Otte: staring into the abyss [LWN.net]

Otte: staring into the abyss

Posted Jul 27, 2012 18:15 UTC (Fri) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185)
In reply to: Otte: staring into the abyss by raven667
Parent article: Otte: staring into the abyss

Rewriting stuff from scratch is seldom the answer indeed... Which makes it worse if it looks like the current platform these great apps are written on depend on the work of one, increasingly frustrated person. I know that, for instance, the gimp people are working on GTK3 support, but they also have to contend with really bad bugs and lack of support for Windows and OSX. I don't like that situation one bit. Porting gimp to Qt was a demonstrated possibility way back in the closing decade of the last century, I doubt the feasibility of that at the moment.

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Otte: staring into the abyss

Posted Jul 28, 2012 22:30 UTC (Sat) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]

I know that, for instance, the gimp people are working on GTK3 support, but they also have to contend with really bad bugs and lack of support for Windows and OSX.

I imagine that things have moved backwards in the last few years, then. For a long time people complained about Windows and OS X support, and for a short while it looked like all the pieces were in place, but now we might be back where we were before: so much for that "ISV friendly" weak-copyleft-tending-towards-permissive licensing that meant that anyone doing the portability grunt-work was likely to keep it to themselves rather than share and collaborate; there's a danger that Qt could go the same way if various companies write off their investments.

It's all very sad and a reflection of the last five years or so in the wider free desktop scene.

Otte: staring into the abyss

Posted Jul 29, 2012 12:50 UTC (Sun) by Frej (subscriber, #4165) [Link]

GTK3 just got in homebrew that's what actually matters on OSX? :)

And GTK3 works better with the quartz backend than gtk2 ever did, i think the loadable backends helps quite a bit here.