On Monday, 5 October 2015 at 18:21:55 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> On 10/05/2015 12:35 PM, Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> On Sun, 2015-10-04 at 18:28 -0400, Nick Sabalausky via Digitalmars-d
>> wrote:
>>>
>> […]
>>> I absolutely, positively cannot stand software that uses GTK for GUIs
>>> (including Unity and GNOME...not that anybody actually uses GNOME
>>> anymore) regardless of whether I'm running on Windows or Linux. So I
>>> definitely won't write software that uses it either, if I can help
>>> it.
>>
>> Lots of us use GNOME and are proud to do so.
>>
>
> GNOME3? I'm surprised to hear that. My (perhaps inaccurate) understanding was that it landed with quite a thud and alienated a lot of its userbase (and even many of it's developers), moreso than the early days of KDE4 did. And I've never personally known anyone who did use GNOME3 (to my knowledge), so I figured it had become very much fringe.

Enough folks hated it that there have been at least two projects started which are forks of gnome (mate and cinnamon), and some distros are now using those as their default, which has reduced gnome's foothold. So, it did tick off a lot of people, but I don't know how many folks actually switched or how many have come back now that gnome 3 has become much more polished. A lot of folks just use what their distro has. Clearly, there are plenty of folks who use gnome 3 now, regardless of how it was received initially, but how many ultimately dropped gnome because of gnome 3 is probably hard to judge. I don't think that there's much question though that gnome 3 helped further fragment the *nix DE communities, because now we have mate and cinnamon added into the mix. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but between that and Unity, gnome is bound to have lost a lot of market share even if they still have a significant number of users - though since the gnome guys aren't exactly in it for the money, that's not necessarily a problem. They'll just keep on trucking, making what they think is the best DE, and those that like it will use it, while those that don't will find an alternative.

Personally, I definitely haven't liked what I've seen and heard of gnome 3 and would rather use gnome 2 (much as I hated it), but I'm a diehard KDE guy, so it doesn't really matter all that much to me so long as it doesn't end up affecting KDE in a negative way.

- Jonathan M Davis

On Mon, 2015-10-05 at 14:21 -0400, Nick Sabalausky via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> 
[…]
> GNOME3? I'm surprised to hear that. My (perhaps inaccurate)
> understanding was that it landed with quite a thud and alienated a
> lot
> of its userbase (and even many of it's developers), moreso than the
> early days of KDE4 did. And I've never personally known anyone who
> did
> use GNOME3 (to my knowledge), so I figured it had become very much
> fringe.
> 

Your understanding is indeed inaccurate. Yes there was a huge kerfuffle when the GNOME2 → GNOME3 thing happened. Many very vocal people screamed that the GNOME people were a bunch of w###### and all that sort of stuff. Many GNOME2 users abandoned GNOME and rewrote GNOME2. Many people though got over the marketing (and other) stupidity of the GNOME developers, and actually tried the revolutionary GNOME3 and liked it. I know I went to XFCE but couldn't make it work. Then when I actually tried GNOME3 instead of just screaming about the revolution, I found I really liked it.

This does not excuse some of the appalling behaviours of the GNOME developers, some of which continue to happen. This is sad.

> […]
> Wait, is there a distinction between "wx" and "wxWidgets"?

No, just bad phrasing on my part.

And wxWidgets is the old wxWindows.

-- 
Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder@ekiga.net 41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel@winder.org.uk London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder

On Mon, 2015-10-05 at 21:05 +0000, bachmeier via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> 
[…]
> This was one of the more extreme cases though:
> 
> - GNOME 3 was very different from GNOME 2. It had no appeal to their existing users.

Because they hadn't tried the new way, they just wanted the old way. I was in that camp.

> - GNOME users were told that GNOME 2 was dead so they had to "upgrade".

Nothing wrong with that per se, but the GNOME team definitely failed on almost all counts of marketing and customer care.

> - There was little advance warning that it would be so different.

Not entirely true. There was a good 6 months warning.

> These factors combined to make the vast majority of GNOME users very upset and very vocal. I'm a happy MATE user today but I had to switch to KDE for a while until that became a realistic option.

Not vast majority by any means. Many very vocal people yes.

I now really like GNOME3 and wouldn't want to switch back to GNOME2 or anything remotely like it.

I do wish though that the GNOME team would learn better marketing and customer care.

