My personal reason is that GTK 3+ lost his track in what constitutes a desktop widget set. It's also getting slower at each release, it keeps breaking visual consistency and basic features get removed or heavily deprecated in favor of a "dumbed down" approach. So if the non-technical users are actually migrating to dumb web-apps and couldn't care less, the technical crowd which demand power features and efficiency are getting fed up. As a developer, I certainly am. The trend started already with the latest 2.x series in GTK, not with GTK 3.
My standards for quality on the desktop are way higher than what the "web" is supposed to give you today. It must be fast, consistent, and don't have any glitch.
The looks are a secondary point (and GTK 2 engines, or Qt4 for the matter) already give you great customization possibilities, which are way beyond what most other systems can do already.
GTK 3 and QML (Qt5) would like to target the same space as web applications. It doesn't make sense. Applications which are written with a web UI in mind will translate very poorly on the desktop, and the opposite is also true. My experience with QML was abysmal, and definitely not worth the extra dependency. Maybe you think that you button must be big and fat and have extra space to be tapped on-to, but on a desktop this is all wasted space on the screen that I want to use for data.
GTK 3 is trying to innovate a bit on the UI front, but many of the changes come with usability regressions on the desktop which I don't find acceptable anymore. Overlay scrollbars are a good example. In principle, they're a great idea. However the implementation is riddled of bugs which makes using scrollbars with a mouse a pain.
The CSS theming is nice, but they keep breaking the styles at each minor release. It's also incredibly slow. Whereas GTK+ and QML aim for rendering in a GL context, the reality is that if you want predictable performance they're going to be useless anyway.
>GTK 3 and QML (Qt5) would like to target the same space as web applications. It doesn't make sense. Applications which are written with a web UI in mind will translate very poorly on the desktop, and the opposite is also true.
QML is not targeting the same space as web applications. Its a more flexible and dynamic way of creating user interfaces. Its designed so you can create UIs for kiosks, infotainment systems, mobile applications, games, and desktops all with one toolkit. QML has components specifically for desktop development that have the same look as your traditional forms based widgets.
> It's also getting slower at each release, it keeps breaking visual consistency and basic features get removed or heavily deprecated in favor of a "dumbed down" approach.
This is simply not true.
We are closer to hitting 60 fps (or whatever your EDID actually presents) than ever before, and staying locked to that. The more complex of an interface you create, the harder that is, but that is no different today than ever before. Work is underway doing something similar to the webrender concepts which will improve render times even further.
I'm not sure what you mean by visual consistency, other than we create new widgets as designers ask for them. Just because applications choose to use something other than say a GtkComboBox for everything is hardly our fault. I welcome a future where application developers can decide what UI concepts work for them.
That doesn't mean you can't use deprecated widgets. This is no different than any other platform. We experiment with new ideas, keep what works well, and deprecate what doesn't based on feedback and user testing. GTK+ is one of the few libraries that generally stays ABI stable for a decade, so deprecated is more of an indicator than "this will be removed next month" like developers are used to with web APIs.
> GTK 3 and QML (Qt5) would like to target the same space as web applications. It doesn't make sense. Applications which are written with a web UI in mind will translate very poorly on the desktop, and the opposite is also true. My experience with QML was abysmal, and definitely not worth the extra dependency. Maybe you think that you button must be big and fat and have extra space to be tapped on-to, but on a desktop this is all wasted space on the screen that I want to use for data.
Where do you get your information? Because they seem to be fairly miss-informed.
GTK+ is most definitely not trying to be a web application toolkit. The "big buttons" are that size because people have all sorts of accessibility needs different from your own. Or you're on HiDPI and we don't have 1.5x scaling (yet) as it requires more plumbing in the compositor to do 3x scaling in the toolkit and 2x downscaling (and input transformations) in the compositor. I hope to see this before long.
Personally, I'd like to see a "condensed" theme variant of sorts. Finally, thanks to all the CSS node work in 3.20, you can pretty much get that with a couple CSS lines.
> The CSS theming is nice, but they keep breaking the styles at each minor release. It's also incredibly slow. Whereas GTK+ and QML aim for rendering in a GL context, the reality is that if you want predictable performance they're going to be useless anyway.
