This comment is not correct. GNOME Foundation didn't co-opt or sabotage GTK. For a very long time it's just been mostly GNOME people contributing. It's a known problem that GTK needs more people contributing to fix issues on other platforms. No one I've talked to at the Foundation is happy about this either. If you're bothered about this, you should consider showing up and start contributing.
GTK4 and Adwaita apps can still be styled however the developer wants. If some app developer wants to make a Windows theme, go for it.
Overlay scrollbars aren't forced. The app developer can disable that and make the scrollbars always show. You might not want to though, because some Windows apps do have overlay scrollbars. For example: VS Code.
Keyboard shortcuts are also up to the app developer. If someone wants to have some compile time setting to change the keybinds when building on Windows, go for it.
I have no idea what you're saying about libadwaita separation. You can very clearly look at the libadwaita code and see what's in there versus what gets upstreamed into GTK. No one has any way to lie here. It's just an extra set of GTK widgets you can optionally use.
The draft MR written by Paul is still open. I doubt it will be merged in the current state it's in, because it has bugs.
To begin with, the onus of all of these things has been shifted to the app developer. Previously, a lot of it was up to the user or the desktop environment.
I said “basically force” because non-overlay scrollbars are possible, but getting them requires every app’s developer to change the property everywhere. If (I recall correctly, it’s not even a theme thing.) That’s completely unrealistic, quite apart from there being no convention. Firefox gets an “always show scrollbars” checkbox in its preferences, which you can manually tick; but I haven’t come across anything else exposing it.
Keyboard: I wasn’t speaking of keyboard shortcuts, actually but other details like what arrow keys do, how text is selected by keyboard (e.g. Ctrl+Shift+Left/Right: which punctuation marks word boundaries, what punctuation or whitespace do you include in the direction of selection). Windows has strong conventions on how those sorts of things work, and my recollection is that GTK does things the GNOME way rather than the Windows way when on Windows.
libadwaita: they said “we’ve split out GNOME HIG stuff into libadwaita, GTK is now more platform-neutral”. In practice, compared to GTK+ 2, even more GNOME HIG is baked into GTK, even more strongly: in the past, users and desktop environments could override various of the stuff; now, the app developer has to support it, or you have to maintain increasingly onerous patches against their source code. That’s the problem. As for what’s in libadwaita, it’s mostly just a few widgets, and various functionality such as colouring stuff that seems to me to pretty clearly belong in libgtk (because it’s useful almost everywhere, and other platforms have analogues which you want to be supported out of the box).
Nope, the onus is always on the app developer. Even Microsoft is inconsistent with their own Windows apps using overlay scrollbars. Old Windows apps don't have them, but the new app guidelines for Windows 11 actually say you should use overlay scrolling: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/design/contro...
Windows developers just have to pick which guidelines they want to follow, that's how it goes. I don't know the specifics of keyboard interactions but I'd imagine it also changes over time in Windows and varies depending on the app, because that's how everything is in a nearly 40 year old operating system.
I'll steelman your argument anyway: say there was a standard behavior for all of these things. Someone could start doing a lot of testing on Windows and conceivably adding lots of #ifdef _WIN32 to GTK. That isn't particularly hard to do. The problem is then how that affects the apps if the toolkit now has some behaviour that only manifests on Windows. App developers then have to test that and ensure it doesn't break their apps in that specific environment, and if any behaviour is undesired then they have to start adding more #ifdef _WIN32 as well to the apps. Like if an app has a custom text widget or a custom scrollbar, what will they do? You also can't fix that by making them a runtime switch instead of an ifdef. If there was any custom stuff at all, the users and desktops still couldn't override it unless the app developer added another switch.
There just isn't any way around it, the app developer has to handle it. This is a problem with any toolkit that runs on multiple platforms. I can see why you would think it was less of a problem in GTK 2, because less apps were using it so they had less opportunities to make fancy widgets that don't fit in on Windows. Old GTK 2 versions of Inkscape had their own weird bugs, they were just different bugs. None of these can really be fixed in a toolkit, even Qt has problems which you seemed to acknowledge in another comment:
>Of course, other options in a similar space like Qt aren’t entirely better
I've looked through a few of your other comments too and my answer is the same: If you think the direction is bad, then you should show up and start fixing all the open GTK bugs on Windows. Don't just report the bugs, actually fix them. There aren't enough people to even do that, never mind start adding a bunch of extra Windows functionality. And if you do catch up to the point where you can add extra functionality, then you have to stick around for long enough to fix all the new bugs. That's the deal with volunteer projects like GTK: there is no money to hire experts, if you're an expert in Windows development who wants things done then you need to step up and volunteer.
