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List:       qubes-devel
Subject:    Re: [qubes-devel] Re: Preferred framework for graphical stuff?
From:       Joanna Rutkowska <joanna () invisiblethingslab ! com>
Date:       2017-04-02 21:41:46
Message-ID: 20170402214146.GA1228 () work-mutt
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On Sun, Apr 02, 2017 at 02:39:28PM -0400, Jean-Philippe Ouellet wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 21, 2016 at 11:13 PM, Marek Marczykowski-Górecki
> <marmarek@invisiblethingslab.com> wrote:
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> > 
> > On Mon, Nov 21, 2016 at 10:57:25PM -0500, Jean-Philippe Ouellet wrote:
> > > On Mon, Nov 21, 2016 at 10:14 PM, Marek Marczykowski-Górecki
> > > <marmarek@invisiblethingslab.com> wrote:
> > > > Generally yes, especially the part about choosing GTK ;)
> > > 
> > > Noted.
> > > 
> > > > Since then we've moved to default Xfce, and GTK will be more consistent here.
> > > 
> > > Are you saying that Xfce as default is the long term plan now?
> > > 
> > > Or saying that there will be more consistency between {GTK in Xfce vs.
> > > GTK in Gnome} than {Qt in Xfce vs. Qt in Gnome}?
> > > 
> > > I don't understand.
> > 
> > Both Gnome and Xfce use GTK widgets, so GUI parts done in GTK (vs Qt)
> > are more consistent with the rest of desktop environment.
> 
> [1] has made me give some more thought to this. Yes, GTK is the
> natural choice for things wishing to be first-class citizens in Gnome,
> but this may not be the strongest consideration long-term.
> 
> Moving to Gnome has stagnated, and is a very low priority [2].
> 
> With the planned disaggregation of the GUI into its own domain [3],
> iteration in the desktop experience of Qubes becomes much easier, and
> I think it's quite reasonable to consider that Gnome may not be the
> only final target.
> 
> I think it is also worthwhile to consider the difference in experience
> between Qt in primarily-not-Qt environments, vs. GTK in
> primarily-not-GTK environments. On other non-linux platforms, Qt is
> much better integrated into the native desktop UX than GTK. This is at
> least true on Windows and OS X, and even Genode has native support for
> Qt which continues to improve. This may may sound irrelevant now, but
> I think is less so post-GuiVM.
> 
> FWIW it seems that peoples' complaints about the current Qt
> qubes-manager in Xfce have nothing to do with it being Qt instead of
> GTK.
> 
> I'd also like to bring attention to some relevant 3rd party
> discussions on this: [4]
> 
> I believe that limiting the inputs to this decision to "Gnome means
> GTK, we plan to eventually target Gnome, therefore let's use GTK" may
> be short-sighted.
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> [1]: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/qubes-devel/jDHiZ9nhzIc/5DIRzcOUCwAJ
> [2]: https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/1806#issuecomment-280281571
> [3]: https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/833
> [4]: https://askubuntu.com/questions/281092/why-is-canonical-choosing-qt-over-gtk-for-unitys-next-generation
>  

These are all good points, JP. But I think it's difficult and often
counter-productive to try to over-generalize or make code over-portable "just in
case". So, I think that the choice of the GUI framework should be dictated
primarily by the requirement to make our GUI stuff first-class citizens of
whatever Desktop Environment we want to be the official one in the upcoming
release. At this time we believe that for both 4.0 and 4.1 this will be Xfce4.
The next criterion should be ease of development/integration with current code.

Perhaps for Qubes 5.x we will want to switch to some yet-unknown desktop
environment, but then, chances are high, we will want to rewrite any GUI stuff
anyway. This is because the new environment might use different UX paradigms, or
maybe in a few years time the general UX paradigm will change. So, ISTM, trying
to plan too much ahead (which framework/lang to use for GUI/UX), might often not
be worth it.

joanna.
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