It's no secret to GTK+ developers that the theming API was always sort of a gray area. As of 3.20 the theming API, for the first time in nearly 18 years, is considered stable.
GTK+ does not render with GL today. (There is integration to embed GL into the scene, though). That might land for 3.22, but it's a lot of work and I would not be surprised if it doesn't make it until 3.24 as it's part of the drain-the-swap redesign of the drawing model. Presumably vulkan will be supported too.
> The "big buttons" are that size because people have all sorts of accessibility needs different from your own
What accessibility needs are you targeting when you make the buttons and titlebars bigger? Why did this change drop suddenly? Was there a cry from the majority of your users that the widgets are too small to use with desktop inputs?
Usually when there are accessibility issues you add options to deal with that, you don't change everything for a relatively tiny percentage of your user base. Would you make all your widgets have max contrast and double the font size by default because it improves accessibility for the visually impaired?
> Usually when there are accessibility issues you add options to deal with that, you don't change everything for a relatively tiny percentage of your user base. Would you make all your widgets have max contrast and double the font size by default because it improves accessibility for the visually impaired?
There are way more types of impairments than visually impaired. We do have high contrast themes to help with a subset of visual impairment. (Even visual impairment is a wide-spectrum).
Many of us may not particularly like touch screens, but an incredible number of computers that run Linux/BSD these days have touch screens. Things should work out of the box for these computers whether or not you want one.
So we can make arbitrary guesses at what the "majority" is but the reality is we have a lot of hardware that we should support. Getting real statistics about users in F/OSS is difficult due to the high overlap of people interested in personal privacy. So we try to make as informed of decisions as we can.
Additionally, more computer users than you might image have various difficulties in using the computer. Even if its not a majority, say one in ten, is still a large number of users.
Count yourself lucky that you don't have an impairment (right now). It is common that people have an impairment at some point in time (RSI, broken arm, etc).
I certainly agree that HiDPI is often way too large today (again due to the need for compositor integration), and I also agree we should have a condensed mode. However, I'd probably argue to implement a condensed mode on top of an effective 1.5x scaling (3/2) rather than yet another option in the toolkit/themes.
Why are you lecturing me on visual impairment and disabilities? At no point did I claim you ignore that user base.
>Many of us may not particularly like touch screens, but an incredible number of computers that run Linux/BSD these days have touch screens. Things should work out of the box for these computers whether or not you want one.
Okay so after all that we get to the root of the issue. Instead of a good traditional desktop experience, you want to provide a mediocre desktop/touch hybrid experience. Instead of doing one thing well, the aim is to do multiple things poorly.
I am trying to not come off as lecturing. My apologies if it was interpreted as such. You were making claims and I'm simply trying to provide examples of how other peoples computing experience might not match your own.
> Okay so after all that we get to the root of the issue. Instead of a good traditional desktop experience, you want to provide a mediocre desktop/touch hybrid experience. Instead of doing one thing well, the aim is to do multiple things poorly.
No need to get disparaging here. Clearly we don't want to provide a "mediocre" experience, nor do I think we do.
I also don't agree that supporting touch is some sort of hybrid experience these days. We aren't trying to be a mobile platform. We aren't trying to be a phone platform. Peoples traditional desktops (including many home workstations) have touch. These are real desktops bought by real people who get real work done.
I work with a lot of people who have desktops. I have two. I haven't seen anyone use a traditional desktop with touch. No one. Not once. My girlfriend is a 2d artist and she uses a wacom tablet for digital painting in photoshop. That's it.
I always disliked the huge buttons that come by default with some desktop environments, and I'm amazed the argument is "people use touch". As far as I and everyone around me is concerned, no they don't.
If it's an accessibility issue, it should be an optional solution for those who need it, not the default.
Don't normally comment online as I find it a lot of work (it's taken me about 5 hours to put together this pretty badly written response), but while there's a GTK dev here on topic I don't want to miss the opportunity.
> There are way more types of impairments than visually impaired.
