elementary-dev-community team mailing list archive

[Jo-Erlend Schinstad <joerlend.schinstad@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 10 July 2013 22:45, Daniel Foré <daniel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> I can confirm that from speaking to Canonical employees and attending UDS
> that the tone has been for a long time that they will eventually stop
> supporting Gtk+ in favor of Qt
>

For Ubuntu SDK apps, that has been known for quite a while and there are
good reasons for it. But that's something _very_ different from not
supporting GTK+ on their display server, though it's obviously vice versa,
purely technically speaking. That would effectively kill Mir right from the
beginning and this seems a highly unlikely goal for any software company –
to design your products to fail.


>
> At the current rate, 14.04 may be the last version of Ubuntu under which
> you can run Gtk+ apps unless the community wants to build Mir support for
> Gtk+.
>
> Canonical is building a suite of default apps in Qt and all their
> third-party dev documentation is now focused on Qt. This is happening.
> Ubuntu is for Qt.
>

You seem to still be talking about Ubuntu SDK apps? Yes, on Touch, GTK+ is
not supported and according to Michael Hall, this is primarily because of
scaling GUIs to make applications look the same even if the resolution
changes. You should of course still be _able_ to run GTK+ apps, but they'd
look horrible because of lacking support from the SDK. But on the
_desktop_? It makes absolutely no sense in removing all those applications
because they themselves want to write in Qt.


> But like ConciousUser has stated, there is absolutely nothing wrong with
> that. That is 100% their choice to make and in my opinion, having a
> dedication to a single toolkit is a great choice. That's why elementary
> also has a dedication to a single toolkit and if we built a new display
> server I can tell you right now we'd have no intention of making Qt run on
> it.
>

There are lots of things wrong with that, which is why I don't believe it.
But let me get this straight; if X has to be replaced and nobody else
writes a new display server for you, then Elementary OS is willing to
remove software like GIMP, Evolution, Inkscape all all other great GTK+
applications? You wouldn't want to support Evolution for your
business/corporate users – even if those represent your primary income?
That, to me, seems like an amazingly bad idea. Perhaps you'd decide to port
those applications to Qt instead? After all, you want your OS to be a
success, right? Then you need to have good apps.

I can't believe Canonical intends to do any of that, and I won't believe it
until I see an official statement. The only other option I can see is to
keep supporting XMir forever, which in time will mean supporting X.org
alone. That would most likely be a lot harder than supporting a GTK+
backend. Right? Likewise, porting everything from GIMP to Evolution would
also mean an insane amount of work.