GTK2 revival

[UCyborg]

"No, sorry, sir, you are working on a project for old people that like old stuff, you don't get to move it forward, you don't get to do anything except watch them worship their idol called GTK2, and scoff at your GTK2-atheism, at your non-belief. The GTK3 version won't be made better, there won't be a port to anything newer, this new fork will be used as an excuse to ignore modern Linux, all your work is going in the retro Linux bin as a toy for Slackware and Devuan users to play with. Sorry, that's what you get for working on UXP and thinking it was worthy of a serious investment of time! The kind of people that surround your project won't ever do anything but drag you backwards and scold you for wanting to support modern platforms, getting excited about every retro fork and lashing out at every deprecation. They'll keep pining for GTK2, for SSE2-only builds, and Windows XP, and never forgive you for moving forward. That's your potential userbase, and it's not the one you wanted, not the one you were working this hard for. Deal with it."

Maybe you'd be happier where I work. VS2026, .NET 10, jQuery with tons of plugins etc. Lead dev recently recompiled some critical native libraries with VS2026 just because, so I guess pre-Win10 is going bye-bye in the next major release!

Edit: Oh, I forgot, there's a bit of a retro touch with Subversion.

[solitude]

I heard here that over 90% (can't remember exact number) of Pale Moon users are on Windows. Catering to that audience I think is more important because that's where the majority of users are, so I don't think worrying so much about what specific toolkit on Linux will make people happier is ideal, rather go with the most reasonable option that's supported and not too hard to port to (which seems like Qt6).

[Basilisk-Dev]

I heard here that over 90% (can't remember exact number) of Pale Moon users are on Windows. Catering to that audience I think is more important because that's where the majority of users are, so I don't think worrying so much about what specific toolkit on Linux will make people happier is ideal, rather go with the most reasonable option that's supported and not too hard to port to (which seems like Qt6).

UXP isn't just Pale Moon. Other applications such as Epyrus and Basilisk also build on top of UXP,. In the case of Basilisk, around 30-35% of my users are Linux users according to autoupdate server logs.

[Night Wing]

Off-topic:
I have been using the GTK2 builds for linux Pale Moon for many years in all of the many linux distros I have experimented with since 2013. Because of this thread, I decided to give GTK3 a shot so I am now using the linux GTK3 version 34.3.1 on this old 64 bit, 14" HP Pavilion dv4-5113cl laptop dinosaur from the year 2012 with a smallish screen resolution of 1366x768 which I mainly use for traveling purposes.

I used to have a problem with the GTK3 builds concerning the Bookmarks Toolbar on this laptop which is another story. To make this post short, whatever was effecting the Bookmarks Toolbar on this particular laptop has been resolved. From here on out I will now be using the GTK3 tarball builds for my linux Pale Moon. All's well that now ends well.

And a public "shout out" of appreciation to Moonchild and especially trava90 (Travis) since Travis has been the one who builds the GTK linux versions of Pale Moon, when he took over from someone else who left years ago, for taking care of us linux users since that time. "Thank you" from me.

[UCyborg]

My leaning towards GTK2 for what much I mess with Linux basically boils down to:

• The way default themes are made on mainstream distros, Pale Moon ends up with fat URL / search bar in GTK3 version. I like them thinner, like on Windows. GTK2 version gives that without having to know anything about themes. Being primarily a Windows user, I don't have much incentive to dive deeper into themes on Linux. Though on the laptop, which is secondary to my desktop, I did end up with the theme where these bars happen to be the way I like even with GTK3 version.
• Flash Player. I always install that and knowing it's a GTK2 thing, using GTK2 Pale Moon keeps everything GTK2 instead of mixing GTK2 / GTK3.