[arch-general] GTK2 GUIs became a PITA after upgrade

[Carsten Mattner]

On Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 4:30 AM, Andrew Ridgway <ar17787 at gmail.com> wrote:
> There have been a few bugs reported about the gtk 3.20 theming issues[1]
>
> and in those bugs it mentions that there is a fix upstream that we
> just have to wait until it trickles down[2]
>
> It seems that 3.20 requires themes to update something (not sure what)
> and this is the problem
>
> Get on to the people who produce your themes to make them compatible with 3.20
>
> I have found avoiding gtk3 where possible atm is helping. I am using
> the aur version of firefox that is compiled against gtk2 and it seems
> to be working better (also less memory so I may actually continue to
> use it when this is all done)
>
> This is the fun of Arch isn't it? - we are the bug finders!
>
> [1]https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/48853;
> https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/48855;
> https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/48783
> [2]https://git.gnome.org/browse/gtk+/commit/?h=gtk-3-20&id=6144b2276c7298040c080f85ffa83afbe1257c54

Given that the gtk3 devs do not intend to support theming, it would
be great if they officially stated so and communicated that theming
gtk3 is unwelcome, so that theme authors could spend their time
on more fruitful efforts.

As it stands right now, most themes do not work across gtk3 version
and you need to match the theme with your distro gtk3 version,
which means you cannot shared ~/.themes between two distros
or distro branches.

Therefore, I can absolutely understand users' desire to prefer
gtk2 builds of applications.

I myself, tried to port my custom gtk2 Raleigh style to gtk3
with some level of success, but it neither looks as nice as
gtk2 nor does it behave as performant.

gtk3 since 3.18 or so got much slower as well and for each
and every window that is drawn it first shows a black rectangle
before the widgets appear.

I've tried communicating the issues upstream, but I was met
with replies that boiled down to "use Adwaita".

gtk.org could fix all of this by officially announcing there's no
theme support.