooser is not a full blown file browser and that it either should not display or cause the creation of new thumbnails.

I think you're misunderstanding those comments, the point is that an external service needs to generate the thumbnails. If the file chooser needs them it will have to call out to that external service. There isn't any desire to build all the complex system-specific behavior around thumbnail creation into GTK itself.

>Like the guy who stopped responding after only a year of complete radio silence from the GNOME devs?

All open source maintainers I know are overworked. You shouldn't take it personally or make negative assumptions if someone doesn't get around to your pull request. This is especially true of large PRs that can be overwhelming to review.

[josefx]

> . You shouldn't take it personally or make negative assumptions if someone doesn't get around to your pull request.

Wether the submitter took it personally or not is not even apparent and it does not change the fact that progress was blocked on GNOMEs side of the process and not by the submitters disappearing after changes where requested as the previous comment claims.

[crashdancer]

Yeah and I'm saying that's not a bad thing or even a rare occurrence. Sometimes PRs can be de-prioritized or forgotten for reasons that are outside of anyone's control, developers are human beings so that just happens. I've seen it in lots of open source projects.

[jeroenhd]

Qt on Windows looks pretty out of place. Qt copied Windows Vista pretty accurately, but I haven't seen any fluent design yet. The Vista style also looks a little off now that Microsoft has tweaked the native controls in Windows 11.

KDE applications look out of place in Gnome. Some Gnome distros pack GTK-like themes for Qt applications, but Dolphin looks like ass on Gnome. Depending on your theme/night mode settings, it's also broken (black labels on dark grey backgrounds broken). Gnome apps may look out of place elsewhere, but at least they're functional.

I, too, can't deal with different behaviour, but KDE is no better than Gnome when it comes to integration. The core application UI design approaches differ, so I doubt good UI integration can even be done; cross platform applications would need complete UI overhauls for every platform they target, ruining the whole point of cross platform UI toolkits.

Thankfully, Linux applications using XDG portals will invoke native controls for features like file pickers, limiting the damage both ways. I expect something similar to happen on macOS and Windows.

[crashdancer]

>sabotaging everyone else by removing the Tray or the server decoration

Please avoid this narrative. I personally never liked the tray or server decorations and I don't use them other platforms. If you talk to other happy GNOME users you'll see they feel the same. It works fine for me, there's no "sabotage."

[simion314]

>Please avoid this narrative. I personally never liked the tray or server decorations and I don't use them other platforms. If you talk to other happy GNOME users you'll see they feel the same. It works fine for me, there's no "sabotage."

It is sabotage, most people need to use non GNOME apps, like Slack, Thunderbird that need a Tray.

So the solution is super simple, you do not use non GNOME apps then your brain is not affected by a Tray, you do not use non GNOMe apps then your eyes are not bothered by server side decorations, what GNOME did was to try and force everyone to use the GNOME was and they failled, I no longer follow Linux drama closely so I do not know in how many groups did GNOME users fractured? there were 3-4 new DEs based on GTK.

[crashdancer]

None of those apps need a tray though. Personally I have no problem using chat and email apps with only notifications. Something not being to your liking does not mean it's sabotage.

>what GNOME did was to try and force everyone to use the GNOME

I would be very interested to know if you could give a source for this accusation. Just show me one comment from a GNOME maintainer saying they are trying to "force" everyone and how they planned to do it. If they were going into homes and offices holding people at gunpoint forcing them to install GNOME then I think everyone would have heard about that by now.

[simion314]

>None of those apps need a tray though.

What do you mean?

That each time I get of my deska nd then I go back I should either get a stack of notifications or just check each app to see how many emails or messages I missed?

Sure those apps won't crash if soem evil person makes the Tray stuff go to /dev/null.

The idea is if you listen to the users that restored the Tray,a nd the big distros that also restored it or forked GNOME you would be forced to accept the reality, but GNOME designers pretend the reality is wrong and their fantasy is real, somehow reading a book or watching a video about UX makes those guys experts and a big bunch of the community stupid.

Also , stop pretending you are stupid, we all know the big issue with CSD vs SSD , GNOME refusing to make non GNOME apps work on their desktop, check how many forks GNOME vs KDE community had and use logic to understand the real world and non the fantasy in GNOME blogs.

[rleigh]

No. Why should anyone avoid discussing what happened?

We can all see with our own eyes how much GNOME cares about collaboration and interoperability with others. It's zero. It's been this way for a very, very long time. And that disdain for everyone else has consequences.

I used to develop GTK+ applications. I no longer do. Because it was an absolutely miserable experience, working with a toolkit which repeatedly requires every application developer to down tools and do a lot of busy work rewriting perfectly working code when APIs are changed or deleted. No other GUI toolkit causes so much pain and disruption to their userbase. It's quite clear that there is no regard for the actual needs of real application developers, and people like yourself aren't helping. You can't defend the indefensible.

[crashdancer]

You shouldn't avoid discussing what happened, I'm saying you should avoid making unfounded bad faith accusations.

>We can all see with our own eyes how much GNOME cares about collaboration and interoperability with others. It's zero

I mean, the blog post disproves this entire accusation by listing a bunch of projects they collaborate with. This is what I mean: please be more careful with your words. You're disrespecting yourself and the readers of your comments by making these kind of hyperbolic statements.

>which repeatedly requires every application developer to down tools and do a lot of busy work rewriting perfectly working code when APIs are changed or deleted. No other GUI toolkit causes so much pain and disruption to their userbase

GTK isn't the first or only project to deprecate and remove APIs, Qt does is it in every new version too. And you don't have to do this unless you're upgrading to new versions. Some projects are still using forked versions of old Qt and GTK for these reasons. That's totally something you can do.

[guerrilla]

Yeah, but now there are three, not just two. GTK, GNOME and Qt, rather than just Qt and GTK.

[NekkoDroid]

By that logic you also forgot iced, libcosmic, libxfceui4, kirigami, xapps, flutter, .NET Avalonia, electron/html, sdl/raw rendering, and probably alot more that I don't know or can think of. This really has been just GTK and QT for ages.

[anthk]

GTK was not always tied to Gnome. It was born with Gimp; and XFCE was remade into GTK making it faster than Gnome itself.

[shrimp_emoji]

Gimp Tool Kit!

I wonder when Gimp will upgrade to GTK 4, and realize GNOME has twisted the GTK framework into a draconian railway to making a mobile app with rounded corners, and give up and switch to Qt like so many other apps have.

[tristan957]

Inkscape was ported to GTK 4, and LibreOffice is in the works. Please read the article before commenting.