GNOME Foundation Announces Transition of Executive Director [LWN.net]

The GNOME Foundation has announced that executive director Holly Million is stepping down at the end of July, and will be replaced by Richard Littauer as interim executive director:

On behalf of the whole GNOME community, the Board of Directors would like to give our utmost thanks to Holly for her achievements during the past 10 months, including drafting a bold five-year strategic plan for the Foundation, securing two important fiscal sponsorship agreements with GIMP and Black Python Devs, writing our first funding proposal that will now enable the Foundation to apply for more grants, vastly improving our financial operations, and implementing a break-even budget to preserve our financial reserves.

The Foundation's Interim Executive Director, Richard Littauer, brings years of open source leadership as part of his work as an organizer of SustainOSS and CURIOSS, as a sustainability coordinator at the Open Source Initiative, and as a community development manager at Open Source Collective, and through open source contributions to many projects, such as Node.js and IPFS. The Board appointed Richard in June and is confident in his ability to guide the Foundation during this transitional period.

Million says she is leaving to pursue a PhD in psychology. The board plans to announce its search plan for a permanent executive directory after GUADEC, which takes place July 19 through 24.

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Sounds like a success

Posted Jul 14, 2024 1:23 UTC (Sun) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (20 responses)

Balancing the books after the project's recent past is a good accomplishment.

The show must go on. GNOME is one of those things that needs to survive or we all perish. There aren't really any alternatives to GTK for what it does, and nobody else is trying.

GIMP hasn't had a significant update since they added GEGL, what, 15 years ago? It's 2 major versions behind its own toolkit, it runs on a windowing system that's been pronounced dead in increasingly angry and panicked tones, and… it does what it's designed to do. No fast fashion. That is how all software should be built.

Sounds like a success

Posted Jul 14, 2024 2:07 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (3 responses)

> There aren't really any alternatives to GTK for what it does, and nobody else is trying.

People are actually trying just that: https://blog.system76.com/post/cosmic-july-2024

They are using https://iced.rs/ as a UI library. And honestly, so far it looks like they're doing a better job than GNOME. And given that it's Rust, and a crusty C, they have a much higher development velocity.

Sounds like a success

Posted Jul 14, 2024 2:15 UTC (Sun) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

Oh, that's news to me. I do hope their UI toolkit's got better engineers on it than that javascript superfund website though.

Sounds like a success

Posted Jul 14, 2024 14:04 UTC (Sun) by e-rk (guest, #166547) [Link] (1 responses)

I just skimmed through the documentation, but it looks like it is rust only? IMO one of the biggest advantages of GTK is that bindings can be created fairly easily for most languages.

Sounds like a success

Posted Jul 14, 2024 23:52 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

They might add bindings in the future. But I think that it might be better to deal with iced.rs kinda like Apple does: you write the UI logic in Swift/Objective C, and then add Python/C++/whatever logic behind that.

Alternatives to GTK?

Posted Jul 15, 2024 7:25 UTC (Mon) by epeeist_pitlochry (guest, #156764) [Link] (14 responses)

The show must go on. GNOME is one of those things that needs to survive or we all perish. There aren't really any alternatives to GTK for what it does, and nobody else is trying.

Are there really no other UI toolkits available for Linux (and other operating systems)? If it were to go away, is there nothing that software like GIMP, Inkscape or Darktable could migrate to?

Alternatives to GTK?

Posted Jul 15, 2024 8:23 UTC (Mon) by jem (subscriber, #24231) [Link] (13 responses)

>Are there really no other UI toolkits available for Linux (and other operating systems)? If it were to go away, is there nothing that software like GIMP, Inkscape or Darktable could migrate to?

Of course there is. I haven't used GNOME a single day of my life. Some of the apps I use are built on GTK, but there is no reason they couldn't have used some other framework.

Alternatives to GTK?

Posted Jul 15, 2024 10:55 UTC (Mon) by epeeist_pitlochry (guest, #156764) [Link]

Of course there is

Phew, we won't perish if GNOME goes away then.

My initial post was obviously tongue-in-cheek, I do realise that other toolkits are available (KDE/QT being the self-evident one).

If GNOME did go away, then I expect that the developers would groan, and move to another toolkit. We have already seen this at a lower level, with X11 being replaced by Wayland

Some applications would die of course, and users might move to other applications (Scribus, Krita and VKDT for the ones that I mentioned in my previous post).

Alternatives to GTK?

Posted Jul 15, 2024 14:12 UTC (Mon) by tuna (guest, #44480) [Link] (11 responses)

Maybe the reason is that those apps could not use another GUI framework because they lack the features or license flexibility that GTK has?

Alternatives to GTK?

Posted Jul 15, 2024 18:31 UTC (Mon) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (10 responses)

Well, obviously, Qt is a more than competent alternative to GTK. Everyone knows this. GTK, while not as bad as EFL, is still pretty bad, causing huge issues for applications trying to move from one version to another. Qt has more features, has the same license for the important parts -- LGPL -- and a contract that will make it BSD-licensed if its makers ever break that license. Sure, the current company maintaining it sucks, but having maintained dozens of patches to Qt over many years, I'm not sure I care so much. After all, IBM and the Qt Company, which is the biggest villain?