Thankfully I have perfect eyesight, however I am very dyslexic. I have problems with spelling, but Google's search spell checker and voice recognition have made huge differences to me in that respect over the last year or two.
But relevant to GTK - I have a terrible short term memory. A goldfish like short term memory. I can barely remember a sentence when switching between windows, 5 numbers is a challenge (no distractions please) and remembering how another programmer abbreviated a variable's name is a huge distraction.
I can't organise IRL or digitally. When I'm programming terminal windows just keep piling up, because I can't remember what terminals are doing what (is that sitting at a prompt or is it watching a folder with inotify?). I could click through the open terminals and disrupt my chain of thought and forget what I'm doing or I could just open another terminal, keep working and do a closing session every so often.
So onto how GTK is making my life harder: by making widgets more accessible to people with impaired vision/touch screens they've made them bigger. I can now fit less on screen and I have to remember more. I have to move between windows more and I have to scroll more. This really is making my life much harder, I'm honestly getting lost on my desktop because I can't remember shit and I'm constantly having to switch windows - because there just isn't room any more for two side by side windows on 720p.
And it really never used to be this way. Compare Gnome Terminal with xterm. Yes gnome terminal is better, for instance you can turn off bold fonts (Myself and many other dyslexics have problems with bold and especially italics) and have a nice GUI for changing the settings. But it's visually huge. I'm pretty sure (unfortunately not checked at all, I use XFCE - because it's smaller on screen) with the default font settings you've got just about enough space to tile 120 columns of Gedit and a 80 columns of Gnome Terminal - but not something you'd actually write code with, by the time you've got Sublime's side bar open you're going to have to shrink the fonts. And find a window manager theme with smaller borders. And find a reduced size widget theme (these often don't shrink out much whitespace). And after that somehow you'll still feel cramped, maybe it's because everything has been unnaturally shrunk.
And, really ranting now, the web is the same, I'm starting to quite regularly zoom out on websites to make them more navigable, I'm getting lost scrolling between the massive headings and huge white spaces. I can't find the damn menu buttons and by the time I've found them I've forgotten why I wanted them and have to mentally backtrack (What am I doing? Why? So why was I reading this? What was the bit that sparked something? Oh yeah! Right, back to the menu! Where did that menu go again?...).
Going to the terminal example again if I want to tile my XFCE Terminal and a Digital Ocean tutorial I've to zoom Digital Ocean to 90%. And Digital Ocean are efficient with screen space.
I'm currently using a 720p 13" laptop display and I think my next laptop is going to have to have a 1080p screen, just so I can fit whatever I'm working on. I'll then have to override the DPI settings of course and generally have a broken display setup. I'm looking to buy hardware and run a nonstandard setup to solve the accessibility problems that GTK has introduced for me when solving accessibility problems.
As an analogy to the situation (on bad days) I feel it's like GTK/Gnome is running around shouting "EVERYTHING MUST HAVE WHEEL CHAIR RAMPS! NO STAIRS! ACCESSIBILITY HAS SPOKEN!" ignoring that sloped surfaces can be difficult/painful for those with hypermobility syndrome. And when it's brought up "I'm able bodied but my knees are getting sore" (AKA "your widgets are too big I'm clicking around too much") the response is that it's accessibility and wanting something different is denying wheel chair users. But this response is missing that an able bodied person is having problems (they're being annoyed by it because it's causing them difficulty) and if an able bodied person is having problems then there is almost certainly someone less able who is having even greater problems.
As in able bodied people are complaining your widgets are too big because they're finding they have a higher cognitive load because they're having to switch windows more often. The reduction in general accessibility (higher cognitive load) is traded to enable specific use cases and it's considered ok. In testing you able bodied people say "this is barely harder" and your specific use case say "this is great". But what's missing that there are other people with other disabilities you never tested - we don't speak out because there's not many of us and frankly it's not very easy, both to speak out and to make a meaningful contribution to something as complex as UI ergonomics.
Basically what I'm saying is, yes it is good to have options for disabled users. But forcing the default is not a good idea and you might find you're causing problems. The default route into buildings with access ramps is still normally a set of stairs.
