Re: Abysmal state of GTK build

[Po Lu]

Óscar Fuentes <ofv@wanadoo.es> writes:

> The 90% X Firefox user share you mentioned several times was a statistic
> of dubious relevance when it came out 6 months ago and is pretty much
> irrelevant now.

6 months ago makes it "irrelevant now"?

> The Mozilla Telemetry guys said at the time that it is not truly
> representative, for several reasons.

Could you find those "several reasons"?

> And, more importantly, Wayland adoption is gaining momentum, with
> major distros (such as Ubuntu) defaulting to it and KDE joining Gnome
> as a stable Wayland-based desktop environment.

It can hardly be called stable (like Wayland in general) when it
implements a different screencast protocol extension from GNOME Shell
and wlroots.

> I'll say that by 2025 Wayland will be more popular than X by a wide
> margin, and then X will have a hard time with basic maintenance by lack
> of manpower (some insiders say that it already suffers from that.)

I will always be available to take up anything that might be missing on
the X server side of things.  But contrary to what people repeat off
internet blogs, the X server is not seeing a lack of maintenance,
manpower, or even new features: XInput 2.4, with support for trackpad
gestures, was released approximately a year ago, which shows that it is
evolving faster than it was during the heyday of X development in the
mid-90s.  X is also a stable and mature system, by nature of its much
more centralized development methodology, meaning that it requires less
manpower to keep working than Wayland, where every feature is preceded
by two to three protocol extensions from different organizations, and
constant changes in the display server are required to keep up with
updates to unstable protocol extensions.

> This doesn't mean much for Emacs on the short and medium term. Emacs
> works on XWayland, and XWayland is improving so applications running on
> it doesn't suffer from a degraded user experience compared to native
> Wayland ones, apart from the constraints related to being based on X.

HiDPI does not work on XWayland.  It is also impossible to actively grab
or warp the pointer.  All of these are very basic problems that have not
yet been solved.

> Another claim you made several times is that distros will stop providing
> GTK2 packages soon. This is hard to believe, since other major
> applications (such as GIMP, as you said) also use GTK2 and distros still
> provide packages for libraries way more ancient and obscure than GTK2.

The GIMP is the last program keeping GTK+ 2.x in package repositories.
Previously, there was also wxWidgets, but almost everyone is in the
process of switching to its GTK 3 backend.

The moment GIMP 3.0 is released, GTK+ 2.x will disappear.

> Finally, it seems to me that your experience with some GTK developers is
> influencing your technical discussion on this thread.

No, not at all.