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Solus abandons GTK

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Development

One of the leaders of the Solus Linux project, Joshua Strobl, announced his intention to abandon GTK in the development of both future versions of Budgie and the entire ecosystem of applications in Solus. On his blog, he made a number of criticisms of the current state and development plans of GTK, as well as the GNOME development philosophy.

According to him, the widespread implantation of Adwaita as the only true desktop theme and the accompanying removal of part of the API for various kinds of customization has added headaches to developers who maintain the GNOME stack in distributions or integrate their applications into it. All suggested options for customizing the look and feel of GTK-based applications and related libraries are rejected, and members of the GNOME team are insolently rude in response in tickets and social media.

Joshua also complains that GTK4, released a little less than a year ago, slightly complicated the code for working with widgets by prohibiting direct inheritance. But he sees a much more important problem with the abolition of the X11 API, in particular for obtaining the configuration of the connected monitors. Moving towards full support for Wayland, GNOME removed the X server polling functionality, instructing the developer to write their own interfaces to access X11 directly (or to APIs of other operating systems, if the application turned out to be cross-platform).

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Rolled back to gtk2 version of yad

Budgie desktop migrates from GTK to EFL libraries from the...

  • Budgie desktop migrates from GTK to EFL libraries from the Enlightenment project

    The developers of the Budgie desktop environment have made the decision to move away from the GTK library in favor of the EFL Enlightenment Foundation Library ( ), developed by the Enlightenment project. The results of the migration will be offered in Budgie 11. Notably, this is not the first attempt away from GTK – in 2017 the project already made a to move decision to switch to Qt, but later revised plans in the hope that the situation would change in GTK4.

    Unfortunately, GTK4 did not live up to the expectations of the developers due to the continued focus only on the needs of the GNOME project, the developers of which do not listen to the opinions of alternative projects and do not want to take their needs into account. The main incentive to move away from GTK was GNOME’s plans to change the way it works with skins, which make it difficult to create custom skins in third-party projects. In particular, the platform interface style is provided by the libadwaita library, which is tied to the Adwaita skin.

GNOME to prevent theming, wider community not happy

  • GNOME to prevent theming, wider community not happy

    If you’ve been paying attention to recent chatter in the GNOME and surrounding communities, you may have noticed there’s a lot of disgruntled developers within certain communities that rely on parts of the GNOME stack, such as Pop!_OS and Budgie. I’ve been trying to follow most of these discussions and have been itching to write about it, but with the discussions still ongoing and my own lack of knowledge on the intricacies of the interplay between distribution maintainers, desktop environment developers, application programmers, and GNOME itself, I figured I should stay away from it until someone with more knowledge stepped in.

    Well, thanks to Joshua Strobl, experience lead of Solus and one of the main developers of Budgie, I now have a great in-depth story to link to. I urge you to read the whole article, but here’s Strobl’s conclusions:

Building an Alternative Ecosystem

  • Building an Alternative Ecosystem

    I am an unashamed Linux user. I have used Linux since first getting an Ubuntu 8.04 CD in the mail, exploring over those years many different distributions and desktop environments, ranging from a radical user experience built on web technologies in the form of JoliOS, to experiencing the classic GNOME aesthetic of the 2.x days, Cinnamon, Plasma, and for the last few years helping to build a desktop environment that balances a traditional feel with modern features in the form of Budgie.

    Budgie has evolved significantly over the years, going from a more GNOME 2 look-and-feel, to a ChromeOS-like aesthetic in v2, to the Budgie experience many of you are familiar with introduced in v10. The constant throughout all of these changes is our enduring stance on how Budgie should fundamentally function out-of-the-box, with a more “traditional” feel that makes it approachable for new Linux users while offering additional functionality that existing Linux users would find attractive. To facilitate this user experience, we have built Budgie on software developed by GNOME, from GTK as our toolkit of choice, Mutter as the underlying window manager for budgie-wm, multiple integrations with gnome-settings-daemon, and so forth. This has been the case dating clear back to even before its first “testing” v1 release in February of 2014.

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