This worries me about our current GTK2 standard

[Gustavo 'Gus' Carreno]

Hey Y'all,

First of all, I'm not trying to blame anyone or even start a bloody flamewar. It's just that this video kinda gave me a sense of dread...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hn3Aeen1snA

Ok, sure, the video is centred around Arch Linux. But how long will it take for major dists like Debian/Ubuntu/Fedore/Suse/etc.. to begin thinking about retiring GTK2?

I don't want to start anything here, I'm just wondering how is the core team dealing with this possibility?
Like, is there a roadmap for, at least, GTK3?
If so, then how far along are we?

You know, a bit more information on this subject, cuz it looks like some dists are kinda pushing the subject of sunsetting GTK2 already, and that scares me a bit...
I'm still using HexChat quite a lot, and that was mentioned in the video

Many thanks in advance for any answer!!

Cheers,
Gus

[Thausand]

https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/lazarus/lazarus/-/commit/287fbaaa1a56d37458146e624d1dd9b6c4debddd

Other support widget https://wiki.freepascal.org/Widgetset

Then make use gtk3 / qt, make error and report for notice (and fix) 

[dbannon]

Gus, gtk3 has improved quite remarkably recently. I still cannot build my app because of, at least, https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/lazarus/lazarus/-/issues/41797 but it sure is worthwhile people testing it (and, obviously following up problems).

On the other hand, I think it is time we presented Qt5 as the default linux widgetset, it works, looks good and bugs are addressed very quickly if reported. Qt6 is perhaps even better ?

My app is available on Debian (etc) in Qt5 form only.

The problem is that the official prebuilt lazarus (from SourceForge) is done in GTK2 and that does, to some degree, send the wrong signal.

My github repo, where users get to choose widget sets, has both gtk2 and Qt5 versions of my app for Arch, the Qt5 downloads are five times the gtk2 ones.  But that is reversed with .deb packages !

Davo

[ALLIGATOR]

Is there any guide on how to build an application using GTK3 on Windows?

[dbannon]

There used to be a air bit of (mis placed) support for gtk2 on Windows but I've not seen any such attempt for gtk3. Maybe but pretty low key if it is.  Not sure how WSL works.

My guess is  your best bet is VirtualBox !

Davo

[ALLIGATOR]

Is there any guide on how to build an application using GTK3 on Windows?

I think I figured it out...

But it seems that no one has tested the ability to compile widgets on Windows for a long time, because errors immediately started to appear

[Thaddy]

That's 2, not 3?

[ALLIGATOR]

That's 2, not 3?

Yes, I decided to start with something simple
(Hoping that there are fewer bugs than in 3)

But the general idea remains the same

[dbannon]

There used to be a air bit of (mis placed) support for gtk2 on Windows

Just to clarify, by 'support' I mean by the GTK developers, you used to be able to download a suite of GTK2 libraries for Windows that allowed you to do a cross platform application thing. I was not referring to support for GTKx in fpc/lazarus on Windows.

Msys2 / Mingw is also an option but I would not recommend it.

Alligator, that project options screen is used when cross compiling but not running an app.  Its also, obviously, used by Linux users who get to choose between 5 different native widget sets (a blessing and a curse).

Davo 

[Thaddy]

Only instructions for 3 and 4, but not 2 anymore indeed:
https://www.gtk.org/docs/installations/windows/

A fork for GTK2 on Windows64 exists here: https://github.com/tschoonj/GTK-for-Windows-Runtime-Environment-Installer

https://sourceforge.net/projects/gtk-win/ is another option.

[Gustavo 'Gus' Carreno]

Hey Davo,

Gus, gtk3 has improved quite remarkably recently.

This is very reassuring to read, Davo!!

Thanks for that!!

Well, adding to that the commit that Thausand posted, this makes me less worried for the near future!!

At least we're progressing at a good pace, and that, for now, is good enough for me

Cheers.
Gus

[Thaddy]

To me it is not reassuring at all: stuck with gtk2, which has no support! Yes, NO!
How about that? Should we be programming to legacy? Well, use a vm for that.

I already ran into multiple problems to support it.
XWayland is the least of the issues. A stop gap.

Use glasses if you happen to be short sighted.
GTK2 is legacy.

Anyway, I keep programming my GUI-less programs without effort... And don't really have to think anyway..

[dbannon]

To me it is not reassuring at all: stuck with gtk2, which has no support! Yes, NO!

But Thaddy, you can use Qt5/6 ! If you must use Gnome as a desktop, its a 50meg of so install (in the unlikely case its not already installed). And it works fine.

Davo

 

[Thaddy]

Yes, point is : GTK2... But you know that.
Let's switch to another available default.

GTK2 exists with grace, not sense.

I do not even know how to translate that to Dutch.
(don't even try a translator, they are all wrong)

[PascalDragon]

Is there any guide on how to build an application using GTK3 on Windows?

Considering that the main idea of the GTK3 widgetset is to be used on *nix systems except macOS, so in my opinion the support on Linux (or another *nix system) should be fixed first, before one tries to get it working nicely on Windows.