I've been reasonably satisfied with Mate 22.04, especially compared to 20.04, until I started using Gthumbs on 22.04. It was rock solid on 16.04 but on 22.04 it crashes randomly.
Is this our GTK future?
I feel like a total idiot for thinking I could manually bind Qt. I wouldn't have been done in a decade. I'm going to try starting over from scratch, but this time by using a program to loop over all the Qt headers and generating the bindings from them.
Sorry about saying "trust me we're almost there!" for the third time in a row. Just wish me luck 
!
(I know that the main discussion right now is about STLWRT and moving to GTK2 rather than Qt, but it's good to have multiple options. For example, I don't think XFCE would switch to Qt, but they would probably love STLWRT. On the other hand, a lot of GTK apps that aren't associated with a desktop environment may choose to Qt since it looks ok on many different desktops. I'm not exactly sure what MATE would do.)
After the bindings are done, I was hoping to make something similar to STLWRT, but it would convert GTK apps to Qt apps. It would work as a compile-time (macro) or runtime library.
GIMP was taken over by GNOME at the same time they took over GTK. I think it's fine though, since it hasn't had any large updates to functionality in a long time. It can be kind of like MS Office 2007: old but better than the new.
I'm not a developer, but I surely think that Budgie, MATE, Cinnamon, Unity, XFCE and COSMIC have expressed the same concern for the future of their GTK desktops and should therefore cooperate to fork GTK3 and keep it alive (and maybe improved in a non destructive way for traditional desktops). In addition, all these desktops can maintain a common application library that works well in our traditional desktops...
1 Like
Yes Win8, Unity, Gnome3 the whole convergence thing. Seems developers no longer care about what users want and only care about what new thing they can develop.
Win8 is what drove me to Linux.
3 Likes
Don't forget there's also the Linux Mint team, which develops one of the most popular Linux distributions that uses all 3 traditional GTK DE's.
It seems if they're not satisfied with an upstream piece of software they use, they will be willing to fork it. One of their developers mentioned it in a similar discussion, but regarding Libadwaita.
1 Like
Sorry for bumping this thread, but I have decided to create my own fork of an older version of simple-scan to ease the pain a little bit.
5 Likes