[Users] GTK 4

[Tom]

The future is not what IBM says it is. Especially when it comes to the
free software ecosystem. There is just not a valid reason to use
gtk3/4 over gtk2. The ONLY thing it offers claws-mail is it will make
the UI look like your looking at it through binoculars, this "HiDPI"
support at the expensive of everyone else who thinks a 1080P screen in
front of your face is more than enough.
https://www.rgb.com/sites/default/files/articles/viewingdistanceresolutioncomparison.jpg
And even if it's not, I want a breath of fresh air every time I upgrade
my monitor not claustrophobia.

Resource usage is absolutely terrible. gtk3 offers nothing over gtk2
that claws-mail actually uses. You get over three times the resource
usage for no benefit. You get a major increase in latency and UI
responsiveness for no benefit. You get retarded gimmicks like
Client-side decorations and buttons in your menubar which completely
break window managers like DWM.

X11 is not going away any time soon. The people who complain about
"tearing" problems on cheap intel iGPUs all they need to do is set
anti-tear = true in their Xorg.conf. aka triple-buffering. Or stop
using buggy, proprietary novidya graphics cards and get a much more
reliable AMD or Matrox card.

It does not matter of redhat/fedora (IBM) declared gtk2 "EOL". That
doesn't mean gtk2 still isn't receiving fixes. Go check the git repo.
What that does mean is that gtk2 is mature, stable, reliable, and no
longer changing for the sake of change. The people who still use it can
patch like, like open source and free software is SUPPOSED to work, not
a single monolithic corporation constantly shifting it around in
instability to give the illusion of added value in order to try and
sell more people something.

Speaking of instability, as a CM developer have you just been under a
rock or something since 2014 in regards to gtk3? Have you not
experienced the crashing, bugs, CONSTANT ABI CHANGES, CONSTANT API
CHANGES in gtk3 from redhat/fedora (IBM) interrupting your work on a
weekly basis, and then when you go to talk to the gnome-people about it
your met with nothing but vitriol and hostility!? "This is the new way
we are doing things, I am right and everyone else who thinks
differently is wrong" And now after the gtk3 instability fiasco that
STILL IS NOT RESOLVED btw, we are doing another MAJOR version change?
Are you flippin kidding me? gtk3 has been such a epic disaster we are
still in a half way mix between gtk2 and gtk3 and now we are going to
go ahead and mix gtk4. What's next? A system running gtk 2, 3 ,4 ,5 and
6 all at the same time?

No. There is a thing you have to take into account here and that is
trustworthiness. IBM has destroyed that. I seriously do not understand
how you can expect gtk4 to be any less of a disaster than gtk3 was. And
what's worse I expect the majority of developer time to be spent on
fixes stupid little gtk3/4 related bugs because the software is so
unstable and immature than improving claws-mail itself. Flooded by
maintenance work external pressures.

Regarding the "security focused distros". You don't improve security by
throwing removing the ability of older software to work. All you
accomplish by doing that is reducing the usefulness and utility of the
operating system. You also just create unnecessary busywork for
yourself, and end up re-implementing the same things over and over and
over again until the creative people get tired of doing that and give
up.

Take a look at Trinity Desktop Environment vs modern KDE. It's a world
of difference in terms of speed and flexibility. Also look at all the
cool applications we lost in modern KDE thanks to change for the sake
of change.

It's unreasonable to think FOSS can or should have to keep up with the
unsustainable major change release times of big tech corporations like
IBM and Google. Just look at the web, how badly that was fucked up.
Nowadays thanks to whatwg and ECMA, no other browser can keep up and
google chrome has become mandatory. And you can't really call Mozilla
independent when they are 96% funded by Google and spend all their time
just playing catchup to google chrome, trying to just become an
orange-colored chrome. All the other browsers who joined the whatwg
have been killed off. And you want to bring THOSE technologies, that
ones that kill off any other company but Google, the ones that
drastically change by committee every single year to the CORE of our
native program guis? Does this not seem insane to you?

Also, why do you care about some hypothetical user's problem?
Claws-mail isn't a paid product that you need to constantly go out and
try to find more users. It's /your/ mail client written for you and
your needs and people with similar needs. Why does it matter if some
stupid distro decides to starve their own selves out of useful software
in the name of change for the sake of change and being
anyways "up-to-date" with the latest fads and trends?

Slackware developers develop for their own needs and wants, rather than
developing for some hypothetical user that doesn't exist and it's
worked out pretty well for them. Same thing with FreeBSD. The things in
the ports tree are the things FreeBSD users and developers actually
want so they did it and shared it.

I don't think you should give a crap about what Fedora or Canonical are
doing. Give a crap about what other people are doing if they are paying
you a support contract, and then maybe give them a custom static binary
and a repository url.

and my final point is
Adopt things ONLY if they are ACTUAL MEASURABLE IMPROVEMENTS OVER WHAT
CAME BEFORE, and are able to AT LEAST DO WHAT THE PREVIOUS THING DID.
Do not change things for the sake of change. Change things only if they
do what the previous thing did better.


If you think everything I said is full of crap, at the very least
consider spending time targeting tqt3, qt5, or motif instead of gtk3.
The last good release of gtk was gtk2. I expect everything from here on
out without massive organizational changes to be worse than what came
before.

I switched to Linux when I realized everything that came after Windows
2000 Professional and NT5 workstation was going to be worse off. A
portion of the Linux and FOSS ecosystem seems to have caught the
useless gimmicks and change for the sake of change bug. Bloating up
each new release even though there's not any additional functionality
that's actually useful. Just gimmicks.

Speaking of, can I pay you to continue supporting claws-mail without
GNOME dependencies? Like a https://liberapay.com/ like thing?
-- 
 _________________________________________ 
< I am a jelly donut. I am a jelly donut. >
 ----------------------------------------- 
\
 \
   /\   /\   
  //\\_//\\     ____
  \_     _/    /   /
   / * * \    /^^^]
   \_\O/_/    [   ]
    /   \_    [   /
    \     \_  /  /
     [ [ /  \/ _/
    _[ [ \  /_/