The developers of Linux Mint shared progress on Linux Mint 22 in their monthly news digest, including their vision regarding the development of GNOME and applications being developed under it.
In 2016, the developers of Linux Mint launched a project called XApps aimed at creating universal applications for traditional desktop environments based on GTK to replace the default GNOME applications. These include Xreader (a fork of Atrill, which is a fork of Evince), Xplayer (a fork of Totem), Xviewer (a fork of Eye of Gnome), among others. More details about the project can be found on their website. the website.
The digest states that the developers plan to expand the list of applications included in the XApps project and encourage others to join the effort. They particularly reach out to developers of Mate and XFCE who are interested in developing applications that are independent of the GNOME project, as well as distribution developers who use it as their base environment. Xubuntu is primarily mentioned in this context.
The reason for such a statement, along with the creation of the XApps project, is the growing divergence between GNOME developers and others in understanding how user program interfaces should be structured, and the use of the libAdwaita library by the GNOME project, which serves as the foundation for most interfaces in modern GNOME applications. According to the Linux Mint developers, this library was created solely for GNOME, and GNOME applications are increasingly unsuitable for use anywhere other than GNOME itself.
As an example, the authors of the digest provide screenshots of applications based solely on GTK and those based on LibAdwaita, illustrating the differences in the appearance of the applications and their unsuitability as default applications in a distribution that positions itself as a full ecosystem with a unified approach to interface design, rather than a patchwork of solutions.
Due to such incompatibility, in the future, GNOME Font Viewer was removed from Linux Mint 22, and some of the programs were downgraded to GTK3 versions, specifically:
- Celluloid;
- GNOME Calculator;
- Simple Scan;
- Baobab;
- System Monitor;
- GNOME Calendar;
- File Roller;
- Zenity.
The developers plan to completely abandon Zenity and further develop the others as forks.
Additionally, the Mint developers believe it is unwise to follow Ubuntu's approach of modifying the libAdwaita library for their themes, which is why the Adwaita theme will be removed from the list of available themes in Cinnamon 6.2.
The developers believe that the XApps project can address this issue, asserting that its primary principle should be independence from the distribution and desktop environment, whether it's Cinnamon, XFCE, Mate, or any other. In their view, XApps should be a separate project with its own repositories on GitHub, chat, website, management, etc.
Source: linux.org.ru
