The end of the nice GTK button
All of this is pretty much how I feel on the matter, too. GTK3&#x27;s interface was a really lovely blend of skeuomorphism and more abstract widgets that came together to make a really unique experience. Even if it didn&#x27;t work in <i>every</i> context, I appreciated how well it worked for less complicated applications and making great-looking, device-agnostic GUIs. Cawbird was a wonderful native Twitter app made possible with GTK3. Curlew packed all of the important features of Handbrake&#x2F;FFMPEG into a more streamlined, simple package. Foliate took e-book reading into the 21st century. So many amazing apps were enabled with this switch, and even though it&#x27;s still a second-class toolkit, it was my guilty pleasure on Linux.<p>In comes GTK4. Much like the article alludes to, the elegant and simple shadow of interactive elements goes <i>poof</i>. Developers spend hundreds of hours crusading against letting people use third-party themes, just so they can simplify and reduce UI elements to a nigh-unusable pulp. Developing with GTK4 is a nightmare. Using GTK4 is a pain in the ass. For christs sake, there was a devastating font-rendering glitch that existed for more than <i>ten months</i> after the first GTK4 release that was ignored in lieu of simplifying buttons, developing a new forced stylesheet and telling people &quot;don&#x27;t theme our apps!&quot; Whenever I take this up with a maintainer, they immediately take it personally and write out a litany of reasons why I&#x27;m wrong and why I&#x27;m not allowed to disagree. The priorities here are almost unbelievably misaligned, I&#x27;ve pinned my GTK packages at the last GTK3 release and await some sort of admission of failure.<p>I simply can&#x27;t take it anymore. These are the people making desktop Linux miserable, and I frankly feel no remorse watching their attempts at &quot;simplifying&quot; the ecosystem crash and burn.