Other/future projects • Re: GTK2 revival

Ok, many new posts to reply to. If I left something out you want me to reply to please send me a message again..

Any changes we'll get binaries for Daedalus? I didn't/won't move to Excalibur due to usrMerge and... GIMP 3.

Yes, now there are debs for Daedalus https://git.devuan.org/SteveM/DTK_debs

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The thing is: we want gtk2 to be better than gtk3 and imo it is, with the exception that vanilla gtk2 is somewhat slower than gtk3 atm in Pale Moon. We already fixed that though and we're going to make it even faster. We don't want to preserve the bugs at all. Guys, you all use Pale Moon. There are people who claim that you guys want to preserve an old browser engine, which just isn't true. Please don't do the same to us

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Yes, we're not upset by your reaction, but I do want to clarify something. We're not just "keeping the past alive for oldschool reactionaries who want things to stay the way they are". Think of gtk2-ng as being what Pale Moon is to Firefox. Pale Moon isn't an ancient browser engine with patches to compile it on modern systems. It's an up-to-date browser engine with a different philosophy. We like gtk2 and we want to give it the same treatment you guys gave to UXP and Goanna. We want gtk2 to become a modern cross-platform toolkit that runs well on modern and old hardware alike. We want to to define what is modern. We want to be the future. We want your browsers and your amazing email client to be the future. We can make it the future.

Is there anything you miss in gtk2? We can add it. We're already planning on writing a new theming engine for css theming as well as a gui application that allows technically illiterate people and casual users to easily create gtk2 themes for various engines. We're also going to add support for proper fractional scaling (the way it works in windows and KDE), smooth scrolling and touch support. In a couple months the win32 and quartz backends are going to be as fully featured as the x11 backend and we'll add a HaikuOS-gdk backend too.

We don't want this to be some nice-to-have nostalgic sideproject. We want to turn this into a toolkit that's going to be used for brand new software, available in as many distro repos as possible. If we can convince the Ardour team to use our toolkit and make it easier for developers to migrate to our toolkit instead of gtk4 then it will stay. We can then highly boost your engine's market share by making it the default for all the software we're going to modernise.

Also, I remember The_Squash. His project was called "STLWRT" and yeah, he did want to merge gtk2 and 3, but you would have had to compile all your software again for that. Our goal is to stay binary compatible.

Sorry for the wall text. TLDR, please let me know what you'd like to see in gtk2. We want it to be a truly modern toolkit just like what Moonchild did to Gecko when he forked it into Goanna.