From Newsgroup: comp.os.linux.misc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPdIBLk__tY

So, I started out looking for tab for 'The Fields of Athenry', fell into
the internet rabbit hole, and wound up here. I found it to be interesting.

It echoes my personal experience. While I am primarily a C programmer and mostly worked with Motif/Tk my initial feeling was Gtk was incredibly
ugly, and the was a few Gtks ago. However Qt wasn't an option for
commercial software. It wasn't so much the licensing fees as TrollTech's requirements were incredibly opaque. We were paying for both developers licenses and the sites were paying for runtime licenses for other
products. but you could get a handle on the costs upfront.

As the years went on the two camps grew further apart, plus the splinters
in the GNOME world as people decided GTK X or GNOME X sucked and forked
off the old technology.

Towards the end he makes a point I've also experienced. I run Konsole on Ubuntu and that comes with a certain amount of KDE support. There is also
the 'I've been gnomed' phenomenon. It usually involves installing Proton, rebooting, and finding you're now using GNOME instead of Cinnamon or
whatever else you expected.

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From Newsgroup: comp.os.linux.misc

El 12 Apr 2026 00:32:30 GMT, rbowman escribió:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPdIBLk__tY

So, I started out looking for tab for 'The Fields of Athenry', fell into
the internet rabbit hole, and wound up here. I found it to be
interesting.

It echoes my personal experience. While I am primarily a C programmer
and mostly worked with Motif/Tk my initial feeling was Gtk was
incredibly ugly, and the was a few Gtks ago. However Qt wasn't an option
for commercial software. It wasn't so much the licensing fees as
TrollTech's requirements were incredibly opaque. We were paying for both developers licenses and the sites were paying for runtime licenses for
other products. but you could get a handle on the costs upfront.

As the years went on the two camps grew further apart, plus the
splinters in the GNOME world as people decided GTK X or GNOME X sucked
and forked off the old technology.

Towards the end he makes a point I've also experienced. I run Konsole on Ubuntu and that comes with a certain amount of KDE support. There is
also the 'I've been gnomed' phenomenon. It usually involves installing Proton, rebooting, and finding you're now using GNOME instead of
Cinnamon or whatever else you expected.

This woudn't happen with an inmutable distro, be with Guix or any other
one.
In order to get another desktop you need to full rebase it, reboot
and fetch everything else from Guix as an user or via Flatpak.

Your user ($HOME) data will be kept after rebasing, don't worry.
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From Newsgroup: comp.os.linux.misc

On 2026-04-12, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

While I am primarily a C programmer and mostly worked with Motif/Tk
my initial feeling was Gtk was incredibly ugly, and the was a few
Gtks ago.

What little GUI puttering I've done in Linux was with GTK.
I too am primarily a C programmer, and GTK was the only
package that worked with straight C (i.e. not requiring C++).
--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | Growth for the sake of
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | growth is the ideology
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | of the cancer cell.
/ \ if you read it the right way. | -- Edward Abbey
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From Newsgroup: comp.os.linux.misc

On Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:35:03 -0000 (UTC), anthk wrote:

There is also the 'I've been gnomed' phenomenon. It usually
involves installing Proton, rebooting, and finding you're now using
GNOME instead of Cinnamon or whatever else you expected.

This woudn't happen with an inmutable distro, be with Guix or any
other one.

The choice of which GUI environment to use on login is a per-user
choice, not a systemwide one. So I don’t see why immutability would
make a difference to this.
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From Newsgroup: comp.os.linux.misc

Lawrence D´Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

On Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:35:03 -0000 (UTC), anthk wrote:

There is also the 'I've been gnomed' phenomenon. It usually
involves installing Proton, rebooting, and finding you're now using
GNOME instead of Cinnamon or whatever else you expected.

This woudn't happen with an inmutable distro, be with Guix or any
other one.

The choice of which GUI environment to use on login is a per-user
choice, not a systemwide one.

It is actually a per-login choice. You can choose your DE among all
the installed ones with every new login.