Over the past thirty years, there have been many developments, but all the criticisms of Qt have been proven irrelevant. Not bindable to other languages? Nah, PyQt has been around long enough that my page about the book on that topic I wrote only exists in an archived version of my website. Corporate shenanigans? Sure, but it's still LGPL.

And as for GIMP's portability to another toolkit, that was proven to be possible in 1999 already: http://www.linux-kongress.org/1998/abstracts.html. (Isn't it awesome how that website has kept its urls stable for over 25 years!)

Alternatives to GTK?

Posted Jul 15, 2024 21:38 UTC (Mon) by tuna (guest, #44480) [Link] (2 responses)

You like Qt. Good for you. Even if you like Qt that much there is no point dissing the GTK devs. If Qt is so much better everybody will eventually use it and GTK will be another forgotten platform.

That has not happened yet though.

Alternatives to GTK?

Posted Jul 16, 2024 1:07 UTC (Tue) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (1 responses)

Like? No, not really. I just dislike GTK more. I'm just like, how can anyone not recognize that there are important applications being developed and used by millions of people that that don't use GTK while there are still people who think GTK, which is basically a motif clone redesigned a couple of times, is the only game in town.

Alternatives to GTK?

Posted Jul 16, 2024 7:19 UTC (Tue) by tuna (guest, #44480) [Link]

Nobody that reads LWN thinks that GTK is the only GUI toolkit available.

Alternatives to GTK?

Posted Jul 15, 2024 23:30 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (4 responses)

> causing huge issues for applications trying to move from one version to another

QT has had some major portability-between-versions challenges as well, made much worse by...

> Corporate shenanigans? Sure, but it's still LGPL.

Note that this wasn't always the case! It started out proprietary, and to this day anything other than the bleeding edge still is. [1] Meanwhile, those "corporate shenanigans" are responsible for a lot of otherwise-unnecessary toolkit-induced application churn.

[1] The idea being if you want API stability (and support), you have to pony up for a commercial license.

Alternatives to GTK?

Posted Jul 16, 2024 1:08 UTC (Tue) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (1 responses)

"Note!"

How is that relevant today?

Alternatives to GTK?

Posted Jul 16, 2024 1:32 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> How is that relevant today?

Very few things are genuinely written from scratch; you nearly always have technical debt (sometimes substantial) from past decisions.

Plus there's the fact that the aforementioned "corporate shenanigans" have included screwing around with the licensing and maintenance promises, combined with a marked decline in quality in recent years. Anectdotally QT6 has been.. quite brittle, with levels of API churn that remind me of current Python practices..

Alternatives to GTK?

Posted Jul 16, 2024 5:33 UTC (Tue) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link] (1 responses)

I've ported from qt4 to 5 to 6. It's not more than 3h work every few years.

Alternatives to GTK?

Posted Jul 16, 2024 11:56 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> I've ported from qt4 to 5 to 6. It's not more than 3h work every few years.

Much like GTK2->GTK3, porting is made much more complicated if you've created custom elements on top of the toolkit.

Alternatives to GTK?

Posted Jul 16, 2024 9:51 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (1 responses)

> a contract that will make it BSD-licensed if its makers ever break that license

Neat - where is that? Trying to find the canonical source for it, but stuff like "qt gpl bsd" has a lot of noise on search engines.

KDE Free Qt Foundation

Posted Jul 16, 2024 10:33 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

I think you want some of the documents linked at KDE Free Qt Foundation pages. This is where the owners of Qt have promised that the KDE Foundation can take the last Free Edition of Qt as BSD if the Free Edition is ever discontinued or relicensed away from the applicable set of GPL licences (GPLv2-compatible for components previously available under GPLv2-compatible terms, GPLv3 or compatible for the rest, some bits also LGPL).

Sounds like a success

Posted Aug 11, 2024 14:09 UTC (Sun) by daenzer (subscriber, #7050) [Link]

> GIMP hasn't had a significant update since they added GEGL, what, 15 years ago? It's 2 major versions behind its own toolkit

The final release of GIMP 3 based on GTK3 is expected in the near future. The jump to GTK4 shouldn't take nearly as long after that.

Also, it's been decades since GTK stood for GIMP Toolkit and it was developed primarily for GIMP.

> it runs on a windowing system that's been pronounced dead in increasingly angry and panicked tones

This is a misconception. The thing which is dead (in the sense that there's no significant upstream development anymore) isn't X in general, it's specifically Xorg.

Xwayland is actively developed and maintained, with yearly major releases delivering new features. The vast majority of X clients work as well in a Wayland session as they do in an Xorg one. If this works well enough for an application, there's no intrinsic reason why it has to be ported to native Wayland.

That being said, in the case of GIMP there are reasons for it wanting to run Wayland-native, e.g. support for higher-precision colour formats and more sophisticated colour management support (the latter is still WIP in Wayland, getting close though).