Other/future projects • Re: GTK2 revival

And, @athenian200, relax, at this point, "deprecation" is just a buzzword made up by corporate big-shots and marketeers to fright people off stable paths they don't want them to follow, because being stable is bad for their business. The men that follow this trend are either unaware of better options (but being a hardcore smartphone user helps here, too) or neophiles/hipsters anyway (the devs, mostly). That's what "modern Linux" is for. But don't forget that, while we cheer for this most-welcomed non-deprecation of GTK2, a Qt6 port of UXP looks to be on its way too.

It really looks like two clashing views here: the "community", the hackers, the men, against the companies who need to make their money one way of another, and do it by, on one hand, pushing half-baked shit into everyone's face, and, on the other, deprecating what currently works just to be sure people won't stick to the "old and insecure". To me, UXP aligns itself better to the former.

Yeah, honestly I hope the Qt6 port (or similar) happens, it would be a bit of a relief for me... getting a Qt version working would likely buy us more time as far as working on modern distros, and there's a chance people would like it better than newer GTK.

I don't think it's really as simple as you make it out to be, and people have been saying that for years. To me it seems like the "community" just maintains the long tail and keeps the old, stable stuff going a little longer while the less stable stuff is adopted at the fast-moving, corporate end first. There's an element of truth, but the world is not as simple as "corporate bad and fast moving, community good and stable," at least not in my book. If we disagree, we'll just have to agree to disagree. But what I usually see is, eventually the newer stuff stabilizes and comes downstream, so it's not like you avoid the future forever... you just delay having to deal with it and maybe get a better version of it than if you'd been forced to adopt earlier, a little sugar to make the medicine go down. I also feel like this glosses over very real security implications in a way that I have repeatedly seen people get burned by because of this very way of thinking.

Like, it's not that we intend to drop support for the old stuff (unless it genuinely becomes a burden or gets in the way of something), but I think ignoring where things seem to be headed and the mainstream while refusing to prepare for them just because they seem to suck isn't a very smart way to do things. It's never been a winning strategy in my experience, and I'm not keen on the whole "give up on modern Linux because it's too hipster, just trust the community hacker rebels bro," mentality, because I've never seen anything good come out of thinking that way and betting the farm on that sort of thing.

By the way, how do you think NPAPI figures in here, Flash Player being deprecated about the same time as GTK2?

Off-topic: Honestly, I find it rather annoying because GTK2 is not a dependency I want us to have on Linux. I've actually been experimenting with trying to get NPAPI plugins to work with raw Xlib/XEmbed in situations where GTK2 isn't available. I have had some success, but Flash Player is among the more stubborn ones. I know this a little off-topic, but I'm even looking into stuff like Pipelight (de-GTKed of course) or whatever to get the Windows version working on Linux in the future because I don't trust GTK2 to remain available on most distros and really don't see being relegated to retro-friendly distros as a future I want, even if I'm grudgingly appreciating the stopgap existing if mainstream distros pull the plug too fast, I still want the long-term strategy to be supporting both modern and retro Linux rather than being chained to the latter and having to put all our faith in it. The nuclear option (which I've already added as a build flag and which has been used on some distros already), is just disable NPAPI on Linux to build with pure GTK3 and tell Linux users to suck it up and it's not our fault they don't have a stable ABI, though we would still have NPAPI on Windows and Mac even in this case. Truth be told, Flash Player is sometimes half-busted even with GTK2 available due to modern glibc issues, so you'd need an old glibc to run it reliably in some cases as well. Linux is just... not friendly to its own native binaries, and honestly I'm not sure even GTK2 forever would save existing NPAPI plugins that can't be recompiled on Linux long-term given what I've been seeing with glibc lately.