Re: About the last exchange on bugtracker

[gbWilly <gbWilly@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tuesday, November 18th, 2025 at 14:23, Fabien Bodard <gambas.fr@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> There's an interesting question regarding GTK4.
> I think GTK4 has become too specific to Gnome desktop environments, and the changes are really hard to keep up with.

Wayland is going to give even more trouble as the newer toolkits are focusing their development more on Wayland and seem to slowly replace X11 functionality in future versions
Wayland is a coup of big IT into open source. Big IT, can pay developers to work at these open projects and thus hijack them and determine the direction to go in.
They want X11 gone, because of security, read as they do not control the narritive and it allows for too much freedom. Not exactly what you want when rolling out a total surveillance society, right?

> Is it a good idea to maintain the GTK family and not focus your efforts solely on Qt, Benoit?

I never use the gtk family even running a gtk based desktop. QT simply provides things I need that gtk can't somehow.

> It's a lot of time to dedicate to many topics, and you're working alone.
>
> While it's important to maintain a separate driver for the database, it's less so for the toolkit.
>
> Furthermore, I think it would be possible to add another, lower-level toolkit with the following specifications:
>
> - window management
> - basic widget (drawing area, text area?)
> - input manager (keyboard/mouse/joystick)
> - printing
> - drawing (painting class)

This looks like a good manner of avoiding a lot of the crap that can be expected with the future developments.
I have been thinking about it as well, the future of Gambas in a drastically changing open source environment, and how to deal with it.

I see new distro versions shipping on a crap foundation that I do not want to install on my system.
Will I even be able to develop as I like in 5 years from now? Could a solution like Fabien suggest be our saviour?

> (based for example on EFL https://www.enlightenment.org/about)
>
> And the rest would be entirely implemented in Gambas.
> Because after all, the fun is in developing with the awesome tool you've created for us, not getting bogged down in the nonsense of the new era.

Best sentence I've read I a while, give me hope ;-)

> We're from the Compusaurus generation. So we prioritize usefulness over fads. We have limited resources and time. And we waste time on things that are ephemeral... too ephemeral.

> The only two ways to address this are:
>
> - reduce our dependence on external libraries as much as possible for our underlayers.
>
> - create wrappers directly for everything else... and therefore develop a tool that facilitates their automatic or semi-automatic generation.
> - find a good distribution method... Suse saved us, but it's not a panacea. We need to look into FlatPak for example.

I very much like all you say, but I very much dislike these one package for all distro kind of solutions and I avoid them at all times. I did try them once, not a fan.

I also very much dislike solutions that are less complex as the original. Don't get me wrong, I'm ok with less complex for those that need it, but if I understand the complex I want to be able to use the complex, giving me freedom in how to approach things.

But reality is that less complex removes the possibility of doing complex. And everyone stops using the complex solution, so that one becomes unavailable (you see how we are slowly creating the future idiots, and AI will accelerate this even further). Wayland is a great example of this taking away freedom. It will make X11 vanish, simply because all will be shipped defaulting to Wayland and the useful idiots will start using it en mass, so there goes your freedom of choice. That's how it always goes in everything. The usual suspects to sell these ideas (in all parts of life) are security, safety, health and more of that crap. There is a pattern and it's in everything and everywhere nowadays, at least for those willing to see.

So, I would very much like it if Gambas would become more independent of the ever growing pile of underlying crap that is heading to us.

Sorry, if it sounds a bit like a rant, but I have seen so many choices taken away from me in my life and I'm so sick and tired of it all.

gbWilly

[GambOS](https://gambos.gambas.one/)
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