Browser Development • Re: Linux Pale Moon with Qt toolkit

Without that, our options are limited to what we already have in our code base, or some completely agnostic solution like Wine or SDL.

Well, we do already have preliminary code for an SDL version. And honestly, I do get the appeal of the Wine solution... it lets us focus on Windows and not have to worry about what Linux does.

Now, I'm not saying Linux users will love it if we go that route (they will probably be pissed, and you'll have to anticipate frustration on their part if pragmatism pushes us that way)... but I think an option like that is better than simply saying something like "Pale Moon only runs on Debian and Slackware because everyone else dropped GTK3," you know what I mean? We can support old GTK for a little while longer, probably half a decade if the pattern we've seen so far with GTK2 holds, but at some point it really seems like something is going to have to give, and I don't want that something to be our ability to run on any Linux distro besides the ones with the best legacy support. That's barely better than having to run inside a VM or a Docker container or a Flatpak or something, it's not a Linux strategy.

By the way, I was admittedly curious... what percentage of the userbase is on Linux compared to Mac and Windows, anyway? I had gotten the impression more of our users moved to Linux recently, but maybe it's just those are the more vocal ones frustrated with Windows 11.

EDIT: Did briefly try to run the Windows version of Pale Moon in Wine on Linux just to see how that looks... it seemed to work, videos played and everything, but there were issues with sound, the AppMenu wasn't visible, and showing the menu bar didn't look quite right. But there were no crashes with complex websites and it worked for the most part. I get the feeling that's basically going to be the issue with anything like Winelib or SDL out of the box... visually things may not look quite right compared to normal expectations, but running at all is still better than "hunt down this old toolkit or a special distro," at least IMO.

But really... if the Windows version were to work well enough in Wine... then that would solve several headaches at once without us having to do any additional builds. NPAPI on systems that lack GTK2? "Just use the Windows version in Wine, you'll be okay." GTK3 was dropped? "Use the Windows version in Wine, we tested it and it's fine, that works great on GTK4-only and Wayland-only systems."

And of course, I do think GTK3 will survive longer on BSD and SunOS, solely because I don't think they can go Wayland quite as easily as Linux. So, I'm obviously not eager to drop that code... but I do think if nothing changes, the time may come when almost no Linux distros can use it, but I can still compile my SunOS port. Let's just say there is a reason I ported to Solaris all those years ago... because I knew they were literally in a position where they would have more trouble implementing Wayland than anyone else, even the BSDs, and also are heavily dependent on nVidia's GLX support to function with graphical acceleration. So being tied to GLX/nVidia with no kernel-level support for what Wayland requires to function as a protocol means X11 is probably safer there. It's worth remember Linux is not the only platform using that code... but Linux may become, ironically, a platform we have to port Pale Moon to all over again some day while the other platforms keep using our old Linux code because they're still fundamentally Unix while Linux becomes more of its own thing.