Certainly some user preferences could damage some apps. But it mostly didn’t, it was generally good enough, and when it did it commonly pointed to a bug in the app anyway (e.g. setting text foreground colour when you don’t know what the background colour is—you must always set (or know the value of) either neither or both). And this flexibility was used by a variety of platforms.
Since you mention overlay scrollbars again, I’ll emphasise something I only alluded vaguely to in my initial wording: GTK does GNOME-style overlay scrollbars. The look and feel are both completely different from Windows 10 and 11 overlay scrollbars, and you certainly can’t accurately emulate the behaviour and I doubt you can emulate the look either. I’ll also mention something that apparently didn’t make it into my previous comment: macOS lets you turn overlay scrollbars on or off at the user level.
As for getting involved: they’ve been actively and deliberately gutting stuff useful for other platforms, and refusing to undelete things because of their vision of how things should be, seen most clearly in how they’ve handled overlay scrollbars and theming. I’m not interested in getting involved with a project like that; it seems to me fairly clearly a lost cause for anything I could do, if I was even willing to spend that kind of time on such a thing.
>But it mostly didn’t, it was generally good enough, and when it did it commonly pointed to a bug in the app anyway
That hasn't changed though? The individual settings might have changed. Some were added and some were taken away, as is usual in development.
>The look and feel are both completely different from Windows 10 and 11 overlay scrollbars, and you certainly can’t accurately emulate the behaviour and I doubt you can emulate the look either.
If there are subtle things then no you probably can't without writing a new widget. So again, you're talking about having a big #ifdef inside the scrollbar code. Practically speaking the maintainers would then have to maintain at least two separate scrollbar implementations. Those are the Windows 11 scrollbars though, what about the old Win32 scrollbars that are still used in a lot of places? Do you skin them to look and act like Windows 11? 10? 8? Vista? Do you change that at runtime by detecting the OS version? Just looking at the scrollbars on my Win 11 install I see at least 4 different scrollbar styles. So which ones do you support?
Say you decide to go the easy route and only support the default Windows 11 scrollbars with the overlay. Fine. They won't look right if you run them on Windows 10 or 8 but whatever. So when when Microsoft releases a new version or changes the behaviour of the scrollbars, you still have to track that and release a new version in step with Microsoft so it doesn't get out of date. If you want everything to be consistent then you have to do it with every widget, not just scrollbars. That's easily several full time jobs just doing that, which no one has been available to do. Because realistically you need people who are expert Windows developers as well as expert GTK developers, and they have to be willing to volunteer to work for free full time because GTK is a volunteer project. As far as I've seen those people just don't exist.
Really though, I don't think it's as big a problem as you're making it out to be since Windows apps are already widely inconsistent with regard to every widget, including scrollbars.
>macOS lets you turn overlay scrollbars on or off at the user level.
Compared to the work of reimplementing everything, it's not particularly hard to push another boolean setting through the code. It's already there on the app level. But like you say, that wouldn't really solve anything.
>they’ve been actively and deliberately gutting stuff useful for other platforms, and refusing to undelete things because of their vision of how things should be
Every project has a vision of how things should be. That's what separates every project from the rest. That isn't why this is happening though; most of the time they're refusing to undelete things because no one is around to maintain them. You don't just bring code back into the project and suddenly it works, someone has to do actual work to make that happen. If you can make a real good case for bringing back that code, and you can show you'll do the work and you won't disappear, then that person could be you. Currently I don't think any maintainers are Windows developers, they're just trying to keep roughly the same amount of Windows functionality working within the time they have available to work on it. Which is not a lot of time.
But I can see you've already made up your mind that the developers are trying to make things worse for you and sabotage you because they don't like you or something, so I doubt I can convince you of anything. This is why I don't enjoy engaging with this forum often. Have a good one.
GTK4 and Adwaita apps can still be styled however the developer wants. If some app developer wants to make a Windows theme, go for it.
Overlay scrollbars aren't forced. The app developer can disable that and make the scrollbars always show. You might not want to though, because some Windows apps do have overlay scrollbars. For example: VS Code.
Keyboard shortcuts are also up to the app developer. If someone wants to have some compile time setting to change the keybinds when building on Windows, go for it.
I have no idea what you're saying about libadwaita separation. You can very clearly look at the libadwaita code and see what's in there versus what gets upstreamed into GTK. No one has any way to lie here. It's just an extra set of GTK widgets you can optionally use.
The draft MR written by Paul is still open. I doubt it will be merged in the current state it's in, because it has bugs.