For example I could request that bold and italic fonts not be used anywhere in a UI, for me this would be great, but for able bodied users this would be a step backwards and reduce accessibility (the UI can't highlight important text for instance). Able users would complain, and it would be a mild "oh I liked it when the top command put the total memory in bold, it made it pop out a bit" to which GTK would correctly say "but dyslexics find this approach much easier" but this conversation misses that there is another category of people with poor eyesight who find the bold emphasis really helps them find the important details in the UI. But because GTK has made removing bold and italic default (in the name of accessibility) the user with poor eyesight has no options to turn that back on, and the community is already galvanised against allowing bold, because they did a UI study and it helped dyslexics.
> Count yourself lucky that you don't have an impairment (right now).
Worst of all is if the "but dyslexics find this much easier" statement has accusatory undertones of ableism (Despite my quote I don't feel audidude has done this). That might lead to the poor eyesight user to agonizingly craft a response over 5 hours that tries not to offend anyone in the galvanised community, because they don't have dyslexia and don't understand the difficulties faced, maybe they really are being ableist. Alternatively, and much more likely, they'll just keep quiet and GTK will carry on oblivious, making life worse for them.
Now I have got to thank GTK for being really good with having highlightable text in dialog boxes so I can copy and paste into Google. Also after spending a lot of my childhood in Learning Support classes I have to thank GTK for all the hard work they're putting into accessibility, it isn't sexy, it annoys people but it's damn important (even when I think it's going wrong and sometimes makes me wish I worked in construction).
Thank you so much for writing this post. I know it must have taken quite a bit of time to put together. I don't think all the reasons about the choices we've made were necessarily accurate, but the post is so valuable on it's own it's not worth nitpicking.
I'm sorry that things have been getting harder for you. I'll share this information when we have our summer meet-up face to face to discuss the next years work.
I can't know for sure without studying (maybe you'd be interesting in doing a study with us?) but I'd think if we can get the additional scaling factors into libmutter (the compositor layer for GNOME) that you'd have more precise control over the sizing that would work for you.
That was a pleasure to read, and sheds a different shade of light on the matter of accessibility. Definitely is going to make me think twice when designing a webpage or application.
Thanks for the writeup :)
There is some great info in this post. The draining of the swamp is really good work, and seems to be starting to pay off.
I hope for the CSS theme changes there is some sort of migration, or warning - was trying gnome-staging on Ubuntu and lots of things broke with the change.
Fingers crossed that GL will bring GL Enabled cairo at the same time.
Drawing with cairo-gl/glitz/etc was never really faster than drawing on the CPU. I think it's more likely that we'd use the image surface (backed by pixman) and texture uploads.
If we are hitting a path where we expose the immediate mode style drawing (a'la cairo) then we've probably already lost the performance race.
I'd like you to substantiate the claim that it "gets slower at each release" before I'll accept it, it conflicts with my experience. I've seen every single GNOME application get consistently faster for the last five releases; today (with GNOME 3.20) they render at ludicrous speed on even my oldest intel boxes.
My standards for quality on the desktop are way higher than what the "web" is supposed to give you today. It must be fast, consistent, and don't have any glitch.
The looks are a secondary point (and GTK 2 engines, or Qt4 for the matter) already give you great customization possibilities, which are way beyond what most other systems can do already.
GTK 3 and QML (Qt5) would like to target the same space as web applications. It doesn't make sense. Applications which are written with a web UI in mind will translate very poorly on the desktop, and the opposite is also true. My experience with QML was abysmal, and definitely not worth the extra dependency. Maybe you think that you button must be big and fat and have extra space to be tapped on-to, but on a desktop this is all wasted space on the screen that I want to use for data.
GTK 3 is trying to innovate a bit on the UI front, but many of the changes come with usability regressions on the desktop which I don't find acceptable anymore. Overlay scrollbars are a good example. In principle, they're a great idea. However the implementation is riddled of bugs which makes using scrollbars with a mouse a pain.
The CSS theming is nice, but they keep breaking the styles at each minor release. It's also incredibly slow. Whereas GTK+ and QML aim for rendering in a GL context, the reality is that if you want predictable performance they're going to be useless anyway.