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  "path": "/viewtopic.php?t=33365&p=274088#p274088",
  "publishedAt": "2026-05-15T18:19:59.000Z",
  "site": "http://forum.palemoon.org",
  "textContent": "> The development money is almost all being poured in by multi-trillion dollar corporations whose customers are data centers and huge corporate server farms. IBM and Google and Facebook and whoever else is paying the salaries for Gnome and systemd and Wayland engineers do not give a single thought to the home desktop user experience, they just want a simple Gnome desktop environment that's easy to roll out across thousands of seats at a time, is rarely used by mostly headless data center installers, and is easy to support. And hardly anyone uses the standard Gnome corporate desktop as a home desktop. Ubuntu heavily modifies it, and supports many alternative desktops. Debian's popcon shows that most of their users don't use the Gnome desktop. Mint and MX, two of the more popular home user distros with installed bases in the millions don't even offer a Gnome version, because none of their users are asking for it. So there's a huge disconnect between what gets corporate development, and what home users ultimately end up using.\n>\n> I think the gulf between what the trillion dollar corporations want on the desktop and what the home users want is widening. So rather than a convergence on standards, the next decade is likely instead to see un-healable rifts. Following the Qt path may be a good middle ground, as it's always been the primary alternative and is widely supported in every popular distro.\n\nYeah, I'm not saying you're wrong per se, but here's the thing... while home users may not be running GNOME as it's shipped upstream, they are _definitely_ running MATE and Cinnamon, which are downstream of GNOME. MATE at least, was originally a fork of GNOME 2, but eventually adapted to GTK3. And from what I have seen of GTK4 (I studied it a bit), they WILL be able to adopt it after GTK3 is deprecated because it is designed to work for both GNOME and what GNOME forks want (see the other thread about the Qt port, the common assumptions about GTK4 being GTK3 but worse and a GNOME-only toolkit are slightly wrong), but it will be work for them. Because of that, they probably won't be able to justify a GTK3 fork long-term, however there is the hope that if someone steps up to maintain GTK3 before it's deprecated, they might decide to stick with it for longer. MATE went GTK3 _well_ before GTK2 was deprecated upstream at GNOME in 2020. However, I do hope that MATE and Cinnamon can converge on a shared \"libclassic\" as a libadwaita alternative for their GTK4 version rather than both developing independent alternatives.\n\nSo the point isn't so much, \"I want UXP to target modern GNOME\" or anything like that, but rather, \"what GNOME does _eventually_ impacts downstream forks of GNOME which are much more popular.\" Basically, it's precisely _because_ the development dollars come in from upstream and are poured into server distros that most of the downstream distros (and downstream forks of GNOME) eventually have to use the pieces they are given to build on top of RHEL's foundation or else become increasingly broken, fiddly, and left behind with the amount of tech debt from staying behind increasing year on year. Like, we're seeing that already with MATE, Cinnamon, XFCE looking into Wayland, wlroots and similar trying to give people some of what they had on X11 with Wayland, etc. wlroots is the community's \"spoonful of sugar\" to make the Wayland medicine go down. And it's like... as much as it may annoy users for me to say this, from a developer standpoint, targeting all the GTK3 desktops is similar to targeting GNOME 3. Users may like MATE and Cinnamon better because of creature comforts and classic feel, but under the hood from the perspective of an application developer, targeting them feels a lot like targeting GNOME 3, especially in the case of Cinnamon. So really we just support what we internally think of as \"GNOME family of desktops\" with GTK3, which includes MATE, Cinnamon, XFCE, and GNOME 3 itself of course. From our perspective, these are all GTK3 desktops that are all \"spiced/riced\" a little differently for the taste of users, but that customization doesn't really change the API or what we have to do much in the end. And if they go GTK4, then that still requires a lot of the same work for us as if we were targeting modern GNOME, even if from the user perspective they manage to put in the \"sugar\" so that everything looks similar or maybe even better for them than it did with GTK3.\n\nMy point is, what the user sees on the surface from \"cooler\" distros/DEs that look radically different from GNOME is often quietly built on that very same RHEL stack with several coats of paint added, not usually or always a fundamentally different architecture. Unless they use KDE, which really, truly is its own stack. But most of the others are just GNOME forks trying to provide a cooler experience for users and buffer them from upstream a bit until they can adapt their stuff. That probably feels dismissive of their efforts, but that is honestly how the average developer feels about it.\n\n* * *",
  "title": "Other/future projects • Re: GTK2 revival",
  "updatedAt": "2026-05-15T18:19:59.000Z"
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