-- 
Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder@ekiga.net 41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel@winder.org.uk London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder

On Sunday, 4 October 2015 at 13:24:23 UTC, karabuta wrote:
> In YHO, what keeps you from using any of those fully(mostly)? Gtkd first,  followed by dlangui.  I need to know what I am signing up for.

I'm working on a search utility using gtkd, it's essentially a GUI for grep. I was using a program called Search Monkey previously but it hasn't seen much development and was pretty buggy, so looking to replace it with something of my own. This is my first experience using D and GTK so I'm a complete newbie.

My limited experience with gtkd has been very positive, while the documentation is primarily reference material it's not very difficult to figure out how things work with GTK based on examples from C or pyGTK. I do use Linix and Gnome Shell so I'm fully wedded to the Gnome HIG so no issues for me in terms of using GTK as a toolkit since it's native to my environment.

I really like the fact that gtkd appears to be a full binding and supports GTK 3.16 so newer GTK features like headerbar are available. I had considered learning Go for this utility but the lack of a full binding for GTK was a major impediment for me. I had also previously fooled around with Python but didn't like the language very much, the dynamic typing and indentation to delineate blocks are not for me.

On Tuesday, 6 October 2015 at 13:38:28 UTC, Gerald wrote:
> My limited experience with gtkd has been very positive, while the documentation is primarily reference material it's not very difficult to figure out how things work with GTK based on examples from C or pyGTK. I do use Linix and Gnome Shell so I'm fully wedded to the Gnome HIG so no issues for me in terms of using GTK as a toolkit since it's native to my environment.

A major advantage to D is that you can declare bindings to C libraries such that using them in D is pretty much identical to using them in C. Having more D-like wrappers around such bindings can be really nice, but when you need to know how to use the bindings, all you have to do is look up how you use those functions in C, and you know how to use them in D. The only major hurdle is having the bindings in the first place. But once you have them, there isn't much reason to program in C rather than D. :)

- Jonathan M Davis

Am Mon, 05 Oct 2015 14:21:55 -0400
schrieb Nick Sabalausky <SeeWebsiteToContactMe@semitwist.com>:

> > Lots of us use GNOME and are proud to do so.
> > 
> 
> GNOME3? I'm surprised to hear that. My (perhaps inaccurate) understanding was that it landed with quite a thud and alienated a lot of its userbase (and even many of it's developers), moreso than the early days of KDE4 did. And I've never personally known anyone who did use GNOME3 (to my knowledge), so I figured it had become very much fringe.

As of 2015, critical reception is much more positive.[48] Debian, a Linux distribution that had historically used GNOME 2, switched to Xfce when GNOME 3 was released. However, Debian readopted GNOME 3 in time for the release of Debian 8 "Jessie".[49][48] Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel, switched back to GNOME 3 in 2013.[48] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME#GNOME_3

Fedora and RHEL also use gnome 3 by default.

Gnome 3 was kinda annoying but has improved with every release. If you use the keyboard shortcuts, virtual desktops and some nice extensions it's a nice DE. And with proper icons (numix) it also looks great.

Am Tue, 06 Oct 2015 13:41:48 +0000
schrieb Jonathan M Davis <jmdavisProg@gmx.com>:

> On Tuesday, 6 October 2015 at 13:38:28 UTC, Gerald wrote:
> > My limited experience with gtkd has been very positive, while the documentation is primarily reference material it's not very difficult to figure out how things work with GTK based on examples from C or pyGTK. I do use Linix and Gnome Shell so I'm fully wedded to the Gnome HIG so no issues for me in terms of using GTK as a toolkit since it's native to my environment.
> 
> A major advantage to D is that you can declare bindings to C libraries such that using them in D is pretty much identical to using them in C. Having more D-like wrappers around such bindings can be really nice, but when you need to know how to use the bindings, all you have to do is look up how you use those functions in C, and you know how to use them in D. The only major hurdle is having the bindings in the first place. But once you have them, there isn't much reason to program in C rather than D. :)
> 
> - Jonathan M Davis

True, but you wouldn't really want to use the GTK/GLIB C API in D ;-)

GTKd is a complete class-based wrapper, although mainly auto-generated.

On Sunday, 4 October 2015 at 13:38:04 UTC, Manu wrote:
> On 4 October 2015 at 23:24, karabuta via Digitalmars-d <digitalmars-d@puremagic.com> wrote:
>> For some time now I have been trying various GUIs options in D. I came to settle on gtkd and dlangui(stability is not my current priority).
>>
>> In YHO, what keeps you from using any of those fully(mostly)? Gtkd first, followed by dlangui.  I need to know what I am signing up for.
>
> Qt is the defacto portable standard, including mobile devices. Sadly, there is no substitute, so as far as I'm concerned, D waits for a Qt5 binding.

