PAPaulHoule·Dec 23, 2024Submission
Gtk3-classic: Patches to bring back a traditional experience for GTK+3
5 points · Open discussionlah7
gtk3-classic
Shell2019–2024
lah7 / gtk3-classic
gtk3-classic
Patches to bring back a traditional experience for GTK+3
7Distinct people
8Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
396GitHub stars
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Patches to bring back a traditional experience for GTK+3
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year8 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2019-07-26 13:53:03 UTC to 2024-12-23 22:33:41 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 2 | 0 |
What Hacker News says
8 sourcesGtk3-classic: Patches to bring back a traditional experience for GTK+3
3 points · Open discussionUnfortunately they also lost tons of functionality in the process. The fact that typing on a file picker starts a recursive search instead of simply jumping to the file/folder with the prefix you typed, is nothing short of hilarious.
Gtk-classic is the only thing that keeps me sane https://github.com/lah7/gtk3-classic
In GTK File Chooser Dialog gets a thumbnail view after 18 yearsI have had success getting typeahead search working again in some applications with https://github.com/lah7/gtk3-classic.
In An X11 apologist tries WaylandIt's a bug when it stalls out your computer for 2-3 seconds because the file picker is doing a recursive search through all of your files.
Thankfully, patches that fix this (along with some other bugs and anti-features) are actively maintained by community members, despite being ignored by the GNOME project.
https://github.com/lah7/gtk3-classic
In Gnome Turns 25Others may find that pushing towards server-side window decoration is annoying and imposing, so this is unfortunately an area where not everyone can be happy. In any case you may be interested to try a patch: https://github.com/lah7/gtk3-classic
In Using IceWM and a Raspberry Pi as my main PC, sharing my theme, config and someSorry, I think I misspoke. Thumbnails do generate properly and show up in GTK file picker, without needing any kind of hard dependency on gnome or any desktop services. That's not actually a hard problem, it was standardized way back.
The actual problem is this 15 year old bug: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/issues/233
This right here has collected most of the patches I'd consider to be important, and the maintenance requirements do not appear to be significant. Of course it is work that doesn't directly benefit the gnome DE.
https://github.com/krumelmonster/gtk3-mushrooms
But it's important to note that GTK is not gnome. It's really important to recognize that as gnome fights harder to become it's own platform, that other platforms do make use of GTK. The gnome-foundation being completely inflexible on the needs of other projects mea
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ns that at the end of the day it is really hard for other people to collaborate on GTK.
Gnome can do whatever it wants, but the idea that GTK is only supposed to serve the gnome project does seem like a bit of a betrayal. That seems to be a pretty common thought: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GTK#Criticism
In the GTK+ 2.x era, I would have agreed with you. GTK+ was either the basis for or easily themeable to feel reasonably native under any Linux desktop environment and, because of the applications which depend on it, pretty much everyone is likely to have it already installed.
Unfortunately, in the GTK+ 3.x era and beyond, the perspective of many KDE users is that hell has frozen over because GTK+ has supplanted MacOS as the GUI with the most alien feel to it.
(Plus, the LXDE developers started a transition to GTK+ 3.x, got fed up, and decided that their upgrade path from GTK+ 2.x would be Qt 5. They then merged with Razor-Qt to form LXQt.)
Personally, what rubs me the wrong way the most is the various ways in which it explicitly goes against what HCI research recommends because the GNOME people just liked it better their way. (And I've re
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ad quotes by the devs showing that they now see GTK+ as GNOME's toolkit first and other desktops are on their own if they don't want to ride along... which explains things like how long it took them to stabilize the GTK+ 3.x theming APIs.)
I still might consider it if the gtk3-mushrooms patchset for making GTK+ 3.x less alien weren't a single-person, amateur effort that's only packaged for Archlinux.
(https://github.com/krumelmonster/gtk3-mushrooms)