The future of Xfce (or beating the Gtk3 horse to death)

[Nick Schermer]

On 2013-03-18 20:54, Liviu Andronic wrote:
> So if Gtk3 indeed evolves to become incompatible with Xfce by having
> hitherto standard functionality removed, what would Xfce do? Stick
> with Gtk2, as remotely likely as it seems right now? Radically change
> direction and switch to Enlightenment (
> http://www.enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about/efl ), as Auke once
> suggested and especially since Enlightenment seems more compatible
> with the Xfce philosophy than Gtk3 given the direction in which the
> latter is currently heading?

Porting is not a real option, it maybe sound like that way but it would 
mean rewriting Xfce entirely. So bad idea.

There is nothing wrong with Gtk3, but you have to be patient. All the 
people complaining about gtk3 outside the Gnome dev team got on the 
train too soon. Theming was a mess up to gtk 3.6 and so was the memory 
usage. Right now things are looking a lot better.
All the articles are a laugh, its whining because 1 guy has no idea 
what he is doing. It is impossible to support gtk 2.18 -> 3.6 apart from 
theming issues. Every developer should know that.

So, yes Xfce will use gtk3 eventually, simply because there is nothing 
wrong with gtk3 (gtk3 != gnome3). In fact not much users will notice the 
switch as long themes don't break. In master some modules even compile 
against gtk3 and some of the libraries build a gtk2 and 3 version out of 
the same code. The day we switch is unknown tho. Enough should be ported 
to provide a working desktop (core modules but also goodies).

And remember it's the GIMP Toolkit! Not the GNOME toolkit, so as long 
The GIMP is using gtk2, we will too.

Nick