I don't recommend that though. My primary DE is Plasma, while I have a
fallback for lxqt when Plasma is broken (I use Debian unstable, and
Plasma being broken happens about once a year for a day or so). Some
apps behave weird in lxqt; I suspect that their local configuration
which is fine for Plasma doesnt fit lxqt too well.

I guess that is even worse when you switch from Plasma to GNOME and
back.

Greetings
Marc
-- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Marc Haber | " Questions are the | Mailadresse im Header Rhein-Neckar, DE | Beginning of Wisdom " |
Nordisch by Nature | Lt. Worf, TNG "Rightful Heir" | Fon: *49 6224 1600402
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From Newsgroup: comp.os.linux.misc

On Sun, 12 Apr 2026 01:12:17 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

On 2026-04-12, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

While I am primarily a C programmer and mostly worked with Motif/Tk my
initial feeling was Gtk was incredibly ugly, and the was a few Gtks
ago.

What little GUI puttering I've done in Linux was with GTK.
I too am primarily a C programmer, and GTK was the only package that
worked with straight C (i.e. not requiring C++).

I preferred wxWidgets (wxWindows at the time) which is a C++ toolkit that
us built on Gtk for Linux.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WxWidgets

There are a number of bindings including wxPython and wxPerl. The code
looks quite a bit like C++ Windows API programming, instead of the C
kludge. I'm not allergic to C++ but I avoid a lot of the more esoteric
pieces.

It's interesting how many DEs have derived from various versions of Gtk,
Xfce, MATE, Cinnamon, and LXDE for example. The original LXDE crew jumped ship and developed LXQt. I think Lumina is still around and there probably
are others but Qt/KDE doesn't seem to have spawned as many forked
derivatives. I wonder if that's because of licensing ambiguities or, as he points out in the video, Qt doesn't make a lot of breaking changes that
piss people off.


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From Newsgroup: comp.os.linux.misc

On 12/04/2026 02:12, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

On 2026-04-12, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

While I am primarily a C programmer and mostly worked with Motif/Tk
my initial feeling was Gtk was incredibly ugly, and the was a few
Gtks ago.

What little GUI puttering I've done in Linux was with GTK.
I too am primarily a C programmer, and GTK was the only
package that worked with straight C (i.e. not requiring C++).

I chose a different route, I program in javascript and CSS and run it
all under apache/php.

With C backends underneath.

Its justs simpler than faffing around with all the toolkits and widgets
--
The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to
rule.
– H. L. Mencken, American journalist, 1880-1956

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From Newsgroup: comp.os.linux.misc

Charlie Gibbs wrote this screed in ALL-CAPS:

On 2026-04-12, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

While I am primarily a C programmer and mostly worked with Motif/Tk
my initial feeling was Gtk was incredibly ugly, and the was a few
Gtks ago.

What little GUI puttering I've done in Linux was with GTK.
I too am primarily a C programmer, and GTK was the only
package that worked with straight C (i.e. not requiring C++).

The project I forked (circa 2015) used gtkmm, so I went with that
for a long time.

Then I found a qt fork that someone had written, and forked
that, so my project could be built with either GUI framework.

Although I liked gtkmm better in some ways, qt seemed to me to be
better supported on Windows. So I forked my own fork to be
qt-only.

However, except when necessary to interact with the GUI code, I
avoid stuff like QString and qint in favor of stuff in the std
namespace, converting back-and-forth as necessary. Thus I was
easily able to write a console/daemon version of the project.
--
I've been on a diet for two weeks and all I've lost is two weeks.
-- Totie Fields
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From Newsgroup: comp.os.linux.misc

On 2026-04-12, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPdIBLk__tY

So, I started out looking for tab for 'The Fields of Athenry', fell into
the internet rabbit hole, and wound up here. I found it to be interesting.

It echoes my personal experience. While I am primarily a C programmer and mostly worked with Motif/Tk my initial feeling was Gtk was incredibly
ugly, and the was a few Gtks ago. However Qt wasn't an option for
commercial software. It wasn't so much the licensing fees as TrollTech's requirements were incredibly opaque. We were paying for both developers licenses and the sites were paying for runtime licenses for other
products. but you could get a handle on the costs upfront.