Can someone please tell me what is wrong dlangui? It might not be stable and it mighint u()
{
  int m = 35, bar = 5;
  bar--;
  m /= bar;
  return m;
}t have some few bugs, but is it something I can rely on for a windows-linux GUI app. Surely it might get better somehow.


Any unfiltered opinion on this? It hurts so bad that tkd does not look convincing.

On 10/06/2015 02:21 AM, Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Mon, 2015-10-05 at 14:21 -0400, Nick Sabalausky via Digitalmars-d
> wrote:
>>
> […]
>> GNOME3? I'm surprised to hear that. My (perhaps inaccurate)
>> understanding was that it landed with quite a thud and alienated a
>> lot
>> of its userbase (and even many of it's developers), moreso than the
>> early days of KDE4 did. And I've never personally known anyone who
>> did
>> use GNOME3 (to my knowledge), so I figured it had become very much
>> fringe.
>>
>
> Your understanding is indeed inaccurate. Yes there was a huge kerfuffle
> when the GNOME2 → GNOME3 thing happened. Many very vocal people
> screamed that the GNOME people were a bunch of w###### and all that
> sort of stuff. Many GNOME2 users abandoned GNOME and rewrote GNOME2.
> Many people though got over the marketing (and other) stupidity of the
> GNOME developers, and actually tried the revolutionary GNOME3 and liked
> it.

Fair enough. Of course that doesn't account for *all* those who were unhappy with GNOME3 (but I know you're not implying it does): My dislike of GNOME3 *is* from after trying it first. Just seemed wacky to me, and I didn't feel much point in bothering to adjust to it, what with all the other alternatives out there.

Actually didn't mind GNOME2 *too* much back at the time: My main beefs with GNOME2 were just the overly-padded GTK widgets/rendering and it seemed to be going for more of an OSX experience for my tastes (Plus I never really liked the Nautilus-based file managers: Like Finder, they just make me feel like my hands are tied behind my back).

> I know I went to XFCE but couldn't make it work.

Y'know, I've always had a fair amount of respect for XFCE, but their big problem has always been polish. It's always had a lot of promise and potential, and I still respect it for that. But it's been in strong need of a big heavy dose of polish for a looong time.

(Ex: Just try adjusting the taskbar. And then go back and see how slick, intuitive and "just works" MS (go figure!) managed to make taskbar adjusting a full twenty years ago, back in Win95. Even KDE still hasn't managed to match that either, although it's still way ahead of XFCE in that regard).

>
> This does not excuse some of the appalling behaviours of the GNOME
> developers, some of which continue to happen. This is sad.
>

Yea, :( They've even lost major developers over some of it, AIUI. It's too bad. Gnome may not be my cup of tea, but its community does deserve better.

>> […]
>> Wait, is there a distinction between "wx" and "wxWidgets"?
>
> No, just bad phrasing on my part.
>
> And wxWidgets is the old wxWindows.
>

Ahh, ok.

On 10/06/2015 11:33 AM, Johannes Pfau wrote:
>
> As of 2015, critical reception is much more positive.[48] Debian, a
> Linux distribution that had historically used GNOME 2, switched to Xfce
> when GNOME 3 was released. However, Debian readopted GNOME 3 in time
> for the release of Debian 8 "Jessie".[49][48] Linus Torvalds, the
> creator of the Linux kernel, switched back to GNOME 3 in 2013.[48]
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME#GNOME_3
>

Wow, I had no idea about any of that. While I doubt I'll be switching (still don't like GTK or Nautilus, and happy enough with KDE), but now I'm curious to take another look, see how it's come along.

> Fedora and RHEL also use gnome 3 by default.
>
> Gnome 3 was kinda annoying but has improved with every release. If
> you use the keyboard shortcuts, virtual desktops and some nice
> extensions it's a nice DE. And with proper icons (numix) it also looks
> great.
>

Well that's good to hear. KDE4 went through the same path. After spending time with KDE4, I found it to be it a terrible blunder of an upgrade even after, several point releases in, people were saying it had finally been fixed. It still has some warts that annoy me (and some things I just gave in on), but it's finally won me back from my hiatus with XFCE/LXDE. Looking forward to v5 stabilizing further.