Doesn't GTK4 address your complaints? To a certain degree, I think they've realized what you say. GTK4:
- decouples GNOME and GTK. They've created a new library, called libadwaita, that hosts the GNOME stuff.
- brings big performance improvements (it has GL and Vulkan backends)
- is much better on macOS and Windows.
Anyway, I agree with you on your points. One of the issues of opensource graphic programs is that the toolkits that are available are quite problematic/don't care about this use case. This is not just about GTK, as QT has also been causing a lot of headaches to the Krita developers. It is not by chance that Blender, which draws the UI using its own toolkit, is not affected by these issues and has a fantastic, fast UI.
Not the parent commenter, but I find GTK4 worse than GTK3 on non-GNOME Linux environments. The popovers capture input and hang your entire Xorg session until you press Esc (affecting EasyEffects), GTK4 has window creation race conditions breaking title bars on KWin and window positioning on KWin and xfwm4, and line height and text y-coordinates are non-integer and text is rendered at fractional vertical coordinates, resulting in blur even with hinting on (which assumes integer-pixel vertical positioning).
I might need to take a closer look at it at some point. I’ve never used anything that uses it, and I haven’t inspected it or grasped the scope of libadwaita, but most times I’ve heard anything about GTK 4, there have been major bad things—selection bias, to be sure, and perhaps confirmation bias, but it may indicate something. The three examples that come to mind immediately:
• They severely damaged text rendering and initially didn’t even acknowledge it as a defect, dismissing the report: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787. More recently there’s some movement on the issue, but the initial reaction was not a good look, at least.
• Of accessibility, they’ve completely redesigned it, in a way that is very convincingly better, or will be once it’s all finished including supporting tooling, but the impression I’ve received from a couple of communities where it’s come up a bit at times is that at least when they released GTK 4 and told people “start adopting it!”, GTK 4 apps were opaque to screen readers, because half the plumbing was missing. This impression could be false, and if there was any lack, hopefully it’s addressed by now.
I’m curious what the state of affairs is for approximating native look and feel on Windows. GTK+ 2 had a once-fairly-decent win32 theme that became fairly significantly out of date after Windows XP, but there were also some more recent themes that did parts better (and other parts worse). I’ve never seen a Windows theme for GTK+ 3 that is even halfway decent for look, and feel is a dead loss (e.g. menu keyboard behaviour and list box popup positioning and behaviour are both just painfully wrong).
If they’re serious about cross-platform, attempting to match Windows and macOS look and feel (and completely ignoring Linux, for a while) is where effort should be placed. I don’t know if they are.
On text rendering, I've seen that too and I agree with what you say, unfortunately. There is a difference between being professional/straight to the point, which I appreciate, and being dismissive.
On the other topics, I'm not informed enough, but at least it's good some work on the accessibility front is happening, compared to the dire situation of the last decade... I hope that eventually the situation improves. Accessibility improvements really benefit everyone.
Regarding the matching of the look and feel... in the last few years, this mindset has become very common, where each app is an island and no effort should be made to look native, because, in fact, there is no native look anymore. Windows has always been like this, and Linux desktops have started embracing that. From the app developer perspective, it's understandable. For the user, it means giving up decades of usability studies and the pleasantness of coherence. Given this direction, I expect GTK apps to look like GTK apps wherever they run, unfortunately. On the bright side, the default look of GTK4/adwaita apps is kinda similar to what macOS and Windows 11 are going for, so at least it won't look too alien over there.
- decouples GNOME and GTK. They've created a new library, called libadwaita, that hosts the GNOME stuff.
- brings big performance improvements (it has GL and Vulkan backends)
- is much better on macOS and Windows.
Anyway, I agree with you on your points. One of the issues of opensource graphic programs is that the toolkits that are available are quite problematic/don't care about this use case. This is not just about GTK, as QT has also been causing a lot of headaches to the Krita developers. It is not by chance that Blender, which draws the UI using its own toolkit, is not affected by these issues and has a fantastic, fast UI.