1d ago

GTK ported to Android — here we gooooo!

This is very exciting. Here is the APK I downloaded. And the associated discussion.

It even already seems to support stylus input which is very exciting seeing as there has been talk of porting RNote to Android.

44 comments

I can't read the discussion because some damn Canadian neko waifu thinks I'm a bot.
- It does that for all clients
  You just need to wait for the proof of work to complete
  
  I did but it told me I'm a bot :(
  Edit: Yay, it worked.
  
  You just need to wait for the proof of work to complete
  I will never find the irony in this anything other than pathetic.
  The one legitimate grievance against Bitcoin and other POW cryptocurrencies - the wasteful burning of energy to do throw-away calculations simply to prove the work has been done... the environmental cost of distributed scale meaningless CPU cycle waste purely for the purpose of wasting CPU cycles, has been so eagerly grasped by people who are largely doing it to foil another energy wasteful infotech invention.
  It really is astonishing.
  
  It actually doesn't do that for all clients, according to the docs
  It'll let you straight through if your user agent doesn't contain "Mozilla"

Doesn't KDE/Plasma (or Qt) have this for years?
- Yes, and a few KDE apps work great on Android.
  But more FOSS is more better, so GTK on Android is great news for both Android users and GTK developers
- Yes, e.g. Krita has long been available for Android tablets.
  darktable on Android would be awesome, I don't think there's currently any good FOSS raw development software for Android.
  
  It might not be as good as Darktable but Snapseed which is natively made for Android can develop raw photos
- We could have a neat little internet comment war about personal opinions on Qt...
  But it's the weekend and I'd rather not.

What is this
- Quite a substantial step towards being able to use Linux apps on Android phones.
  
  Ohhhh I see
  
  Oh, are we getting Year of android desktop?!

Somebody is gonna put Gnome on an Android, I can feel it.
- Gnome for phones already kinda exists with Phosh. I guess that wouldn't be too hard to port
  
  For touchscreens, Gnome is great, I dunno how well it would work, but I wouldn't be sad to see someone try to make an actual fully featured Android UI replacement out of it.

I tried using GTK with C, JavaScript and Rust and the experience was always terrible. The tools, the documentation... C is just sooooo old and GTK doesn't translate well to Rust. For me GTK is great for Window Manger level tools that need to be small, super fast and are fairly static (you don't add new features do settings app or clock widget that often). I definitely wouldn't do cross platform apps in it.
- First, what do you mean by "C is just so old"? That seems like a language problem, not a GTK problem. Tbh, when it comes to documentation, you're likely better off with C as the official GTK docs targets the C API (https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/).
  Also, what do you mean by "it doesn't translate well to Rust"? Because, Rust, like other supported langs like Python, have bindings that are equally well-documented to an extent. I haven't used the Rust binding but I've used the Python binding extensively and there are references to all the APIs (https://lazka.github.io/pgi-docs/)—same with Rust (https://gtk-rs.org/gtk4-rs/).
  Lastly, I can understand not using GTK for cross-platform apps, but not for the reasons you mentioned. While GTK's primary target is Linux, you can technically still make it cross-platform.
  
  By "C is so old" I mean it lacks a lot of features modern languages have. Proper linting, code formatting, dependency management, version management, virtual environments, modules. Yes, you can solve some of it with docker but it's terrible compared with Rust for example.
  By "it doesn't translate well to Rust" I mean that GObject doesn't translate well to Rust structs so you end up with weird structures split into multiple modules and terrible code overhead. Compared with modern UI frameworks it's just not ergonomic to work with.
  Yes, I know GTK supports multiple platforms but if I want to develop for desktop and mobile I had way better experience using Tauri+Leptos. It's not just about having some bindings and some docs for it. It's about how much effort does it take to set it up and figure out how to implement specific functionality. Good docs, good tools good compiler and readable code for the framework help a lot.
- I definitely recommend using Vala for Gtk as it was tailor made for it. It's built on top of the object system that Gtk uses so the API fits in to the language flawlessly, unlike Rust. It even has its own website for browsing the Gnome APIs https://valadoc.org/
  
  I read about Vala but a language that compiles to C seemed icky to me. I don't know, maybe it solves all the issues that C has. Maybe I will give it a try one day.
- Tangent, but why did you ex lisp?
  
  I did some Lisp programming long time ago but I don't touch it anymore.

Why are buttons on top?

44 comments