As the years went on the two camps grew further apart, plus the splinters
in the GNOME world as people decided GTK X or GNOME X sucked and forked
off the old technology.

Towards the end he makes a point I've also experienced. I run Konsole on Ubuntu and that comes with a certain amount of KDE support. There is also the 'I've been gnomed' phenomenon. It usually involves installing Proton, rebooting, and finding you're now using GNOME instead of Cinnamon or whatever else you expected.

I've dabbled with both, but only made proper software using Qt, as I can
handle C++ and it just seemed to make more sense, and have a better GUI designer. I've got a project now, but using FLTK.
--- Synchronet 3.21f-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: comp.os.linux.misc

On Sun, 12 Apr 2026 09:24:30 +0200, Marc Haber wrote:

I don't recommend that though. My primary DE is Plasma, while I have a fallback for lxqt when Plasma is broken (I use Debian unstable, and
Plasma being broken happens about once a year for a day or so). Some
apps behave weird in lxqt; I suspect that their local configuration
which is fine for Plasma doesnt fit lxqt too well.

LXQt probably fits better than LXDE :) I use i3 on the Mint Cinnamon
laptop and sway on the KDE boxes. Mostly I stick with CLI, possibly with LibreWolf open for look-ups. I have had lockups if I start mixing and matching. I never dug into it but I think the root cause might be i3 conflicting with Mutter or sway with KWin.

I had one box that started as GNOME. I didn't care for GNOME and added
KDE. It mostly worked but was fragile. Updates were interesting.
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From Newsgroup: comp.os.linux.misc

On Sun, 12 Apr 2026 11:23:10 +0100, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

On 12/04/2026 02:12, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

On 2026-04-12, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

While I am primarily a C programmer and mostly worked with Motif/Tk my
initial feeling was Gtk was incredibly ugly, and the was a few Gtks
ago.

What little GUI puttering I've done in Linux was with GTK.
I too am primarily a C programmer, and GTK was the only package that
worked with straight C (i.e. not requiring C++).

I chose a different route, I program in javascript and CSS and run it
all under apache/php.

With C backends underneath.

Its justs simpler than faffing around with all the toolkits and widgets

That works. However if you develop a full on Angular app it stops being simple.
--- Synchronet 3.21f-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: comp.os.linux.misc

rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

I had one box that started as GNOME. I didn't care for GNOME and added
KDE. It mostly worked but was fragile. Updates were interesting.

Starting over with a new account and a new set of dotfiles and dotdirs
is most likely to fix that. It's not the concurrent installation, it's
usually dotfile contents that doesnt fit the other side.

Greetings
Marc
-- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Marc Haber | " Questions are the | Mailadresse im Header Rhein-Neckar, DE | Beginning of Wisdom " |
Nordisch by Nature | Lt. Worf, TNG "Rightful Heir" | Fon: *49 6224 1600402
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From Newsgroup: comp.os.linux.misc

On 12/04/2026 19:14, rbowman wrote:

On Sun, 12 Apr 2026 11:23:10 +0100, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

On 12/04/2026 02:12, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

On 2026-04-12, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

While I am primarily a C programmer and mostly worked with Motif/Tk my >>>> initial feeling was Gtk was incredibly ugly, and the was a few Gtks
ago.

What little GUI puttering I've done in Linux was with GTK.
I too am primarily a C programmer, and GTK was the only package that
worked with straight C (i.e. not requiring C++).

I chose a different route, I program in javascript and CSS and run it
all under apache/php.

With C backends underneath.

Its justs simpler than faffing around with all the toolkits and widgets

That works. However if you develop a full on Angular app it stops being simple.

Indeed. Its always the shortest path to the intended end result. That
path depends on where you want to get...
--
The biggest threat to humanity comes from socialism, which has utterly diverted our attention away from what really matters to our existential survival, to indulging in navel gazing and faux moral investigations
into what the world ought to be, whilst we fail utterly to deal with
what it actually is.


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