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What's next for GTK, given the Gnome fiasco?

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  What's next for GTK, given the Gnome fiasco? RS Wood  <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2014-07-10 11:28 +0000

#3995 — What's next for GTK, given the Gnome fiasco?

From the «How about GTK++ or GTK#» department:
Title: The Future of GTK+
Author: bryan@pipedot.org
Date: Wed, 09 Jul 2014 18:13:43 -0400
Link: http://pipedot.org/story/2014-07-09/the-future-of-gtk

Once hailed as the most free and widest used X toolkit, the future of GTK+
now looks dire. The gnome developers have essentially highjacked[1] the
latest version, GTK3, and are actively destroying all ability of non-gnome
users from using this once popular toolkit. I find this very unsettling, as I
have developed a number of my own desktop applications using GTK+ through all
three of its major versions. I've always preferred GTK over QT, but with some
of the recent changes, I'm starting to change my mind.Of course, I'm hardly
alone in this opinion[2] as many other projects have abandoned GTK in the
recent months. Take Audacious, for example. This GTK music player has had
increasing troubles with the gnome developers screwing[3]things[4]up[5]. So
many troubles that they are now planning on switching toolkits rather than
further deal with the upstream management. Although they had a functional
GTK3 port, they've officially reverted back to GTK2[6] until they can
properly refactor their entire program into QT.I've been a happy user of the
XFCE desktop environment for the last few years. This light and easy to use
UI gets out of the way and just plain works. However, the interface toolkit
of XFCE is tied to GTK2 and its authors have no clear upgrade path. A similar
project, LXDE, has also seen the writing on the wall and are well into a
rewrite project[7] that switches their preferred toolkit from GTK to QT.
Although the “G” in GTK stands for “GIMP” this popular image manipulation
program has yet to release a GTK3 version. Even Linus Torvalds' own pet
project, Subsurface, has recently abandoned GTK for QT[8]. Is the future of
GTK+ programs doomed? Can a revival project, such as Mate[9], takeover
maintenance of the GTK toolkit for the rest of us? (let the gnome people
screw up their own fork)

Links:
[1]: http://www.linuxuser.co.uk/news/a-linux-conspiracy-theory (link)
[2]: http://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotting-in-threes/ (link)
[3]: http://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2014/01/20/even-more-client-side-decorations/ (link)
[4]: http://blogs.gnome.org/nacho/2014/01/15/gedit-has-a-new-face/ (link)
[5]: http://igurublog.wordpress.com/2014/03/22/gtk-3-10-drops-menu-icons-and-mnemonics/ (link)
[6]: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTcyODA (link)
[7]: http://lxqt.org/ (link)
[8]: http://liveblue.wordpress.com/2013/12/16/subsurface-4-0-has-been-released/ (link)
[9]: http://mate-desktop.org/ (link)

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