Yes, because GTK2 is so difficult to upgrade to new versions, whereas Qt4 to Qt5 usually only involved replacing a few identifiers (cannot speak to Qt6 since I don't do Qt anymore). That's why distros need to drag GTK2 along even though we are already at GTK4.
I work on the IUP fork, where I have and support the Qt driver, which works with both Qt5 and Qt6, and I only need a couple of checks to make it work on both. I often check if I broke the Qt5 build; nope, all good there, hard to break. For GTK3 and GTK4, those must be separate drivers; there's no way you can handle that with a couple of checks. Everything is different. That was possible to some extent and works with GTK2/GTK3 (single driver), but there are so many checks and workarounds there. Qt is so nice to work with.
Yeah let's start on a specific version that they overhauled the API since computers are getting new hardware features, god forbid a different DPI. And use that as a leverage point against a library that kept their API quite stable for the last 20 years!
Especially when comparing Qt against a library who couldn't keep its shit together for 5 years and is infamous for breaking all sorts of API and removing features.
> since computers are getting new hardware features
It's not possible to move forwards fast anywhere.
> and removing features
Yeah, this is indeed very unfortunate. They claim the GTK core team is about 2 devs, so tiny that we're lucky the development goes further at all. Hard to understand considering Red Hat became part of IBM.
And tell you what, the posts on linkedin and the blogs like this, where the take away is 'I got fired and next time I'll work LESS'. Really?
Errr, might want to reconsider that strategy, unless you think that you are going to get binned no matter what, and just cruising until that happens is the solution. Just seems like a massively negative outcome.
That, or they are going for the spiteful 'hopefully I convince everyone else to lower the standard, so others get sacked, or so I look good again'.
The point of the article isn't to just "work less", but rather that working above and beyond what you're contracted for in a large organization in the long run ultimately won't matter. The takeaway is that your "extra" efforts can be better spent elsewhere: family, personal projects, interviews for next gig, etc.
The article makes it very clear that they're talking about large, 100+ staff companies; when you're just another interchangeable cog in the machine. Today it's seldom that the person doing the layoffs is also part of the day to day operations, hence the you're "just another row in an excel spreadsheet" call out. Anyone who thinks otherwise is deluding themselves by thinking at the boots-on-the-ground level (known individual/quantity, appreciated) instead of the macro COO/CFO costs tracking level (unknown individual/quantity, interchangeable.)
I don't think the original post is advocating for just "throwing in the towel" here. Instead they're simply stating that working what you're specifically contracted for is a more reasonable and sustainable model than always going "above and beyond" for little to no gain to your work life and at great cost to your personal life.
Corporations by design don't "care" about you, they only care about maximizing profits and returns for their shareholders. Sure you can get "noticed" by higher ups, but those individuals have no obligations to you in the day to day operations unless you're getting cozy with the (increasingly externally conteacted) deciders/architects of the next upcoming re-org.
It's not explicitly stated in the article, but their call-out of the behavior of large companies speaks to the missing piece of the puzzle here: the "stage" of the company's lifecycle plays a crutial role in how much your "above and beyond" contributions matter. 10 person start-up? Matters significantly. 1000+ person org? Drop in the bucket.
I'm not defending the parent, since I don't think 7% is bad, but the conflation of legality and morality (or insert a less dramatic word for "things people are allowed to judge you on") is one of the most tired fallacies in all of discourse.
I was working on an F1 game back in the PS1 game. The studio wanted to fire one of the track texture artists. They pulled him up for a texture that was on the back of one of the break boards...
'whats this?'
Now given it was like a 16x16 texture, he could have said anything..
'its <name> as a stick man with his ** out!'.
Handed them the ammo.
However, related to the moon, we did a demo / prototype one time, and put it into a soft QA cycle before sending to publishers. One of our QA (rightly, but sigh) raised a bug saying the moon was upside down, and given the location of the game, it would be rotated.
I just don't get GTK / Gnome decisions anymore. Font rendering is one part, but my personal hate is the stupid over padded default theme. Coupled with the fact they are making it as painful as they can get away with whilst still saying they support custom themes.
Until they cut back on the bloated, padded default, no one is going to take gnome / gtk seriously as a productive desktop env. There is countless studies showing more scrolling or less information presented in all sorts (like finance, programming, creative writing etc), leads to more mistakes.
But yet, this is the default theme (gtk4) next to a custom one (Mojave-dark). Pointer (mouse precision) is increasing, why on earth would I need such a bloated UX.
It seemed to start around the GNOME 3 time when they were "simplifying" apps by removing all useful UI elements and hiding them in a hamburger menu that you couldn't access with the keyboard, ensuring you spent 80% of your time waving the mouse cursor around waiting for submenus to appear.
And since then it has got worse and worse. Thank goodness for Mate!
I don't understand how it could get like this. KDE3.5 and GNOME2 suddenly look amazing compared to the modern UI. Bonkers. It's like they don't try using their computer for a day.
Anymore? Gnome/GTK has been like this for a long, long time. The relentless taking away of options, choices, the ridiculous "everything mobile UI" drive, that's been going on for YEARS.
I used to use gnome-terminal, the last bit of gnome in my workflow. Then some genius decided to remove the --title argument to it, and you could no longer change the window title text. Somebody actually put in the work to remove that super basic feature.
No gnome for me, never again. It is a worthless project.
> The relentless taking away of options, choices, the ridiculous "everything mobile UI" drive, that's been going on for YEARS.
At this point, damn near to 20 years now, I'd say.
I've always found it bizarre that GNOME basically hid complexity away from users in a way that makes no sense. It often requires extensive workarounds or patching.
As someone who uses stock GNOME on Fedora with only minor theme tweaks on most of my devices - speak for yourself! On my touchscreen laptop the large buttons are welcome, and when scaled down on a 4K display it doesn’t matter that much. On my desktop I do use arc-theme however, so I see where you’re coming from.
I think GTK3 was the sweet spot. I used GNOME 3 for a while on the desktop and it was really nice once you tossed some extensions in (and replaced the ugly Adwaita colorscheme). Then I updated to GNOME 40 and felt physical repulsion, so I moved to Plasma, probably for good. I'd love to explore the timeline where the maintainers didn't axe a ton of features/support and instead focused on doing their own thing really well. Now all we have is a lame Mac clone, and they can't even deny it anymore.
Flat I can just about tolerate, the stupid padding round every single element is what bugs me.
There has been loads of studies showing the amount of mistakes in coding or spreadsheet type work goes up massively with having to scroll windows, but yet, gtk3/4 is a bloated, oversized mess.
Mice precision has increased, so why on earth do we need toolbars that can take upto 1/8th a 768p screen. Stupid.
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